Jessica Winter

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

Largely inept and weirdly endearing.

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.

Begs the question: Did the lads from Squatney trail the zeitgeist at every turn, or were cobandleaders David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel simply in touch with their past and ahead of their time?

Doesn't quite know how to take its leave; it tapers off like a curling cigarette trail, but it lingers like a ghost.

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.

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

Pleasant and undemanding, all the more so whenever Tom Wilkinson's on-screen as a possible Erlynne suitor, the movie miscasts Hunt as the pragmatic seductress.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The best that can be said about director Christine Lahti's feature debut is that it doesn't fall into any ready category.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Ledger's deadpan baritone pumps wit into his tepid one-liners like collagen into a wilted starlet's kisser, and the clumsy staging might not grate so much if the tone weren't so self-congratulatory.

Meticulously uncovers a trail of outrageous force and craven concealment.

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

First-time director Bonnie Hunt pays slavish adherence to the Nora Ephron rules of assembly for the prefab rom-com.

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

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."

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.

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.

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

The Kid's denouement resembles the nightmare that would have transpired had execs foisted a toupee and a happy ending on "12 Monkeys."

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.

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

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

Bursting with grotesque burlesques of household relations.

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

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

An aura of dust and mothballs evidently leaves a capable cast feeling woozy.

Often succumbs to the craven hysteria perhaps inherent in its hoary premise.

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

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.

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

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

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

The film has exhausted itself with fits of glib hysteria long before its truly stupefying final twist, a stunning betrayal of audience trust.

Some dogs can bark.

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

Preposterous enough to entertain.

The high-concept scenario soon proves preposterous, the acting is robotically italicized, and truth-in-advertising hounds take note: There's very little hustling on view, though McCrudden does arrange for his lead gym rat to be shirtless as often as possible.

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.

Somehow the U.K. film industry can always scrounge enough loose change from the cushions to foot the bill for a pre-chewed lump of sickly saltwater taffy like the mawkish Scottish-seaside postcard Dear Frankie.

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.

A story that splits at the seams with plot holes and bloat.

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.

The script, allegedly by "Donnie Darko's" Richard Kelly, throws together tangentially related plots like cats in a sack.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Improbably, the sequel only ups the ante on its predecessor's comedy-of-embarrassment quotient.

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

The visual subtleties don't come to bear on the storytelling, unfortunately -- the dialogue is cumbersome, the simpering soundtrack and editing more so.

A crystalline curio of dumbshit nihilism shot through with fleeting pathos, Koury's home movie often evokes "The Decline of Western Civilization Part III."

A confusingly edited music-video hodgepodge.

Whittled down from a series of 36 short films commissioned by a German television network between 1996 and 2000, Erotic Tales leaves you only to ponder the horror of the 33 that didn't make the cut.

Surpassing Dan Aykroyd's "Nothing but Trouble" as the most astoundingly atrocious walrus-flop of a directorial debut by a languishing actor ever contrived, Sally Field's Beautiful.

Achieves inadvertent pathos via its own obscene irrelevance.

Me You Them can't find a rhythm or a consistent tone.

Gets a lurching spring in its step whenever Tom Green shows up to, say, cram a live mouse in his mouth.

Pola Rapaport's slender documentary-cum-reconstruction Writer of O disappoints in its workmanlike approach to such fragrant material.

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

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

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

Brimming with fatuous "clever" dialogue and gorgeous women swooning over Schaeffer-played boors, the like-sounding titles denoted a vain, smarmy Woody Allen acolyte drowning in his own reflection.

As the tourist on a time budget, the usually brilliant Coogan merely mugs and flails (we can only imagine what Johnny Depp would have done with Fogg), while he and able straight man Chan enjoy scant opportunity to develop any comic rapport.

[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?!"

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.

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

Hammer betrays a tiresome attachment to cross-cutting ladyporn with antiquated educational filmstrips, to no real end but snarky giggles.

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.

Energetic and thoroughly brainless.

Dinosaur amounts to 80 minutes of discouraged Cretaceous trudging, punctuated by the occasional fight or stampede and one pyrotechnic coup: a truly thrilling meteor shower.

Collapses in a heap of affirmational outbursts and metaphysical goop. The fond chemistry between the leads deserves a better movie.