Maitland McDonagh

Actress-turned-writer/director Asia Argento's angry, outspoken, semi-autobiographical rant of a film is strident and occasionally juvenile, but it packs an undeniable wallop.

Would be as tedious as a home movie if the couple, Edward DeBonis and Vincent Maniscalco, weren't gay men and their nuptials not colored by the clash between their personal faith and their rejection by the mainstream church.

The cast, a mix of beauty-contest winners, models, veteran actors and newcomers, is as diverse as the characters they play and work together surprisingly smoothly.

Rather than rage, Peosay's film radiates sadness over a singular way of life in danger of imminent obliteration.

The film is never dull -- no mean feat, given that it spends two hours telling a story whose end is widely known -- and features performances that range from coarsely effective to phenomenal.

Though ultimately the film is all smoke and mirrors, the sensibility it reflects is rich and exciting.

This loving parody is steeped in comic book trivia and lore: The more you know, the more heartfelt your response to the film is likely to be.

It unfolds in the angst-haunted shadow of the 9'11 terror attacks and teeters on a thin edge of sheer panic.

Anonymously titled and packaged like a vulgar teen sex comedy, this candy-colored trifle is so precious it nearly floats away on a cloud of fairy dust.

It's a frequently funny diversion that doesn't have a mean-spirited bone in its body.

Driven equally by big questions and the abiding desire for small pleasures, like a decent cup of tea, it's an eccentric, mind-bending head trip that greets every catastrophe with an endearingly goofy smile that embodies Hitchhiker's Guide's Zen mantra: Don't Panic!

The film's a trifle, but a beautifully crafted one.

Neither cheerfully naughty nor suffused with gauzy prurience, it evokes a time of turbulent (and often ugly) emotions with disquieting intensity.

Like the fresh-faced leads, the film is an unexpected charmer.

An amateur in the best sense of the word, Dobson is an engaging ambassador for a life of the mind lived firmly in the real world.

Welcome Home also features surprisingly strong performances from Ratajkowski, Scamarcio and Paul (“Breaking Bad”) and ends with a nifty little parting shot whose implicit condemnation of mindlessly consuming the lives of others should give audiences a little chill.

So crammed with plot twists that it's hard to follow, simultaneously ludicrous, sappy and casually dismissive of all the things Hollywood holds dear.

Thoroughly old-fashioned entertainment.

The movie is at its best when it's most straightforward. Flights of fancy like the child angel perched on Melvin's ceiling or his conversations with the black-clad Sweetback, who appears to undermine his confidence at crucial junctures, seem forced and pointless.

Screenwriter Matthew Tabak's directing debut is carefully plotted, well acted and surprisingly free of cheap thrills.

Making such a tragedy the backdrop to a love story risks trivializing it, though Chouraqui no doubt intended the film to affirm love's power to help people endure almost unimaginable horror.

The unspoken question that underlies their struggles is whether a facility run by sheer force of personality can survive when that personality is gone; the film ends on a cautiously hopeful note.

A candy-colored, superficially fizzy revenge fantasy with a startlingly corrosive undercurrent of bitterness and frustration.

A disturbing examination of what appears to be the definition of a "bad" police shooting.

The success of this effect, which helps elevate the movie above a classy disease-of-the-week saga, rests firmly on Russell Crowe's performance, and it's a strikingly good and moving one.

It's a sly, subtle portrait of systematic hypocrisy.

Paxton is impressively subtle and elicits remarkable performances from O'Leary and Sumpter.

While the film's exploration of Irish religious intolerance takes it to many familiar areas, the specifics are unfamiliar and fine performances -- especially those of leads Cunningham and Brady.

While Costner the actor clearly imagines himself the Gary Cooper of the 21st century, he's got a crude sentimental streak that Costner the director fails to curtail.

Combined with the Mamet-lite dialogue, a medley of all-too-deliberate pauses, smug literary allusions and calculatedly careless repetitions of the word "thingie" that obscure the meaning hidden in supposedly meaningless prattle, the result is a chic, vitriolic polemic that's as irritating as it means to be provocative.

Extravagant special effects notwithstanding, this is really a triumph of casting: The aplomb with which Jones plays wry straight man to Smith's street-smart wiseacre is terrifically enjoyable.

The result is sometimes strained, but often fresh and funny. And the sequence in which the entire cast sings "Avenues and Alleyways," bombastic '70s crooner Tony Christie's lush ode to thug life, is worth the price of admission in itself.

Despite its leisurely pace, this unpretentious, character-driven picture is a low-key charmer.

It's all about the amazing look, cobbled together from an astonishingly evocative range of sources: "Nosferatu" and "Mad Love," "Brazil" and "Metropolis," a haunted mosaic of bits and pieces of movie memories.

The soundtrack, which relies heavily on melancholy Sinatra standards like "The Good Life," "This Town" and "Summer Wind," casts perfectly modulated warning shadows over the film's light, bright look.

The action is confined to a single set and atmosphere is appropriately claustrophobic, but the image quality is harsh and flat. This accentuates the oppressive meanness of Vince's hotel room, but makes for some unpleasant viewing.

Do director Bryan Singer and screenwriter Brandon Boyce really mean to suggest that the roots of genocide lie in homosexual desire?

This slight slice of L.A. life is distinguished by two fine, subtle performances. Redgrave is quietly heartbreaking-- Penn accomplishes the daunting task of revealing the spine beneath Melanie's sweet-natured tolerance of her perpetually disagreeable husband.

Melodramatic look at alienated California high school students.

Frankenheimer pretty much ignores everything that's happened in the action and thriller genres since 1975, and mostly that's a good thing.

Nolan's intention was clearly to cast the material in a more conventional Hollywood mold without turning it into namby-pamby nonsense, and he succeeds admirably.

No matter how you spin Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's chronicle of headbangers on the couch, it sounds like a pitch-perfect parody in "Beyond Spinal Tap" mode. If anything, knowing it's no joke makes it harder not to giggle.

Spare, sleek and coolly entertaining, even if there's less to this game of true lies than meets the eye.

Overall, the film feels a little stiff, perhaps because screenwriter Steven Peros adapted his own stage play. But the performances are a delight, especially Dunst's effervescent turn as Marion Davies.

This melodramatic action opera is a lurid love letter to the guns and poses aesthetic of Hong Kong action cinema.

Allows the supporting cast to steal the movie.

Censorship, madness, social rebellion and the power of art.

The sequel-ready twist at the end is a letdown, but until then this is a neatly constructed nail-biter.

This is solid entertainment, and the time Caviezel and Pearce spent training for their sword fights pays off handsomely.

The film's dispassionate examination of the shifts in Susan and Daniel's relationship as they drift from irritation to barely suppressed panic is at least as nerve wracking.

Precociously glib and never less than engaging.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong: there are second acts in American lives. But all too many of them are sad, sordid or both, as this fact-based story of sex, drugs and murder featuring adult-movie superstar John Holmes aptly demonstrates.

Cynics may scoff, but the spirit of Woodstock -- not the 1999 debacle, but the 1969 original -- lives.

The melancholy joke - if you can call it that - is that the pall of global mediocrity has erased national differences and turned women like Tamiko and Amanda into ghosts drifting through their own lives.

Yes, the story is pure formula, though given less twinkle and lip gloss than Hollywood would have brought to bear on it; the film is so remake-friendly you can cast it in your head.

Sweet-natured charmer in its own right.

D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus's record of the event is an invaluable document, its technical limitations notwithstanding.

The story is simple enough for young children to follow, and the computer-animated images are both bright and surprisingly complex. Adults won't find the action heart-stopping.

Yash Chopra's thinly veiled plea for reconciliation between India and Pakistan is cloaked in a decades-spanning Romeo-and-Juliet romance.

Brisk, glossy and gloriously art-directed, Scorsese's lavish biopic is a pop trifle, engaging but not compelling.

Dense collage of digitally altered images often looks shockingly like some super-hip media agency's show reel.

A sleazy, seamy, flashy, steamy, vulgar exploitation thriller that revels in every minute of its own trashiness and delivers some pretty solid -- if prurient -- entertainment before strangling in a one-twist-too-many ending.

This lushly produced, lightweight romance embraces every cliche of the genre without so much as an ironic shrug.

Though Bittner's slacker charm may not be to all tastes, the parrots are natural-born scene-stealers with more than enough charm to seduce the most dubious viewer.

There's very little plot, and director Mangold's attempts to make a connection between the social confusion of the '60s and Susanna's inner turmoil don't really work.

Their subtle, complex performances could put far more experienced and better-known actors to shame.

An honorable film, beautifully acted, refreshingly un-camp in its take on wide lapels and progressive rock and occasionally coolly moving. It's just that ultimately, there's less here than meets the eye.

By turns profane, vulgar, unpredictable, scabrous and perpetually somewhere between buzzed and three sheets to the wind, Bukowski opened a window onto a fringe world of blue-collar drudgery and alcoholic self-obliteration with his blistering, bleakly comic dispatches from the gutter.

A blockbuster hit in Korea, Park's feature debut is a beguiling mix of the generic and the unfamiliar, and it ends on a shot that's nothing short of heartbreaking.

Director Sturla Gunnarsson crams each sequence with subtle, telling detail while avoiding "exotic India" clichés.

Mark Moormann's documentary tends to the worshipful, but Dowd, a charmer onscreen, was by all accounts just as appealing in real life.

Beneath the plot's romantic turns lies a surprisingly complex examination of the personal and professional price of honesty; falsehoods, half-truths, little white lies and self-delusion spur most of the key plot developments, and Roos never resorts to platitudes to account for their effects.

The film should be required viewing for all aspiring filmmakers, but the story's road-accident appeal is universal.

The giddy, "anything could happen" sense that made "Pulp Fiction" and "Reservoir Dogs" so viscerally exciting is missing here. But Tarantino's first picture in nearly three years is a faithful adaptation of Elmore Leonard's "Rum Punch," and its melancholy edge is a wistful delight.

Piper Perabo is a revelation -- and Barton is maturing into a sensitive, subtle performer with a marvelously expressive face.

Curl your cynical lip if you want, but there's a place for heartwarming, life-affirming, even weepy dramas, and Robert Redford brings the best-selling novel about a traumatized teen and her wounded horse to the screen with dignity and restraint.

In the end, the film feels a little futile; its relentless, one-miserable-note tone is numbing.

This minimalist meditation on loneliness and loss is so spare and drained of color that it seems always on the verge of fading into invisibility.

It's a raw, haunting experience.

The film deploys its disparate elements smartly, and director Hirotsugu Kawasaki can stage an action sequence with the best of them.

The multitalented Jaoui and Bacri excel on every level; her direction is efficient and unobtrusive, their script dissects the nuances of corruption by celebrity with a razor-sharp scalpel, and they deliver a pair of subtly unsparing performances.

The film's elliptical character development sometimes renders the actors' work opaque; restraint is an underpracticed virtue, but even it can be taken to excess.

This underrrated shocker has developed a cult following since its scattershot 1973 release, but deserves a wider one.

The result is sheer, unadulterated nastiness with no apologies.

Banderas inhabits the role of the mariachi with a feral grace undimished by the seven-year gap between films.

Kidman accomplishes a remarkable feat of transformation, adopting not only an accent, but a slightly seedy, faintly feral demeanor that almost makes you forget her icy good looks and fashion model's figure.

Nasty fun all around.

The story is less a sustained narrative than a series of scenes. But personal dynamics are the main event, and McDormand's powerhouse performance alone compensates for many minor deficiencies.

Viewers are left to draw their own conclusions, which inevitably will be colored by individual reactions to unabashed frontal nudity.

This psychological thriller takes its time and never delivers the big shocks genre fans raised on its American cousins have come to expect. But it works up a chilly atmosphere of creeping dread, and the tension.

Director Nancy Savoca's no-frills record of a show forged in still-raw emotions captures the unsettled tenor of that post 9-11 period far better than a more measured or polished production ever could.

Affectionate, melancholy and anchored by a well thought-out performance from Sean Penn.

The payoff doesn't quite equal the intensity of the spectacularly squirm-inducing premise, but Farrell takes his showboating star turn and runs with it.

A fresh and spirited fairy tale.

The story is predictable, but Reeder's performance is painfully convincing and the East Village locations so uniformly grimy that they all but weep despair.

Without the top-notch cast it would be indistinguishable from hundreds of pedestrian serial-killer pictures that clog video store shelves.

What could easily have been a sentimental, fannish exercise in musty nostalgia is in fact a lovely tribute to an era of feverish creativity that seemed as though it would never end yet now lives only in memory.

Despite its floating narrative, this is a remarkably accessible and haunting film.