Yes, the raunchy sex gags return as the four high-school buddies from the original film reunite after their first year at college, but thankfully so does the self-deprecating honesty that made American Pie an oddly touching teen flick. There’s plenty of titillation here, but also a surprisingly mature recognition that casual sex may not be

How many times must Owen Wilson perform CPR on a comatose movie? Like I Spy, Shanghai Knights and other Wilson misfires, this Elmore Leonard adaptation about a con man in Hawaii occasionally flails about with signs of life, but mostly it’s dead on arrival. Wilson is as endearingly goofy as always, but for all his

Exhibit A in the curious career of Saturday Night Live veteran Rob Schneider. Schneider has no discernible comic talent, aside from giving the impression of being a 10-year-old stuck in a 40-year-old man’s body, yet here he’s given a plum part: that of a lowly aquarium cleaner who stumbles into a second career as a

An angry letter to a faceless utility company in the guise of science-fiction, Douglas Adams’ 1979 novel channeled all his frustrations at the inanities and bureaucracies that govern society into a tongue-in-cheek guide to extraterrestrial life – which is revealed to be just as bogged down in inanity and bureaucracy as our own. This adaptation

This often-amusing exercise in geek chic garnered a cult following, especially among teens, possibly because they found its portrait of a high-school nerd (Jon Heder) reassuring: they could never be as cluelessly dorky as the title character. Heder’s commitment to the role – he makes being a loser a form of rebellion – goes a

Landing right in the middle of his richest period is this Alfred Hitchcock lark, a curious comedy that neither looks back at Rear Window nor ahead to Vertigo, but rather exists in some goofy space all its own. It’s as if Hitchcock went on vacation, but kept working. Filmed in throbbing Technicolor and expansive VistaVision,

Owen Wilson refined his off-kilter act into marketable Hollywood shtick for this outing. Eddie Murphy, who’s been selling his wiseacre routine for years, welcomes him into the sell-out club, playing a boxer who teams up with Wilson’s dopey spy.

Dignity is the last thing you would expect to find here, yet that is the defining quality of this vehicle for Steve Carell, in which he plays a nerd whose buddies make it their mission to have him deflowered. In between the raunchy male talk and disastrous dates, he stumbles into a tentative romance with

It is hard to imagine an Adam Sandler movie played straight – Happy Gilmore as a tragedy, anyone? – but that may have been the only approach that could have saved 50 First Dates. There’s a fine conceit for a romantic drama here – Sandler plays a veterinarian in love with a woman (Drew Barrymore)

Imagine a Peanuts holiday special in which Lucy got drunk and Snoopy spent most of his time defecating and you’ll get an inkling of what’s offered by this animated musical. Like Big Daddy, one of Sandler’s worst films, this mixes raunchy gags with shameless sentimentality as it follows the redemption of a modern-day Scrooge (voiced