Dennis Lim

The Fluffer even heads south of the border for its finale, as if hoping that warmer climes will energize its fitful melodrama.

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.

Roughly splits the difference between "Six Days, Seven Nights" and "9 1/2 Weeks." Which is something like the nth-order derivative of an infinite regression.

Amid numerous identical skirmishes with leapfrogging arachnids, trace elements of black comedy and intentional camp are discernible but utterly extraneous.

It's been smoothed over plenty, but this is one creaky, rigged contraption.

Lifshitz successfully maneuvers his trio of outcasts toward a state of grace: His vision of misfit utopianism, in its own quiet way, is as defiant as anything in Fassbinder.

Hovers between mythic poetry and earthbound grit; the result is an inert, drably florid spectacle.

It lacks the coherent internal logic that distinguishes the best mockumentaries.

Dreary adventure. Parents, be forewarned: No talking equines means more songs, and the viselike soundtrack might be someone's idea of a cruel joke: hoarse whisperer Bryan Adams.

Might as well be bad TV...Splendor is what happens when a director whose natural mode is subversion runs out of things to subvert.

The wall-to-wall rap score is as kinetic as the acrobatic fight choreography, and nothing else matters.

Too breezily, You’ll Get Over It gets over it--the dewy, abrupt optimism of its ending seems wholly unearned.

The only flicker of thematic interest -- AM radio obsession as psychopathology -- is duly subsumed into a sea of desperate soundtrack come-ons.

A reticent, primarily visual experience.

Bloated loquaciousness, damp self-absorption, and defensive reflexiveness on display here.

If Birth succeeds more as a source of visual and aural enthrallment than as supernatural narrative, it's largely because the final third hovers uncomfortably between the mystical and the earthbound.

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

A stifling chamber piece laced with Repulsion-style foreboding and an undercurrent of kink.

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.

K-PAX undertakes a garbled but comprehensive survey of Hollywood therapeutic clichés: The rain man has an awakening from his cocoon, pays it forward, turns into the fisher king.

Suggestive of nothing so much as Saturday-morning TV.

Boorish and flatulent.

Earnest and misguided in equal measure, The Theory of Flightis ostensibly a bold and rare attempt at depicting disabled people as sexual beings, but the notion is couched in such spurious and schematic terms that the film never really stands a chance.

The beauty of Sandler's performance -- a superbly modulated suite of crestfallen groans and grimaces -- is he often seems to be reacting not just to his crazy wife but also to the dismal movie he's stuck in.

Just when you think it can't get any worse, Maze rams home a body blow -- equating the involuntary spasms of Tourette's with the ungovernable impulses of the heart.

The plot is muddy and quite beside the point. The almost meditative mood takes center stage.

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

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.