Lou Lumenick

It's what Hollywood calls a 'tweener - not quite edgy or artistic enough to satisfy the art-house crowd, but a tough sell for family audiences because of its extensive subtitles, two-hour-plus running time, and a (tastefully rendered) male rape scene.

A gleaming hunk of French period schmaltz expertly rendered by director Christophe Barratier.

Even a great British cast and obscenity-laden gangland dialogue aren't enough to make what amounts to an extended acting exercise into much of a movie.

The talented cast doesn't stand much of a chance in this rambling, pointless narrative.

An excruciating indie knockoff of "Training Day."

Filmmaker Alison Murray drew on her own experiences, but Mouth to Mouth would have benefited from more focus and fewer dance sequences.

Thirty years after "Annie Hall," the beloved actress is scraping below the bottom of the barrel with this desperately unfunny farce, in which she mugs and pratfalls in the worst performance of her entire career.

You could do far worse in the current marketplace.

The actors don't seem to have been directed at all, and the movie is very sluggishly paced.

A maudlin and unintentionally hilarious romantic weepie.

It's a shame, because the actors are so much better than the threadbare material.

A blackly funny provocation.

This laugh-starved twist on "Big" and the many lesser body-swapping comedies of the era is basically a lecture on sexual abstinence.

Limps to a fairly lame conclusion, but until then its remarkable candor is like spending a memorably hilarious, harrowing and unforgettable weekend with your wacky in-laws.

Like Roald Dahl's book, Tim Burton's splendidly imaginative and visually stunning - and often very dark and creepy - new version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is squarely aimed more at children than their parents.

It doesn't help that the central character, Jerome - earnestly played by Max Minghella of "Bee Season" - is essentially a passive observer.

Less a conventional biography than a performance film - one that stuns and delights.

Overlong and not well-acted.

Zellweger dusts off her Bridget Jones accent - and a constellation of annoying vocal and facial tics - for Miss Potter, an unrelentingly mediocre, TV-movieish biopic of beloved children's author Beatrix Potter.

An unqualified triumph, the year's best movie so far.

Seems more like a merchandising ploy than a successful attempt to entertain kids and their parents.

Watching The Italian Job in a theater makes you long for a fast-forward button - to skip past 90 eyeball-glazing minutes of generic caper plotting and cut to the chase, as it were.

Neither a concert film nor a documentary but a ghoulish “event” offered just in time for Halloween, This is It is sadly -- and reprehensively, if you ask me -- the movie equivalent to the National Enquirer’s infamous post-mortem shot of Elvis Presley.

Between D-Day, the sheer ambition of Paul Thomas Anderson's historical epic and Robert Elswit's dazzling cinematography, this is a must-see movie - even though its emotional temperature rarely rises above freezing and the climax goes way, way, way over the top.

Pepe Danquart's To the Limit from Germany looks great, but it's an altogether different animal.

Based on a video game, far exceeds expectations -- in negative ways that inspire thoughts of less than zero stars.

A sexed-up Afterschool Special pretty much guaranteed to render audiences comatose.

A grim, challenging movie that will amply reward audiences willing to go along with its ride into the dark depths of its characters' souls.

Raja, which is basically a dark comedy about how this odd couple manipulate each other, is extremely well acted, though the direction by Jacques Doillon is on the leisurely side.

The new "Pelham," although no classic, is a lot of fun if you're in the right mood.

Fairly entertaining, if hardly surprising, results.

Sweet without being sticky and funny without getting silly, Whip It introduces Barrymore as a director with a keen eye, a good ear for tone and an inspired touch with actors.

An intriguing, if seriously flawed, film noir.

A surprisingly upbeat look at that Middle East hotspot.

Plays like a very good TV movie. Short on visual flair and starpower, Thirteen Days is not the definitive story of the Cuban missile crisis, but it's an engrossing historical lesson nonetheless.

Accurately described as an Icelandic version of Pedro Almodovar's gender-bending black comedies -- but it's also reminiscent of early Woody Allen movies.

At heart, The Italian is a Dickensian tale that paints a vivid portrait of post-Glasnost Russia en route to a four-handkerchief ending.

Aaliyah rules as the undead Queen of the Damned, even if she has scarcely half an hour of screen time in this campy Anne Rice vampire tale.

Playing for only one week. Parents of tweens, you've been warned.

Murphy has fallen back into the comfortable rut of sloppy family comedies that are low on laughs and high on toilet jokes.

A star is born in In Good Company, which showcases Topher Grace.

The best thing about Some Body -- an amateurish, quasi-improvised acting exercise shot on ugly digital video -- is that it's all over in 80 minutes.

Tender and often extremely funny.

Apprently novice filmmaker Angela Ismailos' definition of a Great Director is one who's willing to sit or walk with her while she lobs innocuous questions and gives herself lots of awed close-up reaction shots.

With awkward acting, plotting and direction, this is no "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," "Jungle Fever" or "One Potato, Two Potato."

It's still easily the funniest movie of the year.

It's not surprising to learn that the story -- which the press notes assert is loosely based on fact -- has been kicking around Hollywood for 15 years. It's that bad.

Grant hasn't had any real chemistry with a female co-star since Julia Roberts in "Notting Hill," but Barrymore works so hard at it and is so charming that you might be fooled.

Treads an awfully thin line between the provocative and the exploitative.

Shamelessly derivative, contrived and predictable, The Proposal is nonetheless a crowd-pleasing romantic comedy.

Thanks to Hudson and the other women, it's a moderately beguiling date movie.

This isn't a mystery except in the most general sense. It's a dense, Altman-esque psychological drama centering on 10 characters whose lives become as tangled as the lantana.

Morrow fares less well with the script, which he also produced and collaborated on.

A gorgeously photographed and less intermittently fascinating 2 1/2-hour film.

On the plus side, Definitely, Maybe has an appealing cast, some amusing scenes and at least tries to do something different.

An unsatisfying drama that premiered at Sundance '07 and was supposedly delayed because of the Virginia Tech shootings.

It takes a world-class storyteller and a great yarn to rivet your attention for nearly three hours. This very classy, old-school movie - employing cutting-edge technology that will make your eyes pop - did it for me.

Mostly a well-acted, expertly directed comedy with characters and situations of truly universal appeal.

Well-meaning yawn-fest.

At heart a rather chilly and clinical portrait of four very selfish people.

Only sporadically entertaining.

Arguably the darkest episode in the entire series (and the first to carry a PG-13 rating) the visually stunning "Sith" is also the fastest-paced and most accessible.

The most devastating spoof of reality TV since Albert Brooks' 1978 "Real Life."

Remarkably sluggish and not particularly suspenseful.

CSA would have benefited from a bigger budget and better actors and it gets weaker as it goes along, but it's still thought-provoking stuff.

Free love, vegetarianism and lack of personal property are the rule.

Might have worked as a 10-minute sketch.

Screenwriter Marc Lawrence, who worked on the original, throws in unbelievable plot twists merely as excuses for comic mayhem.

This generic exercise in computer-generated animation may provide passable entertainment for very young children, but adults will be less than enchanted by its preachiness, talkiness and Communist Party-line political views.

A fascinating, sad, sometimes quite poetic window into a grueling way of life most of us know little about.

Duvall and Spacek are so in tune with each other's rhythms -- despite their 20-year age difference -- that it's hard to believe they've never acted together before.

It's so devoid of joy and energy it makes even "Jason X" - a recent attempt to prolong the rival "Friday the 13th" slasher franchise - look positively Shakesperean by comparison.

Fun but somewhat exhausting.

So bad it's awful.

The longest 85-minute road trip you could imagine.

A non-starter.

Offers highly effective performances by a cast of real-life employees without previous acting experience, who also collaborated on the intriguing screenplay.

Not a very visually interesting documentary its simply one head talking to the audience, with no film clips, photographs or other diversions. But its awfully hard to turn away.

So full of solid performances and appealing characters that I wished writer/director/producer Preston Whitmore (“The Walking Dead") had considered the dictum “less is more."

Under Jordan Susman's inept direction, these twentysomething airheads, angry about the proliferation of Starbucks outlets and other societal ills, all resemble nubile models.

A flawed labor of love that's definitely worth a look.

Never-quite-believable crime drama.

Tries to be a gay version of "Sex and the City," which was pretty gay to begin with.

It's not uninteresting, but so much footage is given over to earnest discussion of sexual politics that the overall effect is like sitting through a semester's worth of transgender studies.

The Spanish Inquisition was better summed up in an eight-minute musical number by Mel Brooks than in the entirety of Goya's Ghosts, an across-the-board disaster from one of my favorite directors, Milos Forman.

Soporific, shamelessly derivative and barely coherent by American standards.

Treads water.

Tries, with much less success, to do what "Witness" did in exploring an Amish town.

Ranges from exquisitely sensitive to crass, but overall, it's an interesting effort.

Doesn't quite reach the heights - though it does plumb the depths - of its hugely popular predecessor. But it will have an enormous, appreciative audience doubled over with belly-busting laughs.

Though it comes from a director whose résumé includes "Flashdance" and "9 ½ weeks," these smoke-filled interludes are less erotic than today's average car commercial.

Emotionally honest, feel-good saga with a universality that stands out in a season of singularly depressing and cynical Hollywood product.

A remarkable accomplishment, an absorbing documentary about the joy of reading that's also a positively gripping literary mystery.

An anti-date movie if there ever was one, Teeth is a darkly engaging if uneven horror movie spoof centering on men's fear of castration.

Honestly, it's still pretty hard to resist as a guilty pleasure: A fluffy date-night movie that wrung a tear or two from more than one hardened male critic's eyes, chick flick or no.

An enthralling 3-D IMAX documentary.

Here comes Wayne Kramer's Crossing Over, a bid to create the "Crash" of illegal-immigration dramas.

A rare film offering from Mongolia, is an unusual, captivating and crowd-pleasing semi-documentary about an extended family of camel herders -- and two of their flock.

Excellent performances in an entertaining if less than totally plausible story.

There's 80 minutes of mawkish, overacted melodrama - laced with gratuitous violence and profanity - before we get to anything more than the briefest snippet of a dance number.

A triumph of misguided moviemaking, starting with a grotesquely miscast Mira Sorvino, who arguably gives the worst performance ever by an Oscar winner.

Genuinely scary, exquisitely shot -- and very well-acted.

Taken together, Eastwood's masterworks - two of the best films of 2006 - may be Hollywood's last word on World War II.

Basically, this tale of a pregnant waitress looking for a way out of an unhappy marriage is a funny and touching riff on Martin Scorsese's "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore," not to mention its better-known sitcom spinoff, "Alice."

The demand for her services is so great that she suffers from "penis elbow," but her popularity also brings self-esteem and a possible boyfriend in her boss (Miki Manojlovic) in this lethargically directed comedy.

Sexual and toilet humor plumb new depths in Keenen Ivory Wayans' Little Man, which will stink up theaters like several gross of dirty diapers.

May not be vintage stuff, but it goes down fairly smoothly.

In the fourth and by far the worst screen version of "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers," Nicole Kidman's character struggles to stay awake - as will the audience.

The cowardly producers have banished the grit and darkness of Parker’s original.

Never rises much above yawn-worthy.

A hapless family film that's too scary for little kids and too boring for everyone else.

The heavily symbolic The Dying Gaul doubtless worked better as a play, but the film is worth seeing for its peerless cast.

This cliché-filled labor of love is staffed with some fine performers - Jennifer Holliday sings at a juke joint and Frances Sternhagen plays an older version of Emily's sister.

Though there are moderately interesting interviews interspersed throughout, Deadheads will want to see the numbers, in which Grisman's more formal style complements Garcia's looser approach to his music.

Dreamgirls may be good enough to win the Oscar for Best Picture - great costumes, sets and choreography help - but despite stellar work by erstwhile "American Idol" contestant Hudson and Murphy, it's far from a great picture.

In a season of hyperven tilating political docu mentaries - witness Michael Moore and his imitators - Ross McElwee shows just how far subtlety can go with his latest charming effort, Bright Leaves.

Sticks to reporting. Unlike most political documentaries, it doesn't preach - to the choir or to anyone else.

Little more than a series of sketches, tied together by Joe's on-air interrogation by a nasty shock jock played by Dennis Miller.

Director Adam Green's genuine affection for the genre helps make Hatchet a cut above average.

Suffers even more than the Harry Potter films from a compulsion to be faithful to the source material, including cramming in a head-spinning assortment of characters and subplots.

At times, writer-director Cedric Klapsich seems to be trying to copy the frestyle of "Amelie," but L'Auberge achieves only a fraction of its charm.

This messy, disappointing, self-important and utterly humorless version of the Marvel comic book character may be the toughest flick with a green protagonist to sit through since "The Grinch."

There is no shortage of indie movies about economically challenged women. This one is different, in that the women actually do something besides just talk about it.

If this movie were a teenager, you'd put it on Ritalin right away.

A depressingly predictable journey of self-discovery.

Manages to create a creepy atmosphere, even if the plot itself is somewhat unfocused and the scares scarce.

The movie equivalent of a 12-course feast crammed with unforgettable images and mind-boggling stunts.

Sort of a poor man's "Rent" - minus the music and the AIDS - and much blander than the title would have you expect.

The musicians' stories, while quite entertaining, add up to a somewhat confusing chronology. Still, they're good enough that you wish Justman hadn't resorted to those tacky TV-style re-creations that mar so many documentaries these days.

Feels like it was written and directed by an audience focus group in Omaha?

Secretariat ultimately delivers where it matters, in the home stretch.

A calculating crowd-pleaser that sometimes feels like a movie equivalent of the corporate chains it's decrying.

There's very little doubt in my mind that somewhere, culinary legend Julia Child is fuming about being consigned to a double bio-pic with a whiny, self-centered cooking blogger.

While the latest installment avoids the nonstop parade of potty jokes, it never rises much past the level of mediocrity.

The quirky High Fidelity really deserves being called the first must-see movie of the century.

Occasionally funny but more often hackneyed, schmaltzy, predictable and overdone fairy tale that seems longer than 100 choruses of ''Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious."

Dreamworks Animation's clunky and wildly unimaginative Monsters vs. Aliens really doesn't have a clue what to do with the [3-D] technique.

A schmaltzy, smutty and mean-spirited quasi-satire.

A thoughtful, old-school documentary.

A lavishly mounted blockbuster that has little personality of its own except on a purely visual level.

The Coen brothers might have done something inspired with this, but director Kanievska... turns out a more modestly entertaining little low-budget movie.

This is noir on steroids, cartoonishly ultra-violent and drawing inspiration from Mickey Spillane novels and E.C. comics of the '50s.

Filmmaker Josh Stolberg claims to have been inspired by real-life events, but mostly he ineptly rips off other movies and wastes a cast that includes Rosanna Arquette, Adam Arkin and Elizabeth Perkins.

Does a solid job of documenting the life and art of the drag grand dame, whose life has been almost as tumultuous as the characters played by the Hollywood divas he channels.

After years of diminishing returns, Woody Allen spectacularly returns to form with Vicky Cristina Barcelona, his funniest movie in years and arguably his sexiest.

Visually striking but gets bogged down in supernatural clichés.

Documents the Nixon administration's failed, almost comically inept attempt to deport the most political of The Beatles and his wife, Yoko Ono. Given the latter's cooperation with the filmmakers, it comes as no surprise the Lennons come off as saints.

This is a gifted director who actually has something to say and knows how to say it. We'll be hearing from him again.

Though it preserves the terrific lead performance of Richard Griffiths - best known to film audiences as Harry Potter's evil stepfather - The History Boys is essentially filmed theater, with minimal, and usually clumsy, attempts to take the action out of the classroom.

Sporadically funny, dumbed-down version.

Well, it smells, all right, but authentic isn't the word I'd use for this maudlin male weepie, a compendium of the worst clichés of sports and journalism movies.

Possibly because Heigl is one of the producers, the most beautiful woman in the film -- the stunning Christina Hendricks of "Mad Men" -- dies in an off-screen car crash barely before the opening credits are over.

That someone as smart as Duchovny would get bogged down in such predictable treacle is a mystery worthy of investigation by Scully and Mulder.

Director Roland Suso Richter maintains tension for 2 1/2 hours, even though the resolution is almost surreal.

Though dated and unsophisticated compared to the much cooler Bourne spy thrillers, M:i:III will probably hit the sweet spot at the box-office - and give Cruise a whole new reason to start jumping on couches.

I was laughing so hard, tears were streaming down my cheeks.

It's a positive hat trick by John Cameron Mitchell.

Petty larceny - but Allen's fans won't want to miss this lowbrow caper.

Carell's frantic mugging as a modern-day Noah barely keeps Evan Almighty afloat.

Astonishingly sharp and stunningly beautiful images of galaxies as far as 100 billion light-years away.

A really classic adventure yarn with one of Hollywood's great actors hitting one out of the ballpark. If you're seeing only one movie this season, this is the obvious choice.

This intense psycho-sexual drama doesn't easily lend itself to the camera.

A documentary that exerts a car-wreck fascination as it follows the icon through her 75th year (she's now 77) while looking back over her tumult-filled life and career.

A highly entertaining first-person documentary .

Hyperactive.

A rare film that depicts a skinny male in a relationship with a plus-size woman. And, small wonder, Brittain's sweet charisma makes her the most lovable big woman on screen since Lynn Redgrave in "Georgy Girl."

Often charming and funny, though sometimes quite gross.

Well worth seeing for the terrific performances.

It's nicely photographed but slow-moving, dull and utterly predictable.

Brewer, who romanticized the world of pimps and ho's in "Hustle & Flow," is obviously out to push some politically incorrect buttons with this ludicrous - yet, in the end, sweetly involving - Southern Gothic pulp yarn.

Norton, returning to cracking form, doesn't try to make the selfish and smug Monty sympathetic -- but he lights up the screen, especially in two fantasy sequences.

As hip, funny and truthful a sleeper as has ever flown under Tinseltown's radar.

It's a drawn-out look at politics that's largely devoid of the trademark humor that long ago got New Wave veteran Chabrol labeled the Gallic Hitchcock.

Purposely amateurish.

Starts out promisingly, but quickly sinks under the weight of its own plot twists, ponderous pacing and Val Kilmer's monotonous performance as a ruthless special-ops agent.

A cringeworthy, unfunny example of a culture-clash romantic comedy.

The kind of unsophisticated family entertainment they supposedly don't make anymore.

Solid entertainment value for the money, but those who think it's saying anything new or profound are kidding themselves.

If ever a movie could be charged with imperiling the morals of a minor, it's probably Sleepover, a sleazy, PG-rated sex comedy that's apparently aimed at 8- to 10-year-old girls.

Painfully unfunny spoof.

A baffling mixed platter of gritty realism and magic realism with a hard-to-swallow premise.

A slick, sweet, fast-paced, feel-good romantic fantasy that's fairly irresistible if you can keep your cynicism in check for a couple of hours.

Twohy serves up a hard-to-swallow second-act twist and an unconvincing back story, but the slightly overlong A Perfect Getaway recovers with a pulse-pounding climax.

A gorgeous and witty piece of stop-motion animation.

Far from perfect, but it holds your interest as a character study because of strong performances by Daniels and Stone.

Liev Schreiber's film version of "Everything Is Illuminated" achieves the impossible — it's even more annoying than Jonathan Safran Foer's gratingly precocious novel.

As in Allen's films, the extensive shooting -- mostly at locations in and around Central Park -- takes place in a whitebread world where the only person of color is Rosemary's nanny.

Those endless end credits reveal that McKittrick previously worked at Steak & Ale, Roadhouse Grill and Friday's. He may well need to return to his line of work after a debut as dismal as this one.

An unforgettable portrait of a testosterone-driven era.

Rarely have I wanted to fast-forward through a movie as much as Click, a treacly and not-funny-enough Adam Sandler comedy.

An unholy mess.

This satisfying adaptation of a popular novel is mostly an artistic reflection on youthful loss of innocence.

An atmospheric but sluggish and needlessly confusing British contemporary film noir that may indeed leave some audience members struggling to stay awake.

Basically a PG-13 version of “After Hours,” with more than a bit of “The Out-of-Towners” thrown in.

Its intriguing subject matter is diluted by too many bland performances.

Deadly dull.

A beautifully acted if fairly poky coming-of-age story.

Accomplishes a near miracle -- this British import makes you yearn for Burt Reynolds, who appeared in a vastly more entertaining version of the same story.

This is one perfectly terrifying movie, an instant classic.

Aniston's best on-screen performance since "The Good Girl."

Vanity productions don't come much worse than One Third, an amateurish, dialogue-free curiosity courtesy of Yongman Kim, the founder of the Greenwich Village institution Kim's Video.

You'd be better off renting Demi Moore's "Striptease."

A summery confection crammed with fresh young talented faces that's hard not to love.

Bland and timid.

Helen Mirren outdoes even her Oscar-winning performance in "The Queen" with her tour de force as Countess Sofya Tolstoy in Michael Hoffman's delightful The Last Station.

A 21st-century equivalent of the early James Bond flicks.

A misleadingly bland title for a gripping documentary.

This would be a stultifyingly incestuous affair even if all the jokes about fertilization weren't so tiresomely lame and predictable.

Lust, Caution could have done with a lot more lust and a lot less caution.

One of my critical brethren opined that this sort of dumbing-down and low comedy may be the only way to sell the public a movie about the Iraq war. If that's true, God help us.

Will no doubt figure prominently in the awards season. But be warned, you can cut the gloom with a knife.

This promising premise is turned into basically an overgrown TV movie.

There's not a moment of true wildness in It's Kind of a Funny Story, which never gets any more outrageous than projective vomiting.

Refreshing for its simplicity and its originality in a marketplace dominated by soulless blockbusters.

May be predictable and silly, but it's never dull.

A film that fans of Latin jazz won't want to miss.

The sort of movie where all of the best jokes are in the trailer, but these days a romantic comedy with anything worth quoting at all is something of an accomplishment.

A charmless, unscary, fatuous and largely incoherent fairy tale.

They should sell antidepressants along with the popcorn at theaters showing Cecilia Miniucchi's Expired, one of those Sundance "comedies" that make you contemplate slitting your wrists.

Things rapidly go downhill in this pinch-penny production.

The often difficult-to-follow plot is sort of "Traffic" for nitwits.

It's basically a series of music videos - a few quite good - strung together over two long hours and loosely connected by a weak story line loaded with anachronisms.

The chief attraction in the overlong 20 Centimeters, besides ample soft-core sex, are the well-staged musical numbers.

Nothing this year comes close to being as utterly unforgettable as Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, an extremely dark and disturbing fairy tale for audiences say, ages 12 and up.

Some may find it titillating; more will find it offensive and deeply disturbing.

A refreshingly unpretentious little thriller.

A reasonably entertaining cartoon feature.

A gorgeous, poetic and stirring epic.

Gets pinned down in a barrage of schmaltz, cliché, stereotype and racial condescension - not to mention a historically dubious premise.

Beach ("Windtalkers") gives a tremendously moving, Oscar-caliber performance as Hayes, portrayed by Tony Curtis in an earlier movie and celebrated in a song performed by both Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan.

You don't have to be gay or Italian or live in Canada to enjoy Mambo Italiano, but a tolerance for ethnic mugging helps.

Aside from a nifty new way to avoid surveillance in the middle of the desert, there's nothing here we haven't seen in many other movies - including "Spy Game," directed by Scott's brother Tony before 9/11.

A murky and morbid dirge of a gay romance.

The 3-D effects are among the most effective ever shot.

A perfect storm of wooden acting, hackneyed direction, inane scripting and laughably cartoonish special effects produces a shapeless mess more wearyingly stupid than arch-villian Dr. Doom is evil.

It's the chemistry between the Arquettes (they met on the first film and married after the second) and their rapport with Campbell that sustains Scream 3 through its overly convoluted plot.

Slight but consistently entertaining.

If there is a genius working in Hollywood today, it's animation director Brad Bird, who tops the delightful "The Incredibles" with arguably the finest 'toon in the Pixar canon, Ratatouille.

Joshua falls a bit flat at the end, but overall it delivers some genuine old-school chills - something that was missing when Macaulay Culkin played a similar role in "The Good Son."

The best and most entertaining movie adaptation of a stage musical so far this century - and yes, I’m including the Oscar-winning "Chicago."

A sizzling soundtrack and Jennifer Lopez's best performance since "Out of Sight" go only so far in El Cantante, a downer of a musical biopic that leaves no cliché unturned.

It's a stirring reminder of a time when anything seemed possible - these American heroes boosted morale eroded by the Vietnam War, as well as bringing the whole world together to celebrate their success.

The best scene centers on neither Latifah nor Martin. Rather, it's the venerable Plowright delivering an a capella rendition of the slave spiritual "Is Massa Gonna Sell Me Tomorrow?"

A charming, hilarious robot love story aimed at the entire family.

It's got more imagination than half a dozen movies combined; there's nothing else out there like this, and to me that's a very good thing.

Hollywood's umpteenth tale of robots run amok is surprisingly smart, cool-looking, nicely paced and well-acted.

About the only question not answered by Good Hair is whether Michelle Obama wears a hair extension (most come from religious ceremonies in India) or straightens her hair.

The most gut-bustingly funny movie so far this year.

A thorough but highly entertaining documentary details the making of the notorious 1972 film, the series of legal battles that helped make it immensely popular and the flick's considerable cultural legacy.

The characters are so cartoonish, it's hard to care on any level -- except that it wastes such talented performers.

"I am surrounded by oceans of boredom," the campy Abraham complains at one point. It's a sentiment audiences are bound to share.

A witty and wise midlife comedy, not only represents Peter Riegert's debut as a feature director but gives this gifted veteran performer his juiciest big-screen role in quite some time.

Watching Meryl Streep act can be an exhausting experience - and never more so than during Music of the Heart.

This wacky former Andy Warhol superstar more than holds your interest in an offbeat documentary.

Strictly remainder-bin material.

May be the first movie that effectively erases virtually its entire story line by the very last scene.

This masturbatory exercise is the least revealing "documentary" since Jerry Seinfeld's "Comedian."

Very slowly builds to an emotional payoff in a devastating scene where the three main characters simultaneously seek relief in sex.

Has its share of laughs.

Beautifully photographed and fitfully amusing, Gaudi Afternoon would be an impressive film from a first-timer, but Seidelman is experienced enough to know she should have told the actors not to camp things up so excessively.

A pathetically unfunny comedy that should have been shipped straight to video, if not recycled as guitar picks.

A soufflé of a romantic and family comedy that stubbornly refuses to rise.

Being John Malkovich, which contains not a frame of extraneous footage, is more than a must-see movie: It's a must-see-more-than-once event.

Harmless, fish-out-of-water fluff.

This overlong, obvious and indifferently acted melodrama was written and directed by Luke Eberl, a former child actor, before he turned 21.