Ed Park

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

His story is sad but not humorless.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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."

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.

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

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

As parody, it's toothless and often smug, but as random Ferrellspeak generator, it has its delights.

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

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.