Derek Elley

Despite engaging performances from a cast led by Matthew Rhys and Kate Ashfield and pro direction by first-timer Richard Janes, yarn about art grifters lacks real snap, which ultimately stems from the so-so script and lack of real coin.

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.

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 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."

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

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

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.

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

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.

Often nastily violent, and defiantly foul-mouthed in a realistic but dramatically unnecessary way, this portrait of a ruthless young hood in '60s London has several fine qualities but dilutes them with disorganized direction.

The overall effect simply underlines the central weakness of the pic: that the neo-kitschy futuristic scenes don't add much to the real-life '60s relationships.

Devoid of genuine inspiration or involving character development.

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.

What the picture most needed was a complete cinematic rethink and, yes, even some action to move it along.

One of the most highly crafted pics in recent memory, and certainly the most original in vision of the 23 features competing at Cannes this year, Songs From the Second Floor rapidly wears out its welcome after the first few reels to finish up as a perplexing objet d'art.

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

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

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.

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

A haunted-house one-trick pony.

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

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

There's no shortage of existing docus on the subject, and Panh's doesn't bring either a fresh enough angle or enough new material to the table to justify its length.

A thinly scripted mood piece centered on an estranged fortysomething among vacationing friends in Italy, Unrelated doesn’t carry the viewer along with its protag’s emotional problems.

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.

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

Gorgeously mounted, but butt-numbingly slow.

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

An overlong stygian comedy that badly needs a transfusion of genuine inspiration.

Tendency to go for art rather than action, and a leisurely pace that isn't bolstered by much dialogue or food for thought.

Pic is the eclectic Taiwanese helmer’s most accessible work since the 1986 “The Terrorizer” but is flawed by hit-and-miss scripting and performances.

A slow, empty, over-mannered snoozer that shows Taiwanese helmer Hou Hsiao-hsien asleep at the wheel.

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.

A colorful, enjoyable ride most of the way but could have been even better if Beatriz Flores Silva's direction had more often risen above the functional and had not gotten a bad attack of conscience in the closing reels.

Mainland helmer Wang Quanan and his regular lead actress, Yu Nan, tread on largely familiar ground in Tuya's Marriage.

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.

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.

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.

Strongly cast, long-limbed yarn contains some of Ratnam's best stuff in its first half but script weaknesses mar the later going and film's overall impact.

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

Contains some brilliant invention between duller stretches.

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.

The temptation of artists to fiddle with their earlier works brings predictably mixed results in Ashes of Time: Redux.

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.

An intellectual-cum-sexual teaser whose twist is apparent far too early on.

Talky, repetitive and largely covering the same ground with no new thoughts, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is a major let-down.

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.

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

An often remarkable, often infuriating lateral spin on genre material that desperately needs another sesh at the editing table.

A handsome although dramatically muddled Noodle Western.

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 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.

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

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.

Mediocre, dramatically flat picture.

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.

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

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.

Japanese helmer Hirokazu Kore-eda’s ongoing interest in love, loss and souls in limbo is stretched way too thin in Air Doll, a beautifully lensed (by Taiwanese ace Mark Lee) and charmingly played (by South Korean icon Bae Du-na) modern fairy tale about an inflatable doll who takes on a life of her own. Recut to a trim 90 minutes, this fragile yarn would work perfectly and have a chance of an afterlife as a specialty item. In its present form, pic may not get much farther than the fest netherworld.

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

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

The lowdown on The Low Down: charm 8, content 2.

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

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

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.

An easy-to-digest slice of literate entertainment for upscale and older audiences that lacks a significant emotional undertow to make it a truly involving -- rather than simply voyeuristic -- experience.

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.

Attempts to meld reality and artifice but to uninspiring results.

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.

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

Small but delightful tale about a dyed-in-the-wool spieler who develops a soft spot for a blind girl dumped in his care.

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.

Four years after Frantic, Roman Polanski approaches rock bottom with Bitter Moon, a phony slice of huis clos drama between two couples aboard a Euro ocean liner. Strong playing by topliner Peter Coyote can't compensate for a script that's all over the map and a tone that veers from outre comedy to erotic game-playing.

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

With very little dialogue, and even less plot, five chapter stops lend the movie a skeletal structure: "Wrath," "Silent Warrior," "Men of God," "The Holy Land" and "Hell." But any discussion of the Dark Ages conflict between paganism and Christianity is reduced to just grunts or insults.

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

What gives Quitting its freshness is its setting in a country that often denies it has such problems and the decision to anchor the film strongly within the Chinese family fabric.

High on charm but extremely low on content, Blue Gate Crossing is a half-hour short stretched to feature length.

Overplays its slim hand by a good two reels.

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

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.

Too much caution and too little lust squeeze much of the dramatic juice out of Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, a 2½--hour period drama that's a long haul for relatively few returns.

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.

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.

Low on drama and originality, and high on deja vu, sophomore outing by writer-director Li Yang ("Blind Shaft," 2003).

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.

Several large leaps of faith take some of the dramatic steam out of Unveiled, an otherwise well-acted and accessible lesbian drama that also flirts with issues like loss of identity and anti-Muslim tensions.

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.

Picture generally stays afloat on the strength of its characters but sometimes threatens to sink under its overlong running time and vignettish structure.

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.

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.

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

Easy on the eye but light on originality.

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

Cool it may be, but scary (or even mildly shudder-inducing) it ain’t, even in 3-D.

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.

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