Maitland McDonagh

To make the package look fresh, there's a pile of complications.

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

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

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.

Unlike most mainstream filmmakers, Ratnam doesn't try to include something for everyone, but he does deliver several handsome production numbers.

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

Ironically, it's most engaging when the focus shifts to Hurt's matter-of-factly amoral enabler, whose glistening suits and jewel-colored shirt-and-tie combinations suggest a particularly poisonous tropical reptile.

Kusama's impressive feature debut is an affecting coming-of-age drama whose story is familiar without being hackneyed.

De Mello's dedication is inspiring enough to speak for itself.

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.

Xiao's bittersweet film is superficially a swoony love letter to the cinema. But her valentine has a hidden sting, rooted in some hard truths about movie mania.

Intelligent and engaging, this documentary about rave culture overcomes the challenge inherent in its subject; rave's appeal is by nature nonanalytical and experiential, while documentary films play to the intellectual observer.

Past and present, reality and fiction blend seamlessly into each other in Satoshi Kon's dream-like animated drama.

This teen-oriented gloss on Shakespeare's tale is cute and occasionally quite funny, but it's undermined by slack direction.

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.

Portabella has no interest in conventional biography -- it's hard not to suspect that he included the tale of Felix Mendelsson (Daniel Ligorio) discovering the score for the "St. Matthew Passion" wrapping a meat delivery precisely BECAUSE it's probably apocryphal.

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

It's a lavish entertainment that revels in lurid colors and yet more lurid emotions.

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.

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.

A sickly soft-swirl confection of low laughs and smarmy sentiment.

But it's also old-fashioned family drama that invites audience participation ("Don't you go making eyes at your cousin's husband, you little slut!"), and is surprisingly satisfying, in a gooey kind of way -- like macaroni and cheese or peach cobbler, perhaps.

Seeks to set the record straight. But Gere's sneaky, ingratiating presence keeps it dishonest to the last frame.

Impassioned, unwieldy and padded with celebrity interviews.

Outsourced is a sweet, good-natured surprise that takes the cliches out of an overworked genre and makes them seem almost fresh and entirely charming.

The performance sequences are in color, while the recording sequences are in B&W. Jacquot's strategy allows his cast the benefit of being able to give full performances (Raimondi is a particularly good film actor) while demonstrating vividly that the beauty and power of the opera reside primarily in the music itself.

This lushly produced, lightweight romance embraces every cliche of the genre without so much as an ironic shrug.

A sober, earnest drama about child abuse.