Lisa Schwarzbaum

For all the creaminess of the sets and costumes, every character talks as if she is still made out of written words, not flesh, and each woman's struggles feel about as important as a tea dance.

Soft sexual and racial jabs replace the more daring political commentary of the original, a crude classic from the Roger Corman factory.

Oooh, this is toxic.

A realistic drama that looks and feels as inevitably true and moving as a good documentary.

The cockeyed devotion with which writer-director Roger Donaldson dramatizes the story of New Zealand motorcycle legend Burt Munro and his classic 1920 bike in The World's Fastest Indian is in direct proportion to the cockeyed devotion with which Munro himself pursued his lifetime goal of setting a land-speed record at Bonneville Flats, Utah.

The ensemble cast shared the best-actor award at the 2006 Cannes film festival -- and rightly so.

Ironically, they make the bond between John and Savannah look so natural that the ''dear John'' turn in their relationship makes even less sense than it does in the book.

The character of a scruffy computer nerd, played with might-as-well-enjoy-myself charm by little-known actor Justin Bartha, steals the picture from glossier players.

What's missing from this by-the-numbers drama is a sense of abandon.

A parent-and-kid-oriented comedy about the adventures of men doing the hard work of mommies, which couldn't be more timely -- or less delightful.

Unbearable were Witherspoon not such a genuinely attractive performer.

In the end, we never know why anyone is the one for anyone. And this qualifies as a filmmaking problem, at least for us here on Earth.

Rambo teaches that fighting sucks, good intentions can be futile, and coalitions of the willing are a charade: A man's got to do what a man's got to do.

A ripe psychosexual compost heap of a drama that emits a provocative scent of rot and nonsense.

Enough to anesthetize the living.

Highly unoriginal but nevertheless stirring drama.

Gets weirder and meaner and darker and sadder as it progresses, which is amazing since it simultaneously remains funny and horrifying right up to the end.

Pathfinder's moody, muddy look is courtesy of music-video director Marcus Nispel, who doesn't distinguish between people and tree trunks when it comes to emotional content.

It's impossible to watch Tony Kaye's theatrically supercharged, equal-opportunity button-pusher without experiencing a welter of emotions -- which is just what the filmmaker planned.

Clumsy camera work adds to the pre-wedding jitters in writer-director Galt Niederhoffer's pashmina-thin drama about attractive self-congratulatory Yale alumni gathering for the nuptials of two of their own.

2F2F, under the cut-to-the-chase direction of John Singleton, strips the package known as the Mindless Summer Movie down to its barest components of wheels, skin, and a pulsing soundtrack.

Everyone involved fulfills his or her job requirements adequately. But the magic is gone, and Shrek Forever After is no longer an ogre phenomenon to reckon with. Instead, it's a "Hot Swamp Time Machine."

In the presence of profound questions, the filmmaker goes profoundly shallow.

Wrings laughs from the antics of affable, eccentric villagers who cheerily break the law.

Ineffably Australian and intriguingly (rather than annoyingly) artsy, Look Both Ways introduces a handful of people gobsmacked by life-changing crises, all of them trying to make sense of responsibility, mortality, and connection.

The notion of meta has never been diddled more mega than in this giddy Möbius strip of a movie, a contrivance so whizzy and clever that even when it tangles at the end, murked like swampy southwestern Florida itself, the stumble has quotation marks around it.

But the very thing that drew the two actors to this ripping yarn — their enchantment with playing archetypes of male power — is the very thing that undoes their awfully big adventure.

The result is a pageant long but not deep, noisy but not stirring, expensive but not sumptuous.

So many body parts from other engineered romantic comedies have been crudely harvested and stitched together in the making of this weird robotic lark that "Maid of Honor of Frankenstein" might be more useful a nickname.

A helluva lot happens in 16 Blocks - an outrageous amount, really, along with a coda that deposits the audience squarely at a movieland finale. Who knew that looking both ways before crossing is where the real action is?

Zigzags across the conventions of genre, occasionally driving on the shoulders of black humor -- it's a road movie for the way we process suspense today.

Even in the summertime, the most restless young audience deserves the dignity of an action hero motivated by something more than franchise possibilities. Movies like XXX -- a big 000 -- don't deserve our $$$.

The words belong to Mr. Shakespeare. All else in this Macbeth is the pleasurably fevered invention of brash Australian director Geoffrey Wright.

Gruesome stuff — and yet Body Bags moves along with such jaunty, good bad taste that it’s hard not to smile.

Apted keeps the speechifying and dramatic poses away from Grant (poor Hackman’s the one forced to say, ”If you could cure cancer by killing one person, wouldn’t that be the brave thing to do?”). And he gives the star room to do clean work without the fussiness that marred Nine Months.

An ambitious debut feature.

The performances are tender, the script elegant, the cinematography (especially during a virtuoso chase scene in a soccer stadium) artful.

There's a bravura recklessness to Beautiful People that perfectly fits its subject.

Neither powerful nor interesting. It is a run-of-the-mill movie ''product'' developed as part of a 50 Cent marketing plan.

Coppola's stranded royal suggests that at heart, Marie Antoinette was just a simple girl who wanted to have fun, and got her head handed to her.

The movie is enchanting.

A movie at once understated and radical, deceptively unremarkable in presentation and ballsy in its earnestness. Don't let the star's overly familiar squint fool you: This is subtle, perceptive stuff.

It's probably the impresario's best-made movie yet, his most joyful, and his most moving.

Another must-see marvel of horror, comedy, and impeccable filmmaking by the Korean director Bong Joon-ho.

This shambling romantic comedy...clings to a sensibility that's imperviously, uncompromisingly Canadian.

A good measure of the movie's white-knuckle fun comes from Craven's old-hand familiarity with the way thrillers tick.

The air smells sweet and there's a thrumming beat in Bossa Nova.

Labored miscalculation of a teen-trend comedy.

This is essential viewing for understanding our world.

A loony attack on wacko liberalism and a ding-dong defense of wacko conservatism.

The best vignette, at the very end of the film, is the story Auster originally wrote for a newspaper as a Christmas piece, the one that inspired Wang to make Smoke in the first place. It's the one you'll want to inhale.

Sends comedy backward in time, and we're in the 1970s, ethno-sitcom style: These Andersons in their out-of-date white, snooty gated community apparently confuse themselves with their forebears on The Jeffersons.

The filmmaking is as strong as the subject matter, with an elegant structure.

The loserville teen comedy Underclassman is like a student project sloppily cribbed from other kids' notes -- kids who have seen "Rush Hour" and still can't get over how funny it is to stick a noisy black guy in a distinctly nonblack setting.

A comedy that might have made Butch and Sundance jump off a cliff.

The flourishes don't answer the question most on Potterites' minds -- who lives, who dies? -- but they briefly stupefy.

Sad, menacing, empathetic story.

The title Terror's Advocate is both a statement of fact and a worrisome understatement in a documentary as slippery as its subject.

Did granny intend this stuff for strangers? We'll never know. File this ''therapeutic'' movie, well made and creepy, on the dysfunction-as-art shelf next to "Capturing the Friedmans."

A Scottish weepie of such bathos and balderdash that it deserves a drinking game in its rotten honor.

Superb, Oscar-nominated documentary.

Bright dialogue and finely embroidered performances adorn The Guru like festive beading on a pair of made-in-India bedroom slippers.

The best moments in his first movie outing are those that feel most TV-like, just another day in the eternally optimistic undersea society.

Argues on behalf of the Darwinian theory that all of life imitates high school...But the argument is only halfhearted. Just Friends is much more interested in - and hilarious about - the small nostalgias of suburbia.

A crappy thriller gussied up with a chrome-plated veneer.

A revolutionary life has rarely felt less edgy, or the biography of an iconoclast more bourgeois.

Jindabyne -- named for the lakeside town in which the troubles spill -- can't contain all that the filmmakers want to throw in. Best to keep glued to the taut performance by Laura Linney.

The stunning, must-see drama Crash is proof that words have not lost the ability to shock in our anesthetized society.

Cassavetes throws in everything he can recycle to grab a core-demo viewer -- slutty teens making out, blaring rock music, guns, split screens.

A quietly dazzling microcosm that's always just this side of eerie, just that side of tragic.

Which brings us back to Kidman, who really IS sensational here.

This Debbie Downer of a drama is a bitter slog.

The result is an intense, action-driven war pic, a muscular, efficient standout that simultaneously conveys the feeling of combat from within as well as what it looks like on the ground.

Bassett's natural dramatic fierceness, so powerful when incited to action, is at odds with the knee-weakening sexual surrender required by the story.

Agresti fattens us up with the kind of kid's-eye-view tragi-comic adventures that regularly supply empty calories in artificially sweetened foreign-language imports.

The always surprising Watts creates a woman at once contemporary and retro. And Norton, as a producer as well as star, concedes enough space for Schreiber and the effortlessly fascinating Jones to earn their own spotlights.

It’s only when you’re in the grip of the climax that you realize how richly the filmmaker has painted a landscape that to other eyes might appear so parched.

The antidote to every square tough-guy caper you've ever seen, and the inspiration for many great ones. It is an existential imperative to seek out a showing and burn rubber to get there, preferably in an excellent car.

It offers an attractive getaway route from self-importance, snark, and chatty comedies about male bonding. Here, stick shifts do the talking.

And here's the revelation: Miley Cyrus is a really interesting movie star in the making, with an intriguing echo-of-foghorn speaking voice, and a scuffed-up tomboyish physicality (in the Kristen Stewart mode) that sets her apart from daintier girls in her celebrity class.

Up and Down captures Prague life with a fervor that's comical but a longing that's serious; no one is easy to pigeonhole.

About two people on a stage, talking their way into and out of alienation.

Duck Season unfolds with a slaphappy logic that only looks casual. In fact, every unfinished conversation and banal picture on the wall (one's of ducks) matters as four little people share one memorable little day.

I mean no impertinence when I say that as a portrait of love and grief, writer-director Mike White's exceptional film Year of the Dog deserves the same admiration accorded Joan Didion's exceptional memoir "The Year of Magical Thinking."

Gravity-defying kung fu choreography.

Something marvelous happens as the filmmaker, in his first feature, expertly metes out small scenes of communication between people taught, for generations, to be wary of one another: This Band swings with the rhythms of hope.

Hoffman acts the hell out of the role.

This audaciously issues-loaded indie drama works, improbably and entirely, on account of the marvelous, often familiar-looking, rarely starring character actor Richard Jenkins and his perfect performance as a stodgy, widowed economics professor.

The frustration of this good-hearted, off-key warble of an indie, written by Rose with Robert Cary, who directed, is that the filmmaking pales when compared with the classic elements of 1950s and early '60s romantic musicals to which it pays homage.

The scariest thing in the not-scary-enough The Ring Two is the notion that even smart, attractive adults - yikes, even mothers - just never learn, either.

Maybe the worst thing that can happen is that every other movie at the multiplex will be sold out this weekend.

It's thrillingly original, lyrical, and wise, and the filmmaker conveys the mutable intensity of young love with the authoritative originality of an important filmmaker.

The very title The Departed suggests a James Joycean take on Irish-Catholic sentiment when, of course, this story is anything but: It's Scorsesean, and he's in full bloom.

The actors more eager to goof around in schlumpfy costumes on a low-budget lark than to play their trashy characters with the seriousness such farce requires.

The Savages is terrific -- a movie of uncommon appreciation for the nature and nurture that go into making us who we are, a perfectly calibrated drama both compassionate and unsentimental.

A lovely, thoughtful, and yes, uplifting adventure.

Here the fascination is Hurt, so deft at steering his character away from booby-trap clichés that he guides his young costars safely out of sap's way and brightens an otherwise very yellowed tale.

The writer-director bestows honor -- generously, apolitically -- not only on the dead and still living American veterans who fought in Ia Drang, but also on their families, on their Vietnamese adversaries, and on the families of their adversaries too.

A mesmerizing work of disturbing power and unease.

And the guy is really good at his job: He knows how to combine impossibly macho action plus attractive self-amusement into a reliable rhythm of ooof! and wink-wink.

Another thinking-person's thriller from director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland, also co-pilots on "28 Days Later."

Smith transfers an Iowa-based short story by Randy Russell to India's western Goa region -- and works in Hindi, primarily with novice actors. The result is a story both authentically specific and profoundly global.

With no Jamie Lee Curtis as a volleying partner, though, Lohan's chipper energy is, like, so totally out of proportion given the colorless pliability of everyone around her.

Stripped of the pleasures of terror, flattened of grandeur (with a tacked-on coda that fairly groans with storytelling defeat), the movie sinks from the weight of its own heavyhandedness.

Howard looks peachy, and actor-turned-director Jodie Markell sweats the details -- moonlight, honeyed accents -- but the brittle script resists restoration.

A slick, synthetic, self-important drama that thinks it is saying more than it is simply because of its subject matter.

While much of The In-Laws feels stuck in time, what really does it in is the script's boring, modern sensitivity to fatherhood, and bonding with one's kids, and all that enlightened parenthood crap.

There are moments of real funniness in this smarter-than-anticipated goof-fest.

Just because A Walk to Remember is shrewd enough to activate girlish tear ducts doesn't mean it's good enough for our girls. They're willing to buy tickets; why not honor their wits as well as their wallets?

Lives happily ever after because it's such a feisty but good natured embrace of the inner ogre in everyone.

Film music by Nino Rota provides a Fellini overlay.

Casé, with her sturdy, elemental body and shining eyes, is the reason phrases like ''inner beauty'' were invented, and she's also the reason this idealistic, naturalistic film by Rio de Janeiro born Andrucha Waddington has been such a success at festivals around the world.

The laughs are few in this inert, ungenerous comedy.

For a visual bonus, Hugh Dancy appears in bike shorts as the lone male Jane-ite.

Traces the sport to its Polynesian beginnings, then zooms in on the genesis of 20th- century Southern California surf culture -- the boards, the bikinis, the laid-back cowabunga.

Miller's theme is innocence, the loss of it, and the reclamation of equanimity in the face of that loss, and the music she makes is haunting.

A mess -- all high concept, stranded performances, and no laughs.

Funny, director and co-writer Dani Levy suggests with no little coldness, how the scent of money can do what religion, ideology, and ethical principles cannot.

The uncoagulated anguish of parents mourning the death of a child has rarely been more powerfully depicted than in the collected vignettes of grief, rage, and retribution that make up the riveting domestic drama In the Bedroom.

While Robbins has a good time playing the boyish devil, the rest of the principals transmit on an awfully low baud rate.

The Human Stain is, contradictorily, drained of color by the spotlight turned on its charismatic leads. Between the labors of simplifying the story for the screen and accommodating the stardust of world-class actors, an essentially, uniquely American tragic hero and heroine are bleached of real American tragedy.

Filmmaker Reed Cowan (himself gay and raised Mormon) documents the church's considerable financial influence on Prop 8's passage. Then he expands his sad and furious homegrown film to record the misery of gay Mormons sometimes driven to suicide over being rejected by their church and families.

In watching the birds and the man with an affectionate, curious eye, the filmmaker builds a story of surprising emotional resonance.

The wry filmmaker has created an urbane society of family and friends as ridiculously pretentious and hypocritical as they are cultured, accomplished, and posh.

Poorly engineered: lurchingly paced, the dramatic conflicts duct taped together.

The calm poetry of the cinematography offsets the mess of the politics to stunning effect.

A thriller made from a completist's checklist rather than with a cultist's passion.

All the nuggets of spoken wisdom rattle around with a tad too much space and (at 2 1/2 hours plus) too much length.

Mezzogiorno (Love in the Time of Cholera) plays Dalser with the kind of fervent intensity once seen in silent films.

The jazzish score, by Lee's music man, Terence Blanchard, is typically intrusive. But the mood is right, the twists are new. And with one casting inspiration, Inside Man furthers the rising stardom of Chiwetel Ejiofor (Serenity).

The more rink time, the better: As directed by hip-hop music-video king Chris Robinson from a story by "Antwone Fisher's" Antwone Fisher, the skate scenes are a blast.

It's young-Hollywood-driven business as usual in this derivative, nasty, and ultimately empty drama.

With In Between Days, the filmmaker captures feminine melancholy with rare precision. Find this movie.

Adams, of course, is a peach. Her sparkle requires only minor character adjustment and twinkle recharging from her recent triumph as the old-fashioned modern heroine in "Enchanted."

Janet McTeer displays Amazonian power while Jennifer Jason Leigh tears into her role as a high maintenance creature with a ferocity that leaves little room for her usual acting tics.

When it comes to crazy, violent, semidelirious, testosterone-laden, proto-Viking tales about a mute visionary one-eyed warrior who breaks skulls, Valhalla Rising is pretty great.

The mad genius of this cheerily bonkers feature is the integration of a documentary-style safari into an outlandish fiction involving a fancy-pants CIA pursuit of a downed spy satellite, and a shotgun-wielding outback widow.

Sophie Scholl has a certain quiet dignity that wins its audience popularity honestly.

Pulling the bandage of sentiment cleanly away from oozing concepts like ''heroism'' and ''our nation's war on terror'' in the aftermath of recent wounds, here's a drama about the most politically charged crisis of our time that grants the dignity of autonomy to every soul involved.

The imagery is exotically grungy and jumbled by flashback, but in the end, the picture's more pulp than juice.

Forget "Monty Python," You Don't Mess With the Zohan is a circus that never really flies.

The first 3-D film produced by Jerry Bruckheimer turns out to be similar to 2-D projects from the same noise-making producer--heavy on action scenes and heavy, too, on message.

Riveting true-life drama.

Like many of the worst pop-referential parodies of the post-''Scream'' era, this one stalls on laughs once the big joke has been established.

What Emily doesn't do, though -- what this slow-moving, sour, sloppily assembled teen drama doesn't allow her to do -- is make her predicament of any emotional interest.

A junky thriller that mistakes brute-strength plot twist, showy violence, and the against-type participation of Jennifer Aniston for earned excitement.

Vibrantly, intricately alive on its own terms. This is what magic the movies can conjure with an inspired fellowship in charge, and unlimited pots of gold.

Washington is wasted here. Kelly Lynch is wooden. Crowe has a ball going over the top, but how much taunting and eyeball popping can a performer do?

You're either in the mood to go along with the puzzle pieces or you're not. I'm not usually a puzzle-piece fan myself, not when it's clear that the filmmaker rigs the moves. But I couldn't help but fall for the repurposed real estate, and cheer for the lady strong enough to break through walls when she senses a child is waiting.

The movie flaunts its comedy roots like a messy bleach job.

A nifty horror movie that doesn't claim to be anything other than a zippy exercise in creature-feature entertainment.

The movie may be more bogus than a Gucci bag for sale on a Fifth Avenue sidewalk, but at least the backgrounds are real.

If you sign on, disarmed of irony, for her trip -- I did -- you'll be rewarded with a rare thing that may in itself prove the existence of a Higher Power: a Hollywood entertainment that makes you consider deep thoughts.

It's okay for a grown movie critic to admit she cried freely and with great feeling for more than half the movie, and grinned like a dork through the remainder.

For those newbies, this update, starring peppery Disney re-do queen Lindsay Lohan as wannabe car racer Maggie Peyton, is as serviceable an introduction as any to the notion of a sentient set of wheels.

Director Peter O'Fallon fires his biggest gun: a blast of Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus, truly heavenly music wasted on a handful of dust.

The nonprofessional cast of Bahman Ghobadi's remarkable, slow, rough edged feature reveals a simple, piercing grimness and determination framed by the gray, icy landscape of Iranian Kurdistan.

Yes indeed, Pirates 2.0 is a theme ride, if by ride you mean a hellish contraption into which a ticket holder is strapped, overstimulated but unsatisfied, and unable to disengage until the operator releases the restraining harness.

A strange, black-and-blue therapeutic drama equally mottled with likable good intentions and agitating clumsiness.

In a class by itself.

Feels staged and exoticized in the way stories about insular communities often do when told by outsiders.

Asif Kapadia's blazing feature debut, a gorgeously photographed saga with a fine sense of the way place shapes personality, has won numerous awards in the filmmaker's native Britain.

Naturally, a subject this right-on draws a right-on cast. Kris Kristofferson, Avril Lavigne, and Ethan Hawke pitch in.

One piece of advice in trying to make sense of it all: Follow the sleepwear, since Bullock cycles through a few garments that clarify which day is which. Another suggestion? Ignore the two-bit psychological and spiritual doggerel with which screenwriter Bill Kelly tries to deepen the meaning of the game.

In the heaving cross-century swirl of the climax, ''Weight'' makes its point: Jealousy is timeless; Hurley is not.

Under Reitman's deanship, Ferrell lets his freak flag fly and Vaughn unlooses a notably funny, light-on-his-feet lunkheadedness.

Quite grand, quite exotic, David Lean-style epic.

In the end, One True Thing suggests, families can be healed even in loss. This may not be a true thing, but at least this emotional drama offers up hope, sweet like one of Kate Gulden's tasty cakes.

A triumph of performance, production, and adaptation over the empty-calorie dither of its source material.

The film is almost deliriously stylish, which helps mask the silliness. But the bellowing music, by John Adams, is infuriatingly intrusive -- which undoes the visual good.

The ethos of the Chelsea Hotel may shape Hawke's artistic aspirations, but he hasn't yet coordinated his own DV poetry with the Beat he hears in his soul.

A historical drama as static as it is stately.

A witty, stylish, beautifully made charmer of a family picture.

Subplots go nowhere, and characters -- many played by well-known actors -- barely get screen time. Willem Dafoe, Salma Hayek, and Jane Krakowski are among those who are there and gone.

Raquel's devotion to her employer is barbed with hatred, need, and an insecurity she manifests through constant tiny acts of sabotage that would be funny if they weren't also so chilling -- bordering on psychotic.

Commits sins of romantic comedy as well as sins of spiritual tragedy.

This toothless thriller...feels like a strained reworking of ''The Fugitive.''

The tonal elegance of this black comedy set in a dark time -- is boldly dependent on performances that tug at taut lines of moral complexity.

An amazing thing -- a work of cinematic art in which form and structure pursues the logic-defying (parallel) subjects of dreaming and moviegoing.

Isn't a movie, it's Gorgonzola, a crumbly summertime stinker veined with pop-cultural fungus.

A brain-squandering thriller.

Fiennes speaks with his body what the script cannot formulate about what it's like to be a man apart. The actor creates particulars of time, space, class, and personality with one crook of a finger, one twist of a wrist. I call that nobility of craft; he's the actors' prince.

This outstanding work — so meditative — is clearly an affirmation of life (and never more provocatively than in the film’s unusual coda, in which moviemaking itself becomes part of the discussion). It’s also so grounded in the real emotional scope of ordinary people that the magnitude of the subject is answered in the most mysteriously matter-of-fact way.

The Illusionist looks rigorously styled and measured, and every one of Norton's postures feels chosen. Yet the interesting actor has chosen so thoughtfully that we're riveted.

The orgasm, it turns out, is low on the list of Amy's issues. The title is faked.

As a follow-up to his striking 2002 directorial debut, "The Believer," this second obsessive study in fanaticism by writer-director Henry Bean has its own delirious integrity and outsider-art charm.

The Big Apple of this evanescent tone poem is an invented nocturnal landscape featuring speechifying eccentrics and absurdist moments that feel northern European in sensibility.

I rather like the whole mystic- crystal-revelations aspect of K-PAX, and the idea that even a psychiatrist of Jeff Bridges' handsome, American substantiality is open to notions of cosmic improbability.

The unusual intimacy and authenticity can't be faked: The cast is peppered with nonprofessionals, most notably Michal Bat Sheva Rand.

The storytelling may be ordinary, but the cast is one of those all-star reunions.

A pitiless yet elegiac Australian Western as caked with beauty as it is with blood.

Only pretends to care about good people who sometimes do bad things. In fact, it hasn't got time for the pain.

A muscular sequel to To's riveting 2005 gangster picture "Election."

Lathan, charismatic and beautifully strong, holds the screen in every scene.

Tautou is a fascinating, unsmiling, petite presence with a severe brow and an androgynous appeal, so much so that I wish Alessandro Nivola (Junebug) were a more robust beau as Arthur ''Boy'' Capel, the love of Chanel's life.

Rashid's optimistic fairy tale is inventive, in a show-queen way.

Leconte (''Ridicule'') gives his heart to the luck of romance, to the dream state visual style of Fellini, and, most lyrically, to the passion of the dagger point swoon.

While we can agree, for the sake of Iberian-American cinematic friendship, to go along with the whole simplified 1960s swinger premise and ''The Jackie Gleason Show'' choreography, we can also long for the comparatively nuanced 1990s swinger premise of ''Friends.''

A quaint, romanticized rendering.

John Hurt is magnetic as a Catholic priest running a school where terrified Tutsi have taken refuge, while Hugh Dancy, as a naive teacher, represents white commitment to black Africa at its most impotent and unreliable.

This cranked-up drama wants it both ways.

In stories like this defiantly unsubtle, structurally clunky specimen, causes women who are considering abortion to think again, and self-selecting audiences to enjoy a light, luxurious weep.

This super-duper deluxe nature documentary clearly aims to recruit young viewers as conservationists.

This measured bio-production might be viewed as a lesser companion piece to "Vera Drake" -- although in the case of Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman, all the period-piece tastefulness makes for a story more instructive than emotionally tangible.

It took writer-director Samuel ''Shmulik'' Maoz nearly 30 years to make this disturbing, visceral, personal film.

Look for bloody axes, grotesquely disfigured zombies, and creepy visions — much of it bloatedly self-indulgent and a small part wicked funny about the influence of guys like Stephen King/Sutter Cane who write words read by people who don’t read anything else, or maybe don’t read at all but only go to movies like this one.

The archival footage is so breathtaking, the reminiscences so piquant, that even a stranger to dance can't help but be swept up by this peek into such exquisite, now vanished glamour.

Davies registers believable frustration and deadpan teenage disengagement in equal measure.

Features the dullest, least lifelike collection of pals this side of "Eyes Wide Shut."

Twelve ogles the lost boys and girls as they make their mistakes. But unlike the novel, the movie never really gets inside these kids, who aren't in the least all right.

Shaped and softened by producer Ivan Reitman, screenwriters Len Blum and Michael Kalesniko, and director Betty Thomas, however, the movie-star Stern is a defanged tiger, funny but tranquilized.

The last thing Marber's quartet of modern miserables needs is to be admired; they are the very worst of average people, but on screen they have become the very best of the baddest.

Rutina Wesley glowers with just the right touch of sweetness as a brainy student (and stellar after-school stepper).

Croft is one humorless butt-kicker. Excavations in exotic lands have rarely looked so much like items on a to-do list.

Mouret not only stars (opposite a delicate Ledoyen) as the slightly schlemiely fellow in want of a woman's affection, he also wrote and directed this enticing, weightless divertissement.

Operates on such outdated, unimaginative conventions of movie chemistry that Moore and Brosnan end up appearing older and stodgier than necessary.

What this Manchurian Candidate for a new generation makes up for in timing, it lacks in discipline and edge.

A half hour in and still, the plot, tone, and setting are incomprehensible.

(Denis's) visual style is hypnotic, rapturous, and she makes barren landscapes look gorgeous, hard men look vulnerable.

Not one female character escapes mockery or patronizing.

The voices of Liam Neeson -- as the film's narrator -- and his late wife, Richardson, inevitably add to the project's poignance.

A crude, silly supernatural thriller.

The spectacular battle scenes are the engorged heart of the delirious adventure. But Woo also gets maximum romantic value from Tony Leung as a war hero married to Chiling Lin as the tea-pouring beauty.

That everything gets worked out -- friendship affirmed, jokes made about silly magazine articles on reeling in a boy -- is as sure as the soundtrack's inclusion of a Mandy Moore song.

A sharp-looking Mob drama with a gooey moral center.

It's raunchy, outspoken -- and also a smart and agile dissection of art, fame, and the chutzpah of big-budget productions.

I wish 'Hero's emotional heat rose more intensely -- more recklessly. There's something grand but distant and almost fetishistic about the operatic solemnity with which Zhang approaches the Rashomonic story of assassins attempting to kill a king.

May be the first time travel fantasy to move grown fellows with 401(k) accounts to tears.

Drawing on a documentary visual style he deftly employed in "One Day in September" and "Touching the Void," director Kevin Macdonald uses McAvoy's boyishness to treat Garrigan's apolitical foolishness as yet another damn mess in one African country's hell.

As charmingly verklemmt New York women with bad luck in men and good luck in apartments go, Nora Wilder in Broken English has all the breaks.

Masterpiece of voyeurism.

Grace Is Gone grabs on to a name, a war, and the metaphor-come-to-life of a theme park with rides going nowhere. And we, the people, are spun around and shaken for tears.

This funny, gory stab-athon is as sophisticated about the mechanics of Part 2s as the original was savvy about horror flicks.

The filmmaker's decision to shoot the past in color and the present in murky black and white is an inspired visual translation of psychological truth.

The pond is so shallow in this wan romance that there's no room for anything to float.

The only metatwist missing in the twittering self-regard of this indulgent home movie is the participation of a documentary video crew -- ideally helmed by some TV exec's USC-grad son -- shooting the filmmakers shooting the play within the play.

That durable, sexy powerhouse Beverly D'Angelo steals every scene she's in.

Miller hit documentary gold when he met Levitch. But this marvelously structured, sensitively edited, deep and compassionate portrait (in atmospheric, made-for-Manhattan black and white) of one man hopscotching a fine line between verbal genius and psychological miswiring is Miller's own jewel, the work of a gifted filmmaker.

It's a thin line between 20th-century Nazism and 21st-century corporate culture in Heartbeat Detector, Nicolas Klotz's rewardingly chilly psychological thriller.

The narrative logic of Swimming Pool slips through our hands like cool water, shimmery and light-dappled, leaving behind the pleasures of summer heat and goose bumps.

A Smith production is always noisy, shambling, and liberally smutty on the outside while conservatively gooey on the inside.

Campos (who was 24 when he made this jolting pic) captures the numbing psychic scramble that just might cause the YouTube generation to go morally haywire. Or become filmmakers.

The result is a naughty throwaway in all senses of the word.

What the characters in The Witnesses -- and we, the audience -- pay testimony to in André Téchiné's urgent, compassionate, and ultimately optimistic French drama are the toll the epidemic has rung, and the responsibility of the living to choose life.

A cheap cut-glass tiara of a booby prize goes to Drop Dead Gorgeous for messing up so utterly.

There's no denying that when it comes to communicating a certain delirious romanticism of character shaped by thousands of hours spent sitting in the dark, the artist who made this showpiece is a master.

Diva is based on one novel in a series about Gorodish and Alba by the pseudonymous ”Delacorta,” but the movie’s mad excitement hinges entirely on the pleasure to be had in moving our eye from one gorgeously composed stage set of artifice to another.

The unintended effect of all the melodramatic complications in Transamerica is, oddly, to distract attention from an understanding of exactly what that courage really costs.

A small, heartfelt film.

What matters now, what Lumumba conveys, is the urgent chaos of revolution.

A highly original Death in Venice-scented comedy drama written and directed with flair by British feature novice Richard Kwietniowski.

A traffic map of calls and responses, lessons and homework, wishes and fulfillment. All roads lead to acting-award nominations, but none lead to truth.

This sunny ode to brotherhood, made on a tiny budget, goes a fair distance on good vibes.

Undoubtedly downplays the seamier, less attractive experiences of Arab women and men in Tunisian cabaret culture, and plays up the fairy-tale charm of the universal ''Flashdance'' formula in an unusual setting.

A weightless, style-driven thriller set in a photogenically chaotic Hong Kong.

Gray has an artful, understated way of conveying what's going ?on inside, often simply by focusing his camera on Kazan.

A poky dawdle of a Southern-style indie that would pass without notice but for John Travolta and Scarlett Johansson.

Allen draws a snappy, loose-limbed performance from Penn.

This sincere, delicate, and intrinsically religious comedy may also become that most unexpected of blessings - Danny Boyle's first family classic.

Antielitist, anti-hypocrisy, pro-feel-good entertainment.