Andrea Gronvall

The best, Shaking Tokyo, stars the versatile Teruyuki Kagawa.

This dyspeptic 2003 coming-of-age story from Italy often seems on the verge of nervous collapse, veering from giddy adolescent romps to adult shenanigans and shrill political discord.

As in many nature films, the ostensible subjects are less captivating than their scenic backdrops.

The singing dolphins opener is a giddy prelude to an imaginative romp that's helped along in the slow patches by mind-bending visuals.

Writer-director Karin Albou nicely balances intellect against spirituality but is defeated by the sex scenes, which are tinged with an Orientalist exoticism; the result is a bodice-ripper for the art-house crowd.

This sequel improves on the 2005 original about four friends.

The jokes don't all work and the topical references can be irritably hipper-than-thou, but at least director and cowriter Will Gluck (Easy A) aims high: this is patterned on the Tracy and Hepburn comedies, albeit with a lot more skin.

A lunatic cast energizes this comic fantasy.

A tired, generic crime story.

A crime wave gives the heroine a mystery to solve and provides most of the comedy, but the film is stronger in its dramatic stretches.

This carefully observed film has lots of heart.

Meticulously rendered CGI creatures--from Arthur Rackham-esque flower sprites to a troll that could have sprung from "Jurassic Park"--spike this dark adventure, shot marvelously by Caleb Deschanel.

Ella Ramangwane gives a fine performance as the young Sandra.

Like some laid-back distant cousin of Tim Burton, writer-director Goran Dukic manages to balance the ghoulishness with whimsy and melancholy, at least for a while. But the strain is obvious in the story's last third, as the filmmaker struggles toward a resolution that fits the logic of the hero's netherworld.

Stunning vistas of New Zealand's rolling countryside aren't enough to carry this lame 2006 horror spoof.

Perry benefits from the fire, heft, velocity, and lyricism of the language, but he also updates the material and makes it work onscreen, eliciting powerhouse performances from an ensemble of actresses.

The European actors (especially Sartor) give commendably realistic performances, but the film suffers from an episodic script, which contributes to the sense of anticlimax when the battle finally arrives.

George is suitably adorable, wreaking the kind of havoc that gives tykes a guilty thrill. Yet the movie concludes with the specious moral that reading is inferior to experiencing life firsthand.

Drawn to these fumbling kids, Hurt gradually opens up about his one great, tragic love (Maria Bello), but any catharsis is circumvented by his floundering costars and their risibly cornpone dialogue.

Humorous touches add warmth without being cloying, but Mullan carries the film with his intelligence and rugged intensity: images of his barrel-chested physique against the craggy shore resound on such an elemental level as to be almost spiritual.

The humor loses momentum as the cleric shuns her advances, and the action grows frenetic following the arrival of his twin brother, a macho general.

Austere and formally complex, the drama may nevertheless be Ozon's most accessible film due to the physical attractiveness and vitality of the intelligent couple.

In one slender documentary codirectors Shane King and Arne Johnson accomplish what Hollywood routinely bungles: incisively depicting the inner lives of complicated young females.

This forceful expose shows how area residents are fighting to keep their beloved Coal Mountain pristine, but filmmaker Bill Haney allots too much screen time to environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and barely any to the urban consumers in distant states whose thirst for cheap electric power is part of the problem.

Perhaps it's fitting that a movie about the early CIA be tangled and opaque, but this drama loosely based on the life of uberspook James Angleton verges on incoherence.

Endorsed by the Dalai Lama and narrated by his nephew Tenzin L. Choegyal, this delivers an impassioned plea to save Tibet's endangered culture but little new information.

The movie is notable for its perceptive take on issues facing immigrants, and atmospherically photographed by Robbie Ryan (Red Road), but its flat, static quality belies the novel's richness.

Thanks to her fearless, charismatic star, Ondi Timoner has directed one of the more hopeful movies of the year.