Jessica Winter

The entire unwieldy contraption rests on the shoulders of erstwhile "Queer as Folk" jailbait Hunnam: Bleached and bland, earnest and wooden, he's exactly what the film asks him to be.

The Virgin script occasionally resets a gold standard for refined crudery.

The whole of Sunshine State is less than the sum of its parts, but the parts are often lovely, and always true.

Chaiken ably balances real-time rhythms with propulsive incident -- she catches subtler interior strains, too.

Meticulously uncovers a trail of outrageous force and craven concealment.

Tonally, however, Earnest boasts perfect pitch, thanks mainly to the blithe, nimble actors.

The week's guilty pleasure is The Count of Monte Cristo, a gorgeously photographed, sumptuously designed adaptation of the Dumas swashbuckler boasting the most ludicrous dialogue since director Kevin Reynolds's "Waterworld."

He (Wolens) captures Crayola-vivid images of both the unspoiled forest canopy and denuded expanses of slash-and-burned landscape -- a bleak summation, perhaps, of the area's past and future.

Accomplished if lacking in urgency, this Oliver Twist (scripted by Ronald Harwood, who also wrote "The Pianist") showcases Polanski's proven gift for Dickensian caricature.

The patient camera leans in closely on the three lead actresses -- extraordinary first-timers all.

Once Drake reaches the candlelight vigil that acts as his penultimate set piece, he sustains an impossible balance between mordant wit and articulate bewilderment.

Preposterous enough to entertain.

Redoubtably hilarious as always, Zahn also lends his character unpredictable flashes of anger, pathos, and faint psychosis, even when the movie jumps the median from ticklishly discomfiting black comedy into by-the-numbers horror jolts.

Like a kid playing make-believe, In America is blithely confident of its own contrivances; it only benefits from a certain unselfconscious naïveté. And as with a misjudged Christmas gift or a mawkish sympathy card from a kindly relative, one can hardly doubt its uplifting intentions.

My friend even supplied a blurbable quote: "The best dumbass-buddy comedy I've seen since "Wayne's World!"

Code Unknown is Haneke's most expansive and, oddly, hopeful work -- not a gaze into the void, but a fierce attempt to scramble out of it.

Endearing and well-acted.

Though there's considerable footage of hippie activity (crafting kites, sleeping) and moments of prelapsarian frisson (a cop warns that "there's talk of the Hell's Angels coming down"), the film is resolutely performance-driven.

Amid the muddy scrubbery of the camp and its hinterland surroundings, Ghobadi catches some striking compositions.

Remains a genial lesson in how to both honor and subvert womanly expectations.

Unfortunately, the delicious snatches of reflexive wit function as mere intermissions between the distended action sequences and Michael Bay–style megatonnage, which have earned Pixar its first ever PG rating.

Easily the best teen movie of the year.

Spheeris gives every indication of having gotten too close to her material, but her film's overall air of discombobulation is poignant in itself.

Director Waters and screenwriter Tina Fey (also cast as the voice-of-reason math teacher) aim less for the usual high-gloss caricature than acutely hilarious sociology, nailing the servile malice of 15-year-old girls.

In 1974 a director, a screenwriter, and a producer (Robert Evans, who for once deserves a few of the plaudits he's apportioned himself) could decide to beat a genre senseless and then dump it in the wilds of Greek tragedy. [Review of August 8, 2003 re-release]

A scrupulous and impeccably acted account of the fallout from a family secret.

One of the refreshing aspects of the slight, flawed Tumbleweeds is that it creates a world inhabited by recognizable people.

In a remarkably subtle, assured debut performance, Compston evokes Billy in Loach's "Kes" and, in the heartbreaking final seaside shot, Antoine in Truffaut's "400 Blows."

Unstintingly funny -- far more so than the wince-worthy trailer -- owing to Chan's pairing with droll indie eccentric Owen Wilson, as his would-be gunslinger sidekick.

An international cast of curious creatures in their native habitats stars in this charming Gallic duo (Animals and Ice/Sea) of featurettes.

Utterly necessary film.

Director Joe Wright coordinates a delightfully cohesive acting ensemble.

Albeit scattershot, Phantom does cohere as a satire of keeping up appearances in which everything is as it appears.

Karine Vanasse, as the protagonist Hanna, is perfectly cast because she has the body of a woman and the sweet, sexless face of a child.

The last half hour bogs down badly, with a cynical fake-out ending and a final scene that borders on non-sensical.

An engrossing study of a protagonist who variously inspires pity, clinical interest, fondness, and revulsion-sometimes all at once.

Slick and sober, fiercely contemporary, and rigged by a fail-safe three-act structure, Dirty Pretty Things nimbly straddles the line between realism and popcorn pop, but it knows which side its bread is buttered on.

A veteran of commercials and music videos, director Chris Nahon crowds out too much of the sprawling combat gymnastics, but his film doesn't lack for luxuriously seedy ambience --his Paris is a retro-futurist sewer.

Often seems less a British new wave front-runner than a charming nouvelle vague tagalong,

July's witty ode to only-connecting sustains a delicate tone of pensive whimsy.

The movie has the addictive episodic intimacy of great TV.

Cahiers-savvy cinephiles will recognize Fanfan as the type of handsome prestige production that the French New Wave overthrew in the early '60s, but this example of the "cinéma de qualité" is hardly a musty artifact, with its compact editing, its breezy and mischievous tone, and, in a country not yet a decade removed from the Nazi occupation, its acrid anti-militarism, clear from the ash-dry narration of the opening battle sequences onward.

One of Gitaï's greatest assets in Kadosh is such stillness, which leaves facile outsiders' judgment out of the frame and thereby deepens our immersion in the narrative.

This film is solidly built, faithful to its material, and utterly lacking in pretense, but its maker is still running in place.

Akerman's characteristically patient, pensive approach elegantly accommodates her reportorial responsibilities.

As sweet and unassuming a film as they come, embraces both perspectives -- it's sympathetic to the batty throes of a first infatuation, but affably demurs at indulging them.

Almost inevitably for a documentary of this stripe, it risks aestheticizing poverty--but here it's usually the kids themselves who compose the most arresting images.

Doillon's ease with young performers is again seamlessly evident.

The wonderful-terrible dervish of Umbrellas reaches peak abandon, worthy of Vincente Minnelli, when Geneviève sobs out a plaint for Guy as a carnival whirls outside the shop.

The movie's subject is brotherly love in all its extremes; the trajectory is grimly inevitable, and yet its final descent still manages to startle.

The film marks a welcome departure from the usual rah-rah machismo of the semi-nationalist action adventure, but Jordan never escapes the mighty shadow of "The Thin Red Line"--from the grace-note inserts of exotic birds, snakes, and foliage to Ledger's laconic, sometimes haiku-like voice-over to Klaus Badelt's embarrassingly Zimmer-derivative score.

Burnt Money arranges a triumphant martyrdom for its bad boys -- a redemptive blaze of glory, dozens of faceless corpses notwithstanding.

With elegant restraint the film subtly intimates the wintry dead end-twilight years bereft of love, partner, or vocation-that may be in store for its aged lover man. (Payne's "About Schmidt" did too, when not gorging snidely on idiot Americana.)

Carion is no Jean Renoir, but he does strike an appealingly low key of tender, faintly goofy affinity between the combatants.

Penning's film applies too much force behind its hairpin turns, but broad scripting and acting are counterbalanced by crisp photography, shivery sound design, and well-chosen debts.

Hudson is ebullient, never cutesy, and her accent stays in tune.

Unexpectedly bridges genres -- it's a buddy movie, a horror story, a boy's-own adventure, and a near metaphysical meditation on the limits of human endurance.

Not to imply that our Claude's gone native, but here his unabiding fascination with bourgie-style repetition compulsion bears some resemblance to sympathy.

The performances can be stiff, but a kinetic mix of anxiety, dread, and numbed resignation is always palpable.

The photographer's show-don't-tell stance is admirable, but it can make him a problematic documentary subject. War Photographer infers the psychological and physical toll of his peripatetic existence, but provides scant insight into his technique.

Jeff Feuerzeig's tremendous documentary runs on the motive force of intelligent fandom and radiates an ineffable grace.

Smith's work is a means of cauterizing wounds that have not even begun to heal...certainly not across a continent in Giuliani's New York.

Though angry and sorrowful, Trembling Before G-d, beginning with the title, is above all a work of reverence.