Derek Elley

Marvelously involving family saga.

This is a thoroughly Euro bedmate to the 1997 "Bean," with the Gauls rather than the Yanks as the butt of Bean's bumblings.

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

An ersatz "Pride and Prejudice" in all but name, Becoming Jane is a finely tooled Brit-lit costumer that, like Anne Hathaway's flawless accent as the young Austen, lacks only that final convincing 5%.

There's not much magic left in Kenneth Branagh's The Magic Flute. Relocating the 1791 opera to WWI and adopting a hard-edged approach that worked for "Hamlet," Branagh has wrought a "Flute" for high-end aficionados only. Lavishly mounted and well sung, but thin on charm and spontaneity, pic is likely to hit a bum note at general wickets.

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.

Opening half-hour has some of the best stuff in the movie, walking a precarious line between black irony and showing the war from a totally German viewpoint, without tipping over into gallows humor or parody.

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

Does what it does well but too often seems a pointless exercise in British miserabilism crossed with a nasty gangster yarn.

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.

Austen nuts may rend their frocks, and Bollywood buffs may split their cholis, but there's an immensely likable, almost goofily playful charm to Bride & Prejudice that finally wins the day.

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.

Another slam-dunk from vet producer Yash Johar.

A superbly written loony-tunes satire, played by a tony cast at the top of its game.

An often grippingly staged mountain movie that's good but not great.

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

Boosted by a delish performance from Carrie-Anne Moss as a local vamp who helps unthaw the Englishman, but holed beneath the waterline by a gratingly miscast Sigourney Weaver as the persnickety autistic.

Combines scares and chuckles with good production values.

High-octane plunge into pop gangster psychology.

Surprisingly conventional Olde London Towne gaslight mystery, gussied up with some doctored visuals, and an eccentric performance by Johnny Depp.

A handsome although dramatically muddled Noodle Western.

Stays resolutely grounded thanks to miscasting of Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno as the leads and a script that contrarily breaks every rule of the genre.

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.

A slickly mounted slice of can-do nonsense.

Rather dark, decidedly English and exceedingly well played, Keeping Mum is a neatly crafted black comedy with more than a nod in tone toward the Ealing classic "The Ladykillers."

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.

Pic's busy direction and bright performances partly compensate for a script that goes in too many directions at the same time.

Shows a consistent inability to generate any kind of drama when characters open their mouths.

First hour is an often gripping look at the realities of modern Islam ("You can do anything you want, as long as it's not in public," says a soldier's wife), before silliness takes over.

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.

Solidly entertaining for those who like their dialogue crisp and with a main verb in every sentence.

Deeply felt but dramatically unconvincing "fictional documentary" -- inspired by the March 2006 rape and killings by U.S. troops in Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad -- has almost nothing new to say about the Iraq situation and can't make up its mind about how to package its anger in an alternative cinematic form.

Brings nothing new to the table, and spends far too long making the audience think it will.

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.

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

A polished genre piece with superior fright elements.

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

Film plays as a quirky Brit riff on everything from U.S. slasher pics to revenge oaters but without Meadows' usual psychological complexity.

An embarrassing failure at almost every level.

An extremely silly but effective enough romp for family audiences.

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

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.

An astonishing improvement on the original version. With 27 minutes excised, pic emerges from its mind-numbing undergrowth as a memorable -- if still highly specialized -- exercise in personal, '70s-style American filmmaking, with a cohesive feel and rhythm that marks Gallo as a distinctive indie talent.

At heart, Best Men is a modest picture that harks back in many ways to U.S. movies of the late ’60s and early ’70s in its unconventional attitudes and anti-establishment tone. Pacing never lingers, and, unlike in Guncrazy, there’s no narrative fat; at the same time, there isn’t much emotional residue either. In short, it’s simply a quality B movie.

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

A drama of impeccable intentions flawed by arch dialogue and only OK direction.

A sexy, good-looking political bodice-ripper with an almost flawless cast at the top of its game.

Like a tragic overture played at the wrong tempo and slightly off-key, Woody Allen's London-set Cassandra's Dream sends out more mixed signals than an inebriated telegraphist.

The most emotionally satisfying pic to date by Korean iconoclast Kim Ki-duk.

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.

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.

A risky idea only occasionally gets both wheels off the ground in "The Theory of Flight," a sometimes wryly amusing, oftimes dramatically awkward story

Chained to the floor by a script that isn't particularly funny, direction that goes for realism rather than stylization and an almost complete lack of comic timing.

A haunted-house one-trick pony.

Super-slick street-racing pic, based on a Nipponese manga series and set in Japan, is aimed squarely at the East Asian market, which it has conquered in spades since late June release.

Mixes a rites-of-passage story with political and sexual elements to solid but finally uninvolving results.

A generally entertaining but rather old-fashioned romantic comedy.

Though the script never makes a convincing case for the lads as '90s Robin Hoods, it's restlessly inventive, with a pleasant, rather than rib-cracking, humor and likable touch of naivete.

Amounts to a giant cry of "Americans, get engaged!" wrapped in a star-heavy discourse that uses a lot of words to say nothing new.

Overlong and very Euro-flavored.

15 is Asian Kid Rebels 101. So predictable it could almost be a parody of the genre -- though that would require a sense of humor above and beyond the self-reflexive comedy on display here.

Charmingly eccentric light comedy.

A wannabe romantic comedy with miscast leads and a script in desperate need of a good editor.

Slight but sleek, Flirt is still fun.

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

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

Some genuine shocks punctuate The Exorcism of Emily Rose, an unusually intelligent genre item that manages to mix full-bore horror with courtroom drama.

The picture sports a strong lead cast but is diminished by TV-style helming and production qualities.

A mildly entertaining but dramatically messy kidpic.

Many of the weaknesses and few of the strengths of Guillermo Arriaga as a scripter are evident in his directing debut, The Burning Plain.

An intriguing spin on the British crime genre that's more a series of strong performances than a fully worked-out character drama.

OK entertainment but nothing more.

Both the pic's power and its problems stem from Love deliberately taking no moral position nor offering any solutions; he gives his audience what it wants at a gut level and doesn't wimp out at the end.

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.

An unquestionably sincere but dramatically stillborn outing by veteran John Boorman.

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.

As shocking and deliberately manipulative as the original movie and -- some may reckon -- even more pointless.

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

A touching, often poetic, sometimes achingly real snapshot of a brief encounter related almost entirely through the bedroom.

Doesn't ring true as a love story between a cocky scam artist and a clever biology student, despite a game effort by Charlotte Ayanna in an impossible role and Adrien Brody at his loosest.

Game ride that makes the two previous installments look like models of classic filmmaking.

More often a noirish action drama, a melancholy meditation on history and nationalism, than the high-tech thriller promised by its hype and artwork.

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

A shake 'n' bake Brit teen-spy actioner, without a smidgeon of originality, humor or involving characterization, Stormbreaker is a high-profile bust.

A hip comic curio.

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

Pic maintains a likable, breezy tone throughout but looks increasingly threadbare of real inspiration or originality as it proceeds.

Not helped by a wooden perf from Jim Caviezel as a humanoid alien who accidentally imports a real alien to eighth-century Earth.

A charming relationships comedy about food, gourmet cooking and emotionally chilling out. Anchored by a career-best performance from German thesp Martina Gedeck.

Sumptuous pic version, which evokes the original show while working as a movie in its own right, is lit by a radiant, vocally lustrous perf by teenaged Emmy Rossum.

Plays like a movie where the script went missing on the third day of shooting.

Over-long, under-written and needlessly obscure instead of genuinely atmospheric.

A solid slice of entertainment without reaching the psychological depths promised by the subject matter.

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.

Mixed Indian and Western cast --turn the true story of a case that changed British law into an old-style melodrama (in the best sense) complete with a feel-good ending.

An entertaining chick pic for all ages and sexes.

Delightful comedy of manners.

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.