Edward Crouse

A shaggy, appealing parable involving two lovers, some gorgeous heifers, gentle Maori gangster-golfers, and a dilapidated suitcase packed with used baby shoes, The Price of Milk throws itself onto the magic-realist sword with aplomb.

A painfully earnest case of generic romance spiced with queerness.

Ends up an intricate, becalmed take on a soul adrift.

Takes its heroine, Lisa (Van Dyck), to the neurotic brink.

If "Next Friday" approximated smoking the same old shit, FAN is a manically generous Christmas vaudeville.

What seems like a nut-on-a-bar-stool rant morphs into a triumphal evocation of the emotional-political bluster of that time.

Admittedly compulsive in both sex and shutterbuggery, Araki has long lived on the art-porn border, though this doc aims to show him as conversant in flowers, kitties, skies, and neorealist kids' faces as he is with bondage.

A sharp-dumb, jack- and goof-off affair.

In this visually malnourished film, quirks substitute for character.

A grassroots refutation of Discovery Channel/National Geographic dispassion, The Great Dance: A Hunter's Story is hot and sweaty with fetching curves.

Thuds away at the now familiar New York turf of Jews and their mating habits.

Manages to gracefully step out of the way of its own referential overload.

A free-for-all doc that, like its subject, seems on several planes at once.

One-upping Latino immigrant movies like "Luminarias" and "Tortilla Soup," Washington Heights zeroes in on go-getters (mostly of Dominican lineage) whose ambitions are transformed by familial demands.

Alternately tense and cheesy.

Far from terrible, Leconte's latest movie suggests the work of a slightly hip preacher.

Majesty's reissue is a delirious and loony surprise in this season of nattier ape-suits.

Dissolving four characters' lives into the dank smoke of the bitterest of torch songs, Gloomy Sunday fashions an apocryphal, pretty, and somewhat pat biography of the title ballad.

Demands high tolerance for low comedy.

Chock-full of feisty-frank go-girl sextalk speculating on white guys' underplayable size.

Worth sticking around for: the triumphant end credit sequence of each Red Orchestra mug shot morphing into the next one.

With playful, compelling gore having slowed to a near trickle stateside, Uzumaki demands attention.

Jacket's shrill, Necco-colored sets and distractingly awful CGI long shots almost mask the movie's real coup: Letscher's physique.

As theory, Sexual Dependency is no worse than a tinny artist's statement, but as moviemaking, it's brutally embarrassing, inexcusable.

Mushy and musty itself, A Piece of Eden takes an eternity...this time to cheat and shortcut its way to lesser Frank Capra moments without the gritty touch of, say, a Garry Marshall.

Even if actorliness sometimes invades the tired faux-doc form, Unscrewed is, in the end, a likable, wrinkly taint of a movie.

Green, saucer-eyed, cokey, frying in flop sweat, gives the viewer the shrill thrill of being in someone else's nightmare. But the songs? Swung, man, swung.

"Check this out, bro," James Cameron says as he returns to the site of the real Titanic, armed with robots, a 3-D Imax camera, and the same colossal hubris that necessitated a call for silence as he accepted his Oscar on behalf of those who perished.

The best sequences -- auditions in a strip bar and a public bathroom -- still can't compete with that industrial musical called "Pola X."

Overall the acting is sound, the missteps few, and the murky digicam smash-and-grab sheen entirely apt for the cacophonous Christmas crush.