Can you sue yourself for plagiarism? If so, then 'Old School' has presented Ivan Reitman with a case.

His work isn't all glower. Even though he hasn't smiled in a movie since the underrated 'Proof' in the early 1990s, Mr. Crowe is given to a hurt swallow when he's uncomfortable and to a look of suffering in his eyes.

Scene by scene, you can't help being impressed by 'Mean Girls;' it's like a group of sketches linked by a theme, with some playing much better than others.

It's true that as Mr. Chan makes more American movies - and gets older - we will never again see the kind of fistfight choreography that the star would devote four months to shoot.

LACMA has the imprimatur of art, and that's a big leg up.

What makes 'Pootie Tang' the motion picture enjoyable is its no-brow ambitions; it's a joke action film. It slides through enough African-American pop culture signifiers to raise laughs out of those who will appreciate the references; it revels in more cheese per square inch than a soul food diner.

The action comedy 'Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl' raises one of the most overlooked and important cinematic questions of our time: Can a movie maintain the dramatic integrity of a theme park ride?

For years, Ono's work - musical and otherwise - was, in large part, dismissed and derided; at best, it was often misunderstood.

Political perspective and the Cannes festival are linked almost as inextricably as fast-food consumption and detrimental effects on health.

I've been cheered by the reaction to what I've done with Film Independent at LACMA and the organizational support I've received in pursuing it.

What we're most aware of in 'Eight-Legged Freaks' is how similar it is to other movies, a recombinant mutated species itself, the product of the crossbreeding of the suffering-from-gigantism movies of the 1950s and the 1990 B-picture classic 'Tremors.'

The idea of Seth Rogen as the Green Hornet so inflaming the fanboy community is amusing, since that group's 20/50 vision also had it tsking its disapproval about Michael Keaton as Batman and Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man.

Before he became 'a working actor,' as he now proudly calls himself, Jamie Dornan initially caught the public's attention as a model - you may remember him from those greasy underwear ads with Eva Mendes, among many others.

I saw Berry in concert a couple of times in the late '70s - and like almost every North American male of a certain age, I went because a friend was hired by Berry that very day to be part of the legend's backup band.

Each country has its own way of communicating a narrative and, through that, expressing family experiences in emotional stories.

'Man is an endangered species,' announces one of the titles at the beginning of the sci-fi lump 'Battlefield Earth.' And after about 20 minutes of this amateurish picture, extinction doesn't seem like such a bad idea.

For those not so taken by the star power, this new 'Ocean's Eleven' is the equivalent of a domineering team you can't stand that enters the Super Bowl. Even if you don't like the players, the odds are so good that it's tough to bet against them.

When Bruce Lee gets his cameo in 'The Green Hornet' - as one of the drawings in Kato's notebook - it clarifies what the film is: an unrealized sketch. A sketch can afford to allude to a point of view. Moviemakers need to show their point of view, something this shrug of a movie never gets around to doing.

In 2013, when it turned out that the plot of LaBeouf's short film 'HowardCantour.com' (2012) had been purloined from graphic novelist Daniel Clowes's 2007 comic 'Justin M. Damiano', the actor-director responded with a series of tweet apologies that also appeared to be shoplifted.

The director Sofia Coppola's new comic melodrama, 'Lost in Translation,' thoroughly and touchingly connects the dots between three standards of yearning in movies: David Lean's 'Brief Encounter,' Richard Linklater's 'Before Sunrise' and Wong Kar-wai's 'In the Mood for Love.'

The world may not be ready yet for the film equivalent of books on tape, but this peculiar phenomenon has arrived in the form of the film adaptation of J. K. Rowling's 'Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.'

'The Third Man,' directed by Carol Reed and written by Graham Greene, is, quite simply, one of the finest movies ever made.

'Plan Nine From Outer Space' for a new generation, 'Battlefield Earth' is set in the year 3000, after the beings from the planet Psychlo have conquered our planet in only nine minutes.

Like his countryman, Kiefer Sutherland, Seth Rogen has a voice that's 10 years older than he is - a combination of world-weariness and exuberance, an instrument that he's mastered for specific comic shadings.

'Pootie Tang' may be raw and slovenly - hey, it often is raw and slovenly - but it succeeds as a laugh getter because of the spot-on satirical notes. You might say that the movie walks it like it talks it; I'm not sure what Pootie would say.

A little of the sketch character Pootie Tang went a long way on HBO's now late, probably soon to be lamented 'Chris Rock Show.' So it's surprising how much fun the character's film debut, 'Pootie Tang,' is.

Given the knee-jerk patriotism of recent war movies, it's discouraging to see 'Windtalkers' evade pertinent facts that could have recast the doubled-edged issues of racism and loyalty and made them relevant to contemporary times.

Performance art is really more of a command than an invitation.

Since most of 'Mean Girls' consists of the outsider Cady observing the tribal rites of her new setting and laying it all out in narration, this movie is just like home for the meticulous and ruthless deadpan that Ms. Fey has perfected for the satirical 'S.N.L.' newscast in which she and Jimmy Fallon are the anchors.

'Old School' is so breezy it could be a late-night talk show, especially when Craig Kilborn, of 'The Late Late Show,' sidles into camera range as a particularly loathsome competitor to Mitch.

Muhammad Ali inside the ring and Muhammad Ali outside the ring were totally different men; his abrasive, magnetic daring and infectious self-love outside the ring galvanized the world and distracted many from his sniper's precision. He was a heavyweight with the fluttering gracefulness of a middleweight.

The film's star, Eminem, doesn't appear to have a great deal of range, but he can play himself. Even though the protagonist is named Jimmy Smith, the thoughtful '8 Mile' is a raw version of the rapper's own story.

'Certifiably Jonathan' contrives crises for its subject - a bid to get his paintings into MOMA, among others.

I dress well. I travel; I seem to be relatively glamorous for a film guy - which, to me, is like being the fastest midget in the circus.

Mike Mignola's 'Hellboy' comics have a drizzly, musty gothic ambience - the same fetid air that H. P. Lovecraft circulated in his fiction.

It's more dangerous to be a friend or relative of Jackie Chan in the star's movies than it is to play the third yeoman on a 'Star Trek' episode.

If Mr. Chan ever makes another movie like 'The Tuxedo,' it's American audiences that will see him in court. With 'Shanghai Knights,' he has come through with one of his best. This time, it's personable.

One of the best things Gwyneth Paltrow has done in years was her mesmerized, good-sport cameo in a 'Pootie' sketch, when she was melted over him like butter on an English muffin.

Often, when Jim Carrey plays it straight, all of the vitality is drained from his face; he looks like a root-canal patient trying out a pleasant expression for his oral surgeon.

One of the funniest things about Mr. Kaufman is that all of his filmed scripts - 'Being John Malkovich,' 'Human Nature,' 'Adaptation' and now 'Sunshine' - sound like titles from REM's 'Reckoning.'

The road back from degradation begins with self-awareness - and sometimes, as in 'Phone Booth,' change can begin with a single phone call.

'Va Savoir' is a lovable comedy about love that looks upon life as drama and uses the world of the theater as a staging device.

Music is a big part of the director's life; Ms. Coppola's previous feature, a screen adaptation of 'The Virgin Suicides,' was informed more substantially by the score by the group Air than by the narrative.

The influence of John Hughes is fully felt in the melodrama 'Donnie Darko.' This first film written and directed by Richard Kelly is a wobbly cannonball of a movie that tries to go Mr. Hughes one better; it's like a Hughes version of a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

It may be a bit early to make such judgments, but 'Battlefield Earth' may well turn out to be the worst movie of this century.

Adapted from the novel by L. Ron Hubbard, who cranked out sci-fi pulp by the cubic ton, 'Battlefield Earth' has the musty feel of the days when the genre's highlight was Flash Gordon.

'Eight-Legged Freaks' runs out of gas scarily fast - its one-joke premise lends itself more to a short than a feature.

Whom do you feel sorrier for: the cast of 'Boat Trip' or their children? Remember, kids can be very cruel - and this latest 'get Cuba Gooding Jr. career counseling fast' project is a misfire from beginning to end.

'Boat Trip' is more tiresome and dumb than actually bad.

'Black Hawk Down' has such distinctive visual aplomb that its jingoism starts to feel like part of its atmosphere.