Laura Sinagra

Unfortunately, despite pretty-on-the-inside performances from the four kickass Clamdaddies, too many extra shake-ups end up crowding out the characters, and distract from the easy camaraderie and slice-of-life intimacy that lures us into their van to begin with.

Though agile edits keep things moving, in braiding several tales into one tight suburban tangle, character development takes more shortcuts than "Short Cuts."

Perhaps if Sister Helen had been released when filming was completed in 2000, its tough-loving Irish nun, who gives hell to male drug addicts in a Mott Haven "safe house," might have passed for endearing.

This "Last Waltz"–like doc is almost funereal, full of reverent banalities spliced between overly folksy takes on melancholic Leonard Cohen bombshells.

With a premise this screwy, nobody has any choice but to follow the savvy lead of Bebe Neuwirth, who, as Hudson's "Composure" editor, hams her queen-bitch-mother-hen role to glazed perfection.

What makes Winter Solstice, a nice little Jersey vignette about a widower and his two teenage sons, so striking is writer-director Josh Sternfeld's respect for the verbal shorthand of family interaction.

The clunky yee-haw script full of tired bitch/angel oppositions and Witherspoon's school-play petulance cranks the twang to a blare.

Planned inanity never gets mad mad mad mad enough.

With just the right balance of epic grandeur and break-into-song goofiness, this Bollywood love legend does double duty as a women's-rights manifesto and a plea for amity between India and Pakistan.

Unfortunately "My Left Foot's" Jim Sheridan, that reliable purveyor of Irish struggle-porn, anchors us in tedious exposition.

The Boys of Baraka's heart may be in the right place, but its portrait of poor Baltimore kids selected to attend boarding school in Kenya is rife with suspect perspectives.

Kind of a bore.

Clive Owen proves he can just about save anything.

Despite frequent cuts to mambos and cha-chas, this insulated tale of rich interns swindling rich studio bosses has no “Clueless”-style SoCal breeze (or righteous “Working Girl” gotcha).

The opposition of Christian spirituality and the bad religion of drugs is enough to send you down to the feel-good bodega just on principle.

Never really finds a fresh groove.

On a dark set, between strums and archival clips, this master raconteur exudes his own brand of obnoxious charm, the kind that can only be possessed, never imitated.

Our counselors' lawyer-ese is illegally bland, and their committee-penned banter meticulously Botoxed.

An odd blend of passionate performance footage and maddeningly shallow analysis of Cuba's music and politics.

There's something wrong with Hustle. A bad aftertaste, and not just the dry grit of Memphis dust, but something meaner. A feeling that Brewer's sensibility is way off. Aside from Howard's characterization, the most indelible parts of the movie are the demeaning caricatures forced on DJay's women.

Where the earlier flick (Garden State), in its smallness, felt like an honest representation of writer-director-star Zach Braff's struggles with notions of home, Crowe's is a hodgepodge of great ideas and moods in search of a plot to enrich.

Aims for a mix of "Heathers" wit and "Batman" TV-show camp.

As wrathful health inspector, possessed choir director, and general castrating angel, Union wrecks store with a slew of ass-chapping teardowns that would make Cam'ron curdle.

Fellowes's larger goal seems to be making sympathetic characters of Anne and Bule, who for all their lovey-doveyness never emerge as much more than rich twits à la "The Great Gatsby."

Not only is there not enough panting to bunch any panties, this polite romp could use more of that other L-word: laughs.

Unfortunately, during the inevitable "what every woman wants" breakdown, Zellweger can't muster Doris Day's detached fume.

In the central romantic push-pull, Elster and Harold achieve a rare, edgily hopeful chemistry amid emotional ruins.

Kuryla has her prole banter down, and moments like McKenzie's desperate dance on her jalopy hood when Turturro locks her out move beyond literary sting into kinetic and sympathetic gutter picaresque.

These flashes push Dig! beyond recording-industry kvetch, causing it to stay with you longer than either band's ephemeral music.

Echoes the trajectory of the post-Communist-bloc region itself, unmoored and at the mercy of pitiless capitalist forces.

In this study of keeping up appearances while everything falls apart, the stakes never seem as high as the title suggests.

Russell Fine's kinetic camerawork outperforms the plot.

If this adaptation of Chinese punk-lit writer Wang Shuo's fiction doesn't survive its Bronx trick-out, you can't really blame Brody, whose luminous autodidact seems caught between camp and coolsville.

Theron's empathetic victim-wrath and elemental female outrage almost trump the otherwise cartoonish gender-bending and award-grubbing po' folk put-on.

Moore's lip-glossed petulance never catches fire with Goode's canned drollery.

In yet another roundelay that, like "Crash" and "Heights," follows the "Short Cuts" template of cosmic interconnection.

Bow Wow isn't bad. But he and the dudes who fill out X's crew never quite nail the desired What's Happening!! vibe.

Catherine Hardwicke's directorial debut is less a damozel-in-distress fetish flick than a bird-flipping plunge into coded girl-cult communication.

Blue Car gets so much of the hard stuff (including Meg's Plath-via-Tori poetry) that it assumes the easy stuff will take care of itself. It doesn't.

Potter's anachronistic rhyme schemes tumble forth with an out-damned-spot verve that rages against irrelevance.

Party never gets rolling.

The real charm of this trifle is the deadpan comic face of its star, Jean Reno, who resembles Sly Stallone in a hot sake half-sleep.

Most importantly, the environment feels real: the accents, the snaps, the working moms and warehouse crack nooks, every dilapidated stairwell, every bodega and lovingly appointed teenage bedroom sanctuary.

While the camera unsuccessfully courts Southern gothic humor, caressing a hodgepodge of retro-fetish knickknacks, the actors' knowing glances seem to look beyond the confines not only of the town, but of the film itself.

With a character this dull--so dull that we're told over and over how smart and special she is--the resulting glut of date-ad losers seems like just deserts.

When ditching the mawk to follow his daredevil muse, the director delivers stunning shots of cliff dancing and stunt pilotry.

The filmmaker achieves the desired sense of remoteness and claustrophobic doom, and though the story could be told more economically, her slow approach conveys the distended chronology that attends an indentured servitude resembling slavery.

The cast, save the charisma-free Schneider, is uniformly hilarious, and deserves classier high jinks than this Juwanna Tootsie roll.

Spotting trains that left the station a few years back.

As usual, Figgis coaxes moon-shooting performances, but all the furious improv lacks any sort of map.

Northfork's overall ponderousness prevents it from becoming a transcendent fictive poem on the violent domestication of the West.

Despite Weaver's wise instincts for the thoughtful pause, we're stuck with yet another ass-kicking female actor struggling to shade in the contours of a wispy sketch.

Holder and Parker tread lightly on issues of sexism, and sex in general, and leave us wishing more questions were asked.

A resolution gifting world-surveillance software to the cops, plus slo-mo action over the oft reprised "Close to You," stretch past bullet time into nap time.

Bullock manages medium charm, but you gotta feel for King, forced to play dat-bitch-crazy butch to Bullock's untrammeled femme.

Mostly, its unearned funnier-than-thou smugness plays like a DIY dorm-lounge homage.

It's too bad that Allouache's insurgent Islamists, into whose clutches Yasmine falls for a time, come off like Indiana Jones villains.

It's Filippo Pucillo who gives the youngest son such mellifluous southern sass that you wish the camera would abandon the whole woman-as-sadness retread and scooter off in his direction.

Doubles as a narrative of the nascent women's movement.

Miller's women share the affliction of scars left by dominating fathers. But the stories lean toward self-importance, and used verbatim in heavy voice-over, they register as a parody of spareness. Posey is the only one who has fun puncturing the solemnity, turning the real surreal in a softer version of her usual attack.

Rote melodrama.

A straightforward epic, almost alarmingly quaint in the telling.

The trumped-up alley-to-plaza intrigue could use more smoke and less mirrors.

Hobbles a likable cast with dialogue flatter than Bollywood's cheesiest.

Melodramatic Filipino coming-of-ager concerns the budding sexuality of a young girl in a devoutly Catholic culture.

Aiming for Almodóvar lite, the flick is more reminiscent of "The Love Boat" -- drenched this time in cheery polysexuality. Everyone is an angel (and a horny little devil) in this breezy earthly trifle, even if the zaniness never quite takes wing.

Lots of Dowse's ideas work well--the ringing tinnitus, the conversion of sound to visible waves, the trimming of treble and bass for underwatery effect, the removal of ambient noise entirely. But as the humor flags, It's All Gone Pete Tong starts to feel more like an exercise.