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

Mel Brooks takes direct aim at George Lucas’ space saga, but with a rifle filled with far too many blanks. There are a few good gags here – you’ve got to love the Millennium Falcon being replaced by a Winnebago with wings – but most of it is juvenile, corny or both. The random cast

Luke Wilson, the straight man of the Wilson brothers, plays second banana once again, this time to Uma Thurman. In this scrambled spoof/romantic comedy/farce (the movie’s own secret identity is never truly revealed), Thurman plays G-Girl, a sort of female Superman and the temperamental girlfriend of Wilson’s Matt. When he tries to end things with

At its best, this traditional Adam Sandler picture -meaning there’s plenty of sexual innuendo, comic violence and moments of absurdism – spoofs the contemporary need to pigeonhole people according to their perceived problems. Sandler plays a mild-mannered corporate lackey who gets mistakenly assigned to an unconventional anger therapist (Jack Nicholson, delightfully mugging his way through

A far smarter send-up of cultural stereotypes than Bringing Down the House, Malibu’s Most Wanted stars Jamie Kennedy as Brad “B-Rad” Gluckman, a privileged California white kid who acts like he just stepped out of a rap video. The spoofing of hip-hop mannerisms is dead-on, while a plot twist in which two proper black actors

An improperly projected preview screening – in which the first 10 minutes of this lame comedy about money-grubbing buddies made the characters look like they were standing in front of a fun-house mirror – was the only amusing thing about the experience. That’s how bad the National Lampoon movie brand has become – it needs