Lisa Schwarzbaum

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exceedingly blurred rendering of a simply told, artful novel.

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

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

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

Harrison Ford? Terrific -- and re-energized.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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