Maitland McDonagh

The movie's film-studentish navel-gazing wears thin long before its over.

Bojanov's sad subjects could as easily be in Detroit or Glasgow or Marseilles. What keeps his film from being a relentless wallow in wasted lives is its surprising conclusion.

The film is relentlessly peppy, often quite funny, sometimes a bit too convinced of its own adorableness and ultimately as smoothly reassuring as a TV sitcom.

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.

Utterly amateurish.

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.

Casting Caine as Austin's father is a stroke of pure genius.

The performances are rough and sometimes amateurish, but that works in the film's favor more often than it doesn't -- there's none of the false slickness that comes with hot young actors playing rock 'n' rollers.

Stiller's performance throws the whole enterprise out of whack -- he's a grotesque mass of tics, twitches and swaggering macho shoulder action.

Director Forest Whitaker, who appears to have been typed as a female-friendly director in the wake of "Waitinh to Exhale's" runaway success, drags out the already painfully slow proceedings with syrupy dissolves, slo-mo sequences and redundant flashbacks, underscoring it all with an intrusively obvious country soundtrack that matches lyrics to emotions with cringe-inducing exactness.

An oversized National Georgraphic special whose images of the Nile and Egyptian ruins are absolutely breathtaking on the oversized IMAX screen.

Quite enjoyable on its own terms.

It's all pretty entertaining in a shallow sort of way.

On the downside, it's slackly edited -- comedy is, after all, all about timing and there are way too many lengthy shots of Cho waiting for her audience to respond.

Taut, cynical thriller.

Horror buffs looking for a novel twist on genre formulas should look elsewhere, but this body-count potboiler about a sinister video game and the poor dopes who make the mistake of playing it is the movie equivalent of junk food: It's not good, but it's predictable and even satisfying, in a low-expectations way.

Sweet-natured, episodic comedy-drama.

It's both the shortest 3 1/2 hours you'll ever spend at the movies and spectacle of such magnitude that it's hard to imagine feeling you didn't get your time and money's worth.

There's no time wasted and no showy effects to detract from the situation -- just sheer tension.

Sweet and sort of cute -- watch and see if it doesn't kind of sneak up on you.

A crude, artless bogey tale.

A leaden excuse for family entertainment, loosely inspired by Jules Verne's 1873 novel, coarsened almost beyond recognition and dominated by Jackie Chan's comic martial-arts schtick.

Kilmer slips in and out of a series of ludicrously elaborate disguises, some more convincing than others, while poor Shue shuffles through the role of a sexy, book-reading babe pretending to be a dowdy lady scientist in kneesocks.

It's merely glum when it should be bracingly grim.

This quietly gripping film is both universal and particular.

Both informative and intensely moving.

Merits watching if only because it's a bracing corrective to the deeply entrenched image of Europe's Jews plodding, sheep-like, to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps.

Smarter and more engaging than it has to be.

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

The conclusion, clearly meant to feel ambiguously poetic, is distinctly unsatisfying.

Such a glorious cast, deployed to such trivial effect!

Hard though this antic farce tries to be outrageous, its satirical jabs at American culture are obvious and juvenile, as is the use of Jimmy's plastic bubble as a goofy metaphor for fear of life.

This film's rhythms suggest nothing so much as a weirdly macho telenovela, full of family drama, isn't-it-ironic humor and maudlin twists of cruel fate.

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

Uneven tragicomedy.

Billed as a dark comedy, brothers Jay and Mark Duplass' shaggy, ultra-low-budget tale of a tense New York-to-Atlanta road trip is more accurately a relationship-hell drama peppered with strangled laughs.

"Charlie's Angels" director Joseph McGinty Nichol (aka McG) shows surprising restraint with this emotionally freighted material, weighting the movie heavily towards relationships.

Steve Austin is conspicuously inarticulate and uncharismatic. Former soccer lout Vinnie Jones, whom no one will ever mistake for Laurence Olivier, acts rings around him.

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

The film's 85 minutes drag by painfully slowly, because there's no respite from Chapman's tedious, self-pitying reveries.

The film's characters, computer-animated over motion-caputure footage of flesh-and-blood performers, are as blank-eyed and rubbery-looking as moving mannequins -- the stuff of nightmares, not dreams.

Adults -- even the die-hard dog lovers -- will just have to resign themselves to being bored silly whenever the cartoonish Cruella is absent from the screen.

Smilovic's rapid-fire, Tarantino-esque dialogue is consistently razor-sharp, and the elaborate set design - which leans heavily towards shiny, riotously patterned wallpaper - is an eyeball-jangling blast.

Dialogue is kept to a bare minimum, but the film's complex underlying sound mix -- a subtle symphony of faintly heard voices and the muted sounds of cars -- adds a haunting texture to what could have been the slightest of stories about a woman's ephemeral victory over emotional numbness.

This handsome, elegant and restrained fable about love, artifice and power in fin de siecle Vienna is lavishly imagined and yet oddly airless.

It's vulgar, to be sure, but it's also brash and invigorating.

Non-musical scenes that move the narrative forward are staged realistically, while the lavish production numbers reflect the star-struck imagination of one-time chorine Roxie, for whom all the world ought to be a stage.

The flashy spectacle of intersecting narratives and its crosscutting and fractured chronology nearly overwhelms the film's simple message, in this case that despite divisions of language, race and geography, we're all connected.

A disappointing hodgepodge of rehashed clichés.

So awash in tired ethnic clichés that the story drowns.

It's sweet-natured, soothing and there's a behind-the-scenes/blooper reel at the end that will reassure anyone worried about the animals' treatment during filming.

Thoroughly preposterous on every level.

Craig Brewer's sweaty, feel-good story about a small-time pimp and dope dealer making one last, desperate grab at his long-deferred dream is driven by longtime supporting player Terrence Howard's subtle, go-for-broke performance as Memphis mack Djay.

This tribute to old-fashioned hard-boiled detective fiction is laced with Hollywood satire and snappy, lightning-fast dialogue.

That director and co-writer Gurinder Chadha transforms this sitcom material into a lively and charming film about the melting pot at full boil probably owes something to the fact that her own multicultural bona fides are firmly in order.

Mendez directs with remarkable assurance, using B&W footage to suggest the monochromatic clarity Santiago craves, as well as color to depict the riotous reality that threatens to overwhelm him.

Animator Bill Plympton's seventh feature is a must-see for fans of his often witty, always scabrous, hand-drawn work.

Thompson's stories are familiar, but she weaves them together with such assurance and good humor that they're equally soothing and thoroughly enjoyable.

The first half of Lover's film is surprisingly affecting...But the film comes apart in its second half, when James' flight triggers a long series of flashbacks to the brothers' childhood.

Sprawling, gooey and profoundly juvenile, this derivative thriller piles on the cheese: aliens, male bonding, psychoanalytic gobbledygook, childhood secrets, military black ops, gross-out special effects, explosions, bodily function humor and a retarded boy with special powers.

Spare, elegant and tailor-made for intense discussions over dark coffee, Boe's film is a slily bold and delightfully inventive variation on an age-old theme.

De Felitta's portrait of Paris -- who died in June 2004 -- isn't always flattering, but it is genuinely moving on many levels, none of which require knowledge of or even interest in jazz.

The story works, in that everything fits together, but the film feels hollow and unfinished, like a run-through for a movie rather than the movie itself.

It should come as no surprise that there's an American remake in the works, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon and directed by Martin Scorsese.

Richly atmospheric but a little thin in the character department: It feels oddly truncated, despite nicely textured performances.

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

Exactly the kind of sporadically clever, button-pushing fright-fest that keeps genre fans hanging on until something more fulfilling comes along.

The sequences are handsomely designed, but frankly, you might as well be watching someone play a video game.

Though more coherent than the disastrous Hellraiser: Bloodline, this psychological thriller with demons gets bogged down in too many "Is it real or just a nightmare?" sequences, and Sheffer's typically wooden performance as Joe makes it hard to sympathize with his travails.

In the end, the sheer obviousness of Shainberg and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson's take on Diane Arbus' perverse determination to examine and document the forbidden overshadows even Kidman's beautifully modulated performance, which takes Diane from brittle neurosis to a vaguely predatory ingenuousness.

Strong performances and sharp dialogue distinguish Jeff Lipsky's melancholy second feature, which charts the two-year course of a "perfect" relationship whose flaws are evident from the outset.

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.

Whaley's determination to immerse you in sheer, unrelenting wretchedness is exhausting.

A straight-faced throwback to the glory days of mutant wildlife on the rampage.

Welsh-born actor Roger Rees bares body and soul in director/cowriter Eric Werthman's handsomely photographed examination of the dynamic that unites a masochist and the sex worker who caters to his desires.

The superficially cheery “Boogie Nights” is infinitely scarier.

Resembles the giggly teen romances that saturate the Japanese market with a coolly alienated French twist.

In the end it's the same old blood pudding.

Slight and whimsical.

For rip-snorting pop entertainment, it's one discomfiting, nasty piece of work, and ain't that a kick in the head.

Anchored by Friel and Williams's exceptional performances, the film's power lies in its complexity. Nothing is black and white, starting with the girls' complicated relationships with their parents, which are simultaneously nurturing and fraught with psychological peril.

The trouble with this satirical take US involvement in Iraq, penned by Mark Leyner, John Cusack and Jeremy Pikser, is that the real thing is equally absurd and only marginally less funny.

Despite its length, the film only starts feeling as long at the end -- or, more correctly, ends. Serious fans of the novels will be prepared for the serial codicils, but the uninitiated are likely to think the film is over several times before it actually is.

A pitch-perfect parody of poverty row horror/sci-fi pictures of the 1950s, Larry Blamire's meticulous takeoff could easily be taken for the real thing, which is both its genius and its Achilles heel.

Scott swaddles this fundamentally straightforward revenge story in a jumble of bleary freeze frames, random changes of color saturation and film stock, jump cuts and stuttering montages, splashing text from some menacing word soup onto the resulting collage of chicly disturbing images.

The limp thriller plot Deery constructs to frame his theological inquiries is both artificial and not very interesting, a lethal combination.

Crammed with outrageous turns of fortune and quicksilver shifts in tone, Almodovar's film is held together by performances so subtle and complex it's hard to single out only one as exceptional. But Cruz is astonishing.

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.

A vivid telling of a familiar story -- the rise and fall of a street criminal -- bolstered by exceptional performances and a clear-eyed take on the economics of dealing and the pathology of ghetto fabulousness.

Slight but affecting.

It's all very well to say that laughter and tears are just a heartbeat apart, but both variations on Melinda's story bear the unmistakable mark of Allen's morose sensibilities.

The greatest hits of '70s bar-rock soundtrack - "We're an American Band," "Right Place, Wrong Time," "Sweet Home Alabama," "Magic Carpet Ride" etc. - has a certain rollicking, kick-ass energy that, unfortunately, never rubs off on the movie.

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.

None of it really amounts to anything, even as a nostalgic snapshot of a time and place.

You can't accuse the film of making speed addiction look glamorous, but the freak-show kick is too compelling for it to be called cautionary.

Its real problem is that Matilda Dixon, apparently conceived as a cross between the Blair Witch and Freddy Krueger, is an oddly characterless bogeyman, perhaps because she's 100 percent special effects technology with no actor underneath.

Solidly entertaining and surprisingly free of the Mamet-isms that can suck the life right out of the most tightly crafted story.

Where else are you going to find an extended riff on the weird, weird world of David Lynch movies, an homage to "The Shining" and flatulence gags in the same place?

Utterly predictable, noisy and stupid.

There's less than meets the eye in this tricky psychological thriller, one of a long line of mess-with-your-head brain ticklers in which all is not as it seems.

It's enjoyable poppycock.

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.

The cast — a felicitous blend of character actors and up-and-comers — work together like a street-smart machine, and Hoffman's scummy turn as porn-peddler and all-around creep King is a reminder of just how sleazily funny he can be.

Boon's film is both funny and heartbreaking, a supremely confident mix of political satire, free-floating paranoia, fractured family dynamics and the kind of comedy that regularly reconfigures itself into tragedy.

Charging Albert's film with looking too much like an American chick flick is to give it short shrift: For all the drinking, dancing and group hugs, by the end of their 36-hour trip down memory lane, the women's problems remain unresolved and poisonous secrets are still leaking out.

The musical number that runs during the closing credits funnier than anything that precedes it, which isn't saying much.

The irony is that Shakur's speaking voice is the film's greatest asset: His transformation from eager-to-please teenager to gangsta icon is vividly apparent in the sound bites.

It's all densely imagined and more than a little goofy -- perhaps too goofy for the average American viewer.

Yet another of Israeli-born filmmaker Amos Kolleck's pointless, meandering tales of eccentric New Yorkers navigating the treacherous waters of love and survival.

Whatever the complicated truth about PTL, Tammy Faye's homespun charisma is undeniable; if only the Lord would give her the strength to say, "Get thee behind me, false eyelashes!"

The performances are uniformly excellent.

This lighthearted meditation on life, death, love and timing contains some genuinely lovely scenes, but they're buried in a shapeless jumble of cutesy-pie vignettes.

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.

Production-designed within an inch of its life, this remake's best conceit is the casting of Crispin Glover as its socially maladroit rat fancier.

It's as chilling as Algernon Blackwood's elegantly unnerving "The Willows," played absolutely, unsettlingly straight.

A lifelong baseball enthusiast, director and co-producer Mike Tollin -- persuaded many real-life baseball figures to make cameo appearances.

The second version of Graham Greene's sad and prescient 1955 novel about American involvement in Vietnam hews far closer to the book than the first, preserving the sophisticated ambiguity of his depiction of a tangled struggle for power played out on both personal and political fronts.

The crime story here is lazily constructed, mostly an excuse for the give-and-take between Tucker and Chan, which is shrill and raucous without being especially clever.

Chalk up another family for Leo Tolstoy and Philip Larkin file: The Paskowitz family is unhappy in its own unique way and mum and dad f**cked them up -- they didn't mean to, but they did.

The result is truly a family film, not a kiddie time-waster that throws the occasional sop to adults; whether you like or love it is a function of how vividly the material reflects your own childhood fantasies.

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.

Fans of the series may be disappointed to see so little of Barker's sadistic Cenobites, but while they're used sparingly, they're used to good effect.

So formulaic it starts to fade from memory before the last punch is thrown.

Despite, or perhaps because of, a flurry of 11th-hour recutting and reshoots -- the film feels rushed and unfocused.

Peter Fonda's cameo appearance is a cute fillip, but hardly worth the wait.

Compelling on a personal level.

That Carrey, who's a bit old for the part, always seems one facial muscle away from a smirk doesn't help matters.

It doesn't pay to look too closely at this sumptuous fantasy, but if you're in the right mood to let it wash over you it's very warm and fizzy indeed.

The film's last 20 minutes devolve into a tedious slog through the kind of pointless, predictable running and screaming that give horror movies a bad name.

It desperately wants to be a paranoid political thriller, but this cobbled-together collection of corruption-on-Capitol Hill and cop movie cliches is so implausible that it's hard to care about any of the conspiratorial cover-ups and counter cover-ups.

The verdict: More thoughtful than Harlin's version, but hardly the invigorating mix of shocks and metaphysical horror needed to revitalize the Exorcist franchise.

There's nothing under the goofball gags and gushing gore, and its welcome is worn out well before it's over.

The series' breakout star remains Scrat (Chris Wedge), a scrawny, speechless rat-squirrel thing trapped in a Sisyphean quest for acorns, and while kids' movies generally could do with fewer scatological gags (the target audience for poo and pee humor needs no encouragement), writers Peter Gaulke and Jim Hecht managed to come up with a (relatively) sophisticated one.

It's straightforwardly entertaining and a genuine nail-biter.

Picking up some 10 years after the previous film left off, this stripped-down, intelligently conceived follow-up is a respectable conclusion to the Terminator trilogy.

Fleder delivers the requisite shocks, and his direction is brisk, efficient and occasionally stylish; Judd and Freeman both give more than the material demands.

Pokey, blood-spattered, cheap-scare-larded prequel.

Henry James's novel of social-climbing, forbidden love, friendship and betrayal, given a lush treatment that neglects neither the elaborate period trappings nor the story's intensely contemporary emotional underpinnings.

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

Eastwood, ironically, is the weak link in the cast, a less-than-ideal choice to play a screw-up who squeaks through life on personal magnetism: He's got star quality, sure, even a certain remote sexiness, but he's no charmer.

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.

An intensely internalized portrait of external pandemonium, a slippery, insidiously haunting work of poetry rather than brilliantly realized pulp.

The main event is the Mamet-esque battle of foul words between vintage hard-case Ray Winstone and the seething sociopath played by Ben Kingsley.

Director Joe Chapelle knows how to stage a spooky scene, and Going and McGowan supply a refreshing alternative to the shrieking bimbos so familiar to horror fans.

James Woods adds another hateful, embittered creep to his gallery of losers, neurotics and junkyard dogs with vampire slayer Jack Crow.

If his ambitious first feature isn't entirely successful, it nevertheless poses genuinely provocative questions and opens a window into the way the 9/11 disaster looks from outside the U.S.

This big-budget bore looks lovely but is so miscalculated that you can't help but wonder whether anyone involved had ever seen the original.

The result isn't very funny: There are clever bits, sure, but they're embedded in long, painfully obvious sequences built around one-shot gags.

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

Jeremy Gosch's documentary about the origins of professional surfing shines a light on four wave riders – three Australians and a South African – who helped transform a counter-culture life style into a billion-dollar industry.

Dave Collard's preposterous script relies heavily on fortuitous coincidence... and thoroughly stupid behavior.

Be warned: the silly songs are damnably catchy, from Gerrit's ode to the seventeen pigeons he keeps on the roof, which he sings while sporting a very tight set of white undergarments, to the rousing "Ja Zuster, Nee Zuster."

Unfortunately, the trajectory of Mueller and co-screenwriter Kevin Kennedy's repetitive screenplay echoes "Taxi Driver" so closely as to invite unfavorable comparison with Martin Scorsese's benchmark chronicle of alienation.

Crass, trashy and none-too-funny comedy.

An astonishing movie that keeps you off-balance from the first scene.

This is a film worth seeing, and LaBute is a filmmaker well worth watching.

Michael Meeropol provides a far more eloquent statement of the song's enduring impact: "Until the last racist is dead, 'Strange Fruit' is relevant."

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.

A cool indictment of television's near-irresistible pandering to the inner peeping tom.

First-time writer-director Ryan Shiraki's crude, gross comedy of campus sexual errors might push boundaries better were it not so painfully unfunny.

A dismal misfire that attempts to make black comedy out of the adventures of war correspondents and the dirty business of international politics.

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

Driver and Renner deliver haunting performances in this story of crime and punishment.

Such astringent details as a banjo player plucking a few ominous notes from "Dueling Banjos" when Ed first lays eyes on the Norman Rockwellian beauty of Spectre ensure that the story's fundamental sweetness never becomes cloying.

You don't have to be Jewish to love Jonathan Kesselman's uneven, profane and occasionally flat-out hilarious parody of vintage blaxploitation pictures, but it helps.

In the hands of a more gleefully provocative filmmaker, this variation on the standard erotic-thriller stew of sleaze, tease and murder, this ludicrous farrago might have been tawdry fun.

There's no denying the freak-show appeal and you don't see frontal nudity like this on TV, but otherwise it's all as contrived and artificial as "Survivor."

Conventional to the core but gets a blast of pure, hard-driving energy from Joaquin Phoenix's and Reese Witherspoon's vividly realized performances.

This formulaic mess of sports-movie cliches and self-esteem claptrap contains a couple of funny bits, but you have to slog through a lot of done-to-death bodily function jokes to get to them.

First-time writer-director Robert Edwards is nothing if not ambitious, attempting to encapsulate the history of totalitarian oppression and misguided revolutionary zeal into a broad, blunt, black comedy.

The look is utterly faithful to Tezuka's aesthetic -- he loved classic Disney animation, especially "Bambi" (1942) -- but it's hard to empathize with the angst of a character who looks like a Super Mario Brother.

Preposterous, disingenuous, remarkably unfunny and genuinely distasteful.

The big surprise is so obvious that it makes the deliberate pacing seem painfully slow, and Kidman's prissy accent and tight-lipped performance are more than a little grating.

The spectacle of the near-naked Ricki (Lopez) striking sexually provocative yoga poses while floridly extolling the virtues of female genitalia is particularly mortifying, but it's only one of many horribly miscalculated scenes.

This new SAW film is so utterly unimaginative it doesn't even count as hommage; it's just a smudgy copy of a still chilling original.

Hong Kong action pioneer Tsui Hark is in high form here, tricking out the bare-bones story with disorienting camera angles, trick photography and virtuoso action sequences.

Amateurish performances from nonprofessional actors undermine this ultra-low-budget crime drama.

Goofy and surprisingly slow-moving.

Though ultimately flawed, the film's depiction of velvet-gloved cruelty and matter-of-fact betrayal is surprisingly potent, and it's pure pleasure to watch Bacall prowling the corridors of power, tossing her golden mane and tossing off world-weary observations in a voice pitched somewhere between a purr and a growl.

This anti-thriller radiates dread rather than suspense; it delivers creeping apprehension rather than adrenaline-pumping kicks, and the uniformly strong and finely calibrated performances more than compensate for the absence of technical razzle-dazzle.

Writer-director Pan Nalin's film is at its best when he focuses on the meticulous, hands-on preparation of herb- and mineral-based drugs; it's also genuinely provocative to hear Ayurvedists argue that healing should be a vocation rather than a career.

A fairly serious psychodrama rendered in cartoon images.

Cinematographer Ken Kelsch, Ferrara's frequent collaborator, picks up the theme of overlapping lives by layering images within scenes -- the ongoing interplay of reflections and shadows is breathtaking -- and through slow, shimmering dissolves.

Formulaic hodge-podge that trades on a certain demographic's affection for the bogeymen of their formative years.

Special kudos to Adams, who nails the distinctive body language of Disney's spunky good girls and manages to make Giselle's relentless optimism seem charming rather than a sign of mental deficiency.

There's nothing blatantly wrong with it (except perhaps the red-assed baboon ex machina), but it's 100% shock-free and coasts to a formulaic conclusion.

M. Night Shyamalan's sixth film mines a rich lode of end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it clichés, but while the set up is spooky, the development is heavy handed and marred by Shyamalan's inability to write natural-sounding dialogue or convincing characters.

John Cleese supplies the voice of George's brainy and terrifically tolerant sidekick, a very unconvincing animatronic gorilla named Ape, but even he can't raise the level of humor above the harmlessly goofy.

Directed and co-written by country singer Dwight Yoakam, this film just screams "vanity project."

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

Rip Torn, Linda Hunt and Jerry O'Connell mark time in minor supporting roles.

It's a deeply provocative piece of filmmaking.

It's by no stretch of the imagination a good film, but it delivers what it promises: naked girls whaling on each other, flesh-ripping zombies and genre stalwart Todd growling and glowering satanically from beneath a mane of dreadlocks - the He-Who-Kills teeth are a nice touch.

Brassy and energetic, first-time director Mars Callahan's vividly photographed ode to the seductive allure of professional sharking succeeds in making the game seem genuinely kinetic and thrilling.

Story of small triumphs and everyday sorrows is never maudlin or sentimental.

Classic melodrama given a thoroughly modern, utterly Almodovarian face-lift.

A shameless puddle of romantic slop.

Ostensibly an "adult comedy" about serious things, screenwriter Richard LaGravenese's disjointed directing debut rings profoundly false, a story about class distinctions and suffering conceived and executed in privilege.

Grace fares better than Linney, and both escape with more dignity than Harden, whose blowsy, wanton Missy is a coarse, soap-opera caricature of a suburban hoyden.

This wry, low-key comedy, crafted by members of the sketch-comedy group The State, swims defiantly against the stream of contemporary comedy, eschewing bodily-function jokes and obvious gags in favor of laughs so sly and self-effacing you could almost overlook them.

If you're charmed from the outset, this is an enjoyable trifle; if you're not, it never gets any less mannered and convinced of its own wit.

Unfortunately, the remake is as toothless as the original and gets bogged down in the humiliations of the Harpers' down-slipping life.

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.

The film is relentlessly formulaic -- it's like a super-sized Afterschool Special with PG-13-rated bad language -- and is weighed down by Trevor Rabin's bombastic score, which telegraphs the appropriate emotional response to every feel-good moment.

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.

The harder you try to follow the narrative the more frustrating the film becomes, but its sleekly menacing images work their way into your brain like slivers of dry ice.

The whole thing is fun for 11-year-olds of all ages.

The characters are two-dimensional and the story is intensely formulaic.

Only Rejtman's sharp eye for absurd detail and the bleakly subtle joke separates comedy from tragedy in this story of listless Bonaerenses chasing their own tails through successive drab rings of urban hell.

This tale has been told and retold; the races and rackets change, but the song remains the same.

An uneasy mix of B-movie scares.

This amateurish comedy features some amazing sequences shot in Moscow. But everything else about it is second rate.

What distinguishes Cordero's film is his use of location.

The title refers to a diorama at New York City's American Museum of Natural History that depicts a whale and a giant squid locked in mortal combat.

The film's Buck Rogers-style graphics are cool, but the shrilly squabbling brothers -- realistic though they may be -- are insufferable, the story's your-turn/my-turn structure is tedious, and its relentlessly reiterated message about brotherly love and cooperation is really grating.

Wobbles unsteadily between broad humor and paranoid thrills. The result is a bland muddle.

Fisher's dialogue draws heavily on the original film's intertitles and script directions and the addition of sound is a plus for moviegoers uncomfortable with the artificial embarrassment of silence.

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.

Light, formulaic and soft around the middle.

Makes you wish consumer automobiles were built to NASCAR safety standards.

Van Sant's film feels as dated as Hitchcock's, and Hitchcock's has the better excuse.

That's not to say it isn't entertaining, only that the scenes which rely entirely on the fragile interplay between Jessica and Ryan suggest a more compelling movie that got lost in the welter of high-speed highway recklessness.

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

The cast is strong and work together flawlessly, and romantic comedies that take an unabashedly male perspective without being relentlessly vulgar or misogynistic are rare indeed.

Nearly strangles in its own stylishness but benefits from smoldering performances.

Though filmmaker Nina Gilden Seavy followed Bering Strait for the better part of two years, their story is in no way over at the film's conclusion.

While in her earlier movies Jennifer Love Hewitt made an impression by spilling out of her tops, in this one she spills out of her clothes at both ends. This could, if one were feeling charitable, be construed as a broadening of her range.

The occasional eerie moment can't elevate this routine piece of by-the-numbers J-horror above the pack.

Urzua's unsentimental story of shattered idealism is specific to Cuba, but anyone whose path to adulthood was paved with disillusionment, -- whether they were betrayed by faith, family or institutions – will understand her melancholy nostalgia.

McKenzie's mercurial performance is the centerpiece of this sad, surprisingly absorbing story.

Generous, slyly tough-minded documentary.

The result is so intoxicating, it hardly matters that you've heard it all before.

Is there anything more irritating than an exploitation filmmaker with self-referentiality on the brain?

Gorgeous but seriously unsatisfying.

Maguire and Douglas are extraordinary (though Douglas feels a little old for his role, which seems to have been written for a man in his early 40s); even Downey Jr. delivers a sharp, understated performance.

Who will survive and what will be left of them? If you don't have a pretty good idea, this is not the movie for you. If you do, rest assured you've seen it all before.

It starts slowly, but this contemplative drama's cumulative effect is genuinely haunting.

The vicious clamor the film occasioned in the U.K. is simply the measure of how volatile a subject the relationship between England and Ireland remains more than eight decades after the film's events, and the thinking viewer can hardly help but see parallels between the Irish insurgency and all subsequent guerrilla conflicts.

Without their efforts, ordinary moviegoers would never know that air-guitar competitors must craft a series of one-minute routines, some to songs they've only just heard, or that their efforts are judged on the 4.0 to 6.0 scale used to rank competitive figure skaters. Important to know? No. Fascinating? Absolutely.

It's hard not to be charmed by scenes like the one in which Briggs gives his posies a little pep talk, assuring them that just because they sprouted behind prison walls doesn't mean they can't compete with those hoity-toity flowers at Hampton Court.

Sure, like cotton candy: It doesn't do a thing for you, but it's wickedly sweet as it melts on your tongue.

Tries to be all things to all people and winds up a tedious muddle.

Blanchett's quietly radiant performance anchors even the most outrageous plot developments, and she's well-supported on all sides.

Shot in shades of steely gray and streaked with near-constant rain, this gloomy revenge thriller is a sadistic cartoon.

The impish Wood is a little light as Sean, who's inextricably bound by same family ties that robbed him of a promising future and made him a fugitive from the only life he's even known, but the supporting cast is top-notch.

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.

This is a psychological study that rejects psychology, an erotic drama of surpassing coldness, and a story of amour fou in which the madness is calculated and the love frozen.

Morgan borrows Christmas-specific nastiness from a wide range of fright flicks, but the result is less than the sum of its parts.

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

Horse lovers and racing enthusiasts are this likable film's obvious audience, but you don't have to care about the Derby to get caught up in the stories of the people and the horses behind the two minutes of glory.

A hokey monster mish-mash that plunders the richly textured histories of Dracula, the Wolfman and Frankenstein's monster.

Creepy, beautifully designed horror yarn about mutant roaches that delivers both artfully eerie atmosphere and some boffo shocks.

Though beautifully acted by Basinger (everyone else is relegated to a supporting role), there's a strange vagueness to much of this sumptuous, stunningly photographed melodrama.

Though Keaton is convincing as a smarmy narcissist who secretly thinks he deserves to fail because writing plays isn't REAL work, he's also thoroughly unlikable -- a problematic trait in a protagonist.

The final scenes pack a surprising melodramatic punch.

Features a nutty mix of broad comedy, romance and maudlin melodrama.

Black comedy of the deepest, richest darkness laid over an aching meditation on the atrophy of dreams.

The generally competent B-list actors are hobbled by cliché-ridden dialogue but do their best to react in remotely plausible ways each time the script nails them with some new melodramatic contrivance.

The competition between man and machine is fogged by distrust and obfuscation. And for now, the result is a draw.

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

First and foremost a celebration of Cuban dance and music.

This ode to the peculiar strength and flexibility of love, romantic and platonic, is simultaneously perverse, overwrought, deeply creepy and truly moving, a high-wire act that finds humor in the grotesque and hope in emotional malformation.