Carina Chocano

Every adult in the movie is a caricature: Close, Janney and Wilson are compendiums of such broad, unattractive traits they make the ladies of "Desperate Housewives" look complex. The men, meanwhile, are weak, clueless and preening, with the exception of Fiennes, who's nuts.

Ultimately, Youth Without Youth is more intriguing than it is satisfying. It hooks you, then lets you flounder.

If you're thinking of seeing it, and you're old enough to drive (or even read this), do yourself a favor and rent the original instead.

Bruni-Tedeschi is a lovely actress, and whatever emotion is evident onscreen comes courtesy of her.

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.

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.

Despite an intriguing premise in which the architect of a housing project is confronted by a resident-turned-activist who wants his help in getting the place torn down, Matt Tauber's The Architect feels schematic and contrived.

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

As it is, Mrs. Palfrey seems to suggest the Claremont is located somewhere in the Twilight Zone. Where are the televisions? Where are the chain stores? Where are the immigrants? I see the buildings, but where is England?

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.

National Treasure is as doggedly hokey and ham-handed as a Disneyland ride.

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.

Creepy and unsettling, to say nothing of gory, but overall it's a little claustrophobic and uneven.

I'd be happy to see it listed in an in-flight magazine, but "Annie Hall" it's not.

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.

Any glimpse of emotional honesty comes courtesy of the actors, who manage to do a credible job despite the material.

A few scenes are worth the price of admission for their inspired camp alone; Shaw happens to be in two of them.

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

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

If you can get past the Eurocentric focus, there are worse ways to pass the time than to see The Children of Huang Shi, if only because the glimpse into the time and place are captivating and the images are gorgeous.

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.

Shot on grainy, often blown-out and distorted consumer-grade video, scored to a feedback distortion-heavy soundtrack that will be familiar to fans and tinnitus sufferers alike, and clocking in at one merciful minute under three hours, Lynch's much-anticipated follow-up to "Mulholland Drive" signals a hale swan-dive off the deep end, away from any pretense of narrative logic and into the purer realm of unconscious free association. I found myself pining for "The Elephant Man," but that's just me.

Keaton and Ted Danson, who plays her husband, Don, are the comedic bright spot in the movie, not least because they are ridiculous.

Feels like the cinematic equivalent of being stuffed with fruitcake and doused with a gallon of egg nog, so if that's the sort of thing you go in for around the holidays . . .

The result is at once familiar and disconcerting, meta-Keillor done in Altman's desultory, distracted style.

A mess of a movie -- but a warm, friendly mess that's hard not to like, even when it tests your patience.

Too dark to be very funny, too mushy to be pitch black.

To watch the film is to marvel at the cast's virtuosity at fleshing out the shallowest people in England, and the observable intelligence and talent of all those involved doesn't make Separate Lies any more compelling, or its characters more resonant.