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

Very clever about being very clever, Adaptation stars Nicolas Cage as Charlie Kaufman – the real-life screenwriter who wrote Adaptation, in which ‘Kaufman’ struggles to adapt a novel into a movie and eventually writes himself into his screenplay. It’s all a hoot for struggling scribes and Hollywood insiders, if ultimately less insightful than Kaufman’s previous

Live actors and animated characters combine to bring Jay Ward’s cute and corny 1960s television series to the big screen. Natasha, Boris and Fearless Leader – played by Rene Russo, Jason Alexander and Robert De Niro – once again face off against ‘moose and squirrel’ (playing themselves). This has some charm and it’s certainly wittier

Another farce involving skittish dentist Nicholas “Oz” Oseransky (Matthew Perry, desperately flailing) and goofy hit man Jimmy “The Tulip” Tudeski (Bruce Willis, not nearly embarrassed enough), The Whole Ten Yards is like a morgue for laughs. Dead jokes are lined up across the screen.

Starring Robert De Niro and Eddie Murphy as mismatched cops forced to pair up for a television reality series, Showtime means to spoof the big-gun cop blockbusters of the ’80s while still shooting off a few guns of its own. The gimmick works, thanks mostly to the easy camaraderie of the leads – they’re an