Maitland McDonagh

So awash in tired ethnic clichés that the story drowns.

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

The material is inherently compelling and anchored by Washington's performance.

An exhilarating, funny and deeply sad story of growing pains that works on two levels; it's a feel-good story that quietly undermines the notion of gain without loss.

Bielinsky's feature debut is a smart, enormously entertaining thriller whose preposterous conclusion in no way diminishes the fun of getting there.

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.

Fun for the kids, but no Beauty and the Beast or Lion King. This child-friendly retelling of Hercules' story takes the predictable liberties with a story originally chockablock with sex, violence and generally sordid behavior. After several passes through the Disney wringer, a sanitized, blandly blond Hercules (voice of Tate Donovan) emerges, ready to enter no pantheon other than that of muscle-beach pinup boys.

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.

Despite the handsome production values and best efforts of the attractive young cast, it's hard to get deeply involved with the frantic "what's going on?" sturm und drang.

Bar-Lev also explores the freakish popular appeal of child prodigies, the family dynamics that come into play when a child's celebrity and earning capacity overshadows the adults', and the remarkably conflicted and contradictory admissions drawn from Brunelli about Marla's work.

But once you're good and drunk on the look, details like the tin-eared tough-guy dialogue (which sounds especially stilted issuing from flesh-and-blood mouths) don't seem so important.

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

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

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.

This gentle, slow-moving film contains some charming sequences but no new insights into the pleasures and burdens of family.

Older Than Ireland isn't relentlessly upbeat. It's filled with stories of loss, disappointment, tough lessons learned and compromises made, and it's hard not to suspect that the genetic hand you're dealt counts for a lot.

Firm dates and more detailed historical background would have better served the filmmakers' purpose than their "chronological narrative relay race," which muddles an already complex situation.

It's vivid evidence that great music and stories transcend time and place.

Phillippe has the unenviable task of trying to make O'Neill equally interesting, but an eager beaver with some unresolved family issues is no match for a poisoned soul methodically laying the groundwork for his own inevitable fall. The unfortunate imbalance makes long stretches of the film feel dull, but when Cooper is on screen it's mesmerizing.

Heir to a long tradition of apocalyptic scare stories, the film wears its influences proudly.

Eerie, surreal and a welcome respite from Disney-style animation, this French sci-fi allegory may not offer any mind-blowing insights (genocide is bad isn't exactly a new thought), but it's a trip.

But transforming full, live-action performances into quavering cartoons isn't inherently lyrical, and here it produces the jittery sense of a world dissolving into flat forms and buzzing prattle.

This stage-bound farce could easily be an American sitcom: It's all slamming doors, eavesdropping and stupid miscommunications, garnished with a heavy-handed helping of comedy of humiliation.

Berlevag's 1300 inhabitants are by nature hardy and uncomplaining, but Knut Erik Jensen's unhurried documentary reveals that there's more to them than mere stoicism.

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

Shunji Iwae's film began life as an interactive online "novel" and unfolds in a series of achronological vignettes whose cumulative effect is chilling.

Polished but oddly lifeless heist thriller.

A sweat-slicked, near-abstract ballet of blood and sand.