Lisa Schwarzbaum

The kids in this syrupy family picture are spunky tykes and the adults are dolts, but Wood is worth watching because she's so clearly ready to play nobody's girl but her own.

The title embraces the richness of Kechiche's beautiful film, which captures the rhythms of displacement and hardship, the bond of family meals, and even the daily routines of the magnificent women who are part of Slimane's life.

In the creature’s mating habits and its wriggling life, Imamura creates a parallel to the upstream battle of these fragile outsiders, and he makes his points with abundant, tender humor.

Taylor does that thing she does when she whispers as if she has just discovered speech; Pearce enjoys himself doing his own singing, and embracing grunge.

Like a great novel from a more expansive bygone age, The Best of Youth is full of big thoughts; like a great soap opera, it's also full of sharp plot turns, vibrant characters, and great talk. It is, in short, the best of cinema.

Suicidal depression has rarely looked so amusing.

A film of wonderful looseness and innovation. Set free to film fakes, the director is the real thing.

Bee Season answers the question no Talmudic student or fan of "Unfaithful" has thought to ask: What would Richard Gere look like as a learned Jewish scholar and teacher?

As ever, Egoyan assembles a devoted repertory cast, including Christopher Plummer.

Nakedness has rarely looked so...naked. And innately, universally comic.

The players are timelessly familiar in American Teen, too. But filmmaker Nanette Burstein tells their stories with a distinctly 21st-century pop and audacity.

This hankie-yanker is an emotional cheat.

Watch for the ''Mrs. Doubtfire'' syndrome: In Santa drag and padded for laughs, Scott demonstrates how to be a more sensitive, more funsy parent than boring old Mom.

The director has said that the plot was influenced by a real English thief named Valentin who showed up at his door one day to repay money stolen a decade earlier.

Even an audience moved to tender patriotism might wonder how Scott, a proven master of ''Gladiator''-size visual showmanship, could have bombed away the personality of every man fighting until he's left with nothing more than pure combat.

There are stretches of big fun in Big Trouble, and little pleasures too.

What the activist drama "Fast Food Nation" does with talk and the aid of movie stars, Our Daily Bread, a riveting documentary by Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter, does even better, with no voice-over and barely a word spoken by the unidentified workers involved in matter-of-fact killing and harvesting.

Their love story was inevitably complicated. And so is the documentary Chris & Don: A Love Story -- not simply a love letter to love -- by Guido Santi and Tina Mascara.

Downey's head and heart are in the right place, but the movie is more in pieces than whole, and more about iron than about men.

Buscemi is stymied here by the inertia of his material.

The whole concept, supposedly based on a true story, is weird — this is what Vietnam movies have come to? But at least the Disney quadruped has the grace to say nothing, and Leary, still an interesting motormouth, knows enough not to smoke or swear when there are elephants around.

After teeny indies, this studio release retains the trademark love of warped American gothic that the Polishes share with David Lynch and the brothers Ethan and Joel Coen. But the unexpected streak of yearning sunniness -- the Spielbergian touch of boyhood dreams propelling a grown man -- gives The Astronaut Farmer a warmth that's new for them.

Fantasy leaks into reality.

Errol Morris may have been put on earth to make The Fog of War, a stunning portrait of Robert S. McNamara that closes a year of outstanding nonfiction movies on a high note.

Amreeka is strategically inviting and carefully mild even when making unsubtle points about Palestinian suffering and American insensitivity.

That Just Like Heaven succeeds at all - at least for teenage girls with limited interest in the drafting of living wills - is due entirely to Witherspoon's can-do charisma.

With the pitiless, devastating Fat Girl, Catherine Breillat puts men and women, boys and girls on notice: When fantasy, hypocrisy, and manipulation mix in a wet, sandy place, you dive into sex at your own risk.

As loose and restful as pajamas.

Cynical and cheerily merciless.

A nifty, entwined, ultimately gripping adaptation of British crime writer Ruth Rendell's novel ''The Tree of Hands'' by French director Claude Miller.

Jammed with banner-ready political rhetoric, and the relentlessness of the lectures is wearying. The plot, on the other hand, is a standard contraption built on enduring urban anxieties and involving a nasty hotel-room trade.

The movie sparkles with witty self-awareness.

Thrilling little epic set in the bewildering arena of the English language.

Doesn't have much time for refinement of image or elegance of plot. What it's got instead is an insider's feel for the local, excitable hoodlum life and speech.

The storytelling is the series' best, with a zingy balance of drama, humor, and Deep Thoughts (in a screenplay by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, directed with confident exuberance by Irvin Kershner). [Special Edition]

As filmmaking, the docu is only travel-diary so-so. But the chance to experience the machine-gun rhymes of ''the Turkish Eminem'' - a young man called Ceza - is priceless.

Cheery, expertly constructed Spanish farce.

And there's that perfect soundtrack, jammed with hit after timeless hit. So integral is the music to the heat of Chill that even a now-hackneyed scene like ensemble-dancing-while-cleaning-the-kitchen (to the Temptations' ''Ain't Too Proud to Beg'') takes on a glow far lovelier than the chore warrants -- as does this ingratiating, fake movie.

The filmmaking is rudimentary in The Treatment, Oren Rudavsky's adaptation of Daniel Menaker's novel, but the feeling for the patient-and-shrink dynamic is authentic.

The movie pretends to warn against such shallowness -- but flaunts its arousal at how exciting such a controllable world is for those with access to the software.

In the most shocking contribution to this self-conscious but fascinating sampling of art challenged by life, Mexico's Alejandro González Iñárritu (''Amores Perros'') makes a horrifying suspense story.

The film is notable for its nice performances, its handsome photography, and its very active music. If the preceding praise sounds generic, so is the movie.

Ceylan, who also served as cinematographer, frames the affecting, unstudied performances in gorgeously chosen shots and nonevents that sometimes teeter on the edge of comedy before knocking us breathless with their emotional power.

As a thriller, this 21 2-hour production takes a slow route between short bursts of excitement.

Must viewing for the Bridezillas set, this winning pageant of gaudy bad taste is the work of some of the U.K.'s most popular comedy performers.

If only for the comedy glory of Sigourney Weaver as a TV network president who confuses acid reflux with gut instinct, this very smart, very funny movie about the making of a network sitcom is a cut-glass gem of a showbiz conceit.

Doesn't keep any secrets but an open one: that Johnny Depp is on a roll, and actor's block is definitely not his problem.

Jeunet maintains a firm control of his dreamscape creation, drawing on influences as varied as "Toy Story," "Children of Paradise," and TV's "Mission: Impossible."

The scariest thing about The Haunting is how awful it is. No, worse than awful: desperate. It’s a horror flick afraid of its own audience, as lost in its own geography as the fictional film crew in The Blair Witch Project.

Here we are again: not entertained, not nearly enough, by an installment of the ''Star Wars'' epic that, for the first time, exhibits symptoms of...nerves. And a chill, conservative grimness of purpose, rather than an excited thrill at the possibilities of cinematic storytelling.

Director Betty Thomas demonstrates her expertise at keeping indulgence at bay in even the coarsest of comic situations.

A weightless movie as cheerily artificial as the Old Navy pitchman's bronze skin tones.

The scenery (prettily captured by There Will Be Blood cinematographer Robert Elswit) is littered with heavy symbolism (fire! rain! dead birds!); the performances are merely heavy.

Each actor appears to have received the script to a different movie, while Allen adds his own directorial touch of sexual vulgarity.

The role of a poised daddy's girl is a dull one for Holmes, who looks pained, in a nonspecific way, throughout her capers; the movie itself, with a screenplay by Jessica Bendinger and Kate Kondell, is a dull one for director Forest Whitaker.

The blessings of salvation have rarely felt so mixed, the parameters of Lolita-hood so elusive - which is exactly Martel's specialty.

Luc Jacquet's exquisitely shot eye-of-God study of a year in the lives of these distinctive birds is a nature film built with a feel for the epic and a love of operatic narrative.

But Solondz also creates keen portraits of the participating characters in Dawn's daily drama. (The only downside: The drama veers unsteadily toward outlandishness.)

What slays them in the second balcony, though, flattens on the screen.

Director Stephen Herek (Mr. Holland's Opus) and screenwriter Tom Schulman (Dead Poets Society) offer no clues, no challenges, nothing to provoke the smallest bubble of curiosity in an audience that waits 40 minutes only to realize Oh, I get it, this isn't going to be Eddie Murphy Funny!

Flirting is a little too weighed down with stage business to soar. But episode for episode, it's one of the ha-ha-funniest movies currently around.

Blithe and exhilarating romantic comedy.

There's not a moment in Bagger Vance that can't be anticipated.

In the tradition of such food-as-love films as "Eat Drink Man Woman" and "Big Night", kitchen work is idealized as a form of communion in this indulgently nostalgic story -- deep-fried with plot, script, and character cliches but honey glazed with goodwill...

A Little goes a long way.

There’s a self-awareness to Shampoo that gives the movie a cleansing sadness and, oddly, makes Beatty an affectingly amoral roue.

A stirring action movie -- in the international manner of ''The Fast Runner'' or ''No Man's Land."

Silly, undone by lack of faith in its own subject.

If I ran the circus, the gang that made the sturdy, witty, inventively animated Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! would get first dibs on any future movie productions of the Theodor Seuss Geisel canon.

What blows us away is the power of Ifans' moist puppy eyes and chilling smile as a true believer undeterred by reality.

Part "Law & Order," part "The Omen," the movie doesn't trust the audience to follow serious theological and legal discussion without a spook hook.

In the juxtaposition of cataclysmic matter-of-fact misery and cinematic poetry, the filmmaker finds a calmly stunning way to convey the experience of living with death as something intimate, and, unnervingly, almost natural.

In the handsome, haunting submarine thriller Below, the usual perils of deep-sea maneuvers are heightened by psychic unraveling.

And as ever, the jokes are a jumble of the gross, the baggy, the raunchy, the mistimed, and - every once in a while - the refreshingly incorrect.

Something is happening to our boys: They're getting mushy. Shallow Hal is not so much about how gross people are as how beautiful they are once you get beyond the rude, noisy flesh. It's a sermon wrapped in a fat suit.

Conveys the heaving passion of Puccini's famous love-jealousy-murder-suicide fandango with great cinematic innovation.

The actors themselves are more rip roaring and full of spunk than in their first outing.

The Cell is foremost about singular imagery, a succession of still pictures strung together frame by frame.

Superb family drama.

Jaa, mesmerizing as ever to behold with his pinwheel moves, also (co)directs for the first time.

There are moments in Baran as wholesomely heart-tugging as any involving Charlie Chaplin and a blind girl, but the film is saved from aren't-kids-cute sentimentality by a warmth that isn't faked and a stately sense of composition.

Affliction -- a beautiful bummer, a magnificent feel-bad movie -- is American filmmaking of a most rewarding order.

The result is weightless entertainment that's both camp and true, a warped adoration of star-quality actresses as amazing creatures who can project the lives of fictional characters as well as the essence of their own fabulous selves.

The mix is Lifetime soap–meets–Woody Allen smart-set comedy, with less humor and a genteel Connecticut setting.

Pandaemonium goes a long way toward capturing the compelling delirium of opium among a crowd of freethinking British iconoclasts.

One of those thrilling confluences in pop culture that rewards audiences for thinking the worst about politicians and the best about movie stars.

The sides to consider in Taking Sides are all but obscured by cinematic pomposity at best, Holocaust porn at worst.

Knows what it needs to do for both its stars, does it, and doesn't make a federal case about it. I'd watch these two together again in a New York minute.

The author was able to compensate for the book's plotlessness by contemplating other people leading full lives quite as important as hers. In Wells' movie adaptation, even the birth of a friend's baby becomes all about Frances and the play of emotions on Lane's busy, beautiful face.

Ultimately, the talented cast -- among them M. Emmet Walsh, Faye Dunaway, Skeet Ulrich, and Viggo Mortensen -- play to their easiest star turns rather than their most interesting strengths.

The performances are winning -- Gyllenhaal is particularly sharp as an aggrieved sibling, and there's mutual zing in her scenes with Reilly.

Directed, with overfondness for the goofy ways of guys, by Ted Demme and written, with overfondness for the sound of guys pontificating about nothing, by Scott Rosenberg.

The worldview, the sense of childlike fun shaded with adult melancholy, and the joyful, serene attention to visual oddity and wordless beauty could only be made in Japan. And, specifically, made by Hayao Miyazaki.

The director of The Descent is savvy enough to suggest even more than he shows. And he's old-school enough to load up on glimpses of good, clean, gruesome gore.

The ethical, independent-minded kid has his unhip charms, and so does Hey Arnold! The Movie.

In their own precisely posed ways, the drenched players in The Heart of Me are as compelling as those in any less decorum-bound love triangle.

Enough does work, and well, to make Set It Off a valuable model for a new kind of girl-pack story: one that’s not just for girls.

Had Latura et al. paused for even a moment to acknowledge what they were doing, Daylight might have been a whole other ball of fire.

This is a movie about actors acting; who cares why Juliette was in the pen?

Gentle Bingenheimer, who retreats from being ''figured out,'' is dubiously honored with unenlightened commentary by people hell-bent on doing so.

A cheeky, great-looking, thoughtfully loopy creature feature about the lure and dangers of cutting-edge gene splicing.

A knock-kneed but likable just-for-girls drama set in 1963 that promotes single-sex institutions as the best breeding ground for future female senators and filmmakers.

49 Up is a precious document, and must viewing.

Way ahead of its time 30 years ago, and just as stunning today, Killer of Sheep is one of those marvels of original moviemaking that keeps hope of artistic independence alive.

It challenges, this nervy oddity, like modern art should.

A Lebanese variation on sweetly soapy dramas about Women Who Bond With Wet Hair.

Some things are funnier than a barrel of monkeys. Most things, frankly. And anything is funnier than Ed.

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

Directed by Luis Llosa with all of the subtlety of a snake-oil salesman, is in the great tradition of cinematic cheese, as processed as Kraft Singles slices. [18 Apr 1997, p. 48]

The movie is a rigged game of clichés and platitudes, but fans will be pleased by additional proof that Latifah is a lovable Queen but not a pampered princess.

The steady drip-drip-drip of nothings like this are killing us all.

Topsy-Turvy reminds us that, in any age, creative expression is at once the most personal and most communal of enterprises.

There's no great romantic climax to Don Juan DeMarco (and that may be a drawback for Depp lovers looking to swoon), but there is an airy delicacy to this tall tale that fits in perfectly with the weather these days, the hormones, the whole seasonal gestalt.

Slums of Beverly Hills has the kind of big heart, strong voice, vivid look, and original sense of humor many young artists -- particularly young female artists -- don't find until they're riper, and some never find at all.

The hero himself has been denatured for a young, late 1990s audience with little appreciation for real suavity or sex play.

Because the script, riddled with verbal ugliness by David Elliot and Paul Lovett, sends the movie to a series of arbitrary nowheres, the final showdown for the Mercer boys and their enemies is just as meaningless and sense-deadening.

The endless, numbing sameness of it all.

Helen Mirren's allure lies not in finding what's regal in every woman she plays, but in finding what's womanly in every royal.

Malty brew of heroics and minutiae.

Gentle study in human resilience and luck.

Murray, meanwhile, turns in a thrillingly knowing, unforced performance--an award-worthy high point in a career that continues, Max Fischer style, to defy the obvious at every turn.

The first great, mind-tickling treat of the new movie year.

As filmmaker Michael Mann takes pains to emphasize in his handsome, underheated gangster drama Public Enemies, the gent may have been murderous, but he had style.

In The Informant!, that brain -- screwy and yet capable of doing important undercover work -- free-associates like Ellen DeGeneres on a swing through Walmart. Cute, but as even Agent 86 would say in "Get Smart": Missed it by that much.

Disoriented but occasionally disarming saga packed with moments out of an ''Alice in Wonderland'' adventure, a stalker thriller, and a condensed season of TV's ''Big Brother.''

The picture was made in 1969 and is only now being released in the U.S., in a beautiful restoration supervised by original cinematographer Pierre Lhomme.

It's the first futuristic disaster movie that's as cute as a button. Which, when all the special effects blow over, is what we Americans like in a monster hit.

Joel Schumacher directs with far less fetishism than he might have, while producer Jerry Bruckheimer kicks up only a fraction of the bull dust usually visible in his projects.

There's so much dark material jammed into this complicated, conflicted, challenging, and charismatic man's (Gibson) own noggin that sometimes he knows not, I think, what he's done. Here, behold, Mel Gibson has made the weirdest, most violent movie of the year.

Enthusiastic as one might be that Jack Lemmon has found a new lease on movie life with his Grumpy Old Men series, the funny-crankpots genre wears mighty thin on this road trip.

It's a royal, finely modulated double performance by an actor who always wears his powers with graceful modesty.

Nobody’s Fool shines with intelligence and grace and the natural light of fine moviemaking. Like a shot of superior whiskey, it’s a sharp comfort in the grayness of winter

Sad, funny, sexy, and altogether marvelous.

Too bad Kapur's new, glittering sequel also shows up feeling prematurely old, square, and cautious. A production of exquisitely complicated wigs and expensively grand wide shots, it pauses often to admire its own beauty, leery of messing with previous success.

Escape 2 Africa is pretty tame, but it knows how to keep its own turf tidy.

There's something almost endearingly out of sync about the sleek but now dated Euro-thriller The International.

A funny and intermittently sharp German satire that musters gentle nostalgia for East German communism while mocking the not-so-distant past.

Look, but don't be touched: There is much to see but little to remember in this telling of a battle we are meant never to forget.

It borders on perky -- a duller, safer tonal choice for the story of a conniving go-getter whose fall is as precipitous as her rise.

Wild Grass is itself odd stuff: Sometimes it's as playful as Marguerite's crayon-red corona of frizzy hair, and other times as autumnal as the sight of Georges alone in his study, feeling stuck.

The classy production, with its aesthetic graces, is especially convincing about the charisma of the man, a performance specialty of the great Bardem.

We do live in a fraught world of interconnections, Bier makes clear, and what happens far away matters, in unexpected ways, close to home.

So sharp and dryly urbane in its mod-Brit take on the noir, noir, noir, noir world of gambling, dames, and pulp fiction, it makes higher-profile attempts like ''Rounders'' look blah, blah, blah, blah.

Because I’m not a 9-year-old boy, however, this story of a kid who acquires a blank check, cashes it for a million bucks, spends it all, and learns that having stuff isn’t nearly as satisfying as having a father’s love comes across as a calculated, mechanical production owing much too much to Home Alone.

This activist documentary -- alternately impassioned, despairing, edifying, and hectoring about all the ways humans are screwing up the earth in a death rattle of hubris -- shouts, People, do something! In contrast, "An Inconvenient Truth" feels positively hushed.

There's a grim modern parable to be read into the dangerous effects of the gospel-preaching local crazy lady Mrs. Carmody (brilliantly played by a hellfire Marcia Gay Harden) on a congregation of the fearful.

A gaudy, daring, operatic, and bloody funny provocation of a melodrama from Park Chan-wook.

Often has the rambling feeling of a home movie Blaustein made for his buddies.

High school reunions should only be this satisfying.

It's a stylish scramble of evocative footage, groovy music, and crazy-candid reminiscences from key players still proud to score.

May not tell a great story, but it's a great wow.

A triumph of psychological depth and artistic brilliance offered as the magical adventures of one skinny little girl.

The team who made "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" display plenty of whirligig energy, if not much control or lightness of touch.

Both the definition of ''my'' and the definition of ''Winnipeg'' become profoundly fluid in this exquisite ''docu-fantasia'' (Maddin's term), an entrancing riffle through the olde curiosity shoppe of the filmmaker's psyche.

Reveling in mess and homegrown multiracial mayhem, Death at a Funeral finds a new lease on life.

Kinsey is patient and educational and never (darn it) rude or shocking.

As distressed as a comedy can be without qualifying as a snow emergency.

The movie is cross-eyed with fuzzy thinking; it's also an interesting, if wacko, artistic response to world events.

Examination of one of the English language's most useful utterances and why the sound packs such a friggin' wallop.

Gorgeously shot tableaux of random adolescent brutality are interrupted by flashes of computer garble and chat-room talk, backed by ''Lily's'' music, with its blend of Debussy-like arpeggios and Enya-like sighing.

Another depressingly empty action thriller.

If only Roberts' warmth, coupled with Javier Bardem's scruffy sexiness as Felipe, were enough to compensate for the folded-map flatness of this production.

Rock and Mac exult in the kind of highly charged verbal and physical antics that are star-turn rewards for performers currently at the tops of their games.

The audience may have bought the act in "Napoleon Dynamite." But this time, the act bombs.

Too often, Purple Butterfly is as impenetrable as Zhang's placid, obdurate beauty.

Rancid, misogynist comedy.

There's a painterly translucence to this ''Springtime,'' and a mystery, too; each frame is as delicately poised and lit as a Vermeer portrait of a woman, beckoning but unknowable.

In this oddly uninvolving caper, the size of skulls makes its own statement: The producers assume that audience interest in movie stars is bigger than audience interest in characters.

But the great revelation in this version is the terrific, beautifully controlled work of Alexander -- Seinfeld's most gifted actor, whose recent movie roles have not allowed him to show his range.

Alexander Payne's scathing, subtle, and complexly funny tragicomedy builds a perfect, off-kilter universe--it's a first cousin to "Rushmore."

It's a bouncy, loose limbed, ''families do the darnedest things'' sitcom that elicits ungrudging laughs.

Any grown men and women who pay to see the movie face a harrowing ordeal.

Watching Running With Scissors the movie instead of reading Running With Scissors the best-selling memoir by Augusten Burroughs is like running with a spatula, or maybe some weird toast tongs.

The humor built into this sharp-witted human comedy is enhanced in the translation. Meanwhile, the arrestingly stylized imagery of the original Madness has not been lost.

There's a kind of tough beauty to this deft, satisfying thriller.

The Reckoning, with a script by Mark Mills, demands close attention; it's a play of words and ideas crowding for consideration.

This patient, perceptive, nonjudgmental love story about age difference is the first to convincingly explain the temporal physics of May-December romances.

Chiara Mastroianni charms here just as her maman, Catherine Deneuve, did in Demy's 1964 classic.

Essential, unique viewing.

The sermonizing on behalf of good clean fun and hard old effort (Cosby co-wrote the script) is as faded as Big Al's sweater after too many days on earth.

While never slow, the film feels quiet and spacious, like a prayer.

Indeed, the point of Syriana appears to be that the whole lousy, corrupt, oil-producing and -consuming world is a ball of wax, ready to melt.

As a book, The Beach offers the option of diving deep. As a movie, it sticks too close to the shoreline.

The Cuban escapade, designed to provoke, backfires when he loses focus by including Cuban firefighters in an homage to 9/11 first responders.

Time, Kim Ki-Duk's pointed commentary on surfaces and consumer fads -- with particular meaning for plastic-surgery-obsessed South Korea -- is as tautly ''pretty'' and inexpressive as the results for those who compulsively seek cosmetic perfection.

If all this sounds awfully classroom-bound, it isn't -- far from it. Each man's story as he tells it is riveting, truly stranger than fiction, and awesome, too, in the way of unfathomable humans.

The point is, wherever he is, this James Bond is pissed. And that ceaseless anger begins to curdle every sequence that might otherwise bring a little happiness. I mean happiness for us, the viewers.

With those piercing eyes, Owen makes a lovely, soulful Joe, of course. But it's not the nice papa we want to understand here, it's the unapologetically naughty one.

Has a sensuous, intimate filmmaking style that overrides The Wedding Song's more precariously loaded plot parallels.

Abysmally stupid drama.

It's a good bet the average American moviegoer, however familiar with the rhythms of cinematic global culture, has never experienced such a handsomely self contained world.

If you like Kathy Bates movies, you'll probably be frustrated with this one, since as Tripp's mother, the invaluable character actress is made to whipsaw between playing sappy domestic slave to her son's laundry and salty, overly sexual wife.

Shortz's gentle manner and French-foreign-agent mustache go a long way toward making him a thinking girl's pinup nerd - and this despite the man's pitiless insistence on making the Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle ''tough as a _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _.''

Well-made film. Indeed, discovering such a small pleasure is the kind of experience that rewards film lovers who browse with open eyes as well as hearts.

This is an action-comedy sequel so indefatigably preposterous and farklemt -- as they say in certain Upper West Side saloons -- that it actually improves on the original.

Pfeiffer reveals an emotional nakedness that's almost shocking. Never has she exposed so much and done it so simply. Who knew she could be this good?

Where ''Rushmore'' surprises and delights with its spiky depiction of sprawling American idiosyncrasy, Tadpole's more urbane, less complicated charms are specifically made in New York City.

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

In a series of endings, she, and the audience, are falsely promised that she can have it all. In other words, The Prince & Me is committed to the controversial American policy of No Fantasy Left Behind.

The hell of it is, Be Cool is tepid entertainment that could be cool if it spent less time entertaining us as if we were demanding a definition of rhythm.

The added value that writer-director Douglas McGrath has in mind is gossip -- and a goggly interest in gossip becomes the glittering gimmick of Infamous.

Diverting enough, but it's also the kind of high-concept studio concoction Ricky Gervais might have ridiculed in his great backstage-showbiz sitcom "Extras."

Although it shares a bitter interest in slum desperation with last year's Brazilian-underbelly docudrama ''City of God,'' Bus 174 pulls ahead, I think, by not confusing cinematic pizzazz with the content of misery.

Baumbach's movies are addictive dispatches from a genteel jungle of white privilege, where highly educated people behave badly. I can't take my eyes off the exotic wildlife.

There's a double meaning in the title of this folksy, relentlessly political, heavy-handed story, written and directed by Mark Herman and set among the coal mines of Yorkshire, England, in 1992.

The interviews Bitton conducts, almost all with Arabs and Jews who share her despair, are less meaningful than what she captures in silence: the sight of farmers separated from their farmland, everyday people thwarted in their dailiness, and children playing next to what looks like prison walls.

Tatyana, the embodiment of a heroine whose still waters run deep, requires more maturity than Tyler as yet possesses.

Banderas uses all his old wiles in this well-oiled, businesslike, quite clangingly violent sequel to "The Mask of Zorro."

Haunting and hopeful.

A sly catalog of deceits and a gentle commentary on slippery creativity and desire.

An inviting international audience-pleaser.

A gentle, traditional (like, from the last century) romantic comedy.

Sophisticated, funny, and joyously subversive animated bug epic.

Also starring: the landscape, beautifully photographed by cinematographer Lu Yue. The look is rosily glamorous in sophisticated Shanghai, and mistily poetic on the quiet island to which the mobster and his party escape.

This is a movie that considers graphic violence with a refined taste for the sensuous: Guts spill, blood spurts, corpses stink, but there is a handsome, absurdist humanity to the way Jeunet (who wrote the script with Guillaume Laurant) maps out the crossroads of human carnage and human caring.

Coaching from the same playbook with which they made "Rudy" and "Hoosiers," director David Anspaugh and screenwriter Angelo Pizzo create a reverent fable.

Ang Lee's bloody but dramatically anemic depiction of the American Civil War as fought by boys without uniforms.

A skeleton-thin thriller wrapped in glamorous production values.

Diverges to become something quite powerfully unnerving and guilt-ridden.

Sometimes Brenda Blethyn is content merely to nibble the scenery. In Introducing the Dwights, a drippy Australian family comedy caper, she chomps it to a pulp until we long for her straightforward monstrosity as a mother in "Little Voice."

Scott gets into the zip and rush of urban energy with an enthusiasm bordering on hilarity.

The movie is Drew Barrymore's directorial debut (she also plays fellow Hurl Scout Smashley Simpson), and it's clear she's more attuned to grrrlishness than real athletic power.

This very earnestly American prison gives off an unusually mellow European air.

Intriguing creepout.

This latest market-savvy bit of circuit preaching is less cartoonish than Perry's previous big-tent revival meetings.

In theory, Zoolander is ''Pret-à-Porter'' on laughing gas. In practice, however, the movie is an ill-fitting suit of gags, too long in the crotch even at 90 minutes.

Based on a true story, this Indian variation on a theme of "The Burning Bed" emphasizes the psychological freedom the inmate finds behind bars.

A blithe charmer balanced somewhere between a life-should-be-so-neat fairy tale and a life's-a-real-bitch tragicomedy, leaves political debate at the ticket counter and focuses solely on what it's like for Juno MacGuff to be Juno MacGuff.

The film's lures, while undeniable, are synthetic, and we never do learn what fuels all the greed besides pints of beer.

The result is a slack do-over fantasy in which Zac Efron, as a basketball star, looks baffled as to why he hasn't been asked to sing and dance.

Another contemporary story about a woman with a successful career punished with a lousy personal life.

In a feat of dullness quite powerful in its own way, this lifeless family comedy sucks the joy from every joke it touches.

A tacit auteur-to-auteur endorsement of the inalienable right to make movies--regardless of talent or sobriety or adult responsibilities--is what gives American Movie its uneasy kick.

The performances are vividly alive.

A charmless rom-com.

No authentic emotion of any kind happens in this damp, Seattle-based romance, a fizzle for both stars.

The answers he strings together are babble in this superficial vanity documentary. Nice shots of awesome, God-approved scenery, though.

This slapdash, charmless, baldly boomer-chasing romantic comedy, directed by Michael Lehmann (Heathers) from a clunky, orgasm-obsessed script by Karen Leigh Hopkins and Jessie Nelson, is the lazy studio's answer to a call for more age-appropriate entertainment for "More" magazine readers.

For all Golino's comeliness, she's upstaged by the windy beauty of the landscape, and by Crialese's attention -- in an Italian neorealist way -- to the routines of daily life in an insular, traditional culture.

Beauty competes with vacuity in Elephant, and for a good stretch of writer-director Gus Van Sant's maddeningly passive ode to high school innocence and Columbine-age youthful evil, beauty wins.

Duplicity doesn't have depth -- but it does have Julia Roberts, in full Hollywood movie-star mode.

His (Charles Dance) cinematic style mixes the scent of mothballs with that of the lavender in which these ladies are preserved.

Dopey, not dope.

When Barrymore finally gets mean, the movie finally gets good. Then comes another sing-along, dammit.

So shameless is The Kingdom, ignoring consequence and treating its audience like cash-dispensing machines with buttons to be pushed rather than thinking individuals willing to consider the reality of America's entanglement with the Middle East.

Calculatedly soppy, seasonally phony Americanized remake of Giuseppe Tornatore's 1990 "Stanno Tutti Bene."

While inevitably oversimplified, is never less than engrossing.

A delightful, perceptive, funny, detail-perfect fable.

Jafar Panahi's wonderfully funny, outspoken shaggy-dog story, a light counterweight to his sadder 2000 feminist drama "The Circle."

Art history majors may write in with corrections. Meanwhile, I'm declaring that the masterly, big-canvas biographical drama Chi-hwa-seon: Painted Fire is about the Jackson Pollock of 19th-century Korea.

Perelman pays such cooing attention to surfaces that our response to violence carries no more importance than our response to the delicate jewelry around the adult Diana's neck.

A lot of Money Never Sleeps - too much - is about Gekko père's desire to reconnect with his very angry daughter.

The result is flashy, but the meaning is a bit of a bob and weave.

The truth is, the freakiness kinda turns the director on, and he nearly strangles Suspect Zero with love.

Engages in the cinematic equivalent of not inhaling.

There is not one honest moment, not ONE, in Hanging Up.

The stories are shocking, tender, sometimes funny, with a soap-opera abundance of plot. Always, the camera stares, respectfully neutral about ordinary people grappling — inconsistently, as men and women do — with the ordinary mysteries of being human. You’ll stare back, amazed it’s taken more than a decade to spread the word.

An unexpectedly alert teen-scream disaster chiller.

Ricardo Darín, wearing a mild-mannered expression of emotional remove, plays the unnamed antihero, obsessed with imagining the perfect robbery. The ''aura'' is the clarity with which he sees -- or imagines he sees -- the world in moments preceding an epileptic attack.

The culprit, I'd say, is the uninteresting casting of Miss Roberts in the title role. She's a pleasant enough performer, but her made-for-teen-TV acting style, a perky blandness, doesn't supply a clue as to the appeal of Nancy Drew after all these years.

When not unnecessarily bland, synthetic, and indistinguishable from undistinguished teen TV, A Cinderella Story is unnecessarily coarse and dumbed down, with every character except Sam and Austin subject to perfunctory ridicule.

The technique is impressive. But it would count for little if the human story -- of a magnetic, resourceful, and, in the way of all Rohmer heroines, articulate woman who was mistress to the Duke of Orleans -- weren't engrossing on its own dramatic terms.

The movie is in love with its own story loops and fancy, pop-dream cinematography from Almodóvar associate Affonso Beato, which is fine; it's also in love with its own indie-culture cleverness, which isn't.

Just coarse, clunky, jerry rigged, and -- worst of all -- not funny.

The fact that this formulaically winsome movie, directed by British TV helmer Julian Jarrold, is based on product-line changes at a real Northamptonshire factory does little to freshen its approach.

Robert Downey Jr. is an uncomfortable sight as the school's hard-drinking, overstressed principal.

In making a movie about the hot mess of Afghan history, a sense of reserve turns out to be a useful tool for peace.

They also make joyful music, communicated, both by the singers and their playful, sensitive documentarian, with an authority that quite knocks off socks.

Breillat, the flamethrower who made "Romance" and "Fat Girl," artfully twists period-piece drama to suit her provocative modern notions about sex, gender roles, and power.

Naples-born Servillo is a national star, famed as a theater, opera, and film director as well as an actor. And he's got the face of a mensch (or a Madoff) -- which makes his embodiment of criminal banality all the more identifiable, as well as horrifying.

A boggy mix of fact, fiction, and changeable wigs and beards worn by Heath Ledger in the title role, manages to shrink the grandness of the myth without clarifying our understanding of the man.