Maitland McDonagh

An icily seductive parable about family, power, unconventional justice and the perils of answered prayers.

Canet and Lefevre pruned subplots and fixed the novel's ending -- it's now merely preposterous rather than patently absurd – but it's the cast that makes the genre clichés feel vivid and even fresh.

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.

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

Although phenomenally well-acted, the film's leisurely pace ultimately makes it feel as oppressive as the tropical heat and humidity that gradually turn the characters into slow-moving heaps of damp, dirty rags.

An acid-dipped valentine to the sometimes seedy magic of movies.

Its power lies in the intense, subtle performances of the ensemble cast and Bellott's ability to keep the tangled narrative threads from becoming a knotted mess.

Despite some lovely performances (though, sad to say, Patricia Neal's isn't one of them) and charming moments, this meandering ensemble piece and its Tennessee Williams-ish finale is oddly out of character.

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.

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.

Given the controversy, which strongly suggested that the filmmakers had it in for President Bush, the film's biggest shocker may be how kind Range and coscreenwriter Simon Finch are to him.

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!

The formulaic mechanical plot machinations benefit greatly from the presence of the vivacious Stiles, gravely beautiful Blair and personable Lee, who radiates fundamental decency without seeming like a sap.

Lafosse's razor sharp dissection of relationships strained to the breaking point is hypnotic in a road-accident kind of way.

A sprawling, messy, frustrating and impassioned examination of the psychological fallout from America's obsession with a highly artificial and all-but unattainable standard of beauty.

Simultaneously groundbreaking and remarkably faithful to the classic play.

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

The film works best when it's sticking to the guns and poses conventions of macho crime pictures. When it reaches for emotional resonance, the results range from unconvincing to ludicrous.

This tedious hodgepodge of martial-arts mayhem, bogus mysticism and computer-generated special effects doesn't even pretend to have a plot.

Black comedy requires perfect pitch: Pedro Almodovar has it and cowriters/directors Michalis Reppas and Thanasis Papathanasiou don't, at least by the evidence of this film.

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

A down–under fable with a sweet country-music twang.

A taut, literate tale of civilized men pitted against implacable nature, encumbered by a meaningless and not especially enticing title.

What a joyless, fussy contraption of a movie!

It's an overblown campfire tale that doesn't know when to stop.

It's sad to see such subtle, wrenchingly emotional work expended on such trifling material.

Crowe preserves the original film's plot twists and turns, but his version lumbers when it should be whipping along, daring you to keep up. The wall-to-wall pop music soundtrack eventually becomes oppressive, and Cruise's oily smile doesn't really constitute a characterization.

It's all pure, brainless fluff, but it's unpretentious and "Wannabe" is damnably catchy.

This psychological sci-fi thriller was originally made as a 40-minute segment of an unrealized portmanteau picture, then expanded into a freestanding feature. That's probably why it's padded with shots of Olham running down corridors.

Overall it's a frustratingly uneven movie, delicate at one moment and bluntly obvious the next.

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.

John Walter's documentary suggests that Johnson, who made no distinction between his life and his art, designed every detail of his own mysterious 1995 suicide with the same whimsical care that went into his painstakingly assembled pieces, and provides an engaging overview of Johnson's eccentric career in the process.

Mitevska telescopes centuries of conflict between nations into an intimate story of siblings whose hopes for the future are being slowly poisoned by the sins of the past.

Since her claim to fame is having brought the first living panda -- a cub named Su Lin -- out of China, Harkness's success is a given, but the footage of pandas in their natural surroundings is enchanting.

Familiar story, electrifying execution.

Barnes, now in his seventies and relocated by the Witness Protection Program, is shot only in silhouette, but there's plenty of footage of him in his heyday, dressed to the pimpalicious nines and playing to the cameras like a movie star.

A bit of whimsy.

The film vacillates between inanity and flat-out lameness, and the decision to recut from an R-rated version to a PG-13 sucked out whatever life might have been left.

This flashy and ultimately conservative morality tale relies on shockingly frank sex talk to cover the fact that the characters are shockingly poorly developed.

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

Desperate-to-shock slice of sleaze life.

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

Ambitious, deeply flawed and studded with sequences that achieve pure, majestic greatness.

What really sinks the film, though, is the utter absence of chemistry between Perry and Willis.

Sweet, likable and consistently engaging, if so insubstantial that it's always on the verge of blowing away.

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

But what truly distinguishes the movie is Cage's performance, which is so off the wall that even if you don't like it you have to watch in awe.

Bello is phenomenally good as the embittered Marcia, while Stuart and Christensen do their best with their less complex roles, but they're all undermined by Alfieri's shrill, mannered dialogue and cliched backstories that wouldn't be out of place in a dysfunction-family-of-the-week movie.

It's easy to envision the big-budget remake, but hard to imagine a mainstream American production capturing the original's sour, sweaty immediacy.

Pekar's autobiographical chronicle of day-to-day banality is a rich, if dingy, tapestry of ordinary life in all its infinite, homely peculiarity, which filmmakers Sheri Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini bring to uniquely eccentric life.

This version moves like a freight train, but suffers from a debilitating charm deficit. Wahlberg is no Michael Caine and Norton delivers what must be the sourest, most lifeless performance of his career to date.

The ensemble performances are perfectly meshed, and the Sprechers deserves special credit for bringing the desperate underside of Posey's brittle self-assurance to the surface.

Director Joseph Ruben's best efforts can't keep Gerald Di Pego's puzzle-picture script from toppling into absurdity as it lurches from melodrama to psychological thriller with supernatural overtones to full-blown exercise in X-Files-style nuttiness.

Sporadically funny... occasionally very funny.

MacKinnon's film draws on his past as a youth worker and features a standout performance from first-time performer Harry Eden.

Clearly, there's the germ of a good -- potentially even great -- movie here, but it's thoroughly smothered by a pair of lazy, self-congratulatory star turns by Hoffman and Travolta.

Simultaneously gorgeous and forgettable, sentimental and prurient.

Canadian-born choreographer Alison Murray draws on her own experiences as a 15-year-old runaway living in squats and on the streets, in her feature-filmmaking debut, which is a clear-eyed look at the pleasures and price of abandoning conventional mores for experimental lifestyles.

There's less than meets the eye to writer-director Flowers' time-hopping narrative, and what could have been a routine but entertaining crime story gets hopelessly muddled in its telling, despite the efforts of a generally strong cast.

This second installment is heavy on battle sequences, which will thrill some viewers more than others.

Not a terrible movie exactly, just a dark, edgy idea relentlessly worn down into mildly diverting blandness by the mega-wattage presence of stars Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts.

Were the film's tone not so hysterical it might be provocative; as it is, insights and insults are inextricably intertwined.

Astonishingly inept drama.

This by-the-numbers (no pun intended) psychological thrill ride is efficient and utterly soulless.

Despite the futuristic setting, which relies so heavily on GGI effects that it looks like a feature-length production concept painting, this film is painfully predictable.

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

This dreary science-fiction/historical-action hybrid is a misfire of staggering proportions.

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

This soft, formulaic comedy/drama has a far better cast than it deserves, and they work their hearts out trying to bring life to a cliched script.

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.

Nathanson's script has a disheartening let's get on with it air, and the film feels like marathon training...

If Griffin were a jowly Southern redneck, his mean-spirited rants would make him a pariah.

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.

There's nothing hugely wrong with this picture, if you allow for the fact that it's derivative, predictable and crude. There just isn't anything especially right with it, except for a pretty creepy black-and-white nightmare sequence and a scene that reveals more than most people want to know about vampires' urinary peculiarities, but is certainly something you haven't seen before. Unfortunately, both occur within the last 20 minutes of the film, and there's a formulaic lot of nonsense to huff and puff through first.

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

There are echoes of Stephen Spielberg's "Duel," as well as "Roadgames," "The Hitcher" and "The Hills Have Eyes," but director/cowriter Mostow isn't interested in hommages: He's just looking to crank up the suspense (not the in your face action, thank heavens), bit by miserable bit, and does a very nice job of it.

Pacino is a one-man three-ring circus, blustering, capering, cursing, raging and weaseling his way through this predictable morality play like a trickster Satan on speed.

Brooding ghost story is rich with psychological and political implications that never obscure its fundamental creepiness.

Jelski's screenplay, a finalist in the fiercely competitive Walt Disney Screenwriting Fellowship competition, is repetitive and stagy.

It's a show we don't see, presumably because of issues with music rights, and while "much ado about nothing" might be overstating things, after more than an hour and a half of buildup, it would have been nice to see Wu-Tang perform.

Rymer's film doesn't revitalize vampire clichés in any significant way and, frankly, "Velvet Goldmine" is a more seductive movie about sex, death and rock and roll -- and it's not even about vampires.

The supernatural plot elements are developed so unconvincingly that the story seems to be about people ruining their own lives by believing in stupid superstitions, so it’s a shock to realize the ghostly goings-on are meant to be taken seriously.

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.

Frenetic and cheerless action aside, the film's real problem is the Cat, who looks most unmagically like a second-string college sports mascot and conducts himself like a risque baggy-pants comedian.

Delivers its commendable message with affecting eloquence.

Cunningham tackles a complicated subject, rejecting the stridency favored by filmmakers of the Spike Lee persuasion in favor of a more even-handed tone.

Tony Scott's thriller is flashy, but it's not dead stupid and it's never dull.

He (Anderson) manages to guide his cast of characters through an epic story of self-delusion with a skill and grace that many more experienced filmmakers would be hard put to match.

Sleek, stylish and crammed with girl-power action.

An awkward amalgam of road movie, buddy comedy and melodramatic conventions, first-time writer-director Jordan Roberts' male weepie ricochets between affecting scenes and insufferably maudlin ones.

Once it settles down, it becomes a star-making vehicle for Jackman, and a supremely polished example of the sort of swoony love story cherished by women who secretly hope that some day their prince will come.

The whole lurid business is undeniably entertaining, but it leaves a bad taste.

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.

This whimsical weeper gets off to an awkward start and never finds its footing.

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.

What begins as a sorry exercise in cynical seduction becomes a case of amour fou.

An Arthurian tale minus everything the average person knows or cares about Arthur and his knights.

If the movie overall had the bitter brio of Malcolm McDowell's brief turn as Globecom guru Teddy K, a Franken-mogul stitched together from bits of Richard Branson, Barry Diller and Rupert Murdoch, it would be a pointed black comedy.

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

Raised in Mumbai, classically trained actor-turned-writer-director Khanna addresses the volatile issue of women's rights within Islamic households, and if his sensationalistic debut feature makes its point with a heavy hand, it's also starkly effective.

Inlike many directors with music video backgrounds, Tim Story keeps the flashy cutting to a minimum and lets the story unfold at its own unhurried pace.

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.

A surprisingly tight, clever, twisty heist tale.

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.

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.

But once you're good and drunk on the look, details like the tin-eared tough-guy dialogue (which sounds especially stilted issuing from flesh-and-blood mouths) don't seem so important.

Overall the film is a stylish lark with no resonance, a mean-spirited one-night stand of a movie.

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.

The writers get the mix just about right, and first-time Bond director Martin Campbell moves things along fairly briskly.

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.

Director Stephen Purvis and writer Chris Haddock never rise above the material's inherent pulpiness, but they keep the twists coming until the very end.

Characters find themselves in absurdly complicated situations, but respond with sardonic cool rather than hot-blooded hysteria.

Shelly was murdered before she could continue developing as a writer and director, and while this, her last film, is extremely uneven and undermined by an excess of quirk, Keri Russell's performance as a pregnant pie-guru is a charmer with a bracing streak convincingly desperate determination.

No aliens. No firefights in space. No robots. Just an eerily attractive, sleekly costumed cast in a stylish, cooly intelligent throwback to the Twilight Zone era of deeply serious science fiction.

Carrey's relentless showboating is almost its undoing.

The result is an unpleasant slog to an unrewarding conclusion that feels far longer than it is.

The film ends on an ambiguous note that will infuriate some viewers and strike others as the only possible finale to Don's sad absurdist journey.

The love story is pretty conventional stuff, but Linney's finely calibrated, low-key performance as Callie goes a long way towards making it more interesting than it might otherwise be.

This sentimental comedy is generally sweet natured.

Formulaic though it is, the story hits the right emotional buttons and promises that hope and dogged work trump despair.

If ever a movie cried out to be French, it's this one, and not just because it's a remake of Claude Chabrol's notoriously icy La Femme Infidele (1968).

Surprisingly, Hurley comes off better than either of her demonstrably more versatile co-stars; she's not much of an actress, but she has an engagingly saucy swagger and her open-mouthed expression of outraged disbelief is priceless.

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

What divides opinion is the film's tone: Are those naive, portentous pronouncements about media, voyeurism and the numbing, pornographic allure of atrocity footage a sly reflection of the YouTube generation's boundary-free narcissism and callow youth, or evidence that Romero – never one to underplay a metaphor – has become a hectoring, tin-eared fogey?

Whether this measured exercise in romantic melancholy moves you to tears or bores you to them is probably a matter of personal susceptibility to the sting of bitter regret for love lost.

A riot of artfully grungy hotel rooms, sleazy costumes and sordid behavior, Allan Mindel's directing debut gives off the smug air of hipsters at play, making it hard to care what happens to any of its lost souls and inept opportunists.

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

Watts is good -- occasionally very good -- and her willingness to be filmed at unflattering angles, in pore-wallowing or with bright blue ice cream smeared on her face is admirable.

Renner's performance as Dahmer is unimpeachable, fascinating without being charismatic, and Kayaru's Rodney is a marvel of complicated characterization under difficult circumstances.

This thin, clichéd comedy of crime and social climbing contains some scattered laughs and whole lot of padding.

Markowitz 's low key coming of age/coming out story isn't particularly original, but features subtle performances and a vivid sense of place.

Without Bullock, the film's frantic antics would be painful to watch; with her, they're just trivial.

The technology for twinning a single young actress is considerably more seamless than it was in 1961, and Lohan is a perky charmer.

Poignant documentary.

There's a caper and there are some laughs, but this isn't a larky caper flick; it's a pulpy little story that could at any minute go straight to hell.

Though consistently handsome, the film never quite achieves the shallow but hugely seductive intensity of its MTV-style opening credits sequence.

It's too fundamentally light-hearted to wallow in grinding poverty and despair.

The battle sequences and lightsaber battles are gripping, and for every scene that doesn't deliver the goods, there's another that hums with surprising intensity.

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.

Westby's sympathy for the Scottys of the world is evident, but like them he doesn't always know how to put his best face forward.

Zwick frequently sacrifices dramatic urgency in the name of sobriety.

There's little room for ideas when there are flaming cars to be crashed, and overall the film is an infelicitous hodgepodge that lifts as liberally from "The Quatermass Experiment" (1956) and "28 Weeks Later" (2007) as "Body Snatchers" while leaving all the best bits behind -- even the iconic pods are gone.

The trouble with this precious fable isn't that the Whitmans are self-absorbed ninnies: It's that they aren't characters at all.

Katzir's documentary is as much a labor of love as Spaisman's theater, and it's often rough around the edges.

The result is undeniably offensive and occasionally very funny, but the gags fall flat as often as they hit their mark.

A quietly harrowing chronicle of addiction and fragile recovery anchored by Vera Farmiga's intense performance.

Thoroughly gripping.

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.

Absolutely breathtaking documentary whose close-up shots of birds in flight are so freakishly intimate that the film is compelled to open with the statement they're not special effects.

Mukherjee's charm keeps the child-like Geeta from being thoroughly annoying, and the musical numbers are pleasant, if not particularly memorable.

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.

Davaa and Falorni's film does suggest that camels have inner lives as rich and complicated as the human beings with whom they live in such intimate proximity. But they're also wholly camels, matted, goopy-eyed, gritty with sand and quick to knee an adorable calf in the snout when its demands become annoying.

Rough-edged but affecting drama.

This film pivots on a romantic triangle as overwrought as it is stylized. It's like a Douglas Sirk melodrama ratcheted up with fists of fury and wrapped in apparently endless yards of shimmering silk.

A brightly colored, picaresque adventure that's equal parts telenovela melodrama and pop-magic realism.

The breakout star is retired English bouncer Lenny McLean, 49, who memorably declares, "I f***ing hate violence."

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.

Murphy is a revelation as James, and what American Idol castoff Hudson lacks in technical acting craft she makes up for in raw energy and a voice that could melt the rhinestones off a beauty queen. To complain that Beyonce pales by comparison is to fault her for nailing the essence of the infinitely malleable Deena.

This coolly beautiful film is both a superior thriller and an engrossing study of a sociopath's progress.

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

Mines familiar territory and does nothing especially new with it. On the plus side, Kishitani is a spectacular villain.

Although inspired by actual events, the film proceeds along formulaic wish-fulfillment lines, its dynamics unaltered by the casting of a mixed-race actor in what was originally a redneck role; it's a sign of some sort of social progress that justified ass-kicking trumps race.

The movie takes a desperately wrong turn about 45 minutes in, and you can almost hear the great sucking sound as the whole thing churns down the drain in a swirl of narrative contradictions.

(A) languorous, mud-spattered psychological tale.

Unfortunately, Flicker wasn't able to rise above the limitations of his microbudget, and his message is compromised by student-film production values and performances that range from adequate to pretty awful.

Freakies fans will swoon.

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.

Ricci brings her trademark gravity to the wary Suzie, but Blanchett's role is the dazzler.

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

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

This simplistic animated feature falls firmly within the long tradition of bland, upbeat and earnest religious instructional films.

The film isn't even enjoyably sleazy: It's just dumb and tacky.

A preposterous wilderness adventure (the kind that makes kids think sneaking into the zoo's bear pit is a cool idea) laid over a touchy-feelie story about good parenting.

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

While the film is shot in shades of gray, the drama is played out in black and white.

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.

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

Tatou IS adorable, but Michele is a such a brainless flibbertigibbet that it's hard to take her spiritual quest at all seriously, and if you don't feel in your heart that she's really TRYING to grow and mature as a spiritual person, then who cares about her idiotic antics?

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

The trouble isn't just that this haunted-house story, written by Mark Wheaton and directed by Hong Kong filmmakers Danny and Oxide Pang, is both formulaic and derivative. It's that it's completely free of atmosphere, the very thing that their 2002 "The Eye" had in such creepy abundance.

This sly, subtle and very French psychological drama dissects the relationship between three insecure Sorbonne students and their deeply flawed idol.

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

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.

This rambling exercise in local color has been a pet project of Duvall's for more than a decade, and it's to his credit that he managed to get such a low-concept picture produced. It's also to his credit that he resists the temptation to take easy potshots at religion, particularly of the revivalist variety.

The war between highly specific coming-of-age angst and icky-sticky overcoming-adversity cliches eventually brings the whole thing down.

This amiable picture talks tough, but it's all bluster -- in the end it's as sweet as "Greenfingers."

Even the film's ironic ending is deftly handled, its cynicism is tempered by a certain rueful wisdom.

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

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.

For anyone unfamiliar with pentacostal practices in general and theatrical phenomenon of Hell Houses in particular, it's an eye-opener.

fans of this venerable Eurotrash form will welcome any evidence that it's still alive and writhing lasciviously.

A disappointment that mines the same vein of gross-out romantic comedy as"There's Something About Mary," without that film's oddball charm.

Harlin's brisk pacing leaves little time for reflection, but the whole house of blood-spattered cards dissolves upon even cursory reflection.

To call the film noisy and brainless isn't even a criticism - it's unadulterated auto-porn, as shallow and shiny as it wants to be.

The lanky, wide-eyed Tautou is so phenomenally charming -- her smile could sweeten vinegar -- as to make Amelie irresistible.

This potent drama might be dismissed as therapy in the guise of filmmaking if it weren't so clear-eyed. At its core are three remarkable performances.

Mena's characters rarely do the sort of spectacularly stupid things that provoke derisive laughter from seasoned horror-moviegoers.

Genuinely gripping, balancing the travails of constructing the tunnel against the characters' stories with considerable skill.

Amiable, brightly colored spoof of '60s pop culture.

The film's title refers both to tiny, fish-shaped vials of liquid heroin and the small fry flitting around the edges of the urban drug scene.

The larger message remains clear: Unified communities have more power than they realize, and the most vicious enemy of progress is learned helplessness.

A textbook illustration of the American movie industry's ability to take an offbeat foreign film and systematically alter or soften every provocative and original thing about it.

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

There's a terrific movie buried in Woody Allen's tale of two American girls broadening their horizons in Barcelona, and every once in a while tantalizing glimpses penetrate the twee narration and mannered performances.

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.

As a debut it holds out the promise that Montias might do something more interesting in his next film.

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

This stylized tale of guilt and retribution is a surprisingly sleek and affecting drama.

The film falls short even as a record of Broderick and Lane's crowd-pleasing rapport: Both have done the show so many times that every scrap of life is gone.

Scenemaker Dito Montiel's rough, grating memoir of growing up in a poor, violent section of Astoria, Queens, in the mid-1980s features a few too many arty flourishes, but also packs a raw power that's hard to shake.

The acting is flat, and the scientist's ideological speeches too bluntly designed to mirror post-9/11 rhetoric. But there's a dreamy fascination to the iconic images of machines fighting a perpetual war for the human creators they'll inevitably outlast.

The plot unfolds exactly as you expect, but Gedeck imbues Martha with a remarkably subtlety of spirit.

Surprisingly compelling, if not up to dealing with the larger political issues it raises.

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

Clichés negate bona fides; hence, the movie feels like a corny Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland vehicle with cussing. That said, the tapping is fabulous.

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.

For all the bloodshed, it's fundamentally a cold, cold fable, the icy whisper that turns every happy thing to ash.

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.

Patwardhan offers no solutions, but poses disturbing questions.

A workmanlike piece of storytelling elevated by fine performances.

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

It's a serious and well-researched consideration of natural childbearing vs. hospital delivery that explores the larger social conditions and assumptions that shape women's choices.

Formulaic to the core, this reworking of the fondly remembered high-school slasher picture works surprisingly well on its own terms.

The truly creepy thing is that there's no bizarre, COMA-like conspiracy behind the malfeasance, just an awful betrayal of trust -- the kind of thing that sends an icy, paranoid chill through the blood just as the anesthetic takes hold.

Slick and glib when it means to be profound yet ruefully witty; its rhythms are pure sitcom, complete with emotional rimshots.

These lessons are driven home via silly dialogue ("Her name was Marion and she loved volcanoes...") and painfully predictable plot complications, repeated often enough that there's no need to take notes, except for the benefit of friends who fall asleep.

The juvenile gags seem aimed at moviegoers who hate the whole idea of independent/art/foreign-language films and the stuck-up eggheads who like them -- so what's the point?

You come away from the film wishing her the best, but fearing the worst.

Director Rick Rosenthal ("Halloween II") seems to have forgotten everything he ever knew about generating suspense, relying on cliched shadows and grainy, handheld images supposedly shot by the increasingly terrified students.

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."

The sequence in which the crew acquires press credentials to the Republican National Convention by helping organizers desperate to book a rock band (they deliver Leitch's scruffy pals the Interpreters USSA) is priceless.

Pointed, unsubtle political satire.

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.

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 film is graphic without being lurid, and the naked emotions onscreen are far more shocking than the naked bodies -- though there are plenty of those, in all shapes and sizes.

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

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

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

An uneasy mix of frat-boy yocks and "Twilight Zone"-style science-fiction.

There are poignant moments in this apocalyptic "what if" exercise.

Wongpim pays tribute to classic Italian Westerns in his face-hugging close-ups, but his film is more silly than existentially anarchic, and its exotic quirkiness wears thin quickly.

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

Bizarre, utterly original and truly indescribable comedy...You just have to see it for yourself.

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

Well-written and surprisingly well-acted by a relatively inexperienced cast

Noisy and obnoxious, this flashy action picture is so hell-bent on seeming smart that it fairly forces you to think about how fundamentally stupid it is.

As M, Dench knows she has a tiger by the tail and isn't fazed in the slightest. Reservations aside, the film marks the beginning of a new phase in James Bond's history, and it promises to be a gripping one.

It's sometimes hard to breath for the sheer volume of acting sucking the air out of the room, and keeping three narratives movie without muddling them all is a hugely ambitious undertaking for any director, let alone one on his second film.

The heart of the problem may be that real life youth-sports insanity has far exceeded the bounds of family-friendly comedy.

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.

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

Cornish's raw, nuanced performance and Shortland's sympathetic but unsentimental portrayal of Heidi's fumbling steps toward maturity are underscored by Sydney-based band Decoder Ring's catchy, angst-ridden score.

The result is a soggy swamp of nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyahing, its only grace notes are Giamatti's fine, nuanced performance as Heep and Christopher Doyle's handsome cinematography.

Surprisingly effective supernatural tale in which there's more to fear from the living than the dead.

Not for all tastes, but produces haunting juxtapositions.

A murder mystery wrapped in an experimental portrait of life in a rural Hungarian town, writer-director Gyorgy Palfi's engrossing feature debut is a breathtaking feat of filmmaking.

Though it includes a couple of sword fights, Yamada's epic domestic drama could easily be called an anti-samurai film. But its aim is less to subvert the genre's conventions than to deepen them, extending its parameters to include the minutia and rhythms of everyday life.

Hugely smug and annoying.

Offbeat documentary filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato dissect the history and legend of perhaps the best known and most profitable pornographic movies ever made.

Lee occasionally stumbles as a documentarian... But the material is so profoundly moving that it hardly matters.

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

Could as easily be called "Spurlock: Cultural Learnings Of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of America."

Though the ballets themselves are beautifully shot, they lean heavily in the direction of gimmicky and prop-heavy pieces; they're visually interesting but, by and large, they're not great dance.

Salvatores draws strikingly unsentimental performances from his young actors, all making their film debuts, and juxtaposes the petty meanness of children with the calculated cruelty of desperate adults to haunting effect.