Dennis Lim

A humane, unassumingly quirky rumination on chance and caprice.

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

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

Constipated English whimsy for the easily tickled.

Japanese director Ryosuke Hashiguchi ("Like Grains of Sand") enriches his rendition with melancholic ambivalence, sociological specificity, and a knack for delicate epiphany.

Star/writer Mike Myers and director Jay Roach struggle visibly with exhausted possibilities and diminishing returns.

Seinfeld's cool professionalism is almost cruelly juxtaposed with the tortured narcissism of heel-nipping tyro Orny Adams, who illustrates the mirror-image view from below. Comedy is pain, whether you're top- or underdog.

You can see the strenuously grand conclusion of Alex Winter's clammy psychological thriller, Fever, coming a mile off, but the director's impeccably chic expressionism and Henry Thomas's persuasive, dread-soaked performance make the wait a painless one.

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

The movie might test your tolerance for the mystical, but its whispery vagueness is of a piece with the luxuriantly grainy atmospherics.

Deceptively placid and subtly unpredictable drama.

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

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

If the movie feels cumbersome and overstuffed, it's because Egoyan's characters, so often aphasic, are this time driven by a compulsion to speak -- though the noisy tumble of words mostly underscores their failure to communicate.

The result is a freakishly potent farce.

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.

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

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

The movie avoids grand conclusions, and its restraint heightens the clarity of the perspective shifts that constitute a rite of passage; Nico and Dani is a modest chronicle of a summer during which everything had to change so that everything could stay the same.

Set largely in empty public spaces late at night, Blue Gate Crossing supplements its slender narrative with disarming performances and plangent atmosphere.

Director John Stockwell keeps the proceedings casual, and the film is admirably at ease with its dutifully trite plot and porn-worthy dialogue (most of which vanishes under the crash of a wave or the roar of a jet-ski anyway).

At heart, a work of infectious, unironic affection.

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.

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.

Neither sardonic nor slapstick enough, Bandits is framed as a flashback -- which merely heightens the general feeling of inevitability.

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.

Unduly smug about its flashy conceit and otherwise utterly empty, the film plays like lobotomized Kieslowski, less Blind Chance than dumb luck.

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