Maitland McDonagh

The sequel is something of a disappointment, embroiling its refreshingly level-headed heroines in a series of clichéd romantic dilemmas.

Freundlich's postmodern road movie contains several sharply observed scenes but doesn't really add up to much.

Whether this riot of unrepentant trashiness strikes you as tediously ridiculous or brainlessly amusing is probably a matter of mood.

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.

This fifth film should please fans who rate the films based on their fidelity to the canonical texts. But for the uninitiated, it's a dry and slightly dreary introduction to the world of Hogwarts and Azkaban.

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.

Unfortunately, the mystery isn't mysterious and the characters are caricatures; the wintery New England landscape is the most striking thing about the film, but it's not interesting enough to justify watching it for 100 minutes.

The irony is that for all its "not your father's spy movie" posing, it's exactly like the later James Bond pictures: predictable, lightweight and 100 percent disposable

Veers regularly into disease-of-the-week territory but is rescued by the powerhouse performances of Ken Watanabe (who was instrumental in getting the film made) and Kanako Higuchi.

Beautifully animated, the celebrity voice performances are terrific, and the action sequences negotiate the fine line between being physically convincing and becoming too intense for the young children.

Lazy, superficially au courant and utterly forgettable.

Sternfeld's script, developed at the Sundance screenwriters' lab, is spare to the point of stinginess; individual scenes play beautifully without adding up to anything, stranding the actors in an emotional vacuum that drains the life from their performances.

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.

The mix of rollicking, family-friendly action and backwoods mysticism is odd, as is the story's progress from larky escapades to increasingly grim consequences, and Craven never quite manages to make it all seem a smoothly integrated piece.

Meticulously observed and devastatingly well-acted.

Thalbach's passionate performance is the film's center, but she's aided by a strong supporting cast, Jarre's propulsive score and the gritty locations: It was shot at the very shipyard where real-life history was made.

Nathanson processes this pungent stew of greed, ambition and self-delusion into pablum so sweet and bland it wouldn't shock a convent-raised idealist.

A feature-length Twilight Zone episode, filtered -- not entirely successfully -- though the sensibilities of David Lynch and his Wild at Heart collaborator, Barry Gifford.

When a performer as sharp as Cedric the Entertainer is reduced to funny fat-guy shtick, you know you're in the presence of grinding mediocrity.

It's all terribly schematic, thematically obvious and not in the least bit funny.

The filmmaker's command of storytelling is less than assured, and with the exception of Figueroa and Annette Murphy (who plays Pepe's mistress Letti), the film's performances range from awkwardly wooden to amateurishly awful. While Arteta is definitely a filmmaker to watch, this particular movie is a testament to aspirations that considerably exceed his present abilities.

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.

Earnest but unenlightening drama.

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.

For all the sex and slicing, the most shocking thing about it is how dreary it is.

Despite the frequent and elaborate sex scenes, the film's overall tone is both melancholic and alienating, suffused with the sad certainty of Claudine's impending death in Venice.

The film's prestige is a doozy, both dazzling and preposterous, but if you're watching closely -- as Cutter advises in the film's first few minutes -- it's flawlessly set up.

The mockumentary conceit gives a vivid immediacy to the material, and the PAL digital video cinematography is often surprisingly lyrical -- certain shots of empty, fog-shrouded San Francisco sites more than make up in eeriness what they lack in special-effects decrepitude.

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.

The defendants – especially Hoffman and Rubin – baited elderly Judge Julius J. Hoffman, who never failed to take the bait; Seale was so obstreperous that Hoffman had him gagged and bound to a chair, another indelible image.

A cute, slight tale.

Production values are low -- though, mercifully, the sound recording is clear -- and overall the project smacks of juvenile hijinks.

Rosie O'Donnell's bracing freshness and genuine likability cut through the cloying stuff every time, but there's nowhere near enough of her to balance things out.

While sumptuously beautiful, the film is often stilted and undermined by some painfully amateurish performances that no good intentions can smooth over.

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

Bendinger pulls out all the stops visually, using bold set design, frantic editing, extreme angles and computer image multiplying that turns what begins as a Busby Berkeley exercise in synchronized movement into a kaleidoscopic infinity of handsprings and back flips.

Precociously glib and never less than engaging.

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).

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.

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.

Although the story is as predictable as can be -- "surprise" twist ending included -- the performances are better than those in most super-low budget horror pictures, and Jessica Gallant's super-16mm cinematography is surprisingly handsome.

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.

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

The best you can say is that it's all pretty harmless and pretty stupid.

Preposterous plotting and interchangeable young actors.

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.

Its imagery is never less than breathtakingly beautiful, and is occasionally truly awesome

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.

Things quickly degenerate into a series of juvenile jokes about flatulence and bosoms, and by the end the cast is reduced to frantically manhandling a corpse for yucks. Not funny.

Even by the debased standards of preachy sports movies aimed at kids, this is pabulum.

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.

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.

The film's tone - a mix of childlike directness, twee whimsy and arty sentimentality - is a matter of taste.

If there's a gay cliche who doesn't flounce through this feel-good German comedy, he must have been out of town when the casting call went out, but its fundamental good nature is tough to resist.

It's hard to tell whether Hyams' subjects are exceptionally nice guys or whether there's an excess of decency on the PBR circuit, but if even one were more conspicuously flawed, the film might be more compelling.

Sweet, goofy story.

Serrau effortlessly navigates the tricky transition from ruefully comic chick flick to gritty crime picture.

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

Ironically, Faris' Samantha is the most convincing personality in the mix: She's a grotesque caricature of Courtney Love by way of Nancy Spungen, a vulgar, selfish monster of unbridled id, but you always know where she's coming from.

Like "Secret Things," the film is ultimately infuriating, subtle, self-indulgent, astute and disingenuous, which makes for great -- if divisive -- conversation.

Though glossy and smoothly directed, this limp concoction has all the sparkle of flat champagne.

Puerile, gross and pandering to the lowest impulses of teenage boys.

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.

This is pure big-budget formula filmmaking.

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.

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.

It's familiar, undemanding and not as bad as it could have been, but you can't help thinking that somewhere else, there's a real party going on.

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

Anderson strikes a near flawless balance between looseness and structure, and indulges the occasional flight of cinematic fancy without undermining the movie's emotional integrity.

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

The movie's gossamer-thin plot, padded with dream sequences and flashbacks to scenes you saw less than an hour earlier, exists only as an excuse for obvious homages to better films, stunt casting...and what pass for clever remarks in circles unfamiliar with real wit.

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

Though once capable of writing distinct characters, Toback now populates his pictures with one-dimensional conceits who all talk like undereducated hustlers, from college professors to bottom feeders and international lions of business.

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

The story itself is uninteresting, and the songs are painfully undistinguished.

While handsomely mounted and generally well acted, the film is undermined by long stretches of awkward, obvious dialogue and by the vagueness of Lisa's revolt against the status quo.

Done in by its tone.

This bizarre hybrid of romantic comedy cliches and less-than-subtle social commentary defeats their best efforts to make it sparkle.

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

What it lacks in objectivity, it makes up for in vivid intimacy.

"Saturday Night Fever" with designer drugs and duds.

Piercing, sweetly melancholy and acted with a breathtaking eye for nuance.

The younger actors bring varying degrees of experience to bear on their roles, but all capture the desperation beneath their characters' tough fronts, while the NYC locations are suitably depressing.

The filmmakers know the tropes of spooky movies: Glowering shadows, squeaking playground equipment, eerie storms and half-glimpsed forms, but the film rests on Rueda's subtle, intense performance, rooted in every half-articulated anxiety that ever gnawed at a parent's brain.

Gallo's poor, poor pitiful me routine wears very thin, very fast, but Ricci is incandescent, a softly-glowing dumpling of a dream-girl in powder-blue fishnet tights and sparkly tap shoes: She's the diamond in the dirt.

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.

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

Is there anything so painful as a comedy whose every gag falls flat and then lies there, flopping like a dying flounder?

Fiore captures various artists horsing around with groupies, smoking dope and hanging out backstage, and cuts the material together in the kinetic but meaningless manner of MTV promos.

Penn, in particular, is so subdued he's hardly there, while Hurley's seductive, hyper-articulate Adaline is actually ludicrous, sucking suggestively on ice cubes and reciting poetry like a phone-sex operator pretending to be a book-reading babe.

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