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.

This isn't one for the time capsule--just bury it.

Often the script (co-written by Michael Bacall, who plays sardonic bipolar rich kid Chad) rings clear with mouths-of-babes declamations that all pained kids spew before downing adulthood's suck-it-up Kool-Aid.

Disney misfire.

Though Zilberman's affection for the women leads to some indulgent digression, the doc's low-key tone (and lack of the stock, timpani-backed Nazi iconography) throws certain anecdotes into powerful relief.

As a gloves-off Erin Brockovich, Ryan never makes it into the ring.

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.

Less "Freaky Friday" than just plain freaky.

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

Not only documents the soul-titan concert held at L.A. Coliseum seven years after Watts burned, but illuminates the rue and kinesis of a city in full Black Power flower.

Moormann's film transcends A&E hagiography, and Dowd's spry egoism and science-hipster joie de vivre provide piquant icing. Recalling trends, technical advances, artists, and landmark sessions (one where he suggests the rhythm for "Sunshine of Your Love"), Dowd conjures the excitement that helped coax so many iconic performances.

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.

If Martínez-Lázaro, as he reiterated at the Miami Film Festival earlier this year, wants to expand the U.S. Spanish-language film market, one hopes he'll aim higher than this.

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.

Like "Spellbound's" glimpse of the darker side of childhood competition, Mad Hot Ballroom--a look at New York City schools' fifth-grade ballroom dance program--is best when exploring issues of class and gender and definitions of success.

Kind of a bore.

Clive Owen proves he can just about save anything.

Maybe it's the terrible lighting, but Friend-out-of-water Aniston spends most of this flick looking like she needs Dustin Hoffman to bang on the glass and get her out of this mess.

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.

A convoluted writing exercise gone horribly wrong.

If hopeless literalist Kasdan could have decided on a tone this could have been a gynophobe's "Independence Day."

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.

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.

The new tunes sound like Buster Poindexter mainlining Sweet 'n Low, and at a critically song-starved moment, John Goodman's Baloo admits, "King Louie? He split!" Before the third defibrillation of "Bare Necessities," you and your kids might too.

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.

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.

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.

Without a scorcher like Pam Grier, the sub-NYPD Blue dialogue and acting dilute what could have been a shrieking wake-up call about for-profit prisons.

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

When this flick is honest about its pimping, it has that Rat Pack charm. But attempts at real ruggish posturing--like that de rigueur sideways-gatted, full-body-exposure firing stance--are just plain laughable.

Really, any wit at all would have helped balance the playful but crass butt-seeking money shots.

A movie that's two-thirds flashback (and could have been called "Ex, Ex, Ex, Why?").

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.

Cube is still adorable, but the potentially poppin' battle between the shop and big-box competitor Nappy Cuts gets obscured by sloppy chronology and flat, cartoonish politicos.

The reverent pacing lags a bit, but the film's meditation on the struggle to find spirituality that reconciles Islam with tribal belief systems is powerful in its understatement, and its wordless observation of France's Malian community quietly evidences daily cultural preservation amid the hard labor.

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

Manages to explore the darker facets of friendship without being dark.

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.

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.