Dennis Lim

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

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

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

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.

Stein's script is slack and tin-eared, too feeble to pass for satire, and inadequate even by lazy-pastiche standards.

Returns the teen movie to the uncomplicated glory days of "Porky's" and "Losin' It."

Craven's terror-alert white-knuckler is zippy, unpretentious.

A "guilty pleasure" -- only it's the sort of film that would mock anyone who felt guilt in pleasure.

Good-natured but labored, the film clings to its lone gimmick with increasing desperation.

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

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

A more intuitive writer-director could have extracted a credible study of time-warped bereavement from Jennifer Egan's extensively praised novel, but Adam Brooks's turgid adaptation merely emphasizes the book's stiff contrivances and wobbly characterizations.

Going through the motions of a liberal-Hollywood polemic with the sweaty, mounting hysteria of a bad liar, The Life of David Gale is foremost an overheating gotcha machine, scripted by first-timer Charles Randolph with seams showing and red herrings stinking up the joint.

The "Humanite" director's Death Valley void is the real "Lost in Translation."

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

Doesn't just look and sound like a car commercial. It is a car commercial.

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.

Mariage takes his time and allows the film to drift in an almost ostentatiously casual manner.

Anyone expecting the decorous serenity of the Ang Lee film should be aware that Iron Monkey strives for no more or less than comic-strip thwack and thump.

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

Swinton provides her own brand of incandescence, doubling as the film's aching heart and its center of gravity.

Still most easily defined by its unavoidable parallels to any number of lesbian-overtone psychodramas.

Not content simply to examine the relationship between sex and death, BI2 ponderously blurs the boundaries between art and life, and the plot, already mired in nonsensical backstory, collapses with the late-inning introduction of a tired metafictional device (not to mention a wildly lunging "Usual Suspects" twist).

A humane, unassumingly quirky rumination on chance and caprice.

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

S&H's chief pleasure is the spontaneous, sometimes quite touching rapport between the two stars.

French director David Fourier's six-minute mock-instructional free association, "Majorettes in Space," is alone almost worth the price of admission.

Suggestive of nothing so much as Saturday-morning TV.