Jessica Winter

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.