Maitland McDonagh

God moves in mysterious -- some might say positively spiteful -- ways in this trio of scabrous tales adapted from short stories by "Trainspotting's" Irvine Welsh.

Say what you will about (Smith's) sense of humor, genuine faith is rare enough in popular culture to make any sighting worthy of note.

The wholly invented character of unattainable love interest Julia Cook (the real Kelly once referred to an enigmatic "Julia" in a letter) is the film's weakest link and smacks of a desperate attempt to shoehorn a pretty woman into a story about grubby men with tangled beards.

An acid-dipped valentine to the sometimes seedy magic of movies.

Its power lies in the intense, subtle performances of the ensemble cast and Bellott's ability to keep the tangled narrative threads from becoming a knotted mess.

Simultaneously groundbreaking and remarkably faithful to the classic play.

This is first-rate comedy of discomfort, so don't sample it with a date unless you're looking for a very queasy evening.

This psychological sci-fi thriller was originally made as a 40-minute segment of an unrealized portmanteau picture, then expanded into a freestanding feature. That's probably why it's padded with shots of Olham running down corridors.

Overall it's a frustratingly uneven movie, delicate at one moment and bluntly obvious the next.

Since her claim to fame is having brought the first living panda -- a cub named Su Lin -- out of China, Harkness's success is a given, but the footage of pandas in their natural surroundings is enchanting.

A bit of whimsy.

Sweet, likable and consistently engaging, if so insubstantial that it's always on the verge of blowing away.

Pekar's autobiographical chronicle of day-to-day banality is a rich, if dingy, tapestry of ordinary life in all its infinite, homely peculiarity, which filmmakers Sheri Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini bring to uniquely eccentric life.

The ensemble performances are perfectly meshed, and the Sprechers deserves special credit for bringing the desperate underside of Posey's brittle self-assurance to the surface.

MacKinnon's film draws on his past as a youth worker and features a standout performance from first-time performer Harry Eden.

This second installment is heavy on battle sequences, which will thrill some viewers more than others.

Ultimately the sci-fi fillips — human cloning, memory wipes, empathy viruses — are subordinate to screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce's doomed romance.

The film's saddest contention is that five decades later American public schools remain economically segregated by economics, which too often produces classrooms whose complexions have changed little since the pre-Brown era.

The film is simultaneously sweet natured and sharply observed, and if love eventually conquers all, it takes its own sweet time doing it.

There are echoes of Stephen Spielberg's "Duel," as well as "Roadgames," "The Hitcher" and "The Hills Have Eyes," but director/cowriter Mostow isn't interested in hommages: He's just looking to crank up the suspense (not the in your face action, thank heavens), bit by miserable bit, and does a very nice job of it.

Delivers its commendable message with affecting eloquence.

Cunningham tackles a complicated subject, rejecting the stridency favored by filmmakers of the Spike Lee persuasion in favor of a more even-handed tone.

Tony Scott's thriller is flashy, but it's not dead stupid and it's never dull.

Sleek, stylish and crammed with girl-power action.

A breezy romantic comedy in which opposites attract against all the reasonable odds, this slight but thoroughly charming film benefits immeasurably from the assured performances of leads Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno.

Inlike many directors with music video backgrounds, Tim Story keeps the flashy cutting to a minimum and lets the story unfold at its own unhurried pace.

Ice Cube is so genial and laid back it's hard to believe he's the same snarling thug who ass-kicks his way through action pictures, let alone the seethingly angry rapper who emerged from NWA in the early 1990s.

No aliens. No firefights in space. No robots. Just an eerily attractive, sleekly costumed cast in a stylish, cooly intelligent throwback to the Twilight Zone era of deeply serious science fiction.

The film ends on an ambiguous note that will infuriate some viewers and strike others as the only possible finale to Don's sad absurdist journey.

Whether this measured exercise in romantic melancholy moves you to tears or bores you to them is probably a matter of personal susceptibility to the sting of bitter regret for love lost.

The story's message is less than profound, but it's vividly delivered.

The technology for twinning a single young actress is considerably more seamless than it was in 1961, and Lohan is a perky charmer.

Poignant documentary.

There's a caper and there are some laughs, but this isn't a larky caper flick; it's a pulpy little story that could at any minute go straight to hell.

It's too fundamentally light-hearted to wallow in grinding poverty and despair.

Davaa and Falorni's film does suggest that camels have inner lives as rich and complicated as the human beings with whom they live in such intimate proximity. But they're also wholly camels, matted, goopy-eyed, gritty with sand and quick to knee an adorable calf in the snout when its demands become annoying.

Rough-edged but affecting drama.

The brouhaha aside, this chronicle of SNAFUs foretold doesn't have much new to say but says it with biting precision, and Phoenix's sharp, sneakily sympathetic performance is a pleasure to watch.

(A) languorous, mud-spattered psychological tale.

This rambling exercise in local color has been a pet project of Duvall's for more than a decade, and it's to his credit that he managed to get such a low-concept picture produced. It's also to his credit that he resists the temptation to take easy potshots at religion, particularly of the revivalist variety.

Even the film's ironic ending is deftly handled, its cynicism is tempered by a certain rueful wisdom.

It's Jagger's bone-dry, mournfully brittle delivery that gives the film its bittersweet bite. Michael Des Barres and Anjelica Huston make the most of their supporting roles.

For anyone unfamiliar with pentacostal practices in general and theatrical phenomenon of Hell Houses in particular, it's an eye-opener.

The lanky, wide-eyed Tautou is so phenomenally charming -- her smile could sweeten vinegar -- as to make Amelie irresistible.

This potent drama might be dismissed as therapy in the guise of filmmaking if it weren't so clear-eyed. At its core are three remarkable performances.

Genuinely gripping, balancing the travails of constructing the tunnel against the characters' stories with considerable skill.

The plot unfolds exactly as you expect, but Gedeck imbues Martha with a remarkably subtlety of spirit.

Narrated by NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, the film's form is measured, but its message is incendiary.

Fluffy, candy-colored and aimed directly at tweens -- girls between the ages of 10 and 12.

The truly creepy thing is that there's no bizarre, COMA-like conspiracy behind the malfeasance, just an awful betrayal of trust -- the kind of thing that sends an icy, paranoid chill through the blood just as the anesthetic takes hold.

Though the movie is clearly meant to work on its own, the relationship between Starling and Lecter plays best if you're familiar with "Lambs."

The sequence in which the crew acquires press credentials to the Republican National Convention by helping organizers desperate to book a rock band (they deliver Leitch's scruffy pals the Interpreters USSA) is priceless.

Pointed, unsubtle political satire.

The film is graphic without being lurid, and the naked emotions onscreen are far more shocking than the naked bodies -- though there are plenty of those, in all shapes and sizes.

Adventurous viewers will find this unusual genre hybrid an intriguing experience, and Donnie Yen's fight choreography is breathtaking.

It's sometimes hard to breath for the sheer volume of acting sucking the air out of the room, and keeping three narratives movie without muddling them all is a hugely ambitious undertaking for any director, let alone one on his second film.

Overall, the book is a far more rewarding experience than the movie.

Salvatores draws strikingly unsentimental performances from his young actors, all making their film debuts, and juxtaposes the petty meanness of children with the calculated cruelty of desperate adults to haunting effect.

It's amusing more often than it isn't, largely because the cast is so nonchalant and, well, French about everything.

The laughs are low -- very low -- and the comedy often flags. But two elaborate sequences involving a bad-tempered little ankle-biter are standouts.

Francis Ford Coppola has turned John Grisham's pulpy bestseller into surprisingly creditable -- if morally muddled -- movie.

Atkinson's painfully unfunny turn as an insensitive gynecologist is eclipsed by Hollander's scathingly funny portrayal of belligerent auteur Proclaimer, whose wears his pretenses with such scabby aplomb that they achieve high style.

A sweet-natured and refreshingly uncartoonlike look at the trials of an unworldly Midwestern college boy negotiating his freshman year at NYU.

Things take an unexpected turn into far grimmer territory when the wormy Robert finally turns.

Spooky and character-driven, this stylish ghost story owes a great deal to contemporary Japanese ghost movies in general and M. Night Shyamalan's "The Sixth Sense" (1999) in particular but weaves a creepy spell all its own.

This kind of gloomy razzle-dazzle isn't everyone's cup of mind-altering tea, but strong performances make it worth the effort to keep the time-tripping shenanigans straight until the surprisingly satisfying payoff.

It's informative as far as it goes, but the film's raison d'etre is the simple sight of large wildlife up close and personal, and it's mesmerizing.

The story of the business is historically interesting, but the story of a friendship tested to the breaking point is timeless.

A spectacular natural disaster spiraling out of control, a crime gone wrong and a poor jerk caught in the middle: Yes, it's a standard action-picture recipe. But what a difference a cast makes.

Rises above its low-budget limitations by pandering to the most outrageously paranoid fantasies of unhappy office drones.

A virtuoso experiment in animation that combines traditional anime aesthetics style with a variety of Western animation styles.

A lovely homage to a charismatic star.

It's funny stuff, though most of the pimps seem like such buffoons it's hard to imagine how they actually make a living.

Beautifully animated epic is never dull.

If this new film seems less prescient than its predecessor, it's only because reality is rapidly catching up with Cronenberg's warped imagination.

Often clever but fundamentally shallow, this shaggy-dog story is greatly enriched by its extraordinary bluegrass soundtrack, supervised by T Bone Burnett and performed by a phenomenal collection of artists.

Tthough it comes wrapped in a stylish French mantle of feminist rage and sexual empowerment, the picture ultimately belongs squarely in the tradition of rape revenge pictures.

Informative documentary.

If not an entirely successful film, it's a bold and haunting one.

While many films of this kind are undermined by amateurish performances, the main cast is solid and some of the supporting performances (many from non-professionals) are small gems.

For all the "touched by an angel" sentimentality, the movie's eerie, slightly menacing vision of black-clad angels lurking in the shadowy corners of unsuspecting lives is genuinely haunting.

It's a compelling story, and very of its tumultuous time.

Although Sonny is computer generated, Tudyk supplied his voice and body language -- provides the story's emotional core, an irony Asimov would surely have appreciated.

It's a bad sign when audience enthusiasm peaks during the credits sequence.

Holmes's story isn't pretty, but it's fascinating, in no small part because the people Paley interviews offer a glimpse into a brief time when making porn was an act of rebellion that attracted a diverse and eccentric group of filmmakers and performers.

Its power lies both in Aronofsky's evocation of tightly wound paranoia and in his flawless dovetailing of personal obsession and cultural anxieties.

Consistently earnest and well-intentioned but only occasionally moving, despite the efforts of a generally top-notch cast.

It's cool and spare, but there's an essential lightness to the film's tone despite the heavy material, and Deborah Eve Lewis' glistening B&W cinematography is simply luscious.

Bright, who reworked co-writer Stephen Johnston's screenplay, changed all the names except Bundy's so he could "make up stuff," but the irony is how close to the facts -- at least to the degree they're known -- he stays.

With the exception of a brief sequence on the Galapagos Islands, where Maturin briefly indulges in some pre-Darwinian study of its unique ecosystem, the entire film takes place aboard the ship, and Weir's greatest accomplishment may be that it never feels claustrophobic.

It's not about sex -- it's about Barbra and Bette and the Village People: That's the lesson of this cheerful, mainstream comedy about tabloid TV, Hollywood sophistry and family values that finally gets discussion about gay people out of the bedroom and into the record store, where it belongs.

Ridiculous, yes, but in an eminently watchable way. Most of the plot twists work surprisingly well, and the frequently naked leads work up some genuine chemistry.

A bravura tap-dancing finale as exhilarating as it is bizarre.

A triumph of art direction over narrative, but what art direction!

Unwilling to offend, Zwick whitewashes a culture in which brutality and contemplative beauty were inextricably intertwined and, afraid to alienate audiences, he shies away from the story's logical downbeat conclusion, replacing it with an "ambiguous" ending that recalls, of all things, "The Road Warrior."

It all seems terribly familiar.

Though this frank documentary about extreme sexual practices comes with a cautionary message, it could perhaps use a stronger one.

While there's no denying that the film's animation is technically impressive and is sometimes quite clever, its inventiveness is frequently at the service of gags so distasteful that gag is the operative word.

As live-action adaptations of cheap, unapologetically stupid cartoons go, this is top of the line: The cast is appealing, the sets brightly colored and fun to look at, the mystery as lame and goofy as any featured in the many inexplicably beloved Scooby-Doo cartoons.

An earnest, thoughtful, surprisingly well-written (given the number of writers who worked on it) drama about guilt and betrayal that features excellent performances by Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt and dares to defy the juvenile wham bam thank you ma'am aesthetics that have turned mainstream action pictures into feature-length video games.

As to what happens between shows, well, apparently not a whole hell of a lot. If there are groupies, demolished hotel rooms, midnight payoffs to the vice squad or drug- and alcohol-fueled misbehavior, there's no evidence of it here.

The images of gods and ordinary Tibetans that Bush captures are more eloquent that his turgid narration, and overall the film works better as a travelogue than an introduction to Tibetan Buddhist beliefs or history.

Overall, this puff piece is shapeless, repetitive and feels much longer than it is.

The film's bright spot is Irish comedian Dylan Moran, who plays Libby's charmingly dissolute cousin and who also happens to be Dennis' best friend. He's fresh, unpredictable and genuinely funny -- everything the film isn't.

This supremely silly supernatural potboiler is slickly entertaining for just under two hours and absolutely hilarious for 10 minutes near the end.

Gloriously seductive musical sequences seem suddenly hokey and self-conscious when they're staged in Western settings, and the songs' English-language lyrics are painfully banal.

The child actors are bland, the adult characters are forced to act like dunderheads to keep the paper-thin plot going, and the generic-sounding Jimmy Buffett songs are just a LITTLE out of sync with the film's target age group.

To his eternal credit, Jones gives his considerable all and even coaxes a startling note of poignancy from one scene, while Smith just bops along, lobbing gags and grinning at the special effects.

An intoxicatingly beautiful but painfully simplistic fable about love and death.

A screwball comedy without a charismatic, smart-talking dame is no screwball comedy at all.

And while the divas make their characters hugely entertaining, they're also such high profile actresses in such a soft-edged film that it's hard to actually worry about what's to become of them.

It's a shame it's not a better movie, but its small virtues include an uncompromising performance by English actor Jonny Lee Miller.

The music is generally undistinguished, with the exception of the searing "Every Six Minutes."

Young Tamimi is a terrific rider but a lackluster screen presence, and the film's brevity ensures that her trials have a perfunctory quality that keeps them from being truly compelling.

A blackly comic, neo-noir heist picture, Australian screenwriter Scott Roberts's directing debut fairly oozes strenuous eccentricity.

Essentially a romantic comedy with a heavier-than-usual dramatic component.

Casting a film set in Latin America with Spanish-and Italian-speaking performers acting in English misfires; the actors' diverse accents clash, some are clearly more fluent than others and the sense of relief when anyone speaks a rare line in Spanish is palpable.

Overall this is an assured piece of genre filmmaking that delivers the goods so stylishly it hardly matters that they aren't fresh.

The strong cast keeps the material from descending into sheer smutty tripe, but it's an uphill battle and in the end, not really worth their considerable efforts.

The script is often obvious and much of the acting is amateurish (Rakesh's comic sidekicks are just dismal), though Purva Bedi is a shining exception — she's got star quality to burn.

This moody film is ravishingly beautiful to look at -- but the story's fairy tale atmosphere doesn't entirely mesh with its psychological underpinnings.

This slow, derivative chiller (which lifts liberally from "Ghost Story," "Rear Window" and "A Stir of Echoes") wastes far too much time on red herrings and telegraphs its plot points with painfully obvious dialogue.

Though the story eventually runs out of steam and it's never clear why the night-crawlers torment certain children and then come back to get them, fledgling screenwriter Brendan William Hood and director Robert Harmon -- whip up some effective suspense sequences.

An old man's movie, filled with regret over things lost, corrupted and spoiled.

Ethan and Lenny's story is silly, good-natured and full of unlikely moves, just like the titular twister.

Despite its failings, Wind Chill represents a road rarely taken by 21st-century American horror films: Original (in the non-remake sense of the term), subtle and restrained.

Even Stevenson, a singularly accomplished and versatile actress, can't do much with Julia's early scenes, in which she's forced to dither around like a complete idiot.

The Country Music Channel's first foray into feature filmmaking is sickly sweet and thoroughly predictable, and woefully underuses veterans Harper and Reynolds, but it features some stirring performances, including BeBe Winans and Willie Nelson dueting on "The Uncloudy Day."

A far cry from such sneakily subversive werewolf-sex tales as "The Company of Wolves" (1984) or "Ginver Snaps" (2000), this pallid little picture is all "Lost Boys" (1987) posturing by way of the sublimely ridiculous "Covenant" (2006).

Shock-rocker Rob Zombie's loving homage to flat-out nasty horror films of the 1970s will leave many post-"Scream" (1996) horror fans cold because of what it's not. It's not slick or glossy. It's not funny or self-referential.

Though something less than a masterpiece of the genre, this good-natured skirmish in the war between men and women benefits from Hudson's thoroughly charming performance.

Well acted (notably by newcomer Brown), warm hearted and utterly predictable, this film is aimed squarely at everyone who loved "Good Will Hunting."

First-time filmmaker Ben Younger makes not a single false move when delineating the merciless, high-testosterone world of boiler-room brokerages.

An efficient but shallow fright show.

Between Magruder's oily schmoozing and the camera-ready combo of Spanish moss and constant rain, he and cinematographer Changwei Gu whip up some amazing atmosphere.

Lack of chemistry between Richard Gere and Julia Roberts sinks this souffle.

Ultimately, the film feels unfocused and attenuated, despite its brief running time.

The climactic revelation is a real disappointment, humdrum rather than chilling.

The obvious product of a corporate search for the next great fantasy franchise, this adaptation of the first in a series of popular children's books by the writer-illustrator team of Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi is a lump of leaden whimsy.

It's just plain exhausting to watch the admirably game cast members running around like headless chickens in chic period clothes, surrendering their dignity to the task of navigating the plot's frenetic contrivances.

Elvira fans could hardly ask for more.

The plot is simply an excuse for a string of good-natured dope jokes (come on -- you have to love that their hookah is called Billy Bong Thornton) and goofy sight gags inspired by everything from Jerry Garcia to Jerry Maguire, most of which are undoubtedly funniest if you're eight miles high.

Like most anthology films, this thematically linked trio of shorts is a mixed bag.

The result is unfortunate: Pinter can't find emotional depths that just aren't there, but dispenses with most of what made the original entertaining in the search for them.

This intermittently charming look at East-meets-West culture shock in contemporary Beijing seriously overreaches its grasp.

For all the complicated backstory, weighty themes, action set pieces and fanciful production design, the film is oddly unengaging.

Aimed at youngsters, this odd mix of fantasy and disease-of-the-week conventions doesn't really gel, though its ambitions are laudable.

The film ends before Franken can actually take the step from commentator to participant, which adds to its overall unfinished and unfocused air.

Sax keeps things moving, but the best thing about the film is the British cast.

While the film delivers some sharp dialogue, overall it's soft and slightly unfocused.

The prodigiously talented Allen, Bates and Lange give it their all, but there's a limit to what even they can do with platitudes and prefabricated homilies.

Kutcher's performance isn't terrible, but the brilliant, bewildered, increasingly desperate Evan is the film's center, and grounding its flights of fantasy in rock-solid emotional reality is more than Kutcher can manage.

In fact it ends, as all good romantic comedies do, with a wedding, though the identities of the newly married couple might be the least predictable thing about this cheerfully ham-fisted celebration of love and family in modern-day Madrid.

By the time the film winds itself up, the sophisticated fizz of its first 45 minutes has been smothered by explosive bombast.

This film is pure, empty (if gorgeous) spectacle, and the decision to loose the tongues of the ape planet's humans (they were mute in the original) undermines the contrast that lies at the heart of the story's power.

Ukraine-born, American-based filmmaker Andrei Zagdansky's deeply frustrating "documentary essay" examines the Orange Revolution.

This modest picture is distinguished by some marvelously bitchy dialogue.

A must-see for martial arts enthusiasts.

Only McKellan seems to understand the profound silliness of the film in which he finds himself, and he camps it up accordingly.

First and foremost a showcase for the latest developments in motion-capture and 3-D technology.

Feels soft without being especially affectionate, and only sporadically funny.

So low-key that it verges on unconsciousness.

The impulses that produced this project, which brings together three short, English-language films by African female filmmakers into a feature-film package introduced by rap icon Queen Latifah, are commendable, but the results are uneven.

Has a certain weird charm, but it's too seamy for children and too simplistic played for adults.

The politics get pretty short shrift, but cigarettes and liquor are everywhere.

There are two kinds of police officers in David Ayers and James Ellroy's convoluted, ultraviolent tale of corruption within the LAPD: dirty cops and dirtier ones.

Though inspired by Weiland's own childhood, the film's plot sticks close to the underdog's coming-of-age formula and is marred by young Bernie's gratingly self-pitying voice-over.

Is it funny? Sporadically.

The resulting awkward, earthbound mishmash thoroughly overshadows Judd and Kline's authentically moving performances.

It's ultimately hard to care deeply about a silly, sheltered girl-woman who's taking an inordinately long time to learn that money can't buy happiness.

A sober, earnest drama about child abuse.

Adds little to the annals of werewolf lore. But it's briskly paced and features a couple of clever twists on genre conventions.

Maybe the life was edited out of it in the two years between shooting and release, or maybe Dominik was simply overwhelmed by the outsized myths of the West, but the film only comes to life after James' death, when Ford quite literally takes center stage.

Overall it's a colorful, diverting cautionary tale.

Yet another variation on the theme of Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." If you've read the short story, you'll see where things are going in no time flat; if you haven't and want to be surprised, don't look it up.

Though too long by a good half hour, Lee's latest film packs a genuine emotional punch, largely because its polemical agenda doesn't entirely eclipse the drama.

Equal parts soap drama and ham-fisted morality tale.

The film's bizarreness pales next to that of little-known exploitation film "Sonny Boy" (1990), which weaves similar material into something authentically nightmarish.

Though the film ends on a surprising and genuinely magical note, it takes its own sweet time getting there; some viewers will have lost patience before the denouement arrives.

A welcome alternative to such hyperkinetic drivel as Pokémon.

Ford is the problem: He looks great for his age (56, to Heche's 29), but oozes a stolid gloom that snuffs out those sparks long before they can set the lush scenery on fire. In a classic screwball comedy, he'd be Ralph Bellamy.

It's an amiable, middle-class coming of age story, soft and sweet and ultimately a bit inconsequential.

Ultimately aimed at a Christian audience looking for genre entertainment with a certain sense of propriety (which partly translates into there being no murders), the film tries to serve two masters and doesn't quite deliver for either.

Bresson's vision of the miseries of 15th century life -- which was undeniably nasty, brutish and short -- comes dangerously close to the comic squalor of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

Most of the gags recycle the same tired old romantic comedy schtick, with special effects.

Everything has a fusty, embalmed quality: Whatever gave the novel its vitality has been smothered.

Goofy, raunchy and very Japanese, Miike's film will probably play best to fanboys who love "Power Rangers" and "Ultraman" -- and there are plenty of them to go around.

A film for fans of this alternate universe of movies that flourished as soon as the 1934 Production Code effectively excised most prurient, violent and otherwise titillating material from Hollywood films and withered in the '70s as mainstream movies finally caught up with the indies.

As a film, it is earnest, cliched, often awkward and unlikely to inspire anyone who isn't already thoroughly sold on its message of salvation through community activism.

Though smartly written and handsomely produced (the film's visual polish is remarkable, given its modest budget and the swanky settings the story dictates), this film would benefit greatly from more bite.

There's nothing hugely original going on here, but as twisty-turny crime thrillers go, this one is perfectly entertaining.

It's periodically enlivened by unlikely cameos, including Lou Diamond Phillips as an undercover cop posing as a transvestite hooker and Gladys Knight as a forgotten Motown singer.

The film's meandering narrative, melodramatic conclusion and underdeveloped characters overshadow the genuinely shocking abuses it condemns.

Repetitive and uninspired, it panders to the lowest expectations of horror buffs and squanders the efforts of a competent cast.

Fluff in the tradition of Hollywood's screwball comedies of remarriage, lacking the wit or grace of such classics as "His Girl Friday" (1940) and "The Awful Truth" (1937).

Smoothly enjoyable, undemanding entertainment and features a couple of knock-out giant croc attacks.

In all, about a third of the film (most of it contained in three extended sequences) is audaciously funny and genuinely disturbing. The rest will sorely test the devotion of Carrey's fans.

But beneath the bombast it's pure paste and tinsel and, robbed of the thrill of live performance, the show's deficiencies are glaringly apparent.

Though occasionally enlivened by fanciful sequences suggesting the surreal power of Kahlo's vivid inner life, it's often mired in the mechanical accretion of incidents that blights most biographical films.

Even the dramatic heavy hitters, who include Cox, Gleeson, O'Toole and Julie Christie, as Achilles' mother, are powerless in the face of Pitt's yawning hollowness.

The city looks breathtakingly lovely, the movie's Brazilian characters are charming and filled with joie de vivre, and using excerpts would take care of the fact that the pacing's a bit sluggish for such fluffy material.

Ultimately, despite striving mightily to give everyone a fair shake, the film kindled the ire of conservative Christians and Muslims anyway.

The stepping is terrific and the climactic sequence, a knowing nod to the infamous Bollywood "wet sari" number, is a knock out. But the united colors of we-can-overcome cuties, predictable class conflicts and sanitized keeping-it-real bluster bring the story's intensely formulaic nature into the.

Painfully cliched. The music is throbbing and the leads are cute, but there's nothing here viewers haven't seen before.

The actors -- especially Klein and Bernthal -- deliver startlingly powerful performances.

Mega-budget action extravaganzas don't get much sillier than this.

Done in by its tone.

This genial little picture, which has been kicking around for more than a year, doesn't have a mean bone in its body.

"Saturday Night Fever" with designer drugs and duds.

When the average comedy is aimed at juvenile 12-year-olds of all ages, the fact that Russell's target audience is precocious 12-year-olds of all ages is a significant improvement without actually being a triumph of mature wit over boorish puerility.

The movie's low budget shows, but the competent (many of them also sitcom veterans) cast keeps things moving smoothly.

It's a shame to see such dedicated performers flay their psyches in the service of such fundamentally shallow material.

Still odder is the movie's sexual worldview, which is simultaneously infantile and fetishistic. Boys wear rubber, lipstick, and spandex, but don't seem to have a sexual bone in their unmuscled bodies.

The film delivers lots of high-pitched hysteria but never manages to make its spoiled protagonists interesting.

Alnoy's narrative is better suited to a trashy thriller than a vehicle for weighty political themes.

Though the film contains many haunting images, the absence of a solid emotional foundation makes its increasingly preposterous story developments feel arbitrary and ultimately pointless.

Features some strikingly intimate footage of Noonan's extended family, but lets Noonan himself drives the show and his colorful tales of villainy that cry out for more context than MacIntyre provides.

Bill Murray plays the secondary role of a nameless American gag writer brimming with one-liners about the absurdity of Cuban life, Dustin Hoffman has a cameo as kvetching gangster Meyer Lansky.

Overall, the performances are surprisingly convincing, but the mockumentary elements – feel out of place and the intrusive.

Ironically, the filmmakers seem to think the audience for this movie about super-smart people is super-dumb.

By the time it reaches its fiery finale, the film feels less mythic than self-consciously portentous.

The film's wittiest moment comes before it starts: the familiar MGM lion is replaced by a roaring crocodile when the studio's logo appears.

Just a little shy of twisting the knife that extra twist.

If all this were anarchically funny, its shambling idiocy could be forgiven.

The film's style is best described as utilitarian, but it gets the job done; the performances range from good to a bit amateurish.

Make no mistake: This slackly paced picture doesn't gel.

Though generally sympathetic, the film manages (without stooping to clichéd moralizing) to suggest that being Ron Jeremy isn't the non-stop paradise his fans imagine.

This film is no exception to the rule that philosophical debate seldom spawns compelling cinema.

One-scene guest star Sissy Spacek packs enough genuine madness into her brief screen time to make the surrounding film feel like so much listless play-acting.

If only this amiable shaggy dog story...didn't degenerate into an implausible, second-rate thriller after takeoff.

Although notorious in South Africa, Stander is little known elsewhere and Canadian director Bronwen Hughes' unsatisfying account of his life and crimes is unlikely to earn him a spot on the outlaw celebrity A-list.

Heartfelt but overly familiar film.

Fun if you like this kind of thing and don't expect too much of it.

Hartley's score is lovely and he makes excellent use of digital video, but the film's paucity of provocative ideas is its undoing.

Spare, rough around the edges and unsentimentally melancholy.

This package of three short films originally produced for German television is sex-themed without being especially sexy.

The film's epic look is undermined by his narrow focus; in the end it feels rather thin and less than the sum of its handsome parts.

Screenwriter and co-director West -- who works in gay porn -- evinces an easy and even-handed familiarity with the milieu, and his characters only occasionally lapse into broad caricature.

Though the clash between old-world parents and their American-born children is familiar territory, New Jersey-born, Taiwan-raised director/cowriter Bay-Sa Pan gives the conflict a culturally particular spin and elicits strong performances from her appealing cast.

What do you get when you cross a serial-killer movie with a sappy father/son drama and give it a time-travel twist?

There are effective scenes and powerful performances scattered among long sequences in which various members of the family gaze into space as they contemplate the burden of the past, walk aimlessly through Atlanta or have odd encounters with strangers.

All's well that ends well, and rest assured, the consciousness-raising lessons are cloaked in gross-out gags.

The whole enterprise has the sweaty sheen that comes from trying too hard to be cool.

This smooth concoction goes down with a pleasant tingle and leaves behind a warm glow.

The film's lingering exploration of their sleek surfaces verges on roboporn.

This cautionary tale, complete with the swank cars, cool clothes and depraved babes that inevitably accompany degradation Hollywood style, is based on former sitcom scribe Jerry Stahl's lurid tell-all memoir of his descent into heroin addiction. Under the witty surface, the moral seems to be "The devil made me do it." Even by sitcom standards, that's old.

Though overall an overwhelmingly positive portrayal, the film doesn't ignore the more problematic aspects of Brown's life.

The greatest mystery, though, is how this thoroughly trashy picture wound up opening theatrically, rather than going direct to video.

Simply a series of set pieces designed to insure Angelina Jolie's status as action-babe pin-up.

The perky Aniston is both unflatteringly photographed and utterly unconvincing in the pivotal role of Lucinda, and overall the film has the oddly disconnected quality of '70s Euro-thrillers whose international casts spoke different languages on the set and were dubbed into conformity.

Has honorable aspirations, even as it becomes mired in mainstream movie conventions.

A strong cast that flounders in profoundly unappealing material.

The film is dreary and attenuated, the tedium broken only by the occasional golden moment when one of the stellar supporting players - Ron Silver as the principled presiding judge who alternately tolerates and quashes Jackie's antics, Peter Dinklage as the lead defense attorney or Annabella Sciorra as Jackie's ex - manages to cut through the clutter.

No one and nothing can be taken at face value in Beach's twisty tale of secrets and lies, which buries its very interesting idea in a welter of ludicrous dialogue and skin-flick imagery.

How engaging you find this loosely structured road movie will depend on how charming you find the over-aged slackers played by Josh Alexander, who also wrote the screenplay, and Robert Bogue.

The gorgeous Mole Antonelliana is the breakout star of Ferrario's fluffy valentine to the cinema.

Suicide, child molestation, corruption, insanity and the faintest implication of incest are wound around the film's suggestion that the cure for modern-day alienation and anomie lies in embracing traditional Japanese culture, like ritual tattooing.

The story is slight and would probably be better suited to a short subject, but first-time feature filmmaker Pierre-Paul Renders gives it a striking formal twist: It's told entirely in the first person.

Wan's debut feature is a twisted, squirm-inducingly nasty bit of work, which isn't a criticism because that's exactly what he and cowriter Leigh Whannell had in mind.

Trapped uncomfortably between its higher aspirations and the demands of genre, this picture never quite gets its bearings, but it's still a solid ride.

Attal's characters are one-note position statements, which forces the unsubtle soundtrack - mostly American pop songs that range from the Velvet Underground's "Sunday Morning" to Radiohead's "Creep" - to bear the brunt of clarifying their thoughts and feelings. Without it, you'd be entirely in the dark.

Would be more appealing if the women's behavior weren't alternately moronic and venal.

While movies like "The Long Riders" (1980) and "The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid" (1972) aim to be serious considerations of the outlaws' lives and legends, this picture just wants to have fun.

The extremely intimate violence is more explicit than is the mainstream norm, and Dalle's mouth is the stuff of nightmares.

There's not much substantive food for thought.

It is ultimately a simplistic film that will play better to youngsters who wish their grandpas were this cool and to parents who are nostalgic for the kind of exceptional childhood they neither had nor can provide for their own children.

There's nothing much new going on here (we feel compelled to point out the resemblance to one of the worst-ever episodes of The X-Files, "Teso Los Bichos"), but it's all slickly done, with the requisite big jumps, false leads, weird science and scary trips down dark corridors.

God bless Jennifer Tilly, who attacks her role in this third sequel to 1988's killer-doll picture CHILD'S PLAY with incomparable slutty brio.

The surprise is how tame and passionless it all seems, particularly after director Philip Haas's fevered "Angels and Insects."