Laura Sinagra

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

Like Catherine Hardwicke's "Thirteen," this film has an ear for the way moms talk to kids, a sensitivity to drug-sweetened intimacies, and an appreciation of the urgent nuance, not just the comedy, of recovery-speak.

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.

Even in the teen-flick "Sweet Valley" of 1987, there were few places outside John Hughes's brain where paying somebody to be your girl didn't look like prostitution. Yet somebody made the Slow-Times-at-Clueless-High stinker Can't Buy Me Love.

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.

The film has a feel similar to his songs--airtight, forthright, never spat till they're set.

Nothing plot-wise is worth e-mailing home about. But director John Polson's surging pace, double-flip edits, nu-metal bash-ins, and copious jump-fucks make a sure-handed tempest in this teacup.

Unlike Reese Wither-your-spoon, stagy Murphy actually does deserve her own "Philadelphia Story," or "Singin' in the Rain." She's obviously a camp genius (see "Clueless," not "8 Mile"), but this dopey script, topped with too-pretty Kutcher's rote 70's Show blowups, ain't it.

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.

Bury this in the time capsule: a memento of the Clean South, 2003.

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.