I’m not quite sure what Johnny Depp is doing in this pirate yarn, but it works. As Captain Jack Sparrow, a ramshackle scamp with dirty dreadlocks and enough eye makeup to incite jealousy in a sixth-grade girl, he speaks in an accent that’s slightly British but mostly slurred. Turns out his loose-cannon act is the

At just over 200 brisk pages, C.S. Lewis’ novel invites movie adaptation far more easily than, say, the Harry Potter books, so that a movie version needs only to let its source story breathe. Director Andrew Adamson (Shrek) does that right from the start, expanding on the book’s brief prologue to introduce the four sibling

Another manic, cartoonish martial-arts comedy from Hong Kong filmmaker Stephen Chow, this time about a showdown between a vicious street gang and the relatively peaceful denizens of a dilapidated tenement in 1940s Shanghai. I found it all overwhelming and decidedly more graphic than Chow’s equally zany but more enjoyable Shaolin Soccer. The mixture of geniality

All you really need to know about this miscalculated mess is one early plot point: Zorro (Antonio Banderas) and the love he won in the first film (Catherine Zeta-Jones) get divorced. You might think this means that the sequel to 1998’s The Mask of Zorro – which breezily captured the happy-go-lucky tone of the legendary

Aside from Matthew McConaughey – whose outlandish, post-apocalyptic dragon-slayer simultaneously invokes Gen. George Patton, Sir Lancelot and Mad Max – this is one dull creature feature. McConaughey goes for camp, but almost everyone else, including star Christian Bale, smothers his ironic sparks like a damp rag.

A great concept burdened by an unwieldy back story, the comic-book adaptation Hellboy feels like the ponderous prologue to a novel. Ron Perlman nearly saves the movie in the title role. A demon who has been raised by a kindly professor to battle the forces of evil, Hellboy conducts his missions with dripping sarcasm. Hellboy

A spy thriller feverishly pitched to the extreme-sports generation, XXX is such a hack job the filmmakers might as well have given guns to those mountain-biking, sky-diving buddies from the Mountain Dew ads of the same era. Vin Diesel, a smart actor in a dumb star’s body, plays a newfangled Evel Knievel who’s recruited by