Lisa Schwarzbaum

Preposterous-for-no-good-reason supernatural tale.

Surges with an energy and visual verve that improve the play and enhance the themes of dramatist Peter Morgan's script.

Like the comic strips of Ben Katchor, Tokyo Godfathers artfully appreciates the beauty and humanity in junked lives and landscapes.

However admirably Minghella urges a break from complacency and an entry into a state of local/global compassion, his characters are position holders rather than people.

An unlikely comedy charmer.

Scattershot, hit-and-often-miss comedy.

A reality-twisting cousin to "Being John Malkovich" -- showcases a Van Damme who's sly like a fox about his own image.

You need know nothing about Italian politics to completely enjoy the fantastical, Fellini-fied, tragi-comic, biographical fun-for-all Il Divo.

An affectionate puff profile.

Gillen can't make good on his gaze's search and destroy capabilities.

Greggory anchors Gabrielle in manly bewilderment and rage, while Huppert claws the title character's way to self-awareness.

In aiming for a new kind of lit-drama cool, Jane Campion freezes the warmth right out of Henry James' expansive heart.

The most beautiful movie ever made about a man who could only move one eyelid -- almost dangerously beautiful.

The best scenes are hilarious sessions between the great Gemma Jones and the wonderful Pauline Collins as a charlatan fortune-teller.

But the story is, still and all, only a pause, deferring an intensely anticipated conclusion. And it's in that exquisite place of action and waiting that this elegantly balanced production emerges as a model adaptation.

The movie bubbles with intellectual curiosity and narrative ambition.

The Island begins with a whimper of interest as a cool-hued, cautionary exploration of the ethics of cloning, and ends, in a hail of product placement, with a dumb bang.

The movie was a major success for Melanie Griffith, sure, but it was as the secretary's boss ... that Weaver combined all of her star qualities, pulled in laughs, and took home an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Of all the shocks in the riveting and timely political thriller Paradise Now, the most unsettling may be the dignity bestowed on a pair of prospective Palestinian suicide bombers.

The three are so full-bodied and so powerfully affecting that you're carried along on the pleasure of being in the presence of their extraordinary talent.

In the grim and empathetic lost-youth drama Sweet Sixteen, the director focuses on a few failed souls -- rather than excoriate the system that failed them -- to produce a story of particularly streamlined, eloquent despair.

Adrien Brody completists will appreciate Love the Hard Way, if only as an example of the kind of self-conscious, brat-noir projects their man probably won't be doing anymore.

The breath of cinematic life, though, the sensibility, the energy, belong to Joel and Ethan Coen, and this is their stirring success.

Neither star is sloppy, but both are loose and mellow -- a couple of pros who know they're the whole show.

Even the championship showdown feels polite.

It's Complicated is middle-aged porn, the specialty of Meyers, who also set ladies and interior decorators drooling over homes and gardens in 2006's “The Holiday.”

The movie meets the requirements of the "Life Is Beautiful" school; those loyal to the tougher, more stringent Osama academy of realism need not apply.

And among the things this ''HP'' does very well indeed is deepen the darker, more frightening atmosphere for audiences of all ages already familiar with the intricacies of the ''Potter'' landscape. (This is as it should be: Harry's story is supposed to get darker.)

Almodovar is positively mature, adapting a novel by Ruth Rendell so deftly that the plot now also describes the invigorating and sometimes disorienting effects of democracy after long years of repression under the Franco regime.

A slippery entertainment that's all feints and few punches thrown at a fight card of indistinguishable terrorists, Muslim and otherwise.

This is one of the year's best. To paraphrase the Wild Thing named KW, I could eat it up, I love it so.

It took director-producer Leon Gast 22 years to edit and finance When We Were Kings, his thrilling documentary about the legendary 1974 heavyweight-championship fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire. But the lag time has only deepened the impact of this thrilling documentary: All sad thoughts of Ali as a wounded warrior fall away in the glow of seeing the champ at his best.

This charm-filled documentary about passionate Harry Potter fans (and one foe) leaps all over the place.

It's a gussied-up sorority-of-rising-stars project produced, I fantasize, by baby-boomer studio guys whose younger spouses articulately defend a woman's right to stay home and raise the kids.

This peachcolored comedy about a wacky family who shove their sadness into a bulging closet is being marketed as ''from the producers of Little Miss Sunshine'' All that's missing from the formula is a Volkswagen Microbus.

A disconcertingly jumpy tale of breathtakingly crummy parenting, the windblown movie dares a tolerant audience not to call Child Services.

Does a great job of being in two places at once: In the head and gangly bodies of kids, and in the hearts of those of us who have survived grades 6-8.

It took me two viewings to enjoy the landscape of Weerasethakul's mysterious jungle -- so very thick, steamy, and foreign -- without wishing for clearer trail markers.

What falls in Chicken Little are hopes.

An alarming male wallow passing as a fetching date-night dramedy.

Excessive, but I, like Mr. Jingles, can't resist the Christmas-season cheese.

The power of this great movie -- part comedy, part tragedy, part satire, mostly masterpiece -- is in the details.

Timing is everything. And Youth in Revolt is late -- arriving not just at the tail end of the star's sell-by date for this particular kind of character, but more importantly at the tail end of the intended audience's attention span for an inconsequential Sundance-y tale of sexual coming-of-age.

Gorgeous as the underwater life-forms are, the excitement of Aliens of the Deep comes from that most old-school, low-tech of elements: real human beings.

Circles the heart of noisy, modern Tehran with an informal, documentary-like freedom that is thrilling in its naturalism.

Exquisitely structured, pitiless study of a middle-aged man trapped in a stagnant emotional weather pattern.

The Dutch born Janssen sparkles serenely.

Sagnier is yummy.

Ellen Barkin provides unexpected diversion in a madwoman cameo as the PD's brassiest brass. But otherwise the clichés keep coming.

Out of the zany strictures of Dogma 95...Danish newcomer Thomas Vinterberg has made a funny, volatile, visually dynamic story about the unraveling of one extended family during the course of a patriarchal 60th-birthday dinner.

What could have been a parlor game becomes a surprisingly rich sketchbook, boosted by the work of fine actors.

The enterprise might also be called ''Picket Fences on Ice."

There's no artistic or thematic point — except maybe to demonstrate that a young filmmaker is as much in need of someone to say no as the characters in this disingenuous exercise.

Becomes yet another lame sports farce.

There's a lot of yelling, cracking wise, and cooing in this creepy rom-com.

Director Sérgio Machado, who worked as an assistant to Central Station's Walter Salles, lingers sensually over every wrong move his attractive tragic trio make.

Each man's shtick swells into a frenzy of overacting.

Fan-ready and saga-solid.

Weirdly moving.

The effect-laden showdowns feel more dutiful than daring, and the rare moments of fun are parceled out frugally, like precious nuggets of adamantium.

When a brilliant fish wriggles by, even a less than ardent anime viewer will want to freeze the frame and gape.

That's the moral nut of this highly unexceptional episode, a midlife production in which each Enterprise crew member does his or her vaudeville act.

Without doing anything so divisive as taking sides, The Counterfeiters pays sympathetic attention to those who play their cards to win even when the rules are terrible, not least because the remarkable Markovics, an Austrian TV actor with a pugnacious anvil of a head, is so riveting as an unsaintly survivor.

If it's not up to the cups-and-balls elegance of previous Mamet movies like ''The Spanish Prisoner'' and ''House of Games,'' if it piles on more psychological fake-outs than is safe in a setup this size -- well, at least it's got that talk, that language, that thing Mamet does that is at this point as identifiable as the cadences of the Bard.

The movie's hide-and-seek attitude toward truth mirrors the intricacies of one lover getting to know another -- an arresting notion of the heart that's much more than paper-deep.

Campion's big-sisterly encouragement of Cornish's lovely, openhearted performance -- and Whishaw's well-matched response -- results in a character instantly, intimately recognizable to anyone remembering her own first love.

Even blood, spilled so freely, has a distinctive intensity of red in this beautiful and harrowing film.

Hands On a Hard Body itself is sometimes as bumpy as a panhandle dirt road, but out of the low-budget roughness and moments of Lettermanesque ain’t-folks-nutty humor, sharp portraits emerge of contestants as well as of the families and friends who massage, feed, and revivify the flagging bodies.

Mr. Lazarescu is that rich and riveting a film of universal small human moments and big-system failure.

Everything you've ever loved (or hated) but were afraid to laugh at in Asian martial-arts movies, ''Matrix''-ian bullet-time actioners, and Farrellyesque slapstick comedies -- all rolled into Hong Kong's highest-grossing local production ever.

A lot of fun early in the evening, when the Rat Pack ambiance is novel, but gets bleary by 4 a.m. in the story.

You know what you want to see if you want to see The Notebook...You want to see girls in pretty 1940s dresses, soldiers in stirring World War II uniforms, handsome automobiles and equally handsome Southern landscapes. You want to see romance overcome adversity.

Shortbus is chipper, it's fresh, it emits a distinct musk of controversy. I'll take the longbus.

The movie is so finely minced a mixture of Sondheim's original melodrama and Burton's signature spicing that it's difficult to think of any other filmmaker so naturally suited for the job.

It's a tiny, sunny character study about a fat guy who's an unlikely chick magnet. And as such it's a pip.

By the time Worf (Michael Dorn), knocking off a slimy attacker, growls a Schwarzeneggerish ''Assimilate this!'' we've already done so, with pleasure.

Wayne's World's Penelope Spheeris directs and also plays herself, in a movie with a message as self-congratulatory as it is meta: All problems are surmountable when selfless Hollywooders work extra, extra hard, pulling together ''for the kid.''

Best in show is the divine Gillian Anderson as a powerful celebrity publicist, editing the image of her clients in much the same way this adaptation tames Young's much pricklier book.

Anderson brings compassion to his amused sense of yuppie tragicomedy, as he does to his nuanced understanding of Boston, the setting of this appealing fairy tale.

Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe) makes a believable cocky lad who signs on for the con; an oddly bewigged Ben Kingsley is fussier and too actorly as his handler.

The result: This great work of art has the potential to change the world.

When Rock finds his authentic swing as an actor as well as a comedian, he'll be, like, a movie god.

The two XXL personalities are in fit, fighting form in a comedy as bracing and furiously right for the moment as it is broad and huggable.

The gorgeous music includes Ralph Vaughan Williams' wafting tone poem ''The Lark Ascending'' -- apt in describing an artist who might well be part bird.

The already heavy-footed clomp of Grisham's declamatory storytelling style has been given an extra-thick-soled, wing-tipped, liberal-leaning, reality-tampering kick thanks to a screenplay credited to four writers.

Ridicule gently suggests that the culture of sound bites has deep roots.

An amiably raucous, scorched-earth mockumentary.

Charms because of its natural, non-magical attitude toward humanity.

The individual components of director Marc Abraham's David-and-Goliath drama are roundly unexceptional; the script, soft and teach-y; the performances, earnest.

In Please Give, the sharp-eyed filmmaker sends her vibrant representative out into the world to explore what it means for a woman to be lucky and still feel itchy. The report has the resonant ring of truth.

The fetching cast (including Jennifer Beals as a histrionic girlfriend), while a long way from Gwyneth and Matt stature, nevertheless reflects Stillman’s enhanced status as an established indie talent.

Slippery issues about trust, parental responsibility, and the inalienable American right to personal and political freedom are ceded to Hollywood's inalienable right to stage high-pitched chase scenes and a shocking big finish.

A characteristically engorged and sloppy coming-of-age movie from the filmmaker (''Harvard '66'') who, in his body of work, indulges his fantasies as fetishistically as other men finger their cigars.

Although In the Mood for Love isn't in the mood for action, it dazzles with everything but.

Wargnier directs his French historical drama, a foreign film Oscar nominee, in a way that allows little perspective on the extent of Stalinist cruelty; even when terrible things happen, they do so sedately.

In moments that have nothing to do with representing the weight of love (whatever that is), the film comes alive: when Ami Ankilewitz isn't a symbol - just a man who, for instance, loves a woman.

The documentary takes on its own engaging shape - one of edgy editorial and political ambivalence.

This fresh and interesting story about a tight-knit clan of Irish grifters in the rural South who make their living scamming is a ''con men on the road'' picture all the more welcome during a season of junky action thrillers and indie-style explorations of kinky sex.

Trembles with respect for Hillenbrand's book. It's hobbled by good intentions, grand plans for telling many stories at once, and a fear of the very audience whose intelligence and sophistication it claims to court.

A recitation of woes doesn't constitute a plot, and panoramic shots of migrating wildlife don't convey enough African flavor.

The production feels self-congratulatory and illuminated only dimly.

Everything is aces about this lineup's pedigree. But Devil never lets loose. It's a jazzy composition about sex, sleuthing, corruption, race, and cheap liquor that's a half step out of tune.

Coarser, more hectic, more cheaply written sequel.

Turns out to be the funniest, most risk-taking, most incisive movie of the summer.

The drama ultimately retreats to safer, duller, more illogical, and more reactionary impulses and stereotypes.

Achieves its exquisite tension--deepening beautifully from a "Death in Venice" setup to an imaginative meditation, on art and life, of uncommon sensitivity.

Gehry sketches and free-associates about how he's not nearly the menschy aw-shucks pussycat from Canada he appears to be but rather a wily, complicated L.A. lion.

The hardest work falls to Cusack, a subtle actor with a valuable gift for conveying the sadness and loneliness beneath the skin of even the most jaded and self-contained men-about-town.

The dramatic conflicts are soapy and unsubtle, but Karanovic pours intense authority into Esma's scarred psyche.

Talented filmmaker Susanne Bier (Brothers), armed with an outstanding compositional sense, keeps control over the storms of melodrama that swirl in this rich weepie.

The mechanical beauty and android possibilities of the future excite the filmmaker, and that's where Minority Report becomes an alluring postcard from the edge. But it's an edge over which Spielberg never seems to want to step.

An only-in-the-movies mother hustles pool to raise the money to abduct the son she's been forbidden to see since her divorce.

WDIGMT? serves up speeches about trust and fidelity and rolling with the punches and blah blah blah. But it does so with so little energy that the actors might as well be saying the words blah blah blah.

Bridget's most attractive asset is that she's played by Renée Zellweger.

Writer-director Oskar Roehler spends all his energy on cataloging ''outrageous'' behavior, and none on giving the transgressions any meaning.

A ferocious, funny, gory, and astute Canadian horror parable.

Almereyda's fascination with creative creatures and their mysterious ways is abundantly clear. And distracting.

A frustratingly old-school, Hollywood-style, inspirational biopic about Amelia Earhart that doesn't trust a viewer's independent assessment of the famous woman pictured on the screen.

Redgrave shimmers like one of Tuscany's magnificent cypress trees as an Englishwoman searching for Lorenzo (Nero).

It's refreshingly low on the kind of Cinema of Empowerment pedantry that often goes along with stories about ethnic families, sweatshop working conditions, or women confronting issues of weight and body image -- and this little crowd-pleaser embraces all three.

An awfully tidy, infernally sparkly study in skewed blessings, made manifest by Committed Acting from Sigourney Weaver.

Satisfying, melancholy political suspense story.

Sky Captain is a gorgeous, funny, and welcome novelty.

Korine remains unnecessarily smitten with sordidness, and there's plenty of it here.

Stunning, fully formed masterpiece.

As a Balanchine-like martinet, Peter Gallagher is a hoot, whispering to his minions about good and bad feet.

Remains a sampling of stagy scenes barreling to a gruesome climax, parts greater than the sum of the whole.

An animated family movie about penguins -- in the wake of "March of the Happy Feet," they're the Angelina Jolie of animals, both cute and admired everywhere. Plus, it's about surfing.

A stunning study of one desperate woman's conscience.

Hilariously fake and rude. And thus true and tonic, if you know what I mean.

Bridges' guileless performance makes this piquant little indie tale of country music, redemption, and the love of a pretty younger woman such a sad-song charmer.

The trek is long, the direction (by Murray’s Quick Change colleague Howard Franklin) is soft, the script (by Roy Blount Jr.) is windy, and the occasional laughs are as heavy-footed as the thunking lead pachyderm herself.

A muscular, ardently naturalistic retelling of the ninth-century Anglo-Saxon saga.

There's great music, an excellent dog, and that indescribable Kaurismäki tension between misery and a cosmic joke.

At the Lethal Weapon plant, what you see, after 11 years, are the rusting remnants of a once innovative model.

Genre-hoppers like Steven Soderbergh ought to love this neat triple doozy. [Note: From a review of the entire trilogy.]

More like a summer-camp theater project than a studio movie.

The hoot and giggle of a girl-power fairy tale blended from potions of ''Monty Python,'' ''Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,'' and ''Shrek.''

The movie is ornate, arbitrary, and fetishistic, too, with the added challenge of being hell to follow for those without access to crib notes. Intellectually, I can admire the emphasis on visual style over plot clarity.

Parse the philosophy behind the spill of words, though, and you'll find intellectual jumble, junk. Better to nod to Yes as a drowsing chant than take it seriously as a statement of global concerns.

Lacks confidence in its own much bigger, potentially fascinating story -- an American tale of pageantry and history.

An Unfinished Life is inert, kaput -- a middlebrow mush of platitudes rather than an okay corral of distinct characters with heartbeats. It's awful not in an exciting, uncontrolled way but in an overly controlled, narcotized way.

Parker has a great time being the anti–Carrie Bradshaw while Keaton-as-matriarch is a particular joy -- funny, beautiful, elegant, touching, and at ease with a familiar, get-out-your-hankies holiday subplot.

There is every reason to learn about the link between jewels and death, by all means, but no reason to try to disguise a term paper as entertainment.

Nothing Lee has done is as flashy or as mucked up as Bamboozled.

It's not the homosexuality that's dubious here, it's the chicken.

The daffy, innately British joke that propels the cheeky U.K. comedy hit Shaun of the Dead is that although real zombies have risen up -- slacker wankers Shaun (Simon Pegg) and his best pal and roommate, Ed (Nick Frost), are too slack, wankerish, and blitheringly British to notice.

A film not even a star as foxed and foxy as Johnny Depp himself could save.

Disappointingly tired, unfunny, and disengaged.

The Arrival looks and feels awfully small and cheap. In that way, the movie does feel like those science-fiction classics of the ’50s. But back then, sweaty heroes didn’t utter lines of ’90s dialogue like ”I look like a can of smashed a–holes.”

The subtle selectivity of Leconte's eye, how he moves with great control from gesture to gesture, is matched by the disciplined intensity of the performances.

A forceful Neeson and an even more intense Nesbitt (Bloody Sunday) both show their stuff and obscure the unrelieved pain endured by the men they portray.

These 173 minutes don't drag, they waltz.

Can these banal relationships between undifferentiated lovelies be saved?

This overlong, lurchy homage to John Cassavetes' 1980 film "Gloria" is a mess, but a fascinating one, given Swinton's desperately avid performance in the title role.

Teasing drama whose relentless good-deed/bad-deed reversals are just interesting enough to make a sinner like me pray for an even more interesting, less symmetrical, less obviously cross-shaped creation.

Petroni takes the poem at face value, turning diaphanous literary imagery opaque and literal.

Soon enough a pointed ode to New York City nerve-rack and survival skills dissolves into a far more average, less compelling, and sometimes just slapdash-vicious cat-and-mouse game.

Everything is vast and hugely ambitious in Martin Scorsese's magisterial, scrambled historical epic.

Many of the characters go by two different names. So best advice for optimum viewing is, see Broken Embraces...twice.

Both script and direction are the work of the glittering comedic polymath Stephen Fry.

Her death was shocking; this well-made telling of her life is inspiring.

Definition eludes the delicate pleasures of this marvelous, idiosyncratic movie collage.

Director Todd Phillips tries for the kind of frat slaphappiness he applied so successfully to "Old School," but these boys are less scoundrels than individual salesmen for the brands of Heder and Thornton.

The animals are dignified cuties and the humans are boisterous archetypes, and if you want the heart to have more darkness, you’re barking up the wrong vine.

Smith's book is a charmer, but the keys to this ''Castle'' have been misplaced.

Yagira's performance is so extraordinary, it won him the best actor prize at the 2004 Cannes film festival.

Oldboy caused a love-it-or-hate-it stir at Cannes last year, and how could it not: It's an onslaught made to cause a sensation. Consider me simultaneously jolted and depressed.

The picture moves with stealth, enjoying its own thriller-ness as hints are laid and mislaid. There's a sense that Hitchcock is hovering in the background and cheering for Auteuil, who musters all his French superstardom to play a man having his mask of blandness torn off.

This is interesting stuff. So why does The Last Stand feel driven to dumb itself down, as if embarrassed by its own ideas?

A traditionally dressed, old-fashioned drama, starring Kevin Kline in the Robin Williams role -- is as much about the moral development of the adult as about his boys'. More so, maybe.

The generosity and gorgeousness with which Aussie writer-director Stephan Elliott (and costume designers Lizzy Gardiner and Tim Chappel) turn this most unlikely road picture into something arresting - if a tad sentimental - in its naive vision of a perfectly tolerant world.

What's astonishing about Sofia Coppola's enthralling new movie is the precision, maturity, and originality with which the confident young writer-director communicates so clearly in a cinematic language all her own.

There's no enjoyably outlandish hiss to this variation on the formula, and no Ice Cube or Owen Wilson, either. This time, a ship of capitalist fools (and no movie stars, unless you count utility player Morris Chestnut as a headliner) steams along the river in Borneo.

Howard luxuriates in writerly misery as Barlow, and the participation of the filmmaker's real-life wife, Debra Winger, as Barlow's ex gives the scenes between the two of them an unfakeable erotic charge.

Gripping, highly original.

So much is satisfying in KC that its shortcomings are all the more discordant.

Costner's determination to avoid change keeps this baseball movie at a low line drive when it might have knocked one into the bleachers.

This is all grimy, guy on guy fun, right down to the fevered, bad English dialogue.

A companion piece to "Match Point" that suffers all the more in comparison.

Underneath the ravishing imagery however, hearts are in flux.

An out of date 1950s movie.

X2 sparkles with a lightness of spirit that was missing from ''X-Men.''

The fact that it's difficult to believe someone who looks as dewy as Tautou would be so dangerous is much of the game.

An appalling, jaw-dropping movie that will cause serious nightmares.

Working from a script cowritten with accomplished Siberian filmmaker Sergey Bodrov, the director creates a taut picture of a place, and a liberating moment of choice.

Jennifer Baichwal's gorgeous documentary Manufactured Landscapes amplifies the powerful work of Edward Burtynsky, a Canadian artist who specializes in large-scale photographs of terrain transformed by civilization into rivers and tides of industrial ugliness.

In One Hour Photo, Williams is a snapshot of human complexity worth framing.

Fiennes' very skin participates in the project -- his fingernails are nicotine-stained the color of tea bags. The performance works; it's a ballet, a concerto of big, big Acting.

Lovely to look at -- and languid to the point of stultifying torpor, as interesting characters make speeches to one another about life, love, and literature.

As engrossing and logic-resistant as the state of dreaming it seeks to replicate, Christopher Nolan's audacious new creation demands further study to fully absorb the multiple, simultaneous stories Nolan finagles into one narrative experience.

Evenness of political keel, combined with a generic filmmaking style, is an artistic weapon way too puny for a successful assault on so tough, bruising, and crucial a subject.

Everything is wrong pretty much from the start of this misbegotten adventure.

Mirren's all-out display in this distinctly British absurdo-literary extravaganza had me wishing Elinor were my own fabulous auntie and that she'd lend me some magic items from her closet.

Reflect the robust status of Yiddish theater in the early 20th century, and its post-Holocaust decline.

There's something invigorating about this unpretentious dog tale. And if a penguin drops by to promote his own movie product, well, there's room on the frozen continent for all.

The punchlines are as tired as Hogan looks.

Working from a stagy script by Sam Catlin, director Danny Leiner uses a dainty palette of tristesse (untouched when he made Dude, Where's My Car?) to suggest that the shadow of 9/11 makes every discontent more pathetic.

It's a work of art that deserves a space cleared for its angry, nervous beauty.

A satisfying contraption of twists, missteps, and blithe repartee that produces old-fashioned, honestly earned guffaws.

Superbad is cute if you like guys who aren't even remotely bad, in a coming-of-age tale so old-fashioned the girls might just as well be wearing bloomers.

Bale exists all too large under the circumstances, a well-fed actor playing at emaciation for the sake of a fiction about a character whose torment is as unreadable as his vertebrae are countable.

"Old Boy's" vivid star Choi Min-sik plays a terrible schoolteacher -- yet another damned soul in Park's inflammatory, inimitable movie inventory of hell on earth.

Mamet regulars Ricky Jay and Joe Mantegna blend well with Mamet newbie Tim Allen, a treat as a spoiled-rotten aging Hollywood action star.

Brisk and sweet, even if the script veers toward fussy and lame.

Bleak, scathing, and utterly compelling.

Unfortunately, the charming Batfamily can't stay in their cave indefinitely; they've got to go out and fight crime. And that's where this elaborately high-style production from Batman Forever director Joel Schumacher hits an iceberg.

The charm and art of De Felitta's gentle domestic sketch expand far beyond biographical borders.

Goldberg, for all her character's tough bluster, is sweet too: Her performance here is contained, modulated, dignified without cushioning the Whoopi edge that makes her work so interesting and uncategorizable.

Ozon specializes in dissecting the vulnerability, erotic longing, and garbled intentions with which people regularly rub up against one another.

The big goofball relies too much on the funny hair and swingin' postures of the era as punchlines in themselves.

What's missing in The Missing -- despite throwing in The Everything, from magic trinkets to group hugs -- is soul.

Every porridgy inmate in this instantly forgettable romp warbles in the prison's amateur musical, and one of them demonstrates a rather extreme devotion to the tomatoes he grows in the on-site greenhouse.

It's a lovely, original, Australian take on a climactic moment usually thought of as all American.

Lasse Hallström calms Irving's typically busy 1985 best-seller with a balm of the Swedish director's typically soothing lyricism.

Johnson also grabs hold of a fundamental truth and seduces us with it: The schoolyard can be the noirest burg of all.

The vignettes don't add up to a story, but Wong's nervy brio and subterranean-fantasy style make for an arresting work about an exotic subculture.

It's left to Caine to wink and nod at his own contribution to real caper classics of the 1960s and '70s, produced with more emphasis on fun and less on instructive fact-finding.

A memory of the automobile in which a father drove away from his family provides the title for Blue Car but no hint of the power of writer-director Karen Moncrieff's superb feature debut.

The characters in Alien Trespass (directed by X-Files producing alum R.W. Goodwin) are specimens of Sputnik-era determination, led by a gung-ho Eric McCormack.

It allows for little of the dark and funny in Irving's picaresque morality fable. No room! Not with the buckets of bathos thrown our way, substituting for mass-market spiritual uplift!

The film makes excellent use of the cold Scandinavian landscape to emphasize the story's gloomy loneliness. And Rapace and ? Nyqvist have compelling chemistry.

Love means never having to say you're recycling plot material.

Monsters, Inc. has got that swing, that zippity, multilevel awareness of kids'-eye sensibilities and adult-pitched humor.

Holland's empurpled bio-fantasy is hooey with an anachronistic feminist slant from start to finish.

A movie not funny enough for a comedy, not touching enough for a heart-warmer, and not energetic enough for a story about a robbery of rare coins — Danson and Culkin end up exposing all their weaknesses.

As PC busting goes, this first feature directed by Tony R. Abrams and scribe Adam Larson Broder shoots at close range, and there's something endearing about the way the filmmakers fire away so eagerly at such fluorescent-colored targets.

The conservatively cheery artistic style suggests that the animation team has been reading Sundance merchandise catalogs.

It's in the brightly observed vignettes from mall-society life, captured with a low-key, on-the-run visual style, that Burman shows his best stuff and deadpan wit.

A confidently original, engrossing interpretation.

The story is glossy junk begat of just-plain junk anyway: Lauren Weisberger, who wrote the hiss-and-tell roman à clef best-seller on which the picture is based, was herself an assistant to Wintour.

Good times and bum times, they've seen it all and they're still here. Lucky us.

Add The Unforeseen to the catalog of artfully produced nonfiction films that show how humans are screwing up the planet.

So much goes down on Nick and Norah's one enchanted evening that the best advice is to enjoy the ride -- the actual ride -- around this vibrant new New York.

The amazing thing about John Woo's steely, impersonal adaptation of Philip K. Dick sci-fi story about a tech genius whose memory is erased...is how it vanishes in front of our eyes even as we watch it.

Can be interpreted politically or even biblically or not at all, as the elemental struggles between dominance and submission, impulse and action, man and nature, father and son, play out to their stunning conclusion.

The performances are razor sharp. And the ideas in this movie are, no kidding, big.

New-era losers (the cast is a cheery scrum of relaxed kids, led by genuine whiz pitcher Sammi Kane Kraft in the role created by Tatum O'Neal) now include a rotten kid in a wheelchair.

A pleasurably unsettling, sunbaked tale of sex and politics set in late-1970s Haiti.

This mediocrity disguised as entertainment, this greed promoted as synergy — this, to paraphrase that seminal media study, Broadcast News, is what the devil looks like.

Visually witty and even marvelous when it comes to depicting the spectacular creatures evolving at a speed previously known only in the Bible.

The star is done in by the deathless mediocrity of the production, an assemblage of random camera shots, messy editing, redundant scenes, and witless dialogue as haphazardly stitched together as the flesh on Jonah Hex's face.

An elegant adventure of a different kind.

The magnolias in Callie Khouri's fried green movie look limp.

In this slapdash production directed by Mel Smith ("The Tall Guy" but also, alas, "Radioland Murders"), written by Richard Curtis ("Four Weddings") and Robin Driscoll, there's just enough unrepentant self-centeredness missing to take the hilariously brutish edge off Bean's game for those who know him.

Jaoui handles her crowd of vivid characters so naturally, and shoots her scenes so unobtrusively, that the diagrammatic cleverness of the plot never overwhelms the intelligence of the observations.

Fierce, loving, and electric, this movie's got bite as well as bark.

This wan, formulaic teen movie from ''Metro'' director Thomas Carter is afraid to pump up the volume on its own interracial, hip hop Romeo and Juliet story, lest it challenge even one sedated viewer or disturb the peace.

The agonizing moments that convey what it's like for Bone to feel helpless and afraid of Daddy Glen even when he's not torturing her are where the art is. The pornographic violence is artifice. [13 Dec 1996]

The filmmakers can't decide whether to trust the period innocence of the book (and play down their casting coup) or let the young man rip as a preteen-babe magnet... So December Boys splits the difference -- safely, dully.

Guy Ritchie's second feature, is a faux tough caper modeled lock, stock, kit, and caboodle on his earlier film ''Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.''

Kelly, the 26-year-old writer-director of this excitingly original indie vision, shares more artistically with Wes Anderson or Paul Thomas Anderson than he does with Spielberg or John Hughes, but the point is, he's out on his own here. He swings big -- with flair.

A majority oriented movie that assumes sophisticated familiarity with a sexual minority.

Amir Bar-Lev's engrossing film is as much about the stubborn ambiguities of art, truth, meaning, and relationships as it is about the authenticity of the Olmstead oeuvre.

A painfully polite Iraq war drama pitched at the MTV generation.

This tender documentary considers the mysteries of both art and coping.

Crystal turns in his best (read: least sappy) performance in ages, getting through an entire movie -- most of it, anyway -- without mugging.

Could it be that the director of "L.A. Confidential," "Wonder Boys," and "8 Mile" has been defeated by characters on a first-name basis with brisket, by women who, in Susannah Grant's screenplay, represent avatars of joyless workaholism and joyless sexaholism?

Intense, autobiographically based drama.