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.

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

Indulges something of a number obsession, amounting not exactly to a movie but rather a tallying of atrocities.

Can't transcend its own suffocating milieu.

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

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

This ghastly comedy emits the subliminal whine of a sucking chest wound.

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

Easily the best teen movie of the year.

The staging and performances are awkward, the frequent shoot-outs a snore.

Only silent Becks himself rises unstained from this reheated ethno-niche stew.

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

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

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.

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.

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

The scoreless Or (My Treasure) consists solely of stationary shots that, while sometimes awkwardly composed, build in organic momentum and bracing detail.

The Governess is too dirty-minded to fit the Merchant Ivory mold but not salacious enough to qualify as bodice-ripping laff riot. [04 Aug 1998]

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

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]

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."

Leitman's interviews are lax and inconclusive.

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.

Plumbs new depths of craven heartstring-yanking.

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

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?

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.

If Moon Shadow does sometimes overcome its sentimentalism and faulty parallels, it's because the film is altogether unburdened by cynicism.

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.

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."

Hide and Seek follows no semblance of internal logic--the unveiling of Charlie is a ludicrous cheat, the last reel a unique paroxysm of rancid idiocy.

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.

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.

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.

Should come with a disclaimer.

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

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

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."

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.

All solipsistic jaded-Cosmo patter.

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.

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

Amid the sticky-sweet swamp of Jeremy Leven's script, Rowlands and Garner emerge spotless and beatific, lending a magnanimous credibility to their scenes together. These two old pros slice cleanly through the thicket of sap-weeping dialogue and contrivance, locating the terror and desolation wrought by the cruel betrayals of a failing mind.

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.

The idea isn't as odd as it might first appear, since running a salon is one of the few socially acceptable means for a woman in Afghanistan to earn an income. The execution, however, evokes a particularly outlandish Christopher Guest mockumentary.

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

An oafish wish-fulfillment wankfest.

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

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.

Levin's Brooklyn Babylon, set during a hot summer in Crown Heights, is an ethnic-strife tract as thuddingly didactic as his previous "Whiteboys."

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.

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

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.

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

As documentary filmmaking, it's cheap and suspect. As advocacy, it's necessary.

The loud, musty production design -- steeped in lime greens and tangerine oranges -- smells of recirculated air and enervated ambition, but unfortunately, so does the movie itself.

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.

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

Broomfield's investigatory technique remains a frustrating pileup of unfocused Q&As and misplaced credulity. But when Broomfield travels to her Michigan hometown, he pieces together a life blighted at breech-birth: a grotesque of abandonment, incest, physical and sexual abuse, pregnancy at 13, and homelessness.

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

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

Slack, saccharine script.

High-buffed, low-rack pulp.

Ends up waddling its way toward gentler, mistier climes, stopping just shy of "Doubtfire" country. It doesn't run out of smelly steam so much as downshift and become a different movie.

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

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.

Occasionally smirky.

The movie has the addictive episodic intimacy of great TV.

Leaks treacle from every pore.

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.

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

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

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

This dreadfully earnest inversion of the "Concubine" love triangle eschews the previous film's historical panorama and roiling pathos for bug-eyed mugging and gay-niche condescension.

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

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.

Sitting through the last reel is significantly less charming than listening to a four-year-old with a taste for exaggeration recount his Halloween trip to the Haunted House.

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.

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.

An endless chain reaction of cartilage-crunching, organ-pulping brawls.

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.

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

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

Comes down to two sorely limited and rapidly tiresome characters.

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

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

Never lacks for energy, and the director and his stars stride with focused confidence through the hooey.

An arthritic exercise in self-pleasurement.

Can be blamed foremost on its fire-and-brimstone screenwriter, Pierce Gardner.

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

This sly, engrossing doc is an expert riposte to smug proponents of the fetterless free market.

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.

Boldly aspirational. It's Jeunet's stab at "Paths of Glory," dipped in a sepia bath and halfway wrenched into a women's picture.

A plea for equality of opportunity, a worthy objective somewhat obscured by non-disabled actors occupying the lead roles. In any case, one imagines Rory himself would prefer a Farrelly disability blooper reel.

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.

Niccol's fatal error is in making the protagonist at once amoral and insipid, an admixture thickened by Cage's loquacious yet stoned voice-over and Moynahan's moist-eyed tremblings as the trophy wife.

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.

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.

There's so little leavening humor here, and so much physical and emotional violence visited upon the already abject, that the film seems as pointless as the wasted lives it purports to examine.

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.

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

Elicits not the voluptuous discomfort stirred by the boys' (Peter and Bobby Farrelly) best corporeal shenanigans but creeping embarrassment for everyone on screen.

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.

Vomitous.

There are pages missing from this fable: Meadows reports that his financiers asked him to cut one-quarter of his original script just before production began, and his fondness for long takes sits uneasily beside the apparent gaps in the narrative.

The film itself is thinly conceived, except in the area of bodily misfunction. It plays like the murky B side to the immortal Gilliam-Jones epic "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

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

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.

The director has a fitfully deployed gift for droll humor, but Chutney Popcorn mostly provides evidence that the ins and outs of the improvised multiparent family can be as prosaic as the nuclear Eisenhower model.

Two Men is slow and sweet as warm pudding, but Cranham and Derek Jacobi (as one of Churchill's intelligence officers) both add a generous, wholehearted gravitas the film might have thought to ask for in the first place.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Dippy romantic thriller.

Choppy, overlong documentary.

Anemic.

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

Lovely to look at but insipid.

Amiable and hollow.

The last scene reads like an admission of defeat.

Blends past and present to draw some utterly stupefying parallels.

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

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.

The poised Vega and pleasingly phlegmatic Sabara are resolutely uncute performers, and the reach-out-and-touch-it gadgetry carries a homey scent of proactive nostalgia. Spy Kids 2 is an island of lost Circuit Cities.

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

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 contortional physical shtick familiar from Lawrence's sitcom, laden with a dollop of Three Stooges violence, should keep the boys happy.

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.

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

A bad one-night stand endured with a jailbroke cad and his put-upon travel-agent pal that hinges somewhat on the characters' impression that Frank Sinatra is still among us.

A handsome, mostly tasteful production on par with 2001's Bayley-Murdoch impersonation "Iris."

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

Unfolds as a series of slightly disjointed vignettes, padded with redundant voiceover and an oppressively histrionic score.

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

"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.

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.

The Business of Strangers goes too far in dramatizing Julie's primal, Paula-fied surge of female fury, and the script finally mistakes respectful ambiguity for vaporous drift.

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

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.

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.

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