Dennis Lim

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

Perhaps awed by the congress of Method men, director Frank Oz stands back as his actors phone it in.

The movie takes shape as an entertaining psychological armwrestle between rank belligerence and blustery condescension.

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

In much the same fashion as Gregg Araki's "Mysterious Skin", Auraeus Solito's feature debut confronts the taboo of pre-teen sexuality with a startling mix of openness and sensitivity. No less than precocious Maxi, the film is alarming, endearing, and utterly unflappable.

Less a thriller than a comedy, and a formulaic one at that, predicated on an amusing but bizarrely simplistic clash of personalities and cultures.

By the final shot, which assumes the viewpoint of a decapitated head, its appalled comedy has swelled, beyond outrage, to a pitch of punch-drunk hysteria.

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

This Canadian cheapie plays like an above-average "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" episode, filtered through the sensibility of early David Cronenberg.

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.

Bad Santa is a one-joke film; to his credit, Thornton embodies that joke with vicious, vaguely insane conviction.

As with Téchiné's best work, Strayed is a peculiar, lingering blend of robustness and delicacy--a movie with hardly a single wasted frame, incongruous word, or false gesture.

Much of Undercover Brother plays as a funnier, if similarly addled, "Bamboozled."

You're paying for the view, and it's truly breathtaking.

Smitten by the symmetry of his parable, director Roger Michell crosscuts emphatically between the preening leads -- a strategy that only draws attention to the numerous lapses in logic and unpersuasive changes of heart while sidelining the lively supporting cast

Without deploying reductive backstory or simplistic psychology, this fearless movie -- easily the year's best debut feature -- illuminates Esther's pathology as an extreme response to the mind-body split.

Thrives on vivid incidentals and telling details.

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

A lightly comic slacker drama that takes the desperation of teenage tedium seriously.

Unfolds in a shroud of nonspecific suggestiveness but never emerges from under it.

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

Some of the testimonials are underedited, but as a work of passionate advocacy, I Remember Me can't be faulted.

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.

There's no gold dust to be found here, just an awful lot of stick-on glitter.

Kormakur's debut feature fulfills the basic requirements of good slacker comedy: It's grounded in quotidian tedium and frustration, and it acknowledges both the humor and pathos of the relevant coping mechanisms (here, lackadaisical flings, porn addiction, amnesia-courting binges).

Come Undone's true subject is, simply enough, the perspective-warping enormity of first love, as preserved in a scrapbook of before-and-after snapshots.

Primer unites physics and metaphysics in an ingenious guerrilla reinvention of cinematic science fiction.

The brilliant concluding chapter in the death trilogy that inspired Gus Van Sant's artistic rebirth.