Jessica Winter

Niccol's fatal error is in making the protagonist at once amoral and insipid, an admixture thickened by Cage's loquacious yet stoned voice-over and Moynahan's moist-eyed tremblings as the trophy wife.

A frat-boy remake of "Pink Flamingos" which isn't all bad.

A happy ending is never at issue here -- it's clear where she's going, but there's little clue where she's been.

Most frustrating, Stage Beauty fumbles XX/XY politics at every turn.

Boldly aspirational. It's Jeunet's stab at "Paths of Glory," dipped in a sepia bath and halfway wrenched into a women's picture.

State and Main is a Hollywood satire as cynical and thickheaded as its supposed targets.

Like grieving itself, the film is awkward, messily honest, and sometimes darkly funny.

Lovely to look at but insipid.

She (Dunst) provides the only major element of Bring It On that plays as tweaking parody rather than slick, strident, body-slam churlishness.

Aspiring to evoke an unreal city stranded in the autumn of the soul, the film succeeds only when it peers up from the intro-philosophy book for the occasional glimpse of everyday beauty.

The uncertain plot somehow concerns ginseng and stolen objets d'art; the main thrust is acrobatic slapstick with a decided antipatriarchal twist.

Watching Ben get the girl or be seriously injured trying always has its dry, keening pleasures.

Cheeky and elusive, Last Life in the Universe inhabits a high-lonesome world unto itself, a bright daydream that dissipates in the aching gap of a missed connection.

Broomfield's investigatory technique remains a frustrating pileup of unfocused Q&As and misplaced credulity. But when Broomfield travels to her Michigan hometown, he pieces together a life blighted at breech-birth: a grotesque of abandonment, incest, physical and sexual abuse, pregnancy at 13, and homelessness.

The Road Home is foremost enthralled, however, with its lead actress -- wide-eyed and pigtailed, revered in close-up after stunned close-up.

Mehta feels compelled to twist the screw, shamelessly plying her audience with mawkish tropes wearing the garb of "innocence."

Carandiru's every scene is cut from factory-issue prison-genre cloth to fit jailhouse stock characters.

Godard light, but not lite: Its breezy postures front for melancholia.

Can any American filmmaker other than the Farrellys make a rom-com in which the principals engage in activities apart from the tiresomely tireless dissection of rom?

The narrative is unexpectedly sleepy, excepting the occasional flashy set piece.

A widescreen wallow in socially enforced slum nihilism brought to you by Miramax, Tsotsi could be pegged as "City of God" relocated to the Soweto shanties, but it eschews the ironic swagger and strobe-speed action of Fernando Meirelles's lurid jigsaw for a more conventional arc.

Occasionally smirky.

Amiable and hollow.

Having established Josey as the focus of the entire iron range's enmity, the filmmakers panic, and North Country spectacularly self-destructs in a climactic courtroom free-for-all.

The Edukators smiles indulgently as the kids rage belatedly against the dying of the SDS light.

The elliptical, even fragmented editing style clashes with the reiterative voice-over, which could indicate a stylistic choice or cutting under duress.

With wit and empathy to spare, waydowntown acknowledges the silent screams of workaday inertia but stops short of indulging its characters' striving solipsism.

The idea isn't as odd as it might first appear, since running a salon is one of the few socially acceptable means for a woman in Afghanistan to earn an income. The execution, however, evokes a particularly outlandish Christopher Guest mockumentary.