Lisa Schwarzbaum

The film squanders every opportunity (and international-coproduction cent) on by now imitative Nine Inch Nails-video-style visual Goth-goo, and, scarily, forgets to input a plot or script that makes any sense.

The surprisingly puny haul comes from the jolly, usually sparkling comedy workshop of David Dobkin, who directed "Wedding Crashers," and Dan Fogelman, who wrote "Cars" -- two great movies that both make better stocking stuffers.

Brooks guards the movie from overheating in a surfeit of warmedy.

Older and sadder, Mulder and Scully are no longer sure they've got the energy to even ask if the truth is still out there. And it feels as if Carter is skeptical, too.

Miracle -- the title taken from TV announcer Al Michaels' famous game-clinching cheer, ''Do you believe in miracles? Yes!'' -- wins not when it exhorts by word but when it shows by action.

What willful streak of perversity inspired Kevin Costner to take on this wacky tale of a letter carrier-turned-postapocalyptic hero?

None of this detracts, however, from the terrific piss-and-merlot performances of Channing and Stiles, or from the committed participation of Frederick Weller as a Neil LaBute-era businessman caught in the lounge between two she-devils disguised as businesswomen.

Veteran French farceur Francis Veber proves that feature-length idiot humor is not limited to the Farrelly brothers.

A peculiar combination of willful meandering and matter of fact violence, and it occasionally confounds in its attempts to exalt.

Against all odds in heaven and hell, it creeped me out just fine.

Every once in a while, though, Firth's eyebrow hints, Can you believe I'm wearing this dorky leather breastplate?

A rich, dark, pulpy mess of entanglements that fulfills all the requirements of the genre, and is told with an ease and gusto that make the pulp tasty.

Ramis’ talented, underused SCTV colleague Eugene Levy makes a brief, welcome appearance as a nuttily dim cement contractor, but he’s a zany interlude in an otherwise muted, unzany tale.

Wafer-thin, content-light, structure-wobbly, and whimsy-heavy.

It's a toss-up as to what's the worse sin in this graceless piece of tragedy porn.

Walking the path grooved by such stone-faced confreres as De Niro and Schwarzenegger (and following up on his own more successful self-parody in "Men in Black"), Jones positions himself as a Man in a Stetson.

A jolting, artfully made drama set in and around a suburban playground somewhere between "American Beauty" and "In the Bedroom" on America's psychic highway.

Spiderwick is set in the present, but goes for an overall design look of dainty, cozy, William Morris-y arts-andcraftiness.

The movie is a guzzle of yahoo-Mountain Dew empty-calorie satisfaction: A quick blood-sugar high, an eyeful of bikes and bosoms, and you're out of the theater in 80 minutes. And on a bleak winter's day, that can be meal enough.

God forgive me, but I enjoyed the nerve-racking silliness of this newest, loudest exercise in destruction.

The fact that Allen wrote the script in the '70s explains something about why his newest movie feels so old.

This sloppy, pleasant comedy by playwright and TV producer Robin Schiff (Almost Perfect) is an amiable mess, a padded-out expansion of a play called "Ladies' Room."

For the invited filmmaker, the opportunity to make a statement is surely a thrill, but for the viewer - who can't pause indefinitely, as with a book, between stories - the focus-shifting is a demand.

Anderson's adaptation is heavy on production numbers in which jingles come to life and light on conveying any real feelings of Eisenhower-era darkness the prizewinner herself might have felt during her decades of marriage to an abusive, drunken man.

This hip send-up of the superhero lifestyle has a bunch of great comic bits from a group of great, eccentric talents, but not enough bourgeois discipline to see the story through.

Scottish actor Peter Mullan saves a drama tangled in the seaweed of life lessons from drowning in pathos.

Exceedingly blurred rendering of a simply told, artful novel.

An immediately forgettable action pic directed with a blowtorch by Lee Tamahori.

Myself, I felt victimized by the stereotype shtick of reliably grating Rob Schneider as a Canadian-Japanese wedding-chapel minister from SNL castoff hell. But maybe that's just because this movie encourages sensitivity by hitting everyone over the head with its humor hammer.

"Revenge of the Nerds" is way cooler in its proud defense of geekosity, no question. But anti-ditz role model Amanda Bynes just happens to be cute.

Harrison Ford? Terrific -- and re-energized.

A funny, shrewd, no-bull family comedy about the relationship between mothers and teenage daughters that allows Curtis the comedian to remember her days as a slinky starlet while making use of her wisdom as the mother of an adolescent girl herself.

Excels at creating a keen, creepy sense of a civilization stopped dead in its tracks -- vaporized, almost, except for those disemboweled bodies left still undisposed.

To contextualize the story's lack of subtlety, it helps to see these casting choices as ongoing penance for the time when, as a boy, Chen denounced his own father to the Red Guard.

The son is obsessive and petulant, punishing and self-pitying, and by the time he gets to a talk with his hurt old mother, we understand why.

There are no big thrills, only gentle laughs in this light story by Hugh Wilson and Peter Torokvei (Wilson also directed).

It's a merciless and mirthlessly funny antiwar weapon from a filmmaker who has seen battle firsthand and has lived to make art from memories of hell.

Black Book may be the looniest use of the Holocaust as a playground since Roberto Benigni served up his infernal clown act in "Life Is Beautiful."

At a little over two hours, this is a pared-down but no less essential Dickensian feast.

Anderson's big, showy flower of a movie unfurls brilliantly, each plot petal a thing of exquisite design. Then it ripens. Then it disintegrates, leaving a mess of color and a faint whiff of rot.

The warmth comes through, even if the storytelling is simplistic and clichéd.

It's all very French, very intricate, and -- this is Rivette's magic -- seemingly as light as air.

Driven by Bogosian's finger-snapping dialogue and theatrical structure, subUrbia doesn't allow for much pleasurably Linklaterish lounging; each character has got some serious orating to do before the night is over.

Inside the Norwegian director's glove of empathy is a fist of unappeasable anger.

I'm as touched and charmed by its failures as I am transfixed, at times, by its successful inventiveness and audacity.

The nervy style of this newfangled Western, with its eerie, insinuating score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, is so effective that long after Pitt and Affleck have left the screen, emotional disturbance lingers like gun smoke.

This is an origami story, really, about what a construction of chance the big world is.

There are pleasing outcomes for almost everyone in Happy Endings, and that's not good news.

Suggests that finding one good priest is a feasibility, but it takes a miracle to meet one as hubba-hubba as Ed Harris.

Eventually I gave up on meaning and began instead to study the profuse imagery -- and also the flat characters and anchorless performances.

When you watch this failed horror thriller -- which has been under studio doctors' care for some two years, undergoing futile title changes and reshoots -- there's no respite from the odor of flop sweat stinking up the screen.

Russian-born Xenia Rappoport gives it her tragic-heroine all as an abused Ukraine prostitute-turned-sneaky housemaid in Italy in The Unknown Woman.

The facts are so awful that Dear Zacharycan be forgiven much of its antsiness--as a memorial, as a condolence to Bagby’s parents (who became activists for judicial reform in their late son's honor), and as a howl of grief.

Peculiarly coy feminine-empowerment fable.

But in this standard athlete-dies-young presentation, we never do catch the magic that made Steve Prefontaine a towering figure. Instead, this Pre is a shaggy-haired, sentimental favorite -- a teen angel rather than an Olympian.

Without ever dipping into indignity among wet, half-naked men, Shower sparkles with joy.

Beautiful, compassionate, articulate domestic drama.

Strangely inert drama.

Overworked if heartfelt indie.

No schmucks were harmed in the making of Dinner for Schmucks. That's the problem.

But Levinson's passion to explain how he got from there to ''Sphere'' gives Liberty Heights its own farkatke Hollywood integrity.

The only real magic in The Lake House is that Kate and Alex have never heard of e-mail.

This is a gentle, engaging narrative of constancy and devotion against all odds, both natural and bureaucratic, in which the past represents enduring family values and customs.

It's a puzzlement how so many pros could have so wrecked one of the most beloved, hummably familiar movie musicals in the Rodgers and Hammerstein repertoire.

Ladies! Thelma and Louise drove a '66T-bird, remember?! They picked up a young male hitchhiker 17 years before you did, and they too, um, interacted with a trucker and admired magnificent American sunsets -- is it coming back to you? Nope, it's not, which is exactly why the tires are so low on this creaky vehicle.

Processed comedy chop suey.

Filmmaker Yung Chang finds a sad and beautiful way to glimpse the big picture of dislocation through an exquisitely poised small study.

That the story is so oldfashioned and domestic and the family so average and secular is, in its way, the wind beneath this Broken Wings.

Very ''Waking Ned Devine.'' There's shrewd wit to Pouliot's gentle, no-bull farce.

It's an intoxicating feeling when a movie excites and enlivens us like this -- and there's a particular giddiness to be had in thinking about what movies can (but don't often) do for one's soul after imbibing such a fine vintage.

Reeves is a stiff dancer and he delivers his lines in a full leather jacket monotone.

The movie is smart, serious, and adult about something that matters, but not at the expense of a kind of awful, sensual revelry as le Carré's capacious plot hurtles to its big finish.

This beautiful, terrible story is not easily forgotten.

Bears the weight of too many genres jostling for screen time.

It's sort of an ursine ''The Last Waltz,'' with more costumes and no direction from Martin Scorsese.

It's scariest as a parable about the evil that exists in the hearts of adolescent boys.

The hothouse drama Mother and Child is organized like a femme-friendly spa that specializes in treatments for the psyche rather than the skin. Soft New Agey music tinkles intrusively. Sore spots are prodded and massaged. Clients pass one another in the changing room. The ritual is exquisite to some, and excruciating to others.

The Weather Man is what indie misery looks like when re-created by one of Hollywood's big studios.

There's a tidiness and affection to this British homage to John Hughes movies.

An irresistibly vibrant concert-tour documentary.

Superb psychological thriller.

Soaring and romantic, wild and serene, feminist and gutsy, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is one of the best movies of the year.

Married Life congratulates its audience on a sophisticated, humorous complicity in the obvious immorality of Harry's murder plans, as well as in Richard's own ungentlemanly designs on his pal's gorgeous girl. Every adult, the movie suggests, has got a secret.

Bon Voyage arrives like one of those old soldiers who stumbles from his hiding place unaware that the war is over and the world has changed -- and with it, French cinema.

Strands Cedric the Entertainer behind the wheel and forces him to motor a collection of laugh-and-learn wacky situations by sheer force of his outsize charm.

The title Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is a brain banger. But as sci-fi nomenclature goes, it's easy to read--no twistier, certainly, than "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow."

The pleasure of any Star Trek movie lies in experiencing the familiar mixed with the inventive.

Another 3-D animated kid movie demonstrates that cartoon storytelling pitched to young people is the last, best refuge of sprightly filmmaking this hard, hot summer.

In their stark, black-and-white visual style, they are redolent of Italian neorealist cinema or fine muckraking WPA photojournalism.

Unlike in ''Freaky Friday,'' no magic spells are involved. Nor is there any of ''Freaky'''s marvelous charm in this ungainly Manhattan fairy tale, directed by indulgent sentimentalist Boaz Yakin.

With the same affinity for stories of culture clash he showed in "The Quiet American" and "Rabbit-Proof Fence," director Phillip Noyce embraces the tale with gusto.

Stephen Rea, Aidan Quinn, and Alan Bates play Desmond's legal eagles, and when joined by Brosnan, the sight of this grandiloquent quartet lolling in pretty Irish settings is a pleasant enough thing, 'tis.

Jacquot economically conveys the small, painful sacrifices both lovers -- but particularly the woman -- must make, and the constant, ongoing negotiations of power required to maintain no-strings freedom.

The lame-o aspects of the whole campy setup are still lame-o.

The Ephron sisters, sophisticates entrusted with a simple TV situation comedy, lose the magic of the com as they mess with the sit.

And if real eroticism is missing - this is a Disney movie, with bosoms heaving more in a gentle parody of heaving than in full desire - the great discovery of this Casanova is Hallström's recovered capacity for play.

True to his stolid, humanist instincts and characteristically stodgy directorial style, writer-director John Sayles creates a story more educational than engrossing.

Clooney proves himself to be a true movie star and romantic leading man. His charm, his energy, even his ease with children (one of any adult actor’s most terrifying challenges) carry One Fine Day into irresistibility.