Ed Park

Efficient, suitably anonymous chiller.

Works best as a rapid-fire series of sight gags and absurd remarks.

Family goes easy on the schmaltz, and the catastrophes have the puncturing feel of real life.

Less a romance than a feature-length plug for 'N Sync and its personalities -- and so, like all ads, not meant for "conscious consumption." Which opens the blissful avenue of sleep.

The situation -- a mother-daughter mind-body switcheroo -- is as enduringly appealing as it is absurd, and the comedy flows therefrom.

Hardly a nuanced portrait of a young woman's breakdown, the film nevertheless works up a few scares, particularly a tense call-number hunt in the library stacks.

Lighthearted if shy of a lark.

Stateside's real-life frame allows the complexities of mental illness and military service to lose dramatic tension, resulting in a desultory home stretch of group therapy, tears, and reconciliation.

Ham-handed to start, with a fondness for cochlea-crushing decibel levels, National Treasure gets more entertaining as the preposterousness rises.

If nothing else, Sophie Fillières's Ouch! is a secret pop culture index.

As a dirtier Deepak, Mistry is blankly sweet, suitable for his role as Subcontinental Rorschach.

But mostly the film is just hectic and homiletic: two parts exhausting "Men in Black" mayhem to one part family values.

The low-key animation, featuring little that could not have appeared in its '50s predecessor, is all the more affecting for being so pristinely preserved.

Culkin broods and freaks out ably, but Igby's snotty, dysfunction-derived malaise remains off-putting, mostly because his lines aren't half as clever or empathic as Steers would believe.

The most blatant rip-off is of the "Rushmore" soundtrack. But Ralph Walker is no Max Fischer, and his monomania gets dull fast.

To this viewer and reader, the decade-old juggernaut is as deeply felt as it is flawed, dense and illogical and laudably "weird."

In the rare moments when a rifle, grenade, howitzer, bayonet, dagger, fist, land mine, or flamethrower isn't being deployed, the film pushes its melodramatic plotline with soap operatic shamelessness.

Chad Friedrichs's doc has too many rock-crit talking heads, too often saying the same thing based on scant information -- a clumsy portrait of the artist that inadvertently serves as a mirror of the critical faculty itself.

Patient and fascinated, but never succumbing to abstraction, Wheel of Time can be seen as the middle installment of a trilogy against nature.

So true to its title that I've forgotten many of the details already--and I just saw it this morning. This latecomer has been rendered completely obsolete by “Memento.”

An anti-"Rififi" in which nearly everybody loses their cool, not after the big score goes down but repeatedly and neurotically throughout.

Danny Boyle's Millions is not what we'd expect from the "Trainspotting" and "28 Days Later" director. It's essentially a gentle, kid's-eye parable.

If music be the food of love, Cool & Crazy could stand a few more hits from the spice rack.

"Sopranos" vet Dominic Chianese is squandered as a banal father confessor.

This poorly conceived sequel to Gore Verbinski's "The Ring" ditches that film's scariest conceit.

When it comes to the "humans," the atmosphere collapses. Unnervingly smooth, mouths moving in strange, even frightening formations, the Polar people are the least convincing things on-screen, glaring impostors amid the otherwise painstakingly rendered scenery.

The leads smooth over the plot holes endemic to all 4D fables, making the movie more than mere déjà vu.

Bledel, consigned to corsets and croquet, looks so weepy for much of Tuck Everlasting. The reason might lie in a script that favors the starchy demands of period melodrama over her TV show's fizzy screwball banter -- or maybe it's just William Hurt's embarrassing brogue.

The self-consciousness is unintentionally touching, but it wet-blankets the film into a thirdhand lark.

It's all an excuse for some daft production numbers, however, and a chance to relive the vanished Holland of your youth. Yes Nurse? No Nurse? Maybe Nurse!

Unsettling in spots, Princesa ultimately glosses over the futility of Fernanda's plight, her misery rapidly erased.

Some reliably vertiginous fight sequences (rope bridge, rooftop signage) and modest flight experiments liven up the mix, but for all the leads' individual appeal, they seem to occupy slightly different films.

Despite a late-inning swoon of pat emotional generosity, Game Six is a gratifying playground of high-wire language.

Ismail Merchant's screen adaptation retains much of the novel's incident, but fumbles both the humor and moral ambivalence.

The film stakes out a self-affirming Atkins-free zone that seems unobjectionable in theory, but its speechifying tendencies and familiar familial tensions overwhelm the more delicate scenes.

Bears some resemblance to "All About My Mother," but lacks its compatriot's flamboyance, content to traffic in glib banalities and unwitting self-absorption.

A bitter little fable of rent control and its discontents, Duplex moves rapidly into darkness and claustrophobia.

Crammed with wild action, obvious but well-mounted gags, and playful effects, the film is refreshingly silly.

Strangely coy about its denominational allegiance.

Seeing BLT has been positioned as a political act. Alas: The film in question seems hardly worth the fuss.

Ultimately everything feels one-sided and sanitized.

Transpires in a somewhat chintzy fantasy kingdom lousy with more cameos than your typical Love Boat season.

Club's inability to moralize saves it from kitsch.

Aside from cameos by Jim Broadbent (as the drunken major) and Peter O'Toole (as Nina's reclusive, eccentric father), much of the acting strains for a sophistication that quickly becomes annoying.

Bones splits the difference between horror and social commentary, with pallid returns.

Alas, The White Countess, the final Merchant Ivory film, is something of a lacquered dud.

White Noise vigorously pushes the supernatural line throughout, but unfortunately its final movement is so incoherent that the whole thing collapses.

Mike Leigh mainstay Timothy Spall deftly shades in the designated goner, fellow "Still Crazy" alum Bill Nighy is sweetly wispy as the capable fop, and anger-management counselor Olivia Williams trembles pleasantly as usual.

The animated scenes conjure aromas of the stilted "Clifford," and the overall approach is to throw preordained movie sequences (rap number, shopping spree) together and hope for the best.

Craig keeps Joe Rose on a hair trigger, but Morton is wasted as Claire; Ifans simply looks stoned.

Has shades of such oleaginous insider-treading as "The Player" and "Celebrity," but the mood, like the lighting, is altogether sunnier.

A huge problem with the whole shebang is that the impressions (all courtesy Cornwell and Sessions) are shaky at best.

Playful and sentimental, with comic-book characterization and a half-orphaned, filially righteous head case, Janice Beard resembles a British "Amélie."

The adventure-book pace and topsy-turvy English setting evoke the feel of Stephen Sommers's "Mummy" films.

Despite the wall-to-wall shagging in Cin's loft, -- this Three Days of the Condom is less Last Tango in Sydney than "When Harry Met Sally."

SK3D, alas, banks it all on a dead-end VR aesthetic, albeit one emitting a certain black-hole fascination.

Emphatically acted, ponderous, and ultimately a little silly.

Falls into the clotheshorse cliché: all dressed up and no place to go.

Grim headlines aside, FireDancer is hard to recommend, with its haphazard tone, wobbly acting, and cipher-like lead.

The clunky manipulations of plot, and the sorry fate awaiting everyone in this foggy House is less wrenching than acted.

Despite a fairly explicit lesbian boobfest (projected attendance just went up!), the film is more good-natured than provocative.

Numbing but effective debut.

Though the acting is tentative at times, with performances not quite landing on the same page, Evergreen is a compassionate slice of Pacific Northwest misery.

Their opposites-attract trajectory entertainingly reaches an applause-inducing climax -- but heeding Eddie's exegetical advice, Prince refuses to end on such an easy emotional note.

More fun to listen to than watch -- though this still leaves the problem of dialogue.

As hackneyed as they come, but the overall mood is less cynical than affectionate.

Adept and generally enjoyable.

Crudely written, haphazardly acted, and improbably fun.

His story is sad but not humorless.

All stand-up comedy is oral aggression, but Cho's is an especially fascinating strain.

A nimbler approach to border crossing, German-born director Fatih Akin's In July resembles a shaggier "Serendipity," with a similar moony conflation of coincidence and destiny.

Camp is self-conscious when the teens aren't singing, but the quote marks fall away as soon as they lift their voices.

Yuki's streamlined revenge story (the furious, elegant choreography is by HK maestro Donnie Yen) has in its modest dimensions a surprising grace.

A looking-glass cover version of "The Truman Show," the maudlin Jim Carrey vehicle Bruce Almighty lets the comedian ply his rubber-limbed shtick as well as indulge his pursuit of sappiness.

A pleasurably intense burst of anarchy with no moral in sight, thank God.

At least Sean Astin, as a scene-chewing prima donna, seems to be having a good time--and mom Patty Duke gets to call him a "turd."

Solidifying his funnyman rep, Ashton Kutcher appears as oldest child Piper Perabo's model-actor boyfriend, a delightfully brainless narcissist.

One leaves the film with the Twilight Zone sense that the place isn't quite the hellhole prior reports have suggested.