David Chute

It makes the regeneration of an overweight and complacent commercial format look easy.

Ethnically barbed hijinks ought to ensue, but jinks of any sort are in short supply, due to drowsy pacing and a string of distracting staging mistakes that suffocate just about every gag.

The film has been skillfully realized as a commercial entertainment on a huge scale, and it is often surprisingly beautiful.

There’s nothing easier to like than a tear-jerking, action-packed melodrama that knows no shame. But a minimal amount of skill and sensitivity are required.

Dedh Ishqiya ends on a note of sadder-but-wiser resignation that recalls its predecessor, but its high romantic cultural allusions convey a deeper sense of what’s at stake.

It’s a tale that was once thrilling, but the thrills seem to have evaporated.

As a narrative, “Evangelion 3.0″ may make you feel your brain is turning into goat cheese. As a showcase for pure visual ingenuity and splendor, though, it rocks.

At their best, the lush yet punchy musical numbers that Acharya stages for Dhoom: 3 reach giddy heights of pop romanticism.

The Whoopee Cushion hijinks here are punctuated with incongruous outbursts of bloody violence.

If it was more consistent, Bullett Raja would qualify as a solid piece of genre craftsmanship for director and co-writer Tigmanshu Dhulia (“Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster”), with action scenes that are crisply framed and edited for clarity.

The film is a triumph of casting: In a role that is often about the sheer steamrolling force of his character’s personality, Abishek Bachchan’s attention to detail makes Guru accessible rather than intimidating, admirable but also plausible.

The film is so single-mindedly determined to be light and comfortable, to not raise a sweat, that it forgoes even the mildest surprises. The only things that get heavy here are the viewer's eyelids.

The buildup is so compelling in this "Chinese Western" by He Ping (Swordsman in Double Flag Town) that its thunderous anticlimax of an ending can almost be forgiven. Almost.

As a director of melodramatic peak moments, Karan Johar has no peer: He stages a chance encounter on a New York street between an adulterous husband and the two women in his life with the slow-motion virtuosity of a soap-opera De Palma.

This sophomoric stuff is pure self-indulgence, a drone to accompany the admittedly eye-popping sound-and-light show. Oshii looks like yet another director who has gone off the deep end, believing too absolutely his own good reviews.

The complex narrative counterpoint is anchored by a rock-solid performance by one of the world's great actors, the Beijing theater veteran Hu Jun.

Now this is more like it: Flirtatious repartee between glamorous stars in travel-poster international locations; a gratifyingly simple plot with puzzles and sleight-of-hand surprises; and, at regular intervals, outbursts of gaudy, energetic dancing infectiously exploding.

This shaggy-dog sequel is ultimately satisfying for the most low-tech of reasons: The competitive bond between the two central characters.

In the end, Curse also looks alarmingly like a dry run for the opening and closing ceremonies Zhang has been hired to direct for the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008.

The only real-life situations the movie evokes vividly are the circumstances of its own production: underrehearsed actors in hastily staged scenes speaking page after page of awkward expository dialogue.

While it comes on like a flag-waver, it actually delivers something more nuanced. Its underlying skepticism about the Korean War seems to have jibed with the current national mood: The picture was, deservedly, a huge hit.

Ghobadi's genius seems supercharged rather than weighed down by his higher calling, and his imagery is so boilingly alive that we come away from it feeling exhilarated rather than depressed.

Jodhaa Akbar is clear and solid and absorbing, but not quite exhilarating.

The film's snazzy new automated animation style falls short: The supposedly human face of our metal-plated robocop's partner -- the inevitable curvy female in a leather jump suit -- is an inexpressive, glossy doll mask, untouched by human hands.

Exceedingly dry and precise and slow-paced comedy.

As it's been done, with this ingratiating cast, a retro peach-and-turquoise color scheme that makes every shot look like a 1986 fashion layout, and a brace of insanely catchy Vishal Dadlani dance numbers, the movie isn't half bad.

Hitches some of the most irresistible conventions of Hindi movie melodrama to an earnest agenda of social protest.

The Incredibles creates so seamless a mood of exhilaration that we resent being pulled out of it.

The slathered-on visual textures aren’t quite enough, however, to distract us from the glib, leftie posturing, the lazy writing and the drug-deep existential platitudes.

Both in subject matter and form, this 25-minute music drama within the film tips its hat to the roots of Bollywood cinema’s most distinctive conventions -- with the inestimable assistance of its most seductive modern axiom.

The movie is executed by director Kwak Kyung-Taek with flair, technical polish and tumescent firepower that the shriveled cinemas of Hong Kong and Japan can no longer match. But every gesture feels synthetic, from the back story about North-South separation to massage the emotions of the home audience, to the 24-style globe-hopping nuclear-terrorism premise.

In the final reel, the tension dissipates with a flabby hiss, as the film devolves into a banal, conventional ghost story.

This often gripping but also unremittingly grim and drab account of these events is a "Taxi Driver" without the cathartic finale.

This brittle little confection from director Peyton Reed (Bring It On) may drive you up the wall -- unless you're willing to settle for great frocks, stylish production design and wicked opening credits.

Nepotism can't account for the movie's stylistic horrors. Writer-director Arjun Sablok, a TV veteran with visual ADD, has pitched the candy-colored cuteness at a frenzy that verges on hysteria.

Surprisingly engaging, as is the Paul Simon theme song, and the film is enlivened by flashes of humor just rude enough to delight older children.

The result is a soulless piece of product, an ungainly hybrid of sketchy hand-drawn characters in blocky CGI environments, derivative at just about every level.

Apart from an extended scene-setting flashback that takes the form of a lavish Farah Khan song-and-dance montage, most of the running time is devoted to wearying flop-sweat farce.

Paying off a somewhat laborious buildup in the first act with an escalating series of revelations and reunions in the final reel, Krrish is hearty pulp cinema that really sticks to your ribs.

Instantly forgettable caper comedy.

Perhaps it is simply impossible, even with affection in your heart, to craft an evocative homage to the expansive musical melodramas of Bollywood on a small-scale indie budget.

Eklavya contains only one song sequence, a lovely set piece for leading lady Vidya Balan (Salaam-e-Ishq), but it embraces the imperatives of dynastic family melodrama as fervently as any classic of Bollywood’s golden age. This is robust storytelling, with blood and thunder pumping through its veins, and real whiskers on its face.

Schizo is an earnest also-ran, sadly muffled by the opaque performance of non-actor Oldzhas Nusupbayev.

The movie would be all crisp surfaces without the internal combustion of Menon, as a man who bears down on familiar procedures in order to avoid being overwhelmed by his emotions.

It weaves its familiar story with some fresh textures and even manages to invest the conflict on the field with a resonance that transcends the tick-tock turnover of the numerals on the scoreboard.

Surprisingly, not bad.

The most exhilarating fight by far is an acrobatic wall climber between Ja Rule and Nia Peeples, choreographed by Hong Kong's Xin Xin Xong (The Musketeer) who, in terms of thrills per minute, is the movie's real star.

The triumph here is a matter of craftsmanship rather than art, but it's rare enough even on that level for a film to be worth celebrating.

Startlingly raw and honest, playing at times like one of those blistering Donald Goines blaxploitation pulp novels, only with Jesus.

As a story it’s nothing much, but as eye candy it is world-class.

Does full honor to Miyazaki’s teeming and often unsettling landscape, and to the conflicted complexity of his characters: Not a single frame was cut, and the voice casting and performances are uniformly excellent.

Perhaps only a filmmaker from a country steeped in Catholicism could turn out a consistently sharp and profane "divine comedy" (the title means "blessed hell") that is also, for the most part, theologically correct.

Satoshi innovates not by pushing off into more extreme realms of adolescent fantasy, but by using all the resources of animation to tell complex dramatic stories, resources that in his hands seem almost limitless.

Skip the movie, stay home, read the book and say three Hail Marys.

There are so many good ideas at the visual level that you can't help wishing the narrative elements had been more cleverly worked out.

The movie refers glancingly to dozens of Hollywood classics, from "West Side Story" to "City Lights," but at heart it is a debt of honor richly paid by Stephen Chow to his martial-arts forebears and to the traditions that shaped his sensibility. His gong fu is the best.

It simply takes faith for granted as a motivating factor, and thus pulls off the neat trick of never making us feel we’re being preached at -- Yet, as directed by first-timer Adam Anderegg, from Jack Weyland's 1980 novel, the movie is too amateurishly square to make the most of its own ironic implications.

Mathews has obvious storytelling chops, and a sharp eye for absurdity. But there are sacred cows in hip, progressive America, too, and the truly fearless satirist has to be a carnivore.

The only thing remotely resembling a character arc is handed to Regina King, the ferocious Margie Hendricks in "Ray."

The various disruptions Miike visits upon his stories, and upon his audience, serve mainly to focus attention on the manipulating intelligence behind the scenes. They're a fancy way of yelling, "Look at me!"

The most seamless piece of sensuous expressionism Zhang has created since "Ju Dou" (1990).

The cast of the Disney Channel's Lizzie McGuire romped strenuously through a plot that would be old hat as a two-parter on a sitcom.

The movie’s entire first half turns out to be an elaborate fake-out, a setup for a plot reversal so extreme it could induce whiplash even in seasoned Bollywood hands. As clumsily engineered by writer-director Kunal Kohli (Hum Tum), the sudden changeover from romance to political techno-thriller is likely to be especially startling for non-Indians.

A solidly crafted family comedy.

Ultimately, what’s most noteworthy about this middling effort is how aggressively un-contemporary it is.

Silly, derivative stuff.

It would be charitable to forgive this first attempt its technical shortcomings; while the virtual set design is first-rate, the character animation is often clunky and inexpressive. What's harder to excuse is the drabness of the storytelling, the repetitive sitcom dilemmas that are closer to "Top Cat" than "Ratatouille."

The movie works so hard to transform its shocking subject into acceptable material for middlebrow melodrama that it never deals with it.

Feels like a big-budget "Dharma & Greg" episode with toilet jokes.

However shrewdly he's been packaged, Tony Jaa is the real thing.