Manohla Dargis

An effortlessly complex portrayal that relishes the contradictions and complexities of someone capable of both exalted and debased behavior, a shape-shifter it is possible to be fascinated, repelled and compelled by, all at the same time.

If Lies were better, the most obvious point of reference would be "In the Realm of the Senses," but the filmmaking isn't good enough to warrant such comparison, and the ideas are half-baked.

The bittersweet paradox of this franchise is that while the stories have grown progressively less interesting the special effects have improved tremendously, becoming at once more plausible -- when Spider-Man swings through the urban canyons he finally looks almost real -- and more spectacular.

Crushingly unfunny.

A big, provocative and -- it goes without saying -- disturbing work, though what makes it most provocative is that its greatest ambitions are for its own visual style.

Like Mr. Lee's hit-and-miss effort ("Bamboozled"), Mr. Willmott's alternative history takes its inspiration and its rage from an America that has come both a long way and not nearly far enough. But while the filmmaker's anger is palpable it's not very inspired.

A screenplay that not only has a way with genre cliché, but manages to score some deviously witty political points

Minor whimsy of a film.

Often ridiculous, awkward, unsatisfying and dour melodramatic adaptation.

The whole thing is kitsch of the most pricey sort, and it's a good guess that it will be a smash.

Crowe has made a hugely entertaining, nearly pitch-perfect film about rock & roll.

An exuberant, exhilaratingly playful testament to being young and hungry -- for life and meaning and immortality, and for other young and restless bodies -- Reprise is a blast of unadulterated movie pleasure.

If Mr. Kramer's outrage felt honest, his film would be easier to respect. But time and again, he undermines his own righteousness by pumping up the violence and stripping down his talent.

Scottish director Michael Caton-Jones continues to fritter away the last traces of his talent with this ugly variant on Fred Zinnemann's 1973 original, The Day of the Jackal.

Director Gary Fleder can only fling the camera about and indulge in some familiar screen sadism (and no wonder -- his last feature was "Kiss the Girls") as he tries to squeeze a few thrills from material as desiccated as his leading man.

After its electric opening -- one of the few occasions where Bean advances his case cinematically, showing rather than just telling -- the film rapidly assumes the shape of a 100-minute debate, as Danny argues against the Jews and, in the same breath, for them.

Whatever the case, The Invasion lurches and drags and teeters on the brink of death from scene to scene; it plays as if it had been made by someone in a trance, though not a cool one.

Although Vicky Cristina trips along winningly, carried by the beauty of its locations and stars -- and all the gauzy romanticism those enchanted places and people imply -- it reverberates with implacable melancholy, a sense of loss.

Like all good B-movies, Returner comes loaded with enough eccentric touches to give the recycling a whiff of freshness and, as is often the case with many above-par follies, it's the cast that takes the whole thing to another level.

Marks the emergence of one of the more original and promising new voices to hit the international cinema scene in recent years.

If only the whole thing didn't collapse in on itself, and quickly become a parody of artistic reach and terminal folly.

Bluntly effective.

This paranoid thriller has all the failings we expect...but Enemy of the State also has enough wit, talent and narrative thrust to mostly transcend those flaws, at least until that ludicrous finish.

Although he never matches the book in either brilliance or sheer perversity, Minghella has remained essentially true to his source.

The film has been hailed as something of a literary thriller; it's not. The stultifying pace and Moskowitz's filmmaking laziness are forgivable, but it's exasperating and indicative of our low expectations for the documentary form that a film that taps the likes of Leslie Fiedler could be so devoid of ideas. Reading is fundamental; so is thinking.

There are two films at war in director Spike Lee's newest feature 25th Hour, one uninteresting, the other an epic of near-tragic miscalculation.

However nifty, Lee's Cubist gambit fails to capture the graphic tension that makes great comic-book art jump off the page and great pop movies jump off the screen with pow, zap and wow!

It was somebody's nitwit idea to rip out the story's guts and brains for a sour sellout of a finale -- which finds the filmmakers behaving exactly like Stepford men and turning an original into a dummy.

Any resemblance to Cassavetes, intentional or not, only makes the film's flaws all the more apparent.

The junky, clunky, grimly unfunny follow-up to the marginally better “Rush Hour 2” and the significantly finer “Rush Hour,” isn’t the worst movie of the summer. But it’s an enervating bummer nonetheless, largely because it shows so little respect for its two likable stars and its audience.

Miller's strength in her stories and in the film is in her ability to push past ideology and get right down to the nitty-gritty of desire.

One of those rare films in which the moral stakes are as insistent and thought through as the aesthetic choices.

A would-be psychological thriller with next to no psychology and shivers instead of thrills, The Page Turner is a nervous-making, lightly amusing vengeance story that owes an obvious debt to Claude Chabrol.

The three leads go through the motions with goofy geniality, and director Chris Koch has enlisted some consummate character actors -- to help hold up the sagging jokes and story line.

It's a drag how Nettelbeck sees working women -- or at least this working woman -- for whom she shows little understanding; there's a puritan, even punitive, cast to the way she sees her character, whose pathology she digs at with the tenacity of a truffle hound.

The Salton Sea isn't without interest or ideas, though some of the better ones are cribbed from David Fincher and, especially, Martin Scorsese.

The workmanlike title The Bank Job is a nice fit for this wham-bam caper flick.

Mr. Kerrigan isn't just playing with our sympathies; he's also playing with our assumptions. That keeps the tension going.

The cinema of morons made by morons for morons, Swordfish is everything you expect but worse.

Stuffed with playful character actors and carpeted with wall-to-wall tunes, the film makes for easy viewing and easier listening.

A midnight movie in lysergic spirit and vibe, this was a film made for late-night screening and screaming.

Following the lead tendered by the credited screenwriters, Steve Koren and Mark O'Keefe, the director Frank Coraci struggles to push the character toward the kind of age-appropriate complexity lost on Mr. Sandler, forgetting that his star only works when, as all those ponderous bosoms suggest, he's un-weaned.

The latest James Bond vehicle -- call him Bond, Bond 6.0 -- finds the British spy leaner, meaner and a whole lot darker.

A kind of dumb but also kind of smart-about-being-dumb comedy.

It's a beautiful message: surely there's no arguing with "Hey, hey, ho, ho, poverty has got to go!" But there is much to argue with, and much to regret, about a film whose director thinks he needs to drop an anvil on our heads when art would suffice.

One of the most harrowing and plausible visions of apocalypse since George A. Romero's 1968 zombie shocker, "Night of the Living Dead."

The on-screen results are weird and watchable, by turns frustrating and entertaining, and predictably a little morbid.

This genial comedy is as unambitious and, at times, as funny as its high concept.

A true rarity, Murderous Maids is an intelligent, moral shocker.

A masterpiece of indirection and pure visceral thrills, David Cronenberg's latest mindblower, A History of Violence, is the feel-good, feel-bad movie of the year.

Their (filmmakers Oxide and Danny Pang) sense of pacing is nicely arrhythmic, which makes the "boo" moments all the more heart-thudding, but what's even more pleasurable are the pockets of quiet, those lacuna of low-frequency dread when nothing much happens.

The director, Iciar Bollain, who wrote the screenplay with Alicia Luna, invests Antonio with humanity, which would be more impressive if she had paid more attention to exploring the darker recesses of Pilar's inner life.

The best cheap thrill to come out of Hollywood in ages -- it's a shot of tonic for the current blockbuster bloat.

Though the car chases have grown more banal as the franchise has started to run on fumes, the smackdowns have retained their zing.

No question, the film's best special effect is Ms. Garner, especially when she's in costume.

Greatly appealing if not especially adventurous, either for its director or for her admirers.

If Flags of Our Fathers feels so unlike most war movies and sounds so contrary to the usual political rhetoric, it is not because it affirms that war is hell, which it does with unblinking, graphic brutality. It’s because Mr. Eastwood insists, with a moral certitude that is all too rare in our movies, that we extract an unspeakable cost when we ask men to kill other men. There is never any doubt in the film that the country needed to fight this war, that it was necessary; it is the horror at such necessity that defines Flags of Our Fathers, not exultation.

The overall effect is part BBC-style biography, part Hollywood-like hagiography, and generally pleasing and often moving, even when the story wobbles off the historical rails or becomes bogged down in dopey romance.

Despite the filmmakers’ efforts to persuade us that The Young Victoria is a serious work, and despite some tense moments and gunfire, the movie’s pleasures are as light as its story. No matter. Albert may never rip Victoria’s bodice, but he does eventually loosen it, to her delight and ours.

This convulsively funny movie takes an up-close and sometimes queasy-personal approach to its motormouth subject, who, when she's not making you howl with laughter (or freeze up in horror), brandishes her deeply held hurts, fears, prejudices, poor judgment and bad taste as if they were stigmata.

Too bad that by the time the volcano shoots its wad, the movie has already died a thousand deaths, ground to a halt by the interminable waiting for the damn thing to blow.

Guest begins -- but doesn't end -- with caricatures, then peels away at our preconceptions until we see the heart and soul beneath.

Godard has always made films that are as thrilling for their ideas and ideals as for the sheer beauty of their images; the difference here is that for the first time in years he's more interested in turning us on than in turning us off.

A blast into the past, but as with many nostalgic trips it's also shrouded in mist. The awkward, almost embarrassed way in which director Paul Justman, as well as writers Walter Dallas and Ntozake Shange, deal with race is unfortunate, as is the tendency toward overstatement.

For all the director's visual flair, his trademark flashes of gallows humor and his few good moments, there's never a sense that he's made Crash his own.

Absurd beyond belief or reason.

This veteran Spanish director has, in his latest, created both a tribute to an art form and a performance archive.

Good zombie fun, the remake of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead is the best proof in ages that cannibalizing old material sometimes works fiendishly well.

In one of the sweetest ironies of the entire film year, Sam Raimi has made an A-movie with the soul of a B-movie classic.

One of the more watchable films of the summer. A folly, true, but watchable.

The joint doesn't jump in the musical Idlewild; it just twitches and stumbles. As much a missed opportunity as a terrible tease.

A clumsily directed, painstakingly faithful adaptation thats heavy on plot, light on nuance, and features in its title role a young newcomer whose most striking quality is an almost preternatural absence of oomph.

If in Bresson's films nothing ever seems out of place or superfluous it's because he strove to find the essential truth of the image. Not an image or sound is wasted -- or offered up in self-glorification -- and from such seeming simplicity there arises a world of feeling.

If all this sounds a bit nuts, dangerously self-indulgent and very of its experimental moment, it is. But it's also highly entertaining and, at moments, revelatory about filmmaking as a site of creative tension between individual vision and collective endeavor.

Now that's exploitation.

An execrable mess that leaves no genre cliché unturned or human body or soul untrammeled.

More disturbing, yet another robot, or maybe two, seems to have written a Hollywood script and hijacked a major studio production. Given the film's assembly-line screenplay and mechanistic storytelling, no other explanation seems viable. Certainly no one with a heartbeat or taste would blow so much talent, time and resources on such rubbishy writing.

A "slam, bam, thank you, ma'am" trifle of an entertainment.

During the ensuing narrative unpleasantness and visual incoherence (meaningless choker close-ups, pointless slow motion), Hayley subjects Jeff to a range of torture, all in the name of, well, what? Despite the two fine performances, it's hard to say.

Even Phoenix, an actor who can make an incestuous-minded Roman emperor seem sensitive, can't smooth over political nihilism this unsavory.

Spielberg's infidelity to Aldiss (and perhaps to Kubrick, who knows?) would be pardonable if it didn't ruin his movie. In the end, he has failed to make a persuasive, smart movie about robots and people.

I wish Ms. Parker had let that bee in her bonnet go silent, because the movie that she and Mr. King have come up with is the pits, a vulgar, shrill, deeply shallow -- and, at 2 hours and 22 turgid minutes, overlong -- addendum to a show that had, over the years, evolved and expanded in surprising ways.

Touches earnestly on heart-heavy issues of loss: loss of memory, of love and, perhaps because of the local angle, of (or rather by) the Chicago Cubs. But Mr. Kinney, a founder of the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago and a familiar face from film and television, never gives his movie a sustained pulse.

A B-movie-style throwback that’s consistently diverting and blissfully free of morals and messages, A Perfect Getaway is just the thing for the summertime movie blahs: it’s a genuinely satisfying cheap thrill.

What makes this nonsense more galling than usual is that while Ladder 49 might have started out as a heartfelt attempt to honor those in the line of literal fire, it weighs in as an attempt to exploit their post-Sept. 11 symbolism.

As mean-spirited toward its working-class characters, especially its women, as it is profoundly unfunny.

For all their foul jokes and embarrassments, the brothers have a talent for creating characters whose goodness, and lack of ironic self-consciousness, shield them against life's insults.

If the second film never reaches the highs of the first -- we have met the players before and there are no new worlds of wonder -- it nonetheless invests moviegoing with a sense of adventure.

For the most part this is perfectly painless mush. The movie is irrepressibly silly -- what were you expecting? -- but a few hours of Mr. Gyllenhaal jumping around in leather and fluttering his long lashes has its dumb-fun appeal.

Sluggishly paced and shot in the sort of grubby digital video that renders even the dewiest skin tone liverwurst gray, the film comes across as little more than a series of acting workshop exercises wrapped in a tissue of cliché.

Calvaire is pompous, but not without talent or shivers.

Elle dresses in shades of sorbet and dolls up her Chihuahua like a bantamweight drag queen, but by fighting the good fight she's also giving alpha girls and women their due, rescuing them from the magazine horror stories and the taint of Hillary.

To say that Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack it in right now.

There's something unsettling when fiction exploits this history to such puny, self-interested ends.

Unfortunately, Ms. Faucher's screenplay, written with Gaëlle Macé, never finds its focus or reason for being, and Ms. Naymark just doesn't have enough screen presence to make up for the lack of a story or to justify all those tenderly attentive close-ups.

High Fidelity wants to be hip, but it's comically square.

Sincere and sinister and inevitably ambitious, a serious work that insists on its own seriousness even when it edges toward the preposterous.

What's interesting about Stealth isn't its nitwit story... No, what's interesting about this movie - and many others of its kind - is that it continues the love affair Hollywood, that hotbed of liberalism, has long had with militarism.

Manages to entertain mildly only because it traffics in all the familiar action-movie clichés, giving moviegoers ample opportunity to test their action-movie I.Q.

Mr. Hong is not yet the equal of Mr. Antonioni, but it has become increasingly difficult to see intellectually stimulating, aesthetically bold films like this in American theaters.

Mr. Hoffman enlivens Mission: Impossible III, which otherwise droops, done in both by the maudlin romance and by Mr. Abrams's inability to adapt his small-screen talent -- evident in his capacity as the television auteur behind "Alias" and "Lost" -- to a larger canvas.

It's possible that two actors other than Samantha Morton and Jason Patric might do justice to Cecilia Miniucchi's story about two badly matched Santa Monica, Calif., parking enforcement officers who stumble and grope into a relationship. But it's hard to think of a better match for the stubborn idiosyncrasies of Ms. Miniucchi's visual style and worldview than these two.

Packs a lot of good information, witty visual aids and expert testimonials into its fast 96 minutes, and all the bad eating certainly makes for compelling if at times repugnant viewing. But the film ends up too short and, as a consequence, frustratingly glib.

In both its intellectual reach and the elegant simplicity of its form, A Talking Picture bears resemblance to Andrei Sokurov's "Russian Ark."

Lust, Caution -- a truer title would be “Caution: Lust” -- is a sleepy, musty period drama about wartime maneuvers and bedroom calisthenics, and the misguided use of a solid director.

A barely coherent genre mishmash.

Directed by Koji Masutani, this speculative, provocative, frustrating and finally unpersuasive historical gloss races quickly and all too lightly over the major political crises that John F. Kennedy faced during his aborted presidency.

Graced with a shimmering visual style and sense of lyrical self-consciousness that owes a debt to French visionary Jean Cocteau, the modest film provides further evidence of Mexico's recent cinematic renaissance.

The film's septuagenarian director deserves his share of the credit for bringing this human story to the screen with engaging B-movie modesty and no small measure of chops.

As with all of Egoyan's films, this new one comes cloaked in an atmosphere of dread, but for the first time there's no real purpose, intellectual or emotional, to all the free-floating anxiety.

There is no poetry here and little thought.

A triumph of low-end production design, shot in sizzling, solarized black and white, and driven by a propulsive, insinuating score, Pi is a horror movie that makes you think and an indie film that makes you squirm.

Slick, noisy thriller.

Crammed with friendly, sympathetic talking heads and pretty images of a stunned-looking Mr. Bruce, then 35, relearning life (he remembers how to walk but forgot family and friends), the film comes up frustratingly short when it comes to the particulars.

So badly written, so poorly directed and performed, and so garishly visualized -- attention Kmart shoppers! -- it defies explanation.

Rather than steep his story in dread, ideas or something, anything, fresh and different, first-time director Eli Roth just pours on the blood, along with some recycled surrealism and plenty of giddy movie allusions.

A nearly affectless Christian Slater, who carries a co-producing credit and seems to have lost his charisma along with his sneer, plays Tom, an armored-car guard who plays hide-and-seek with a gang of thieves, all of whom, outside of ringleader Jim (Morgan Freeman), are instantly forgettable.

Ms. Streisand hasn't been called on to deliver an immortal or even interesting performance, but she is a pip to watch.

Reasonably enjoyable until its guys are forced to grow up. Because bad behavior is usually more fun to watch than good, the movie is especially fine during the preliminaries.

As to be expected, it's all very beautiful; too bad it's also often annoying, save for a heartbreaking final half-hour.

The film is good news nonetheless - it's a store-bought valentine with real heart.

Like too many animated films aimed at children, Barnyard embraces stereotypes that generally no longer cut it in adult films, and for good reason.

This predictable teenage take on the 'Fatal Attraction' formula goes from dumb to even dumber.

Like the filmmaking itself, the violence has no passion, no oomph, no sense of real or even feigned purpose.

How anyone in the cast manages to keep a straight face is one of the film's innumerable mysteries.

Becomes guilty of the very prejudice that his film has so obviously tried to subvert. It's too bad -- the rest of it is hilarious.

A limp attempt to wed a romantic comedy to a buddy comedy, largely because the filmmakers see women as visitors from another planet, which is more or less what they now are in Hollywood.

Dude, one last thing: If you see my moms and pops, definitely don't tell them about this.

One weakness is the too-brief, tantalizing peeks inside the Barnes. Yet, like the movie as a whole, this limitation comes with dividends: it made me want to hop on a plane to Philadelphia as soon as possible to see the original before it’s emptied.

It’s part comedy, part tragedy and 100 percent pure calculation, designed to wring fat tears and coax big laughs and leave us drying our damp, smiling faces as we savor the touching vision of American magnanimity. It holds a flattering mirror up to us that erases every distortion.

In this film Mr. Coppola blurs dreams and everyday life and suggests that through visual and narrative experimentation he has begun the search for new ways of making meaning, new holy places for him and for us. He may not have found them yet, but, then, he’s just waking up.

It's all terribly tortured, often laugh-out-loud, absurdly funny and, as with all of Maddin's movies, conveyed through images that are as lush and beautifully over the top as the story's emotions.

Takes raw grief as its point of departure only to play out as a comedy of deadpan heartbreak.

Despite the tears, the blood and the booze, Head-On is a hopeful film.

As is often the case with movies of this type, the real stars are the special-effects team, which does some admirably disgusting work.

Robbins has made a drastically different film from the one Welles envisioned -- it's wacky where Welles is absurd, cynical where Welles is canny.

100 percent goo.

Gentle, bawdy and at times rambunctiously, ticklishly rude.

Like Hitchcock, Mr. Wong is at once a voyeur and fetishist par excellence.

Exploitation cinema of the most narcoleptic kind.

It’s precisely the worshipful feel of Lynch -- including scenes in which the camera points up at Mr. Lynch from what seems to be the floor, as if it were a faithful dog -- that makes the movie so sweet and so appealing. It’s like watching a schoolgirl crush unfold, through a glass darkly.

Taken on the level of spectacle rather than of sense, The Last Samurai affords the sort of fizzy enjoyment that can come with epic movie endeavors, including a meticulously detailed world unlike our own, an excellent supporting cast and some pulse-pounding fights.

As sticky as "Strictly Ballroom," if far better behaved, Shall We Dance was written and directed by Masayuki Suo, a man who really knows his way around clichés both benign and tiresome.

While its blowout finale is telegraphed long before the first act ends, and too much else is just as obvious and bland, Judd, Freeman and Franklin never stop adding filigree. The big picture isn't much to look at, but the detailing isn't bad.

It's sexy, brainy and slightly nuts.

While compromised by the uplift and affirmation that mainstream animation regurgitates like a mommy penguin, it also shows a remarkable persistence of vision. Even in a story about singing-and-dancing fat and feather, Mr. Miller can’t help but go dark and deep.

For all the highfalutin dialogue and mysterioso goings-on, the only true mystery Hicks and Goldman conjure up is whether the mellifluously voiced outsider is dangling his new friend a little too closely on his knee.

A slice of social realism, a wedge of naturalism, a symbolically freighted fairy tale -- at times, London to Brighton feels like all of these combined, which, before it all turns to mush, gives the film the aspect of a fascinating and ambitious pastiche. There’s something provocative about Mr. Williams’s attempt to join together so many conflicting, contradictory influences, even if in the end they manage only to cancel one another out.

Baggy, draggy, oddly timed and strangely off the mark, The X-Files: I Want to Believe is the generally bad-news follow-up to the show’s first feature-film incarnation, "The X-Files."

The pleasure of Mr. Stone's work has never been located in restraint but in excess, a commitment to extremes that can drown out the world or, as in this film, give it newly vivid, hilarious and horrible form.

Less savvy propagandists than Mr. Moore, the Celsius 41.11 filmmakers apply their thesis with a trowel.

In "Pretty Woman" Roberts played a tough whore with a soft heart. Here, she's a business owner whose sense of self is so tenuous she doesn't even know how she likes her eggs done.

What distinguishes Memories of Murder, setting it apart from rank-and-file thrillers, is its singular mix of gallows humor and unnerving solemnity.

Working again with Diego Martínez Vignatti, the cinematographer for "Japón," the director doesn't just seize our attention; he commands it - forcing us into a world of terror and beauty.

To borrow and slightly emend the words of Shakespeare: That cat will mew, but this dog will have the day.

Their taste is as bad as their timing is exquisite.

The most interesting thing about The Good Shepherd is how hard the filmmakers work not only to demystify the agency, but also to strip it of its allure, its heat.

Nothing but the Truth has nothing much at all to do with the historical record, which wouldn't be bad if it offered something persuasive and worthwhile in return, like a reckoning of journalism and its abuses.

Even when Mr. Coogan can't make his scenes work, his prickly presence keeps you watching, as does the eerie scenes of winter that Mr. Glatzer captures with the camera.

Like so many political films of this type made for British television, this documentary contains more information than analysis, not to mention predictably spooky music.

Every so often, Mr. Arslan cuts to Kurdistan, where a group of women wander the barren landscape, a Greek chorus gone astray in a film gone amiss.

The brilliance of Borat is that its comedy is as pitiless as its social satire, and as brainy.

While the film’s desperately sad finale indicates that Philippe Garrel knows the truth of '68 better than most and might have suffered a crisis in faith in the years since, this magnificent film is itself proof that all was not lost.

It’s a pitiless, violent story that in its telling becomes a haunting and haunted intellectual and aesthetic achievement.

One of the strengths of Mr. Nguyen-Vo's film is that despite the overwhelming physical beauty of the landscape and the simplicity of his characters, he doesn't succumb to such aerated thinking. The world in Buffalo Boy" is filled with wonder, but it is a world also filled with real desire, real death, not abstractions.

Woody Allen’s latest excursion to the dark side of human nature, is good enough that you may wonder why he doesn’t just stop making comedies once and for all.

Serviceable trash. It looks and moves like a low-end action movie, complete with thumping soundtrack, nanosecond-fast edits, stunts that probably look scary to anyone who doesn't know better and even a third-act police chase through downtown L.A. In other words, it's Bruckheimer for babies.

Icky, nasty, calculatingly odd and a little funny, though more often strained and inadvertently absurd, After.Life changes its mood and apparent intentions from scene to scene, sometimes minute to minute.

Kitted out in period garb and dubious British accents, the actors throw themselves into this flimsy contrivance with energy, but are badly served by a director focused on flipping switches and twirling knobs. Despite a few early sparks of promise The Brothers Grimm sputters and coughs along like an unoiled machine, grinding gears and nerves in equal measure.

A slag heap of outrageous coincidence and shimmering be-all-that-you-can-be posturing, the film is for all intents and purposes another Top Gun retread, which is why its lies don't register as deeply or offensively as those put forth by films like "Mississippi Burning" -- it's too silly to take seriously.

Both in its ingratiating vibe and bland execution, Cars is nothing if not totally, disappointingly new-age Disney.

Sucks -- because it's a frenetic bore that insists on its audience's adoration while making no demands upon their intelligence.

Some of what happens feels real, a lot doesn't, but even when the screenplay groans with clichés, the four lead actresses play their parts with truckloads of heart.

Softer, louder and cleaner than the 1974 version, the new film sentimentalizes the prisoners and the game, filing down their sharpest edges so that winning becomes a matter of triumph rather than resistance.

Directed by the young actor Adam Goldberg, best known for playing the Jewish soldier who falls to a Nazi knife in "Saving Private Ryan," I Love Your Work is an attempt to say something interesting about modern celebrity.

Va Savoir doesn't so much flow as wander, trailing off into drama one minute, slapstick the next; it tries your patience, but ever so gently, masterfully.

The story leapfrogs abruptly from scene to scene, and it makes such a mockery of narrative logic and continuity that the cast tends to look either baffled (Dorff) or as if they're trying to remain unrecognized.

A movie that desperately wants her (Latifah's) hip, her edge and mostly her blackness but doesn't know what to do with the human being who comes with the package.

An agonizingly familiar refrain, but one that the young Argentine director Alexis Dos Santos relates with such tenderness and with so much ethereal beauty that it feels like something fresh.

As high concept and rife with cliché as anything ever churned out by Hollywood, but with worse production values and a load of sanctimonious political correctness.