Maitland McDonagh

Yash Chopra's thinly veiled plea for reconciliation between India and Pakistan is cloaked in a decades-spanning Romeo-and-Juliet romance.

The story itself is uninteresting, and the songs are painfully undistinguished.

While handsomely mounted and generally well acted, the film is undermined by long stretches of awkward, obvious dialogue and by the vagueness of Lisa's revolt against the status quo.

Done in by its tone.

This bizarre hybrid of romantic comedy cliches and less-than-subtle social commentary defeats their best efforts to make it sparkle.

This genial little picture, which has been kicking around for more than a year, doesn't have a mean bone in its body.

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

"Saturday Night Fever" with designer drugs and duds.

Piercing, sweetly melancholy and acted with a breathtaking eye for nuance.

The younger actors bring varying degrees of experience to bear on their roles, but all capture the desperation beneath their characters' tough fronts, while the NYC locations are suitably depressing.

The filmmakers know the tropes of spooky movies: Glowering shadows, squeaking playground equipment, eerie storms and half-glimpsed forms, but the film rests on Rueda's subtle, intense performance, rooted in every half-articulated anxiety that ever gnawed at a parent's brain.

Gallo's poor, poor pitiful me routine wears very thin, very fast, but Ricci is incandescent, a softly-glowing dumpling of a dream-girl in powder-blue fishnet tights and sparkly tap shoes: She's the diamond in the dirt.

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.

Brisk, glossy and gloriously art-directed, Scorsese's lavish biopic is a pop trifle, engaging but not compelling.

Is there anything so painful as a comedy whose every gag falls flat and then lies there, flopping like a dying flounder?

Fiore captures various artists horsing around with groupies, smoking dope and hanging out backstage, and cuts the material together in the kinetic but meaningless manner of MTV promos.

Penn, in particular, is so subdued he's hardly there, while Hurley's seductive, hyper-articulate Adaline is actually ludicrous, sucking suggestively on ice cubes and reciting poetry like a phone-sex operator pretending to be a book-reading babe.

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

Professionally produced and surprisingly tame.

All of which would be fine if Figgis managed to work up any real suspense, but the film slogs towards its inevitable mano-a-mano showdown like something up to its knees in mud.

A sleazy, seamy, flashy, steamy, vulgar exploitation thriller that revels in every minute of its own trashiness and delivers some pretty solid -- if prurient -- entertainment before strangling in a one-twist-too-many ending.

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

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

Though Bittner's slacker charm may not be to all tastes, the parrots are natural-born scene-stealers with more than enough charm to seduce the most dubious viewer.

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

The bad news is that, though professionally produced on a micro-budget, Azita Zendel's ambitious writing-directing debut is undermined by an awkward script and some very amateurish acting.

It's a shame to see such dedicated performers flay their psyches in the service of such fundamentally shallow material.

Rob Reiner's feel-good tear-jerker, in which dying well is the best revenge, wants to be heartwarming. But first-timer Justin Zackham's screenplay is so stridently formulaic and disingenuous that the film falls flat at every inspirational turn.