Andy Klein

Headey, Skarsgård and Rampling flesh these people out marvelously, bringing them fully to life. It's almost a pity: The more real they become, the less pleasant is the time we spend with them.

It's nothing more than a very long movie about someone, literally and metaphorically, having to get back up on a horse.

The only genuine surprises on hand are the few moments when the film defies the expectations that have been programmed into our collective neurons by the past 25 years of horror movies.

It's during the shift to seriousness that The Ice Storm makes its missteps. The intrusion of tragedy, while altogether believable, still seems like a device, a calculated tug at the heart strings. It is, in short, a once-effective ploy that now feels like a cliche. A near-miss might have been more effective.

Thankfully, the final, long action set piece, which owes a debt to "The Manchurian Candidate" among others, is free of such problems. Shiri manages to go out on its most exciting sequence. There are worse ways to go.

While tyro director Simon West fills Con Air with all the slam-bang action and well-honed wisecracks that were the more positive qualities of its predecessors, the film brims even more with all their worst qualities.

In the end, Code Unknown is a puzzle with no obvious solution.

At 75, Aranda can still make his actors sizzle on the screen as well as he did 10 years ago in "Lovers." The explicitly hot bits here may be few and far between, but what there is of them is choice.

It is engaging, touching, and frequently funny. Maybe because his hero is inarticulate and his heroine is mute, Allen relies far more than usual on physical comedy than on the verbal jokes that are his strongest comic suit.

The texture is reminiscent of last year's "Suzhou River," but the basic material isn't as rich.

The cold distance that LaBute brings to the material keeps the viewer at arms' length.

The Wachowskis still hold the current franchise on intellectually engaging action films. It's not like I won't be heading back for a second (or even third) look.

With virtually no interesting elements for an audience to focus on, Chelsea Walls is a triple-espresso endurance challenge.

Generally engaging.

Eastwood provides more than an hour of easygoing fun, followed by 45 minutes of action and suspense.

Shot in stylish black and white, with a memorably low-key performance from Duchesne, Bob le Flambeur is definitely worth checking out on the big screen in a fresh print.

Has an awkwardness that defeats whatever emotional involvement it tries to achieve.

Condensing, paring and shorthanding the story elements can be daunting, and, despite the efforts of Kasdan and Goldman, two masters at wrangling unwieldy source material into shape, there is some awkwardness and confusion in the result.

Hope Floats comes lumbering along, scourging all in its path with saccharine sentimentality and bogus emotions.

For those with a taste for epics that integrate the historical and the intimate.

Handily in a league with its predecessor...as good a follow-up as one can imagine, given the built-in difficulties of sequels.

Stylish, but definitely not for the squeamish

Fans of convoluted narrative in the manner of Christopher Nolan and David Lynch are likely to be intrigued, although Medem has a far stronger streak of sentiment.

What's most disappointing is the almost utter lack of humor -- In the mindless action sweepstakes, however, there's still enough here to place The Transporter above big-bang gibberish like XXX.

When emotion is called for, Cassavetes drags out every tear-jerking moment beyond the point of tolerability.

What Ichaso does do is take us on a dizzying, constantly moving ride through an exciting decade in the blossoming of "Nuyorican" culture with its most flamboyant figure as our focus.

Jones seems to have trouble keeping up with the large amount of action he's required to participate in. And Del Toro seems ill-cast and ill-used.

If a movie is going to be so totally derivative, it should at least do a better job of it.