Jessica Winter

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

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

The traumatized critic must struggle to avoid capital letters in urging patrons to steer clear of the colorfully cast but unbearable Spun.

Lame even by triumph-of-the-underdog sports-comedy standards.

Heartbreakers gives redemption a bad name, but gives conniving misanthropy a worse one.

Paul Morrison's relentlessly unsurprising staging of a "Romeo and Juliet" story fetishizes its accelerating tragedies with morbid solemnity.

Boorman's bathetic tourism is unconscionable for a subject of this magnitude; for an infinitely superior account of this chapter of South African history, seek out the documentary "Long Night's Journey Into Day."

An epidemic of solipsism breaks out among four lifelong African American friends when one of them announces his impending nuptials. Cringe-inducing slapstick jockeys for screen time with undermotivated high-volume confrontation.

Creaky in its mechanics and numbingly protracted, this is basement B horror that fancies itself a prestige chiller.

Throughout this Americanization of the Luc Besson–scripted French hit, Latifah itches to check her watch, Fallon appears mortified, and only Ann-Margret mainlines any comic adrenalin.

Willing's confused procedural -- derived from a novel by Madison Smartt Bell -- is a hasty throwback to the sado-medieval Exorcist descendants of the turn of the millennium (Stigmata, Stir of Echoes, Lost Souls). The somnolent cast can't keep the faith.

Baggy and overbroad, He Loves Me is notable only as a corrective to cinema's promiscuity with fabulous destinies.

Especially in the climactic, clumsily staged gunfight, the prevailing mode is wide-eyed idiocy--which might be the point, since von Trier's satirical target is the hypocrisy of (news flash!) America's eagerness to enforce stability and security with all guns blazing.

This is more than self-amused irony; this is kitsch as religion.

Aidan Higgins's novel undergoes a choppy, perplexing script adaptation by Harold Pinter (who enjoys a soused, belligerent cameo), further muddied by non sequitur editing inserts. Imogen and Otto's happenstance affair holds little intrigue or surprise.

Mistakes self-pitying embitterment for carry-on endurance, and manages to have its causality both ways.

Hoffman has no particular argument to make, and neither does the movie -- just befuddled disgust with The System in general and the right wing in particular.

L'affaire du collier was a convoluted palace intrigue that Shyer and screenwriter John Sweet don't bother to unpack, crafting instead an endless illustrated Harlequin paperback of mawkish backstory and corset-popping purple prose.

There are many dramatic possibilities in an interracial lesbian romance set in a provincial town, but Out of Season focuses on the women's fears of commitment, which would be fine - even refreshing - if they seemed to, well, like each other or something.

Blends past and present to draw some utterly stupefying parallels.

Cédric Klapisch has been compared to Truffaut, but the new-waver's weakness for glib sentimentalism seems to have left the biggest impression on L'Auberge Espagnole.

The rock hero starts out dead and so does the movie.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Energetic and thoroughly brainless.