Writer-director Kevin Smith’s flimsiest film – a road comedy featuring the two crude, New Jersey slackers who have popped up in all of his movies – also may be his funniest, at least to the chosen few. In an admirable gesture of independence, Smith makes movies only for loyal fans of his sophomoric sensibility, not

Martin Lawrence stars in this mean-spirited farce about an FBI agent who goes undercover as a rotund Southern grandma. The movie awkwardly jumps from one uninspired gag about the title character’s size to the next. If you get your kicks by laughing at overweight people, this will be 95 minutes of rip-roarin’ fun.

A sweet romance in a tasteless joke’s clothing, the Farrelly brothers’ latest farce follows a self-deluded skirt-chaser (Jack Black) who is hypnotized so that he sees people for their inner beauty; hence the overweight Peace Corps volunteer he meets looks to him like Gwyneth Paltrow. If this makes you uncomfortable, it’s supposed to – Shallow

A merry melodrama about comic-opera geniuses Gilbert and Sullivan, this period piece should be a delight for anyone who’s ever been involved in musical theater (or has seen The Pirates of Penzance a dozen times). Director Mike Leigh takes material that’s seemingly suited for Masterpiece Theater and injects it with radiance, relevance and life.

At 146 minutes, Steven Spielberg’s epic misfire is too long to qualify as a fascinating train wreck; even its spectacular badness grows wearying. As it speculates on the riotous paranoia that strikes Los Angeles in the days after Pearl Harbor, 1941 throws gobs of money and special effects at the screen and strains for laughs

A breezy, often bizarre animated feature straight from the id of writer-director Sylvain Chomet. The story follows a morose little boy who becomes a world-class bicyclist under the rigorous training of his grandmother, but that’s just a basic premise. Chomet’s sensibility, brought to life through a rough drawing style resembling lovely scribbles, combines an eye

Amanda Peet stars as the object of affection for three best friends, each of whom is as lame as he is despicable (one guy refers to his apartment as a “stabbin’ cabin”). The movie tries to put a feminist twist on things at the end by having Peet dump the trio, but I’m not sure

Watching The Animal – in which Rob Schneider plays a would-be cop who survives a car accident by having animal parts put into his body – is like witnessing the slow, excruciating death of a single joke over the course of 83 minutes. For every gag that works – yes, I laughed when Schneider combs

If this had a sell-by date, it would be 12/31/05. Any viewing after then may cause food poisoning. The freshest film to be lampooned is Brokeback Mountain and Brokeback jokes were already old before the 2006 Oscars. Much of the first third of the picture is modeled on 2004’s The Grudge, and the targets only