A caper film of such postmodernist pretense that it's almost a parody of itself.

A gem of a romantic crime comedy that turns out to be clever, amusing and unpredictable.

There was a lot I liked in Cletis Tout, including the performances and the very audacity of details like the magic tricks and the carrier pigeons. But it seemed a shame that the writer and director, Chris Ver Wiel, took a perfectly sound story idea and complicated it into an exercise in style. Less is more.

Harmless, mildly enjoyable.

Writer-director Chris Ver Wiel stocks this diverting crime comedy with familar characters and formulas.

Screenwriter Chris ver Weil's directing debut is good-natured and never dull, but its virtues are small and easily overshadowed by its predictability. It's the kind of film that plays better on video than in theaters.

It's a respectable B- movie -- airy, inconsequential and a little too cute at times, but fairly entertaining all the same.

Ladling in so much schmaltz that even his in-house critic says, ''This thing's worse than `Terms of Endearment.'''

The yarn itself is a winning one.

It's almost worth the price of admission to see Allen paying homage to "Singin' in the Rain" in the final sequence. Almost.

Cletis Tout is both in love with and able to laugh at the conventions it adopts, which is exactly where it goes wrong. It's just a little too self-satisfied.

This mistaken-identity picture is so film-culture referential that the final product is a ghost.

In the absence of sincerity, Cletis Tout creates a vacuum that flushes out the entire story, leaving nothing but its own hollow cleverness.

It all makes the head spin -- in the direction of the exit sign.