Lisa Schwarzbaum

And for a movie that stars acts of God, this work of mortals provides surprisingly little liftoff. The stuff that whips through the angry skies in Twister is the most exciting part of the spectacle. Essentially, we're turned on by debris.

Part punk-drab British art-house portrait of underclass despair, part bloody vigilante pic, Harry Brown is shakily held together by industrial-strength sound design and the expertly employed theatrics of Michael Caine in the title role.

Director Ira Sachs moves to the rhythms of his native Memphis, teasing emotional resonance out of geography.

Mostly about slapping together a bunch of clichés -- outdated clichés at that -- regarding the loneliness of ambitious women.

Moreau's few ripe scenes are choice, and she spices up the joint with her gravelly voice of je ne regrette rien.

In one rotten production -- all involved have managed to create the most unlikable, man hating, woman hating, unfunny idiots since ''Whipped'' ended up on worst movie lists last year.

The superb screenplay won an award at Cannes this year for good reason.

The cast itself is weirdly overqualified.

The best thing going for Selena is Selena herself, played with verve, heart, and a great deal of grace by the increasingly busy Jennifer Lopez (Money Train, Jack, Blood & Wine).

Walking and Talking is saved from utter banality by a script dotted with occasional buoyant moments of tenderness and wit, as well as by the light touch of its attractive cast.

Great, restrained performances of Beatty and Schreiber, delicately framed by the filmmaker's taste for visual compositions.

The chief frustration of this otherwise well-made, well-acted, well-heeled picture -- a movie classy in its artful modesty, with every detail of plot and period furnishings lovingly conceived, every lick of jazz-influenced score true to the times -- is that it is so very self-absorbedly graceful about something so very insular and...unremarkable.

A failing-grade comedy about the wishful triumph of high school dorks over high school bullies.

Best of all, there's a lot of Jolie, barrels blazing. The star's fearlessly sexy hauteur is unique in the biz today. And when she works it in Wanted, she kills, bullets optional.

The conclusion of Peter Jackson's masterwork is passionate and literate, detailed and expansive, and it's conceived with a risk-taking flair for old-fashioned movie magic at its most precious.

The inevitable heavy-handed life lessons about jealousy and responsibility are doled out — courtesy of writers raised with Dr. Spock and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood as spiritual guides. But the creative team also dispatches overeducated parenthood and post-permissive childhood with wry, observant wit.

Brims with life and loveliness even as it meditates on the loss of childhood.

Dazzlingly beautiful, funny, and meaningful.

But it is the steady accretion of hundreds of small moments in this elegant, high-spirited, intensely satisfying production -- the director's third American movie, but the first to approach the dazzle of his Hong Kong stuff -- that, toted up, makes everything right about this des- perately welcome thriller.

Working with an explanatory script by Dean Georgaris, Reynolds is much more confident in scenes of realistic battle, or even muddy marketplace dailiness, than he is with scenes of desire.

Ice Age: The Meltdown blithely looks on the bright side of life, amassing a screen full of vultures to sing and dance ''Food Glorious Food'' and daring us not to get happy.

Goes where all too few films dare to venture these days -- into the heart of moral darkness.

Maybe this well-loved Luke is who his neighbors want him to be, a good fellow who, with his father, reopens the old movie house in town -- the Majestic -- thus allowing his neighbors to dream in the dark again.

A stinker, the more so for the thespian excesses of the accomplished cast.

This is no real-life comedy à la "Election" -- more like a valuable, teen-scaled version of the presidential election that currently obsesses us.

Waltz With Bashir has transcended the definitions of ''cartoon'' or ''war documentary'' to be classified as its own brilliant invention.

The dramatic power, though, comes entirely from the eloquence of old people, shot in medium close-up, barely moving as they remember things.

A warm and honest portrait of a marriage at its most mysterious, and ordinary.

Measured in anything other than biblical cubits, the sum of Babel's many parts turns out to be a picture that suggests Americans ought to stay home and treat their nannies better.

A demented, orgiastically gory vampire/sex parable.

As a horror picture, Blair Witch may not be much more than a cheeky game, a novelty with the cool, blurry look of an avant-garde artifact. But as a manifestation of multimedia synergy, it's pretty spooky.

Noyce's movie works because the director -- trusts himself, and his audience, to understand that catastrophe isn't always a matter of loud ideology. Rather, it's the result of age-old human weakness. And sometimes it's quiet.

A strange history lesson that leaves us more overlectured than properly overwhelmed.

The movie wants so badly to be mentioned in the same breath as "Heathers" or "Election" that it's not even funny. Really, I mean it, this charred-black comedy is not even funny.

The one valuable prize for audiences in this war pic Cracker Jack box is Jude Law. Once again the talented Mr. Law makes more of a role than most movies know what to do with.

The deliriously enjoyable noir comedy-thriller Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang does nothing by halves and everything by doubles.

Fonteyne edges closer than most to capturing the mysterious rhythms of liaisons -- pornographique, romantique, and otherwise.

No worse than any disease-of-the-week TV movie, and no more moralistic than any Lifetime drama. But it's no better, either, and it ought to be.

Wan, generically pretty adaptation of Alessandro Baricco's 1996 novel.

The filmmaker's got good taste -- and luck -- in casting.

The movie is a rare uncensored postcard from a ruined place, a document at once depressing and hideously beautiful that sketches the real hardships of trampled people -- specifically women -- with authority and compelling simplicity.

Almereyda excises big chunks of plot to shape his vision, but retains Shakespeare's language and pays such rigorous attention to meaning and subtext that what's missing isn't missed.

Feels delightfully organic, eccentrically rambling, the found artistic collage of a woman who herself loves to collect.

In a world full of off the rack thrillers, it's fine boutique quality.

The nightmare is that the live guys in this Dreamcatcher lose the battle the minute the mechanical worm turns.

This ill-fitting movie was mail-ordered from an out-of-date catalog of teen-com stereotypes.

The filmmaker of August Evening creates a succession of quiet, elliptical scenes that accrue into an affecting big picture of family ties and immigrant experience.

A painfully miscast Parker nervously flips her hair and waves her hands, sitcom-style, as a do-gooding dean of students.

Adorable or what?

A gaggle of hip actors squander their gifts in this unfunny, out-of-control comedy.

Gere is terrific at suggesting the kind of addictive cocktail of excitement, panic, chutzpah, creativity, and naked hunger for fame and megabucks that might inspire such big, fat lies.

The loveliest moments put both politics and theatrics aside, conveying the strange beauty of a hard life involving little else than fish, water, and gray sky.

The characters are tedious, as are the fussy performances of Bale and Beckinsale. Everything good in this rock & roll fantasy belongs to the sexy, worldly-wise McDormand, who makes Jane ripe, real, and irresistible.

With sharp riffs on the intersection of '80s pop culture (ALF, Kid 'N Play, Ronald Reagan!) and 21st-century culture (Twitter, Viagra, Second Life!), this Time Machine is a fun dip into a pool of memories that are best forgotten again once the booze wears off.

Thornton, giving a splendid, disciplined performance, seamlessly shapes his coach into a believable man of quality rather than star-size charisma.

Jaoui neatly, gently, firmly slips political commentary into Let It Rain's articulate mayhem.

This insanely busy, exceedingly long, and sometimes endearingly preposterous rendering has simply gotten the directions reversed in its insistence on sticking only to where men-who-make-adventure-flicks have gone before.

There's unwieldy mess -- but there's also unruly brilliance to this dark and funny story about the havoc that ensues when a man's uncensored Freudian id is allowed the run of the place.

A talent-stuffed assemblage of barbs and giddy musical numbers that shouldn't be written off as a feature flop -- but savored instead for the cult-ready collection of late-night satirical skits and misses it is.

Bong Joon-ho's wildly entertaining saga should become the hip, thinking-person's monster movie of choice.

Mike Myers and Austin Powers may stick to their old Beatle boots, but they've both come a long way, luvvy. For proof, just look at all the A-list celebrities-I-won't-mention happy to crash the party.

While Rodriguez punches through the indie clutter to announce herself as a superb new movie talent, so Kusama scores big points in her first main event.

Think of Elizabethtown as Cameron Crowe's rambling amateur travelogue, one from a well-liked professional filmmaker momentarily so distracted by private notes scrawled on his souvenir map that he gets lost en route to telling his story of self-renewal. This undershaped, overlong warmedy is an homage to the memory of his late father.

Many have tried, but none can match Malick's touch for shuffling a deck of elegiac images (water/sky/clouds/rain) and fanning out the hand to express what speech cannot; he's a master, too, of incorporating sound that is often wordless but never empty.

The romantic troubles of three Irish-Catholic brothers on Long Island don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

Requires tremendous restraint not to conclude that this entertainingly apocalyptic mess is about nothing, since it may well be about everything. But I doubt it.

Really, all this movie is about is the joy of checks, calls, folds, rivers, and the acquired thrill of knowing what those words mean.

The Hunted stalks the masculine psyche with sharp knives, but it tracks its audience too noisily to bag us.

Dismayingly conservative dramedy.

The Corporation has better manners and a longer fuse than ''Fahrenheit 9/11.'' But the acerbic, sardonically illuminating Canadian documentary shares with its American cousin a certain bleak leftist glee in pursuit of its cause.

These tales are as highly designed as fashion layouts. But they're as relaxing to thumb through as those NYT Magazine trend pieces.

Enlightenment is good, Dai acknowledges. But the movie's more provocative assertion is the notion that ignorance was also a kind of bliss.

Wilkinson once again astonishes with his ability to convey weakness and strength, hypocrisy and gallantry, cruelty and compassion in the same male animal.

Even Moore's target ticket-buyers are likely to squirm with concern, unsure of who the real weasels and idiots are in this large, unkempt, rambunctious country of ours.

The shallow frat-on-frat rivalry and the poor-boy-loves-rich-girl subplot don't mean a thing. But the stepping does got that swing.

For Yank color in her soap-bubbly movie, director Daniele Thompson has her pal Sydney Pollack appear as...a famous director.

Kevin Bacon's passionate, sharply drawn portrayal of Billy Magic, a slick, finger-snapping, payola-pocketing disc jockey in early 1960s Cleveland, is the best thing about this conventional but heartfelt semiautobiographical coming-of-age story

More than a million people have been displaced in central China in the cause of generating electrical power to meet the needs of the future; Jia's flowing river of a picture washes over a few of them as they adjust to life's currents in the present.

In Get on the Bus, director and material come together with perfect ease — one of those occasional confluences of subject and strengths that make a moviegoer go, ”Of course!” Of course Spike Lee throws all of his bravado, all his storytelling talents, and all his artistic chutzpah into a movie about last year’s Million Man March.

The movie follows convoluted narrative tracks. By the end of the drowsy journey, the characters are indistinguishable from the scenery.

In a staring contest with his audience, Solondz never blinks. He picks and picks at the themes that consume him, and he doesn't care who stays and who leaves. Me, I'm rapt.

Ziplessness has rarely looked so inviting, nor have a couple of actors seemed so much like real people -- attractive, but hardly hunks of perfection -- who happened to get lucky, and are delighted to throw some of their guiltless good fortune our way.

Robin Williams (yes, I'm afraid so) plays a kind of Manhattan-based Fagin with a touch of Midnight Cowboy to his wardrobe. And ants will play havoc in any cynic's pants as this loopy, goopy fairy tale about a kid looking for his parents oozes to its predictable finish.

The real soullessness here is built into the production, a polished adaptation of Hong Kong-style filmmaking that, with its cast of depressive characters, allows for little Hong Kong-style joy.

While each Yorkshire playmate-of-the-month warmly assesses her own undewy flesh, the movie gives off a happy vibe of appreciation -- for the dignity of the real Rylstone lot, the actresses who play them so lovingly, and the simple, flower-bed borders of the story.

Director Roger Michell (''Notting Hill'') conveys some of the sharpest insights into the woman buried beneath the wife and mother in those early scenes, using ragged, vérité-style camera work that takes merciless inventory of a certain stripe of posh, hard-edged modern family life in which dowdy grannies are invisible.

Best of all, a revisit with Jedi makes a viewer appreciate spectacle, presentation, mythology -- that, and the power of a bitchin' helmet to speak volumes in a language even an alien can understand. [Special Edition]

All I know is that something has gone terribly, drum-beatingly wrong in Congo (Paramount, PG-13), and you can sense Jungle Trouble brewing from the git-go.

Bride of Chucky is teen horror for dummies.

There are mountain tunes as powerful as moonshine to be enjoyed in Songcatcher -- but there's also a mighty mushy heap of corn pone to be swallowed.

Thompson, who also wrote the script, has skittery, baffling fun enjoining her plummy guest actors (including Ralph Fiennes, Rhys Ifans, and Maggie Smith) to play broad Brit types.

Roots matter, is Angelou’s Hallmark-style lesson. So for good measure, novice screenwriter Myron Goble also includes an unsubtle subplot about a candelabra that has been in the family since slaves were freed, thereby throwing one more ingredient into this thick dramatic gumbo.

The new movie is an opulent-bordering-on-hysterical mass of chitchat and chase scenes.

In Tarantino's besotted historical reverie, real-life villains Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels are played as grotesque jokes. The Basterds are played as exaggeratedly tough Jews. The women are femmes fatales.?

The only real heat among the group comes from Jennifer Connelly, who, as the bad-girl middle daughter, raises the stakes any time she's on screen.

Dazzling psychological cat-and-mouse drama.

As for the splendid Spaniard Javier Bardem, now knocking socks off in "No Country for Old Men," his lot is worst of all. He's miscast as the romantic Florentino.

Politics is almost an afterthought in this balky, attenuated film.

Nothing about this sputtering midlife-crisis family comedy is natural except the timeless notion that even the most latte-tamed baby boomer has the power to reclaim his inner Iron John. Ray Liotta provides the one true blast of comedic energy as the leader of a real, more pugnacious head-butting gang who tangles with the four amigos.

A marvel of warm collaboration and shared jokes about husbands and wives, shot both in dreamscape color and pristine black and white.

If ''Finding Nemo'' is an awesome Pixar superpower, The Triplets of Belleville is a charming, idiosyncratic, self-governing duchy with huge tourism potential on the other side of the animated-movie planet.

To a character, every man in this faux-homey burg has been castrated! They're all impotent buffoons!

Want Jesuitical fineness of argument? Look elsewhere. This one merely answers the prayers of those looking for an argument.

It's as self consciously arty and fragmented as ''Twin Falls'' was controlled and organically built.

By the end of Death at a Funeral's effortful farce about busted British propriety, you may feel that peculiar facial ache that comes from wishing to laugh with no really satisfying release.

The premise, the structure, and the men-at-twilight conversation in Patrice Leconte's ingratiating drama feel cloyingly predetermined at times, but the sight of Hallyday and Rochefort luxuriating in their contrasting manly personas is a kick.

There's nothing not to like about the movie, a teensy, hand-crocheted trifle, fitted with embroidered pockets of guest stardom, including Mia Farrow as the nice local lady who wants to see what "Ghostbusters" is all about and "Ghostbusters'" own Sigourney Weaver as a movie-studio corporate meanie, ha-ha.

The serious struggle in this lilting doc is told with an inviting light touch and a big heart.

There are no survivors here.

The depth of the story and the characters is awfully slight to bear the weight of such fancy editing. But the performances are crisp and in focus, with Cox in particular showing a photogenic feel for expressing grief.

Hip, funny, mostly nonmusical, decidedly non- epic family picture.

The movie's mortal failing is echoed in the religious medal Pita gives Creasy in a gift of innocent, uplifting love: Finding heft or coherence within all the lugubrious agitation is a lost cause worthy of St. Jude.

There's fun robot stuff, some good philosophical ideas, and a brief, nutty Willis-Ving Rhames reunion 15 years after "Pulp Fiction."

A sad-but-hopeful, dramatic-but-gentle fairy tale intentionally made less upsetting for teens.

The premise of the short-story-size comic thriller Don McKay is as thin and crumbly as a corn chip.

At least some Goode may come from Chasing Liberty: I hope we'll be seeing more of the handsome and unboyish young man with big star potential who looks ready to take on more, not Moore.

Storyboarded with precision, and enhanced with a resonant score by Deborah Lurie, Acker’s handsome, feature-length 9 is, for all its visual flights of fancy, grounded in an apocalypse-proof message graspable by any schoolchild.

Rachel Griffiths...is the best reason, nay, the only reason to pay attention to Me Myself I.

A light romantic do-si-do.

The audience for this grimly disquieting film is, or ought to be, self-selecting.

Shine beams with warmth, sensitivity, and fine taste.

Lane and Gere mime adult courtship with the efficiency of synchronized swimmers. Yet in this ocean of emotion, they look like they're drowning.

The Other Man is self-conscious, overproduced, overacted Euro-marital hoo-ha.

The script is a steady accretion of small stabs to the heart, propelling the gorgeous performances of Berling, Regnier, and especially the 76-year-old French cinema veteran Bouquet, whose every faint smile is killing.

Undeniably powerful, the work also comes with its own built-in shield against feeling any one character's difficulties too deeply, or for too long.

Some sure symptoms: The movie demonstrates a smart movie geek's obsession with the rhythms and gory details of horror storytelling, undermined by a pompous insistence on spiritual lessons of the tritest kind.

What matters is that Tiana triumphs as both a girl and a frog, that dreams are fulfilled, wrongs are righted, love prevails, and music unites not only a princess and a frog but also kids and grown-ups.

The Clearing is what's known in the biz as an alternative for adult moviegoers. Which is to say the film is a performance-driven drama devoid of special effects and loud noises. On the contrary, it's a meditation on midlife weaknesses and compensation.

When they're good, the Yes Men are astonishing, anarchic sights to behold.

Stronger on beautiful imagery than on narrative flow.

Congratulations are in order for Rachel's sexual awakening, but we might as well applaud the dull girl for falling in love with the nearest bunch of lilies rather than the florist.

The movie represents an earnest effort to compensate for all the love the media has shown to firefighters and other land-based first responders in recent years with little thought to the Coast Guard; the drama also crashes on wave upon wave of clichés.

The whole movie turns into a violent, pointless, torture-or-be-tortured chase.

Long before the second hour of Australia (which feels like the fifth), it's clear that Luhrmann hasn't found a satisfactory way to make a movie nearly as ballsy -- or coherent -- as he wants his creation to be.

An unintentionally ludicrous drama of repentance.

Tim Allen doesn’t do anything new in Jungle2Jungle, but he’s got that Allen-via-Disney persona operating at maximum efficiency.

One of the wonders of the holiday season.

Perhaps the highest praise that can be given Paltrow is that there are no appreciable performance gaps between her green talents and the rest of the truly top-drawer cast.

Natalie Portman demonstrates tour de force weeping in the back of a taxi as an American searching for her roots in Israel.

There's an adult life force in every frame of this luxuriously paced work, even in the sight of rain and a lady's stocking.

Fanning is remarkably collected and even dignified. As for the rest of the gang, they ought to be returned to sender.

Mildly cute, mildly drooly, majorly too late spoof/homage.

At the bone, Zombieland is a polished, very funny road picture shaped by wisenheimer cable-TV sensibilities and starring four likable actors, each with an influential following.

Afterward, you'll want to listen to the Beatles sing ''She's Leaving Home.'' It might be a girl like Jenny the lads had in mind.

What's ultimately shocking about Kika is how empty mayhem can be made to look.

Williams turns out to be exactly the wrong candidate for the job, a comedian singularly uninterested in letting anyone else get a word in, but with nothing to say.

Imamura's delight in the infinite oddity of men and women is goofy; it's also, at heart, reverent.

The movie's warm advocacy of hospice, with all the dignity such end-of-life care provides, does real, influential good.

Everything about Foster's ocular intensity is riveting, but little in this hushed vigilante drama makes sense.

As the players enact the fall and rebirth of civilization, Meirelles suggests that even a society gone to hell looks better with a little music-video-like pizzazz.

A tough, authentic street drama born, bred, and shot in the no-spin zone of working-class South Boston.

Simplest of its charms is the opportunity to watch Mortensen adapt his charismatic demeanor of wary, taciturn soulfulness from that of a Middle-earth king-in-waiting to one fitting a half-Lakota horseman in 1890.

A decent disaster pic comes down to the handful of colorful individuals who will live (or, depending on the prominence of their billing, die), as it has since the days of chewy disaster meatballs like ''The Towering Inferno'' and ''Earthquake.'' And the heaviest lifting in Emmerich's production falls to Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal.

The screenplay, by Zemeckis and William Broyles Jr., plumps Van Allsburg's simple fable about the purity of childhood faith in what can't be seen with all sorts of wholly invented characters, complications, and declarations.

It’s an unmitigated nightmare of crude, boorish tripe-and woe unto our nation’s future if kids find it hilarious.

The performances are relaxed. The open-ended, vignette-like structure of the filmmaking sometimes imitates the movement of weary, life-worn men nursing liquor.

It's not the fault of "The Sopranos" charismatic, beefy star (Gandolfini) that he's an actor of such substance and quiet ardor as to make idle movie star ribbitting look frivolous.

Runs into construction problems, maybe from too many foremen. DeVito favors pushy slapstick; Stiller prefers hotshot sarcasm. Barrymore's comic talents are wasted; she's there for decoration.

Never harmonizes into a cinematic experience any more resonant than the average, manly, why-we-fight pic, or coalesces into a stirring cry for freedom.

As directed by Dwight Little ("Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home," a morph of "The Day of the Dolphin" and "Lassie Come Home"), the tension-to-action sequences unspool efficiently.

Like choral singing and travel photography, this adventure is more fun for participants than it is for spectators.

The brittle, very ''written'' catty quips meant to characterize Washington hypocrisy sound perfunctory; the story of an aging, self-hating homosexual who goes home alone to his lacquered town house feels ancient as well as uncomfortable for the writer-director. (Harrelson seems both game and ill at ease.)

''Documentary'' is too impersonal a word and ''visual poem'' is too mushy a phrase to describe Of Time and the City, a short, beautiful, characteristically sublime memory piece by the great British auteur Terence Davies.

A dark, ambitious, unsettling piece of work.

It's got the pleasing proportions of a stocking stuffed with agreeable little treats in the absence of an exciting big surprise.

Overstyled pseudo-thriller.

When it's dull, which it is too often for a kidnap caper, this movie is about a woman chirping ''notice anything new about my outfit?'' to a man whose idea of style is a jacket not crusted in human blood.

Union, who looks so chic and can talk so bitchy-funny, doesn't so much establish a character as roll out a series of attitudes. That's all she's called on to do. That's all anyone is called on to do: Be very tame, and make much ado about zilch.

This otherwise entertaining, aficionado-oriented production, with its circus-act technology that lets a viewer feel, briefly, like a member of the Petty racing dynasty, is as gaudily patched with corporate sponsorship as the sport itself.

FYI, there's zero chemistry between P.S. I Love You's two commodified headliners. P.S.: The plus in the harsh grade goes solely to the divine Lisa Kudrow, delivering desperately needed laughs as the twitchy widow's husband-hunting best friend.

Doug Pray's cool documentary about 85-year-old Dr. Dorian Paskowitz, his wife, and their eight sons and one daughter is about surfing insofar as surfing is the family's shared passion.

With him (Schwarzenegger), we return to a franchise we never knew we missed, surprisingly grateful for the star's generosity -- and evident pleasure -- in strapping on the old sunglasses and blasting adversaries to hell.

A vinegary fable with a Splenda aftertaste -- is a harbinger of hope not only for future feminist comedies of any grit but also for ''SNL''-staffed feature films that don't disproportionately suck.

The movie implodes, with each actor less vivid than he or she ought to be and each character less connected to the others than necessary for such an arbitrary plot.

The energy is sapped by clinging condescension in the guise of compassionate liberalism.

There's piercing sadness, and fury, too, in this Everyman's isolation, and Cantet is singularly skilled at evoking the universal condition of such tragic ordinariness.

A frustratingly inert story, a bookend to last year's wooden ''Captain Corelli's Mandolin.''

With Intolerable Cruelty, though, something scares me: I cannot detect a heartbeat of feeling, no matter how close I press a stethoscope against the star machinery of George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Radio is assembled from small, hard stones of ignorance and intolerance paved over by large, mushy examples of community goodness.

The story is timeless; this could have taken place when Doyle graduated in '76 -- or any year, really, since the effects of high school linger throughout adult life and nerds are forever.

Van Damme and his cronies (including Lela Rochon, Paul Sorvino, and, for no immediately graspable reason, Rob Schneider as Van Damme's rabbity sidekick) race, speed, shoot, chop, and zip through scenes of such festive mayhem, plot is a clunky afterthought, like a lopsided fake Prada label on a cheap nylon knapsack.

Hits you on the head until you laugh.

All too content to be a comedy of surfaces and stereotypes. And because, for all the novelty of the bisexual romantic angle, there's something about Jessica, her New York-singleton ticks and her Jewish-family tocks, that feels...old.

Another grotty drama about junkie love? Well, yes...I make an exception for Jesus' Son.

There's nothing particularly revolutionary about writer-director Robert Edwards' grimly satiric political fable.

We're in David Mamet World. William H. Macy -- the quintessential player of Mamet men in all their impacted rage -- stars in this claustrophobic adaptation.

Smith profiles five extraordinary American homes, and because the owners seem fully aware of the uses and abuses of fame, it's a pleasure to enjoy their eccentricities.

This movie is as packed with flashy bogusness as a lead singer's tight leather trousers. On the other hand, there's nothing bogus about the charisma and tough sweetness of Wahlberg.

What's new and nutty, though, is the physical comedy of Jackie Chan as Fogg's manservant.

A histrionic mess.

There's something almost too controlled, cerebral, and overdetermined about Winterbottom's Western notions.

A slight romantic comedy about five winsome Australian university students who fret and joke about their romantic woes when not talking about movies and cinematic theories. Each has a charming quirk — one (Frances O’Connor) is a cute lesbian, another (Alice Garner) is writing a thesis on Doris Day — but none is deeper than a bag of Reese’s Pieces.

Who knows whether the project is meant to be earnest, ironic, post-ironic, made for adults, made for kids, made to teach lessons, or made to be watched in an altered state? All or none...jeez, this thing is one bumpy ride.

The rare footage of '50s and '60s L.A. alone is a treasure; the City of Angels has rarely looked so hip. Bonus: cool music from the likes of Charles Mingus and the Velvet Underground.

But while this piquant, tapas-like movie (a 2003 film- festival favorite only now being released) asserts that landscape is a kind of destiny from which one cannot escape, Sorin takes delighted, serious interest in how far a person can advance psychologically, even if all roads lead back to a home at the end of the world.

"The Station Agent's" Peter Dinklage provides diversion as a gay wedding planner.

The movie, directed with a gym teacher's whistle by "Scooby-Doo's" Raja Gosnell, is a contempo soft-focus remake of the 1968 original starring Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda.

As ungainly in its jammed-together East-meets-West-ness as Steven Seagal in a yoga pose.

Almodóvar's masterwork, is a spectacular synthesis of everything that has always interested him -- proud women, lovely boys, beautiful drag queens, grand movie stars, gorgeous frocks, wild wallpaper .

Stunning, unsettling, beautifully written drama.

The Promotion edges toward some pretty bleak stuff. Then it steps back and laughs, like an office slacker.

As the reigning inhabitant, Redgrave adopts the swanning gestures of Maggie Smith in this mild adaptation of a Maeve Binchy story.

If you see only one comic love story from Kazakhstan this year, choose this prize-winning honey.

That Annaud and his deft production team create believable dramatic characters without compromising the dignity of the animals they've borrowed as stars -- is the striking (and sometimes unnerving) achievement of a film that also swoops and loops through fairytale hoops.

Overly fussy and self-conscious in its noir details. But in The Missing Person, Buschel makes striking use of the Mike Hammer/Philip Marlowe tradition.

The movie luxuriates in cinema references while laughing at its own fetishes -- a neat talent.

This stunning movie -- one of the very best of the year -- makes a much read American classic feel new and freshly devastating.

Peculiarly bloodless.

It's a buoyant, old-wave disaster pic for a generation of well-conditioned thrill seekers charmed by the revelation that Richard Dreyfuss really is the Red Buttons of our day.

The very opposite of a storybook romance, and also the very model of a great comedy for our values-driven time.

Enchanted is festooned with extravagant set pieces -- there's a great number in praise of romantic gestures, and a ballroom scene to make even grown-up girls swoon.

There may be nothing more fun for actors than experimental exaggeration, especially when filming on a Caribbean island. But there’s nothing that makes an audience feel less welcome than not being in on the joke.

To fully savor Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience, it's best to watch with an audience overwhelmingly populated by girls and young women.

This galvanizing cinematic work is also gorgeous, experimental, alive with a Scandinavian strain of chutzpah, and artistically elegant.

The goons themselves, though, look rather chic, flying through the air in Galliano-goes-to-hell garments straight out of Vampire Vogue.

Educational and upstanding, a little overacted and more than a little overdramatized. But it's honorable.

There are times (and plenty of them) when Slither slops over from smart, affectionate homage into unmodulated frat goofiness as Gunn cannibalizes so many horror plots with such high spirits.

Expertly sinister, office-as-devil's-playground French thriller.

You could trawl the seven seas and not net a funnier, more beautiful, and more original work of art and comedy than Finding Nemo.

Writer-director Salvatore Stabile has a good eye for the details of hard-luck ordinariness, and he sketches believable family bonds with a minimum of flourish.

To Winn-Dixie's great credit, both as a book and as a dandy, dignified movie, there's nothing condescendingly lesson-like in the wisdom India acquires.

An anguished Macedonian drama.

The most unexpectedly audacious, exhilarating, wildly creative adventure thriller I've seen in ages.

An overdeveloped coming-of-age potboiler.

TV's ''I Spy'' knew how to swing. The movie 'I Spy knows only how to scramble and string together moments of Murphy braggadocio and Wilson stoner-ocity, and the sweat shows.

Affleck the director shows excellent instincts, not least of which is letting his younger brother, Casey, hold the center as a young guy not as smaht as he thinks he is.

Noyce honors the story best by standing back (and getting Kenneth Branagh, as a supercilious official, to stand back, too): Noyce lets the landscape and the untrained young actresses own the screen, particularly the naturally magnetic Everlyn Sampi.

By not trying too hard, this remake of a dumb movie has got spring in its step. The bounce is on us.

Not your average divorce gift: Clean's writer-director Olivier Assayas created the role of recovering rock-world druggie Emily Wang for his ex-wife, art-house/action-pic royalty Maggie Cheung (In the Mood for Love).

Bestows generous blessings on all that's good in Englishness, in moviedom, and, of course, in cheese.

A conflicted entertainment, compromised by trying too hard to impress the restless, self-referential adults in the audience.

Each and every character in Christopher Guest's latest hilarious cultural corrective is something inspiring to behold.

The story is as impersonal as it is labored.

The big underachiever turns out to be DeVito, who is incapable of exhibiting believable warmth and complexity, or, indeed, of playing anyone who is not a cartoon.

Färberböck's sensual adaptation is a matter of fact embrace of the unconventional and dangerous during a terrible time.

The Stoning of Soraya M.'s drawn-out torture sequence is harrowing and lurid.

In hovering, The Squid and the Whale becomes its own realistic display of family entropy, as cautionary as it is educational.

More calculated than a Starbucks sampler CD, the picture could win the up-from-hardship award.

Something puddles to nothing in this relentless Miami sun.

Nightwatch is a horror for reasons that have nothing to do with suspenseful moviemaking.

Nothing I've read about Iraq or seen on TV in the past few weeks has felt nearly as real and intimate as this commanding fiction.

Hancock can revel in schmuckery, of course, because you and I and cute kids and peaceful oldies worldwide know in advance that there's no way on Hollywood's green earth Will Smith will ever play someone seriously, dangerously unsavory.

The charms of Evans (from 1995's oddball Funny Bones) and Lane (who's at his best playing to the balcony) are lost in all the detailed hubbub.

Beautifully led by birdlike Sylvie Testud as an ailing young woman in a wheelchair, every character (pilgrim and helper alike) exhibits a soul. And shaped with confident talent by the Austrian filmmaker, every serenely composed shot matters.

Stunning and compassionate period drama.

With an outstanding screenplay by Brian Koppelman and disciplined direction by Koppelman and David Levien, a story that could have been generic (or worse, scented with flowery bulls---) turns into a precise, honest, and affecting drama.

The incisive, close up photography by ''The Sixth Sense'''s Tak Fujimoto outclasses the story by yards.

Here's a romance without a spark of excitement.

A desert of shrill juvenile jokes and clanging chase sequences.

Known for distinctive horror movies like "Cure" and "Pulse," inventive Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa finds just the right melancholy tone to suit a new and all too familiar kind of horror: economic downsizing.

This jovial tour through changing attitudes toward cannibis is so plugged into pothead logic that the opening credits are rerun at the end.

If your allergy to comedies bred from British style mugging crossed with Disney style prancing has, like mine, flared up in recent years, this hybrid from writer director Joel Hershman (''Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me'') will make you wheeze.

And although director Paul Anderson treats the story with appropriate deadpan respect, there are enough sparks of humor (particularly generated by Linden Ashby as a shallow martial-arts actor who worries that he's a fake, with good reason) to amuse the adults accompanying the 10-year-old boys in the audience.

Hersonski quietly and insistently unravels reality from "reality"; her commitment to archival authenticity is its own tribute to those no longer able to testify.

Until he wraps things up much too neatly and idealistically, Koepp puts together a sturdy and efficient thriller.

Fun in its raunchy unwieldiness.

A "Romeo and Juliet" tragedy of surprising power.

Had the ghost of Paul Lynde swanned by in a caftan-clad cameo, you couldn't find a more outdated, miscalculated collection of stale, queen-size stereotypes than those trotted out on this ship of fools.

Like everything else in this superb work of art, ''Shrinking Lover'' is exquisitely Almodóvarian. It's funny, tender, a little shocking, and it pays homage to what we know about movies: that they can move us beyond words.

Don't be fooled: In this unpeaceable kingdom, the den mama is also ready to eat her young.

Although the big picture itself gets mushy, the small moments, especially involving Fey, are sharp.

Pushes and pushes and pushes the emotional throttle without respite.

The superb character actor Celia Weston (In the Bedroom) is truly breathtaking as Ronnie's boozer mom.

Plays out like a variation on an old design dictum: If you can't make it good, make it big.

This condescending story wastes him (Douglas).