Kevin Crust

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.