Laura Sinagra

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.

The total effect, of course, is abject sadness as we helplessly watch each enact a unique anti-success story in an inverted reality show.

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.

Though the edits can be too living-room smooth, the passion and pathology on display transcend the Tabitha Soren overload.

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.

Despite similar excess, Garbus's follow-up to 2002's "The Execution of Wanda Jean" provides another powerful glimpse inside the American justice system.

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.

With no irony and no plot beyond Girls Have Band, Voss reduces Kali and Fauna to earnest Janus faces of Hole's schizo aesthetic.

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.

Harmless slapstick fun.

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.

The barf stream of gay jokes, pussy jokes, fat wife jokes, more gay jokes, and walrus penis jokes ends up making you pine for Lucy's gift of forgetting.

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.

Beyond the buzz of iconoclasm, our explorers find a regular troubled marriage, only with three sides to every problem.

Russell Fine's kinetic camerawork outperforms the plot.

The God-squad answer to Todd Graff's "Camp."

Too bad the central bedfellowship never gels, and Franc. Reyes's script turns a dissection of ambition into "Sleeping With the Enemy"-style nonsense.

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.

Offers a bumper crop of tasty bits.

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

Another in a line of Dogme half-wits whose madness is posited as a state of tortured grace, the young wife in Kira's Reason is a woman well past the verge.