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.