Derek Elley

Fourth feature by Mainland helmer Lou Ye ("Suzhou River," "Purple Butterfly") shoots for metaphysical drama but ends up saying very little beneath all the poetic voiceovers, sexual encounters and political seasoning.

Some fine individual perfs by the tony cast, plus fine period detail and costumes, make the time pass fairly agreeably, but Tea With Mussolini suffers from a fatal lack of focus and emotional center, reducing potentially involving material to a succession of individual scenes.

An involving, often kinetic 2½-hour ride for auds who can accept their entertainment overboiled as well as just hardboiled.

Pic is an obvious but highly accessible entertainment that manages to josh its subjects without being condescending to either Eastern or Western auds.

A charming but overextended yarn about some prairie tykes who mistake a table-tennis ball for a glowing pearl from the gods.

Result is far more accessible than Jia's previous two pictures, with moments of genuine emotion by the real-life interviewees.

Well cast, engagingly played and directed with a stylistic pedal to the metal, Human Traffic is a lot of energy adding up to very little.

Largely thanks to the snappy editing, short scenes and a strong cast led by a matronly Deveuve and Amalric's enjoyable perf as the black sheep of the family, A Christmas Tale never devolves into a tedious two-and-a-half hours of self-examination. But it also never goes very far, either.

Too slim to make much impression outside fests, this nevertheless reps another solid outing by former art director Huo Jianqi.

Like a collapsing star, Sunshine initially burns brightly but finally implodes into a dramatic black hole.

Boal's script stirs a little of everything into the pot, which boils down into seven setpieces divided by brief intervals of camaraderie/conflict among the three protags.

An often compelling drama, marbled with dry humor and flecked with the supernatural, that provides food for thought but doesn't quite reach the brass ring.

Second time round, Bridget is still fat, funny and endearing -- but "all a bit, um, familiar, actually."

A slowly inspiring saga of blood, sweat and horse dung, played with conviction.

Though the film is never dull, and playing by the cast is spirited, it's actually a surprisingly gentle movie, with no big "Full Monty"-like finale to send auds buzzing into the street.

Using the familiar device of cuisine as a metaphor for national identity and personal feelings, bitter-sweet pic about a man torn between his ethnicity (Greek) and the country of his birth (Turkey) makes its points lightly and entertainingly, with only a routine third act letting down the package.

Gay's the way, but the way's not really gay, in the fluffy and largely entertaining Dostana.

High-octane plunge into pop gangster psychology.

Chinese thesp Gong Li goes for a striking career makeover in Zhou Yu's Train, a sensual, slickly packaged slice of Euro-style metaphysical cinema centered on a free-thinking woman and the two men in her life.

An interesting idea comes over only half-formed in Johnnie To's Breaking News, an effective Hong Kong crimer that partly returns to the realistic style of some of his late '90s dramas, but never properly knits its theme of media manipulation into pic's punchy thriller format.

An extremely silly, grossly scatological but often amusing picture that plays like Dumb & Dumber meets Spike Lee in London.

Amos Gitai's most satisfying pic since war drama "Kippur." Schematic set-up is given a human face by fine performances and a physical journey that's often more interesting than the characters' emotional ones, which are weakened by the Israeli auteur's tendency toward convenient doctrinaire-ism and chunks of expository dialogue.

Writer-helmer Gurinder Chadha assembles a gallery of broadly played stereotypes into a movie about social attitudes that's more rooted in small-screen sitcom than anything deeper.

Sports a lustrous performance by Cate Blanchett that gives the movie much of its final sheen but still can't keep it on the rails as the already flimsy story starts to disintegrate in the final act.

Though tastily lensed and with a convincing cast led by Cillian Murphy, essentially small-scale picture lacks the involving sweep of Loach's earlier historical-political yarn, "Land and Freedom."

With its booming soundtrack of songs -- written by Laurent Marimbert and sung by Seigner herself -- and good chemistry between Le Besco and Seigner, pic at times has an operatic emotional intensity that will turn off some viewers but provide a guilty pleasure for others.

Boasting the same refreshing avoidance of CGI and wire work as "Warrior," slickly made production (largely by the same team) is more consciously aimed at the international market, with its Australian setting and multilingual dialogue.

Handsomely shot in widescreen, mostly on actual West Bank locations, and well-played by the cast, pic lays out the issues in an accessible but rather too over-correct way, seemingly eager to please all parties at the expense of real passion.

Immaculately shot and composed as always, and moving at Ceylan's usual measured pace, this one is slightly enlivened by more likable perfs and a trim 98-minute running time.

Overall tone lies somewhere between Mike Leigh and Ken Loach in performances and look, with a modest tech package.

Too often caught between trying to be a sweeping period drama and intimate love story at the same time, with a script that's never fully satisfying on either count.

Davaa's strong visual sense, engaging cast and respect for basic film grammar make this slim exercise in managed reality go the distance.

The supporting perfs provide the real drama, especially Hinds' excellent turn as the outwardly macho but inwardly broken Traynor, and McSorley's simmering portrayal of the psychotic Gilligan

Full of charming moments, but swinging hither and thither between mainstream entertainment and an over-cooked anti-racist tract.

Despite its large cast and complex criss-crossing from past to present, the movie rarely catches fire as an involving human drama.

The pic often plays like a Cliffs Notes version of a longer movie: Pacing and continuity aren't choppy, but there's enough material here for a full-length drama that would go deeper into the characters and their backgrounds. Eklavya is good as it is, but lacks tragic heft.

Neeson growls his way through the functional dialogue as an unstoppable killing machine in impressive, cold-eyed style.

Film traverses Buzz's career with reasonable depth, helped by good-quality trailers from several pics. However, one suspects there are a lot more stories Buzz could tell in a more rigorous format.

A good-looking but slim confection that's short on the multi-characterisation and sense of entwined destinies that mark the great Lelouch sagas.

South Korean cinema finally gets its first full-blown political satire with The President's Last Bang, a virtuoso slice of sustained black humor.

A generally entertaining piece of fluff that's kept afloat by a weathered cast including Fabrice Luchini and Roschdy Zem.

A really small movie done up in a big, moody package, Saawariya entices, fitfully springs to life but finally outstays its welcome by a good half-hour.

Gorgeously mounted, but butt-numbingly slow.

A hip comic curio.

Despite a name cast, with Dillon playing an insurance crook, pic is holed by a plot-heavy script that's unsatisfying at a character level and plays like a cut-down version of a much longer, more ambitious saga.

Script is sometimes confusingly structured, and in its second half doesn't move as smoothly from scene to scene as in Kim's best pics.

Stripped of "Royale's" humor, elegance and reinvented old-school stylishness, Quantum has little left except its plot, which is rudimentary and slightly barmy, in the line of the Roger Moore pics of the '70s and '80s.

Some fine screen chemistry between its leads and a spikey, offhandedly comic script by young writer-director John McKay put spice into Crush.

A London drag queen and a bunch of Midlands working stiffs find common ground and, uh, mutual respect in Kinky Boots, a slick, cross-tracks Britcom whose stride is hampered by its desire not to offend.

Pic's potentially inspiring story too often remains grounded by a problematic script and unshapely direction.

A curate's egg of a movie that starts intriguingly but becomes increasingly frustrating.

Makes engrossing viewing for much of the way...but stumbles dramatically in its final leg.

A slickly mounted slice of can-do nonsense.

Easy on the eye but light on originality.

A seductively lensed but emotionally uninvolving drama about two male Peking Opera stars and the ex-prostie who comes between them, Chen Kaige's fourth feature, Farewell to My Concubine, reps a stylistic U-turn compared with his earlier abstract parables like Life on a String and Yellow Earth.

Though McDonald and Gleeson pair off well as the unlikely fellow travelers, and have some funny moments of physical shtick, the picture mostly springs to life when either Caffrey, as Grogan, or the excellent Doyle, as French, are onscreen.

As a series of action set pieces, the movie is frequently gripping and always highly watchable. However, when the movie strays into weirder territory --- where, one feels, Jeunet's heart really lies --- there's a growing feeling of inadequacy.

Despite some magnificent widescreen lensing, faultless ethnographic detail and a timely sympathy for the plight of the Tibetan people, director Jean-Jacques Annaud's true-life tale about a self-obsessed Austrian mountaineer who learns selflessness in the Himalayas too rarely delivers at a simple emotional level.

A martial arts fantasy in modern dress, but set in an unidentified country and era, The Princess Blade is a tough toasted sandwich with a soft filling.

A check-your-brains-at-the-door, almost non-stop actioner that finally wins the viewer over with its sheer single-mindedness.

Pleasant and engaging, rather than laugh-out-loud funny or emotionally involving.

Admirably non-judgmental docu about life in "the least visited, known, understood country in the world," per Brit director Daniel Gordon, brings a refreshing balance to the usual blind vilification of the country.

The film's persistent skimming from one vantage point to another, with no dominant dramatic line until midway through, will unsettle audiences expecting a more regular construction and something on which to hook their emotions over the long term.

An easygoing kitchen-sink comedy with an unsettling final act.

Classy production values and a textured lead performance by Darshan Jariwala are undercut by a lack of real drama in Gandhi My Father.

Looks set to unsettle as many conservative auds as it will delight nihilistic film buffs.

Western audiences familiar with "Blood Simple" will get a kick out of the reinventions.

Has a script that plays more like a period romancer studded with occasional Wilde-isms and gets uneven treatment from a mixed Anglo-American cast.

But there's little sense of a longer dramatic arc stretching across the characters: Rozema can't seem to hold a single tone for more than a few minutes, and she has too many other axes to grind besides just getting the story up on the screen.

A handsome although dramatically muddled Noodle Western.

Basic joke wears off after five minutes, and many bystanders will start to head out of town. But genre/Asian buffs prepared to ride shotgun for two hours will be rewarded with some classy action sequences and densely accoutred widescreen lensing.

Though Chan wins his usual stripes for death-defying... the movie ends on a dramatically unsatisfying note.

Chockfull of ideas and with an irreverence that irresistibly recalls late '60s American cinema, thesp John Turturro's third outing in the helmer's chair, Romance & Cigarettes, alternately shines and sputters.

A potentially gripping legal thriller about what happens when Western Europe attempts to solve Central European problems ends up as dull entertainment in Storm.

An often intriguing, sometimes hypnotic work, but one that quickly starts to unravel in the final hour as it becomes clear there’s not much beneath the emperor’s clothes.

The plucky music student who overcomes adversity is a staple subgenre of mainland cinema and, though Chen Kaige directs with greater slickness and more finesse and humor, there's still little to differentiate Together from any other state-studio pic.

A man whose name has become a byword for pure evil gets a disarming makeover in The Goebbels Experiment. Far from being the horror show expected from its title, Lutz Hachmeister's cool, almost anti-dramatic docu paints a portrait of an insecure manic-depressive solely through extracts from Joseph Goebbels' own voluminous diaries.

Scripters Robert Lee King and Lamar Damon leave no national cliche or double entendre unturned in this good-looking but relentlessly lowbrow outing which plays like "Clueless Does South Fork" with a side order of garlic.

Has some fine individual moments but fails to cohere into a grander, more substantial statement on the themes it aspires to tackle.

A no-holds-barred, thoroughly generic follow-up to the medical horror-chiller that wowed German wickets in 2000.

Kang remains a superb technician, but somewhere the movie forgot to pack any genuine emotion along with its ordnance and K rations.

Despite its merits, is neither an art movie nor an out-and-out, propulsive actioner like "Shiri."

The movie plays like a career summation in which the 68-year-old writer-director has simply run out new ideas.

Ultimately, this is a striking-looking film -- consciously recalling the paintings of Edward Hopper in its architectural use of space -- which, like its protag, is a little short on real feeling.

Like a passable bottle of champagne, Cheri fizzes and slides down quite easily but lacks real body and doesn't really hit the spot.

Admirably balanced production that pulls the curtain back slightly on a little-charted period of modern Chinese history.

Has all the classic faults of a picture not only directed by an actor but by an actor who is his own producer.

Despite the emotive subject matter, picture is often too sluggish dramatically, and never knits together its stock Western characters into a satisfying whole.

A haunted-house one-trick pony.

There’s almost none of the generous, involving humanity (and warm humor) of the previous film, nor any clear take on the personalities in the slackly structured script, largely improvised by the actors.

Though solidly crafted, with a host of well-etched performances, film is unable to establish a consistent, engaging tone.

A portrait of a contempo British family drifting apart because of generational differences, The Mother ends up an uneasy brew of too many competing tastes and themes.

Has almost zero plot but molto mood. It will appeal to the most faithful of the director's camp-followers and no one else.

Worthy intentions are drowned by schematic scripting and only OK direction in Silent Waters, an achingly PC drama on how Islamic fundamentalism wrecks families and oppresses women.

Wears out its welcome at 100 minutes, but could find an audience in the West as a latenight attraction at gay fests.

A neat idea that doesn't quite hit the bull's-eye.

Either a subtly subversive black comedy, a deeply spiritual portrait of physical rebirth or a whole lot of nothing in a self-consciously arty package, Lourdes isn't about to reveal its true colors anytime soon.

Mildly amusing result, with plenty of slack in its 100 minutes, should work OK with its target audience of female Brit tweenies, who won't notice the pic's shoddy technical package, sloppy direction and the way the original films' antiestablishment tone has morphed into a celebration of dumbed-down "yoof" culture.