Lisa Schwarzbaum

The affectionate, bemused, structurally unkempt portrait is at its best capturing Merritt's close collaboration with his longtime friend and bandmate Claudia Gonson.

Rileys has been casually dubbed "Kristen Stewart's stripper movie," but the handle doesn't stick: Stewart may wear skimpy clothes and grind once or twice from the neck down, but from the neck up she's all hollow, bruised eyes, twisted little mouth, and classic, coltish K-Stew rebellion.

The ever-magnetic Sam Rockwell is Kenny, Minnie Driver is full of beans as Betty Anne's best friend, Melissa Leo is wicked good as an ornery cop, and, in her two chewy scenes, Juliette Lewis reminds fans why we want her to run free forever.

The signature Eastwoodian music that the director lays over the proceedings - piano tinkle, guitar pluck, and an echo of Rachmaninoff out of Noël Coward's Brief Encounter - can't hold the assemblage together.

Milla Jovovich slinks cartoonishly as Stone's seductive wife, on a mission to compromise the lawman. Lordy.

A gaily busy kid flick.

Impressively unflappable and natural, 23-year-old Lohman -- whose best known credit is perhaps a role on Fox's short-lived ''Pasadena'' -- holds the whole plot together skillfully.

Costner (who's also a producer) plays to his middle-aged strengths in a role that exaggerates male weaknesses.

This trip down The Road to El Dorado proceeds under the speed limit all the way.

Watch for the director's own mother, Lili Kosashvili, a standout as Zaza's fierce, stately mama.

She's no Mary Poppins: Maggie Smith is more like a cheery Angel of Death in the light black comedy Keeping Mum, one of those dutifully daft British diddles (complete with Rowan Atkinson as a vicar) that, except for the blunt sex talk, might have been constructed decades ago.

The result is a movie, and Cannes Palme d'Or winner, of riveting power and sadness, a great match of film and filmmaker -- and star, too.

A graceful, unsentimental, well-made movie.

Spike Lee noisily attempts to place the hunt for real-life serial killer David Berkowitz at the center of a hotheaded sociological fantasy linking disco glitz, punk rebellion, ethnic insularity, sexual craving, and sizzling heat into one rattling chain of urban hysteria.

Director Bahman Ghobadi (Turtles Can Fly) shot his faux documentary in secret, and the close-to-the-ground style compensates for the tenuous narrative structure by capturing the energy and variety of Tehran's music scene in all its bravery.

True deft wit is just plum missing from this good-natured, flat-footed, eager-to- please, tee-hee Western.

With every recycled piece of business -- which is to say, every scene in Anything Else -- the distance widens between Allen and the elusive audience he pessimistically chases. He has never seemed less in touch with his own real, pulsing, 21st-century city.

Don't tell Walt Disney, but Hayao Miyazaki really holds the keys to the magic kingdom.

The film values quips and declamations over natural conversation (or an explanation of how such intelligent women could have been so blind to world events).

How exceptional a film actor is Russell Crowe? So exceptional that in Cinderella Man, he makes a good boxing movie feel at times like a great, big picture.

Beresford, who'd like to teach the world to sing, makes the moment as moving as a Coca-Cola jingle. It's not the real thing, but it's effective.

We, the people, are meant to cheer in response, but the spirit isn't willing. War is hell, but so is peace -- at least when it comes to movies in a no-man's-land like this one.

As it is, the story collapses like a bad tip to Liz Smith. Still, there's something brash, retro, and even stupidly touching about all the chatty mania, and the way Baitz and Pacino get off on paranoia, conspiracy theories, and the lure of 1960s idealism.

The hilarious Malkovich, coiffed in an artful pageboy and savoring a fruity French accent, would overpower the competition on sheer thespian madness.

Shanley turns out to have dismayingly few original cinematic notions to back up the basic did-he-or-didn't-he hook in his study of conviction and compassion.

Where the movie falters is in sustaining the tricky balance between pastoral life lessons and creepy suspense.

In the very funny cop comedy Hot Fuzz, overachieving London police officer Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) commits a very British sin: He's too good.

More naturalistic -- and as a result, more believable.