Maitland McDonagh

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

Anemic chronicle of money grubbing New Yorkers and their serial loveless hook ups.

Too daft by half -- it might have been better if Ken were less loony, especially because his nuttiness verges on implying that loons love large women -- but supremely good natured.

It's amusing more often than it isn't, largely because the cast is so nonchalant and, well, French about everything.

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

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

The laughs are low -- very low -- and the comedy often flags. But two elaborate sequences involving a bad-tempered little ankle-biter are standouts.

Del Toro's film ranks with the best examinations of children's inner lives, but be warned: Its haunting insights are best left to adults.

Cocky, vulgar and very noisy picture.

This is a thoroughly conventional story of one man's search for redemption in the neon slime; its multiple flashback structure is just a way of parceling out information, not a device used to undermine the narrative.

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.

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.

Francis Ford Coppola has turned John Grisham's pulpy bestseller into surprisingly creditable -- if morally muddled -- movie.

Swank is painfully uncharismatic, leaving Christopher Walken, in the minor role of occultist Count Cagliostro, to decamp with any scene in which he appears. His performance may not be historically credible, but it's hugely entertaining: Would that the same were true of the film overall.

Their downward spiral is like a slow-motion highway pileup: You might think you don't want to watch, but you can't tear your eyes away.

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.

This picture is just shapeless and shrill. It's disposable, forgettable and aimed at an audience that doesn't care.

Atkinson's painfully unfunny turn as an insensitive gynecologist is eclipsed by Hollander's scathingly funny portrayal of belligerent auteur Proclaimer, whose wears his pretenses with such scabby aplomb that they achieve high style.

The film's subtexts are profoundly reactionary. Women are foolish and untrustworthy.

It may be long, but it's not boring -- how could it be when jack o' lanterns float lazily overhead in the dining hall, and the venerable Maggie Smith turns into a cat?

While the transgressive trappings (especially the frank sex scenes) ensure that the film is never dull, Rodrigues's beast-within metaphor is ultimately rather silly and overwrought, making the ambiguous ending seem goofy rather than provocative.

A sweet-natured and refreshingly uncartoonlike look at the trials of an unworldly Midwestern college boy negotiating his freshman year at NYU.

Preachy and predictable, an afterschool special in all but name.

Why do moviegoers and gamers keep going to see video-game-based movies when neither group is ever happy with the results?

Jade's seamy excesses would be conventional in a direct-to-video erotic thriller; in a major studio production, they're embarrassing.

Though rooted in broad stereotypes and sassy platitudes, the film's feisty cast and generally sunny outlook make for warm and reassuring comfort viewing, the equivalent of a straight-from-the-box dish of mac and cheese.

Biopic cliches hamstring producer-star Jennifer Lopez's pet project.

If not exactly dull, Hopkins' stream-of-consciousness rant is nonetheless self-indulgent and crammed with bits of business that never add up to anything much.

The film LOOKS great, but at a brisk 88 minutes, there's no time to fill in back story, from the epic history of paladin persecution to the deeply personal mystery of David's mother, and the cliffhanger ending is so abrupt that the movie seems bizarrely truncated.

Things take an unexpected turn into far grimmer territory when the wormy Robert finally turns.

Feels astonishingly fresh, filled with subtle performances and devastatingly understated images - Sautet's final shot of Davos alone in a Paris crowd is a killer.

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

For a family-friendly holiday comedy, it's still coarse, formulaic and occasionally just plain weird.

Spooky and character-driven, this stylish ghost story owes a great deal to contemporary Japanese ghost movies in general and M. Night Shyamalan's "The Sixth Sense" (1999) in particular but weaves a creepy spell all its own.

It's hard to say whether the Wachowski brothers' live action take on the Japanese Speed Racer cartoons is more irritating because it looks like a Hot Wheels video game or because the brothers seem to think that there's a powerful family drama humming away beneath the flashing lights and spinning wheels.

This kind of gloomy razzle-dazzle isn't everyone's cup of mind-altering tea, but strong performances make it worth the effort to keep the time-tripping shenanigans straight until the surprisingly satisfying payoff.

Though handsomely mounted, this parable of intersecting destinies and implacable tragedy is as lifeless as a wax tableau.

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.

Equal parts "Mad Max" and "Day of the Dead," this third and supposedly final entry in the Resident Evil franchise is no less derivative than its predecessors but moves along at a brisk clip.

Lawrence runs through his usual repertory of mugging, seething and generally acting like a fool, only to be regularly upstaged by Arnold, Trey's pet piglet.

The film is never dull.

It's informative as far as it goes, but the film's raison d'etre is the simple sight of large wildlife up close and personal, and it's mesmerizing.

Even by the degraded standards of dim-witted summer blockbusters, this is sorry stuff.

The story of the business is historically interesting, but the story of a friendship tested to the breaking point is timeless.

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

Yugoslavian-born writer-producer-director-editor Vladan Nikolic weaves together the intersecting stories of lost souls who bring their international miseries to New York in this cool, cynical thriller.

All the right intentions but never overcomes the essential problem of showing what's going on inside people's heads.

There's way too much CGI gadgetry, some inventive, much simply flashy in the worst kind of video-game way. The kids are nearly lost in the glitz.

By turns awe-inspiring and deeply human.

Gosling is the film's salvation: He really is good enough to make this underwritten fantasy feel as though it amounts to something. But it doesn't.

It's all about action and ogling -- Jolie's boobs, butt and thighs get so much screen time they deserve their own credits.

Forget about social significance, depth of character and complex thematic underpinnings, and repeat after me: "It's only a werewolf movie."

A convoluted exercise in shifting perspectives and fractured storytelling.

Avrich's colorful account of Wasserman's career starts out looking like a puff piece, but quickly reveals a refreshing willingness to delve into the dirty side of a glamorous business.

A protracted piece of whimsy.

Cushioned by money - which frees him from needing to work and allows him to fly around the world looking for his past - Bruce is attractive and well-spoken but not especially interesting, which leaves a yawning void at the story's center.

Contains striking moments, but never coheres.

A spectacular natural disaster spiraling out of control, a crime gone wrong and a poor jerk caught in the middle: Yes, it's a standard action-picture recipe. But what a difference a cast makes.

Rises above its low-budget limitations by pandering to the most outrageously paranoid fantasies of unhappy office drones.

The amazing thing is how dull a movie crawling with gunfire, psycho tantrums and stuff blowing up can be when you just don't care what happens to anyone.

A virtuoso experiment in animation that combines traditional anime aesthetics style with a variety of Western animation styles.

A lovely homage to a charismatic star.

The charismatic Rajskub, who played a prickly computer geek on TV's "24," has nothing to do as Jack's loyal secretary.

First-time writer-director Greg Mottola has a real feel for characters, a quality that's in disturbingly short supply among young filmmakers. The Malone family could easily be a one-dimensional collection of sitcom caricatures, but by the movie's end they feel like real people. He also pulls off a tricky shift of tone, from pleasant, mild comedy to something far more bitter and haunting.

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

Beautifully animated epic is never dull.

Like "Air Guitar Nation," the stranger-than-fiction cast of characters is fascinating, and their high-stakes machinations are nothing short of mind-boggling.

Their mania might be funny if it weren't so creepy.

The scenes from Epidemic have the high-contrast look of a 1920s horror film, are in English (much of it badly dubbed) and feature images that are handsome and preposterous in equal parts -- they're amusing, and too stylized to be disturbing.

Slickly entertaining documentary.

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.

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.

Pinup appeal alone does not a compelling movie make.

Tame as can be by today's standards, but will charm fans of vintage erotica.

Richly imagined and resolutely unpredictable, this dark and profoundly optimistic paean to passion -- for glass, for horses, for the thrill of the moment after a coin is flipped but before it falls -- is held together by Gillian Armstrong's solid direction and by strong, if occasionally strident, performances from Fiennes and newcomer Blanchett.

This modest little moral thriller is a pleasant surprise.

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.

If this new film seems less prescient than its predecessor, it's only because reality is rapidly catching up with Cronenberg's warped imagination.

A painfully slow psychological thriller.

Undermined by contrived suspense sequences, a pointless subplot involving Claire's flaky, trashy sister, and a formulaic thriller ending.

Often clever but fundamentally shallow, this shaggy-dog story is greatly enriched by its extraordinary bluegrass soundtrack, supervised by T Bone Burnett and performed by a phenomenal collection of artists.

The offbeat cast and gorgeous Barcelona locations can't quite make up for the thinness of the mystery and forced quirkiness of the characters and their tangled relationships.

The dramatic scenes are frequently unintentionally funny, and the action sequences -- clearly the main event -- are surprisingly uninvolving, especially given that director Christian Duguay is an extreme skiing buff who habitually shoots dangerous stunts himself.

Tthough it comes wrapped in a stylish French mantle of feminist rage and sexual empowerment, the picture ultimately belongs squarely in the tradition of rape revenge pictures.

Informative documentary.

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.

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 failure on every level.

Self-indulgent wallow in privileged malaise.

Were it not for Kumar's luminous charisma, the film would be unwatchable.

Bleak, darkly humorous and surprisingly unsentimental, Michael Winterbottom's film has the desperate air of a cri de coeur, and unlike many fiction films about war, its use of real-life footage seems in no way inappropriate or exploitative.

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.

If not an entirely successful film, it's a bold and haunting one.

The end result is the very definition of a summer movie: breezy, undemanding and a carefully balanced blend of the familiar and the not-quite-what-you-expected.

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.

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.

The rare sequel that actually improves on the original, this robust entertainment's intelligence and emotional impact belie conventional wisdom that summer movie spectaculars are by nature brainless nonsense and only a stupid snob would complain about their cynical insubstantiality.

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

Despite excellent performances all around, the actors can't overcome the script's limitations.

The result is formulaic, shamelessly manipulative and surprisingly watchable.

Surfing isn't inherently service to humanity; it's a sport whose grace and athleticism Brown captures thrillingly, and that should be enough.

This is a terrible movie in its own right, tasteless and condescending -- if Sandler's character is an Everyman, than the Everyman of today is a boorish jackass

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

Though the portentous title is taken from the Old Testament -- Elah is where little David took on Goliath -- the film's concerns are painfully timely and forcefully articulated.

Enthralling or infuriating.

Newcomer Gregory never captures the mercurial charisma for which Jones was famous (and which Jagger notoriously channeled in his movie debut, "Performance"), without which his story is just another cautionary tale about fast times, intemperate passions and bad dope.

An eccentric historical horror tale whose blackly comic tone wavers distracting.

Boyar's best efforts -- which are quite good -- can't begin to compensate for Guttenberg's grotesque excesses or make the weirdly warm relationship that develops between them convincing, let alone appealing.

Punjabi weddings are notorious for their lavishness, and Nair's intoxicating soap opera revels in the sights and sounds of this clamorous family ritual.

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.

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.

It's not earthshaking or life-changing, but it's cute, occasionally predictable and only requires ACTUAL idiots, like Barry, to act like idiots. As formula entertainment goes, that's a pretty sweet deal.

The thrills are few and the expository dialogue tediously overwhelming in this preachy cautionary tale about getting too big for one's britches.

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 peculiar and oddly haunting achievement.

The film's flashy visuals (apparently geared to engaging video game-impaired attention spans) are entertaining, but its cynicism is distasteful.

It's a dumb movie, but it's good for a few profoundly undemanding laughs.

It's a compelling story, and very of its tumultuous time.

The film never escapes the constraints of its genre, but it's a hell of a ride.

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.

Coppola's awkward screenplay never finds its tone -- or perhaps it deliberately evokes the pulp conventions of WWII adventures, horror films, weepy melodrama, psychological mysteries and superhero origin stories as a way of evoking the fundamental artificiality of the cinema. Either way, it never comes together into a cohesive whole, and is seriously undermined by Roth's morose performance.

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

A gloomy-doomy ghost story that gets off to a creepy start and then spirals into flat-out preposterousness.

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.

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

This feverish drama examines issues of faith and redemption through the practice of prayer intercession.

It's a bad sign when audience enthusiasm peaks during the credits sequence.

Engaging, high-spirited tale.

An intoxicatingly beautiful, maddeningly elliptical and utterly enthralling meditation on the fleeting pleasures and haunting aftermath of doomed romance.

Holmes's story isn't pretty, but it's fascinating, in no small part because the people Paley interviews offer a glimpse into a brief time when making porn was an act of rebellion that attracted a diverse and eccentric group of filmmakers and performers.

It's a sorry state of affairs when a goldfish and a frog (Ginger's prize specimen, unsubtly named Casanova) have more chemistry than a romantic comedy's human leads.

Thank goodness for Pfeiffer's Lamia, a harridan who's lived long enough to get the face she deserves and will do anything to hide it. She's a wicked delight.

Its power lies both in Aronofsky's evocation of tightly wound paranoia and in his flawless dovetailing of personal obsession and cultural anxieties.

Derivative, predictable and entirely forgettable, the sort of low-expectations genre picture that generally goes directly to video.

That Ledger stands out in such a powerhouse ensemble is a tribute to his radically unhinged interpretation of a familiar character: The lank hair tinged seaweed green, the darting tongue and faint lisp that call constant attention to the ghastly rictus of his mouth, the nightmarishly smudged make up… taken together, they make previous Jokers feel like, well, jokes.

Consistently earnest and well-intentioned but only occasionally moving, despite the efforts of a generally top-notch cast.

It's cool and spare, but there's an essential lightness to the film's tone despite the heavy material, and Deborah Eve Lewis' glistening B&W cinematography is simply luscious.

Like "Lone Star," this group portrait mourns a rapidly vanishing American landscape while acknowledging that the past, free of corporate homogeneity though it may have been, is never the unspoiled paradise it appears in retrospect.

The result is 93 very long minutes' worth of admirably committed actors putting themselves through the emotional wringer to very little end.

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.

This thin chronicle of bad behavior among the rich and self-obsessed is above all painfully derivative, borrowing wholesale from Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy" and echoes Allen's own "Crimes and Misdemeanors."

Neither as dull nor as insufferably smug as it could easily have been.

Bright, who reworked co-writer Stephen Johnston's screenplay, changed all the names except Bundy's so he could "make up stuff," but the irony is how close to the facts -- at least to the degree they're known -- he stays.

A beautifully acted, intensely felt story.

This handsomely photographed, briskly directed sci-fi fright picture is enjoyable enough on its own limited terms.

There's a germ of an interesting idea here, but it's smothered by gloomy cinematography a la "Seven" (1995) and grating implausibilities, like the fact that everyone lives in the kind of cavernous, dankly art-directed dumps that only internet millionaires and trust fund twinkies can afford in the real New York.

A high-profile cast can't save this multi-narrative drama about gambling addiction from its wildly uneven tone, which veers from high melodrama to hard-boiled pastiche so overwrought that it's unintentionally funny.

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

With the exception of a brief sequence on the Galapagos Islands, where Maturin briefly indulges in some pre-Darwinian study of its unique ecosystem, the entire film takes place aboard the ship, and Weir's greatest accomplishment may be that it never feels claustrophobic.

Writer-director Erik Palladino's admirably subtle bit of chronological trickery allows his small-scale drama, set in 9/11 New York, to deliver a sucker-punch of an ending.

It's not about sex -- it's about Barbra and Bette and the Village People: That's the lesson of this cheerful, mainstream comedy about tabloid TV, Hollywood sophistry and family values that finally gets discussion about gay people out of the bedroom and into the record store, where it belongs.

Mixes broad humor with a surprisingly subtle portrait of a family pulled in a bewildering variety of directions.

Ridiculous, yes, but in an eminently watchable way. Most of the plot twists work surprisingly well, and the frequently naked leads work up some genuine chemistry.

Stuart and Margolo are genuine marvels of computer generated special effects, each feather, whisker and strand of fur beautifully rendered. But they're bland and rather boring characters, dumbed down for kids.

A crass, tedious sequel.

Never adds up to much of anything.

The music is lavishly overproduced pop pablum of the first order, and there's a deeply shallow irony in the fact the film's most memorable tune, KC and the Sunshine Band's 28-year-old "That's the Way I Like It," is easily twice the age of its target audience.

London-born director Asif Kapadia's second feature, following 2001's critically acclaimed "The Warrior," is a slow, low-key supernatural thriller whose story is too slender to justify its feature-length running time.

Depp's tight, guarded performance is almost painful to watch, and Newell seems to have reined in the flamboyant Pacino, whose portrait of the mobster as a grumpy old woman may be his best work in years.

Bielinsky's feature debut is a smart, enormously entertaining thriller whose preposterous conclusion in no way diminishes the fun of getting there.

A bravura tap-dancing finale as exhilarating as it is bizarre.

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

Rests on three excellent performances, of which the most difficult is Stephen Rea's.

Crafting this crude, noisy remake of Disney's first live-action comedy required the labor of no fewer than five screenwriters.

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.

LaPaglia and Davis deliver top-notch performances that go a long way toward offsetting the material's didacticism.

Stylish and twisty, but not clever enough to support its more outrageous plot machinations.

This mean-spirited invisible man movie tries to hide its poverty of fresh ideas behind a load of state-of-the-art special effects.

Actor-turned-director Clark Johnson uses the flashy, up-to-the-minute editing and camera stunts action fans expect, but keeps the mayhem on a recognizably human scale — it's big, but not insanely overblown.

Joe himself is an amazing creation, less personable, to be sure, than the original lovelorn King Kong, but a far more fully realized character than any of the flesh and blood humans by whom he's surrounded.

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."

Costner's ponderous post-apocalyptic morality tale feels every minute of its nearly three hours.