Carina Chocano

Ratner seems to have found a theme that he can relate to: A terrifying trio of angry, undomesticated women who all but run away with the movie.

A dark and deeply unsettling movie with its roots in classical tragedy.

Includes a few scenes of impressively choreographed mayhem, but they're all but buried in Freeman and Condon's mystical grandpa and weirdo teeny bopper routines.

If this strikes some as some kind of gallingly blasé, ostentatious Parisian sophistication, it's far from it.

The result is not quite a horror movie (too cheerful and can-do) or a thriller (too cheerful and stupid), nor does it parody itself or take itself seriously, thereby canceling out the camp factor. It's more like an improv sketch at 30,000 feet.

Often surprising and thought-provoking (the urge to euphemize is characterized as a drift away from reality), "****" is as funny and cathartic as the word it celebrates, and nearly as perversely shock-happy.

Despite the snappy brilliance of the setup, Prime doesn't entirely deliver on its promise -- something about the way it ends feels like a cop-out, and the opportunities for humor aren't exploited quite as well as they could be.

Has its moments... But does a kids' movie really need, among other similar touches, a Hooters joke? I, for one, wouldn't want to have to explain it.

Schreiber takes Foer's sprawling, multilayered, multigenerational beast and hones it into a post-Glasnost buddy picture; a polished nugget of a road movie, focused mainly on Alex and Jonathan's growing sense of identification with each other and with their origins.

For all its sad moments, Romulus, My Father is a love story between father and son kept aloft by unalloyed admiration.

Campy, shameless and sophisticated, Lichtenstein's debut is gutsy and original, and it makes "Juno" look positively tame by comparison.

Charming, bittersweet.

A humanist parable about how to be a good person, live a good life and make gallons of lemonade when life suddenly hands you lemons, it's predictably delightful and delightfully predictable.

It's the kind of observational comedy, that'll be hard to find come summertime and should be enjoyed while there's still a chance.

For a druggie movie, Candy is surprisingly dynamic and involving.

What's being sold here is the movie equivalent of the honey-drenched sweet potato biscuits that are forever being passed around on-screen. Their nutritional value may be nil, but they sure look comforting.

So, while the movie at times warmed my own middle-class, private school-educated cockles to a toasty complacency, there's an undercurrent of friendly fascism running through it like a nasty draft.

As a take on celebrity as religious mass derangement, Backstage is nominally interesting. As a study of two characters, it's not very convincing.

Feels terminally generic and tone-deaf.

What's missing is less a sense of the protagonist's inner nose (which is very well-trammeled) as a sense of his inner life, motivation or desire.

Small and intimate, Game 6 is a meditation on American theater and the Great American Pastime that hovers above the surface of reality but never quite takes off, either.

Sweet and often hilarious.

Harris, of course, is in a different league from the rest, and his depiction of the tortured writer is remarkably well-realized, considering the nonspecific yet somehow overly familiar inscrutability of the character. Despite its limitations, there's something appealing about the world Rapp has created.

Leatherheads proceeds agreeably, hitting occasional high notes when it isn't getting bogged down in forced slapstick hi-jinks.

Despite very good performances and solid construction, it's a slightly too symmetrical, way too tendentious side-by-side comparison of two families -- Haves, meet the Have-nots -- who come into unlikely contact in the fitfully gentrifying area of Kings Cross.

There's something about Hunt's put-upon persona that grates, and it would be nice to see her for once in a role that doesn't call on her to be so angry, short-tempered and disappointed all the time...Still, all in all, Then She Found Me is a warm, entertaining and well-made little movie and an auspicious debut for Hunt the director.

At a certain point, Wassup Rockers transforms from a relatively naturalistic slice-of-life portrait into a surrealistic funhouse trap.

A glorious blend of kitsch, grit, humor and uplift.

Stahl and Farmiga give layered, restrained performances that keep what might have been a schlock fest with an improbable twist ending from devolving into trashiness. Instead, Brooks and his actors manage to render an involving and thoughtful story from some pretty dubious material.

It's neither very original nor very convincing. "Shakespeare in Love" did something similar by casting its writer protagonist as the hero of a story he himself might have written, but Becoming Jane lacks that movie's wit and playfulness.

As it turns out, spending a couple of hours with emotionally arrested, socially moronic characters is not a whole lot more fun than spending a couple of hours with actual emotionally arrested, socially moronic people.

Rendition offers few surprises, and it tips its hand too soon and too predictably to do much more than goose your weary outrage.

Enthusiastically smutty and lyrical, the movie attempts to capture the way we unconsciously set the emotional moments of our lives to pop music, turning fits of passion, anger and righteous indignation into elaborate musical numbers in our heads.

The movie hardly allows itself any sharp moments at all -- it's much too sweet-natured to be cruel, and much too cheerful to be angry. It probably could have pushed a few more buttons, but Baby Mama aims to please and succeeds.

Robbins plays David with the self-assurance that there's no combination sexier than smart, funny and self-righteously angry.

Modest but well wrought and witty, Snow Cake is full of unexpected moments and clever observations.

For the most part, it's an uneven if amiable and occasionally inspired comedy about getting through adolescence that hits some false notes along the way.

Spanning two decades and a momentous war, Memoirs of a Geisha displays all the pomp and grandeur of an epic, but you wouldn't call it sweeping.

If a more elegant and succinct explanation of what compels some people to go to art school has ever been filmed, I haven't seen it.

Allen's view of what's "deeply real" feels ever more deeply bogus as the movie progresses, his trademark wit having calcified into pastiche and unintended self-parody.

Despite the overt message and Manichean universe it pushes, Amu manages some memorable cinematic moments while getting the word out for its cause.

There's no real jeopardy. The stakes are low. It's a bee movie about nothing.

Good Dick carries its messed-up, highly improbable premise so lightly and gracefully that it ultimately comes off as a sweet, plausible and curiously grounded love story -- and touchingly old-fashioned.

While it's full of arresting, indelible images, Mr. Lonely remains mostly on the level of abstraction. You get it but you don't always feel it.

Hopefully, the girls who see Nancy Drew this summer will take their cues from the smart, engaged, intellectually curious character Roberts so charmingly portrays.

As depressing as it is hard to watch, Palindromes is also consistently, horrifyingly funny and sharp-witted, and the darker and more well-observed its humor, the more it belies the director's unsentimental, even grudging empathy for his fellow DNA monkeys.

Rent is commodified faux bohemia on a platter, eliciting the same kind of numbing soul-sadness as children's beauty pageants, tiny dogs in expensive boots, Mahatma Gandhi in Apple ads.

Intermittently fun and high-spirited, Dead Man's Chest sags under the weight of its own running time.

The alluring surfaces of other people's lives can be deceiving, though generally not in a Nancy Meyers comedy, where the thin veneer of fantasy cloaks ... more fantasy.

A chronological brain-teaser confounding enough to keep you busy trying to figure out whether those holes are in the story or in your logic. But ultimately the movie is more interested in the love part of the equation than in the whole crazy, madcap physics part.

Murphy, who created the creepy, funny, lunatic "Nip/Tuck," is a master of mordant and macabre camp. But here he loses his teeth, seeming to lack any ironic distance from material that practically begs for it.

Sweet-natured and likable as the movie is, it never really delivers on the promise of its ingenious premise, which hints at a subversive retelling of mainstream Hollywood movies but stops short at goofy homage.

Lavish production and wardrobe design, as well as beautiful cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe make Goya's Ghosts lovely to look at, but as a portrait of the artist, the movie is a letdown.

What's rare to see, and what ultimately makes Nacho Libre so enjoyable, is the story of an underdog who's allowed to remain a humble clown all the way to becoming a hero.

Rather than come across as fantastic or dreamlike, the stories have a vivid, hyperreal quality to them.

Love is a many-splendored thing in Robert Benton's dull romantic fantasy Feast of Love, though none of its splendors rings true.

A tender love story and a dead-on lampoon of the genre, but its main drawback is that Showalter is egregiously miscast in the title role.

The whole thing feels fusty and forced.

Bloated and logy, and art-directed within an inch of its life, the movie shovels heaps of phony portent and all-purpose mystical imagery onto a thin and maudlin plot.

The only real reason to catch Eros is to see Wong Kar-Wai's beautiful opening piece, "The Hand."

The use of recognizable movie stars doesn't help, r serve Wong's style. My Blueberry Nights" should have played like a memory, but its hard-living, luckless losers are too beautiful to be believed.

Keanu Reeves has no peer when it comes to playing these sort of messianic roles -- he infuses them with a Zen blankness and serenity that somehow gets him through even the unlikeliest scenes with a quiet, unassuming dignity.

The movie feels stubbornly, resolutely disingenuous and one-dimensional. Everything in it isdesigned to make you feel better, so why does it feel artificial and palliative in that really depressing way?

The wave-like "Rashomon" structure of the story, combined with the steady pace and moody look of Vivere are lulling, but in the end the situation is neither believable nor fantastic enough to be very compelling.

The movie belongs to Blethyn, who takes a difficult, easily misunderstood role and gracefully cracks it open to reveal what's inside.

No amount of goodwill can rescue Face from its painfully literal script and acting that's all about projecting recognizable attitude rather than drawing in viewers.

Pure, unself-conscious macho camp, but it's not like Pacino and McConaughey don't know it. They're pitching tents and romping around in the grass like Jerry Maguire on steroids.

Exciting, distracting and quite possibly permanently concentration impairing, what Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End offers is a wonderfully scenic medley of impressive action sequences so lengthy, elaborate and numerous that remembering what came before becomes a kind of test of mental focus.

David Wain, director of "Wet Hot American Summer," brings his popular brand of surrealist yet mundane humor to the big screen with more or less dreadful results.

The movie doesn't purport to have her stand for all women, just the crazy ones, and as such, G-Girl is pure, soul-cleansing id catharsis.

More than characters, dialogue and lighting, here Petersen is interested exclusively in suspense of the will-he-or-won't-he-be-crushed-by-that-falling-flaming-elevator variety.

What begins, rather promisingly, as a visceral yawp against class difference in contemporary South Korea slowly devolves into a prolonged exercise in pointless sadomasochism.

It does get mired in its obsession with its own style.