Dennis Lim

John Madden's competent, monotonous film version, not exactly stagebound but hardly freewheeling, only underscores its mechanical nature.

Airy, pseudo-folkloric gibberish at best.

As botched-drug-deal tales go, Pusher digs surprisingly deep— its surface clichés give way to an existential despair that finally swallows the movie whole.

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

With a few exceptions, most of the laughs in Stardom are cheap...and worse, the ideas beyond platitudinous.

The lead performances could hardly be better: Gosling, having stolen and propped up entire movies last year ("Murder by Numbers" and "The Believer"), crackles with the economical intensity of a young Tim Roth. Morse, who has racked up decades worth of idiosyncratic character parts, is monumental in this career-peak turn.

This dreamy, languorous farce offers a manageable strawberry-flavored alternative, a mildly kinky Hello Kitty sadomasochism.

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.

You have to, if not love, at least not mind a movie in which the very act of Ashton Kutcher reading is enough of a cosmic trauma to rip a hole in the fabric of space-time.

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

Gray's brand of film-buffery manifests itself, simply and irresistibly, as ardent, uncynical movie love.

It's doubly frustrating that after flirting with (and even upending) biopic conventions for much of its length, A Beautiful Mind finally gives in to them so readily.

A bottomless trough of mystic swill, is too confused to even fulfill the paradigm's most basic requirements.

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

Open Water is simply a stunt--hopelessly literal-minded and cheap in every sense.

Constipated English whimsy for the easily tickled.

It's the sort of movie that could haunt your dreams for weeks. In the end, it is, as promised, all about love—this brave, foolish, improbably moving film's great achievement may be the utter sincerity with which it lives up to its title.

If it's remembered at all, it will be as a time capsule of early-21st-century blockbuster cowardice and redundancy.

After simmering for an eternity, it derails, with spectacular, psychotic force, bulldozing its way toward an almost unwatchable theater of cruelty.

Stevenson's performance is at once clueless and fiercely committed, a volatile combination that pays off in the best scene: the mother of all PFLAG meetings.

Chéreau's film is an unsentimental, almost uninflected, account of a preparation for death, told with a painful clarity that eventually bleeds into compassion.

Superhumanly awful BBC bottom-feeder Love, Honour and Obey, which, paramount among its many faults, is not recognizably a film.

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.

There are worse crimes being perpetrated in Hollywood than The Real Cancún--an exploitation fantasy no more booby-besotted than a "Porky's" or "American Pie" installment, and certainly no more unreal.

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

The year's most repugnant movie.

A disingenuous and colossally daft whiplash twist (presumably Patterson's) that only further perforates an already ragged plot.

An out-of-body experience for its viewers as well as its heroine.

Nolan, withholding master of disorientation in his previous non-linear films, allows far too easy access into the psychic tumult of Al Pacino's cop and Robin Williams's prime suspect.

While the ideas about techno-saturation are far from novel, they're presented with a wry dark humor.

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.

Oneiric as it is, though, Tony Takitani conveys a powerfully tangible sense of loss and loneliness. In both concrete and existential terms, it's a film that dwells on what the dead leave behind and how the living carry on.

Best understood as a memorial…Like most memorials, it is respectful, premised on competing obligations to the dead and the living, and eager to stress that the deaths were not in vain. It not only tells us we should never forget but also illustrates how we should remember.

It's a kick to see the Tim Robbins version of the man recently described by the Microsoft trial judge as "Napoleonic" installed in a disgustingly opulent Bond-villain HQ/pad, and the overwrought Boiler Room-meets-The Game scenario is not without its own schlocky pleasures.

A reticent, primarily visual experience.

Steals every trick in the gaysploitation book down to the Alexis Arquette glorified cameo, but the end result -- compulsively horrible and full of unintentional poignant hilarity -- is its own mutant creature.

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

Münch's characters are given to a certain rapt, unwieldy thoughtfulness, and accordingly, his films cultivate a mood of almost trancelike introspection.

The characters exist in single dimensions (trapped in a noxiously misogynist role, even the fearless Richard stands no chance), and in an effort to keep the plates spinning, the movie quickly devolves from risqué to risible.

Cumulatively, the echo-chamber syntax achieves a kind of atonal harmony, meshing with the themes of reinvention and self-presentation: The disjunction between the panels is tantamount to the gap between image and reality.

The viewer is left to ponder the number of levels on which this counts as a pointless exercise -- a parody of parodic movies, a deconstruction of transparent genres, a self-negatingly knowing example of camp.

The movie's idiotic fascination with the senselessness of its central act is scarily close to a fetish.

Closer casts a smugly amused eye on the human capacity for betrayal. But because it also seeks to congratulate its audience for its urbane unshockability, it never strays beyond the limits of middlebrow complacency.

Using vagueness as a crutch, Charlotte Sometimes makes a fetish of opacity. Still, whether or not it's a pose, the film's poised reticence is refreshing in context -- a rebuke to the contemporary crop of blabbermouthed American indies.

Solid middlebrow entertainment, a vast period epic with an almost DeMillean taste for excess.

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.

There's plenty to enjoy -- in no small part thanks to Lau.

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

It's never clear, by the way, why any of this is supposed to be even remotely funny...This is the kind of movie asinine enough to believe that the mere juxtaposition of sadistic violence and a jaunty tune on the soundtrack is, in itself, clever.

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.

The central conceit is Allen's most amusing since "Bullets Over Broadway."

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

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

Plunging headfirst into mush at every opportunity, Marshall brings out the worst in his actors.

No amount of fidgety editing and anxious soundtrack atonality can distract from the creakingly implausible scenario (Marsden's Dan is an almost comic exemplar of uncharacteristic hostage behavior).

Ju-on never snaps into focus like a "Go" or a "Pulp Fiction," and what at first registers as sloppy plotting starts to seem positively diabolical.

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.

As with Altman's best movies, Gosford Park is above all an entrancing hum of atmosphere and texture.

The cumulative effect is perversely deflationary: long before it's over, the film has flushed the paranoia from its system.

Less a thriller than a comedy, and a formulaic one at that, predicated on an amusing but bizarrely simplistic clash of personalities and cultures.

By turns expansive and astringent, The Mother is a portrait of a woman who, with the dazed courage of someone finally awakened to the world after decades of passivity and repression, keeps on walking.

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.

A feel-good, fatalist placebo.

The Haases, whose previous films ("Angels and Insects," "The Music of Chance") evinced a remote, unfussy sensibility, are a poor fit for the melodramatic contortions that the story demands.

Bittersweet, haunting, and as original and eccentric as homage movies get.

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

Boorish and flatulent.

Darwin's Nightmare strings together cruel ironies into a work of harrowing lucidity. It illuminates the sinister logic of a new world order that depends on corrupt globalization to put an acceptable face on age-old colonialism.

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.

Spins in place with aplomb, generating exponentially more vertiginous doublings with each sweaty-palmed set piece.

Perhaps awed by the congress of Method men, director Frank Oz stands back as his actors phone it in.

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

Essentially humorless, Me Without You manages some pleasing textures all the same.

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.

More exciting and truthful than most better-looking films dare to be.

Watching the film is like reading a Times Portrait of Grief that keeps shifting focus to the journalist who wrote it.

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

It sustains its purplish, epic sweep by thrusting broadly etched characters into extravagantly hokey situations, and registers mainly as a flamboyant joke.

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

The viewer, though unavoidably alert, is before long too numb to care.

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.

A disappointment after the droll, breezy suggestiveness of Fontaine's equally Freudian "Dry Cleaning," How I Killed My Father is rather less than the sum of its underventilated père-fils confrontations.

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

The film is slight but sweetly inquisitive, and its participants are endlessly fascinating.

Guy Ferland directs with close attention to surface detail, but he never gets to the heart of the story - quite possibly because there isn't one to begin with. [21 Oct 1997]

The journey is a yawn -- an outpouring of backstory, punctuated by cute episodic diversions and ill-advised running gags.

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.

Recoing's meta-performance is an unemphatic marvel, his placid countenance stretched tight over telltale flickers: a quickly suppressed smirk of incredulous delight, a nervous twitch of chagrin, an abrupt pang of guilt.

An overflowing septic tank of chicken-soupy sanctimony that proceeds from casually offensive hypocrisy to wretchedly inapt religiosity.

A nostalgic coming-of-age sex comedy tastefully lecherous enough to indicate that its intended demographic is several decades past puberty.

With remarkable directness and composure, it shatters the myth of childhood innocence and the deathless taboo of prepubescent sexuality.

There's not a false note among the performances: Henderson, Hart, Shepherd, Markham, and in particular McKee add unspoken complexities to their portrayals.

A nasty piece of work, and it's nasty in a particularly ostentatious and sophomoric way.

It's forgivable, and even appropriate, that Mondays itself suffers from a certain lack of definition -- a drifting, repetitive dead-endedness that, at the inconclusive finale, shows no signs of abating.

Game Over's brazen lopsidedness may diminish its credibility, but it taps into the essence of all conspiracy theories-the desperate desire to believe.

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.

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

At once robust and ethereal, this is an existential ghost story, with fresh blood pulsing through its veins.

Captures the latent anxieties of a hazy, ambling existence with pinpoint accuracy.

Weirdest, funniest studio release of the summer so far and a bona fide cult object in the making.

This is pure essence of Bay--it's big, it's loud, it has no context, and if you show up tanked, I'm sure it's really quite poetic.

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.

Like "Blissfully Yours" and Apichatpong's first feature, the exquisite-corpse road movie "Mysterious Object at Noon" (2000), Tropical Malady promotes new ways of seeing.

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

By the end of this wholly disorienting experience (this must be what it's like to be held captive in a Long Island supper club and force-fed hallucinogens), there's only one thing we damn well know, and it's that Kevin Spacey sure as hell believes he was born to play Bobby Darin.

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

The film slips into a coma early on and never awakens.

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

The mode is hysteric-Hitchcockian, the result mostly devoid of suspense.

You're paying for the view, and it's truly breathtaking.

16 Years' greatest asset may be its star: Trainspotting's McKidd, coiled and queasy, transcends the dubious romanticism and hard-man clichés of his role -- he exudes a commanding air of constancy in a film that teeters between the rapturous and the ridiculous.

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.

A flabby farce in which everyone seems to be making it up as they go along.

This Canadian cheapie plays like an above-average "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" episode, filtered through the sensibility of early David Cronenberg.

Obsessives will be familiar with the "new" material (almost all available on the original DVD), which elaborates on the time-travel metaphysics and tightens the emotional screws. Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) shares one additional tender exchange with each family member

Hudson keeps the movie rambling and episodic, deferring to the imposing backdrop whenever possible.

The flavor is textbook '90s indie -- self-regarding quirk with an occasional spasm of Solondzian incorrectness.

The title is, to say the least, an understatement. Witchcraft has rarely looked more prosaic and less sexy than it does in Griffin Dunne's Practical Magic.

Oblivious to its own towering obsolescence.

The title's pointedly incorrect pronoun is typical of the film's obtuse childishness.

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

It's hard to fathom why anyone would voluntarily endure a holiday family reunion movie -- a genre devised solely to demonstrate how grotesque and how heartwarming families can be--when actual holiday family reunions already exist for those very reasons.

An engrossing quartet of hour-long films by British documentarian Adam Curtis, doesn't so much challenge Freud's theories of the unconscious as shadow them through the corridors of corporate and political power. What emerges is nothing less than a history of 20th-century social control.

Though overlong at two hours, 6ixtynin9—only the director's second outing (after 1997's spoofy" Fun Bar Karaoke')—is impressive for the tonal control Ratanaruang applies to his swerving scenario.

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

The movie improves immeasurably if you visualize a looming iceberg in the corner of the frame.

A vanity project -- hell-bent on playing barely human characters as themselves, they've created something quitebewilderingly ugly in the process.

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

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

If little else, the third and supposedly final entry in the X-Men mega-franchise suggests that some movies -- or at any rate some formulas -- are not just critic-proof, they might even be director-proof.

As this clueless, bulimic debacle madly regurgitates ideas and iconography from Lang to the brothers Wachowski, Leni Riefenstahl to L. Ron Hubbard, Ray Bradbury to Susan Faludi, it's not just Bale who has a hard time keeping a straight face.

The Machinist has no meat on its bones, and we've seen it all before.

The final scene is as close to perfection as any Amerindie has come in recent memory--in a single reaction of Marnie's, we see a small but definite shift in perspective; abruptly, Bujalski stops the film, as if there's nothing more to say. It's a wonderful parting shot for a movie that locates the momentous in the mundane.

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

A creakily mechanical B-noir.

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.

Smitten by the symmetry of his parable, director Roger Michell crosscuts emphatically between the preening leads -- a strategy that only draws attention to the numerous lapses in logic and unpersuasive changes of heart while sidelining the lively supporting cast

As square-shouldered as you'd expect of a National Geographic co-production. But Bigelow hits all her marks and more within the narrow parameters.

The film is a model of precision and economy, from the scrupulous framing and editing to the dryly note-perfect performances.

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

Apparently fallen victim to the transparent damage-control tactics of studios in possession of perceived stinkers.

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

The film's ephemeral, semi-evasive lyricism ultimately works as a modest frame for Bardem's tender, deft portrait, which is in turn suitably expansive and rooted in the most concrete details -- Arenas's pride and anger, his unsentimental wit and defiant vitality.

Grows increasingly slack and silly.

As a historical document, 24 Hour Party People may be most meaningful to fans whose epiphanies were experienced at least one remove away -- at a different place or time.

Boldly engineering a collision between tawdry B-movie flamboyance and grandiose spiritual anomie, Rose's film, true to its source material, provides a tenacious demonstration of death as the great equalizer.

On a first viewing, the movie seemed a dilution of the formal strategies Jia had perfected-at once less dispassionate and less empathetic. After a repeat viewing, it still strikes me as Jia's fourth-best film (that it's one of the year's best says plenty about the level at which he's working), but it's more apparent that The Worl d's muffled emotional impact should be understood as a function of its setting.

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.

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

Another mystery that gives up its secrets all too quickly, Till Human Voices Wake Us is named for a T.S. Eliot line -- and it proves a woefully evocative title for this snoozy supernatural pastoral.

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.

Despite the agreeable lead performances, it's one of Loach's more forgettable films.

At once laboriously expository and defiantly incomprehensible.

For a quality horny-Italian-teen frolic, you need look no further.

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

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).

The deeply ridiculous 8 1/2 Women could have been made only by a cranky dotard.

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

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.

Indifferently written, passably acted, resourcefully shot in video with enlivening splashes of local color.

Strangely, there's no thrust and parry to this potentially heavyweight mind game. The effect is more like a tennis match in which every feebly contested point ends with an unforced error.

The film never finds a confident tone: it's pitched as a satire, but seems to have no real targets.

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.

Without deploying reductive backstory or simplistic psychology, this fearless movie -- easily the year's best debut feature -- illuminates Esther's pathology as an extreme response to the mind-body split.

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.

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

A ponderous, almost wordless sliver of grotesquerie.

The golden-hued footage is lovingly faked by ace cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, and the straight-faced result is as improbably touching as the Farrelly brothers' underrated "Stuck on You."

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.

Come Undone's true subject is, simply enough, the perspective-warping enormity of first love, as preserved in a scrapbook of before-and-after snapshots.

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.

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

Groove is less a work of subcultural ethnography than a curiously dorky act of hipster sincerity, less party movie than cheesy valentine

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

A breezy first-person video essay that goes in search of the average Asian American woman, all the while wondering if there is in fact such a thing.

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.

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.

Much of Undercover Brother plays as a funnier, if similarly addled, "Bamboozled."

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.

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

Even from deep in a K-hole, you'd need about 10 seconds to figure out the remaining plot twists in this jaded muscle-queen morality tale.

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.

Matching their superbly expressive computer-generated counterparts, the actors are all enjoyably hammy, but the real star of Antz is the art direction, a marvel of teeming detail wittier and more sophisticated than the script.

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

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.

The flashes of emotional eloquence from the actors (especially Fitzgerald and Julianne Nicholson, as the radiant vet student who befriends both boys) are muffled by the ultimately asphyxiating preciousness.

Yet another black comedy that misunderstands and misrepresents the genre.

The Wayans brothers' new bottom-feeder signals its utter exhaustion -- and barely veiled contempt for the audience.

Makes the strongest case for retirement since late-period Roger Moore.

The result is a freakishly potent farce.

"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.

Made with no discernible craft and monstrously sanctimonious in dealing with childhood loss, it might as well be called "Pray It Forward."

Limps into theaters at long last, practically begging, with every arthritic pratfall, to be put out of its misery.

An all-access fan's valentine as artfully scrappy and likably wide-eyed as its subjects.

The shabby metaphysics and complete absence of internal logic are perhaps meant to charm, but only add to the eye-gouging irritant factor.

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.

Largely innocuous and forgettable, Polly lacks "Mary's" romantic pathos and psychosexual anxiety and is a few squirmy set pieces shy of "Meet the Parents."

The panoramas of vacant lots and boarded-up buildings, cheesily scored to lugubrious music, get monotonous, until you realize that repetition is precisely the point.

Cavite is such a shrewd melding of form and content that any seeming contradictions and shortcomings end up working to the film's advantage.

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

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

In his first major role, the Irish actor Farrell deflects the script's more dubious aspects through sheer magnetic presence.

Raw, fascinating, often unpleasant film.

The scenario is stale but the actors are faultless.

Dusted off for one more run-through, and for those who applauded "Titanic's" old-is-new ethos, the moth-eaten, barely breathing Anna and the King will serve as a slap in the face.

Splendidly entertaining.

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).

Enemy of the State isn't really a smart film, but it makes a concerted stab at pretending to be one.

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.

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

Nowhere Man, despite a tossed-off ending, is a compulsive bit of meta-exploitation.

There's a certain satisfaction in recognizing that Harold -- even when he inevitably starts to feel, just like a human -- remains something of an a--hole.

To call Twelve and Holding cartoonish is to put it mildly. Marked by reckless tonal shifts, Anthony Cipriano's screenplay traffics in sensationalism and sentimentality.

It's an astonishing Kidman who contributes the film's -- and maybe the year's -- most inspired turn.

Skin is less life story than luxuriant mood bath.

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.

There's no gold dust to be found here, just an awful lot of stick-on glitter.

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

Kormakur's debut feature fulfills the basic requirements of good slacker comedy: It's grounded in quotidian tedium and frustration, and it acknowledges both the humor and pathos of the relevant coping mechanisms (here, lackadaisical flings, porn addiction, amnesia-courting binges).

The film isn't short on ideas, it's just that those ideas are dumbfoundingly pretentious and trite.

So seamlessly and comprehensively dreadful that its very existence (let alone its appearance in theaters) beggars belief.

Live by the meta-movie rules, die by the meta-movie rules: Rhinoceros Eyes is a parable on cine-enchantment that itself fails to enchant.

One of the cruddiest-looking movies ever made.

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.

Sometimes exerts the gross-out fascination of reality TV's muckier specimens--its arc suggests a slow-motion "Fear Factor," or "Extreme Makeover" in reverse.

A disappointing nosedive into the mainstream for John Maybury, the Derek Jarman acolyte who transitioned successfully from experimental work to features with 1998's hallucinatory Francis Bacon biopic "Love Is the Devil."

As with Téchiné's best work, Strayed is a peculiar, lingering blend of robustness and delicacy--a movie with hardly a single wasted frame, incongruous word, or false gesture.

Winds up a sweetly nonchalant and excellently unwhiny allegory of seeking and gaining entry to the Caucasian fortress that is present-day America, or at least nocturnal New Jersey.

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

Tumbles happily into every pitfall that lines its well-trodden path.

Still astonishingly vital at 96, the Portuguese maestro Manoel de Oliveira here takes a becalmed trip through stormy waters.

Given that The Eye plays out without so much as a single new idea or real surprise, it's a testament to the Pangs' knack for composition and editing -- or Orange Music's merciless Psycho-tronic score -- that the movie goes boo as effectively as it does.

Thrives on vivid incidentals and telling details.

Easily the artiest queer stroke movie of the year.

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.

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.