Ed Park

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.

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

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

Club's inability to moralize saves it from kitsch.

The animated scenes conjure aromas of the stilted "Clifford," and the overall approach is to throw preordained movie sequences (rap number, shopping spree) together and hope for the best.

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

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."

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

Falls into the clotheshorse cliché: all dressed up and no place to go.

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

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

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.

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.

Crudely written, haphazardly acted, and improbably fun.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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."

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”