Kyle Smith

You can't spell cliché without Che. And as I endured this mad dream directed - or perhaps committed - by Steven Soderbergh, I wondered where I'd seen it all before. The booted stomping through the greensward, the jungly target shooting? It's a remake of Woody Allen's "Bananas," right?

This is one horror film that could make the syllabus at Bob Jones U. The way the squid blasts its tentacles into doe-eyed girls seems designed to steer your daughters away from sex until they're about 40.

Five people did escape, and they contribute their stories to the spellbinding documentary.

All the film provides is this bulletin: Lefties are angry about the things Lefties are angry about, chiefly corporate profits.

Two possible ways of regarding Please Give: It's shallow. Or maybe it's deeply shallow.

The big new addition in Shrek the Third is Justin Timberlake as the high school-age future King Arthur, but if Timberlake contributed a song to the soundtrack it would have to be "WhinyBack."

Watching the film, I did manage to retain my empathy for the narrator, though: I was as desperate as he was to escape the situation I was in.

The movie's prideful silliness makes it semi-watchable in the manner of Saturday afternoon cable flicks like "Delta Force."

The movie is just a situation salad, at least until the end, when things start to pull together a bit.

Sounds like a great idea for a gay porno, but the soapy Save Me actually takes itself seriously.

Martin Scorsese's Rolling Stones "documentary" (i.e. concert film) is a first: the only Scorsese film that does not feature the Stones' "Gimme Shelter." Really. I think the Dalai Lama even hummed the guitar solo in "Kundun."

Occasionally there is a striking image or a moment of wounded sweetness, but mainly the film provides ample proof that it's possible to be bizarre and boring at the same time.

Turn the River lacks almost everything Eigeman has as a performer: charisma, wit and snappy delivery.

The film is primarily interested in the music that accompanied this turmoil, which is a bit like covering the American Revolution with the focus on the wigs Washington and Jefferson wore.

If someone ran this guy through a scanner, the readout would say: “Mark down and stock in straight-to-video aisle."

Like "Sex and the City 2," Marmaduke features well-coifed bitches in heat, nonstop puns and its very own Mr. Big. Unlike "SATC 2," this one is harmless and, on occasion, mildly witty.

Miami Vice isn't an action flick but a neo-noir: tough, quiet, moody and hard.

White trash meets white collar in Extract, Mike Judge's workplace comedy -- which contains more reality than the last five documentaries I've seen.

Alan Rickman holds the film together.

Mighty entertainment that makes you feel sorry for the saps next door in the multiplex.

A chipper documentary sure to please seniors.

Director Alfonso Cuarón has a vision so mesmerizingly terrible that it alone - at least, for those who enjoy a gorgeous nightmare - is reason enough to see the film.

The doggedness and good will of these men are irresistible as they pick up on the American dream, finding work and even college educations while trying to locate their missing relatives back home.

An interesting failure, not a fascinating one.

Starts out as a hilarious take on cop-movie cliches, then turns into Will Ferrell's own "Capitalism: A Love Story."

Few documentaries have covered such an important matter so convincingly and with such clarity. When it comes to public education, we are all New Jerseyans.

It feels as shopworn as a dusty VHS tape of "Less Than Zero."

Confessions of a Shopaholic -- a "Devil Wears Prada" for Chico's customers.

Step Up 3D is strictly 1D. Tired choreography and moldy hip-hop gestures accompany insipid characters.

The film mangles its twist and fails to deliver an interesting coup de grace or a sharp line of dialogue.

This weekend, forget "Jarhead" - two hours of guys playing grab-ass in the shower and no chicks. If you're lucky, you can con your girlfriend into seeing Pride & Prejudice.

Nor does the movie try to use the game to make some larger point. Here's one: Even at its best and luckiest hour, Harvard can aspire only to equal Yale.

Paper Heart is like a really special five-minute YouTube clip that goes on for an hour and a half.

It's supposed to be about a Kafkaesque experience. Instead, it IS a Kafkaesque experience. Why are we here? Is everything absurd? Is anyone in charge?

The highlight is a meta touch: A funny on-screen résumé is posted each time we meet a new character.

Goes up for the dunk and misses the hoop, the backboard and the point. Instead, it manages to both strike out and get sacked. Whose idea was it to remake "Slap Shot" a la Jerry Lewis?

Cutesy? My pain was acutesy as the entire plot yawned before me.

It's good-natured myth-making cut into kid-size pieces.

The movie is so heavily weighted toward the Simmons character that no one else really gets to breathe. And though McBride's shtick is brilliant - he could get rich by playing variations on this character for the next few years, and probably will.

The details are true and funny, played brilliantly.

A long, messy cinematic novel full of hate, love, murder, ghosts, madness, poetry and Catherine Deneuve.

The real mystery here is why this slapdash semi-effort didn't go straight to video.

More like Disney's "Sleeping Beauty," somber, slow and elegant instead of frantic and dazzling.

A Skinemax movie cloaked in art-house fancy dress, the sex thriller Chloe might have worked better as an out-and-out popcorn flick starring, say, Jennifer Lopez.

The movie could -- should -- be a symphony, and it frequently makes excellent use of spare classical music. When Brosnan pipes up, he is as welcome as a car alarm.

A girl with relationship woes can hardly set foot in Europe these days without finding herself hip-deep in yummy food and tasty men. The latest iteration of the story is Letters to Juliet or, as I like to think of it, "Eat Pray Hurl."

This loopy farce has the feel of a wacky off-off-Broadway play with more energy than wit, but it has its moments. And the laid-back acting of Hoffman (son of Dustin) just about holds it together.

Illustrating the many ways nuclear weapons could kill you makes Countdown to Zero one of the most frightening documentaries you'll ever see, or endure.

What "Rent" should have been, Once is: a Bohemian rhapsody.

Don Cheadle has a fine time jiving through Talk to Me - accent, please, on the middle word. It's a black "Good Morning, Vietnam."

The horror flick The Uninvited is not unclever - but it is unoriginal.

Watching this movie is like listening to Michael Jackson tell you what real men are like.

Picture "Fargo" played with no sense of comedy, and you'll get some idea of the absurdity of this drunken floozy, clicking and wobbling on high heels, often with bits of her anatomy hanging out, trying to pull off the perfect crime.

An improbable but hilarious combine of losin’-it comedies and the rarefied, Europhile air of the Cinema du Twee.

At one sip per cuss word, though, few viewers will still be conscious for the ending, in which the three cops finally come to the same place, each for an entirely different but equally ridiculous reason.

It may be impossible to make an uninteresting documentary about Hunter S. Thompson, but is it unfair to ask Gonzo for more Hunter and less Jimmy Carter?

As bland as the Kenny G-style smooth jazz its hero listens to in moments of distress.

Even Oliver Stone would giggle at the notion that the CIA couldn't reach JFK through any means except via one of his blond playmates.

Although the movie is reasonably suspenseful for a while and has a few witty moments (of a first draft, the ghost says, "All the words are there. They're just in the wrong order"), it rings false.

Jacques Rivette's film is full of painstaking historical detail, but the behavior of the two nonlovers is mired in inaction and emotionally incomprehensible.

The movie is as lumpy and misshapen as a giant booger.

The only conceivable reason for Warner Bros. to (barely) release this mush is as a favor to Clint Eastwood, whose daughter Alison directed.

Situations get increasingly ridiculous, and none of the characters ever seems like anything but a screenwriter's sketch.

Can’t possibly deserve your close attention. Yet it does, with distilled honky-tonk poetry and generous good humor. It’s one of the year’s best, most deeply felt films.

Doesn't do enough with a righteous premise.

The silliness of Moore's oeuvre is so self-evident that being able to spot it is not liberal or conservative, either; it's a basic intelligence test, like the ability to match square peg with square hole. His documentaries are political slapstick that could have been made by a third Farrelly brother or a fourth Stooge.

Formerly a real American hero, G.I. Joe is no longer a hero (it's a group) or American. (It's a multinational team of military superstars, though the way it does business, you'd feel safer with the Croatian navy on your side.)

The entire script, which boils down to a hopelessly embarrassing lesson about "this beautiful place that can make people live again," seems to have been written within arm's reach of a bong.

God, if you exist, why do you keep letting morons like Walsch get rich?

As always in Veber's films, the predictability is part of the fun.

I suppose it's nice that Romero has a hobby, but he couldn't be more of a bore if he were showing off his pine cone collection.

Since they seem like real people we want them to work out their differences. In the second half, their story is nearly lost in favor of lots of documentary footage of the actual protests. This stuff was pretty ho-hum to look at two years ago, and it hasn't gotten more interesting with age.

Despite all of the hideous critters Hellboy encounters, there is a hint that things are considerably weirder elsewhere.

For rock fans, hearing many Led Zeppelin and U2 classics on a theater sound system is worth the price of a ticket.

School for Scoundrels teaches one important lesson: Avoid any thing carrying the banner of The Weinstein Co., which is to the multiplex what bagged spinach is to the produce aisle.

This is one of those thrillers where the person on-screen is often the only person in the theater who can't guess what'll happen next. Lots of laughable moments provide camp value, though, and Bentley ("American Beauty") makes for a charismatic creep.

This isn't Mamet at his finest, though, which leaves us with a script that is merely three times as smart as the average feature.

The bulk of the movie consists of scene after scene coyly setting up the same ironic juxtaposition, in the exact same way, about innocence vs. Nazism.

Freaked-out funky weirdness starts to happen all around him (Rockwell).

DiCaprio and Connelly give off the sexual tension of pickled herring.

Nutty? Maybe. But a pungent blast of the cinema du bonkers is just what this summer's multiplexes need after weeks of bromide-stuffed retreads that are as smug about their lack of originality as packs of teen girls who dress exactly alike. Mock Jonah Hex if you must, but you can't say you've seen a lot of other supernatural Westerns lately.

An affecting and beautifully realized documentary.

Struggles to maintain a sober, evenhanded tone about an utterly ridiculous story.

The movie boasts five Oscar winners. That figure exceeds by five the number of times I laughed at this cheap collection of icky jokes.

A wan effort at "Annie Hall"-style comedy, has about as much Manhattan sophistication as a gas station in Chippewa Falls, Wis.

Watching Robin Williams as a pastor giving premarital counseling to lovebirds John Krasinski and Mandy Moore in License to Wed is like having a laugh chastity belt cinched up tight around your funny bone.

A 2 1/2-year-old collection of mediocre stand-up routines and dull backstage chatter, Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show demonstrates why comedy clubs require you to have a couple of drinks.

A heist comedy in which the audience gets robbed.

For all its outré set pieces it never rises above the level of pretentious trash.

Although the script works in a couple of pages of collegiate-level ethical debate about "the question of German guilt," what the movie is really interested in is the question of German sex. So think of it as "Schindler's Lust."

I enjoyed the visual effects used to create some hellish creatures and the amusing nods to "The Exorcist" - cranial rotation, even a spooky staircase. But the movie slips in the last act.

Rendition has the depth of a bumper sticker without the brevity.

Director Zack Snyder's cerebral, scintillating follow-up to "300" seems, to even a weary filmgoer's eye, as fresh and magnificent in sound and vision as "2001" must have seemed in 1968, yet in its eagerness to argue with itself, it resembles "A Clockwork Orange."

Is the Crystal Lake PD really doing such a good job? You'd have to go back to Phnom Penh in 1975 to find a place with a higher per-capita rate of unprosecuted homicides.

IF you like rap, you'll probably enjoy The Hip Hop Project. I don't like rap.

Even worse than the hacky chick revenge fantasy now showing on channel 186 of your box.

The oddly compelling documentary Moving Midway is an engineering tale combined with a family history and a ghost story.

UH-UH. Non. Nein. Negative. Sept. 11 is not to be used as the setup for a cheesy disaster prophecy flick.

Time for another of Steven Soderbergh's "experimental," i.e., half-assed, films.

Stone praises Latin America for turning toward "government of the people" (yet ignores Castro's lack of interest in democracy). But it's no wonder he's in such a sunny mood: We see him grow increasingly giddy while chewing coca leaves with Morales (a coca farmer who wants to make cocaine legal).

Satire is merciless; it demands that mocker be superior to mockee.

A scary, inventive, exciting and breathless adventure that combines the best elements of “Children of Men," “Escape from New York" and “The Road Warrior," but leaves out the worst stuff - such as the story-clogging despair and political allegory in “Children," a movie that made apocalypse look like kind of a downer.

The mild British wackiness is more droll than funny, but the movie is a pleasant cup of tea.

As phony as a re-enactment with finger pup pets.

The similar Kevin Bacon HBO movie "Taking Chance" got there first. Worse news: The earlier movie was sober, meticulous and quietly convincing, not a shouty, shoddy bore like this piece of flummery.

Not just a shabby "Wall Street" knockoff clogged with dull, jargon-spewing trading-desk scenes that fail to advance the plot in any way. It's also a nondescript "Sex and the City" retread.

The silliest sci-fi movie since "An Inconvenient Truth."

A pretentious Euro-snore that should occasion a fraud prosecution for any marketer who calls it a thriller -- and which stars an actor who seems to wish his name were Jorg Clooné.

Edward's a remarkable young gentleman when you consider the hell he's been through: It turns out he's always 17, his fate to keep repeating high school, forever and ever. If that's my only option, kindly burn me at the stake.

A sublime meditation that is one of this year's wisest, warmest and funniest films.

The Great Playwrights for Dummies series that began with "Shakespeare in Love" continues with Molière, a French clone of that grating and smarmy Best Picture winner.

Apart from a heart-tugging plot twist, some lesson learning and more random football talk ("no more buttonhooks in the kitchen"), that's about it. Oh, except for the scene in which Kyra Sedgwick - who plays Joe's agent - farts. Be sure to update your résumé, Kyra.

A Liam Neeson thriller so lacking in ambition they should have called it "Paycheck."

The Fourth Kind has a clever gimmick and nothing more.

The movie amounts to an extended short story that progresses slowly and fades away with key questions unanswered. Ambiguity isn't necessarily interesting.

It has a dogged all-night charm and a sense of who its audience is.

No matter how good Blethyn is at playing up the sweet hurt of a woman who is well on the decline but never made it in the first place, your admiration for her shrieking-and-drinking breakdown scenes is likely to be tested after about the fifth go-round.

Turns out to be a dour, shouty atheist manifesto. With a change of scenery it could have been called "Godless in Seattle."

A flea market of fairy tales and hocus-pocus, Inkheart makes as much sense as an inkblot.

Lazy, shallow and repetitive, Phil Donahue's Body of War is one of the most incompetent documentaries to emerge from the Iraq war.

The film is well shot and edited, backed with a bouncy hip-hop soundtrack and full of pep.

For gays who remember the nightmare, Sex Positive may be too depressing to watch. But the movie strikes a cautionary tone for a younger generation that, it says, isn't taking the HIV threat seriously.

Stieve and Glosserman may yet strike a vein: This thing screams out for a Hollywood remake with, say, writers from "The Simpsons."

The Hitcher is the Jessica Simpson of psycho killer flicks - cheerfully in touch with its own brainlessness.

So why does the Democratic Party hate him so much? The answer, as this valuable (if blatantly pro-Nader) documentary makes clear, is hypocrisy.

The script depends heavily on familiar stand-up comedy bits, but it's full of sharp wisecracks and slacker charm.

Dazzling fun. Jerry is master of a new domain.

Throws in enough hurtling bodies, screaming bullets and totaled cars that it at least holds your interest, so it passes the worth-watching-if-you're-stuck-on-an-airplane test.

Dropping by on the same people every seven years like an old friend - or an unwelcome relative - Apted has constructed a peerless, suspenseful work that develops character to a depth that would make Tolstoy jealous. If you have any interest in documentaries, watch the DVD of the first film, "7 Up" (49 Up hits DVD Nov. 14). You won't be able to stop.

Sandler's bizarrely clunky kiddie flick, is a sort of upside-down "Princess Bride."

Like its star, the movie is too short and a little thin but just about perfect.

To kill 80 minutes, the movie has to pad itself with several dull speeches and stagy moments. The worst? How about when the five men, who have ample reason to fear each other and are facing a life-or-death reckoning, whistle "Ode to Joy" together like a bunch of Whiffenpoofs?

If your film is as downbeat and deflated as this one, you had better be leading up to a more interesting insight than, "The older I get, the more I know that I don't know anyone."

Billed as a comedy about a single dad with three girls, the movie is essentially another sudser about the plight of upscale black women in Atlanta.

Maher's sense of humor deserts him in the end, though, when in an apocalyptic montage of fire and hate (bin Laden, Pat Robertson), he suggests all religions are equally bent on destruction of the Earth. It's fatuous to suggest that the Iraq war was launched because of religion or that belief in the Book of Revelation is the same as organizing terrorist attacks.

It all leads nowhere. There are pull-the-rug-out endings, and then there are pull-the-floor-out endings. The Escapist leaves you standing on nothing, like Wile E. Coyote, wondering why you bothered to come this far.

This movie's heart is in the right place, which is one way of saying it's terrible.

Routine stuff, but things move quickly, with several offhand funny moments. Mos Def is hilarious in a cameo as another delivery guy.

Fay Grim is like watching stoners playing Risk and Clue at the same time.

An '80s coming-of-age comedy with more energy than ideas.

Takes a bit of "Swingers" and a bit of "Manhattan" to create a slacktacular vision of uncertain youth in today's L.A.

I went in expecting to be disappointed, but even so, I was disappointed.

Turns out to be formulaic and broad but also skillfully paced and big-hearted, with a sharp cast of comics that makes the most of a sunny script.

Good Luck Chuck, a fungal little sex comedy, doesn't need a review. It needs a tube of ointment and a shot of penicillin.

Adults will sniff out a general air of phoniness - the period detail isn't particularly convincing, and the Scottish factor is overcooked to the point where the script starts to resemble the national cuisine.

Like a Canadian "Six Feet Under," the indie dramedy Whole New Thing mixes characters (teen and adult, gay and straight, married and single) who seem both completely plausible and capable of anything.

Love Happens is a weepie about the grieving process, mainly my own.

Ends up feeling familiar.

The only thing that's shocking about Death of a President is how boring it is.

Matthew Broderick graduates from "boyish" and lurches straight into "curmudgeonly" in the would-be indie heartwarmer Wonderful World.

To really pull off Greenberg would require a lead performance from a master actor. The actor it stars is . . . Ben Stiller.

A kid unversed in other name-brand fantasy movies might go for The Seeker, but in 2007 it's redundant, a puttering Potter without wit and whimsy.

A documentary that uses against Atwater images of lynch mobs, decades-old racist comments of his onetime boss Strom Thurmond, and a clip of Bryant Gumbel calling him "the architect of the evil campaign."

The slacker comedy-drama-romance-whatever Gigantic will fulfill all your alterna-movie weirdness requirements.

The gags vary - a tattooed-breast mystery kinda sags - but there are lots of laughs.

In the mood for some dead-child entertain ment tonight? Reservation Road has what you're looking for. It's "In the Bedroom" crossed with, um, "Fever Pitch."

A pretentious left-wing monster movie with about 15 minutes of alarming creatures and a whole lot of bickering, is a pre-9/11 story which Stephen King wrote eons ago. It operates in the post-9/11 era about as well as a Studebaker at the Daytona 500.

At 86 minutes, the film spends exactly 86 more minutes with its subjects than can possibly be tolerated. Coincidence?

Screamers, one of the most bizarre documentaries you'll ever not see.

Imagine "Clerks" director Kevin Smith with a background in poetry and painting instead of comic books and bestiality jokes, and you'll have an idea of what to expect from an exciting new filmmaker named Sean Ellis, whose terrific debut is called Cashback.

The documentary Darfur Now proves that - no matter how im portant the subject matter - following various people around with a camera doesn't necessarily make a film.

As a spooky midnight movie, The Wolfman is worth curling up with.

Some documentaries are a fervent search for truth; others are a fervent search for snickers. This one is the latter, providing via interviews and old film clips a Greatest Hits for Bush haters.

It's mainly about a supremely annoying French-born LA clothier who became a hugely successful artist without pausing to consider his utter lack of originality or talent.

The paranoia is as thick and luscious as that Reddi-wip, and it's served from both left and right.

Flash Point comes loaded with cliches and immediately starts blasting them in every direction.

Sensory gluttony is reason enough to see a movie, and few epics overstuff the eyes like this one.

Proves that what might be (but probably isn't) worth five minutes of your time while you're passing through the Times Square subway station really isn't worth a 1 1/2-hour movie.

In their refusal to be up-to-the-moment, the Narnia movies are bound to age beautifully, perhaps much more so than the two Shrek films Adamson directed.

Lakeview Terrace holds your interest, though the bad faith on all sides makes it something of an endurance test.

A brutally funny deconstruction, a hybrid of “Watchmen” and “Superbad” filtered through John Woo. It’s a boisterously original piece of entertainment . . . that isn’t for everyone. Note the rating, which should be triple-R, as in Really, Remarkably R.

Dizzy with celebrity, New York society and gay life (if all that isn't the same thing), Infamous is more fun. But "Capote" is a better movie.

A comedic sinkhole, a dramatic tundra.

CHOKE tries to be dirty but manages merely to be dingy.

The first time I saw Yes Man, I thought the concept was getting kind of stale toward the end. As it turns out, that was only the trailer.

The tone is good-natured enough to make a simple movie semi-watchable.

What a sweet collision is Rescue Dawn: the American psycho meets the German kook.

Yet what makes this movie is the digital effects. It's got all the heart of a demolition derby.

Having seen the trailer for Brothers and now the finished film, I feel as though I just watched the trailer twice.

A two-hour trailer: explosion, shape-shift, chase, wisecrack, repeat. Its most amazing trick will be how it vanishes from your memory before the seat you vacate has stopped moving.

You must lead a dull life if it would be enlivened by 76 minutes' worth of Old Joy.

The twists are executed superbly, right up to a climax that fits the David Mamet definition of what makes for a perfect ending: It is both surprising and inevitable.

The film makes little sense (the couple refuses to ride subways, but Metro-North is OK), but it's a diverting conversation piece/freak show.

Scenes that should be grotesquely funny deliver only chuckles rather than a big payoff.

A big warm cinematic jelly doughnut stuffed with youth, vitality, style, whimsy and other equally alarming properties. I tried to love it. But after 20 minutes, I sensed I was intruding on the movie's love affair with itself.

A yellow dog of a movie that delights in offending the offendable. It's also a whitesploitation classic, from its menacing sideburns to its demented laughter.

Those expecting an exhilarating, "Pulp Fiction"-style wrap-up will also be disappointed. Instead, Flowers gives us the impression - as the end of "Traffic" did - that we've just taken a few turns on a merry-go-round of doom that is going to keep spinning long after the movie ends.

The film is shaky as a procedural, and the level of official corruption seems more Moscow than Melbourne. Yet as a fable of power, vengeance and betrayal it exerts a quiet, increasingly wicked pull, equivalent to that of the wrinkly but ruthless grandma.

As the two coaches head for a faceoff in a climactic live TV interview, writer Morgan starts to seem like a rip-off -- of himself.

As portrayed by Anna Mouglalis and Mads Mikkelsen, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky weren't exactly Rhett & Scarlett.

Sharp little psychological thriller.

Director Griffin Dunne's adaptation of Dirk Wittenborn's fiercely personal novel ambles pleasantly through coming-of-age movie territory, then takes a jarring Agatha Christie detour.

A slow train to Dullsville that makes all local stops. You know a film is in trouble if the most interesting thing in it is the luggage.

The Miyazaki legacy is in good hands.

Ryan Reynolds isn't around this time - and neither is most of the wit.

Revenge is a dish best served with bullets, high explosives and giant rolling flameballs. In Quantum of Solace, James Bond orders the revenge buffet, deluxe.

Gives a taste of what it might be like to live inside Mike Tyson's mind.

If we can agree on anything in this great divided land of ours, it's this: Mischa Barton can't act.

The movie is an entertaining stroll through a colorful gallery of characters including, in villain mode, former Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Hoving. "She knows nothing. I am an expert," huffs Hoving, who is so nasty he might as well be wearing a monocle - making Horton that much more fun to root for.

The Concert is an art-house trap, the cinematic equivalent of one of those salads that turns out to have more calories than a Big Mac. And for the same reason: gobs of thick, sweet dressing.

After seeing Everybody's Fine, Paul McCartney offered to write a song that plays over the closing credits. That may be because the whole movie is like a celluloid McCartney tune: warm and playful and sweetly earnest, but lightly funny, too, and crafted with consummate skill.

Except for the rock soundtrack, these movies could be silent - and probably should be.

You could say the 3-D animated kidpic How To Train Your Dragon is "Avatar" for simpletons. But that title is already taken, by "Avatar."

Darlings, there's nothing quite so tragique as a boring eccentric.

Romero's we're-all-doomed-and-maybe-we-deserve-it pessimism is so extreme he would fit right in with a real group of brain-eaters: the French.

By the end, we wind up pretty much where we were four years ago when the pictures first appeared in the papers: Inexperienced troops did disgusting things, but it's a mystery who else knew.

The attempts to out-Matrix "The Matrix," with bullet-time super-slo mo, are staged with such theatrics that they're unintentionally funny. This movie also has "Blade Runner" on its mind, and Raymond Chandler, but mostly it's a weak little sister to "Sin City."

It's condescending, it's vague, it's unfair and, ultimately, it's pointless.

Mostly, this frantic film is yet another attempt at “Spinal Tap” silly. At times it goes for the heart of “Almost Famous,” and its sense of rock is that of a barely acquainted observer.

An occasionally revealing glimpse inside the mind of Chapman before, during and after the assassination.

Old Dogs does to the screen what old dogs do to the carpet. It's unfortunate that only the latter can be taken out and shot.

Swank's character, Erin Gruwell, is a real educator who, in the years following the Rodney King riots, coaxed her students into writing about their bullet-riddled lives.

A blast from the 1980s, when the idea that men were essentially rapists and women rapees was a popular way to score chicks on campus.

The story quietly builds to a rueful and fraught climax in which Campbell Scott does his usual exceptional work

The film could have been improved if it had been less aggressively limp. But the post-adolescent, pre-adult moodiness is spot on: Everyone's favorite author is a bitter recluse, and the soundtrack heaves with the suicide sounds of Joy Division. Trier's intent is to reproduce a sweet, hazy vision of the agony of youth. Ever so elliptically, he succeeds.

Even I realize that other people's babies are boring. So is Babies.

Bursting with the usual colorful pop music numbers and lighter-than-a-soap-bubble quandaries, the film is a typical Bollywood entry, not likely to win over many new converts

Eva Green...Gaspingly beautiful, wouldn't you say?

Since the thing is increasingly impatient to jump forward to the next big torture set piece, there isn't any time to establish anyone's character. Butcher shops are bloody, too, but they're not scary.

The movie doesn't really begin or end. Whether the lights have just gone down or the credits have begun to roll, things are pretty much the same for Henry.

The tales mostly drift along and wrap up unresolved. If this is an accurate slice of Paris life, I'll take the relative excitement of Topeka.

Jason Statham, possibly the greatest B-movie leading man of this era, stars in a complicated and clever imagining of what might have happened in the mysterious 1971 London bank heist dubbed the "Walkie-Talkie Robbery" - in other words, it was unbelievably high-tech.

The Love Guru is even funnier than "Wayne's World" or "Austin Powers." Not.

The makers of The Spy Next Door should give 50 percent of their profits to James Cameron for ripping off "True Lies." Let's see, what's 50 percent of nothing?

There are a couple of grams of interesting stories about Miami's drug traffic in Cocaine Cowboys, but the good stuff is cut with 50 kilos of cinematic baking soda.

A 12th-grade "Sixth Sense" with a third-rate plot.

The only possible interest the movie will inspire in anyone comes when Paltrow flashes a breast toward the end, far too late to pump any excitement into an aggressively boring film that gurgles with self-indulgence.

Poison Friends deftly sketches the fine line - is there one? - between "critic" and "loser."

Like warriors themselves, you will be left to sort through a jumble of emotions: pride and sorrow, bitterness and gratitude. [09 Feb 2007, p.43]

Plodding drama.

Last week I thought watching women take their clothes off was sexy. This week I saw A Wink and a Smile.

For its wicked innocence, this is the finest rock movie since "Almost Famous."

A working-class hero of a film.

The misleading documentary Trumbo paints a golden nimbus of holiness around the onetime highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood, Dalton Trumbo, an on-the-record hater of democracy, defender of authoritarian rule and avowed Communist.

There probably aren't enough futuristic Goth rock musicals, but Repo! The Genetic Opera is weak on a couple of things a musical needs: music and lyrics.

A mashup of Nick Hornby and Martin Scorsese? Why not?

Made to win awards, and I'm here to present it with one: the Cliché of the Year honors, otherwise known as the Hackney.

Transporter 3 is made for airplane viewing, and not just any airplane: an Eastern European one, on the flight from Hrubbishnik to Slutnya.

An occasionally amusing but strained fable about the dangers and delights of sibling rivalry that asks us to believe (for instance) that soccer scouts roam Mexico looking for 30-year-old recruits.

Brutally banal chitchat about life and love ensues.

"Rush Hour" was acceptable. It was to "Rush Hour 2" what McDonald's is to White Castle. "Rush Hour 2" is to Rush Hour 3 what White Castle is to cat food.

Fans of deadpan comic fantasy writers like Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut are likely to be intrigued by this lively little packet of weird -- then dive like a dolphin into Keret's loopy story volumes.

Essentially amounts to an extended interview with a psycho, fleshed out with background material that, while suitably shocking, is not always illuminating or even frank. The film is curiously shy about calling Varg what he is: a Nazi.

The movie (Untitled) is a tinny satire destined to go "(Unwatched)" because it is "(Uninteresting)."

The Young Victoria achieves a fine balance. I guess that's what you get when a film is produced by both Martin Scorsese and Sarah Ferguson.

This is the British way to mingle ideas and entertainment.

We watched a story of a Labrador. Who eats the couch and disobeys. I said to Lady, "It's a labra-bore."

Buscemi is appealing as always, but the movie, is only sporadically funny.

It's ragged, and at times it scrapes your comedy ganglia like a cheese grater. But 15 minutes or half an hour is an ideal chunk of time to set aside for truly inspired absurdism.

The smart indie comedy Diminished Capacity deals with three kinds of dementia: those relating to aging, concussions and being a Chicago Cubs fan. Tying those three things together is a task that the witty script does with surprising adroitness.

When I'm Still Here reached its climactic moment -- Joaquin Phoenix puking into a toilet -- I had never before felt quite so much like a toilet.

Goldblum's wobbly German accent and the staginess of the script doom this effort by Paul Schrader ("American Gigolo").

Oh, and one more thing the comedy of Jackass 3D has in common with "The Divine Comedy": Neither of them is funny.

At some point, this movie must have been a screenplay. But it's an enigma why anyone would bet tens of millions of dollars that people would laugh.

The movie falls into all the usual rhetorical traps.

Most of the comedy comes from dull situations like a fat guy trying to put on a fat suit for no reason.

If you're old enough to pluck gray hairs, you may find yourself rubbing away a few tears.

Red has more snappy joy in store than practically all of last summer's busted blockbusters.

Although it has affecting moments, the film can't quite decide whether it's about aging or about the effects of war on the home front.