Dennis Lim

At best, plays like an attenuated "Seinfeld" episode.

Mawkishly clichéd as it is, Together is an odder hybrid than it first appears -- at once populist and deeply cynical about the price of popularity.

Relying on rote culture-clash pratfalls, Gilfillan belabors the symmetries.

Tennant had hoped the documentary would serve as an "instrument of revenge" on Mustique's new owners. It's the filmmakers who end up exacting revenge on Tennant, gleefully recording his every splenetic outburst and infantile hissy fit.

A happy ending of sorts arrives out of nowhere -- against unfathomable odds, the string of awful ironies ends, for now, with sweet justice.

Neither as weighty nor as weird as it would like to think.

A reticent, primarily visual experience.

Soggy mysticism, nagging inconsistencies, and coarse horror-playbook jolts.

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.

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

Time to Leave amounts simply to a semi-thoughtful disease-of-the-week weepie, admirable in its restraint but shying from the terror of the situation.

For those so inclined, this lulling, banal, and rather pleasant film cultivates a mood of zone-out voyeurism. In the absence of a larger purpose, Morel is content to ogle, perhaps rightly assuming that his viewers will be too.

It's hard not to wish that Chicago had taken place inside a more imaginative head.

The time-outs from wisecracking -- invariably, to impart a simplistic self-esteem lesson or two -- feature the most awkward silences you're likely to endure in a comedy routine.

Even the fast-motion effects and flashy graphics can't make this a spectator sport.

Seeks to portray loss as a literal, convulsive nightmare, and it's not above resorting to horror-movie tropes and Grand Guignol trickery.

But owing no doubt to the requirements of Sandra Bullock, the movie's above-the-line star, executive producer, and worst enemy, this potboiling procedural never stands a chance of disproving its title.

Pitched somewhere between Oliver Stone's "JFK" and the Seinfeld parody thereof, Neil Burger's debut never quite transcends jokester status -- it's a veritable menagerie of shaggy dogs, red herrings, and wild geese -- and the punchline doesn't live up to Barry's dead-eyed, perfectly chilled delivery.

Flawless never approaches the rancid bluster of "8MM," but it's an equally dishonest piece of manipulative hackwork.

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

A blitz of anti-authoritarian poses so feel-good you'd think someone was selling you sneakers.

It's instructive that Waking Ned Devine is being so aggressively sold as a feel-good comedy; the "good" feeling in question is called condescension.

Needless to say, the movie fails as a cautionary tale. But it fulfills its summer air-conditioning duties with flippant ease, and its enjoyably cloddish attempts at political relevance add a fascinating layer of incongruity.

Don Argott's lively documentary, ostensibly a paean to alternative pedagogy, extends its subject a long leash, and he in turn does his damnedest to sabotage the project. Rock School ends up being a movie about just how little fun rock 'n' roll can be.

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

Mad Songs saves its most memorable image for its hard-earned climax, which molds the ambiguous, hallucinatory spectacle of a combusting effigy into a viewer-implicating demonstration of crowd psychology and a harrowing cri de coeur.

Dog Days adheres dogmatically to the school of sado-miserablism that Seidl's compatriots Michael Haneke and Jessica Hausner have turned into something of a national industry (non-Austrian adherents abound too, from Gaspar Noé to Harmony Korine).

Culminates in a pilgrimage to Genet's tomb--a sweetly respectful gravestomp, to be sure, though one suspects the almost apologetic demureness of the central relationship would have irked him to no end.