Kevin Crust

While endearingly heartfelt and G-rated to boot, its storytelling suffers from a lack of locomotive force and characters that feel disappointingly two-dimensional.

Instantly forgettable.

The movie has a lot of the elements that might make it thrilling and it's visually arresting, but it's missing the emotional connection necessary to make it interesting.

The long line of recent muckraking documentaries that has preceded Why We Fight does nothing to diminish its force.

The overly familiar plot points also make the film feel a little dated.

An amazing achievement of personal filmmaking.

Wilson is as sincere as ever at being insincere, though the sweet minor notes of his trademark melancholia seem here to be in search of a more boisterous presence -- say a Vince Vaughn -- to riff with.

A shaggy dog tale in more ways than one, the campy comedy Wasabi Tuna is the kind of film that can give dumb blonds a bad name.

Anker evocatively captures the joys (and sometime frustrations) experienced by high-level artists working within an institution. The ardor they bring to their music is both enviable and inspiring.

The campier aspects of the film are not enough to make up for its lapses into melodrama and just plain silliness.

In essence, you get "It's a Wonderful Life" meets "Wings of Desire," swapping out the substance for self-help platitudes. If you can get past that, you can enjoy it as a 90-minute look at a lovely postcard.

Lifeless and laughless.

A sleek, effective entertainment that is a refreshing respite from the slick emptiness of recent American crime dramas.

Brosnan and Neeson make fine adversaries mining the terse dialogue for veiled dramatic fervor.

A thoughtful, provocative exploration of the ways poets have dealt with the experience of battle throughout history.

The interviews are carefully augmented with speeches by President Bush and other administration officials, plus footage from Iraq and Afghanistan, and powerful graphics detailing the depletion of the global oil supply.

Both acidly funny and very moving.

It's one of the charms of Air Guitar Nation that much of it plays like a mockumentary in which you're not quite sure who's pulling your leg. But it's real, even if the guitars are not.

Archetypal characters and somewhat formulaic plot notwithstanding, Diggers has the conviction to avoid tying things up with a bow and allows us the privilege to imagine where its denizens will go afterward.

Never quite works as a film. The failure to create appropriate cinematic metaphors reduces it to "happiness is a warm puppy" superficiality.

The film is haphazardly structured, undercutting its potential power.

In some ways, The Man plays like a sequel to some terrible movie that was mercifully destroyed before it was ever released.

Scurlock does well to counter the more dire aspects of the film with a razor-sharp sense of humor.

Carl T. Evans' tedious drama Walking on the Sky serves primarily as an acting exercise for its cast and a showcase for its primary location, a scenic Manhattan rooftop.

The strongest scenes are those between Elliot and Richard, which give Second Best a verisimilitude lacking in the rest of the film. The truest thing here is that these two guys have been friends forever and always will be.

Philosophy and religion become entangled with love and sex in Karin Albou's intelligent, sensual drama.

The highly partisan Game Over ably illustrates the often-silly psychological gamesmanship that accompanies world-class chess and nearly catalogs enough circumstantial evidence against IBM to convict.

Slither is a gross, disgusting, but undeniably amusing treat laden with homages and in-jokes.

This logic-challenged dive-bum thriller directed by John Stockwell, who did the equally silly surf movie "Blue Crush."

Originally titled "Fast Track" when it was scheduled to open last January, neither the wait nor the new title makes it worthwhile. The only fast track here is the one to home video.

Recycling is alive but not well in the outmoded teen comedy Dirty Deeds, with a result that is more toxic than intoxicating.

An amusing if slight excursion into nature with a group of animals who turn the tables on their collective nemeses, the hunters.

If Dick Wolf is interested in doing a "Law & Order: Cyber Crimes," he could do worse than to follow the lead of Untraceable, a diverting police procedural about an FBI unit tasked with sleuthing the Internet for mouse-wielding bad guys.

Writer-director Kevin Noland effectively utilizes his fine young cast and the natural beauty and rich culture of northern Spain in amiably posing a timeless question of youth.

An impassioned plea for change, the film balances bleak, Dickensian conditions with details of a growing number of international programs designed to combat the epidemic.

The themes are all familiar and the plot unfolds slowly and in predictable ways, but there's plenty of heat generated by the three leads.

"Inspired by" is an interesting phrase because the movie is more inspiring than inspired. The man's struggles are emotionally engaging, but dramatically it lacks the layering of a "Kramer vs. Kramer," which it superficially resembles.

An intimate drama that views the deterioration of a relationship from the inside out. Moving from summer through fall and concluding in winter, it's minimalist cinema that turns on subtle emotion rather than narrative and demands the audience's full attention.

The result is that they never truly find the innate drama in Pimentel's story, instead simply recounting four or five decades' worth of events that shaped the man.

We've seen the inner lives of hit men and mobsters rendered innumerably in recent years on film and television, but You Kill Me does it in a satisfyingly comedic way, loaded with easily identifiable idiosyncrasies.

Witt injects the film with plenty of razzle-dazzle on the visual side, but the pace deadens whenever the zombies are offscreen or the characters open their mouths long enough to do anything more than grunt.

Zodiac is primarily a complex character study, despite the film's grim and gruesome subject matter. It's a role reversal of sorts for a director who normally emphasizes the brutal tension in his movies.

While an effective rebuttal to media stereotyping, especially in its own portrayals of people of color and the LGBTQ community, Hillbilly feels less assured in dealing with the election, a subject that is getting a little tired but no less confounding.

As clumsy and awkward as his previous films were stylishly silly.

Detailed and intensely researched documentary.

The main strength of "Shakespeare" is its ability to show the vulnerability of its subjects, neither judging nor smothering them with undeserved praise.

An initially promising horror film that turns exploitive, Wolf Creek fails to deliver the requisite payoff considering its leisurely pace.

There's a dry humor underlying the absurdity of Koistinen's experience. When things cannot possibly get worse, they do.

Fascinating, highly entertaining.

Davaa has made a sweetly meditative film.

Harrelson and Maura Tierney, who plays Monix's love interest, seem to be inhabiting a different, more interesting, movie, one that follows the familiar path of a has-been athlete seeking redemption at what looks like his last stop. The strange thing is that the subplot is so tangential to the rest of the movie that the scenes could be omitted with no one the wiser.

A winning combination of humor and crafty filmmaking.

Although the message of the film sounds bleak, it is actually quite rousing.

A stupendously torpid thriller without a single redeeming quality.

A spellbinding, intelligent thriller that takes its time to get where it's going but is well worth the trip.

A clever, delightfully rendered summer diversion.

The twists and reversals that pile up, stirred by greed, friendship and betrayal, fail to register any meaning, simply accumulating -- so that ultimately Autumn is as dry and lifeless as the leaves that fall to the ground in its opening images.

And though the film also quotes Wiesenthal's exhortation "Hope lives when people remember," the filmmakers are most interested in drawing attention to what is happening now, primarily in Europe, and what it may mean for the future.

In the parlance of "The Player," Katrina Holden Bronson's Daltry Calhoun would be pitched as "Because of Winn-Dixie" meets "Napoleon Dynamite," and that is definitely not a good thing.

Director Desmond Nakano, who co-wrote the script with Tony Kayden, does a fine job in evoking the events and era and in guiding his actors through emotion-filled scenes. However, much of the plot revolving around a climactic baseball game is trite and detracts from the overall drama.

Redeemed by its adherence to a simple yet distinctive approach to storytelling and its uniformly strong acting.

The movie is a pastiche of tortured slapstick, groan-inducing dialogue and a lethal dose of treacle, apparently awaiting one of Williams' trademark sprees of riffing and vamping to save the day. That moment never comes, however.

Hurting the film is the fact that the central character, Anthony, is so self-absorbed.

The uproarious laughter that floats from the cinema wonderfully illustrates the universality of the moviegoing experience.

A highly entertaining piece of genre-blending fun.

This family adventure about a team of sled dogs abandoned in Antarctica naturally invokes the traditional shout of "Mush!" urging the canines to go faster, but it's also an apt descriptor of both its shameless sentimentality and ineptly structured story.

Most successful in capturing the emotional elements of its story, the film relies on its excellent cast to balance out sketchily drawn characters and the unfortunate obviousness of its plot.

Evans and Gideon never really succeed in selling the idea that serial killing is a disease -- which would require a degree of realism that the slick, over-plotted Mr. Brooks doesn't otherwise aspire to. They seem to be content with occupying the audience with a series of twists and jolts.