Laura Sinagra

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

A straightforward epic, almost alarmingly quaint in the telling.

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."

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Kind of a bore.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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