Derek Elley

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.