Inverted and cut-rate Ninotchka, built around the talents, most particularly the hoarse adenoidal honk, of Fran Drescher, as a New Yawk cosmetologist recruited by mistake to teach the children of the neo-Stalinist tyrant of mythical Slovetzia. She makes her lines her own: "Could I possibly [gesturing to the bearskin on …

Aside from Drew Barrymore’s Greenpeace activist, there’s not an unselfish, trustworthy character to be found in this well-intentioned “save the whales” tale. It’s a kid pic, so the screenwriters wisely (unknowingly?) never allow personality and emotion to get in the way of the overriding message. A cast of familiar faces …

Garden-variety orangutan comedy (ee-ee-oo-oo) about a simian cat burglar on the run from his human confederate (Rupert Everett with a Terry-Thomas tooth-gap) in a five-star Manhattan hotel. Many felicitous directing touches, courtesy of Ken Kwapis (Vibes and He Said, She Said). Essentially, though, and inescapably kids' stuff. With Jason Alexander, …

A romantic-comic Rashomon: first we get "his" angle on their affair, then "hers." The gimmick, even as applied to relationships, is not new (see André Cayatte's two-part Anatomy of a Marriage, see the TV movie Divorce His/Divorce Hers). What's new is that a man, Ken Kwapis, directed the first part; …

As an explanation of romantic incompatibility, the catchphrase title is stunningly unilluminating, no matter which of its six words is stressed. (On screen, the third one stands out in green from the white of the rest, but that seems an arbitrary reading.) Satisfied with the what and incurious about the …

The grin-and-bear-it title, from a best-selling "tween" novel by Ann Brashares, refers to a clique of four sixteen-year-old girlfriends in Bethesda, Md., linked from the womb in their mothers' prenatal aerobics class, who purchase a pair of thrift-shop jeans that magically fit their dissimilar bodies ("scientifically impossible"), and who mail …

Paranormal adventure comedy, though in most other ways a pretty normal one. The sub-Edgar Rice Burroughs quest for the Room of Gold in the Lost City of Ecuador is just tedious, and the dialogue cries out for either a TV laugh track or a vaudeville drum-and-cymbal routine. But Jeff Goldblum …

What do bros (in this case, Robert Redford) do once they get old? In A Walk in the Woods, they get sick of attending funerals, decide to out-hike Death on the Appalachian Trail, and tell the old lady (Emma Thompson) where she can stick her objections to stupidly risking one's …