Maitland McDonagh

Brawny, he-man spectacle combined with a surprisingly solid story and buttressed by excellent performances.

The end is hardly in doubt, since this sweet-natured film treads a path worn smooth and hard by countless other tiny feet. Its message is as unimpeachable as it is familiar, differentiated from countless similar tales only by the Filipino setting.

The final irony is that it's tailored for a PG-13 audience: The violence is bloodless, the sex is all come-on and the surreally reckless stunts cater to viewers too young to drive.

A must-see for martial arts enthusiasts.

Only McKellan seems to understand the profound silliness of the film in which he finds himself, and he camps it up accordingly.

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

To an outsider, it's pretty thin stuff.

Neither Ketchum nor the filmmakers take an exploitative approach to the material; their focus is the way the youngsters' petty cruelty erupts into murderous sadism.

First and foremost a showcase for the latest developments in motion-capture and 3-D technology.

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

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

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.

Feels soft without being especially affectionate, and only sporadically funny.

Often technically rough, but it's painfully compelling.

This live-action cartoon tries to walk the line between pleasing the faithful and appealing to a broad-based action audience. It fails on both fronts: It's too lifeless and watered-down to stand on its own high heels, but commits the cardinal sin of messing with the original.

Werner Herzog's self-proclaimed "science-fiction fantasy" is a meticulously constructed fiction made from a combination of real-life footage repurposed in ways a conventional documentarian couldn't imagine.

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.

28 Weeks Later is flawed -- the constant reappearance of one key character verges on the absurd -- but it knows where it's going, and it gets there in a chilling blaze of fire, blood and poisonous fog.

Gypsy music is the music of pain, poverty and oppression, all of which she's experienced; it's their blues.

So low-key that it verges on unconsciousness.

Steeped in what may be the ultimate postmodern irony: Talen's impromptu, defiant piece of performance art with political undertones has actually taken on a spiritual dimension.

The impulses that produced this project, which brings together three short, English-language films by African female filmmakers into a feature-film package introduced by rap icon Queen Latifah, are commendable, but the results are uneven.

Has a certain weird charm, but it's too seamy for children and too simplistic played for adults.

Do director Bryan Singer and screenwriter Brandon Boyce really mean to suggest that the roots of genocide lie in homosexual desire?

The politics get pretty short shrift, but cigarettes and liquor are everywhere.

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.

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

Melodramatic look at alienated California high school students.

Alternately sweet and raucous comedy.

Delivers equal parts overwrought tedium and mind-bending beauty, spiked with brilliant throwaway images that more than make up for Kelly's heavy-handed hot-button pretensions.

Frankenheimer pretty much ignores everything that's happened in the action and thriller genres since 1975, and mostly that's a good thing.

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

There are two kinds of police officers in David Ayers and James Ellroy's convoluted, ultraviolent tale of corruption within the LAPD: dirty cops and dirtier ones.

The overall effect is either exhilarating or exhausting, depending on your emotional investment in the franchise, but credit where credit is due: Steven Spielberg and George Lucas set out to make one for the fans and delivered.

For all her own frustrations, Davenport is honest enough not to gloss over the fact that what Muthana's adventures in the screen trade taught him was to hustle, toady and ingratiate himself to useful people. And she helped.

Though inspired by Weiland's own childhood, the film's plot sticks close to the underdog's coming-of-age formula and is marred by young Bernie's gratingly self-pitying voice-over.

Is it funny? Sporadically.

The resulting awkward, earthbound mishmash thoroughly overshadows Judd and Kline's authentically moving performances.

It's ultimately hard to care deeply about a silly, sheltered girl-woman who's taking an inordinately long time to learn that money can't buy happiness.

A tour de force and an utter delight, studded with priceless supporting bits by Miriam Margolyes, Maury Chaykin, Rosemary Harris and Rita Tushingham, each of whom steals at least one richly deserved moment in the spotlight.

Roos' sly, throwaway insights into the ways people deceive and undermine themselves are both ruefully funny and painfully on the mark.

This Australian tear-jerker finds more humor than you'd imagine possible in the story of a dying woman getting to know her adult children.

A sober, earnest drama about child abuse.

Vonnegut's brand of juvenile surrealism...doesn't age especially well...but it could hardly be worse served than to be brought to the screen with such ham-fisted literal-mindedness.

Adds little to the annals of werewolf lore. But it's briskly paced and features a couple of clever twists on genre conventions.

Maybe the life was edited out of it in the two years between shooting and release, or maybe Dominik was simply overwhelmed by the outsized myths of the West, but the film only comes to life after James' death, when Ford quite literally takes center stage.

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.

The film rests on Depp's evocation of Barrie's gentle, playfulness and deeply buried sorrows; it's difficult to imagine another actor so gracefully evoking Barrie's childlike qualities without seeming creepy or emotionally malformed, and only the hard of heart will come away dry-eyed.

Overall it's a colorful, diverting cautionary tale.

Yet another variation on the theme of Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." If you've read the short story, you'll see where things are going in no time flat; if you haven't and want to be surprised, don't look it up.

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

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

This picture's b-movie values probably play better on video than in theaters.

The movie opens with the dismal statistic that most teachers quit after three years. Akel and Mass see the humor in the situation, but the laughs are small and sad.

Weepy, overwrought love story.

Though too long by a good half hour, Lee's latest film packs a genuine emotional punch, largely because its polemical agenda doesn't entirely eclipse the drama.

Equal parts soap drama and ham-fisted morality tale.

Say what you will about feel-good films anchored by feisty old broads, the English have a knack with them and Stephen Frears' fact-based tale of a formidable, aristocratic widow who makes it her mission to put naked girls on the London stage is delightful.

Spare, sleek and coolly entertaining, even if there's less to this game of true lies than meets the eye.

It's a high-energy blast.

The cast deliver consistently fine, subtle performances, underscored by Ben Nichols' mournfully melodic guitar score.

Less a sequel than a variation on a haunting theme -- the nature and origins of humanity.

The film's bizarreness pales next to that of little-known exploitation film "Sonny Boy" (1990), which weaves similar material into something authentically nightmarish.

Though the film ends on a surprising and genuinely magical note, it takes its own sweet time getting there; some viewers will have lost patience before the denouement arrives.

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

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

It's a mixed blessing, in some ways even richer and more atmospheric than the original version, in others attenuated and logy.

Foster finds the common ground on which his eclectic cast can meet (no small feat when they range from brassy Queen Latifah to "Arrested Development"'s deadpan Tony Hale) and keeps the story's sweetness from devolving into saccharine kitsch.

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.

This melodramatic action opera is a lurid love letter to the guns and poses aesthetic of Hong Kong action cinema.

The script is heavy on platitudes about friendship, but since there isn't a single fully fleshed character in sight, who cares?

Would be funny if it weren't so horrifying.

A welcome alternative to such hyperkinetic drivel as Pokémon.

The film's major draws are R-rated gore and some nice physical effects, proof that a man in a top-of-the-line monster suit can still be more effective than CGI.

Allows the supporting cast to steal the movie.

Antal's debut is a sharp, blackly comic hugely entertaining thriller.

Until the disappointingly conventional ending, in which dad and the head baddie go it mano a mano on the streets, this dark drama -- based on a 1956 Glenn Ford picture of the same name -- negotiates its narrative twists and turns with professional aplomb, even daring to make the hero an arrogant schmuck.

Gray doesn't condescend to his outer-borough characters and elicits pitch-perfect performances from his ensemble cast.

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.

An unabashed call to action that shines a spotlight on a problem whose intimate medical nature relegated it to the shadows.

So consistently, outrageously wrongheaded in every way it's hard to know where to start.

Despite its provocative premise, this throwback to deliberately paced, low-tech chillers of the pre-CGI era is a dreary slog through haunted-child movie cliches -- portentous dreams, glassy-eyed stares, cryptic pronouncements.

Ford is the problem: He looks great for his age (56, to Heche's 29), but oozes a stolid gloom that snuffs out those sparks long before they can set the lush scenery on fire. In a classic screwball comedy, he'd be Ralph Bellamy.

It's an amiable, middle-class coming of age story, soft and sweet and ultimately a bit inconsequential.

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.

Ultimately aimed at a Christian audience looking for genre entertainment with a certain sense of propriety (which partly translates into there being no murders), the film tries to serve two masters and doesn't quite deliver for either.

Resnais cuts constantly between the various narrative threads, signaling each change of scene with a superimposed shower of snowflakes; it's a highly artificial device, and a deceptively lovely one that reinforces the sense that all Ayckbourn's characters are slowly succumbing to an emotional chill.

The car stunts are ridiculous, all lightning-fast editing and computer enhancement -- by the time action is this far removed from reality, who cares?

Above all, Jackson evokes an almost palpable sense of the will to power trapped within the ring. Without this evocation of the ring's insidious ability to sniff out the potential for corruption and capitalize on it, the entire enterprise would be precious drivel.

Although the film revolves around a child, it's not a children's movie: A cruel and bitter undertone runs through the fanciful adventures, and Walker's depression is no mere plot contrivance to be cured by Alexandria's childish enthusiasm.

Moreno's subtly calibrated mix of intelligence, naivete, rebelliousness, charisma and practicality produces an unforgettable protagonist; even Maria's recklessness seems reasonable because it's so clearly rooted in desperation.

If it weren't all so cluelessly sleazy it might be funny.

Censorship, madness, social rebellion and the power of art.

Bresson's vision of the miseries of 15th century life -- which was undeniably nasty, brutish and short -- comes dangerously close to the comic squalor of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

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.

Most of the gags recycle the same tired old romantic comedy schtick, with special effects.

Has a terminal case of the cutes.

Everything has a fusty, embalmed quality: Whatever gave the novel its vitality has been smothered.

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.

Professionally produced and surprisingly tame.

All of which would be fine if Figgis managed to work up any real suspense, but the film slogs towards its inevitable mano-a-mano showdown like something up to its knees in mud.

A sleazy, seamy, flashy, steamy, vulgar exploitation thriller that revels in every minute of its own trashiness and delivers some pretty solid -- if prurient -- entertainment before strangling in a one-twist-too-many ending.

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

The movie's low budget shows, but the competent (many of them also sitcom veterans) cast keeps things moving smoothly.

Though Bittner's slacker charm may not be to all tastes, the parrots are natural-born scene-stealers with more than enough charm to seduce the most dubious viewer.

Miike's goofy, gallant, action-packed fantasy deserves to become a classic family film.

The bad news is that, though professionally produced on a micro-budget, Azita Zendel's ambitious writing-directing debut is undermined by an awkward script and some very amateurish acting.

It's a shame to see such dedicated performers flay their psyches in the service of such fundamentally shallow material.

Rob Reiner's feel-good tear-jerker, in which dying well is the best revenge, wants to be heartwarming. But first-timer Justin Zackham's screenplay is so stridently formulaic and disingenuous that the film falls flat at every inspirational turn.

Still odder is the movie's sexual worldview, which is simultaneously infantile and fetishistic. Boys wear rubber, lipstick, and spandex, but don't seem to have a sexual bone in their unmuscled bodies.

There's very little plot, and director Mangold's attempts to make a connection between the social confusion of the '60s and Susanna's inner turmoil don't really work.

The big trouble here is that there seem to be pieces of three different films rubbing up against each other without ever fitting together.

Their subtle, complex performances could put far more experienced and better-known actors to shame.

The film delivers lots of high-pitched hysteria but never manages to make its spoiled protagonists interesting.

A throwback to an age when action movies had room between shoot-outs and car chases for dialogue - real dialogue, not rim-shot-ready one-liners - and character development.

A gloomy, preposterous psychological thriller.

The results are a bit amateurish, but wholesome and achingly sweet.

Negret brings personal experience to the material; his own family endured two ordeals by kidnapping, and he works up a painfull convincing sense of sweaty desperation.

An honorable film, beautifully acted, refreshingly un-camp in its take on wide lapels and progressive rock and occasionally coolly moving. It's just that ultimately, there's less here than meets the eye.

This coarse, nearly incoherent action picture apparently aspires to a 'Pulp Fiction"-like mixture of brutality and self-referential insouciance.

The jabs at the expense of self-centered New Yorkers with more money than sense are so mild they're pointless -- if satire doesn't hurt, what's the point?

Simultaneously nakedly formulaic and oddly clumsy, particularly in terms of character introduction.

A small slice of a suspended life, intimate and filled with the mundane details most people forget when the waiting is over and their real lives begin.

It's funny without being toothless, adrenaline turbocharged without being mean and utterly deranged in the best sense of the word.

William Klein's film documents a turbulent time and an outsized personality, but the film's glories are in the details and its intimacy would be unimaginable in the rigidly spin-controlled atmosphere of 21st-century sports.

McCarthy's flawless casting may be the film's greatest strength: Veteran character actor Jenkins and his costars vanish into their characters -- their performances are so subtle and unforced that they don't feel like performances at all.

By turns profane, vulgar, unpredictable, scabrous and perpetually somewhere between buzzed and three sheets to the wind, Bukowski opened a window onto a fringe world of blue-collar drudgery and alcoholic self-obliteration with his blistering, bleakly comic dispatches from the gutter.

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

A blockbuster hit in Korea, Park's feature debut is a beguiling mix of the generic and the unfamiliar, and it ends on a shot that's nothing short of heartbreaking.

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

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.

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

The loose, rambling conversations that substitute for action might be more interesting if any of the characters were capable of real introspection. But they're so shallow and distracted they can't even manage sustained navel-gazing, which makes their so-called relationships profoundly uninteresting.

Mark Moormann's documentary tends to the worshipful, but Dowd, a charmer onscreen, was by all accounts just as appealing in real life.

This dopey swashbuckler offers little action but lashings of DiCaprio's soft, hairless flesh.

Beneath the plot's romantic turns lies a surprisingly complex examination of the personal and professional price of honesty; falsehoods, half-truths, little white lies and self-delusion spur most of the key plot developments, and Roos never resorts to platitudes to account for their effects.

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

Though the film contains many haunting images, the absence of a solid emotional foundation makes its increasingly preposterous story developments feel arbitrary and ultimately pointless.

The result is hypnotic.

The film should be required viewing for all aspiring filmmakers, but the story's road-accident appeal is universal.

The giddy, "anything could happen" sense that made "Pulp Fiction" and "Reservoir Dogs" so viscerally exciting is missing here. But Tarantino's first picture in nearly three years is a faithful adaptation of Elmore Leonard's "Rum Punch," and its melancholy edge is a wistful delight.

Solomonoff cuts back and forth between 1984 and 1976, gradually revealing the truth of what happened, but the mystery is less important than the complex relationship between Natalia and Elena, which was sorely tested by events beyond their control.

Overall, Grindhouse may well be the Beatlemania of sleaze-movie viewing, but since the real thing is gone it's the best that many fans will ever have.

Horror buffs in search of a fresh take on the usual grue should embrace it wholeheartedly.

Piper Perabo is a revelation -- and Barton is maturing into a sensitive, subtle performer with a marvelously expressive face.

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

It's really all about the cars, kandy-kolored nitro-injected streamline babies with sweeter curves than a Playboy photo spread, more personality than Rome, Brian and Monica combined and enough juice to send a fleet of rockets to the farthest reaches of the known universe.

Features some strikingly intimate footage of Noonan's extended family, but lets Noonan himself drives the show and his colorful tales of villainy that cry out for more context than MacIntyre provides.

Curl your cynical lip if you want, but there's a place for heartwarming, life-affirming, even weepy dramas, and Robert Redford brings the best-selling novel about a traumatized teen and her wounded horse to the screen with dignity and restraint.

The framing story is pointless and almost insulting, even though it's part of former New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen's novel.

In the end, the film feels a little futile; its relentless, one-miserable-note tone is numbing.

Bill Murray plays the secondary role of a nameless American gag writer brimming with one-liners about the absurdity of Cuban life, Dustin Hoffman has a cameo as kvetching gangster Meyer Lansky.

Marvel-man Mark Steven Johnson, who wrote and directed "Daredevil" (2003) and scripted "Elektra" (2005), continues to demonstrate the wrong way to make comic book movies: Make sure special effects overwhelm the characters, let campy mannerisms go unchecked and be sure dialogue is declaimed rather than spoken.

Overall, the performances are surprisingly convincing, but the mockumentary elements – feel out of place and the intrusive.

Ironically, the filmmakers seem to think the audience for this movie about super-smart people is super-dumb.