Carina Chocano

An exquisitely evocative movie that elevates rueful melancholia to a superpower.

What this is remains mysterious after a single viewing, but not so mysterious as to inspire a second.

The Devil Wears Prada spins Weisberger's rant into a sharp, surprisingly funny excursion into the catty realm of women's magazines. The movie skips the condescension usually aimed at this world in favor of rapt observation.

A well-photographed inside look at a fascinating culture and its people.

Ultimately, the scale of the production and the expectation built into the release don't entirely justify the effort.

A wickedly funny satire.

A wry, charming romance about a New York woman who has given up hope of finding love.

Captures Los Angeles in a straightforward, naturalistic way, neighborhood-hopping like a native.

Swicord has a playful sense of humor and a good ear for dialogue, and the movie pleasantly accomplishes what it set out to accomplish.

As a niche entertainment catering to an overlooked audience, Boynton Beach Club is remarkable mostly for its optimism and solid performances.

The White Countess takes place in a fascinating time and place, rife with conflict and turmoil. But to watch Fiennes float (and Richardson trudge) through it all, absorbed in themselves and their own private misery, is to wish they'd started falling earlier, if only to knock some sense into them.

The movie loses some of its initial atmospheric tension as paranoid thrills give way to Rambo high jinks.

Moody, mannered and supremely irritating, Christophe Honoré's Dans Paris plays like a pastiche of French cinema clichés through the ages.

Politics recede in the face of the realities of Young's life, and Spiro and Donahue would have succeeded in making the same point had they omitted all but his day-to-day existence. Together, however, they comprise a powerful indictment of the tactical politics that led to the invasion and a heartbreaking account of one man's living with the aftermath.

Ultimately, it's too self-conscious of its role in the marketplace and too hamstrung by its source material to risk being honest at the expense of being liked.

As lovely as some of the footage looks and as committed as are the three lead performances, they serve only to make Rails & Ties play like an exceptionally well-acted and well-made Lifetime movie.

Shot by Ashley Rowe to look like a cross between a Vermeer retrospective and a music video, Copying Beethoven is silly and misguided, if reasonably entertaining for its charming lack of self-awareness, its weakness for lines like "Loneliness is my religion!" and its transcendently beautiful music.

Beautifully shot on location in New York and consistently well-acted, but it sticks a little too closely to the surface to be very compelling.

The low-key charm of its setting underscores the easygoing performances of a relaxed, well-matched cast. Kristofferson doesn't oversell the grizzled grandpa routine or talk down to the little girl.

But it's one thing to write a loving ode to your mother; another to direct an ode to an ode.

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.