Maitland McDonagh

A deep and astonishingly authentic streak of melancholy runs through this fifth sequel to the 1976 sleeper that made both struggling actor Sylvester Stallone and hard-luck slugger Rocky Balboa international stars.

Overall, the film is occasionally interesting but essentially unpersuasive, a footnote to a still evolving story.

That this deceptively quiet crime thriller about an ex con's troubled homecoming sat on the shelf for four years before finding commercial distribution speaks volumes about both the voracious appetite for sand/surf/summer-break cliches and Hollywood's willingness to pander to it.

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.

The story is slight and would probably be better suited to a short subject, but first-time feature filmmaker Pierre-Paul Renders gives it a striking formal twist: It's told entirely in the first person.

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 southern-fried mess of poetic crime-movie cliches is redeemed by standout performances.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Smith's beautifully observed story of two young women learning how cruel and calculating the world -- and they -- can be is beautifully realized, and Garai stands out among a fine ensemble cast.

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

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.

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.

A long, dark night o' slacker despair, courtesy of Richard Linklater and self-important blowhard Eric Bogosian.

It has a creepy power all its own.

The brothers' dark, all-star farce about sex, lies and surveillance is pretty damned funny.

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.

Endearing without being especially engaging.

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.

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!"

First-time filmmaker Ben Younger makes not a single false move when delineating the merciless, high-testosterone world of boiler-room brokerages.

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.

Without the gloss of novelty, the film's underdeveloped characters and thin -- though busy -- story are forced into the foreground, and its 88-minute running time feels far longer.

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

The story is familiar, but terrific performances and a vivid sense of place elevate it above the average teen-oriented picture.

Although notorious in South Africa, Stander is little known elsewhere and Canadian director Bronwen Hughes' unsatisfying account of his life and crimes is unlikely to earn him a spot on the outlaw celebrity A-list.

The performances are uneven and the loosely structured story never actually goes anywhere.

Brutally gorgeous and seething with incendiary images.

The obvious product of a corporate search for the next great fantasy franchise, this adaptation of the first in a series of popular children's books by the writer-illustrator team of Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi is a lump of leaden whimsy.

Poignant documentary.

If Caspian has a fault, it's that viewers familiar with neither the books nor the first film may have trouble picking up the strands of the story in the early scenes… but in all honesty, how many Lewis neophytes will choose Caspian as their point of entry?

Old-fashioned fun that goes down as smoothly as a vintage cocktail.

The plot is more of the same old running and screaming, but Weaver is worth the price of admission all by herself, which is just as well in light of the less-than-fleshed out characters by whom she's surrounded.

There's never a dull moment and seldom one that isn't sublimely ridiculous.

Say what you will about (Smith's) sense of humor, genuine faith is rare enough in popular culture to make any sighting worthy of note.

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

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.

Jackman and McGregor are a delight to watch.

Groundlings alumnus Prendergast's dark comedy, drawn from on his own family experiences, is firmly rooted in messy, selfish, often-unappealing human behavior rather than self-referential irony and juvenile goofiness.

The film's tone is set by a bravura opening sequence that follows a single bullet from a factory conveyer belt to its resting place in a child's skull, and by Cage's flawlessly sardonic voice-over.

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

The willowy Danes' rich, melancholy characterization is sown in a barren field of snippy attitude and too-cool posturing, and the film's disingenuous air of bittersweet chic becomes deeply tiresome long before it's over.

Thoroughly dotty and surprisingly endearing.

Sleek, stylish and ephemeral as a fireworks display, Ocean's Thirteen is the definition of light, but not totally brainless, entertainment.

A funny, perceptive and seductively engaging movie.

The film's a trifle, but a beautifully crafted one.

This deliriously unsettling film evokes H.P. Lovecraft's exquisitely creepy stories of encroaching madness -- not so much in story terms but in its perversely spooky ambience -- with a subtle dose of David Lynch's dark sense of humor.

Newcomer Grace seems born to the part of an unformed young woman whose character cries out to be shaped, but it's Ivey's unobtrusive skill that shapes their onscreen relationship into something thoroughly convincing.

Trapped uncomfortably between its higher aspirations and the demands of genre, this picture never quite gets its bearings, but it's still a solid ride.

A huge hit in France, Michel Hazanavicius' straight-faced spy spoof unleashes a French operative of incomparable incompetence on the volatile Middle East of 1955.

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

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

An impressive parade of scientists, meteorologists and grassroots activists assert that humanity is capable of adapting to a changing climate, building sustainable communities without sacrificing modern-day comforts and even reversing some of the damage already done.

Foxx is a charmer, and he makes Alvin's unlikely evolution from relentless hustler to reasonably solid citizen believable, and even rather touching.

Dellal and their cast consistently hit the right notes, and the result is an uplifting tale that you don't have to be embarrassed to enjoy.

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).

Despite the low budget, the film is handsomely designed and well acted.

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.

Sardonic and steeped in the tumultuous history of the former Yugoslavia, this absurdist comedy of contemporary mores can be appreciated even without intimate knowledge of its specific cultural context.

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

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.

The film is simultaneously sweet natured and sharply observed, and if love eventually conquers all, it takes its own sweet time doing it.

This film got made because Seinfeld is famous, but it's still hard not to wish the filmmakers had devoted a couple of years to following Adams instead. The guy's such a throbbing bundle of arrogance, raw nerves and self-destructive insecurity that you can see the flame-out coming.

It's a must-see for horror buffs and anime fans; and while it lacks the haunting thematic underpinnings of "Blood The Last Vampire," -- it's a more satisfying movie-going experience.

Well acted (notably by newcomer Brown), warm hearted and utterly predictable, this film is aimed squarely at everyone who loved "Good Will Hunting."

Carrey's relentless showboating is almost its undoing.

A disturbing examination of what appears to be the definition of a "bad" police shooting.

Although the performances by the star-studded cast are generally excellent, only Billy Crystal really manages to transcend the dour misery of Allen's script: His witty turn as a dapper Satan is a blessed relief from the neurotic gloom.

More comic book-like and less intriguing than the original, the film's punch-drunk cyber-mysticism still has a darkly seductive allure that sets it apart from juvenile, Star Wars-style space opera.

Brisk, engaging story.

This intimate coming-of-age story benefits from excellent performances, notably Gregory Smith's.

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

This limp, forgettable fluff is as preachy and heavy-handed as the "Goofus and Gallant" cartoons that a generation of children far less media-savvy than today's recognized as ham-fisted lessons in good behavior masquerading as funny strips.

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.

The script is often obvious and much of the acting is amateurish (Rakesh's comic sidekicks are just dismal), though Purva Bedi is a shining exception — she's got star quality to burn.

A stale rehash of Woody Allen-style "he's a neurotic Jew, she's a flaky shiksa" gags.

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.

Generous, slyly tough-minded documentary.

Watching this string of sketches about small town wackos is like channel surfing a heavy sitcom zone.

A tragicomic Holocaust fable that's by turns silly, triumphant and achingly sad.

A gloomy, preposterous psychological thriller.

Robles and Hidalgo ring enough changes on a stock situation that you're never sure where it's going.

It's so cool all the life has drained away, leaving nothing behind but a faint whiff of attitude.

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.

This disappointing sequel to last year's horror sleeper gets trapped in the clichés it's trying to send up.

Its talky, sluggish script is so bereft of thrills -- intellectual or otherwise -- that even the film's one masterfully staged sequence... falls flat.

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.

This taut crime thriller is a welcome antidote to brainless action extravaganzas in which the mayhem is the message, and rests on two shrewd, perfectly modulated performances.

This film is no exception to the rule that philosophical debate seldom spawns compelling cinema.

Briskly directed by "Sex and the City" veteran David Frankel, the movie is far better than the source.

Overall, how funny you find it will probably depend on whether or not the mere sight of Stiller sucking in his cheeks, widening his eyes and striking preposterous poses makes you laugh uproariously.

A thoroughly respectable affair: Your high school English teacher would approve, and parts are terrifically enjoyable.

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.

Roth's screenplay, steeped in the peculiar rituals, lock-jawed repression and smug sense of superiority of the WASP ruling class that both shaped America's intelligence community and made it vulnerable, is less interested in derring-do than back-room deals and the day-to-day drudgery of spying, driven by the notion that espionage is a cynical high-stakes game played with people's lives and the ante is human decency and connectedness.

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.

But in the end it all comes to naught: Tantalyzing though the leads are, the paintings remain elusive.

The images of gods and ordinary Tibetans that Bush captures are more eloquent that his turgid narration, and overall the film works better as a travelogue than an introduction to Tibetan Buddhist beliefs or history.

For a movie rooted in reality, Italian filmmaker Saverio Costanzo's taut psychological drama is in desperate danger of drowning in metaphor.

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.

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.

Banned for many years in director/cowriter Alfonso Cuaron's native Mexico, his debut feature is a bawdy comedy that pivots on the comeuppance of a serial philanderer.

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."

Restrained and decorous to a fault.

The result, a dissection of the complicated dynamics of sexual and economic exploitation, is pitiless and occasionally inspired.

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.

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

This is solid entertainment, and the time Caviezel and Pearce spent training for their sword fights pays off handsomely.

As provocative as Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," but nowhere near as engaging.

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.

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.

What makes it play is Archambault, who gives a strikingly unpleasant performance as Gerald.

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.

First and foremost a celebration of Cuban dance and music.

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.

This good-natured genre piece gets the job done while sneaking in a couple of pointed observations about contemporary Latino immigrant life.

Handsomely photographed and acted...defiantly old-fashioned testament to the power of love.

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.

Turturro's sweaty, lumpen Cain is a profoundly disagreeable guide down the rabbit hole of hallucinatory paranoia.

Its appeal lies in the powerhouse performances delivered by Dench and Smith.

The film's greatest asset is its performances.

This otherwise sober film's high ick factor is clearly designed to convince restless students that entomology is extremely cool.

Sad, leisurely road picture.

The story is less a sustained narrative than a series of scenes. But personal dynamics are the main event, and McDormand's powerhouse performance alone compensates for many minor deficiencies.

Slight but affecting.

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

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.

Shot in neorealist black-and-white, it opens like a gritty slice of social drama, then takes a sharp turn into bleak, existential horror.

The result is fearlessly divisive and will no doubt play according to viewers' preexisting perceptions.

The remake is infinitely more entertaining if you haven't seen "Nine Queens" -- the details are different, but the surprises are the same and something of the first film's underlying darkness has been lost in translation.

Modest, on-the-money performances, which look effortless because they're so meticulously thought out, make the hours fly by.

Neither trite nor pandering, and that's what makes the film better than most of its peers.

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

Cocaine Angel may be a fine counterpoint to glammy cocaine-scare films like "Less Than Zero" (1987) and "Blow" (2001), but it comes on so strong it risks being dismissed along with the "this is your brain on drugs" school of dope-scare PSAs.

Viewers are left to draw their own conclusions, which inevitably will be colored by individual reactions to unabashed frontal nudity.

Feels hokey, generic and dated.

8-year-olds of all ages, prepare to storm the multiplex!

The story wears thin long before it's over, but Machado draws strong performances from his leads and makes excellent use of its rundown locations.

A throwback to the slickly entertaining melodramas of Hollywood's golden age.

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

Sweet-natured, episodic comedy-drama.

Anderson is a master of detail, from the film's ubiquitous fish motif to the elaborate carnival set piece that unfolds inside the claustrophobic confines of a spook-house ride called "Route 666."

Dillon makes an assured directing debut, neither indulging in unnecessary stylistic flourishes nor allowing scenes to run too long, a tendency in actors-turned-director.

Essentially a supersize episode that ignores a slew of fifth-season developments and adds yet another monster to the mix, one that owes a striking debt to "Alien."

This supremely silly supernatural potboiler is slickly entertaining for just under two hours and absolutely hilarious for 10 minutes near the end.

"Double Indemnity's" darkly poetic carnality is timeless. Trashy, throwaway fluff like De Palma's film can only look bad by comparison.

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.

Jim Brown and Gary Burns hang a powerful antisuburban diatribe in the form of statistics, expert opinions and pictures worth a thousand words on the experiences of the Moss family.

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."

A leaden, tone-deaf remake of the 1955 Ealing comedy starring Alec Guinness, the Coen brothers' painfully unfunny rehash hinges on the duel of wits between five larcenous oddballs and one sweet but strong-willed old lady.

The film's woozy, digital-video gorgeousness is undeniable, and the glittering shots from atop the Brooklyn Bridge could make a tough guy weep.

The result is hypnotic.

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

There's no downside to a reminder that not every beefy, God-talking sheriff is a bigoted cracker, and Kraus' short, no-frills documentary is a model of fly-on-the-wall filmmaking.

You can't help but wish the set up were shorter and the dilemma longer.

Roundly condemned (though not banned) by Church officials in Mexico, the film became a smash hit -- probably in part because the public wrangling gave it an enormous publicity boost.

The thin line between self-esteem and hubris is explored in this cautionary tale.

A candy-colored, superficially fizzy revenge fantasy with a startlingly corrosive undercurrent of bitterness and frustration.

Though ultimately the film is all smoke and mirrors, the sensibility it reflects is rich and exciting.

Spare and coolly evocative, it's a chilling accomplishment.

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.

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.

Overlord, produced and presumably overseen by J.J. Abrams, is good, bloody fun, with all the polish and production value that come with not being a low-budget exploitation movie.

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.

The mere sight of strapping men in micro-mini skirts suffering the indignities of thong underwear, catcalls and pushy pick-up artists is good for a couple of lowbrow laughs, but they're buried pretty deep in dreck.

A very entertaining, hugely neurotic romantic comedy.

The film's saddest contention is that five decades later American public schools remain economically segregated by economics, which too often produces classrooms whose complexions have changed little since the pre-Brown era.

Yes, it's sappy. It's also silly, utterly unironic, a sketch stretched out to feature length, and, if you're in the right mood, pretty darned cute.

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.

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.

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

It's wonderfully satisfying: Collette, MacLaine and Diaz are exceptional, and the mix of humor and heartbreak is perfectly calibrated.

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.

Sweet, goofy story.

This flashy fright flick doesn't break any new ground, but puts an attractive gloss on genre conventions.

This neo-noir pastiche is so preposterously overwrought that you keep figuring it must be some kind of joke, except that it's not funny.

David Mamet's political thriller about the disappearance of the president's daughter is an unsatisfying slipknot of a film -- it looks tight and elaborate, but give it a tug and it goes flat.

That it feels so predictable is, ironically, a tribute to the universality of the experience it explores.

The movie's captivating details are all in the performances, from Foreman's barking-mad Taylor to Thewlis's smoothly sinister Freddie and Bettany/McDowell's hard-eyed gangster, an amoral bottom-feeder with an expedient streak of sadism.

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.

If you're in a triumph of the human spirit frame of mind, this is your cup of dark, sweet tea.

Without the top-notch cast it would be indistinguishable from hundreds of pedestrian serial-killer pictures that clog video store shelves.

So crammed with plot twists that it's hard to follow, simultaneously ludicrous, sappy and casually dismissive of all the things Hollywood holds dear.

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.

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

The film rings so consistently false that it's more likely to induce snickers and eye-rolling.

Like the original "Fantasia's" eight segments, the results are a mixed bag.

For a mountain of muscle [The Rock]'s a surprisingly charming screen presence. And his low-key appeal helps nudge Peter Berg's derivative but good-natured light action picture in the direction of breezy entertainment, rather than painfully noisy macho posturing.

Overall, the book is a far more rewarding experience than the movie.

It aspires to a documentary realism and keeps the focus on the characters at all times. Though the results can't really be called enjoyable, the intensity that bleeds off the screen is undeniably effective.

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

Raimi and company deftly balance spectacle and character-based drama, occasionally tweaking the comic-book mythology but always respecting creator Stan Lee's idea that costumed crime-fighter Peter Parker's life as Spider-Man isn't all derring-do and public accolades.

It's actually sharper, less reverential and generally better than "Misson: Impossible."

Davis' tough, man-of-the-people narration is often annoying, but his words can't diminish the power of his story.

First-time feature filmmaker Oliver Hirschbiegel maintains a riveting sense of simmering brutality.

Characters are undermined by the inexpressive animation that mars the majority of animated films: Their haunted inner lives are clearly meant to take center stage, but their faces are blank and two-dimensional.

Catches you with a creepy sucker punch.

More music and less melodrama would serve audiences better.

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.

Suicide, child molestation, corruption, insanity and the faintest implication of incest are wound around the film's suggestion that the cure for modern-day alienation and anomie lies in embracing traditional Japanese culture, like ritual tattooing.

The manipulative climax works, even as you feel like the jerk in tear-jerking.

By the time it reaches its fiery finale, the film feels less mythic than self-consciously portentous.

Adventurous viewers will find this unusual genre hybrid an intriguing experience, and Donnie Yen's fight choreography is breathtaking.

While billed as "an intimate look" at Jay-Z, the film reveals next to nothing about him beyond the fact that he possesses a formidable ability to spin and remember lengthy rhymes, however vulgar and reductive their content.

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

An utterly preposterous but entertaining sci-fi action brain-bender.

Cocaine cash financed Miami's renaissance, but the film never downplays the human cost at which that urban renewal was purchased.

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.

Film feels like a parody of Mamet mannerisms, and the trouble lies with the play, which Mamet first penned some 25 years for an Actors Equity showcase.

Fresnadillo's film is little more than a gloomy and attenuated Twilight Zone episode, reminiscent of Alex Cox's portentous "The Winner" (1997) without the truly breathtaking conclusion.

Would be too long even if it were twice as funny. And that about sums up the movie.

The film's underlying themes dovetail efficiently with the action but don't generate the emotional gut punch the movie needs; overall it feels padded and logy.

Sharply acted and cheerfully coarse.

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.

His epic reworking of their lurid conventions proved so long that it was divided into two parts, and this one ends on a hell of a cliff-hanger.

Frothy, sentimental and thoroughly good-natured, Malcolm D. Lee's tale of coming-of-age at the roller disco doesn't have an original bone in its body, but it's as energetic, eager to please and endearing as a sloppy, wriggling puppy.

The aliens, meanwhile, are a fabulously nasty lot of slimy, tentacled, malevolent telepaths, but all their superior technology is no match for our red, white and blue ingenuity. Take that, space bullies!

Dithery, nattering and a bit long for such a conspicuously airy trifle.

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.

It's funny stuff, though most of the pimps seem like such buffoons it's hard to imagine how they actually make a living.

A buzzed-up gloss on the original, it's entertaining -- if fundamentally shallow.

Narrated by NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, the film's form is measured, but its message is incendiary.

The only constant in Park's brilliantly cruel world is this: No matter how badly things seem to be going, there's a twist of fate lurking around the next curve that will make them worse.

It's a high-energy blast.

Dense collage of digitally altered images often looks shockingly like some super-hip media agency's show reel.

Ice Cube is so genial and laid back it's hard to believe he's the same snarling thug who ass-kicks his way through action pictures, let alone the seethingly angry rapper who emerged from NWA in the early 1990s.

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.

Although Sonny is computer generated, Tudyk supplied his voice and body language -- provides the story's emotional core, an irony Asimov would surely have appreciated.

Terrio keeps the multiple stories flowing smoothly, and the setting goes a long way to justify the web of fortuitous interconnections -- New York is the ultimate two-degrees-of-separation town.

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

Imagine "Hansel and Gretel" by way of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

What charm the movie has is almost entirely due to Grant and Barrymore -- the master of smarmily irresistible self-deprecation meets the sweetly vulnerable queen of awkward self-sabotage. While they have no romantic chemistry, they're certainly appealing.

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.

Overall, this is the kind of thing that gives literary adaptations their bad name.

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

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.

Although this first chapter in a three-part tale is inevitably overburdened with back story, it ends on one hell of a cliff-hanger.

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

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.

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

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.

There may be a way to remake 1973's cult thriller The Wicker Man, in which a deeply Christian cop has his religious convictions shaken to the core as he investigates the disappearance of a child from within a cheerfully pagan community, but Neil LaBute didn't find it.

Cronenberg's brand of body horror isn't to everyone's taste, but to call him a reactionary anti-sensualist who metes out grotesque punishment for sins of the flesh -- as detractors have -- is to miss the point.

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

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.

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

In a film about the ruthless corporate destruction of small businesses, it's hard not to flinch at the prominent placement accorded IBM, Starbucks and AOL logos.

Part of the problem is its length; at two hours and ten minutes it meanders rather than building up a head of steam and barreling straight through logic and plausibility on the way to Hell.

The story is predictable, but Reeder's performance is painfully convincing and the East Village locations so uniformly grimy that they all but weep despair.

The tone is inconsistent -- sometimes it seems to be straining for black comedy, other times it seems dead serious.

Fingleton turned his own story into a feel-good fable; neither Martin McGrath's gorgeous cinematography nor the hypnotic score by Run Lola Run(1998) composers Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil's can compensate.

Tarantino maintains a flawless balance between flat-out action, quirky dialogue, stylish homages to the glistening shadows of film-noir thrillers, the sun-baked brutality of Westerns (American and Italian), the ritualistic rhythms of Shaw Brothers martial-arts pictures from the 1970s and quietly dramatic moments, shifting between them with quicksilver facility.

The film's tone is a matter of taste -- the more you enjoy the melancholy silent comedies of Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, the more likely you are to embrace its sensibility -- but it's undeniably the product of a singular and beautifully realized vision.

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.

Inspired by accounts of underage vigilante girls in Japan turning the tables on Internet predators, playwright Brian Nelson's schematic tale of the hunter captured by the game, a queasy blend of exploitation-movie nastiness and blunt moral lesson.

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

While the subject is potentially fascinating, Gosling's unfocused, sluggish film is a case study in missed opportunities.

Attal's characters are one-note position statements, which forces the unsubtle soundtrack - mostly American pop songs that range from the Velvet Underground's "Sunday Morning" to Radiohead's "Creep" - to bear the brunt of clarifying their thoughts and feelings. Without it, you'd be entirely in the dark.

The whole enterprise has the sweaty sheen that comes from trying too hard to be cool.

Luis Orjuela's sweet, slight comedy is about a middle-class Colombian family and the huge, cherry-red Chevrolet Bel-Air convertible that conveys them through several years worth of life's little dramas.

The performances are uniformly excellent.

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.

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

The climactic revelation is a real disappointment, humdrum rather than chilling.

Most of the film's humor derives from smug anachronisms (the Brit-pop soundtrack, Wang and Roy's use of modern slang) and jokes about bad English food, teeth and weather that were old when Victoria was a girl.

Milos Forman's film is a series of incredible simulations that never quite cohere into a movie.

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.

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.

Monica Cervera's fearless performance as the homely Marieta, whose movie-made dreams of glamour will never come true, is mesmerizing.

The film's greatest asset, however, is its unusually authentic use of Manhattan locations: Younger clearly knows New York much better than the topography of the human heart.

While this cheerful film has nothing particularly new to say about the ties that hold family members together even when they're driving each other crazy, it's a pleasure to watch such a talented ensemble at work.

The storytelling is jerky (perhaps in part because the running time was trimmed from 185 to 142 minutes for U.S. release) and character development takes a backseat to a breathless rush through battles, assassinations and dynastic plotting.

As a document of the ever-mutable musician's signature persona, a wraithlike androgyne with a head full of apocalyptic dreams, it's fascinating.

In the end, you're left to pick your moral: Money changes everything or money isn't everything or both.

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.

The real trouble is that the filmmakers consistently choose gags over character.

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.

The story is formulaic, but this brutal, fast-paced thriller makes excellent use of Li's martial arts prowess.

It's probably not the last word in WASP angst, but it's eloquent, witty, graceful and as sharp as can be.

Alternately sweet and raucous comedy.

The talented Bettis works her heart out, but McKee apparently directed her to play May as a quivering crazy from the start.

This lackluster sequel was surely much more fun to make than it is to watch.

Cynics may scoff, but the spirit of Woodstock -- not the 1999 debacle, but the 1969 original -- lives.

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

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

Gorgeous and menacing at the same time.

Polished but oddly lifeless heist thriller.

Smacks of a certain kind of TV movie filled with pious uplift, even as it makes token concessions to contemporary lifestyles.

The story's message is less than profound, but it's vividly delivered.

Malkovich pulls out all the gaudy stops.

It's hard to tell whether Attal means the fictional Yvan to be such an colossal jerk. His abrasive obnoxiousness undermines the film's generally light tone, and seriously deflects sympathy away from his character's dilemma.

Winslet and Keitel are perfectly matched, go-for-broke actors handed dramatic license to do a psychic striptease.

While there's no denying that the film's animation is technically impressive and is sometimes quite clever, its inventiveness is frequently at the service of gags so distasteful that gag is the operative word.

Bond spends an awful lot of time being rescued from peril by supporting characters.