Carina Chocano

An unconscionably dreary and amateurish-looking thing, and the rote plot and annoyingly predictable script -- a compendium of bird puns, mostly -- don't work nearly hard enough to make up for the hammy awfulness of the images.

The beauty of this film is in its lapidary details, which sparkle with feeling and surprise.

What Live-in Maid offers is a pitch-perfect observation of life on a continent where forms are adhered to, distances aren't really kept, and your best friend is the person who knows to pour the cheap domestic whiskey into the empty bottle of imported stuff before your bridge buddies show up to judge you.

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.

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

If the script isn't as well-structured as it could be, the dialogue is refreshingly natural. Kutcher is surprisingly well cast as the awkward, somewhat dorky Oliver, and Peet is charming and charismatic without being cloying or artificial.

It's a big, cheesy, familiar bore. With its garland of set pieces featuring Matthew McConaughey in mortal danger strung together by beach-groovy musical hooks, Fool's Gold feels at times like a third-rate Bond movie set to a Jimmy Buffett album.

For an exquisitely melancholy story steeped in a sense of the past as a succession of great waves of political, ideological and economic change, it's fitting that the movie should end with an underwater sequence. It looks like a dream of a memory of a place about to be wiped out by the next great flood of history.

With Bad Education, Almodóvar is at his most breathtakingly complex and mature, and at his most pessimistic.

Volver is just as funny as "What Have I Done," but it's also more sanguine and complex. Its humor is brighter and loopier, more a function of the characters' indomitable spirit than of their terminal despair.

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

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

The movie suffers from a malady common to tiny indies of the let's-put-on-a-show variety -- it strains for irrepressibly nutty, but lands squarely in annoying.

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

Youth and death meet again in Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, a gorgeously stark, mesmerizingly elliptical story told in the same lyrical-prosaic style that has characterized his latest films.

A giddy, gassy piece of lunatic fluff that recounts Jiminy's rise to fame. In interviews, Short has described Glick as a moron with power, and in Jiminy Glick in Lalawood, he takes us back to the early days, when he was merely a moron.

It's a deeply affecting performance, and it drives this quietly powerful, unrelenting film.

For an unabashedly silly spoof of a girly action flick, D.E.B.S. is unexpectedly fresh, thanks mostly to the sweetly exuberant love story at its center.

So good-natured, and its cast seems to enjoy itself so thoroughly, that the total annihilation of disbelief it requires winds up feeling like a reasonable enough request.

A grim, shrill, deluded and incredibly depressing movie, so bewilderingly mean-spirited that the trademark Farrelly Brothers gross-out scenes feel like the sweetest.

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.

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.

The movie is less an uncharted journey than a 2 p.m. bus tour of a music industry legend. But like an expert guide, Mangold shepherds the story with enough grace, energy and skill to make it worthwhile.

The plot, naturally, is silly and not exactly bound by logic. But it's Judge's gimlet-eyed knack for nightmarish extrapolation that makes Idiocracy a cathartic delight.

For all the time we spend watching Justin and Nicole negotiate their needs, we have no idea who these people are.

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.

Somehow, what starts as a series of cheap shots in a barrel develops into something more, thanks largely to warm, engaging performances by Cusack and Tomei. War, Inc. is both right-on and somehow off, but it gets points for trying.

Redford and Carnahan would like us to ponder our role in their fate. And maybe we would, if the lecture weren't so dull and self-satisfied.