Jami Bernard

A well-acted and surprisingly thoughtful treatment of the same old, same old.

A depressingly hollow vehicle.

Union is a brilliant spitfire, though one wishes the script had been run past an English major. But the movie's flaws are smoothed over by a rousing soundtrack, some excellent comic performances and the star-making moves of LL Cool J.

Alamo buffs will be delighted, and everyone else will be treated to something that feels like Old Hollywood crossed with new sensibilities.

Alana De Roma is going to be a tremendous star.

Overall the tone is dark and nasty, exemplified by the inelegant signature kung-fu move of the good guys -- a backward kick to the groin.

Surprises, repulses and provokes. It's also brilliant and infuriating, wise and naïve, outrageous yet unforgettable.

The movie's clever ambiguity allows a number of interpretations. Perhaps it is all a dream, a parable, or a combination of wishful thinking and reality.

The movie suffers from tipping its hand too easily and hating its subject so much.

How dangerous it is to be a woman in Iran, especially one going against the wishes of her menfolk, is brought home time after time in these related vignettes.

Too bad Heaven creeps into town when it deserved more fanfare. Consider it buried treasure, a thriller for the art- house crowd.

Life-affirming story of love, kinship and sacrifice.

Hart's War has its priorities clear, but delivers them with insulting simplicity.

The humor is supposed to stem from the clash of kids who have been raised so differently and of partners with opposing views of child care. But there are just so many jokes you can make about who gets to use the bathroom when.

A prime reason to see this, if you don't mind some really screechy acting by some of the supporting players and insipid metaphors for love and commitment, is its parade of fine flesh, both male and female.

There's something sweet yet chilling in When the Sea Rises. If it had explored more of the chill, it might have turned into a knockout, absurdist thriller.

Once in a great while there's a movie that's so funny, infectious and welcoming - a movie that makes you feel so good about America and the people in it - you just want to climb inside the screen and live there. That's the case with Dave Chappelle's Block Party - part comedy, part concert film, part avant-garde experiment, and all of it a joy.

Payne achieves an impressive control over the look and tone, so that, melancholy as the movie is, it comes off as both comedy and comment on the human condition.

Explores the comparatively enlightened Berlin culture that had allowed homosexuality to flourish in intellectual and social circles before the Nazis forcibly changed the national mind-set.

This Asian-flavored Hitchcock is a complicated tale with no easy answers.

If you think you're tough enough, go ahead and sit through the endurance test that is Bad Boys 2, a brutal, 2 1/2-hour display of production overkill.

Aside from conspiracy theories, Kasparov's undoing inspires a fascinating discourse on genius, competition, humanity and the ghost in the machine.

Would be better if it weren't so preachy.

Oughtta be much bettor.

A climbing thriller whose plot may be on thin ice but whose action sequences are stunning.

There's a thin line between smart-stupid and just plain stupid, and Super Troopers walks it with ease.

The co-stars genuinely like each other, and their pleasure is infectious.

A sexy crime story. The double-crossing complications don't make much sense, but it's fun to watch Wilson turn the hard-boiled dialogue into a series of ironic one-liners under the hot Oahu sun.

What is meant to be an innovative, cutting-edge musical melodrama is so jumbled, irrational and amateurish that it makes dinner theater look like the Old Vic.

While this is not exactly a hopeful movie, it's a polished exercise in the kind of social commentary that can wake people up.

Thanks to Grant's script and direction, the exotic Swaziland location (a film first) and an engaging cast, this smartly crafted drama radiates a gently comic pulse.

Haneke has made a masterly, disturbing movie.

Little internal logic and too many signposts. It's easy to see who in the neighborhood knows more than they're letting on, even without X-ray vision or ESP.

The screenwriters claim they got the idea for this dreary thing by glimpsing a besieged Chelsea Clinton in the stands at a basketball game.

As a love story, Wimbledon is a washout. As a meditation on sports psychology, it might help improve your game.

A draggy shaggy-dog story about a poor Jewish girl's painfully slow emotional awakening. The movie is 145 minutes long, so by the time Esther's awake, the audience may not be as lucky.

The fog also does something genuinely eerie: It causes everyone in the cast to deliver dreadful performances and display inappropriate reactions when their friends are drowned, burned, stabbed or thrown into glass display cases.

We've seen this story before, and the thrill is gone.

The action is tightly focused and well-paced.

The segments are introduced with little clichés or homilies, like "Ignorance Is Bliss," but the fierce intelligence of the script reminds us that sometimes a cliché is the only way to express the ineffable.

A marvel of character-driven drama that no serious filmgoer should miss.

Beneath the noisy, farcical surface of John Turturro's Illuminata is a thoughtful and unusually mature meditation on love.

Pretty thin feature-film subject. But the silliness is so contagious that it doesn't matter.

What really makes the jaw drop is the presence of so many talented actors in what seems like traditional TV treacle. Saddest of all is Debra Winger, reduced to playing the wife-as-wallpaper role. For this she came back to Hollywood?

The suspense is as tingly as jalapenos on the tongue.

As Ryan, Evans attempts to graduate from "Not Another Teen Movie"-type fare to more adult stuff. He holds his own, but he has no edge.

The same audience that loves "March of the Penguins" will eat up this beautifully told, gorgeously shot story of a grieving boy trying to return his pet cheetah to the wilds of South Africa.

Movies about junkies are often brutal to watch, but Jesus' Son has such a light touch, you have little to fear. Little to gain, too.

A stately and deeply affecting look at the human condition, told in something like a series of snapshots.

Tense, fiercely optimistic movie.

The screenplay has no idea how to modulate the banter between the movie's talented stars so that it approximates affectionate and playful sparring.

Although rife with comic possibilities, The Personals develops into a somber tale of personal identity.

A brutal and preposterous action movie about a guy, a kid and a secret code. And a whole lotta shattering glass.

The award for hardest-to-watch movie of the year.

A silly buddy caper that should delight the adolescent at heart, even if some of the jokes have been sitting too long in the desert sun.

Any which way you describe this uncompromising movie, it will never sound palatable. Still, it features one of the most spectacular physical transformations by an actress hungry for a meaty role. I haven't used the term "tour de force" in all of 2003, but now it is time.

A sunny-looking movie about the darkest paranoia.

The idea that every animated feature from Disney is an instant classic officially springs a leak with the noisily disappointing Atlantis: The Lost Empire.

Annaud is a filmmaker who often works with a bare minimum of dialogue. Yet his storytelling is so strong and emotional that words are barely necessary.

Falls short of the mark, content to shoot fish in a barrel.

A standout feature of the movie is its representation of female friendship.

This challenging, inventive movie from Thailand is not for everyone.

For all its folksy jocularity, the movie inspires a sense of global patriotism. In the big picture, every little dish counts.

Feels like an old-fashioned movie in the way it deals with bold sacrifices made in the name of love, while its setting and chary view of the era's political machinations mark it as distinctly modern.

A perfect example of an "art" movie that is so lugubrious and soul-sucking that it's hell to sit through.

A lame buddy-cop movie that squanders stars De Niro and Eddie Murphy as it races from one cliche to the next, blithely unconcerned with whether anything parses.

Shangri-La is in your own backyard.

A lyrical, subtle, chaste and nearly wordless romance.

Thanks to director Wayne Wang ("The Joy Luck Club"), there are also artistic touches that keep this movie from sticking to the roof of the mouth the way peanut butter does to Opal's pet.

A perversely enjoyable entry in that new genre, the biopic of the tawdry TV personality.

There's something uniquely gratifying about watching nonprofessionals deliver totally natural performances.