Maitland McDonagh

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

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

It has a creepy power all its own.

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.

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 about ordinary people living in the shadow of nagging, day-to-day racism, and about the music that reminds them of what's right with the world rather than what's wrong.

Played for Maverick-like comedy, the film might have coasted on Harris and Mortensen's dialogue. But played straight it's both dull and preposterous.

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

That the 27-year-old Usher isn't much of an actor is no surprise, but he's strikingly uncharismatic for someone who's been in the spotlight since he was six.

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

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

The story vacillates between broad, kid-friendly gags and a series of oddly sour riffs on the theme of adult sibling rivalry.

The supporting cast is stocked with far better actors than Seagal -- Kristofferson, Harry Dean Stanton and Stephen Lang among them -- and country music personalities ranging from Mark Collie, Levon Helm, Randy Travis and Travis Tritt to Loretta Lynn's twin daughters Patsy and Peggy, to whom Seagal's character makes some vaguely suggestive remarks.

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

Obvious and, frankly, 25 years too late.

Restrained and decorous to a fault.

A three-hankie weeper in disaster-movie drag, and its tear-jerking bull's-eyes are separated by long stretches of tedium.

One soggy, charmless heap of chum.

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

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.

The movie fails to make Alma a vivid presence -- She deserves better, and so do viewers.

If you can't spell "bogeyman," you shouldn't make movies about him.

The feisty supporting cast is forced to carry the show, and fortunately, they're more than up to it, notably Olin, Platt and Jeremy Irons.

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

Gorgeous and menacing at the same time.

Buried deep inside this ponderous, repetitive psychological thriller is a fantastic half-hour "Twilight Zone" episode.

The film is flat-out gorgeous and contains moments of sheer lunacy.

Though some individual scenes crackle, overall the film feels unfocussed and flabby, like a series of acting improv exercises strung together.

The film's performances are uniformly strong and remarkably coherent, given the conditions under which they were delivered. The actors shot for eight hours straight in a fully lit and set-decorated house, each individually miked and followed by his or her own personal camera operator.

Expanded by writer-director Randall Miller from a nostalgic half-hour short he made while a student at AFI, this well-intentioned film about loss, grief and new beginnings gets bogged down in syrupy cliches and blunt self-help dialogue.

This trashy, overwrought thriller gets itself worked up into a fine, sleazy lather that recalls the matricidal glories "Die! Die! My Darling!" and "You'll Like My Mother", then wimps out at the end.

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 trouble is that Turturro's reach considerably exceeds his grasp.

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.

The film's ensemble portrait of women caught between nostalgia for the tough and free-spirited babes they were (however much that freedom may have been illusory) and uncertainty about what their futures hold is almost painfully on target.

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

Thoroughly dotty and surprisingly endearing.

The profoundly unconvincing CGI work only makes the sorry screenplay and lackluster performances look worse.

This intelligent, oddly aloof thriller is a worthy follow-up to director Steven Soderberg's "Out of Sight."

Falls far short of its grim potential.

Klapisch's use of split screens, fragmented images and nouvelle vague-ish editing would be annoying if it weren't so in keeping with the youthful exuberance his characters haven't quite lost.

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.

Where "Charade" unfolds in a fantasy Paris full of glamorous white people, Demme's film takes place in a gray tangle of streets teeming with multi-ethnic Parisians. Newton and Robbins mimic Hepburn and Matthau, while Wahlberg is the anti-Grant, lumpen and thuggish rather than beguilingly debonair.

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.

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.

The film's resolution is both haunting and satisfying.

It's familiar stuff if you've sampled the vast body of work devoted to LA-dammerung.

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.

This modest picture is distinguished by some marvelously bitchy dialogue.

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.

Though Verow attended the American Film Institute and has made more than a dozen shorts and features since 1994, his low-budget gay-themed films are characterized by phenomenal indifference to framing, sound quality and performance. If his relentless amateurishness is deliberate, it's self-defeating; if not, it's inexplicable: Most people who do anything for more than a decade get better at it.