Ken Fox

An observant and sensitively played drama about adolescent sexuality, unrequited love and heartbreak.

Many of the script's observations sound as though they were lifted directly from the pages of Baxter's book, and they're too platitudinous to impart much wisdom to anyone who's been in and out of love at least once in his or her life. But it's nice to see these ideas played out by a fine cast.

The dialogue is minimal but sharp, the pace swift and the action sequences suitably loud and brutal.

As lightheartedly as the film plays, Morrison manages to say quite a few serious things about immigration and otherness.

Chinese director Ann Hu follows-up her tepid 2000 debut "Shadow Magic" with another luscious historical drama that, thankfully, is a lot more interesting. The plot is no less melodramatic, but here melodramatics work along with the film's theme, not against it.

The gritty location shooting, the absence of a soundtrack and the casting of non-professionals in key roles help capture an all-important sense of place with almost documentary precision.

Style oozing from virtually every frame.

It's mostly very crude, often very funny and a little bit smarter than you might otherwise think.

The film is a pleasant breeze that refreshes, mostly because it's a rare, thoughtful comedy clearly intended for grown-ups.

This charming tale of a quartet of Australian orphans who share a life-altering holiday in the 1960s should appeal to sentimental adults old enough to wax nostalgic over their own adolescences.

In the end it remains an academic exercise, though a dazzlingly ambitious one that’s well worth seeing.

Goldberger, who made his debut with the similarly gritty and deliberately unpolished "Trans," tries to pull the novel's concerns to the surface, but much of its subtlety is lost. Giamatti, however, delivers yet another superb performance, turning what might have been a freak show into an unexpectedly moving experience.

The end result is an entertaining tour film.

Much of it will probably go right over the heads of kids who aren't familiar with classic movies or the naughtiness of Eddie Izzard.

One isn't quite ready to forgive the miscasting of Gere, however, who is about as convincing a Kabbalistic scholar as Madonna.

Aduaka's comprehensive account of an African nightmare covers a lot of important ground, making this flawed film worth seeing.

Unlike, say, David Cronenberg, who manages to establish a crucial, critical distance between his audience and his schizophrenic protagonist in his adaptation of Patrick McGrath's similarly themed "Spider," Carrere re-creates the insane mind through his camera, and diffuses his point about subjective experience by inadvertently raising questions about truth and the movies.

Taking its title from a key track by the NYC noise band Sonic Youth, S.A. Crary's documentary about No Wave music and its paradoxical influence is both a history of music that sought to defy history and a sharp look at the crisis of innovation in an age of commodified nostalgia.

Despite some excitingly shot concert footage, one scene begins to feel very much like the next, and it's all rather predictable.

Veteran conspiracy buffs probably won’t find much of Stone's material particularly new, but Stone’s film does serve as a neat summary for the rest of us while offering a number of intriguing insights into how conspiracy theories work and what they say about specific cultural and political climates.

It's rendered in shiny, state-of-the-art CG animation, not the charming pen-and-ink drawings with which Seuss illustrated his own books or the hand-drawn artistry Chuck Jones brought to the 1970 Horton Hears a Who! short. But considering the messes that came before, that's a minor quibble.

However you feel about her character and what she may or may not have done, Tamblyn's portrayal of Stephanie Daley is softly devastating.

Though impressively ambitious and making the most of a small budget and talented cast, director Ari Taub's feature concentrates so intently on the day-to-day minutiae of infantry life on World War II's European front that the bigger picture gets lost.

Writer-director James Ponsoldt's first feature is a small, modest movie structured around a fairly simple situation that leaves plenty of room for some fine performances.

Needless to say, anyone who's not entirely down with the beastly noise of the Beastie Boys will hate every second of it. This one's strictly for -- and, for the most part, by -- the fans.

We can only hope that the time frame is meant to be sometime before 9/11, and not after. Either way, it's a troubling vision of how terrorism and "martyrdom" occur on both sides of this ghostly war, and is both perpetrated and facilitated by the very forces enlisted to stop it.

For all the gushy feelings, the plight of women like Kiranjit, bound not only by domineering, often physically abusive husbands but by racism and oppressive cultural traditions as well, is poignantly portrayed.

Naturally there's plenty of adolescent drama both on stage and off, and if the film ultimately feels a little thin, that's also to be expected.