John Patterson

What enrich the film are its layers of detail -- moronic racial protocols, turf wars, pecking orders, men as livestock -- the authenticity of the dialogue and the rich range of characters.

It's a strangely stirring experience that finds warmth in the coldest environment and makes each crumb of emotional comfort feel like a 10-course banquet.

There’s something entirely ridiculous about rating a movie like this NC-17: Why should sniggering, infantile, adolescent humor be denied its natural core audience of snigger-ing, infantile adolescents?

An intermittently gripping, good-looking movie.

All Serving Sara can offer is Perry with his arm shoulder-deep up a longhorn steer's backside, a wasted supporting cast that includes Vincent Pastore and Cedric the Entertainer, and a huge, comedian-shaped hole where Hurley's performance should be.

The formula, with its comforting arrangement of familiar elements, is what we're after, and The World Is Not Enough certainly comes through on that front.

It's grim stuff indeed, but somehow the horror never quite overwhelms Nelson's sure-footed approach to raising all manner of frankly unanswerable questions -- in particular, what would or could one have done in such circumstances?

Catalog of ugly female stereotypes and rotten jokes.

Holds its potentially problematic ingredients together remarkably well, summoning outstanding performances from Morrow and Linney, while never dipping into sentiment or patronizing the ailment's sufferers.

It's clever, vulgar and fully committed to making us howl with laughter. If only all sequels were this much fun.

Levy, Luis Guzman, Cheri Oteri -- utterly wasted. At 82 minutes it feels longer than “Lawrence of Arabia” -- and a lot less funny.

An even richer, smarter, funnier sequel.

Grotesque and ugly.

Irish director David Caffrey and English screenwriter Jeremy Drysdale have, respectively, zero sense of pace and a tin-eared grasp of period speech, and together fail either to let us care about their characters or to create any sense of a living era.

There are scenes here that fill one with rage or bring tears to the eyes.

Just avoid this ghastly, insulting farrago at all costs.

Three strikes maybe, but no stars and no thumbs up (except the one way, way up its own ass).

Roth can obviously direct actors sympathetically, and he paces the movie adroitly.

Despite its dry wit and compassion, the film suffers from a philosophical emptiness and maddeningly sedate pacing, and, in the end, the only aspect of the movie that truly commands attention is Jagger's desperately inexpressive acting, which hasn’t improved one iota since "Ned Kelly."

A solidly filmed great play.

As Tweedy talks about canning his stockbroker and repairing his pool, you yearn for a few airborne TV sets or nude groupies on the nod to liven things up. And what do we get? Diet Coke! Tonight is definitely not the night.

Breathtaking stuff that freezes the toes, harrows the soul and turns the viewer's seat into a foot-wide ledge over a yawning chasm.

Director Jordan Brady achieves the remarkable feat of squandering a topnotch foursome of actors -- particularly Theron, a very game and able comedienne -- by shoving them into every clichéd white-trash situation imaginable.

Iguana runs hot and cold, being engaging and dull by turns depending on the plausibility of the character before the camera.

The small-town Irish feel of the movie is infectious, and McGrath uncovers some great supporting players.

It's a pleasure to report that Scream 3 is an absolute riot, jammed with spicy cameos.

Despite good performances from Gregory, Considine and especially David Morrissey, the movie's true merits are all on the surface: its uncannily authentic period reconstruction and its successful use of stressed and textured film stocks. The filmmakers care more about this than about their characters, and it's hard for us not to feel the same.

Rough-hewn, improvisatory and contentedly lo-fi, the resulting documentary should prove warmly encouraging to embattled progressives of all stripes, and incidentally offers the best political date-movie of the week.

Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan lets the tension rise slowly, leads you everywhere you don't expect, doesn't rip you off and totally freaks you out -- all without stale effects or gore.

A scrupulously even-handed account, free of ideological or tribal partisanship, based on eyewitness accounts by survivors and the anonymous "Paras" themselves.

Filmed only with direct light and sound, Bush's stunning camerawork adroitly captures the majestic landscapes and icons of Buddhism: its murals and artworks, monks and nuns.