Maitland McDonagh

Overall it's a harmless disappointment, hampered by the thin story and a surprisingly dreary looking video-game setting, heavy on the floating platforms, cartoony future-cityscapes and goofy gadgetry.

This cautionary tale, complete with the swank cars, cool clothes and depraved babes that inevitably accompany degradation Hollywood style, is based on former sitcom scribe Jerry Stahl's lurid tell-all memoir of his descent into heroin addiction. Under the witty surface, the moral seems to be "The devil made me do it." Even by sitcom standards, that's old.

The film's mix of cheap gags, macabre coming-of-age story, social satire and Cronenbergian body horror is apparently meant to gel into black comedy, but it never quite does.

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.

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

Spare, rough around the edges and unsentimentally melancholy.

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.

Ejiofor's polished, energetic performance -- including several song-and-dance numbers -- enlivens what's basically comfort food in movie form, but sometimes comfort food is exactly what the doctor ordered.

Delivers plenty of sharply funny moments.

To see the two of them on screen together, even past their primes, is a delight.

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.

Rios is the glue that holds Johannesson's neither-fish-nor-fowl film together.

Endearing without being especially engaging.

It's genuinely funny, oddly romantic and surprisingly engaging for what could easily have been an obnoxious vanity project.

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

It's hard to say which sight is more depressing: That of Chinese girls mortgaging their futures in the hopes of helping their families, or drunken American girls, surrounded by privilege and opportunity most of the world can barely imagine, arguing that it's fun to degrade themselves for cheap baubles.

If only the wit weren't overwhelmed by lame jokes about body parts, functions and fluids.

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.

Would be as tedious as a home movie if the couple, Edward DeBonis and Vincent Maniscalco, weren't gay men and their nuptials not colored by the clash between their personal faith and their rejection by the mainstream church.

Though the movie is clearly meant to work on its own, the relationship between Starling and Lecter plays best if you're familiar with "Lambs."

Ultimately the sci-fi fillips — human cloning, memory wipes, empathy viruses — are subordinate to screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce's doomed romance.

A delicate watercolor dream of a ghost story, as insubstantial and tremulously haunting as an unquiet spirit.

Clever though the premise is, the film's real strength is the smooth banter between Sam and Devon; it's never less than smart, often startlingly perceptive and always thoroughly convincing.

Wright's haunting performance is the anchor that keeps Ruscio's film from vanishing down a rabbit hole.

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.

This dumbed-down spin on Jules Verne's classic adventure tale was devised as a kid-friendly roller-coaster ride, and it delivers the goods. Whether anyone over the age of eight wants the goods is another matter altogether.

McCormack and Cochrane can't transcend the clichéd, meandering dialogue, so Brad and Lexi's dilemma never feels like anything but a didactic contrivance.

Based on a short story by Joe R. Lansdale, this low-key oddity stresses character over broad laughs and shock effects, allowing Campbell and Davis to develop a quirky rapport that's a real pleasure to watch.

Delivers its commendable message with affecting eloquence.

It's ripe for an American remake, given the popularity of reality TV shows like "My Super Sweet 16" and "Bridezillas," but it's hard to imagine a better cast than this ensemble.

Veterans Danner and Wilkinson effortlessly make Anna and Stephen more interesting than all the youngsters combined.

It's Jagger's bone-dry, mournfully brittle delivery that gives the film its bittersweet bite. Michael Des Barres and Anjelica Huston make the most of their supporting roles.

The surprise is how tame and passionless it all seems, particularly after director Philip Haas's fevered "Angels and Insects."

Shot in the warm sepia tones of bittersweet memories, this whimsical, unpretentious shaggy war story is the sort of film that looks like a small gem when you accidentally stumble across it on TV or at the video store. But it feels a little unsatisfying when its small virtues are stretched to cover a big screen.

There's not much substantive food for thought.

There's a thin line between fable and twaddle, and this feel-good trifle veers dangerously close to the latter.

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.

The film is never dull -- no mean feat, given that it spends two hours telling a story whose end is widely known -- and features performances that range from coarsely effective to phenomenal.

The feisty supporting cast is forced to carry the show, and fortunately, they're more than up to it, notably Olin, Platt and Jeremy Irons.

Beautifully encapsulates the film's sensibility, a bizarre mix of reverse cool and childishness.

If ever anyone earned the title "diva," it was the late singer Amalia Rodrigues.

The brouhaha aside, this chronicle of SNAFUs foretold doesn't have much new to say but says it with biting precision, and Phoenix's sharp, sneakily sympathetic performance is a pleasure to watch.

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

It aspires to greater moral ambiguity than the average crime thriller, and if it doesn't entirely succeed it nevertheless avoids the lazy moral bankruptcy of movies like "Lethal Weapon 4."

Amateurish, badly acted and shot on the cheap (many sequences don't even have sync sound), this cult item features a 40-minute car chase (almost half the film's running time) that's nothing short of breathtaking, particularly in light of the obvious budgetary constraints.

A bit of whimsy.

It's got turns, it's got an attractive cast that gets shish-kabobed with ruthless regularity. It's just tired.

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.

If you're rooting for Barrymore and Fallon, then why not their team? In the movies, there are enough happy endings for everyone.

And yes, that is Salma Hayek in the chorus line of sexily sinister nurses, perhaps repaying Taymor for lending her dramatic credibility with "Frida."

This brazen mix of old and new is undermined by the predictable story, shallow characterizations and a dopey sense of humor.

Feels forced and awkward, as though it's trying too hard to be weird, culty and profound.

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

It can hardly help but outrage at least some of the people some of the time.

This is first-rate comedy of discomfort, so don't sample it with a date unless you're looking for a very queasy evening.

Despite solid performances from the leads, it comes shrouded in a heavy cloud of ethics-class complications that makes it feel like a "dilemma of the week" TV movie.

If not precisely charismatic, Statham brings authentic athleticism and a certain cheeky presence to his lightly written role.

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

Indie director Bezucha has held on to just enough individuality to breathe a little life into the cliches.

The film is flat-out gorgeous and contains moments of sheer lunacy.

Shattering in its own quiet way.

While many films of this kind are undermined by amateurish performances, the main cast is solid and some of the supporting performances (many from non-professionals) are small gems.

The story is painfully familiar, and McIlhenney regularly stops it in its tracks by indulging the actors in arty monologues that sap the movie of any suspense or sense of momentum.

Director Mike Hodges and screenwriter Trevor Preston's dark revenge tale strips its crime-story cliches of their hopped-up energy and seedy glamour, leaving nothing but sordid sadness.

Shrewder than you'd think and not half as dumb as it looks.

A screwball comedy without a charismatic, smart-talking dame is no screwball comedy at all.

(Salerno-Sonnenberg's) determination and resilience should speak to a broader audience.

Banderas inhabits the role of the mariachi with a feral grace undimished by the seven-year gap between films.

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.

Long, lumpy and sadly charmless, this adaptation of John Berendt's nonfiction portrait of Savannah, GA, refracted through the prism of a scandalous true-crime story, tramples all over the silkily seductive voice that makes the book so compulsively readable and eerily haunting.

The story is complex enough to be absorbing, but its pedantic quality makes it -- and its lessons -- all too easy to forget.

The fact that it was shot at the picturesque Utah resort is a huge plus and the film is so unabashedly eager to please.

This is less a movie than a lecture. Perhaps Lee simply should have made a documentary.

The banality of faceless evil isn't actually all that compelling on the hoof; the film's more interesting as a curiosity than as a film.

A triumph of art direction over narrative, but what art direction!

The complications are predictable, as is the resolution; what keeps the film from sinking into its own inconsequentiality is the throaty-voiced Henderson, who can make the most preposterous behavior ring absolutely true.

The payoff doesn't quite equal the intensity of the spectacularly squirm-inducing premise, but Farrell takes his showboating star turn and runs with it.

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

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 gorgeous Mole Antonelliana is the breakout star of Ferrario's fluffy valentine to the cinema.

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.

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.

A charming comedy-drama that's surprising true to the events that inspired it.

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

The wholly invented character of unattainable love interest Julia Cook (the real Kelly once referred to an enigmatic "Julia" in a letter) is the film's weakest link and smacks of a desperate attempt to shoehorn a pretty woman into a story about grubby men with tangled beards.

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.

An excruciating series of gags aimed at kids old enough to think it's funny when a grown-up acts like a small child.

Van Bebber is out to capture the mood of a generation-long bad trip and succeeds with unnerving accuracy by telling the story within the family circle.

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.

Her heavy-handed montage of war, civil rights demonstrations, revolutions and KKK gatherings, intercut with Shicoff's delivery of the opera's devastating fourth-act aria, is so amateurish it very nearly succeeds in trivializing the power of his performance.

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.

Lavishly costumed and shot largely on location, the film benefits from a phenomenal central performance by Lopez de Ayala.

The movie's mimicry of reality TV clichés is eerie, from the use of re-creations and supplemental footage (especially the experimental video Dawn and Jeff made together for a high school art project) to the smarmy commentary.

The story eventually resolves itself a little too neatly, but it never devolves into a freak show or a fable, thanks in large part to Farmiga and Stahl's deft, quirky performances.

Beautifully animated epic is never dull.

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

The identity of the bad guy is ludicrously obvious; and his public unmasking relies on the dopiest contrivance in recent memory.

Neither cheerfully naughty nor suffused with gauzy prurience, it evokes a time of turbulent (and often ugly) emotions with disquieting intensity.

There's nothing much new going on here (we feel compelled to point out the resemblance to one of the worst-ever episodes of The X-Files, "Teso Los Bichos"), but it's all slickly done, with the requisite big jumps, false leads, weird science and scary trips down dark corridors.

Lurie's film never fully reconciles the story about newsroom ethics with the sentimental drama about bad dads and bereft sons.

B-movie stalwart Michael Madsen turns in a no-holds-barred, road-wreck performance in this nihilistic crime thriller, which plays out a variation on the old maxim that there's no honor among thieves -- even if they're cops.

It's hard to watch two fine actors working themselves into a lather for so little reward.

Situations don't come much more claustrophobic, and if the payoff doesn't quite live up to the build-up, the film is still an enjoyable exercise in claustrophobic suspense.

(A) languorous, mud-spattered psychological tale.

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.

Unfortunately, this visually sumptuous epic is the very definition of a "prestige production," swaddled in good taste and better intentions.

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

Linear storytelling was never Herzog's strong suit even under the best of conditions. His strength lies in capturing lucid lunacy on film, and Manoel da Silva's descent into the jaws of madness is a straight shot into the heart of darkness, a place familiar to both Herzog and Kinski.

Where "Charade" unfolds in a fantasy Paris full of glamorous white people, Demme's film takes place in a gray tangle of streets teeming with multi-ethnic Parisians. Newton and Robbins mimic Hepburn and Matthau, while Wahlberg is the anti-Grant, lumpen and thuggish rather than beguilingly debonair.

Blanchett's insouciant but steely performance alone makes the film worth watching, but it's Brenda Fricker's quietly underplayed turn as Guerin's mother that makes your throat tighten.

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.

By the time the film winds itself up, the sophisticated fizz of its first 45 minutes has been smothered by explosive bombast.

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.

Frequently funny, generally fizzy and occasionally piercingly perceptive about the price love exacts.

However fact-based the material may be, Jordan's salt-of-the-earth characters, with their bluster and pride and rough-edged loyalty, are all too familiar, and their travails feel formulaic, right down to the life-affirming climax.

No doubt about it: Unlike David Lean's much-loved classic, Cuaron's film is loosely based on Dickens. And that's just fine.

God moves in mysterious -- some might say positively spiteful -- ways in this trio of scabrous tales adapted from short stories by "Trainspotting's" Irvine Welsh.

Though ultimately something less than the sum of its parts, the film's performances are reason enough to see it.

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

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.

What it lacks in objectivity, it makes up for in vivid intimacy.

Character-driven thriller, which plays out against a backdrop of desperation, self-loathing and grinding poverty.

Though screenwriter Dianne Houston spent time observing the real-life Dulaine, her screenplay is a showcase for triumph-of-the-underdog sports-movie cliches and coming-of-age-through-adversity moral lessons.

The ideal viewer is a Miike fan...You know who you are.

Gloriously seductive musical sequences seem suddenly hokey and self-conscious when they're staged in Western settings, and the songs' English-language lyrics are painfully banal.

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.

Though the story meanders, the film's look is nothing short of breathtaking.

The movie's greatest liability is the familiarity of the material, much parodied since the glory days of John Ford. Unfortunately, Thornton's love for its iconography doesn't quite bring it to life.

It's an amiable enough picture, and genuinely insightful about the emotional appeal of devoted fandom.

Hicks smothers the story in portentous images and the obligatory memory-inducing soundtrack. The effect is like peering at a photo through layers of shellac: evocative but remote.

A hokey, more-than-a-little-annoying mystical journey of self-discovery.

You may not care for the message, but there's nothing insidious about it.

More isn't always better; everything feels slightly forced, and the funny bits -- make no mistake, there are several -- are all but lost in the noise.

While both the novel and the film are weighted in favor of Bill's (Cruise) character, it's Kidman who gives the film's standout performance.

It would be hard to mount a straight-faced defense of Brisseau's feverish moral tale, complete with a lurking angel of death, but the carnal machinations are hugely entertaining -- particularly if you like your skin with a bracing sermon chaser.

While the cast is uniformly committed, some are able to make more of the material than others.

The bones of a great Western remain barely visible under the layer of mush he and screenwriter Ken Kaufman smooth over them, reminders of the viciously memorable film that might have been.

The trouble is that Turturro's reach considerably exceeds his grasp.

Unwilling to offend, Zwick whitewashes a culture in which brutality and contemplative beauty were inextricably intertwined and, afraid to alienate audiences, he shies away from the story's logical downbeat conclusion, replacing it with an "ambiguous" ending that recalls, of all things, "The Road Warrior."

It's a back-to-basics, gore-and-gristle look at the no-frills nastiness of 1970s films, in which monsters, mutants and ghosts can't hold a candle to the sheer, unadulterated evil that lurks in the hearts of men.

The lives of three deeply unhappy New Yorkers crisscross in unexpected ways in writer-director Joe Maggio's uneven but strangely affecting film.

All the segments are technically polished, but none offers much substance.

It quickly becomes clear that Nijinsky's disordered thoughts are simply the rantings of a man losing his grip on reality. They're sad and occasionally evocative, but they're not especially interesting in and of themselves, and do nothing to evoke or illuminate Nijinsky's genius.

The stripped-down production give a disturbing sense of immediacy to an otherwise fairly conventional story about boys being prepared for war.

Barber's screenplay is mired in cliches that got old in 1935.

It takes a certain genius to make butchered corpses, sociopathic lunacy and meth-fueled debauchery nerve-scrapingly dull, and German director Marc Schoelermann and screenwriters Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (Crank) possess it.

Has a certain silly, kid-friendly charm.

Though the script's twists and turns are fairly conventional and the Davis subplot is handled in an awkwardly obvious way, first-time feature filmmaker Robert Connolly understands the power of style.

For all the "touched by an angel" sentimentality, the movie's eerie, slightly menacing vision of black-clad angels lurking in the shadowy corners of unsuspecting lives is genuinely haunting.

A risky, not entirely successful comedy about mental disability, based on the novel by Sherwood Kiraly.

The fun is in the mayhem, and there's plenty of it.

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."

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

Sigourney Weaver and Alan Rickman imbue screenwriter Angela Pell's characters with a quiet authenticity that's surprisingly moving.

The result isn't exactly funny, just profoundly peculiar and even occasionally, unexpectedly poignant.

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

Affleck's gloomy, one-note performance exacerbates the problem, but the stellar supporting cast helps compensate.

Though generally sympathetic, the film manages (without stooping to clichéd moralizing) to suggest that being Ron Jeremy isn't the non-stop paradise his fans imagine.

A sweet-natured ode to rave culture saddled with a ridiculously clichéd plot line.

Parker's adaptation is meticulous, unsentimental, beautifully acted-- but nearly two and a half hours worth of dying babies, rain-spattered streets, ragged children and filthy, bug-infested rooms is a bit oppressive.

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

And while it was always clear that Lucas cared more about special effects than acting, here his lack of interest has produced phenomenally wooden performances from newcomers and veterans alike: Only the imperious Christopher Lee, as baleful Count Dooku, emerges unscathed.

Ellis' slight film has its charms, and the backstory he concocted to lead into the original 18-minute short is effective. But the film lags badly in the middle.

It’s clearly meant to be a light romp –a party movie to be enjoyed in group settings—and it is.

It's the kind of film Hollywood doesn't make any more, and a pleasant retro diversion.

Simultaneously gorgeous and forgettable, sentimental and prurient.

Only die-hard and undemanding Chan fans need apply.

The supporting cast is a riot of stock exotic characters, verging on the offensively stereotypical.

The horror of LaBute's articulate, self-deluded characters is that they're both sharply drawn and just vague enough that you can insert face here.

Sentimental and predictable, Meily's sweet-natured feature-film debut was hugely popular in the Philippines; its day-to-day details will be exotic to non-Filipino audiences but the characters' dilemmas are couched in the universal language of sitcom complications and fortuitous resolutions.

Rob Zombie's pitch-perfect evocation of '70s horror films about monstrous families and the unfortunates who cross their path is one of a handful of sequels that both improve on their sources and play perfectly as stand-alones.

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.

But fabulous though the allusions, sets and costumes are, Busch's performance is the movie's heart, and like the screen idols whose every gesture he's lovingly absorbed, Busch can pack a world of meaning into an arched eyebrow and a slight crack of the voice.

The film gets off to a slow start and runs long, but Gold and Helfand effectively stake out their own piece of a large and complicated issue.

Compelling on a personal level.

It's a light, silly instantly forgettable comedy peppered with action set-pieces and affectionate nods to its fondly remembered predecessor, including a gracious end-credits dedication to the late Don Adams and Edward Platt.

Doesn’t break any new documentary ground, but it does exactly what it sets out to do: Preserve a live event and make it available to a broader audience.

Director Jesse Peretz, onetime bassist for The Lemonheads, cut his teeth on music videos and appears to have embraced the austere aesthetics of Dogme 95 filmmakers without comprehending that an interesting story and well-developed characters are supposed to be part of the package.

Director Nancy Savoca's no-frills record of a show forged in still-raw emotions captures the unsettled tenor of that post 9-11 period far better than a more measured or polished production ever could.

Juvenile and pointless.

Essentially a romantic comedy with a heavier-than-usual dramatic component.

An astonishing act of synthesis, bringing together disparate Ripper theories and a fiercely idiosyncratic version of London's history, architecture, policing and social structure.

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.

Though Estevez's achievement doesn't quite live up to his ambitions -- the climax of Altman's "Nashville" (1975) evokes the same brutal loss of innocence to more shattering effect -- it still contains enough powerful moments to balance the weaker sections.

Like "Secret Things," the film is ultimately infuriating, subtle, self-indulgent, astute and disingenuous, which makes for great -- if divisive -- conversation.

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

Thoroughly old-fashioned entertainment.

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 parade of eccentrics never ends, and Stone's near-miraculous achievement is to drain the life right out of material so sordid you'd think it couldn't help but be interesting. A must to avoid.

It all seems terribly familiar.

Efficient if uninspired documentary.

Gives off an air of clammy desperation that feels all too authentic without being especially funny and bogs down early in repetitive shtick. (review of re-release)

The film isn’t a genre changer, but it’s elegant and admirably remorseless—and when it breaks bad, it breaks very bad indeed.

If you can't spell "bogeyman," you shouldn't make movies about him.

Though the performances are surprisingly good - the characters are drawn with a broad brush, but the actors, almost all professional comics, hit all the right notes - the material just isn't funny enough to justify the film's length.

This candy-colored animated fable is an awkward mix of corny bee puns, clever sight gags, kid-friendly action, adult-centric workplace angst and Seinfeld's distinctive navel-gazing wit. And what's up with those four-legged bees?

The only serendipitous touch is the casting of New York's "quality of life" watchdog, Rudolph Giuliani, as himself.

A slicked up, perfectly watchable update of a movie that was just about perfect on its own bleakly seedy terms.

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.

A breezy romantic comedy in which opposites attract against all the reasonable odds, this slight but thoroughly charming film benefits immeasurably from the assured performances of leads Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno.

Pacino's no-holds-barred performance is either the reason to see this tepid thriller or the reason to avoid it. His evocation of a Sidney Falco-style flack worn to a nub by decades of trying to spin this dirty town is nothing if not bravura.

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.

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.

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.

An utterly formulaic, teen-oriented romance whose greatest asset is charming leads Julia Stiles and Sean Patrick Thomas.

Zwick frequently sacrifices dramatic urgency in the name of sobriety.

Mark Boone Jr. makes a vivid impression as eccentric loner Beau Brower, and Danny Huston is mesmerizing as the leader of the shrieking, slashing, wallowing-in-gore bloodsuckers. They effortlessly eclipse the rest of the cast.

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

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

Wahlberg acquits himself well, and the supporting cast -- which includes pioneering rocker Levon Helm in a scene-stealing cameo as an aging gun buff who knows a thing or two about cover-ups, Ned Beatty as a corrupt politician, and a Strangelovian Rade Serbedzija -- is so strong you almost wish the film were longer so they could have more screen time.

Ultimately, the film feels unfocused and attenuated, despite its brief running time.

Screenwriter and co-director West -- who works in gay porn -- evinces an easy and even-handed familiarity with the milieu, and his characters only occasionally lapse into broad caricature.

Kapadia's intelligent, nuanced performance is the film's highlight, balanced by Khanna's portrayal of Nashaad, who could easily be a patronizing, chauvinist caricature.

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.

Adapted from J.G. Ballard's cult novel, a dispassionate exegesis of warped desire, Cronenberg's movie is suitably cold, cold, cold: proof positive that movies about sex aren't always sexy movies, at least by conventional standards.

The first-rate cast is lost at sea.

Director and cowriter Niall Johnson's black comedy falters at the end, but until then it manages to wring gentle humor from murder most well bred.

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

And while the divas make their characters hugely entertaining, they're also such high profile actresses in such a soft-edged film that it's hard to actually worry about what's to become of them.

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

This is a shameless, straightforward soap opera (no Almodovarian excess here!), but it's pretty entertaining on its own sudsy terms.

Palindromes read the same way backward and forward, and Todd Solondz' sour tale ends where it begins.

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 feature-length Twilight Zone episode, filtered -- not entirely successfully -- though the sensibilities of David Lynch and his Wild at Heart collaborator, Barry Gifford.

Like most contemporary romantic comedies, the film's plot works only if you accept that everyone behaves like a complete and utter idiot at all times.

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

Slight and pleasantly predictable film coasts along on the considerable charms of its cast and exotic setting.

The film's style is best described as utilitarian, but it gets the job done; the performances range from good to a bit amateurish.

Who knew the rock 'n' roll life could be so mild?

The film's tone - a mix of childlike directness, twee whimsy and arty sentimentality - is a matter of taste.

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

Sweet-natured, formulaic and ripe for an American remake.

The quality of the CGI-heavy special effects is variable and Nomura's fey performance as Seimei gives his relationship with Hiromasa a distinctly homoerotic cast that may or may not be intentional, but the demon zombies and Doson's cackling familiar are crowd pleasers.

Swaddled in terms so trite and cliched that they're almost guaranteed to bring out the closet cynic in even the most sympathetic viewers.

Driven by sheer enthusiam (much of it for the worst excesses of Hollywood filmmaking), which makes it fun to watch in spite of its fundamental ridiculousness.

Baldwin dominates the screen with his slick, beefy swagger, and if Prinze is less than convincing as a kid from Brooklyn, Caan and Ferrara nail Carmine and Bobby with such assured economy that it hardly matters they're one-note roles.

Queen Latifah's warmly formidable presence drives this amiable but poky comedy.

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

There's not an original thought in sight — the story is Evil Dead in a movie theater — and it doesn't pay to give much thought to the self-referential implications of the story: The demons and their gross-out antics are the main event.

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

You can't beat on Dead Man's on value-for-money terms, but it's like an all-you-can-eat buffet -- everything's tasty, the surfeit is sickening.

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.

Their dilemmas are the stuff of dozens of Masterpiece Theater productions, but they're brought to life with a vividness that defies changing mores and cuts to the heart of the ways people justify hurting each other in the name of love.

The animation is truly breathtaking, the action sequences are spectacular (and sometimes very violent) and everything floats along on the strains of Il Won's spare, hypnotic score.

It's all cutely derivative, occasionally charming and very occasionally clever...but the movie's vague aspirations to being something more than disposable fluff never amount to anything.

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

While the film's exploration of Irish religious intolerance takes it to many familiar areas, the specifics are unfamiliar and fine performances -- especially those of leads Cunningham and Brady.

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

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.

So inconsequential that it starts evaporating from memory the minute it's over.

Ricci's less flashy characterization of the immature Selby is equally skilled and meshes seamlessly with Theron's uncompromising performance.

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.

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.

Ultimately, though, the film is forgettable even by the standards of prefabricated pop ephemera.

Slow, solemn going, despite its best efforts at thundering soldiers and comic-relief kings.

An old man's movie, filled with regret over things lost, corrupted and spoiled.

Funny little Nazis require rather more finesse than The Littlest Reich possesses.

It's little more than a disjointed succession of kick-ass action scenes.

An odd blend of recycled American exploitation movie tropes and snarky Euro-art film attitude.

An earnest, thoughtful, surprisingly well-written (given the number of writers who worked on it) drama about guilt and betrayal that features excellent performances by Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt and dares to defy the juvenile wham bam thank you ma'am aesthetics that have turned mainstream action pictures into feature-length video games.

Writer/director Austin Chick falls into the timeworn trap of making an immature, irritating film about immature, irritating characters.

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

The film is juvenile when it should be adult, coarse when it ought to be bubbly, and upfront when witty circumspection is indicated. The result feels a bit like a drag show, a camp blend of pitch-perfect mimicry and anachronistic raunch.

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.

Sentimental, formulaic, predictable and shamelessly manipulative, Marcos Carnevale’s tale of late-life love is also genuinely heartbreaking and heartening.

Clever, fast-paced and surprisingly moving.

The creepy set pieces are repetitive and the payoff is rather unsatisfying, even though the prophecies do eventually pan out.

Everyone involved obviously had a blast, but in the end this is a one-joke movie, and the joke is stretched too thin.

Anonymously titled and packaged like a vulgar teen sex comedy, this candy-colored trifle is so precious it nearly floats away on a cloud of fairy dust.

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

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.

Mega-budget action extravaganzas don't get much sillier than this.

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

Despite its failings, Wind Chill represents a road rarely taken by 21st-century American horror films: Original (in the non-remake sense of the term), subtle and restrained.

Depending on your taste, either much hilarity or a tedious barrage of tasteless, juvenile pranking ensues. Trust your instincts.

In the end it's all seductive surface and no substance, but Lough has a bold eye and a vivid sense of uniquely urban beauty.

French up-and-comer Alexandre Aja's full-bore do-over is a shockingly successful update of a seminal 1970s shocker.

The story is shallow stuff, but pretty entertaining until it becomes utterly preposterous.

This efficient fright machine features a knowing cameo by Curtis's mom -- "Psycho's" Janet Leigh -- a couple of bloody good scares and a genuinely affecting performance from Curtis.

The youngsters all turn in game performances, but the standout is Anne Heche, whose weird Missy Egan is pure Mimsy Farmer at maximum twitch.

The pace is brisk and the details are carefully arranged, but there's no sparkle -- and what's a romance without that?

Engaging, high-spirited tale.

Based on the story of Milarepa (1043 - 1123), who renounced the violence and vengeance of his early life to become a revered Tibetan Buddhist saint, lama Neten Chokling's directing debut ends on a frustrating spiritual cliffhanger.

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

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

If the film ultimately amounts to little more than a middle-aged coming-of-age story, it's richly imagined and filled fanciful touches in keeping with its passionate subject.

Fluffy, candy-colored and aimed directly at tweens -- girls between the ages of 10 and 12.

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.

For all its classy cast and glum polish, this metaphysical horror picture with big things on its mind lacks the malevolent buzz that vitalized SEVEN and THE HIDDEN, two of the more obvious sources from which it draws considerable inspiration.

It may not be by-the-book history -- a relative term in any event, when discussing the ancients whose worldview embraced men, gods and monsters -- but what a spectacle!

A crude, artless bogey tale.

The film's seriousness of intent is unimpeachable – Forman and Carriere see disturbing echoes of the modern world in 18th-century Spain -- but the execution borders on farce.

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