Hazel-Dawn Dumpert

The uneasy meeting of cultures is mirrored all too well in the stiff and clumsy direction.

To watch Joplin, Rick Danko, Jerry Garcia and Mickey Hart, all massively wasted, giggling and jamming, is a delight tempered by the knowledge that Joplin would be dead just months later, with the rest but one following after.

Paymer is the key to this mild-mannered comedy built on easy setups and borscht-belt one-liners.

Never really gets across the essence of who the band members are and why they inspire such fidelity.

This new feature has replaced the original's benevolence, taste and wit with cynicism, armpit humor and manic, desperately unfunny padding.

Whatever ghost-story intrigue the film musters gives way to a tedious cycle of fighting, screwing, shouting and storytelling stuck together by two hours worth of hard-boiled dialogue gone gummy.

Signals the real end of the party, charting a denouement that arcs from blissful ignorance to violence and its ever-present threat to a final retreat.

The young filmmaker clearly needs to experience a bit more of la vraie vie before his own observations can take in more than the clumsy romantic feints and parries of early adulthood.

Aside from isolated flares of unchecked emotion ...Bouquet's Lucie is too far removed from our ken of romance and overriding purpose, or from Berri's for that matter, to be embraced entirely.

It's a case of persona overwhelming presence, and the butterscotch smoothness that was such an asset opposite George Clooney's glittering cool in "Out of Sight" is all but lost in the sheen of this high-gloss production.

The performances are revelatory.

It becomes clear that all this man-child craves is to be loved and, thus, saved.

This feeble remake offers little more than two pretty and willing leads who nonetheless can't hide their embarrassment over being set up as distractions to hide the film's thorough lack of coherence and appeal.

While The Business of Fancydancing is a thoughtful and complex work of sound and vision, it doesn't seem quite right to call it a film, for a couple of reasons. First of all, it is plainly, if crisply, shot on video, with a bright, shiny surface that fairly screams low-rent. Second, the whole business is strangely non-cinematic.

Dean Parisot's direction of the funny, affectionately satirical script by David Howard and Robert Gordon is crisp and assured.

As always, conversation is the constant threading together Rohmer's stately pace and episodic structure, the thing he uses to show us who his characters are and what their friendship entails.

A wonderful movie. For every misstep there are the sublime expressions of agony and ecstasy of which Herzog is a master.

It's cynical and it's depressing, and I would lock a child in a room before I'd show him Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.

The film isn't really about much and so feels patchy and forced, with elements more calculated than inspired, more urgent than exciting.

By cinematic standards, not exactly scintillating stuff: The mix of archival materials, talking heads and dramatic readings is strictly PBS 101. Filmmaker Peter Gilbert's great achievement lies in his integration of disparate historical threads and voices into one steadily paced, riveting tale.

Transcends its video-box-shelf-filler pedigree only when it's actually indulging in guy stuff, mostly of the frat-boy, beer-commercial variety.

Jabberwocky is not a Python film, a fact most obvious in its marked lack of humor.

What could have been a fascinating exploration of geographical mayhem becomes instead an exercise in tedium.

Bad in such a bizarre way that it's almost worth seeing, if only to witness the crazy confluence of purpose and taste.

The result is a sui generis, love-it-or-hate-it exercise in homegrown American surrealism.

The film is never less than lovely to gaze upon, shot in saturated colors, richly appointed in period trappings and peopled only by the very beautiful. But it is also, by its end, too silly to take seriously.

For the most part, the action, shot entirely on Hawaii's famed North Shore without blue screens or tanks, is awesome, all swirling turquoise tubes, thundering foam hammers and sleek, graceful riders.

The result is a carefully wrought, historically grounded and thoroughly absorbing look at a quintessential American experience.