Laura Sinagra

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.

In interviews, Norbu has compared the editing process to meditation. While his pacing echoes that of polestars like Ozu and Makhmalbaf, his edits make striking events out of mundane motions like hands moving under running water and mouths meeting cups of butter tea.

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.

This charmless nonsense ensues amid clanging film references that make "Jay and Silent Bob's Excellent Adventure" seem understated.

A cockeyed shot all the way.

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.

Unfortunately, Bardem is confined by more than Ramón's paralysis. He also must work within the limits of a partially numbed script.

The best moments belong to Shirley MacLaine, who makes the clipped script sing as Ella.

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.

Bravely bucks the "Behind the Music" arc, conveying a reality of constant flux, a sense of the band being jerked in many different directions.

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.

It's an exhilaratingly decentered tale, with the perspective shifting around so there's no character with whom we totally identify throughout.

With Awesome's insistence on professional sound--only a few times do we get sonically dropped into the cavernous, thumping Garden--and cuts to pristine close-ups of things like Mixmaster Mike's admittedly sick scratch detail work, it plays like a hype victory lap rather than a boundary-smashing study of fan curiosity or pathology.

The film outs itself as a shallow indie "Rambo."

A quiet tour de force for Tilda Swinton, who plays researcher Rosetta Stone and her feisty but fragile alter egos.

Kennedy takes pains to illuminate aspects and insights that buck cliché.

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.

If you can handle the truth, Sarah Goodman's entropic doc is as exquisite a basic training in banal U.S. Army culture as you're likely to find.

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