Bill Gallo

Ryan never quite convinces us she's seen the inside of a fight gym, much less that she's worthy to be Rocky in a miniskirt. On the other hand, her director here was not Campion but actor Charles S. Dutton, whose behind-the-camera skills, developed via cable TV, tend toward the cartoonish.

If you love Kawasakis, Hondas, and Yamahas, and don't mind tin-eared writing, get down to the multiplex.

This badly muddled adaptation of a complex novel chases after Guterson's many skeins and themes with no unifying principle in mind.

You'd better be in the mood for a blitz of bumper-sticker philosophy, a major machismo transfusion and 94 minutes' worth of mind-numbing repetition, complete with a musical score seemingly lifted from reality TV.

If, in its groundbreaking assault on the mythology of the American West, Brokeback Mountain gets a lot of people into a furious lather, so be it.

Anyone who expects a little drama with their screen sex will have to go elsewhere.

There is more anxiety than loving humor in the proceedings, and a noticeable lack of charm.

This is a grim and sometimes guilt-ridden examination of the Third Reich in collapse. But it's also weirdly sympathetic, and not just to the peripheral figures in Hitler's twisted world.

An occasionally amusing but wrongheaded remake that arrives more than four decades after the original blazed across the screen.

Indeed, in this era of muckraking left-wing documentaries, The Inheritance offers a more fascinating fictionalized look at what cut-throat capitalism can do to conscience.

For Caan's shtick alone, The Yards is worthwhile, but we may also be witnessing the emergence, in Gray, of a young filmmaker who's just starting to find the range.

An unabashed flag-waver and one of the best feel-good sports movies ever, this authentic charmer does for its young hockey players what John Wayne used to do for the U.S. Marines, and it lifts us, too, onto the boys' cloud of belief.

It's vastly enjoyable in a low-down, scandal-mongering way.

The movie is more a loose collection of skits than a coherent whole. But then, it's never coherence we're looking for when Atkinson's exhausting imagination is cut loose from its fetters. The weird bonus here is John Malkovich's over-the-top performance.

Picture the dopes from "Dumb and Dumber" getting mixed up in organized crime -- but without benefit of Jim Carrey's rubberized pratfalls or his go-to-hell anarchism.

If, having seen "Jackass" half a dozen times, you now yearn to watch a pair of identical twins from Texas Tech cavort in the wet T-shirt contest or hear mobs of drunken undergraduates screaming for more margaritas, here's your flick.

Moviegoers might have preferred a little more care with the characters. As it is, Alma comes off not as a courageous trailblazer but as an indiscriminate adventuress.

In his observant, swiftly paced Stardom, Arcand does it all with relentless wit, high style, and a suggestion of tragedy.

The cast has plenty of room to emote, but their task feels a bit empty and thankless. For the most part, they're carrying the director's water.

The flashy sensationalism of The Sixth Sense -- maybe the best thing about it -- is at war with its desire for contemplation.

A thoroughly unremarkable police action movie starring the magnetic Samuel L. Jackson.

Here's a knowing look at female friendship, spiked with raw urban humor.

In short, Just Say Yes.

Atkins has trouble keeping the tension high and the jokes rolling. Halfway through he begins tripping over the noir genre's dark rules, and in the end he veers off into a haze of romantic redemption that Billy Wilder and Nicholas Ray would have scoffed at.

Arcand loyalists are bound to miss Rémy, but at least he goes out in style. Even the antagonists will have to admit that.

The whole thing has a dour resolve that undermines its attempts at humor.

In Mary Katherine Gallagher's dogged perseverance, it's easy to find not only cheap laughs but real soul. In her way, she's a saint.

A fluent, intelligent piece of work whose sex and violence are anything but gratuitous, and exactly the kind of highly personal, no-holds-barred vision of life on the ragged edge that independents always aspire to but rarely have the goods to achieve.