Manohla Dargis

While desperation and a critique lurk under all these garish surfaces, neither emerges because Ms. Biller, finally, adores this milieu too much to tear it apart.

Everything looks professional if undistinguished.

The problem with Elegy has nothing to do with faithfulness and everything to do with interpretation. The film is an overly polite take on a spiky, claustrophobic, insistently impolite novel.

A deadpan comedy shot through with a vein of despair, the Uruguayan film Whisky is a pint-size pleasure.

Scene for scene, Serenity is more engaging and certainly better written and acted than any of Mr. Lucas's recent screen entertainments.

Billy Bob Thornton's leer is much in evidence in the shoddy comedy School for Scoundrels, though the tackiness of the film, its lazy direction and its self-satisfied stupidity may mean that Mr. Thornton curled his lip about the production rather than for it.

Although what ensues is generally unsurprising and as pro forma down-and-dirty as the genre dictates, it's also on occasion rather affecting.

What is remarkable is the absolute cool with which LaBute charts his story: The director has the soul of an assassin.

Held together by the blues -- Brown's prose and Howard's performance, Big Bad Love is a mess, but it's a sincere mess, beautifully shot by Paul Ryan and faithfully adapted by screenwriter James Howard.

There's something overly studied, almost clinical, in how it all pulls together.

Mr. Allen's invocation of the "Thin Man" films in an interview makes sense, even if he’s no William Powell and Ms. Johansson is certainly no Myrna Loy. Scoop was made by someone who understands that what makes the "Thin Man" series enduring isn't whodunit and why, but the way Nick and Nora look at each other as they sip their martinis, Asta nipping at their heels.

Like, you know, genius. But, like, you know, why?

Like the convictions of some born into religious families, his (Carlos) Marxism seems more a matter of habit than faith. What seems to turn him on is power, which, the movie suggests, he nurtured alongside his luxe tastes.

Alas, excesses of any pleasurable kind are absent from this exasperatingly dull production.

Though it has bad word of mouth, Jonah Hex is generally better, sprier and more diverting than most of the action flicks now playing, "The A-Team" included.

Entertaining to watch - notwithstanding the scene in which Dae-su eats a live animal - which is a good thing, because there is not much to think about here, outside of the choreographed mayhem.

Euro-kitsch of the highest order, which doesn't mean it's necessarily bad, just unnecessary.

Roger Nygards’ sweet, gently funny documentary about the wild and woolly fans of all things Star Trek doesn’t really reveal much about the original landmark series and its various spinoffs, nor does it ever really get to the heart of the shows’ enduring appeal.

There's no defense for movies like these, but neither do they warrant apology; they're irresistibly watchable, like car wrecks.

Amiably goofy, but it isn't especially funny.

It's the brilliance of The X-Files to have turned Mulder's paranoid style into a function of cool. Mulder and Scully aren't just beautiful, smart, well-armed and seemingly impervious to the banalities of everyday life, such as cheap haircuts and ruinous love affairs--they're cool.

Although too compressed by half, the film manages to recreate what, at one point, the hectoring narrator will call an "archaeology of repression."

The rhythms of the dialogue move to the same beat as steadily as a metronome ticks and tocks, while every sentence is polished like stone, absent the jaggedness of real breath and life. You can hear the play in this thing without even knowing it was based on a theatrical production.

A satisfying, unexpectedly involving B-movie that owes as much to old Hollywood as to Greek tragedy.

Loosely constructed, The World drifts along pleasantly for much of its two-and-a-half-hour running time. Mr. Jia has a terrific eye and an almost sculptural sense of film space (especially in close quarters), and he brings texture and density to even the most nondescript rooms.

The film's strength and its entertainment lie in John Myhre's production design, its generally appealing cast...and, perhaps most importantly, a canny degree of self-parody.

Because its director, Tom Vaughan, brings nothing of interest to the movie, including filmmaking, there isn't anything to say other than to note its insulting ugliness and ineptitude.

It just might be that America's favorite jackasses, having played around with sharks in their last big-screen effort ("Jackass Number Two" of course), have this time actually jumped one, and in 3-D no less.

See the Holocaust trivialized, glossed over, kitsched up, commercially exploited and hijacked for a tragedy about a Nazi family. Better yet and in all sincerity: don't.

Given the tainted history of Supernova, it's difficult to figure out where to place blame for either the undernourished screenplay or the moribund action.

Horny is as horny does in the sweetly absurd high school comedy Superbad.

Sometimes a movie's charm materializes where you least expect it and in this particular case it emerges in the unlikely form of Henderson's character, Scotland Yard detective Janet Losey.

A sui generis excursion into sex and race that is by turns terrible...and close to divine.

There’s nothing wrong with Mr. Redford and his love of nature. But there’s something irritatingly softheaded about the generic, nostalgia-tinged blandishments that the film finally resorts to -- a Wendell Berry poem, a grizzled old farmer wielding a sickle -- in place of truly hard questions and solutions that may effect meaningful change. With the polar ice caps melting, I want more than poetry and blame. I want a plan.

The actors certainly look as if they’re having a good time, and if you’re in the right mood, you might too.

The movie keeps you watching and generally engaged.

Watching Ramis struggle with his two stars is like watching someone try to juggle lead weights.

Mostly, as so often with these types of empty entertainments, you are left to wonder why companies that hire so many fine actors to run around under latex and foam and have the best technological wizardry money can buy seem to spend so little attention to the screenplay.

A gorgeous riot of future-shock ideas and brightly animated imagery, the doors of perception never close.

The title character in this nicely kinked Belgian thriller faces a unique adversary: the enemy hot on his heels is Alzheimer's.

Wasabi dawdles and drags when it should pop; it doesn't even have the virtue of enough mindless violence to break up the tedium of all its generational bonding.

Topped with that messy salt-and-pepper wig that frames and obscures his scowling, searching face, [Harris] invests Beethoven with a violent turbulence that sometimes floods the room but mostly stays coiled inside, where it seethes.

Nikolaus Geyrhalter's superb documentary is an unblinking, often disturbing look at industrial food production from field to factory.

Mr. Greengrass knows how to do his job, and there’s no one in Hollywood right now who does action better, who keeps the pace going so relentlessly, without mercy or letup, scene after hard-rocking scene.

The movie love can make it hard to hear the human pulse beneath the noise (it's there, if faint), much less see if there's anything new going on.

The sort of noisy nonsense that Woo's earlier action movies made irrelevant, but alas not extinct.

Home is, as with so many family stories, also something of a disaster movie: the walls shudder and crack, and eventually so do the people inside them.

Has an appealing surface beauty, largely due to the talented cinematographer Virginie Saint Martin, and an equally shallow mystery.

Something wicked this way comes in the nifty horror film The Last Winter, crawling through the hallways and howling into the dread night.

Though Edward and Bella reach certain heights in Twilight, notably during a charming scene that finds them leaping from piney treetop to treetop against the spectacular wilderness backdrop, the story’s moral undertow keeps dragging them down.

"Revolutionary Road" is the kind of great novel that Hollywood tends to botch, because much of it takes place inside the heads of its characters, and because the Wheelers aren't especially likeable and because pessimism without obvious redemption is a tough sell.

Though Ms. Rapace is a fine professional scowler, with cheekbones that thrust like knives and a pout that’s mostly pucker, she tends to register as an intriguing idea instead of a thoroughly realized character. She more or less looks the part that the filmmakers don’t let her fully play.

Isn't just a pleasurable rethink of your geek uncle's favorite science-fiction series. It's also a testament to television's power as mythmaker, as a source for some of the fundamental stories we tell about ourselves, who we are and where we came from.

This isn't a terrible film by any means, but it's also far from being a realized work. Jaglom has said that he “writes” his films in the editing room, but for Festival in Cannes he must have been using a crayon.

Astonishing isn't the word -- neither is incompetent, incoherent or just plain crap. Indeed, none of these words really gets at the very special type of badness that is Deuces Wild.

Barely proficient on a craft level, this jumble of putatively comic misunderstanding and overly familiar crude burlesque achieves its nadir with a cameo from Mamie Van Doren, a degrading, shameful turn that lays bare, all too literally, the filmmakers' contempt for women.

Notes on Marie Menken shines a quavering if welcome ray of light on a largely forgotten figure in the American avant-garde film scene of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s.

A movie with its heart and head in the right place. Too bad its aesthetic sensibilities and technical coordinates are not as well situated.

My guess is that after years of being the trick pony, he wanted to see what it was like to be the ringmaster.

Water Lilies is a nice, watchable, attractive, minor work. What it lacks is a sense of purpose, a commitment not just to its characters but also to its own reason for being.

A serious film filled with both great and awkward ideas and made as much from the heart as the head.

It doesn’t add up to much, which is part of the point as well as the fun, but what makes the film noteworthy is its pure pop adrenaline.

The film teeters so perilously and routinely at the edge of camp, both with some of its casting choices and some unfortunate dialogue (the repeated warning that "Jumby wants to be born now"), that it's hard to know if Mr. Goyer wants to make us howl with fear or laughter.

Filled with small, cute kids and large, goofy laughs and buoyed by fine supporting work from Greg Kinnear and Marcia Gay Harden, the director's latest effort won't rock your movie world, but the fact that he manages to keep the freak flag flying in the face of our culture of triumphalism is a thing of beauty.

Glibly funny and eager to please.

This new film feels like something of a gift, as if the director had decided to burn some of his favorite songs for his newfound friends, the world-cinema audience.

Its one-week theatrical run will make it eligible for Academy Award consideration, though given that organization's often pitiful record when it comes to nonfiction film, it seems unlikely that a movie this subtly intelligent would make its short list.

A grave and beautiful work of art.

The actors in Notes on a Scandal are equally distinguished: Ms. Dench and Ms. Blanchett are among the finest on the market today, and each can deliver expert performances, even when, as is the case here, their roles are false and hollow. The performers sell the goods, but the goods are cheap.

Like real indie films, garage bands are by definition rough around the edges, but what separates the true believers from the poseurs is their passion, their commitment -- and not just how cool they look on screen or on stage. A mainstream endeavor tricked out as an indie, Garage Days gives us plenty to look at but no reason to care.

But while the Pietà imagery startles, it makes increasing sense as the story builds around it. Because as Hideaway deepens and evolves, you understand that the image of Mousse cradling Louis is a manifestation of her love: this was how she held him, with a tender love that in its depth was itself holy.

The film is neither about the Holocaust nor about those Germans who grappled with its legacy: it's about making the audience feel good about a historical catastrophe that grows fainter with each new tasteful interpolation.

Because this is also a document of an actress actually at work, much of the movie's pleasure comes from watching another brilliant performance take shape as Ms. Streep tries out different line readings, gestures and poses in her search for Mother Courage.

Taken starts in low gear and almost immediately stalls out.

A not very good and yet painless waste of time.

Fitfully engaging, finally exasperating.

The film demands engagement and a kind of surrender, a willingness to enter into a work shaped by correlation, metaphor and metonymy, by beautiful images and fragments of ideas, a work that locates the music in the twitching of a dog’s ears, in the curve of a woman’s belly, a child’s song and an adult’s reverie.

Jennifer Lopez's butt? Alas, the moment is over all too soon; the movie, sadly, is not.

It's no surprise that Imamura has directed the best film in September 11, which is doubtless why the producer saved it for last.

Makes for gripping, merciless drama.

A moody little number, The Eclipse makes good on its name by sometimes obscuring its themes and even point, which can have its charms though also severe drawbacks.

This film, which was never released in America and will now be making its way across the country in limited release, has been immaculately restored and features new subtitles. You can get lost in the blackness of its heart and its shadows. You might never come back.

This pricey, juiceless pulp could never have been killed by critics, simply because it was already dead.

Although much has and will be made of the film's sexual explicitness -- and, yes, it is a bit -- this less-than-perfect but deeply felt film is finally most daring for its hard-core insistence on our need for connection.

All too predictably, as if obeying some rule of genre, the director trades in his more involved ideas about alienation and voyeurism for an eruption of violence, then tags on some nonsense about marital fidelity.

Eschewing voice-over or any obvious trace of an on-screen or off-screen presence, she (Brown) lets her images, a little text and other people do the talking for her. Her quiet has its own force.

The film is imperfect, periodically if unsurprisingly sentimental, overly tidy and often very moving.

To watch Ms. Foster storm through a phony airplane for an entire movie has its very minor pleasures - given the numerous close-ups, you can study her lovely face at your leisure - but there is nothing here to feed the head or fray the nerves.

The joy of this unassuming, generous film is that it never sells out its characters' desires or ours.

Mr. Michell whips the camera around too much and cuts into his scenes too quickly, but he pumps juice into this thin story and, together with his performers, keeps a movie going that might otherwise crash-land.

The bigger and truer stars of this enjoyable, sometimes accidentally entertaining movie are the five horses that take turns playing Secretariat.

The film is more funny ha-ha than LOL; it’s a smarty-pants satire that mocks and embraces almost every cliché in the biography playbook.

Plays more like a nightmare than a dream, and an exceedingly unnerving one at that. Sam isn't just a prisoner of her parents' ambitions; like nearly everyone else in this film, she's a zombie, sleepwalking through life while Rome burns.

In a film filled with plaintively expressive faces, characters say as much when they don't talk as when they speak Mr. Arriaga's dialogue, which sometimes sounds like hardscrabble poetry, sometimes sounds real as dirt and is, rather surprisingly, often darkly funny.

Despite his access to both No Wave luminaries and atmospherically battered footage of various bands wreaking havoc at various venues, Mr. Crary never figures out what story he wants to tell.

Strangely entertaining.

Demands to be seen, if only for its beauty.

In Fat Albert, that trademark is resurrected to depressingly diminished ends.

Has a slamming first hour. As Ian Wilson's camera darts over Charles Lee's spookily atmospheric sets, enigmas sprout like mushrooms.

This existentially and aesthetically unnecessary sequel to the equally irrelevant if depressingly successful "Fantastic Four."

The film's three leads are extraordinary, but what Moore does with her role is so beyond the parameters of what we call great acting that it nearly defies categorization.

It's a pleasant-enough creation story to revisit, one weighted down by melodrama and lifted up by some rocking tunes.

Spectacularly grotesque and literally nauseating, even for this usually intrepid moviegoer, In My Skin is among the more disturbing films in this blood-drenched cinematic season.

A cynical, clumsy, aptly titled attempt to cross the female-oriented romantic comedy with the male-oriented gross-out comedy that is interesting on several levels, none having to do with cinema.

While the movie is a conceptual pip filled with quotable laughs and gentle pokes at religious faith at its most literal, it also looks so shoddy that you yearn for the camerawork, lighting and polish of his shows.

The line between cinematic art and exploitation has rarely seemed finer and nervier, at least in recent memory, than in the French film Innocence.

What follows is a sensationally entertaining escalation of frights, the kind that make you wiggle and squirm as you alternately laugh at your own gullibility and marvel at the filmmaker's cunning and craft.

There is another body of war at issue here, however, and it’s this body that throws the documentary off kilter and eventually off course: Congress.

A sublimely nimble evisceration of that cult of celebrity known as the British royal family.

The result is an American masterpiece, independent to the bone.

This is competent if completely impersonal filmmaking of a familiar type that finds the usual allotment of famous, or at least famous enough, actors.

It's a pleasure to watch Lane's delicately lived-in face tremble with feeling -- it's the truest thing in the movie -- but the character's desperation feels wrong, the worst kind of sellout.

What’s striking about John McKay's feature debut is how much contempt toward his female characters the writer-director manages to pack into 115 minutes.

Unsteadily pitched between horror and comedy, Secret Window turns out to be neither terribly scary nor especially funny.

An agreeable if slight, vaguely sketched character study times two.

Only ends up skimming the surface. But even the skimming is largely interesting and thought-provoking, and of course very bleak.

A beautifully off-center movie.

Absent one original moment and bathed in de rigueur steel blue punctuated by sporadic bursts of flaming orange, the movie is notable only for its creative approach to Seagal's bulky gracelessness: Not since "Apocalypse Now" has a film gone to such lengths to hide what its star looks like.

Not since John Travolta sprouted a head of dreadlocks and strapped on platform boots for "Battlefield Earth" has cinematic science fiction been such good-bad fun as in The Chronicles of Riddick.

The kind of witless production that should rightly be cluttering the discount bins at your local video store.

A rare bird indeed -- a disarming, appealingly modest discovery, beautifully shot, nicely performed. Perched on the knife's edge of absurdity, the story at once embraces the large questions (who is the enemy and why) and shrugs them off with a laugh.

This unassuming, insistently entertaining documentary has the virtue of a great subject.

Rock can't set up a decent-looking shot, and he doesn't care about niceties such as character development and all that narrative downtime in between jokes. But he nonetheless wrings biting humor from serious issues with the sort of ferocity that made Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce men of respect as well as comedy.

It flounders whenever it tries to weave the real world into its fantasia, partly because it isn't really about anything other than making money, partly because the spy-versus-spy battle doesn't entertain the way it once did.

What keeps the movie from tipping into full-blown exploitation like "City of God," which turns third-world misery into art-house thrills, is Mr. Fukunaga's sincerity. What keeps you watching is his superb eye.

Even a talented lead couldn't save Mr. Kramer from himself. As a writer, he may have fashioned a genre-busting screenplay, one that has its postmodern cake and eats it, too, but as a director he proves himself as blood simple, if generally less adept, as any Hollywood hire.

It's exasperating -- a near-parody of bad French comedy.

They have created an ingeniously fluid narrative structure that, when combined with Ms. Roberts’s visuals, news material and their own original 16-millimeter film footage, ebbs and flows like great drama.

For all the dolorous trim, Secretary is a genial romance that maintains a surprisingly buoyant tone throughout, notwithstanding some of the writers' sporadic dips into pop Freudianism.

A likable, lightly sticky valentine to childhood, the 1980s and the dawning of movie love, Son of Rambow was written and directed by Garth Jennings and produced by Nick Goldsmith, the duo behind the underappreciated fantasy "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

The results are charming if rarely thrilling, with outstanding performances from Joan Allen and William H. Macy.

In Search of a Midnight Kiss has its derivative moments along with awkward patches -- the inelegantly shaped climax tries to force uninteresting parallels between the two central couples -- it manages the difficult task of creating a sustained, plausible and inviting world.

Timing, good jokes and characters you can laugh with and at are mostly missing from Gentlemen Broncos.

The French filmmaker Simone Bitton takes a measured look at the barrier in her documentary Wall, a film that considers hard-core political realities alongside agonizing personal truths.

If Spawn had anything close to a script, it would be a pretty nifty fantasy about conspiracy, apocalypse and a fat killer clown.

Mr. Dunn and his colleagues dig up some interesting information during their inquiry, like the origins of the devil-horns hand signal, metal's signature salute, but their insider love of the music finally proves as big an obstacle to the film as their ploddingly pedagogic approach.

[Mr. Resler] turns out to be not only the heart of this particular game, but also its brains, lungs and unforgettably endearing mug.

Good enough in patches to make its distracting star turns, storybook clichés and stereotypes harder to take than they would be in a less enjoyable movie.

An early candidate for worst film of the year is Freedomland, an inept, lethally dull drama.

Whatever the reason, his riff on Le Divorce follows the original only in broad strokes, hewing to a similar plot with many of the same characters but without the wit, the barbs and the politics.

Although it starts off vaguely amusing, 8 Women grows progressively sour, curdled by the filmmakers' bad faith and lack of compassion. It isn't just the tone that's off; it's the point.

In Auto Focus, the strangely wonderful and weirdly touching new film from Paul Schrader, the comedy and the tragedy keep getting mixed up.

Not that Madonna has gone in for originality, which isn't really her thing: rather, instead of repurposing a genre, she has riffled through the art-house catalog for inspiration, as evidenced by the film's intentionally grubby visual texture, jumpy editing, direct-address commentary, freeze frames and other tricks.

The Reckoning isn't great by any means and there are moments during the final stretch when it isn't even good. But for its first hour or so, the story moves at a steady clip, generating enough mystery to keep you guessing and enough atmosphere to keep you interested.

Not too long after the knockout opening, all that's left of Snake Eyes are Cage's wild eyes, the dregs of David Koepp's rotten script, and De Palma's restless, anxious camera, on the prowl for something, anything, to hang on to.

Election is finally, necessarily, as much about sex as it is about politics -- wanting it, getting it, losing it.

Here, the message is the moviemaking and the unparalleled joy you get from a film that can carry you off so completely, making you forget about everything save for the beautiful lies in front of you.

Not just everything you want in a David Lynch movie, but damn near everything else you want in ANY movie.

Figgis certainly was after something different, but like "Timecode," in which four linked stories unwind in separate panels, Hotel proves to be a fundamentally insipid bid at experimental narrative.

It is Mr. Soderbergh’s insistence on seeing the A.D.M. scandal as a collective tragedy rather than as another white-collar crime that gives the movie force, resonance, feeling.

This might not be the Titanic of romantic comedies (it’s tugboat size), but it’s a disaster: cynically made, barely directed, terribly written. But quick: there’s still time to escape!

A charming, uncritical, often entertaining jumble, the documentary was written and directed by Leslie Zemeckis.

Loving Jackie Chan has always been easy, which is why it would be nice if he could find better material in which to bask in his long-sought American stardom or, alternately, ease into bad movies as effortlessly as his co-star.

For his atmospheric debut as a feature director, the actor Matt Dillon has cast himself as a guy in need of saving. It's a nice fit.

Grotesquely violent, horribly funny.

It’s intentionally playful and an inadvertent giggle, an overripe melodrama that’s by turns a bodice-ripper, a cloak-and-dagger thriller and a serious-minded historical drama with dubious contemporary overtones.

For Tian, who was banned from directing by Chinese authorities for a decade, it marks a triumphant return; for those who have loved the filmmaker's work in the past, few resurrections have seemed as welcome.

Mr. Lichtenstein seems to want your tears. Nothing wrong there. The problem is that, because he never settles persuasively into one groove -- you don’t believe the tears or the smiles or anything in between -- he can’t begin to approach the complex contradictions suggested by his movie’s title.

The film is unabashedly sexy, and its heady romanticism feels as right and as unaffected as Im's bold use of color and his equally bold decision to tell the story through traditional pansori narration.

An unnerving, surprisingly affecting documentary about our environmental calamity, is such essential viewing.

Despite its spasms of brutality and a swerve into the macabre, After the Apocalypse is, by comparison with more recent films of this type (the "Mad Max" series), gentle at heart and terribly sincere.

Trimmed to an hour, and tucked between a documentary on snails and an episode of Coronation Street, writer-director Mark Herman's Brassed Off could prove lively watching indeed. As it is, however, his pedestrian if sweetly well-meaning inspirational about a coal-mining town done in by Thatcherism is too long, too laborious and 15 years too late.

Like some other contemporary films that try to stitch together a small army of characters into a community of sorts, Happy Here and Now feels like a symptom in search of a cure.

As it is, this collection clocks in at a fleet 87 minutes, which is shorter (and taken together, more lively) than a whole mess of features.

What feels amusingly anarchic on the small screen feels underdeveloped and disjointed on the big screen, perhaps because instead of commercials gluing the jokes together there’s dead air.

It's a shame no one gave the three voice stars of this appealing animation -- Ray Romano, John Legui zamo and Denis Leary -- a shot at the script.

What’s explicit here is ravenous passion and the depiction of desire as a creating, destroying force that invades the very flesh. It's terribly French.

Donner's most calamitous mistake, however, was forgetting to light the screenplay on fire and catapult it from the nearest trebuchet.

Part of what's bracing about Gomorrah, and makes it feel different from so many American crime movies, is both its deadly serious take on violence and its global understanding of how far and wide the mob's tentacles reach, from high fashion to the very dirt.

Shandling comes off as a sleazebag -- all that's missing are the gold chains, tufted chest hair and English Leather.

A delicately funny tale about everyday surrealism.

It’s the sort of performance that announces itself with the subtlety of a lit-up highway construction sign. Caution: Actress at Work.

Even when they don't always add up, these are movies in which De Niro can shrug off the burden of being Robert De Niro. Where the star who was Travis Bickle can again freely assume the part of the great character actor -- if only this time to ask, "You laughin' at me?"

Until the director Frank Darabont decides that he’s saying something important instead of making a nifty horror movie, The Mist isn’t half bad.

Director Glenn Gordon Carron's movie is far more bearable when Kate is spinning lies and sticking her tongue in Kevin Bacon's desiccated bad boy.

Better than the usual three-stage journey of courage, heartbreak and redemption. In this case, the triumph of the human spirit comes with a small bitter chaser.

This is one of those sadistic exercises that puts its characters through the wringer without saying anything true or meaningful.

Sandler smirks a good deal less than he did in his last two movies, and with a couple of acting lessons, he might develop into a screen presence.

Mr. Natali, whose earlier films include “Cube,” hasn’t reinvented the horror genre. But with Splice he has done the next best thing with an intelligent movie that, in between its small boos and an occasional hair-raising jolt, explores chewy issues like bioethics, abortion, corporate-sponsored science, commitment problems between lovers and even Freudian-worthy family dynamics.

Wildly overproduced and filled with fussy flourishes that make even a derelict hallway look like a million bucks, Dark Water fails to rustle up either meaning or meaningful scares.

Director Tony Kaye may be reaching for opera, but screenwriter David McKenna has set his sights distinctly lower.

There is a remarkable stillness to many of the film's most indelible images, particularly the exteriors, which are so carefully photographed, and without the usual tiresome camera jiggling, as to look almost frozen.

A blandly diverting, chastely conceived and grammatically challenged fairy tale for our bland, chaste and grammatically challenged age.

It isn't just that there's something unsettling about a film that aestheticizes a crematorium; it's that there's something trivializing about the very effort.

This maximalist approach can tax the nerves, though it has the benefit of keeping you on alert. It’s also pretty enjoyable. Mr. Fuqua, who happens to be surprisingly good with actors, does have a knack for chaos.

It's no doubt rude, and perhaps irrelevant, to point out that John Waters still doesn't know how to make a movie.

Ms. Moretz is by far the best thing about the film: she holds the screen as gracefully as she executes a running back flip.

Once again, Mr. Kosashvili mixes moments of bitterness and laughter with strong dramatic passages, creating a social milieu in The Duel that is believably inhabited, consistently surprising and true-feeling in detail and sweep.

Like the characters, the scenes pile up but go nowhere; the story seems fragmented, the actors unmotivated, unmoored. Mr. Gray has a feel for pulp, but is seriously off his game here.

Le Petit Lieutenant embraces the spectrum of human drama and comedy, and like a lot of French films it is keenly involved with the everyday pulse of work.

Unearthing even the roughest gems serves a programming purpose, but in this case it has also led to a theatrical release of a movie that looks like a muddy second-generation Xerox and contains all the emotional and intellectual appeal of cold tea and soggy toast.

Working with cinematographer Harris Savides and serving as the film's editor, he (Van Sant) has fashioned a visual style and a narrative shape that has the quality of a waking dream, then a nightmare. Rarely do form and content add up with such harmonious grace and power.

In the preposterous thriller The Forgotten, a pseudospiritual, mumbo-jumbo, science-fiction inflected mess, the director Joseph Ruben does not just fail to tap into Ms. Moore's talent; he barely gets her attention.

Mr. Mahurin is obviously enchanted by his subject, but he never gets past his delight to say anything of real, sustaining interest.

Im recounts the painter's life in bold strokes rather than with the literalist's painstaking detail, and in the process tells us more about the mysteries of genius than a bushel full of quotidian fact.

"Ocean's 23," oops, Ocean's Thirteen, is also a gas; it's lighter than air, prettier than life, a romp, a goof and an attentively oiled machine.

Bruce Willis is ready to earn our love again by performing the same lovably violent, meathead tricks as before.

Central to the last film's success are Manise and Blanc, who invest the story with intensity unmatched since Belvaux stormed through the first feature.

Easier to admire than love, Bubble is a fascinating exercise that seems calculated to repel most audiences, which probably suits Mr. Soderbergh just fine.

Only when Jodie Foster materializes midstory, delivering a beautiful, pocket-size performance as the mistress of one of the condemned men, does the film spring to life.

A confusion of tones, intentions and allusions, Two for the Money lurches from upbeat to downbeat without ever settling into a coherent groove.

The Dardennes know how to build a scene for maximum tension: you yearn to find out who bought Jimmy, and whether his fate lies with a childless couple or an organ mill. But because they make moral thrillers, what matters isn't only actions and events but their emotional, spiritual and psychological costs.

Biographies of living people are tricky if for no other reason than a biographer can sometimes feel protective of his or her subject. Berman and Pulcini obviously adore Pekar, but by not getting out of his head more often and taking him on his own harsh terms, they blow the chance to dig as deep as the source.

The limp title says it all.

It's an overly familiar setup played out by overly familiar types but, curiously, what invests XX/XY with its tension is that there's no sense that Austin Chick, the film's capable young director and writer, knows what he feels about any of this.

Critics are paid to suffer bad art, no matter how icky it is from the start. So all we could do was to Sit! Sit! Sit! Sit! And we did not like it. Not one little bit.

It's slick nonsense at best and for the first hour it's watchable. There's cheap entertainment to be had from a thriller in which two detectives are played by beauties as ravishing as Jolie and Martinez.

Has the makings of a great documentary, but a subject as complex as this demands greater rigor, deeper intelligence and a sense of dialectics.

Like everything else in this film, Mr. Cage's performance is watchable if never credible because his director never resolves the disconnect between this star's function (to entertain) and that of his character (to repel).

Mr. Jayasundara studied film in France and has probably watched his share of classic European art cinema. Although his influences may originate closer to home (in interviews he has name dropped the venerated Sri Lankan auteur Lester James Peries), his use of landscape to convey states of mind suggests that he has more than a passing acquaintance with the work of Michelangelo Antonioni.

Private Property embraces the banal and the monstrous, and affords Ms. Huppert opportunity to astonish rather than overwhelm.

Here, a contemporary French white woman who yearns for liberté, égalité and fraternité is as much a prisoner of her circumstances as women were once upon a time and still are in some cultures, though truly it's all the clichés in this film that make her a captive.

A triumph of modesty and of seriousness that also happens to be one of the finest American films of the year.

Mr. Forster, who previously directed “Monster’s Ball” and “Finding Neverland,” has been soundly defeated by The Kite Runner. Despite the film’s far-flung locations (it was shot primarily in China), there is remarkably little of visual interest here; the setups are banal, and the scenes lack tension, which no amount of editing can provide.

The black-and-white world of Eraserhead disturbs, seduces and even shocks with images that are alternately discomforting, even physically off-putting, and characterized by what André Breton called convulsive beauty.

Finally, a serial-killer movie so preposterous, so garnished with accidental laugh lines and absent essential narrative logic it may actually put a permanent kibosh on this tediously overworked crime subgenre. Here's hoping, at any rate.

The unutterably charming Cinévardaphoto brings together three short works by the filmmaker Agnès Varda, one shot in digital video, the others on celluloid.

What makes Half Nelson both an unusual and an exceptional American film, particularly at a time when even films about Sept. 11 are professed to have no politics, is its insistence on political consciousness as a moral imperative.

The irony is, it's his vulgarity, this mixture of the gaudy and the glossy, that distinguishes Lyne, that makes his work identifiable and, when the story's right, such a guilty pleasure.

Mr. Jacobs has succeeded at one of the most difficult tasks given a director, which is to make a character come alive through the filmmaking, not exposition.

How did something that started out so cool get so dorky?

Casts its spell by drawing out the horror of everyday existence bit by bit, and then tossing in some otherworldly weirdness that makes the hair on the back of your neck try to run for cover.

Mr. Silberling has made a movie that's far rougher in texture and tone than Mr. Handler's books, but while he doesn't have the author's sense of whimsy (or irony) he manages to construct a pleasantly watchable entertainment in all the spaces in the story not laid siege to by Mr. Carrey.

Ms. Scott's outrage is palpable, but she has bitten off enough here for a 10-hour television series.

Delirious, ingenious, often very funny and strangely touching film.

A portrait of dispossession so acute that it's caused a few critics to cry, Let her eat cake!

Mr. Marshall can't rescue the film from its embarrassing screenplay or its awkward Chinese-Japanese-Hollywood culture klatch, but Memoirs of a Geisha is one of those bad Hollywood films that by virtue of their production values nonetheless afford a few dividends, in this case, fabulous clothes and three eminently watchable female leads.

As saccharine as it is disposable.

When I watched I Love You, Daddy a second time, the jokes no longer landed; its shocks felt uglier, cruder. But for once a filmmaker seemed to be admitting to the misogyny that we know is always there and has often been denied or simply waved off, at times in the name of art.

To transcend cliché, movies like Narc need the passion of a heretic who can take stock characters with their stock predicaments and turn them inside out, the way Curtis Hanson and Quentin Tarantino do. Blood, guts and flash aren't enough.

On a purely visual level, it's the most powerful and viscerally exciting movie to come out of Hollywood this year. Which doesn't mean that it's all good.

The Red Riding trilogy looks fine blown up on the big screen, though it’s easier to watch at home, where the remote offers fast relief from a grim fiction that, with its murky palette and unyielding cruelty, serves up a nihilistic vision that is unyielding, hermetic, unpersuasive and finally self-indulgent.

The great, and given Costa-Gavras' previous m.o., inevitable irony of Mad City is that even as it condemns the media for exploiting the situation, it's busy doing the very same.

There's nothing new about this sado-cinema, and nothing much worthy, either.

Uplifting, disheartening, inspiring, enraging -- the mind reels while watching the documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, even as the eyes water, the temples pound and the body trembles.

Although that's enough plot for two movies, Niccol proceeds to clog up his meticulously mounted story with a murder and a romance (hence Uma Thurman), allowing needless intrigue to distract from his ideas.

In Good Company lacks both the emotional sting and the bright pop-culture snap of "About a Boy," as well as Mr. Hornby's carefully cultivated irony, but it makes for an agreeable solo directing debut.

Zwigoff pulls off something in Ghost World that seems a minor miracle -- he creates someone with a complex inner life.

This sensitively directed film is one of those rarest of accomplishments: a graceful work of art about the very creation of art itself.

Falls wildly short of its inspirations.

A promotional gimmick that's being slipped into theaters with the sort of stealth accorded only the unprofitable or the unwatchable.

The director, Burr Steers, whose other credits include “Igby Goes Down” and stints directing TV shows, keeps people and things moving fast enough so that you don’t have time to worry about the details, like the inanity of the story.

Ms. Bullock, who excels at playing spunky, is as appealing as usual, but the role proves as awkward as those heels.

The strange and delightful Talent Given Us is a movie that shouldn't work but does rather remarkably.

Ludicrous but not quite the howler it could and should have been.

Deceptively understated and finally ferocious.

Enormously enjoyable, high-adrenaline documentary.

There is something slightly magical about the lighting, almost as if this were a fantasy land from which Vanya might actually make an escape. This sense of unreality, of magical thinking and wishing, carries the story and Vanya through a remarkable journey.

There’s something irresistible about watching two people fall in love, even in contrived, sniffle- and sometimes gag-inducing films like Last Chance Harvey.

The director Yan-Ting Yuen revisits the country's recent past to explore the history and legacy of one of the strangest byproducts of totalitarian madness: the revolutionary spectacular.

In Freedom Writers Hilary Swank uses neediness to fine effect in a film with a strong emotional tug and smartly laid foundation.

The film is above all a consummate work of art, one that transcends the historically fraught context of its making, and its pleasures are unapologetically aesthetic. It reveals, excites, disturbs, provokes, but the window it opens is to human consciousness itself.

In the end what elevates Mr. Hou’s films to the sublime -- and this one comes close at times -- are not the stories but their telling.

The tediously convoluted plot involves the foursome’s attempt to pay him back, a labored venture that involves crooks with names like Dog and Plank, a man on fire, some fine cinematography, plenty of gore though no real point.

A nutty, often enjoyable farrago of craft and cinematic sampling, King Arthur moves fast and loose, and is almost aggressive in its absence of an original idea, in and of itself a Bruckheimer trademark.

A heavily padded, thinly conceived, well-meaning movie.

Filled with ideas and some nice acting, particularly from Mr. Mackie and Mr. Robinson, both of whom hold the screen easily, Mr. Evans has crammed a great deal of thought and a lot of obvious feeling into his first dramatic feature.

Sandra Bullock looks as if she would rather be shoveling pig waste - though of course in some respects that is exactly what she's doing.

There is so much talent on display in Park Chanwook's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, it is a drag that the film never rises to the level of its director's obvious ability.

Schumacher has gone into the cinematic heart of darkness and emerged with his own peculiar kink on the war movie: Vietnam beefcake.

A seamless model of form and content. (My only quibble is the poor quality of the digital video, which doesn't do justice to Johnson's work.)

The body has its needs, and one of the problems with Diary of the Dead is that it doesn’t get into your body; it doesn’t shake you up, jolt you, make you shiver and squeak. It’s clever, or at least clever enough to keep you going and interested from start to finish. It just isn’t scary.

Though mildly amusing, Murphy's two characters in Meet Dave -- a wee captain and a humanoid spaceship -- neither tax nor stretch him.