Lisa Schwarzbaum

The performances are mediocre. The heart is big. The weather is swell.

A gaily funny, shrewdly inventive satire.

Neither grand enough to be impressive nor antic enough to be charming, the movie settles for bland and frantic, climaxing in a showdown among decadent pyramid builders. How bad are these guys? They're sadists...and, wink wink, sissies.

Powerful, passionate, and potentially revolution-inducing documentary.

The unexpected star is Hathaway, looking cool as a runway model in the role originated by Barbara Feldon, lithe as a (pink) panther, and displaying great comic timing.

Larrain's (literally) dark, edgy movie is a precise artistic commentary on Augusto Pinochet's miserable regime.

How you feel about Valentine's Day may depend on how you feel when someone really, really cute -- and someone you're really, really fond of -- gives you a nasty box of cheap chocolate on Valentine's Day, picked up at the corner Rite Aid and delivered with the price tag still attached.

Three stories by the guy who wrote Trainspotting, banged and smashed into a film by Paul McGuigan with none of Trainspotting's charm and all its grotesquerie.

Absolutely, probably more comfortable with human romantic complication than the usual stuff released on Valentine's Day.

The entertainment gods have cast mixed blessings on Stolen Summer. Let Pete Jones pray.

Misfit teens in the process of forming a high school band learn life lessons and raise their goblets of rock. But there's enough of a strong filmmaking backbeat in Bandslam to carry the movie's light tune.

Something particularly clean shines in this American fairy tale, a quality of simplicity that's almost as hard to achieve in such movies as a middle-aged man's boyhood dreams.

This voyage is strictly one for the disposable present, however quaintly old-fashioned the hand-drawn work that the animators have blended with 3D effects. (Tots will twitch during the grown-up relationship parts, and teens will groan at the kiddie sops.)

The three kindergarteners make up for their lack of irony with laser-power eyes, radical post-post-postfeminist blithe confidence, and some of the coolest retro-futuristic animation style this side of Gerald McBoing-Boing.

Where "No End" is cool and measured, Taxi is hot, anguished, and sometimes as difficult to watch as pictures of torture ought to be.

The political angle is gratuitous, even foolish, and certainly a distraction from the movie's visual strengths.

Isn't nearly as cheerily unpleasant as it ought to be.

The result is an unabashedly home-cooked homage to New York eccentricity.

Tamahori proves that he can shape a studio picture effectively to his specs; his action sense is as personal as his screenwriter’s. As for Hopkins and Baldwin, the well-matched actors grab their parts with disciplined ferocity.

No maid, and no fancy lady either, would swoon for a fellow as damp as the hero so grudgingly coughed up by Fiennes. In the words of Cinderellas everywhere, no effin' way.

A fast, loose, and very funny parody that pulls off the not-so-simple feat of tweaking Trekkies and honoring them.

Ah, monsieur, you can lead a Frenchman to the Big Apple, but you can't make him a New Yorker -- and that's exactly what makes The Professional so fascinating.

Exhausted as the premise already is -- hapless boomer learns that real manhood is a function of committed fatherhood -- Old Dogs nevertheless finds ways to make the lesson even less tolerable.

What's lost in translation is recovered easily enough in Michael Sheen's astonishing performance as Clough.

Not since "Snow Falling on Cedars" have I seen so pedigreed a lit-pic sit there like such an inert teapot, available only to be admired for its mysterious, ineffable Asian teapotness.

Half Nelson offers an opportunity to marvel, once again, at the dazzling talent of Ryan Gosling for playing young men as believable as they are psychologically trip-wired.

Terminally muddled crime drama.

The mixed-up rhythms of the story rescue Barbershop from bland goodness.

Emotional presence and a sophisticated understanding of commitment-phobia (as something other than a comedic punchline or an excuse for sex scenes) distinguishes this intense, contained drama, as does the unforced, sensual, and sensitive cinematography of Uta Briesewitz.

It’s an exercise in mad-as-hell vigilantism. And to reinforce the absurdity of what fury can be unleashed in a woman when a killer smirks, Sally Field — the Not Without My Daughter star herself — plays the ponytailed mom with the itchy trigger finger.

In that rare moment, the movie relaxes its rictus of pain and actually dares to feel good. Moments like these aren't just a negotiation between all and nothing -- they're everything that allows us to care about even those characters who only slouch and shriek ''F -- - orfff!''

There is pleasure in giving oneself up to the gusty swirls of the film's imagery, and especially to the handsome grandeur of its star.

A suspenseful and delightfully creepy French drama.

Del Toro builds excitement, dread, and melodrama in equal layers.

Narc is as cop movie as a cop movie can be.

A very low grade romantic drama indeed, a love story with all the life and death intensity of a heat rash.

The movie, by Dutch director Jan Kounen, is all surfaces, set pieces, Significant Looks, and voguing -- the same strictures Chanel and Stravinsky sought to bust.

There's something Slavic about Warner's storytelling.

For women who smoke and drink like fiends, the trio of pre-owned babes in this weirdly rotten femme-porn romance have awfully good, unwrinkled complexions.

Nothing more than a bad harvest.

It's ''Moskowitz's March,'' really -- and it ends in stirring victory

Pirate Radio is, in the end, about as rock-revolutionary as a tea break. But the choppy production floats on a great soundtrack (the real pirates are the Rolling Stones) and is buoyed by an inviting cast.

Director Costa-Gavras packs a whole lotta hectoring into this high-strung morality play about the broadcast media's culpability in the escalation of human drama into camera-ready Greek tragedy.

When the florid speeches of volcanic rage and frustration draw to a close - and when Collins and Gooding complete their acting exercises - we still have no clue who these men are and what sent them down their intersecting moral dark alleys.

Manages to take great characters and a great plot and leach them of all blood, terror, and excitement.

Insistently sullen, nihilistic, and successful to the point of smugness at transmitting buzzkill, Art School Confidential is the second collaboration between art-house cartoonist Daniel Clowes and director Terry Zwigoff.

It's in all the moments where little happens that Reichardt is most amazing, investing even a gas-station pit stop with perfect emotional pitch.

The result is a picture half sweet, half bitter. Charles Dickens would approve.

When Bebop's anime characters stand still, chirping their strangely stilted, dubbed talk and not moving their strangely blank faces, I feel lost on Mars myself.

Lucy Walker's observant film Blindsight is about profound East-West differences in the importance of journey versus destination and comradeship versus competition.

Director and co-writer William Bindley engages every move in the underdog playbook, including, but not limited to, the time the good citizens of Bedford Falls chipped in to make up George Bailey's shortfall in "It's a Wonderful Life."

The filmmaker keeps himself squarely on screen. This is fine when he engages in throwdowns with the bigots but distasteful when Levin shows himself reacting to footage -- unseen by viewers -- of the beheading of reporter Daniel Pearl.

McCarthy's rawhide has become movie Naugahyde, a substance unknown in literature or in nature.

The movie works hard -- desperately hard -- to be all things to all audience segments. And the visible effort erodes the sense of gaiety, of unfettered fun.

Tack on a jarringly upbeat coda that looks like the kids at the studio demanded a ”happily ever after” ending before they would agree to put the picture to bed, and Something to Talk About becomes a safe, generic family story of no particular personality.

Isn't exactly good - like "Legally Blonde 2," it's a more exaggerated, less buoyant sequel to what should have been a one-off comedy - but it's enjoyable.

Glued tightly from page to screen, Sin City is so seduced by the visual possibilities of sin that style becomes its own vice.

A movie of uncommon sweetness and delight.

Yet Speed 2 is as slow-moving as a garbage scow. Those blinking lights might as well be emanating from a vital-signs monitor. The story is dead in the water.

An effortlessly clever animated confection.

Don't let unpleasant personal dental associations stand in the way of seeing a luminous specimen of independent filmmaking.

This is familiar psychological as well as stylistic territory for Anderson after "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums." But there's a startling new maturity in Darjeeling, a compassion for the larger world that busts the confines of the filmmaker's miniaturist instincts.

Juliette Binoche is outstanding as a wildly untogether single mother who parks her son with a French-speaking Chinese nanny while she whirls and worries.

Now it's just some thin chick in her underwear, kicking butt.

The most spellbinding aspect of Bright Future is that the surrealism sustains its own squiddish logic, concluding with one of the most breathtaking film finales of the year.

[A] gimmicky actors' holiday.

Not only makes excellent use of the singer's sweetly coltish acting abilities, but it also promotes a standardized set of sturdy values with none of Mariah Carey's desperate ''Glitter,'' or any of Mandy Moore's gummy pap in ''A Walk to Remember.''

With (Keanu's) stiff body language and wooden delivery, his every word falls like drops of flat Diet Coke rather than intoxicating wine.

It ought to be seen, because it's a work of moral and spiritual mystery.

For bleakness, the movie can't be beat -- nor for brilliance.

An affecting, old fashioned, antiwar war story.

Technical elegance and fine performances mask the shallowness of a story as simpleminded as the '50s TV to which it condescends; certainly it's got none of the depth, poignance, and brilliance of "The Truman Show," the recent TV-is-stifling drama that immediately comes to mind.

That his (writer-director Tom McCarthy) strange, often funny film is so well-disciplined and deadpan refreshing is an achievement.

It's the showy story, script, and even staging that wear a fella out in this relentlessly precious feature debut by writer-director Jordan Roberts.

Breakdown feels at first so casual, so comfortable with its own small expectations (a good but unglamorous cast, a sturdy but unspectacular plot), that the authentic feelings of suspense are a surprise.

Clint Eastwood's profound, magisterial, and gripping companion piece to his ambitious meditation on wartime image and reality, "Flags of Our Fathers."

Intense but dignified.

Somewhere in this broody ''Twilight Zone''-ish story about magical thinking (and the lure, to filmmakers, of garish casino culture) is a provocative and maybe even shocking thought on the Holocaust as a crapshoot.

First-time writer-director Rodney Evans makes a ballsy leap into historical fantasia, with heartfelt fervor outrunning stray moments of artistic gawkiness.

Grant is game for a new level of meta-ha-ha, joke's-on-me in Music and Lyrics. But with Drew Barrymore as his costar, this bland, light romantic comedy insists on keeping the commentary as disposable as one of the '80s gumball tunes Grant used to swivel to as Alex Fletcher, a washed-up '80s pop star.

Arriving amid the traditionally withered harvest of January releases, Orange County is peachy.

For the love of all things sensual and mysterious, see this one on a big screen.

Unusual, unhurried tour de force--a seamless match of strong artistic vision and physical performance. [19 Dec 1997, p. 52]

At no time do the men -- that is, the straight ones -- believably hold the upper hand. In the new town of Stepford, there's no bitterness, no struggle, no competition, none of the scars of the sexual revolution. There's just gay apparel.

There are instances when the filmmaker tries for Western iconography and settles for ''Full Monty'' ingratiation.

There's a shocking, casual quality to the self-destructive narcissism of the pretty, petty kids squandering their lives in the L.A. sunshine of The Young Unknowns.

For all its wispy fun, Small Time Crooks still tilts, with little-guy stubbornness, at windmills in Allen's mind.

For this 21st-century Nick and Nora Charles, the flame is kept alive despite his nighttime anti-snore nose strip and her nighttime bite guard -- thanks to a shared appreciation of the hilarity of nose strips and bite guards.

That The Big Kahuna is hardly more than a sketch or curtain-raiser is not the fault of the play in itself -- it's short-film size, not feature-worthy.

There’s something earthy and elemental in this tale that was missing in Blue, something quirky and (measured by Kieslowskian standards) energetic.

That sense of déjà vu is at once this Harry Potter's balm and its limitation: many charms, but few surprises.

Out of a harrowing story set in a foreign thicket, Herzog has found American beauty.

Honoring the literary ground beneath it, spotted yellow lizards and all, the movie Holes is easy to dig.

A portentous and goopy Dutch drama.

Each episode (originally made for British TV) works by itself, but there's a real payoff in following all three. (Nothing matches The "Wire," but this holds its own.)

A film of uncommon originality.

The mood is ruined by the bitchy 1990s stereotyping of the husband hunters.

Too many moments of evident labor weigh this clever production down. To quote the playwright: ''Your wit's too hot, it speeds too fast, 'twill tire.''

This unexceptional 1970s coming-of-age story is neither outrageous, new, nor comedic.

Everything old is old again in this rickety extension of 2002's already rickety "Van Wilder."

Even though they're now college dudes, fulfillment for fellas is still predicated on copping a feel and downing a brewski.

Resonant examination of friendship, fame, cultural trends, and the creative process.

The message, if there must be one, of this marvelous, stubbornly personal movie is that there is a spark in every soul.

Cotton candy story with an acrid aftertaste.

As an exception to the norm, Kitano doesn't appear this time, confining himself merely to writing, directing, and editing.

Stumbling adaptation of a Sam Shepard play about men, horses, chance, and lies.

As Williams ricochets between playing submissive soft-drink executive tethered to the whims of a hysterical boss and pathetic dad at the wheel, trying to cajole his family into vacation satisfaction, we can be excused for getting carsick.

The plot and script sag like worn out chew toys just when Cats & Dogs should be in full squeak.

The teachers (including original cast member Debbie Allen as school principal) turn out to be the best part of the show.

Newcomer Jessica Haines is transparent and heartbreaking as the prof's unorthodox daughter, a victim of violence as the old ways crumble.

There's also no romanticizing on the part of the director, who proceeds with calm, unshowy attentiveness (even in the midst of scenes of violence), creating a stunning portrait of an innately smart survivor for whom prison turns out to be a twisted opportunity for self-definition.

It's no myth: All play and no work makes Jackman, as Leopold, a doll of a boyfriend.

The gooey sanctity of the bond between fathers and sons all but nullify Jackson's zesty performance.

The few jaunty, ''Friends''-inflected lines Perry does get off are lost among the cow pies.

Don't leave before the final frame -- if you're still breathing.

This is what a videogame movie looks like now.

Because the talk never gets beyond statement making, and because the characters emit none of Chekhov's radiantly lived-in soulfulness, there's plenty of time to appreciate the sun-kissed landscape.

I don't know that Where the Money Is would work at all were it not for what we, the audience, bring into the theater.

The real feast is in the mix of characters, each so finely and unschmaltzily delineated in a script so confident and controlled that even the most passing of participants comes alive.

Every instance of gleeful bad taste is timed and positioned for maximum, liberating laugh value.

You can forget about veracity, since this gauzy and sometimes dopey romanticization can't be trusted.

Be prepared to collapse into a hoot and a howl of hilarity at all the wrong moments.

No matter what panache Bier adds, Things We Lost is still a TV-scaled tear-duct drama about a beautiful woman who pushes past sadness in her House & Garden home.

Among its better tricks, Matrix Revolutions finally gets the love-story subplot of Neo and Trinity in the right proportion.

The villainous Polluter-in-Chief is eloquently played by Robert Knepper, familiarly loathsome as T-Bag on Fox's "Prison Break." And when Knepper and Statham get together, there's a fine showdown of grimaces.

Universal should have marketed this formulaic drivel as the taboo love story it really is, and then watched its stars run for cover.

By rocketing ahead 200 years from the previous film and jiggering the story cleverly (with a script by Toy Story coscreenwriter Joss Whedon as late-'90s wiseacreish as Alien3 was early-'90s portentous) to create a Ripley reconstructed through a mix of human and alien DNA, Alien Resurrection power-kicks the whole definition of the Horrifying Other into a fresh, deep, exhilaratingly thoughtful, millennium-sensitive direction. [5 Dec 1997, p. 47]

There's not a guy I know who hasn't been looking forward to seeing The Rock pick up the big wooden stick first swung by Joe Don Baker more than 30 years ago.

Steve Zahn makes full use of the many varieties of hyper in his acting arsenal, while Timothy Olyphant has a heckuva good time telegraphing macho mania.

Be prepared to swallow a lot of empty-calorie jokes in which blacks and Latinos insult and misunderstand one another in a spirit of vigorous buffoonery.

You're set up for when director Richard Donner -- who worked with Gibson on all three audience-pleasing Weapons -- switches the movie from a really interesting, jittery, literate, and witty tone poem about justified contemporary paranoia (and the creatively unhinged dark side of New York City) to an overloaded, meandering iteration of a Lethal Weapon project that bears the not-so-secret stamp of audience testing and tinkering.

Rosetta is a character of raw pride in a film of lingering power.

The accountant in Bloom would probably approve of the new Producers: It's an efficient extension of a popular brand. In theory, what's not to like? In reality, the whole schmear.

Torturously whimsical gumshoe caper.

Around town, Stephen Fry ("Peter's Friends"), as a fluty artiste, dogs Flora with his devotion and declares, "I'm engorgedly in love with you!" That's how I feel about this gem.

A curious case indeed: an extravagantly ambitious movie that's easy to admire but a challenge to love.

The Naked Gun writing team and actor-turned-director Hart Bochner do unto the stereotype of inner-city high schools what needs to be done to stereotyped inner-city high schools -- parody them silly -- in this high-flying, low-comedy production.

Bean's commitment to serious theological examination is exciting, Gosling's performance is riveting, and this fiery and imperfect feature shines as a demonstration of independent filmmaking at its most uncompromising.

An artlessly powerful performance by newcomer Nicole Behaire anchors American Violet.

The vivid fictional specifics, and the simple loveliness of the artless performances by nonactor Mongolian nomads, attest to the filmmakers' abundant artistry.

Just as all regular models can't be supermodels, so all action chicks can't be superheroines. Elektra Natchios turns out to be walled off rather than mysteriously alluring; blank rather than deep.

A film noir great... Just to see and hear the extraordinary 3 minute and 20 second opening sequence — a fluid tour de force tracking shot — without impediment of opening credits and street-sound-masking movie score is accomplishment enough.

Only when you look closer do you realize that While You Were Sleeping exhibits precious few genuine feelings. It's a movie cranked out by machine, about supposedly delightfully idiosyncratic characters who only do what they do because the highly structured plot requires it.

The young cast is terrific, giving the stories unearned weight.

Scott Sommer's late-1970s coming-of-age novel, with little of the vivid specificity of "Mean Creek," even though the two share a screenwriter and a producer.

What a dull, nice movie, wrenched from a wild premise and battered into docility.

If, as Fincher has said, this movie is supposed to be funny, then the joke's on us.

Shows a beguiling aptitude for self-mockery in the pursuit of polemic.

An overly picaresque first feature written and directed by David Duchovny, who also co-stars.

A comedy of '90s sexual inclusiveness as effervescent as a cold sody pop -- and about as intoxicating.

When a Stranger Calls is ba-a-a-a-c-k, in frightless form, updated for the age of anytime minutes and caller ID.

Children bumps into a few dead spots along its irreverent way... But casual sophistication and wiggy Australian self-awareness give this product of unreconstructed bourgeois decadence its idiosyncratic charm.

Shyamalan's most alienating and self-absorbed project to date.

The natural, pleasurable 1990s hipness [Lohan] brings to her assignment is therefore all the more impressive. Hayley-holics should be grateful to this new girl at camp too.

The story itself is so powerful and troubling, the moral geometry so vertiginous, and the photography so big that anything other than the natural sounds of snowfall and footfall is a Flat Earth Society intrusion.

The denouement of the movie is as preposterously happy as a children's fairy tale. But the moral is ageless.

Not one bit of the story tracks. But with these women in these roles, you're asking for truth?

The cinematography is consistently hipster handsome, the script is bracing in its lewdness, and Brosnan adds no unnecessary weight to Noble's meaninglessness.

There is also a manufactured symmetry, an every-gal's-got-issues roundness, an HBO sitcomitude to the movie that undercuts its own observational intelligence.

This gallantly imperfect indie pops with attitude.

This warm, funny, sexy, smart movie erases the boundaries between specialized ''gay content'' and universal ''family content'' with such sneaky authority.

Reprise is kissed with the breath of French New Wave sensibility, sweet with verve and a love of forward movement. The mood of joy in the midst of youthful pain is enhanced by the freshness of the first-time lead actors.

It's fun to see the glamorous actress turn down her movie-star flame, but it's a pity she's stuck with so many trite gestures on Kate's journey to fulfillment.

The intimate movie hums with a back-in-the-hood vibe that gets the two stars playing contentedly, and delightfully, for the love of local filmmaking.

Clearly, three sequels haven’t improved Miyagi’s English, but there is something bitchin’ about seeing a babe give a bully a good thwack. Not that girls will go see this or boys will care.

James Westby's loving and self-aware homage to mouth-breathing boys who worship Wong Kar-Wai and can't talk to girls is the opposite of Tarantino-esque: It's Westby-ish, interspersing settings of biting social oafishness with spasms of film knowledge.

There are no zombies out of ''28 Days Later'' to alleviate the slow creep of realistic doom in this chilly, tense corker.

The amazingly natural first-timer was discovered, in a gift of publicity-ready truth, while having an argument with her boyfriend at a train station.

The Tango Lesson is about as far away from Al Pacino’s Scent of a Woman hotdogging as you can get; it really is about the scent of a woman, in all her fascinating peculiarity.

Every moment spent in the company of Keaton... is such a joy that the whole is more delightful than the sum of the formulaic ingredients. Keaton makes Nicholson bounce the way Shirley MacLaine once did in ''Terms of Endearment.''

Let loose in a plot that's surprisingly modern about sex and relationships, Morton gives Eva's torn longings an immediacy that transcends a lot of damp, 1950s rusticated preciousness.

For one of those obstreperously original books that are themselves impossible to translate, Everything Is Illuminated is impressively well lit.

Minghella makes an enticing, intelligent, well-shaped picture about the extreme perils of class envy and sexual panic.

A comic-book superhero has seldom squandered so much screen time being conflicted about his heritage and destiny -- and I don't mean conflicted in a sexy, Wolverine-y, ''X-Men'' way, either; a big-budget comic-book adaptation has rarely felt so humorless and intellectually defensive about its own pulpy roots.

The whole cast is museum quality, and the ''music'' performances are pitch-perfect in their dissonance.

A hateful ”family” comedy based on jokey insinuations of incest.

As an overwrought, overacted drama, Kill the Poor is negligible.

American Splendor presents Pekar as drawn on the page, Pekar as brilliantly interpreted by Paul Giamatti, and the actual Pekar, in the double role of narrator and interview subject -- sometimes all at once. The magic act is thrilling, and truly surprising.

The message is so good-hearted, so inarguable, so dull.

Everyone in this madly good-looking clan has got soapy problems as befits an aspirational, say-amen holiday movie.

Part supernatural thriller, part Oliver Sacks-style meditation on the neurological mysteries of perception, and part Buddhist treatise on reincarnation, the story luxuriates in shadows.

André Téchiné's beautifully ambiguous, exquisitely underplayed drama Strayed has less to do with the events and moral choices of the era that continue to shape French identity than with the timeless psychological effects of finding oneself unmoored from the familiar.

The two are unlikely compadres — no Hope and Crosby, just a couple of average guys walking, talking, and looking for the love of good women. But Poirier establishes an attractive, believable friendship between the immigrants.

Aside from the awesome flames and pyrotechnic scenes of crisis, danger, and part-of-the-job bravery, the movie is a quiet salute; it does its job.

Any random episode of Law & Order would be more sophisticated than this heavy-handed, moralistic Southern-lawyer corn pone, directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

Along comes Two Can Play That Game to demonstrate that antifeminist silliness is color-blind.

Young boys are the only suitable audience for Speed Racer, the elaborate live-action adaptation written and directed by "Matrix" creators Larry and Andy Wachowski. And even they might feel an urge to squirm.

The discreet stink of the bourgeoisie perfumes the wonderfully mordant, dry-eyed family saga, The Flower of Evil.

Using the droll, wise stories of Etgar Keret as her guide, Israeli filmmaker Tatia Rosenthal concocts an artful film that expresses deep thoughts, lightly.

My new theory is that Willis' own aesthetic soul is more old-world than he knows, and that he works best with directors who either are (Luc Besson) or might as well be (M. Night Shyamalan) European.

Acompelling, cant free drama about clashing class systems and challenged family relationships that's all the more engrossing for its organic, near documentary style.

While the young people chatter about life and literature with sometimes overbearing self-satisfaction, the astute filmmaker observes their pretentious gum-flapping with a mixture of amusement, compassion, and wised-up rue.

Grant is the rare actor who can mix the characteristics of sex appeal and ambivalence in believable, rather than irritating, proportions.

Realer and more consequential than much being packaged for TV and movies these days as ''reality,'' the fictional In This World unfolds with the deceptive dispassion of a documentary, but builds with a sure sense of dramatic epic.

Filmmaker Jared Hess (who cowrote the script with his wife, Jerusha Hess) installs Napoleon front and center as a punchline in and of himself -- and as that dispiriting product of narrative defeat, a symbol.

Square, sincere, and proud of it.

The serious accusations are leavened by the moments of brimming, illogical, intimate neighborly dailiness the filmmaker also captures with warmth and infectious high spirits.

In Metro, he’s been replaced by a slick, businesslike machine of an actor, playing an uninspired variation on the Axel Foley character he’s done for over a decade now, since starring in 1984’s Beverly Hills Cop. Only this time he’s not even funny.

Maybe in a few years the incoherent gaudiness of this underperforming sequel to ''Interview With A Vampire'' -- will have transmuted into a kind of appreciable camp. Until that time, however, we're stuck with this damned production

In the end -- an ending of such power and narrative originality (in both book and movie) that those who know it ought never breathe a word to those who don't.

Marvelously inventive, often-ironic Israeli storyteller Etgar Keret and his life- and workmate, Shira Geffen, spin in Jellyfish a dreamy, arty, alluringly cockeyed tale involving three unrelated women in Tel Aviv.

Comes from the same jolly homage-to-schlock-shock producers who remade ''House on Haunted Hill,'' and the emphasis is shamelessly on ornate scares. But with its high-gloss cast and French art-house actor and director Mathieu Kassovitz (''Hate'') in charge, the movie also shoots for class.

Deserves sympathetic attention, if only for the family-values specifics loaded into the story, and the way mildmannered stars Ben Shenkman (Angels in America) and Tom Cavanagh (Ed) embrace their instructional roles.

A handsome epic, a brave-hearted 19th-century man-saga from the director who made the period piece man-sagas ''Glory'' and ''Legends of the Fall.''

Tentle, dreamy animated sci-fi tale.

In a movie like this one, a little madness is its own Holy Grail.

A grandly entertaining historical drama.

This cautionary tale might be easier to swallow if all that stuff didn't look like it came from a Sky Mall catalog.

Windtalkers blows this way and that, but there's no mistaking the filmmaker in the tall grass, true to himself.

Empty jokes hang heavy.

The whole thing wobbles, like the garish, trashy, sexy shoes the young folks are wearing this summer on their way (in droves) to movie theaters, intent on abandoning themselves to pleasurable mindlessness.

The importance of faith, church, kin, staying off drugs, sharing food, repenting from sin, forgiving sinners, appreciating a good black man, rejecting a bad one, and honoring black matriarchy is enumerated with typical, reassuring Perry broadness.

Fados connects today's leading interpreters with legendary fadistas of the past. And it's the last title to be released under the banner of the venerable New Yorker Films.

With a taste for dark lyricism, the director delicately emphasizes the contrast between surface innocence and subterranean danger, and between grown-up secrets and boyhood bravery.

If you loved Amy Sedaris before in a golfer-lady wig and inbred chump's grin, you'll maybe love her again here, while wishing she had another TV-episode-size venue for her talents

Tedious.

Of course, there's still the Williams schmaltz factor.

Without any of the patented Farrelly insight into the insecure, horndoggy teen in every man, and without a grown-up setting in which Harry and Lloyd can transgress like dum-dum geniuses,Dumb and Dumberer is dumberest.

Quick, get the bug repellent, it’s another infestation of clueless, chatty, goofily dressed Gen Xers flitting around the scary idea of love!

Allen's canniest hire of all is Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays a bratty, destructive young star, juicing the proceedings with a power surge that subsides as soon as he exits.

Blinking his puppy-moist eyes and grappling with an English accent, Downey struggles so manfully in the role that one cuts him a lot of slack; working earnestly on her Irish brogue and mussing up her cupcake demeanor in the service of verisimilitude as a wise madwoman, Meg Ryan’s performance is, refreshingly, less precious than she’s been in a long while.

Funny, ungirdled romp - a buddy picture about buddies who actually know what women want.

A shaky piece of work, with stumpy cinematography, choppy edits, speechy dialogue, and loose plotlines. And yet: There's an easygoing authenticity to the depiction of Kenya and her world that coexists with the picture's many weaknesses.

Firewall is a witless entertainment, and a derivative one, too; it's everything listless about Hollywood in February, everything discardable about the genre in general.

The unnecessarily famous cast for such a standard, creaking, fake-spooky ghost story (with Bible verses thrown in for good measure).

Bale is mesmerizing and Rodriguez keeps up with him as the whole unsafe contraption zooms.

The History Boys is as much about the meaning and value of reading and learning as it is about the ho-humness of genital fondling by sir with love.

I don't know if it's ickier to assume that writer-director Brad Silberling (Moonlight Mile) thinks the culture-clash jokes he pushes in 10 Items or Less are charming because they're earnest, or because they're tongue-in-cheek. Either way, this sale is void.

It's worth seeing this stark adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure just for the extraordinary performance of Christopher Eccleston as Jude Fawley, the stonemason in turn-of-the-century England whose dreams of university scholarship are thwarted. And British telly director Michael Winterbottom sustains a fine atmosphere of dank misery.

While we can admire their attractive exteriors, we don't know anything about the interior lives of the three women so vibrantly miserable in their unhappiness.

This thrilling stop-motion animated adventure is a high point in Selick's career of creating handcrafted wonderlands of beauty blended with deep, disconcerting creepiness.

There aren't many at all like Spielberg and Kubrick, directors willing to lasso dreams (that's Steven) and nightmares (that's Stanley) or die trying. A.I. is a clash of the titans, a jumble, an oedipal drama, a carny act. I want to see it again.

Audience empathy for the displaced Redlichs, coupled with the filmmaker's proffered charms of wise natives and their mysterious rituals, goes a long way toward making this lyrical travelogue a crowd pleaser.

This garbled American remake of Takashi Miike's already staticky 2004 exercise in J-horror is a wrong number.

Hard to say who's luckier -- those who have seen the work of Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin before and know what to expect, or those who haven't and for whom The Saddest Music in the World serves as an eye-popping introduction.

The visual and verbal jokes are as bouncy and multilevel (hip height for adults, knee-slap-size for kids) as we have come, no doubt selfishly, to expect from DreamWorks.

Writer-director Georgia Lee never leaves any doubt that the bonds of ethnic family devotion are a charm against any woe more serious than an engagement to the wrong white guy.

The Science of Sleep is like a weird dream that tugs at the memory throughout the day with its intriguing, misshapen pieces.

Safe gets messy, but you won’t be able to wash it out of your system anytime soon.

A story in full billow; it sails through stretches of bloody battle, anxious waiting, wine-soaked relaxation, and marvelous scientific discoveries by the remarkable Maturin (Paul Bettany, well matched again with his ''A Beautiful Mind'' costar).

The intrepid one is the outstanding Josh Brolin, who does such a phenomenal job in the title role that he carries every scene he's in to a place of subtlety and integrity far beyond what Stone needs to make his attention-grabbing noise.

Concentrate instead on the delightful performances. A thespian shoutout goes to Reynolds (his hair bleached bright yellow for the gig) for his jaunty way with a cape, tights, and the hands-on-hip poses of superherodom.

Clever, laid-back.

While the compiled testimony is strong, some larger context is missing.

Zucker directs this mess like a substitute teacher soldiering through a day's work for a day's pay at a decertified school.

Creator producers Paul Germain and Joe Ansolabehere have come up with some unexceptional children and underdeveloped adults.

There's something about Holly: She's the most ridiculous, irritating, two-dimensional rom-com heroine since...Katherine Heigl's last rom-com.

Madly original, cheekily political, altogether exciting District 9.

Lowest-common-denominator humor.

With no climactic showdown and no comforting revelation of motive or reassuring psychoanalytic diagnosis, the nerve-rattling potential of this sly, paranoia-inducing story may sink in only later.

So jaunty, so limber, and so visually self-assured that art peeks through where crap has traditionally made its home.

The character can be a dolt, but Cornish is a marvel, exuding a reckless hunger and prowling with a sexuality of potent directness.

Slow -- sometimes maddeningly, soporifically so.

Mitchell directs and stars in the riotous, loving, and only occasionally pathos-milking film adaptation of his own acclaimed Off Broadway play, with great up-your-ante music and lyrics by Stephen Trask.

Figgis never frees the play enough from the stage to fill the screen.

The movie is so littered with clichés of genre, as well as clichés of artifice in Reeves' pained performance, that any semblance of social reality goes foul.

The sum is no greater than the ''Fame''-style saga of any one of them, and Graff, an actor and screenwriter making his directing debut, is less successful at developing each story than at conveying his general affection for the curtain-call species.

It's Kind of a Funny Story may be the first psych-ward drama to draw on John Hughes movies for tonal reference.

Think of this witty, economically gory little tour de force as "28 Days Later" written by linguist Noam Chomsky.

For a story with so much going for it — including an interesting cast — Just Cause is just not taut and thrilling enough.

Nettelbeck has a particularly lovely sense of behind-the-scenes restaurant choreography. And her warm, patient understanding of little girls' psyches guides young Maxime Foerste, as the turbulent niece, to a terrific performance.

Really, I think we put up with Lars at all only because Gosling has such an affinity for the wounded boy birds he tends to play that it's easy to watch him do his thing.

This charming, if unnecessarily coronation-length production gets the duckling-to-swan ambivalence just right.

This is a deeply unpleasant movie masquerading as a heartfelt social commentary on life in these United States.

This is a character study more than a forward-moving drama, plopped down with exquisite photographic care in a beautiful New Mexico desert, and starring good actors who make a feast of their flavorful roles.

It exchanges the narrative fluidity of the page for visual composition of such strong beauty that the slowness of the storytelling becomes its own eccentric strength.

Consider Primer a successful lab experiment with, as they might say in techie chat rooms, significant indie-cred applications, IMHO. Oh, and :-).

A doozy of a French gangster pic that, in its beautifully refurbished and pithily resubtitled re-release, turns out to be one of the highlights of the 2005 movie year.

The characters who cross paths here in the hard shadows of late-'90s New York City are meant to convey loneliness, bitterness, neediness, loss, and bad karma. Mostly, they convey bad Sundance.

Rohmer treasures the undervalued glories of discourse and the intimacy of conversation over the obviousness of action or sexual display.

The charming movie, already an international success, seduces.

A pompous and garbled parable about how terribly, terribly difficult it is to make it as a creative artist, and how important it is to maintain high standards of haberdashery.

Dizzily rich, witty, and satisfying.

Serendipity has no business working, but it does. And by the way, Eugene Levy has no business almost stealing the show, but he does, too.

Toni Collette gives it the old "Little Miss Sunshine" try in The Black Balloon as an edge-of-kooky, very pregnant mama presiding over a chaotic household.

Martin and Hunt are exactly the right lively but not sticky authority figures to keep the house (and the comedy pace) bouncing.