Ed Park

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.