Ed Park

The multiple story lines can feel choppy, but the dialogue has snap, and the pants' powers never distract from the teenagers' emotions.

Kurt Russell is terrific as coach Herb Brooks, psychological tactician out to redeem his being cut from the 1960 U.S. squad, the last one to beat the CCCP.

As rich in incidental detail as it is narratively diffuse.

Several sharp jolts give the doc its dramatic shape, and one episode in particular, caught with a neighbor's lens, will make you gasp with grief.

A horror story, told with Dickensian compassion, permeating outrage, and little hope.

An unstoppable good-mood generator, the resolutely 2-D SpongeBob SquarePants Movie has more yuks than "Shark Tale" and enough soul to swallow "The Polar Express" whole.

Taut even when ridiculous, with flashes of comedy, 3-Iron has less to offer than its predecessors, but at minimum it's the playful exhaustion of a formal constraint.

Convoluted but diverting.

Though the film lacks some of the paper incarnation's subtlety, Dai's infidelity to his own text keeps things interesting. He busts the book's brief time frame, tweaks countless plot points, and tops it all off with a titanic metaphor not found in his own pages.

Jessica Yu's elegant new doc In the Realms of the Unreal is a spry, creative response to his (Darger's) oceanic talent and claustrophobic life.

This latest and biggest installment is a whimsical success of a very high order: The pace never lags, the invention is incessant, and it makes you want to have a bite of cheese afterward.

A sign of The Baxter's charm is that it's essentially spoiler-proof: We know from the get-go which couples will pair off, and the pleasures lie in the spring-stepped vibe, the natty throwback wardrobe, and the intricate goofball patter.

Chamber's charm lies in the sheer visualization of Rowling's weirder inventions: pots of shrivel-phizzed screaming treelets, Harry's arm gone boneless from a bungled spell, a scolding letter from home that leaps to life as a yapping paper mouth.

Eliminates much of its source's plot, focusing on the book's first third. The result is a crisply shot chamber piece for husband, wife, and boy.

Dodgeball is the most satisfying comedy of the past year--at least among the ones starring Stiller.

Stuffed to the gills with surprises.

E J-Yong's transposition illuminates, with satisfying crispness, the hyper-Confucian high society of the time, as well as the underground Catholic movement.

In their randomness, the bee words take on an oracular quality--shades of kabbalistic gematria, or the "Sortes Vergilanae," the supernatural attributed to symbols on paper.

Conran takes the ghosts in his machine seriously, and the results appear at once meltingly lovely and intriguingly inhuman.

That the e-graveyard holds as many good ideas as bad is the cold comfort that Chin's film serves up with style and empathy.

Fun and nourishing, Charlie's the topsy-turvy equivalent of a three-course dinner in a single stick of gum.

Nathalie is intricate, provocative, cleanly acted, but it's never entirely convincing--and never more so than in the table-turning climax.

Succeeds as the rehumanizing of a near mythical figure.

Both a heartwarming tribute to the late Beatle and a study of hair patterns in the aging British male, Concert for George, recorded at the Royal Albert Hall a year to the day after Harrison's death, manages both reverence and joy.

Though the characters are in fact sustained improvisations, the roles feel inhabited rather than acted -- a quality acutely present in scenes of excruciating awkwardness.

Brims with storytelling flourishes and gently deployed life lessons that even accompanying adults may dig

The most romantic New York movie since August's "Happy Accidents."