Dennis Lim

You have to, if not love, at least not mind a movie in which the very act of Ashton Kutcher reading is enough of a cosmic trauma to rip a hole in the fabric of space-time.

Watching the film is like reading a Times Portrait of Grief that keeps shifting focus to the journalist who wrote it.

An out-of-body experience for its viewers as well as its heroine.

The title's pointedly incorrect pronoun is typical of the film's obtuse childishness.

A ponderous, almost wordless sliver of grotesquerie.

Open Water is simply a stunt--hopelessly literal-minded and cheap in every sense.

Superhumanly awful BBC bottom-feeder Love, Honour and Obey, which, paramount among its many faults, is not recognizably a film.

The movie's idiotic fascination with the senselessness of its central act is scarily close to a fetish.

After simmering for an eternity, it derails, with spectacular, psychotic force, bulldozing its way toward an almost unwatchable theater of cruelty.

Manipulative and cloying, Pieces of April turns into something altogether creepier, even pathological, whenever first-time filmmaker Peter Hedges (screenwriter of "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" and "About a Boy") brings up race.

The journey is a yawn -- an outpouring of backstory, punctuated by cute episodic diversions and ill-advised running gags.

Denying Reality, more like. John Keitel's first feature is impossibly naive, even as smoothed-over coming-out tales go.

It is not, the filmmakers stress, a sequel to "Four Weddings and a Funeral" (which writer Richard Curtis was also responsible for), but it fits the latter-day Hollywood definition of the term -- same movie, only worse.

The ultimate cliché of plot-twist implausibility, the crucial revelation is so outlandishly fatuous it might have given Donald Kaufman pause.

Airy, pseudo-folkloric gibberish at best.

Sputters to a dead halt right out of the gate. One labored scenario follows another.

A numb, oddly dispassionate trudge toward predestined doom, inevitable in all the wrong ways.

The filmmakers at once coarsen and dilute a fascinating life into a lumpy puddle of punishing inspirational hokum.

It's hard to say if this devastating, nakedly exploitative work has a larger point beyond the evocation and infliction of trauma. A repeat viewing might clear that up, but it's an experience I'd rather not relive -- and one that I cannot in good faith recommend to anyone.

Trying to act in this movie is like trying to stand upright in a blizzard.

Unable to capture either its wit, psychological acuity, or formal rigor, the movie essentially reduces the schematic, seesaw narrative to doomy clichés.

Jordan and Kirsten Russell, as the deadbeat-hooker love interest, bring the film to intermittent life, suggesting several more dimensions than the stale, futile scenario ever allows them.

The flavor is textbook '90s indie -- self-regarding quirk with an occasional spasm of Solondzian incorrectness.

Grows increasingly slack and silly.

Endearing but pointless, at once cluttered and tinny, this film-dork fantasia suggests a shopping spree at a high-end vintage emporium underwritten by Daddy's blank check.

Swaddled in the posh vulgarity that passes for awards-season elegance, Memoirs is deluxe orientalist kitsch, a would-be cross between "Showgirls" and "Raise the Red Lantern," too dumb to cause offense though falling short of the oblivious abandon that could have vaulted it into high camp.

Time and again words fail Weber. He's a loquacious but unilluminating host.

While Strand's gay-shorts series took a tentative step toward maturity with 2000's “Boys Life 3,” this fourth anthology represents a full-blown regression.