Jessica Winter

Mackenzie and Marber opt for an anonymous viewpoint of clinical detachment, which generates about the same psychodramatic tension as reading the "DSM-IV."

A junk-food movie striving to be nutritious -- it's one of your racier Be Yourself after-school specials crossed with 'Who Moved My Cheese?" for Cosmo girls.

Handheld sprinting and swish-pans try to enliven the duo's shenanigans: undermotivated fisticuffs, fun with the nutty controls on their limousine (the roof slides open!), Vaughn's endless yapping.

We get a bunch of straight actors focusing on the "gayness" of their characters, mincing and lisping and melodramatically breaking nails, all in the besmirched name of tolerance.

Martin seems uncomfortable and oddly waxen (the orange Al Gore makeup doesn't help), injecting Frank with neither restless anger nor wry humor.

Amid the awkward pacing and gaping plot holes, the film's chief point of interest is Goldblum's morbidly fascinating performance: equal parts Walter Neff and Captain Kirk.

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

Begins and ends with footage of FDR intoning "I hate war," something the film takes two interminable hours to say.

Depp and Highmore's final scene together strikes a muted blow of desolation -- bottomless but just bearable -- that Forster rather bravely lets stand as the last word on all the fanciful solace that Barrieland had to offer.

Pacino simply wipes the cobblestones with the rest of the cast: His beautifully calibrated performance is lucid, commanding, and genuinely tragic.

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

Though it often wallows in louche baroque textures, The Golden Bowl is perhaps the most visually accomplished of the Ivory soaps.

In lieu of vaporous message-mongering, the languid, episodic narrative -- centering on hapless sadsack Quoyle (Spacey) -- streams along by the gentle force of a convincing melancholic undertow, a dejection and longing that's not so much surmounted as sustained.

It's dispiriting to watch him (Murphy) stand patiently by and concoct reaction shots for quipping raccoons and dancing bears.

Day-Lewis is as rooted as an oak in his character and milieu, yet easefully disengaged from the film's pensive histrionics.

Vatel is dull and silly, but the holiday season doesn't offer a better sets-and-costumes workshop.

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

The overdetermined approach preempts character shadings or social subtext-just compare Hideo Nakata's original "Ring," which tapped its dread from viral-replicant mass culture and its pathos from a broken home, or Nakata's "Dark Water," which channeled the sorrow, guilt, and paranoia felt by a young divorcée mired in a custody battle.

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

It's squeamish about sex but not, unfortunately, sentiment.

[Rhys Meyers] remains trapped in an enervating road movie - shelved so long that Rhys Meyers still appears to have baby fat - summed up when Finbar, who turns up in Finland (natch), asks whey-faced Danny, "You couldn't find anything better to do than to come find me?!"

Nothing much happens, and that's the point, but all this wheel spinning could have used more grease.

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

Can't transcend its own suffocating milieu.

A pleasant if overlong road show starring five witty, sweet, humble guys.

Oddly, in representing a private conflict as the microcosm of an unsolvable catastrophe, Free Zone only manages to miniaturize both.

The appealing leads have strong chemistry, but it's the wrong kind: an affectionate big-brother/little-sister rapport that leaves a discomfiting taint on their more amorous clinches.

Leitman's interviews are lax and inconclusive.

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.

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

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.

Sweet and sleepy, I Capture the Castle might feel most comfortable in a Sunday-afternoon slot on the BBC.

Cirque du Soleil's campy, crackbrained, and in no way unenjoyable 3-D IMAX pageant Journey of Man might be the oddest movie offering of the year so far.

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

The kind of quotidian pastoral -- about a simple, honest peasant who finds the greatest love of all -- that the Academy invariably finds irresistible.

The disjointed plotting and afterschool-special dialogue offer scant opportunity for the charismatic leading duo to work up much chemistry.

Claims to sort the bad guys from the good, which is its essential problem.

Occasionally smirky.

The early scenes whir and buzz along to create quite a pleasing clamor.

The mysticism only mystifies; its hieroglyphics are vividly rendered, but Bee Season never manages to spell them out.

Begins with the same deathless question that has bedeviled generations of teenagers: how to fill the space allotted to graduating seniors for memories and shout-outs at the back of their yearbook?

Dark Blue World and Sverak's previous "Kolya" were each written by the director's father, Zdenek, and both films betray a weakness for the symmetrical and sentimental.

The raw art of the malapropism has rarely been so extensively honored, but the increasingly strident, slapstick-smacked movie runs out of steam once the culture shock wears off.

Madeleine's such a cold bitch that the adulterous lovers' anguished scruples scan like inert masochism.

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

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

B. Monkey is crawling with smart actors saying things they don't quite mean.

Casual familiarity with Lyne's oeuvre is all you need to predict the major plot contortion.

Amiable and hollow.

Quek is compelling not for her ideas but the tangled path by which she came to them.

Scott Elliott's palsied directorial debut, from a mine shaft-ridden script, is a sick joke, and Weaver's part in it screams of temporary insanity.

"Legally Blonde" director Robert Luketic bumbles along with typically clumsy blocking and framing, and the misogyny inherent in the three-ring spectacle of bitch slaps, barbiturate covert ops, and wedding plan hysteria does rankle.

Solid raw material, but the execution is overcooked.

Money can't buy happiness, but as Bride and Prejudice teaches us, it can get patience in bulk from a smart young woman of a practical mind-set.

Studiously harmless, Disney's long-in-development film rendition pasteurizes the book's renegade verve with typical means.

The movie is a technical marvel from its lysergic cinematography (by Decha Srimantra) to its pulsing-vessel sound design, but it has no identity apart from its influences, however dazzlingly they're deployed.

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

Like a loud and intermittently charismatic drunk at a dreary dive bar, Intermission grabs your attention, but in no time you're looking for the nearest exit.

Brady and Cunningham share a volatile, symbiotic chemistry, sketching in elegant shorthand the rhythms of a lusty, combative marriage.

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

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

A discombobulating mix of blood-and-grit docu-realism and moony multiplex contrivance.

John Corbett shuffles in for yet another tour of duty as the bland requisite love interest.

Having already looted the Peckinpah and spaghetti-western archives, the director now quotes his own quotations, in service of not a sequel but a vociferous reiteration.

A series of moments that don't quite add up to a movie...one bland, maundering stroll.

The script offers neither a sustained narrative arc nor strong characterizations.

A startling letdown after (Léa Pool's) plaintive, understated coming-of-age tale "Set Me Free."

The film is so grindingly predictable that I was writing out a full plot synopsis in my notebook before it was half over, though the thick grains of Terry Stacey's photography and Deschanel's understated performance add a little kick to the family-dysfunction paces, and Ferrell's dive-bar rendition of the Eagles' "I Can't Tell You Why" is positively riveting. Winter Passing should have been a musical.

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?

Sahara is many things, but it is not a movie. It is the skull-splitting cacophony of 21 producers and four screenwriters (that we know about, anyway) standing in the same room shouting into their cell phones.

Ms. Cruz...once again proves her inability to give a bad performance even under the worst of circumstances.

The film allots far too much time to the cultural exchange program between the fugitive and his aide, in which Otomo can recap his sorrowful biography to a sympathetic audience surrogate.

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

Mona Lisa Smile's only mysteries are the result of frenzied corner-cutting as Newell & Co. speed through the last reel, an exhausting cram session of hair-trigger speechifying and identity transformations bordering on the science-fictional.

The Wedding Planner achieves the dubious but perversely impressive feat, for its 90-minute duration, of neutering Jennifer Lopez.

Arriving just after the best year for animated film in recent memory, Fantasia 2000 doesn't play like a celebration. In its sentimental yearning for a golden age when another one's upon us, it feels a little like a rebuke.

Slack, saccharine script.

High-buffed, low-rack pulp.

Hysterical but inorganic, lacking blood, sweat, or tears.

Indeed, remake hack Charles Shyer (who processed the Parent Trap and Father of the Bride updates) plays coy with most matters sexual -- an odd and puritanical approach to a character who molds his entire existence around the procurement and enjoyment of sex.

Agathe de la Boulaye, as The Painter, gives off an appealing air of good-natured amusement, which is appropriate given her surroundings.

The exposition is thick, the characterization choppy, the wigs terrible.

Comes down to two sorely limited and rapidly tiresome characters.

Not a movie that can afford to take itself seriously.

Too flimsily built and baldly unfunny to bolster Cruz's charms, but Almodóvar's blessed Virgin is, as usual, winning and guilelessly seductive.

Jones's documentary, named for the opening song on Foxtrot, is most effective as a poison-pen missive to Corporate Rock.

Bruce looks hot and underplays handsomely as always, but Hostage is a steaming pile of siege clichés and screaming unlikelihoods.

Dippy romantic thriller.

The last scene reads like an admission of defeat.

A genuine consciousness-raiser, but it's less a social-realist narrative than a high-volume rally.

Gainsbourg is virtually incidental to her mate's screeching navel-serenade, which maintains a stranglehold on the declarative first-person mode of its title.

Gonick's visceral impulses have drawn comparisons with John Waters, but the starry-eyed collision of gross-out gags and candy-sweet sentiment owes as much of a debt to the Farrellys as Bruce LaBruce.

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

Amid the complacent self-congratulation...is a bizarre reactionary bent.

Smug with timely zingers like "The only thing the French should be allowed to host is an invasion," the movie's recommended strictly for Bush advisers.

Since the central odd couple have no rapport, their bond never seems to progress past mutual usury.

A show about nothing—its jokes based on stick-figure stereotypes, its lunges at humanism premised on imbecilic pity.

Too lazy to be a comedy, too conventional to be a head movie.