Ella Taylor

Directed in humongous close-up by former dancer Jon M. Chu, Step Up 2 the Streets is suavely choreographed by Jamal Sims, Nadine "Hi Hat" Ruffin and Dave Scott.

This suffocatingly pleasant cross between "Sliding Doors" and "Six Degrees of Separation" is barely rescued by one beautiful scene.

Michèle Ohayon falls into the old documentary trap - the illusion that once you've found yourself a lovable eccentric to follow around with a camera, you automatically have a movie.

Macdonald's singular achievement is to restore -- through interviews and archival footage -- the dead to such vivid life, you weep for them and for their families, who have only memories to live off.

Directed by Swedish filmmaker Mikael Håfström, who's clearly new at the genre, this aptly named movie is riddled with obvious parallels, crude moral talking points, a script so awful it's practically avant-garde, and a vain attempt at comic relief by RZA.

The setup and execution of this quietly histrionic tale of the distorting power of thwarted love are so patently ridiculous that the urge to laugh gets in the way.

Blessed with a lovely score and strong acting, but crippled by an awkward, mawkish script.

Ondine plumbs the country's most resonant fairy tale and plays impishly along the borders of postcard fantasies of Ireland.

By the end of this mercifully short excuse for a horror movie, you'll be wishing the beast had chowed down on the entire ensemble.

Like so many movies of its kind, Dead Man's Shoes gets hopelessly lost in vicious process, and so loses all sight of anything you might optimistically call insight.

The film is not emotionally subtle, but it is beautifully shot, by cinematographer Declan Quinn, with a grainy, impressionistic eye that mimics a perpetual dance of shards of remembered experience.

A stripling of 24, Tierney has a very young man's immature passion for unrelieved misery, which borders at times on the tedious, at others on the downright comical.

Only at the end, when one of the principals makes a decision you don't see coming, does Face fleetingly weigh in as a movie you haven't seen a thousand times before at ethnically correct film festivals.

No matter how tactful and sensitive Franklin's direction, he has made himself complicit in a polarization that panders to anti-intellectual populism even as it caters to women's movement backlash.

The script is so intellectualized that I couldn't help feeling I was witnessing not two complex people locked in struggle, but the opposed souls (and classes) of Germany: Sophie, emblem of the cultured, tolerant and enlightened humanism of the middle classes duking it out with Mohr, resentful member of a disenfranchised proletariat from whose ranks sprang Hitler's most loyal quislings.

Like most television directors, Shergold is good with actors. Jowly, impassive and rigid with righteous dignity, Timothy Spall makes a wonderfully meticulous Pierrepoint.

If you liked "Love, Actually," you'll love this too, another small jewel in the crown of unabashedly commercial, cheerfully middlebrow, eminently exportable British fluff.

There's something oddly moving about the film purely as a love story between two people who were more alike than was good for them, yet somehow stuck it out. What we see in Frida is not Kahlo the painter, but Kahlo the love of Rivera's life, as he was of hers.

So never mind the Xmas schlock -- go treat yourself at once to this sensationally entertaining soul food.

In the end what drives the movie is the hip young filmmaker's struggle with himself -- his showman's need to toy with our anxieties threatening to overwhelm his desire to make amends to all the servants he took for granted growing up.

Absorbing documentary about gay marriage is most persuasive when most specific.

The worthy text of Mad Hot Ballroom is undercut by the real source of its energy, the heat of competition and the pure joy of winning.

Gröning makes us fully feel the rhythms of their lives, but for the same reasons that most of us couldn't or wouldn't last in such a stripped-down environment, the movie, at just shy of three hours, starts to feel oppressive after two.

Rapp's creepy, ghoulishly funny and, finally, touching new film.

Divided We Fall briskly, often hilariously, forbids us to wallow in the specious comfort of untainted local heroes or irredeemable villains.

Too bad for Gilliam and everyone involved, but in the departments of spectacle and schadenfreude, great fun for us.

As pristine a distillation of Palestinian rage as I've seen outside the evening news.

This gossamer work is one of the loveliest examples of minimalist cinema I've seen in a long time.