Carina Chocano

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.

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.

2 Days in Paris is pure Julie Delpy, figuratively and otherwise. Since first becoming known to American audiences in the early '90s, she's revealed herself to be an artist of sundry and unexpected talents, with a distinctive voice and point of view.

Hindered by its own theatricality, Beyond the Sea feels at once hermetic, defensive and corny.

An intimate movie in every sense, Conversations With Other Women sets out to explore well-trammeled yet at the same time uncharted territory without grinding any axes. What it offers is a modest fantasy that will be familiar to contemporaries of Bonham Carter and Eckhart especially. It's sad and funny, satisfying and frustrating, totally familiar.

Neither linear nor overly explained, Pulse completely dispenses with smash cuts, cymbal crashes and other editing tricks of the horror trade.

Quinn discovers an unexpectedly funny, trenchant fish-out-of-water-eye-view of American life.

Sweet and often hilarious.

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

Chicken Little, though it has its moments, mostly just feels anxious and overreaching. It tries to be all things to all people and fails to be anything to anyone.

With outstanding performances, including a turn by Judi Dench as the evil Lady Catherine de Bourg, Pride & Prejudice is a joy from start to finish.

Blame It on Fidel is the thoroughly engaging, clear-eyed and charming story of a little girl grappling with the domestic fallout of tumultuous political times.

The main problem with Turn the River is that it's a well-acted, if not terribly well-crafted, character-driven drama without much in the way of a purpose.

The movie has no higher ambition than to please a crowd; the fact that it easily does is proof of the world's heartening capacity for change.

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.

The only thing remotely resembling parody in this depressing waste of time and money is Jennifer Coolidge's sendup of Barbra Streisand as an over-the-top string of Jewish mother clichés.

A dark comedy with a melancholy streak and punchy sense of humor.

A wickedly funny satire.

By the time the movie introduces an element of ambivalence in the story, lecture hall ennui has long ago set in, and no amount of jittery horror movie conventions can change it. With nowhere for any of the characters to go, literally, the story becomes a tendentious exercise in belaboring a point.

Too sophomoric to be believed.

Immensely entertaining.

Beautiful, spacey, trans-oceanic odyssey.

In the end, his (Patrick) disaffection make him a singularly uninvolving character, and his disengagement makes him seem alternately shallow, selfish and perverse.

The movie straitjackets Keaton into a humorless, table-pounding role.

A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, or so the saying goes, but the unadulterated joy Irène takes in throwing open the closet door to show Jean how this gold digging is done is positively infectious.

What emerges from these stories is a picture of the fallibility of the system and the vulnerability of innocent citizens, whom even scientific evidence cannot protect from incompetence, ego and prejudice, and of the courage of the exonerated victims to make meaning of their tragedies.

With its R&B soundtrack and footage of civil unrest, Talk to Me might seem to cover familiar ground. But as an intimate portrait of the complex, fruitful and extremely volatile friendship between trailblazing African American men whose daring came to redefine an industry, it's fresh and revelatory.

By the time you've gotten through it, you feel spent, loaded down and more than a little disoriented. Part of the problem is that the movie's big concepts - violence begets violence, absolute power corrupts absolutely, everything is connected, my terrorist is your freedom fighter, etc. - are pithy, brief and irrefutable enough to embroider on throw pillows.