Ella Taylor

The movie feels oddly undercooked and aimless.

Seattle filmmaker James Longley's poetic essay on the plight of ordinary Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds trapped in a war simultaneously waged over their heads and in their faces stands head and shoulders above an overcrowded field of documentaries about the Iraq war.

Pressma's intermittently amusing screenplay, some good-natured cameos by a bunch of his famous friends, and an intelligent performance by Chess — playing herself opposite TV regular Alan Rosenberg -- save the day and the relationship.

Not terrible for a movie featuring John Travolta as a literature professor, but not too good either.

You begin to wonder whether a story is ever going to show up. When it does, it's worth the wait for a long and well-turned set piece coordinating the heist, and two lovely flips in the plot.

The best I can say for Smiling Fish is that it's capable and pleasant, which ought to sound a warning note louder than if I'd said it was awful.

It's hard to know whether to be impressed or appalled by Eva Mozes Kor, the Holocaust survivor in Bob Hercules and Cheri Pugh's fascinating documentary who has made forgiving the Nazis her life's work.

Aniston plays her depressed character with enough conviction to guarantee that practically every scene will be stolen out from under her by minor characters, among them a pricelessly funny Zooey Deschanel as a Retail Rodeo employee who vents her rage and frustration on the customers.

Watching Possession is a movie experience not much deeper than you'd get on your couch watching Masterpiece Theater or Mystery! -- pleasant enough, but oh so soft.

Strip away the cavernous lofts, the minimalist art galleries and the pricey consulting rooms, and you have four characters unable to earn their keep with the audience.

Two Girls and a Guy grooves on a provisional spirit that keeps the movie shifting in unexpected directions, tracking the exhilaration and horror of an open-ended game with high stakes to which no current rules apply.

The meat of the film is their wittily edited interviews with company members, now in their 80s and 90s and scattered around the world, many of them still active as teachers and consultants.

Giuliani Time energetically deflates one trumpeted myth after another about Giuliani's success at turning the city around from its doldrums in the 1970s.

The movie often seems as innocent and goodhearted as its subject. Still, Jebeli is possessed of an impish visual sense. He also has the Iranian gift for bringing to vivid life people we wouldn't give a second glance.

Undemanding, unsurprising and really quite charming within conventional limits, Elizabeth Allen’s tween-coming-of-age feature debut is as realist as can be, given that, of the three nice Florida girls who need to grow up in the movie, the eponymous heroine (Sara Paxton) is a high-achieving blond mermaid with vaguely feminist leanings, a twitchy blue tail and the comic timing of an up-and-coming Cameron Diaz.

Best seen as a performance movie, featuring music (by Iris DeMent and Taj Mahal, among others) too wonderful to be overpowered by director Maggie Greenwald's plodding direction and leaden screenplay.

Cloying, unoriginal stuff, rescued -- barely -- by the easy affection that courses between Bullock and Connick Jr., and by the lovely cinematography of Caleb Deschanel.

For a film about death and endings, A Prairie Home Companion is a cracking good time - a warm, golden bauble within which to shelter, like the radio show that inspired it, from the misery and ennui that engulf us in and out of the multiplex.

It's nowhere near as funny, largely because of an exhaustingly hyperactive performance by Elizabeth Hurley.

Though I'm not fully convinced that cool and jazzy is the way to go with one of the great civil-rights battles of 20th-century America, George Clooney's elegantly muted take on Edward R. Murrow's fight with Joe McCarthy offers many riches, notably a wicked character study of Murrow and a sexy homage to the pleasures of teamwork when the team is a bunch of smart-ass liberal reporters making common cause against a wannabe dictator.

If you get your jollies from watching women being shot, stabbed and humiliated, you’ll love video director David Dobkin’s pointlessly grisly, tediously derivative feature debut.

At his best, Altman turns us into interlopers who have stumbled into a world that seems to predate us and persuades us it will continue to teem with life long after we leave the theater.

This latest offering from the Jim Henson stable puts a cheerfully broad new spin on the boy-and-his-dog franchise.

If you’re going to have your emotional responses shunted around like a gear stick, it might as well be by someone who writes dialogue as funny as Curtis does.

Transamerica is about as sexual as "The Brady Bunch." It's about an intelligent woman in excruciating transition to a new body that will line up with an identity she's held all along.

Brotherhood has its goofy side -- it's a sleek, creepily atmospheric popcorn entertainment.

If it were less prone to soap-opera histrionics, this screechy saga of an upscale family collapsing under the weight of its members' self-absorption might have something worth saying about domestic politics in post-fascist, post-communist, post-socialist Italy.

Leaves you with a bland message -- titillation may get your wicky-wack going but love and partnership stay the course -- but the way it gets you there is divine.