Eddie Cockrell

A humanistic, warts-and-all battle of wills between a dissolute father and an emotionally ravaged daughter.

Part mob-trial thriller, part "dese 'n' dose" extended standup routine, character-rich pic plays like vintage Lumet, mining the grim comedy from life-and-death legal wranglings in the manner of "Dog Day Afternoon," "Prince of the City" and "The Verdict."

Helmer Bruce David Klein's near-reverential treatment is a nice contrast to the rough-and-tumble of tour life.

Stands reasonably well on its own as an urgent, updated genre meditation on nurture vs. nature.

Picture's cliched underlying story of restless youth plays as too naive for an older audience and too provocative for teens.

Laugh-out-loud funny, tartly off-color and ultimately touching.

Impeccably crafted but dramatically turgid.

A tonal triumph of true-life storytelling told with equal measures of tension and redemption.

Deftly balancing epic sociopolitical scope with intimate human emotions, all polished to a high technical gloss, Deepa Mehta's Water is a profoundly moving drama.

What begins as a moderately interesting set of interconnected mysteries involving race and identity soon grows eye-rollingly laborious, not to mention increasingly derivative of Christopher McQuarrie's "Usual Suspects" script.

A natural for kidfests, pic is a fine example of old-fashioned story-telling and also will dance wherever detailed character development and leisurely-paced drama are appreciated.

Timely and entertaining concert documentary.

Confronts an incendiary topic head-on with grace, style, compassion and exquisitely practical wit.

Too often depends on salty, adolescent one-liners that provide shock value guffaws but grow cumulatively wearisome.

Unaffectedly hip and affably manic, Down & Out With the Dolls picks up where "Singles" left off.

Fans of the Grammy-winning musician will revel in the proximity to their idol, though second pic from talented helmer Thomas Riedelsheimer plays a tad long to those unfamiliar with his, or her, work.

An atmospheric and cumulatively impressive feature-length debut from Argentine writer-director Lucrecia Martel.

Admirably idealistic but dramatically awkward.

An Argentine writer dying of AIDS searches for a medical cure and some human warmth in the hospitals and S&M clubs of Buenos Aires in dignified, thoughtful drama A Year Without Love.

Fiction writer and debuting helmer Mary Kuryla is clearly after a Big Statement on abuse and strength of character, but falls short by creating a self-destructive monster in lieu of a sympathetic protagonist.

It will garner critical huzzahs from those it lampoons, which will broaden the duo's (Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy) fan base.

A so-so pic on an incendiary subject, Full Battle Rattle follows the training regimen of one battalion during engagement and occupation in one of 13 fake "villages" comprising a massive Iraq simulation somewhere in the Mojave Desert.

Intense but inscrutable tale involving a woman's gradual remembrance of a long-suppressed trauma.

The moral quandary of Nazi complicity is revisited in taut drama The Counterfeiters, which tells the true story of a disparate group of imprisoned artists, financiers and swindlers secretly assembled in a concentration camp to forge millions of pound and dollar notes to support the German war effort.

Undeniably powerful on the bigscreen.

Unflaggingly genial and universally funny.

It often resembles John Cassavetes' "A Woman Under the Influence," but just as often devolves into a series of bravura acting exercises strung together by an increasingly sketchy narrative theme.

Scrub away a needlessly fussy visual style, trendy narrative tweaks and a climax both morally repugnant and logically absurd, and there’s a tough little noir about buried transgressions coming out of the past in Renny Harlin’s lackluster thriller “Cleaner.” Too mainstream to attract genre interest, and too tangled in its character motivations to sit well with the multiplex crowd, this is a minor stain that should fade quickly and leave only faint traces in ancillary.