Kirk Honeycutt

The movie makes an excellent primer about the world of stock car racing for fans and nonfans alike. In 48 fast minutes, the Simon Wincer-directed film gives you a genuine sense of this particular sport, its rigorous demands and the fan base that supports it with such wildly enthusiastic devotion.

The fun of a movie like this is not found in its logic, but in scary stunts and supercharged emotions.

Life in a Day is an experimental project driven by the Internet at its best, where connectivity among the planet's population has become a reality.

The madness of Holocaust survivors is here played mainly for dark comedy. The film's dazzling central performance in a mental institute finds Jeff Goldblum in the role of his career.

Jarhead refuses to engage in its own point of view toward events it depicts. So the film feels empty and tentative, uncertain of what if anything these events add up to.

Kill Bill-Vol. 2 puts to shame doubts entertained about aesthetic strategies or structural imbalance provoked by "Kill Bill-Vol. 1." Now that the entirety of Quentin Tarantino's epic revenge melodrama is on view, "Kill Bill" emerges as a brilliant, invigorating work, one to muse over for years to come.

An engaging period drama. But German postwar guilt is not the most winning subject matter for the holiday season.

Nothing is bleaker than failed black comedy, which this is.

Biutiful has a strong, linear narrative drive. Nevertheless, and most of all, it's a gorgeous, melancholy tone poem about love, fatherhood and guilt.

This is a coolly efficient, tongue-in-cheek horror-comedy.

Jessica Biel has great fun with the American adventuress, while Kristin Scott Thomas is truly scary as her nemesis and mother-in-law.

It took three films, but The Twilight Saga finally nails just the right tone in Eclipse, a film that neatly balances the teenage operatic passions from Stephenie Meyer's novels with the movies' supernatural trappings.

The film is unusual in that it is a co-production with the Chinese. Whatever difficulties this imposed on the Western filmmakers, the reward is a period film that feel authentic to its time and place.

Splinter is a bad idea, borrowing body parts, as it were, from old horror flicks to genuinely unsatisfying results.

It is so outrageous with its ethnic caricatures, hokey plot and twin-brother mix-ups that you know the whole thing is a lark.

A misfire. The film that wants to be lighter than air instead crashes to earth with the swiftness of a concrete parachute.

Irish director Jim Sheridan, who has made his films in America in recent years, now delivers an American remake that hues closely to the original but loses some of its true grit.

A prime example of a solid romantic comedy.

Much of the bite and a good deal of the wit of the first two films are missing here. The rude send-up of beloved fairy tale conventions remains -- somewhat -- but these playful jabs no longer come as pleasing surprises. You expect them. And you expect better.

Stalls at the intersection of fantasy and science fiction.

Stephen Mirrione's fast-paced editing and David Holmes' pop-rock score propel the story ever forward whether one follows the twists or not.

Stirring tale of a team whose big win speeds the integration of intercollegiate sports.

There is not a credible moment in this overly calculated melodrama.

It may not be as much fun as old spy movies starring Cary Grant or more recent entertainments such as "Spy Game," directed by Ridley's brother Tony, but it feels all too accurate.

The most alarming cautionary tale for men with wandering libidos since "Fatal Attraction." It may also be the first horror movie that women drag men to see rather than the reverse.

Edward Burns' best riff yet on guys trying to sort out their feelings about women.

A real audience pleaser, so long as that audience is mentally agile and adult, for it comes at you from odd angles and features three distinct story lines and 10 main characters.

Few films have so poignantly portrayed a father's relationships with his sons as The Boys Are Back.