Maitland McDonagh

Thoroughly heartfelt. But though Trachtman alludes to the impact that Lior's special needs and local fame has had on his family, she seems uninterested in exploring the larger history of beliefs and traditions concerning mentally challenged people and their closeness to God.

The Carter and Spotnitz's credit, such weighty concerns aren't the stuff of most mainstream genre movies. But they're also not sufficiently gripping to transform a middling thriller into something truly provocative or haunting.

Homey but not especially interesting trips down the Ellis and Cheney family lanes.

Owen Wilson single-handedly hauls this amiable, middle-of-the-road comedy out of sheer mediocrity.

Scruffy, loosely structured and piercingly perceptive about the ways in which technology that supposedly brings people together actually keeps them apart.

The "cute" kids are insufferable, but leads Ali Khan and Mukerji radiate the unabashed star quality that's all but gone from American movies -- poverty and desperation haven't looked so glamorous since the glory days of Joan Crawford.

Based on the story of Milarepa (1043 - 1123), who renounced the violence and vengeance of his early life to become a revered Tibetan Buddhist saint, lama Neten Chokling's directing debut ends on a frustrating spiritual cliffhanger.

But for all the profane language and sexual frankness, Soderbergh's film is no more cynical or world-weary than its inspirations, and in the end, it feels like a clever trick wrapped around a hollow center.

Does so many things right that it's a shame to see it sink into horror-movie cliches.

Impassioned, unwieldy and padded with celebrity interviews.

Cynical, misanthropic and embittered.

Surprisingly enough, puberty-stricken J.D. and Chowder actually sound like real teenagers, but the cartoony look will probably alienate real-life kids that age, and the man-eating house might be downright terrifying to younger kids.

An oddly lifeless affair, though Gretchen Mol's sunny performance almost hauls it out of its doldrums.

Just when the film seems to be getting bogged down in "before I made it big" anecdotes -- around the time she and Andy Dick, who was once dismissed from a food-service gig, spend a day operating a mobile lunch stand -- Gurwitch wisely broadens her focus, interviewing ordinary victims of corporate "right-sizing," plant closings.

The result is a little bit nutty and pretty entertaining in a thoroughly unconvincing way. And watch out for that 11th-hour twist -- it's a head snapper.

While Travolta and Gandolfini have the beefy, closed-off look of post-WWII era cops, they never FEEL: They look like actors playing dress up. Leto overcomes his delicate good looks to embody Fernandez's feral, faintly exotic charm, but Hayek is a standard-issue femme fatale, damaged on the inside but flawless on the surface.

On its own low-bar terms, it delivers the goods: pole-dancing, gut-chomping and Jenna J.

Restrained and decorous to a fault.

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

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.

Screenwriter David Auburn's awkward dialogue spells out the film's themes with painful literal-mindedness.

The result is the farthest thing from a bland, spineless sequel: It's a brutal, insanely excessive successor to grindhouse pictures of yore.

The film's strident tone also serves to undermine its generally above-average performances.

Stanford's script is painfully obvious, right down to the line of dialogue spelling out the title's significance.

The film, though admirably ambitious, is resolutely earthbound, mired in ick and slime and never more wooden than in the delirious climax.

The fewer movies like this you've already seen, the better this one will play.

Litvak's broad comedy has novelty on its side, and though the script never rises above sitcom-style one-liners and sight gags, strong performances invest both the jokes and the syrupy moments of forgiveness and reconciliation with no small measure of, yes, heart.

The result is something close to a textbook example of how NOT to visualize spiritual principles of the "be here now" variety.

The film's flippant style ultimately undermines its material - Rosen's decision not to immediately identify interviewees is especially irritating - and, ironically, makes the American art scene of the '60s appear as shallow and trendy as its detractors always claimed it was.

Leguizamo deserves real kudos for making what he does of T.C., who is the film's walking lesson in how to undermine elitist clichés about working-class Long Island.

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

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.

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.

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.

A cute, slight tale.

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

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

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.

This is pure big-budget formula filmmaking.

The film’s pleasures are small ones, but they’re perfectly pitched and anyone who’s ever collected anything will empathize with the depth of Alan and Paul’s passion, if not their actions.

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

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.

Zahedi has been compared to Woody Allen, and he shares Allen's neurotic sense of entitlement and navel-gazing fascination with his own sexual peccadilloes. Whether you find either man funny or infuriating depends in large part on whether you identify more with their narcissistic quests for self-knowledge or the collateral damage left in their wakes.

An improvement over the tedious "Saw II" (2005), this second sequel to the surprise 2004 hit still features the series' trademark gruesome "games" but shifts the focus to the relationships among the characters.

Though the story is formulaic, the bleakly naturalistic performances give it an uncomfortable sting.

A predictable moral tale enacted by blandly pretty young things who bear little resemblance to the average brainiac.

Though neither subtle nor particularly original, Gens' spin on the meat-movie classic has both nightmarish energy to spare.

The film's depiction of life among the salt of the earth is blandly cartoonish; and the "Super Sounds of the '70s" soundtrack meticulously matches songs to action, as though the filmmakers didn't trust viewers to figure out what these one-note characters were feeling.

It feels as though everyone involved was having a rollicking good time, and while the film itself is wildly uneven, Lin and company get in a few pointed jabs at Hollywood fatuousness and self-delusion, cultural stereotypes and '70s fashions.

While rich in ethnographic detail, the film ultimately recalls nothing more than pulp fictions like Robert E. Howard’s "Conan the Barbarian," which validate their worship of ubermensch-ian brawn by way of sad tales of childhood victimization.

The film's underlying notion, that imperfection is the essence of humanity and the pursuit of bland flawlessness a kind of soul-killing drug, is far more compelling than its story of clichéd teen angst.

Falls disappointing short of its ambition to be both sympathetically straightforward and funny.

While far from the cream of the mockumentary crop, it's still a pleasant diversion.

A snapshot rather than a sustained look at Meat Loaf's tumultuous life and career, Klein's film is a revealing glimpse at the late career of a performer who looked a safe bet to die before he got old, then surprised everyone by hanging on long enough to find fans who weren't born when he started out.

It's a terrific showcase for battling Boleyn babes Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman.

Mark Boone Jr. makes a vivid impression as eccentric loner Beau Brower, and Danny Huston is mesmerizing as the leader of the shrieking, slashing, wallowing-in-gore bloodsuckers. They effortlessly eclipse the rest of the cast.

While Burnam and Garrison imbue their characters with authentic-feeling frustration and anger, they never succeed in making them especially interesting; it's hard to care in any serious way what becomes of either.

While the aerial dogfights are handsome and apparently historically accurate, right down to the tracer bullets that leave graceful, crisscrossing trails in the clouds, they have a video-game feel.

It's almost three hours long, and that's a lot of time to invest in what is, essentially, a theme-park attraction you can't ride.

For all its impeccable indie credibility, writer-director Zoe Cassavetes' bittersweet romance is little more than a hipster chick flick in which the same old smart women make the usual foolish choices.

Sweet-natured, formulaic and ripe for an American remake.

Formulaic but well-acted variation on the theme of pursuing your dreams through dance.

Kilmer and Dorff, who was also an executive producer, immerse themselves in difficult roles.

"Make a Wish" (2003) actually beat this film to the gay-themed slasher-picture punch with its story of lesbians on a camping trip being stalked by a killer, but writer-director Paul Etheredge-Ouzts' background in art direction serves him well — his movie wins hands-down for style and attitude.

Produced by the son of Trinity Broadcasting Network founder Paul Crouch, this historical epic offers a solid two hours of spectacle and intrigue drawn from The Book of Esther by way of Tommy Tenney and Mark Andrew Olsen's novel "Hadassah."

This ambitious independent feature eschews gore in favor of rubber-reality ambiguity.

Stone, the master of the epic conspiracy and the operatic spectacle of diametrically opposed forces at war for men's souls, is so entangled in the trees that he's lost sight of the forest -- who could have imagined?

First written in the early '80s, Terrence Malick's fourth film in three decades is a trancelike take on the relationship of Native American princess Matoaka - better known by the nickname Pocahontas and English adventurer John Smith.

Slick, stylish and super-violent, but also oddly dull.

Overall, the film falls into some comforting cocoon midway between affectionate spoof and adoring homage, much like Keillor's warmly nostalgic show.

You can't beat on Dead Man's on value-for-money terms, but it's like an all-you-can-eat buffet -- everything's tasty, the surfeit is sickening.

In the end, sharp writing and terrific performances can't compensate for the fact that the back-and-forth between a sour scribe and a manipulative celebrity doesn't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

The story's incredible coincidences, lazy cynicism and easy ironies recast a real-life horror story as easy-to-dismiss melodrama, complete with sequential "happy" endings.

Sweet-natured, episodic comedy-drama.

Uneven tragicomedy.

The New Jersey locations and soundtrack help ground the story in a particular time and place, and Schroeder delivers a terrific performance.

There isn't an original moment in the mix, but it's not as crass or vulgar as much of what passes for "family friendly" entertainment, and it keeps the precocious pop-culture references to a blessed minimum.

Ultimately, Tenacious D is a sight gag -- two unprepossessing, chunky dudes rocking out like wiry guitar gods -- supplemented by spot-on digs at the macho bombast and Dungeons & Dragons silliness that drives heavy-metal mania.

If only Reiser or director Raymond De Felitta had been able to resist the fart jokes and the sloppy male-bonding scenes, this could have been a terrific little movie. As it is, it's shamelessly manipulative shtick brightened by sharply drawn supporting performances.

It's a pleasure to see the articulate, disciplined Telfair succeed where so many other young men have failed, but ultimately his path to success is so smoothly upbeat that there isn't much urgency to it.

This didactic drama is set safely in the past and says nothing about the culture of conformity at all costs that hasn't been said before.

Written in the aftermath of a bitter divorce, Mamet's paranoid rant -- an explosion of middle-aged, white-collar, white-men's rage at losing ground to everyone, from women, hustlers, African Americans and homosexuals to the younger generation nipping at their heels -- is as bilious as ever, but time has overtaken and defanged it.

Compelling on a personal level.

Don't hate him because he's beautiful, decent, awesomely powerful, modest and just plain good. That's the big blue Boy Scout package - take it or leave it.

Jane Austen deserves better than to be subordinated to her own creation, the spirited Lizzy Bennet.

With its attractive cast, beguiling score and relatively straightforward narrative, this dark fable of letters and lust is one of Greenaway's most accessible works.

The unfortunate fact is that it's more than a little dull when it isn't preposterous.

Eminently worth seeing, even if it leaves you wishing it were as consistently inventive as Aardman's first feature, "Chicken Run" (2000).

There are no laughs to be had here, though, unless you count nervous titters and frat-boy sniggers at the very thought of, you know.

The minutiae of Carter's book tour isn't always enthralling, but his personality drives the film: pious, stubborn, devoted to his wife, curious, professional, warm and yet slightly removed from the fray, conciliatory, meticulous, self-effacing, funny, decent, intellectually rigorous and firmly committed to his positions.

There's always been a wide streak of the tediously naughty little boy in Besson, and all the seductively stylized images in the world can't hide it.

There are no surprises for anyone who's seen the earlier version, and younger horror fans may find the modest body count and restrained gore unsatisfying.

The story delivers enough twists and turns to be engaging without feeling like work, and the overall vibe is dangerous and flirty rather than brutal or excessively graphic.

Danish writer-director Ole Bornedal delivers up a stylish thriller whose murky, shot-through-pond-scum cinematography is its most distinctive feature.

While snowboarding enthusiasts will eat up every minute of its two-hour running time, it's thin stuff for the unconverted.

Though the raw material is juicy stuff, the details and the larger picture never come together and the cast is uneven.

Has a certain silly, kid-friendly charm.

Overall, it's like watching a home movie of a charming relative.

Television director David Von Ancken's metaphorical revenge Western wears its influences on its sleeve, but adds nothing to the genre that hasn't already been explored in the quietly demythologizing films of Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher, the baroque, operatic Italian Westerns of Sergio Leone and his less-familiar peers, and even in Sam Fuller's deranged, post-Civil War psychodrama "Run of the Arrow"(1956).

Rios is the glue that holds Johannesson's neither-fish-nor-fowl film together.

Ryan Schifrin's first film is a pleasant surprise, an old-fashioned monster movie that relies more on genuine suspense than bare breasts and blood.

The story is complex enough to be absorbing, but its pedantic quality makes it -- and its lessons -- all too easy to forget.

The cast is little more than the sum total of golden skin, firm flesh and blindingly white teeth, but in a film that demands them to be half-naked and soaking wet most of the time, looks trump technical acting skill every time.

A window into bygone morals and mores.

Director/cowriter Adrian Garcia Bogliano's self-conscious throwback to the kind of gritty black-and-white gore films that used to play drive-in theaters and urban grind houses is a short, sharp shocker that gets surprising mileage out of the oldest formula in the book of the dead.

A combination of muddy sound mix and players with heavy accents (particularly Chinese superstar Gong, who seems to have learned her lines phonetically) renders large swaths of dialogue incomprehensible, but the details of what's being said and done don't really matter.

Veterans Danner and Wilkinson effortlessly make Anna and Stephen more interesting than all the youngsters combined.

This is not a film for neophytes: It proceeds from the assumption that the viewer is familiar with the events and people of Jesus' life, and is probably right in doing so: Its intended audience is seriously Christian.

It's dramatically unsatisfying.

Efficient if uninspired documentary.

Jackman and McGregor are a delight to watch.

Nat comes off as flat-out crazy and more sad than amusing or heroic.

And yes, that is Salma Hayek in the chorus line of sexily sinister nurses, perhaps repaying Taymor for lending her dramatic credibility with "Frida."

This scrappy, ultra-low budget comedy, made in 19 days for $70,000 by North Carolina School of the Arts graduates Jody Hill, Danny McBride and Ben Best, comes with its own Cinderella tale: It debuted at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival but failed to find distribution until comedian Will Ferrell and his business partner, Adam McKay, championed it.

Philippe Diaz's controversial documentary about the legacy of the brutal 1991-2002 civil war in Sierra Leone -- widely considered the poorest country in the world, despite its rich mineral resources -- suggests that the rebel faction RUF (Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone) was not alone in terrorizing civilians and committing atrocities, most famously the amputation of limbs with machetes.

Seriously flawed and not for every taste, the film was shot quickly and on the cheap, and is driven by Argento's slurred, scratchy voice and Bette Davis eyes.

B-movie stalwart Michael Madsen turns in a no-holds-barred, road-wreck performance in this nihilistic crime thriller, which plays out a variation on the old maxim that there's no honor among thieves -- even if they're cops.

There's something disheartening about seeing real-life stories and their inevitable complexities put through the Hollywood sausage machine and transformed into bland parables about a privileged, wayward young bucks redeemed by wise, infinitely patient mentors and the self-abnegating spirit of team sports.

Her heavy-handed montage of war, civil rights demonstrations, revolutions and KKK gatherings, intercut with Shicoff's delivery of the opera's devastating fourth-act aria, is so amateurish it very nearly succeeds in trivializing the power of his performance.

Lepage maintains a leisurely pace and lets the narrative wander, but ultimately lands on the right side of the line between contemplative noodling and aimless navel-gazing, ending with an image that's simultaneously melancholy and playful.

Little Acuna -- who looks even younger than 11 -- gives a sweetly unaffected performance as the beleaguered child.

Egoyan drains the life right out of the material, and the result is a chilly, complicated thriller that's neither thrilling nor a "Through the Looking Glass" head spinner.

While it doesn't miss a cliche, it also invests every one with vigorous conviction.

Edward Zwick brings unimpeachable good intentions to his film about the bloody underbelly of the international diamond trade, but when social conscience jockeys for attention with movie-star glamour, glamour always wins. The result is a rip-snorting adventure set against the backdrop of African misery.

Malkovich pulls out all the gaudy stops.

A perverse mixed-martial arts film in which talk trumps action.

Johnny Depp's coruscating, rigorously uningratiating performance as debauched, self-destructive 17th-century aristocrat John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, is the glue that doesn't quite hold together first-time director Laurence Dunmore's adaptation of Stephen Jeffreys' 1994 play.

Polished but oddly lifeless heist thriller.

But the movie is long and didactic, undermined by the faintly pious air of an educational slide show.

Too long and its tone is disconcertingly uneven, but Perry never betrays or condescends to his characters.

While Kudlacek lets some of the elder statesmen ramble, their recollections are a vivid, firsthand window into a bygone era of American art.

The payoff fizzles, but the buildup is intriguing until it topples under its own weight.

If only the wit weren't overwhelmed by lame jokes about body parts, functions and fluids.

Affleck's gloomy, one-note performance exacerbates the problem, but the stellar supporting cast helps compensate.

But for all the sound, fury and spectacle, the film feels vaguely hollow and unsatisfying.

Who knew the rock 'n' roll life could be so mild?

Fergus' thriller benefits from Pearce's high-strung performance and the stark New Mexico landscapes, but the story is familiar and the pacing much too measured for a slight tale of ineluctable fate.

It's earnest, well-intentioned and scrupulously even-handed, in the style of made-for-TV problem movies.

Were there more meat on the bones of this fable about hypocrisy and spiritual hollowness, Marsh's pacing might seem deliberate rather then merely slow.

Matheson's bitterly ironic ending -- which pivots on the nature of Neville's legend -- is gutted and turned into formulaic pap.

Often rings painfully true, but would have benefited from judicious editing.

This candy-colored animated fable is an awkward mix of corny bee puns, clever sight gags, kid-friendly action, adult-centric workplace angst and Seinfeld's distinctive navel-gazing wit. And what's up with those four-legged bees?

Embry and first-time actress Sparks have charming chemistry, but Christopher's slight screenplay wears out its welcome long before the film - which runs a scant 80 minutes - is over.

Clearly a labor of love and a call to action, but it's undermined by the sheer volume of topics it tackles in addition to the main subject.

Cheerfully gross, deliberately retro horror picture pays tongue-in-cheek homage to the kind of genre movies Charles Band and Roger Corman's companies turned out in the 1980s.

The narrative is cluttered with backstory, and the endless digressions overwhelm the efforts of a generally strong cast.

Anime enthusiasts will want to take a look, but the film is too uneven to serve as a good introduction to the form.

Despite the edifying square-up -- moral lessons about family, the legacy of violence and the tenacious power of love -- the appeal is freak-show all the way.

Jodie Foster's fiercely intelligent performance drives this disappointing thriller, whose taut, carefully constructed first half is sadly negated by its implausible and -- worst of all -- unengaging conclusion.

Ti West's affectionate homage to no-frills fright flicks keeps it simple and succeeds on its own stripped-down terms.

Despite solid performances from the leads, it comes shrouded in a heavy cloud of ethics-class complications that makes it feel like a "dilemma of the week" TV movie.

Frankly, it's dumb, but no dumber than "Transformers."

Though the film verges on hagiography, Angio unearthed a treasure trove of fascinating clips, from the bored-looking writer-director leafing through his program at the 1971 Tony Awards.

Grabsky's meticulous and frequently monotonous documentary about the life and music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart comes to vivid life whenever one of the many world-class musicians who sat for interviews simultaneously describes and demonstrates exactly what's so special about particular compositions.

It's an entertaining diversion whose clever structure gives pulp-crime cliches a welcome twist.

Light and sweet, comfort food dressed up with a dash of exotic spice.

It's a light, silly instantly forgettable comedy peppered with action set-pieces and affectionate nods to its fondly remembered predecessor, including a gracious end-credits dedication to the late Don Adams and Edward Platt.

The goofy use of animated, Flubber-like blobs aping Robert Palmer's "Addicted to Love" video (by way of illustrating the irresistibility of desire itself) makes it hard to take the science seriously, which is the BLEEP problem in a nutshell.

This dumbed-down spin on Jules Verne's classic adventure tale was devised as a kid-friendly roller-coaster ride, and it delivers the goods. Whether anyone over the age of eight wants the goods is another matter altogether.

The bad news is that Seitz's protagonists are almost all insufferable: Smug, self-important, opinionated and relentlessly convinced that they're far more sensitive, intelligent and interesting than they are.

When Cox is performing, the movie is firing on all cylinders.

While Canadian writer-director Eric Nicholas has no fresh thoughts about the voyeuristic nature of movie going, he knows enough to make sure when high-tech peeper Doug (Colin Hanks, son of Tom) conceals his camera in a bag, its lens pokes out of the zipper like the big, fat metaphor it is.

It's hard to watch two fine actors working themselves into a lather for so little reward.

Hugely ambitious and driven by Julianne Moore, Samuel L. Jackson and Edie Falco's fine, intense performances, Richard Price's adaptation of his own sprawling novel about a racially charged kidnapping that turns a volatile New Jersey town into a powder keg tries to tell too many stories in too little time.

The film's main attractions are the Charlottes, but the price of watching their eerie psychological pas de deux is to endure muddled metaphors and goofy gadgetry.

The movie has a monster problem -- the more you see of them, the less scary they are -- most of the characters are standard-issue types, and Harden seriously overdoes the pious psycho bit.

Slow, solemn going, despite its best efforts at thundering soldiers and comic-relief kings.

Donnie Yen is famous for combining martial arts traditions into his own unique fighting style and Collin Chou, who studied with Sammo Hung, is up to the task of holding his own.

That there's precious little chemistry between buffed-and-tanned stars Parker and McConaughey is only the first of this slight, overly busy film's problems.

If not precisely poetic in its elaborate offensiveness, it's certainly imaginative. Unfortunately, that's not the same as interesting or engaging, unless you're a dyed-in-the-wool fan.

The key to enjoying the fourth installment in this testosterone-fueled franchise is accepting that it's a live-action cartoon that makes no effort to conform to the laws of gravity, plausibility or common sense.

The product of this ingenuity is a slight spin on an obscure motion-picture artifact, but it's surprisingly artfully done.

Endearing without being especially engaging.

Baldwin dominates the screen with his slick, beefy swagger, and if Prinze is less than convincing as a kid from Brooklyn, Caan and Ferrara nail Carmine and Bobby with such assured economy that it hardly matters they're one-note roles.

The film's pared-down narrative is anything but aimless, and it pays off in a haunting final last scene scored with Gang of Four's "Damaged Goods."

Beautifully encapsulates the film's sensibility, a bizarre mix of reverse cool and childishness.

However fact-based the material may be, Jordan's salt-of-the-earth characters, with their bluster and pride and rough-edged loyalty, are all too familiar, and their travails feel formulaic, right down to the life-affirming climax.

Sivan's film is well acted, beautifully photographed and oddly reassuring. It comes perilously close to suggesting that the injustices of colonial rule were the product of morally weak and misguided individuals rather than a system that empowered and enriched foreign interests at the expense of locals.

If you don't care about the characters, then everything's just a big, dumb joke.

Ultimately, Bubble is less important as a film than as an experiment in simultaneous cross-platform film distribution.

Barnes, now in his seventies and relocated by the Witness Protection Program, is shot only in silhouette, but there's plenty of footage of him in his heyday, dressed to the pimpalicious nines and playing to the cameras like a movie star.

The fact that it was shot at the picturesque Utah resort is a huge plus and the film is so unabashedly eager to please.

Bello is phenomenally good as the embittered Marcia, while Stuart and Christensen do their best with their less complex roles, but they're all undermined by Alfieri's shrill, mannered dialogue and cliched backstories that wouldn't be out of place in a dysfunction-family-of-the-week movie.

Simultaneously gorgeous and forgettable, sentimental and prurient.

Canadian-born choreographer Alison Murray draws on her own experiences as a 15-year-old runaway living in squats and on the streets, in her feature-filmmaking debut, which is a clear-eyed look at the pleasures and price of abandoning conventional mores for experimental lifestyles.

It's a show we don't see, presumably because of issues with music rights, and while "much ado about nothing" might be overstating things, after more than an hour and a half of buildup, it would have been nice to see Wu-Tang perform.

Director Stephen Purvis and writer Chris Haddock never rise above the material's inherent pulpiness, but they keep the twists coming until the very end.

Shelly was murdered before she could continue developing as a writer and director, and while this, her last film, is extremely uneven and undermined by an excess of quirk, Keri Russell's performance as a pregnant pie-guru is a charmer with a bracing streak convincingly desperate determination.

Formulaic though it is, the story hits the right emotional buttons and promises that hope and dogged work trump despair.

For parents who were unable to secure tickets for the young fans in their households, it's nothing short of a godsend.

Katzir's documentary is as much a labor of love as Spaisman's theater, and it's often rough around the edges.

Mukherjee's charm keeps the child-like Geeta from being thoroughly annoying, and the musical numbers are pleasant, if not particularly memorable.

Lurie's film never fully reconciles the story about newsroom ethics with the sentimental drama about bad dads and bereft sons.

The screenplay is blessedly free of mediocre songs and light on flashy pop-culture in-jokes.

There's a terrific movie buried in Woody Allen's tale of two American girls broadening their horizons in Barcelona, and every once in a while tantalizing glimpses penetrate the twee narration and mannered performances.

The acting is flat, and the scientist's ideological speeches too bluntly designed to mirror post-9/11 rhetoric. But there's a dreamy fascination to the iconic images of machines fighting a perpetual war for the human creators they'll inevitably outlast.

Surprisingly compelling, if not up to dealing with the larger political issues it raises.

Wongpim pays tribute to classic Italian Westerns in his face-hugging close-ups, but his film is more silly than existentially anarchic, and its exotic quirkiness wears thin quickly.

A risky, not entirely successful comedy about mental disability, based on the novel by Sherwood Kiraly.

Could as easily be called "Spurlock: Cultural Learnings Of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of America."

Barber's screenplay is mired in cliches that got old in 1935.

Packs five films' worth of drama, crises and revelations into one, and often lapses into sitcom triteness.

The film gets off to a slow start and runs long, but Gold and Helfand effectively stake out their own piece of a large and complicated issue.

Though rooted in broad stereotypes and sassy platitudes, the film's feisty cast and generally sunny outlook make for warm and reassuring comfort viewing, the equivalent of a straight-from-the-box dish of mac and cheese.

Biopic cliches hamstring producer-star Jennifer Lopez's pet project.

Equal parts "Mad Max" and "Day of the Dead," this third and supposedly final entry in the Resident Evil franchise is no less derivative than its predecessors but moves along at a brisk clip.

A painfully slow psychological thriller.

McCormack and Cochrane can't transcend the clichéd, meandering dialogue, so Brad and Lexi's dilemma never feels like anything but a didactic contrivance.

Newcomer Gregory never captures the mercurial charisma for which Jones was famous (and which Jagger notoriously channeled in his movie debut, "Performance"), without which his story is just another cautionary tale about fast times, intemperate passions and bad dope.

Thank goodness for Pfeiffer's Lamia, a harridan who's lived long enough to get the face she deserves and will do anything to hide it. She's a wicked delight.

LaPaglia and Davis deliver top-notch performances that go a long way toward offsetting the material's didacticism.

This DIY oddity is both quirkily funny and strangely poignant, and does justice to the same themes that underlie the far more lavishly produced "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence."

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.