Dennis Lim

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

Thomas's fleet-footed approach suggests the anxious embarrassment of a director in an awful hurry to get it over with.

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

In its own dimly reckless way, the film is riveting -- not unlike watching a tightrope walker with a bad case of vertigo.

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

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.

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

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

This monumentally ridiculous film doesn't stop at subverting stereotypes; it discombobulates narrative logic and the basic laws of human behavior. Still, there's a certain pleasure to be derived from watching the actors attempt to dig out from under the rubble that William Lipz's screenplay repeatedly dumps on their heads.

A ponderous, almost wordless sliver of grotesquerie.

Pressing on in grimly introverted "One Hour Photo" mode, Williams only stirs nostalgia for his slapstick days (ghastly '90s roles notwithstanding)--he's such a natural-born ham he manages to overdo understatement.

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.

Peaks early with a vertiginous dogfight; thereafter, spotty CGI and a bamboozling plot conspire toward a colossal anticlimax.

A pale, patchy amalgam of the year's two unfairly reviled interplanetary adventures, "Supernova" and "Mission to Mars," the lunkheaded Red Planet distinguishes itself with a touching pretense of scientific veracity.

The finale is a near-abstract mess (decapitation, impalation, "Alien" birth) -- in an empathic gesture, the filmmakers end it all with a few sticks of TNT.

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.

Apparently reassembled from the cutting-room floor of any given daytime soap.

Yet another black comedy that misunderstands and misrepresents the genre.

"The only thing that matters is the ending," Mort declares in the closing seconds, just as the director is serving up a colossal (and literally corny) stinker. But for Depp, it's yet another daunting mission accomplished with wit and ingenuity.

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.

The scenario eventually becomes so coincidence-choked that the filmmakers have no choice but to play it for mild snickers.

A road movie, though there's a decided lack of forward motion.

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

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.

Devoid of originality, Gasoline is at least a model of modesty -- a road movie that goes nowhere slowly, and ends up where it began.

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.

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

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