Ed Park

Stuffed to the gills with surprises.

If you doubt whether Honey can scrape together the dough, this is probably the movie for you.

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

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.

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.

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

Though The Sea (and the sea) wants to capture some elemental, unruly truths, it's ultimately an over-lacquered jidai-geki curio, something for the appendix of the next book on Kurosawa.

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.

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.

Succeeds as the rehumanizing of a near mythical figure.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

As rich in incidental detail as it is narratively diffuse.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Braff's naive romanticism is also lovely proof of the film's innocent heart.

The summer's most romantic interspecies love story.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Convoluted but diverting.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ultimately everything feels one-sided and sanitized.

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.”

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

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

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

A flatland of lowest-common-denominated retro-collegiate wackiness.

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.

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

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

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

Less effective in dramatizing the choices facing second-generation Indian Americans than as a showcase for Sheetal Sheth's terrific hair.

Too stupid to be satire, too obviously hateful to be classified otherwise, Frank Novak's irritating slice of lumpen life is as reliably soul-killing as its title is nearly meaningless. ("Good Housekeeping" magazine's legal muscle forced a last-minute change.)

Most of the action is tedious, and the less you pay attention to the dialogue, the less you'll feel your hand inadvertently twitching as if with joystick.

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

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

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.

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

Crudely written, haphazardly acted, and improbably fun.

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

Emphatically acted, ponderous, and ultimately a little silly.

Club's inability to moralize saves it from kitsch.

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.

Adept and generally enjoyable.

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

Shark Tale's shallow plot and leagues of padding put it fully in the shadow of last year's animated underwater offering, the nifty, heartfelt "Finding Nemo."

At least Macht emerges relatively unscathed from the mess, content to brood and mutter self-loathing observations while Johansson and (most painfully) Travolta spoon their Southern accents out of a jar and spread it all over the humid scenery.

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

Posner's dishearteningly unsophisticated treatment itself rings false.

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.

Proves infertile in more ways than one.

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

As earnest as a community-college advertisement, American Chai is enough to make you put away the guitar, sell the amp, and apply to medical school.

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.

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

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

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.