Marc Savlov

For all its noble intent, Hopkins' film falls flat halfway through, mired in bad philosophizing and too-beautiful killing fields, neither bark nor bite mean much here.

It's a noble effort, but aficionados and the mildly interested are recommended to seek out VH-1's excellent Studio 54 documentary in lieu of this shallow morality play.

Like Mumbai, Slumdog pulses and throbs with raw, unadulterated life and the hope for a better Bombay, today. It's brilliant.

Damon, particularly, stands revealed as a comic ace.

In the end, it's a love story after all, but a peculiarly Gallocentric one -- cheap, nasty, but salvageable nonetheless.

The most remarkable aspect of Lemon Tree, however, and the one that's most likely to land this film on many year-end Best Foreign Film lists, is Abbass' devastating and marvelously restrained performance.

There’s a surprising lack of surprises in DreamWorks’ answer to Disney/Pixar’s runaway smash "Finding Nemo."

Kaplan's lustily awful film is to be avoided if at all possible, and if not, well, don't say I didn't warn you.

The film's two saving graces are the time machine itself -- a gorgeous, whirling array of burnished copper and blazing light -- and the CGI-created rise and fall of New York City.

As a period mystery, however, it's as muddy and swirling as the actual record of that fateful, deadly weekend cruise.

You want vampiric satire with actual laughs? Try Mel Brooks' "Dracula: Dead and Loving It," "Love at First Bite," or even Roman Polanski's "The Fearless Vampire Killers." Anything is better than Friedberg and Seltzer's endless, bargain-basement, sub-Cracked magazine un-comedy.

Ultimately, it's a long, incoherent mess of a film, enlivened only by the sure knowledge that the great Will Eisner's original is available to one and all at your nearest comic-book shop.

We've heard tell about the rebirth of the Western at least since Clint Eastwood's vicious, "Unforgiven" 16 years ago, but since the genre never truly died in the first place there's no need to flog that horse here.

The fun of Wild Things -- and there's a lot of it -- is in its never-ending game of cross and double cross.

Dahl, who really does know what he's doing when it comes to investing a scene with both heebies and jeebies, is a notch or two above most.

This is a wonderful, disarming film, sort of like Ghost, but with all the Hollywood drained from it, leaving nothing on screen but the truth of the matter. Which is the way it should be, of course.

Torque knows it’s one big joke, dusty chaps, heaving bosoms, and all, which makes it all that much easier to swallow. And forget.

Innocence is possessed of a highly literate, almost classical story.

It's a riveting, nail-biting, two-buckets-of-popcorn return to form for Howard.

We've just been to this party before and we know how it ends, again and again and again.

Although a few bits (the film is done in blackout sketch style) fall flat and a good ten minutes could be shaved off the running time with no visible damage, it's an impressive and irascible debut that rings true even when you're laughing too hard to hear it.

Neither as adroitly funny as Franken's comic routines, nor as notable as his conversion to the fine art of politics, this is a 90-minute "What If?" with no discernible answer.

Looks like a million bucks (or rather, a million bucks gone to compost), but at its dark heart it's a tedious, bewildering affair, lovely to look at but with all the substance of a dissipating dream.

A winning update of a classic piece of Eighties' filmmaking, and that in itself is something of a coup.

Even the should-have-been-triumphant revelation of the Boogeyman arrives as a CGI letdown of epic proportions.

This is either one of the best “head” films of all time or one of the worst examples of Disneyfied opportunism to come down the pike in years. I'd like to think it was the former, really I would, but somehow I suspect otherwise.

Gratuitous in every sense of the word, this second remake of 1978's Joe Dante-directed/Roger Corman-produced "Jaws" knockoff is ridiculous summertime drive-in fun.

Not only is it interesting to follow the course of Gray's storyline, the movie is also equally interesting to view, even if the storyteller is just sitting in front of a desk most of the time.

It's Winslet who is the heart and soul of Little Children, and when she makes a desperate, final bid to reclaim her soul, it's both horrifying and heart-rending.

Koteas' overearnest performance almost makes The Haunting in Connecticut worth a look, but ultimately even the star of Cronenberg's "Crash" can't salvage what is essentially a substandard rip-off of "The Amityville Horror."

Inspired lunacy.

For a film focusing on such a rich emotional tapestry, Kundun is strangely lacking in its emotional core.

Feels like a been-here-done-that dud.

Its view of mankind is unkind, to say the least, but any race that can produce such remarkably garish gore as this is perhaps salvageable somehow, someday.

The shock ending isn't all that shocking if you're a fan of genre films, but it's nonetheless effective despite the fact that it sidesteps several key questions. Never mind: It's hellishly fun.

Craven is obviously having a ball here, and it's impossible not to sit back and go grinning into this dark, gory ride.

The wraparound storyline is unnecessary and continually interrupts the vastly more interesting story of Khayyam's history.

Sticking it to the man, German-style.

A Sound of Thunder is positively awash in bad hairpieces, leading one to believe that global warming is going to be the least of our problems.

A dead-chamber misfire, a hollowpoint dud.

Shapeshifters-lite. Fangs but no fangs.

It's a straight-ahead caper flick, very cool, and very, very Seventies (although it takes place in 1995), from production and costume design on down to the soundtrack.

The real shocker is how hellishly yawn-inducing this utterly pointless and forgettable Haunting turns out to be. It's enough to make you scream.

The film is one of the more adult offerings out there in a spring movie season peppered with martial arts and superheroes. It may be just what you're looking for.

While the evil that men do to one another in this film may well be rooted in the Cain-like enabling of original sin from one doomed brother to another, the final familial tragedy feels exactly like classic Lumet.

Call it the aesthetic of un-Happiness.

Simply put, Burton's film lacks the social and political gravitas of the original, a film that was wholly of its time.

The catch is, once you get past the stunning special effects and the mind-numbing stuntwork, there's not all that much there.

Eminently resistible, an unclassifiable cinematic leftover best left untasted.

Timely metaphors abound in The Order of the Phoenix, but the story (of which there is much) stands on its own magical merits, dark and darker still though they may be.

Who, exactly, is stalking whom, and for what reason? I'm still not entirely sure, but Resnais' funky, frothy bonbon of a film is nevertheless a breathtaking sight to see.

A film for the young at heart and those who still appreciate honor, valor, love, and the earth.

All this and not a glimmer of General Franco makes for a surreal – and sporadically inspired – comedy of Spanish mores back when naughty was nice.

The end result is overkill en extremis. There is such a thing as too much. And 3KMTG is much too much.

Although it's great fun for the under-8 set and for those of us monitoring the chaos theory that is Nolte's career of late, this film is otherwise mediocre and features some of the most uninvolving 3-D CGI since "Clash of the Titans" earlier this year.

Minus much of the rose-tinted nostalgia his films have occasionally engendered. There is a nostalgic tone to the film, but it's a quiet, subtle one.

Corman's legendary parsimony has rarely been so inobvious; House of Usher has the look and feel of a film made for far more than its tiny $200K budget (and on a tight, 15-day shooting schedule). Its authentically creepy dream-sequence – all grasping hands and hazy blue-gelled fog swirls –­ is a minor surrealist masterpiece by its own right.

Above all, there's Nolte, who hovers over the whole production like some sapient force of nature.

It keeps you off balance, all right, but not enough to obscure the sad fact that Ghosts of Mars is a muddled, derivative disaster straight on through.

Interestingly, Coppola has eschewed state-of-the-art special effects in favor of a panoply of archaic film-school tricks -- reversing the film, multiple exposures, playing with the shutter speed -- that give his Dracula a stylized, almost hyper-real clarity and a wonderfully singular weirdness.

Dude, your movie sucks.

Honestly, if it weren't for Denis' striking visual sense, the producers could make a small fortune marketing Nénette and Boni as a sleep aid. Granted, Colin and Houri are both delightful actors. The bond they create between these onscreen siblings is terrifically realized and fully developed, but it's far too little to sustain a film in which virtually nothing happens, despite the fact that it all looks so very good.

Unlike any other film released this past year, be it from the aspect of its storylines, of which there are many, or its emotional clarity, which is, quite frankly, brutal.

Contemporary adult themes that resonate as much as those in Perfect Blue (stalking, the cult of celebrity) have become increasingly rare in this animated genre better known for tentacled demons and cute forest sprites; it's refreshing to be reminded that not everything in anime need feature that lovable scamp Pikachu, either.

Neither very scary nor very interesting, Godsend is an unresurrectable muddle.

It's still just cops and robbers, but with Donner at the helm, it feels like so much more.

One of the 10 best films ever made, period.

Severance is a British horror-comedy that, from the get-go, has two distracting strikes against it.

A 119-minute trailer.

Silly, predictable, and, dare I say it, oddly endearing, Hackers is the first film I've seen in a long while that annoyed me so much I actually enjoyed it.

While its heart is in the right place, Aeon Flux's head is just a little too high to make much sense.

Kline and Spacey are excellent here, playing off of each other like a couple of professional combatants; it's by far the most interesting thriller in the last six months.

Scorpion fails to connect on anything but the most basic comic level. Despite Allen's usual excellent direction, it all plays like a TV-movie version of something else, Allen-lite.

Broad across and rippling with muscle, 50 Cent mumbles his way through his hits.

Infinitely more entertaining than anything the WWE has done recently, this sophomore outing from "Napoleon Dynamite" director Hess is full of cheesy goodness, but it's Velveeta.

A go-for-the-lowest-common-denominator grab bag of raunchy sex gags and freakish outbursts. The cool thing is that it works.

Despite some briefly breathtaking, computer-generated special effects, Virtuosity is 95 minutes of unsubstantial firefights and meandering plot twists.

One of the most inventive romantic comedies to come around in some while.

The Cable Guy is being marketed as a dark comedy, which I suppose it is, to some extent. Honestly, though, it's just not dark enough.

Far better than advance word had it, Coneheads makes last year's Wayne's World film seem tame by comparison. And yes, Garrett Morris is in it, too.

All one needs to know about Burt Munro, the real-life New Zealand codger and Indian motorcycle enthusiast who in 1967 set a land speed record that still stands today, comes midway through this unabashedly sentimental wall of schmaltz.

Director Miller, thankfully, keeps his pacing quick and his touch deft -- Lorenzo's Oil rarely becomes bogged down in interdisciplinary conundrums or the unwarranted heartstring-yanking that so often occurs in Hollywood MedFilms.

Schroeder's film is fun to watch, even when it's being predictable or brutal, but its memory is nearly gone the next day.

Once the rodeo's over, where do the sweethearts go? Beesley, thankfully, doesn't end the film with the end of the rodeo, but there's a potentially more interesting follow-up doc ghosting right behind this one.

Green, who looks like a chinless, hollow-eyed pederast at the best of times, is simply out of his league here, and the fact that the film drags interminably when it's actually a very average 90 minutes long betrays its essential emptiness.

Spanning three decades, Map of the Human Heart is one of those rare films that illuminates a single human story, and does it so well that you're hardly aware you're watching a movie.

An occasionally charming mix of campy fun and dodgy computer-generated effects.

Painfully lame and hamstrung by a viciously unfunny sense of humor.

It works only sporadically, and more as a comic outing than as a vicious battle of sexual predation.

To paraphrase Nathan McCall, this film makes you wanna holler.

Tykwer's camera can assault the audience with the rankest of imagery, but not even once does it come close to distilling the actual aroma of the abattoir that was 18th-century France. And for that, I suppose, we should all be thankful.

It seems downright unfair to harp on the remake’s differences from the original when both films are having such a ball.

This is high fantasy of the best kind.

It's chilling what Fiennes can do with so very little; he looks like a wounded puppy half the time and sounds like one to boot.

The Fall lives and dies on the strength of Pace and Untaru's remarkable performances. It's there that the pulsing heart of this magical-real film beats most true.

Lemarquis, as Noi, has a stoic and silent tenderness to him, and Hansdottir's Iris is the picture of pensive sluggishness. But then all that cold, cold snow slows you down, both inside and out, until the only thing moving is your heart.

The Road deviates from McCarthy's original text via a series of flashbacks to the man's pre-apocalyptic life with the woman (Theron) who both leaves her family behind and is in turn left behind by them.

Ultimately, it's 79 minutes of footage of a pair of petty, pretty people freaking out over having to go to the bathroom in their wetsuits, and in the end you find yourself rooting for the sharks.

There's nary a hint of suspense in West's film, though, mainly because he loudly trumpets the upcoming disasters so early in the film.

It's a finely calibrated, spiraling lesson in what NOT to do when engaging in adultery, blackmail, arson, and general antisocial behaviors, and in its best moments it recalls the everyday darkness of James M. Cain: average people doing awful things in an amoral and uncaring universe.

Unleashed suffers from a surfeit of sentimentality at times (blame Besson for that), but it's Li's first major Western role of any depth and he acquits himself admirably as both mad dog and melancholy master.

Truth itself is little more than a word in The Prestige, a film that both celebrates the wonder of being fooled and the foolishness of wanting just that.

Has an unerring eye for the banal intricacies of 1950s pre-planned suburban neighborhoods, à la Levittown.

A nifty idea that goes everywhere (and nowhere).

Laugh? Cry? I thought I'd die, but then that's the genius of Gordon.

Invincible is like a thick, sweaty slab of NFL comfort food.

Neither all that scary nor all that hilarious, Vampire in Brooklyn falls directly between the two, into the valley of mediocrity.

Perhaps one of the cutest children's films ever made.

It's an audacious, affecting, and unexpectedly hilarious debut, and most definitely the most original film I've seen all year.

Infinitely subdued, sexy, and melancholy, Nadja is one of the most stylish and quietly exhilarating genre movies to arrive in a long time. Recommended, and not just if you wear black all the time.

Simply a lousy film from start to finish.

A powerful little gem: a little bit of "The Outsiders" (the film's tone is remarkably similar to Coppola's film, minus the airy redemption and golden sunrises), a lot of "The 400 Blows," and a slice of "Radio Flyer" all wrapped up in a dirty black bow.

Pollock is that rare breed, a biopic that makes you want to learn more about its subject, as much as you can, as fast as you can.

This is a dream cast for both Scorsese and the viewer, and everyone is working at the peak of their craft. Nicholson's flawless performance as the increasingly unhinged crime boss is a marvel of manic, paranoid ruination.

It's neither utterly real nor utterly romantic (heroin, like alcohol, manages to be awfully and unremittingly both).

It’s as deadly dull as the blunt end of a rifle.

In the end, it's all la dolce vita no matter how you look at it.

Spottily directed and lacking the dubious merits of even the Friday the 13th franchise, this is one slasher film that should die a quick and lonely box-office death.

A smallish cast peppered with a pair of bullish performances by both Platt and the lesser-known Gleeson. The two spark some chemistry between them, which is more than can be said for Pullman and Fonda's moribund performances.

It's a great set-up, and for the first two-thirds or so of the film it works exceptionally well as a jaundiced satire on the world of gay porn.

We're treated to such a broad panoply of godawful dialogue, righteously shoddy acting, and, worst of all for an action blockbuster of this sort, subpar effects work, that's it's all you can do not to giggle helplessly.

If you (or your kids) loved Toy Story, you'll like Toy Story 2 as well. Just don't expect any big surprises.

Petersen, a director who knows his way around a crane shot better than almost anyone, rallies his troops but can't ignite his actors, and the end result is the sound and fury of Homer undone.

An informative and nonpolemic look at the birth of the modern environmental movement and its various offshoots and key players.

It's a feast of inconsequentiality, though, a love affair-lite that looks great but is ultimately less filling than a sunny summer Sunday's creampuff dream.

It's not quite as bad as "Cutthroat Island," I'll grant you, but it's woefully close.

Here's hoping that younger members of the audience will seek out Conan Doyle's original stories to further explore Holmes' official amanuensis, Dr. John Watson, whose brilliant case studies regarding his friend, roommate, and fellow rationalist are the stuff dreams are made of.

Nearly as much fun as a case of scabies, Beverly Hills Ninja transports the viewer into a mystical realm where pratfall is king and mediocrity is its own reward.

Inexplicable Fantasy Romances for the Harried Modern Gal 101 is a more fitting title for this shameless mediocrity.

It’s ridiculous and smart, hilarious and terrifying, difficult to swallow and probably a necessary antidote to the cacophonous history of a land that all too often seems anything but holy.

By the time the closing credits roll, you're wondering if anyone else noticed that nothing made much sense.

Despite an inordinately complicated third-act resolution, it's head-and-shoulders above most so-called suspense films.

One of the more surreal docs to come down the pike in some time.

To call The Crazies the most original horror film in a long while only serves to point out just how lousy mainstream, studio-released horror has become. It's a solid thriller, sure, but there's precious little in it that hasn't been seen countless times before, and in the end it plays it safe … by not playing it safe.

Director Carr, who helmed the similarly predictable "Daddy Day Care," keeps things moving, both on and off the court, with the sort of light, sweet humor you're not likely to find in too many other summer movies.

Set in some sort of post-apocalyptic Parisian deli o' the damned, this lunatic's take on the future of man is so delightfully warped that it's impossible to shake it out of your head and go get a decent night's sleep.

It's one of the better sequels to come out in years, and although it doesn't pack the emotional wallop of the first film, it's still head and shoulders (and punctured eyeballs) above most of what's out there.

This may be the first film to examine the intricacies of the Colombia-to-U.S. drug route in any detail.

A wellspring of lowbrow comedy that leaves you giggling in spite of yourself. Truly, it does not suck.

10 times too much, a nonstop orgy of bullets, bombs, and booty that aims low and hits the bull’s-eye with enough firepower to sink the Bismarck.

This is a scattershot affair, though fans of Reno should find it engagingly loopy.

Bad and baffling from the get-go, probably the only good thing to come out of this Rollerball is the boon it gives the porn industry in terms of another ready-made title to spoof.

Works both as an engagingly sordid meditation on protofeminism and contemporized sisterhood set in a time and a place where either/or were grounds for, at the very least, defenestration.

Bombastic it may be, but it’s rarely boring, as was the first Tomb Raider. Keep your expectations in line with the source material and you may be pleasantly surprised.

Red Eye's no classic, but with its smart, twisty little script and those two killer performances, it is a helluva lot of fun.

Only Palance is worthwhile, as Curly's long-lost brother Duke (there's an inspired cowboy name for ya), and even that role seems dazed and clichéd. Tack on an absolutely deranged, hackneyed final reel, and you've got a movie that'll fade from your memory so quick it'll make your eyes water and your teeth hurt.

Belongs in the histrionic comedy genre, packed as it is with just plain silly situations that fail to elicit grins, much less guffaws.

Despite a third-act tendency to gather a few spare genre clichés as it rolls along (Guns! Drugs! Angry siblings!), Robinson's film is a cut above the rest.

The film feels like a truly awful "Saturday Night Live" sketch padded out to such unholy lengths as to make "It's Pat" seems like a comic masterstroke.

It's a mess alright, but it's easy on the eyes. Like phone sex is for the ears. Only not as much fun.

Bella is, indeed, a beautiful film. The bustling, cab-crowded thoroughfares of New York City have rarely looked as inviting and the coastline as momentously beachy as they do in this film.

As a take on contemporary television culture, Stay Tuned has a lot to say, but much of it is presented in such a broad comedic format that it passes by unnoticed. This is a comedy, after all; politics aside, though, it never really rises above the level of mediocrity, and never actually descends to the level of television itself.

Sandler's first collaboration with co-writer and current Hollywood comedy godhead Judd Apatow, is a crazed, delightfully bizarre return to form for Sandler.

College, a film so persistently loud and annoying that it single-handedly makes the case for drugging yourself with a roofie.

A genuinely moving portrait of the artist as a young(ish) scullery maid.

Both interesting and insufferable.

At its best, Dr. Dolittle 2 is an inoffensive mish-mash of cute talking animals and their somewhat less-than-cute human buddies.

It's thanks to Akhtar's standout performance that The War Within is as electrifying as it is.

It's the opposite of "The Opposite of Sex," a meditation on multiple truths, and the lies that sometimes lie in between.

Wilson and Beckinsale, as the couple on the rocks, do their damnedest to go along for the creepfest, but nothing in Vacancy manages to come anywhere close to the quiet and steadily mounting dread of the real thing, much less the purview of Norman Bates or his beloved mother.

There are inspired gags, to be sure, but they're few and far between.

Ultimately the composition comes off as both overplayed and underdone.

This new chronicle of the adventures of the king's musketeers, as directed by Braveheart scribe Randall Wallace, suffers from a severe case of over-earnestness and star-power overkill.

It's not a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, just one that grabs your attention and then lets it go, time and time again.

As with all of Lee's films, there's much more going on beneath the surface than is immediately apparent.

There’s not a whole lot of heft to von Scherler Mayer’s romantic comedy with ethnic Indian entanglements; it’s like overdone naan, too flaky and ephemeral for its own good, but still somehow appetizing.

Possibly one of the dullest takes on a real-life murder mystery, this gutter’s-eye-view of the waning days of Los Angeles porn king John "Johnny Wadd" Holmes is barely as interesting as one of the big man’s films, and a lot less revelatory.

Best of all, though, is the kinescope footage of the televised version's early episodes, which eerily resemble nothing so much as every other TV sitcom to follow, Seinfeld included.

The Lost World (unlike Spielberg's original film) leaps head first into the action, rushing, it seems, to get the film's real stars -- the dinosaurs -- to the screen as quickly as possible, and it does so with considerable verve.

The script, by Adam "Tex" Vegas, ricochets between over-earnest romantic comedy staples and a noticeable lack of any consistent tone for Reynolds’ character.

A countrified, monolithic thing of beauty -- gorgeous to behold despite the fact that its overlong two-hour-and-45-minute running time plays off Redford's weather-beaten golden boy good looks far too often for its own good.

Gets its teeth in you and shakes. Once it’s over, you find yourself replaying it on an endless loop in your head.

Thomas’ comic flair is undeniable, as is Stern’s comic acting ability; all other arguments aside, Private Parts is a consistently uproarious affair, riddled with brilliant comic set-pieces, including Stern’s many, many run-ins with various program directors and NBC brass.

Manages to get by on wry smarts, barbed asides, and plenty of Barrymore's comic grace.

So much is going on, and so many bizarre and seemingly random subplots collide in Dreamcatcher, that the film feels like some crazy patchwork quilt sewn by a schizophrenic seamstress. It’s not only confusing, but dull, as well.

At once emotionally charged and genuinely, disconcertingly surreal...a marvel of subdued, genuine filmmaking.

It’s all very nice to look at, sure, but pretty colors and molten intercoolers aside, 2 Fast 2 Furious is about as exciting as a Yugo in quicksand.

Part metaphysical treatise, part educational primer, and part dangerously goofy self-help manual for the New Age set, this bizarre and not unentertaining documentary strives mightily to teach the lay audience everything there is to know about quantum physics in 108 minutes.

This was already tired stuff when cult fave "Sleepaway Camp" came out in 1983, and it’s downright comatose by now.

Fraser, Martin, and the rest of the flesh-and-blood characters look like they’re having a ball, which translates instantly to the audience as well.

The Squeakquel might be appreciated by filmgoers aged 10 or younger.

It’s bravura, classic Hollywood filmmaking, and you like to think that Hughes himself would have viewed it, if not appreciatively, then at least with a sense of kinship.

At its best when it goes down to the pub and captures, quite flawlessly, the grotty intoxication of these mad, bad, dangerous-to-know Hammers fans hoisting incalculable pints.

You come away from Splinter feeling it would have made a far more effective short than the feature-length drag it is.

The Coen brothers’ newest is an odd amalgam of tics and stutters that plays like something of a greatest-hits reel but never seems to jell into a real comedy.

It's a keeper, a tumultuous love story set against the backdrop of 24 hours of really, really inclement weather in the Oklahoma heartland.

It's more fun than a poke in the heart with a sharp stick.

The bulk, the heft, and the girth of Bukowski: Born Into This arrives in the form of the author himself, giving beery readings to Berkeley audiences clearly enjoying a contact high or sitting, ill-kempt but quiet, pensive, Heineken in one yellowy paw, in his apartment.

Due in large part to its cultural relevance, this is also one of the few sequels that nearly succeeds in topping the original.

Jolie's explosive performance surpasses all expectations and renders the film a veritable must-see.

The laugh-out-loud jokery is in short supply, and Reynolds and Reid's kicky charm only goes so far. Bluto Blutarsky, we miss you.

Neither as good as its direct ancestor (Michael Schultz's great 1976 hood masterpiece Car Wash) nor as clever as the original Friday, this is, to put it bluntly, all seeds and stems.

It's smart; it's silly; it's – kill me now – shear terror.

For the most part, this is strictly kiss kiss, bang bang, yawn yawn.

This biting parody of flyover-state beauty contests feels like a bad made-for-TV movie of the week.

About as thrilling as cleaning out your garage.

Bland to the point of pointlessness.

Hardly a serious caper film, Out of Sight instead takes a lighter approach, effortlessly offering up as many unexpected chuckles as it does bullets.

These days, it's dark everywhere. Which makes Slade's wild, often exhilarating neo-Western ride into frostbit vampirism something of a respite, albeit one awash gore.

The comedic success of this pair of dramatic archetypes, the radiant flibbertigibbet and the gray, lumpen elder spinster, in a lightweight bit of piffle such as this is a testament to both Adams' and McDormand's smarts. It's tough to play dumb when you're not and even more difficult to dial down your own innate brilliance.

Doesn't just raise the bar on sci-fi and action films, it rips that sucker off and sends it spiraling into the sun.

Make Ben Stein some more money (and get a good, mordant chuckle while you're at it) by checking out this loopy, factually befuddled documentary that should manage the not-inconsiderable feat of insulting Christians, Jews, Muslims, and those nutty sci-guys who go in for Darwin by way of bad teeth and Einsteinian hair styles.

Why remake Craven's original at all? Oh, yeah, I forgot: Reheated depravity sells. To avoid existential despair, keep repeating: It's only a remake; it's only a remake; it's only a remake.

The most costly and the most popular film in South Korean history is also one of the most gripping and epic war films ever made, and certainly the only one I can think of the portrays the Korean war from the viewpoint of both sides of the conflict.

Ultimately, though, We Were Soldiers fails to bring as much to the table as it at first seems it might.

It's a mess, and one that even the pickled cowboys behind me found yawningly tedious, and that's not something I ever thought I'd be saying about a Sam Raimi movie with the word “dead” in the title.

And Favreau? If you'd told me 12 years ago that Swingers' comic linchpin would end up helming one of the best, most visceral, and downright fun foray of all the comic-book franchises waiting in the CGI wings, I'd have told you to amscray, kid. But what the hell? Turns out irony's good for your blood.

Home may be where the heart is, but I kept wishing this poor silly girl would up and move.

Still, it's worth checking out if only to see Kidman immolate everything else on screen through sheer sexy charisma. Tom who?

Face/Off works like a charm right on down the line thanks to brilliant, exhilarating performances from Cage and Travolta, and the many tremendously enjoyable action set-pieces that are Woo's hallmark.

Shyamalan's premise is a lulu, to be sure, but if you can manage that precious, tentative suspension of disbelief, you'll find Unbreakable a rewarding meditation on the nature of heroes, both comic book and otherwise.

Pop psychology has never been as visceral as it is in Saw III.

In the end, Forces of Nature is a creampuff of a film, it being a scrappy romantic comedy of the purest stripe, what's so wrong with that? Not a thing.

It sounds as ridiculous as a "Pokemon" episode gone horribly awry.

Captivity is the kind of film that gives torture porn a bad name.

Charmingly subversive animation like this is a rare thing indeed, and the fact that you don't have to be under 10 years of age to thoroughly enjoy Mr. Shrek's wild ride is an added bonus.

Has the look and feel of Euro-Altman (vastly superior to Euro-Disney, mind you).

It's a visually stunning film. For every kid everywhere, and for every adult still a kid at heart, the dinosaurs are the thing, and here, finally, Disney does justice to our dreams.

The Israeli comedy Ushpizin begins something like Guy Ritchie's "Snatch" and ends like the Coen brothers' "Raising Arizona" – in between it's a wholly original movie.

Reaches toward new heights of comic laziness and succeeds beyond anyone's wildest expectations.

As a character-driven narrative, it's a hollow beast, too often pedantic, that smacks of good-guy agitprop, shrill when it should be subtle and shrieking when a whisper would be far more unnerving.

I continually found myself longing for the sheer intensity of the director's past glories, like Jaws, or even Duel. Spielberg seems to be trying so very hard for that elusive “Gosh, Wow, Sense of Wonder!” that it all looks strained in spots.

August Rush is a rather prosaic, oddly anxious, contemporary take on Dickens' Oliver Twist, with Williams – in nasty-man twee mode, a newish one for him – thrown in for bad measure.

Miller has somehow, inadvertently by his own admission, managed to capture the essence of the human throng, in all its maddening, scintillating permutations. It's a tour unlike any you have ever taken.

By the time the film's abrupt conclusion arrives, you realize you've been watching a love story and not, as some might hope, "The Lord of the Rings: The Asian Edition."

Tykwer ends the film on a bizarre note that caught me off guard, a too-literal bit of salvation that is more bothersome than revelatory.

Robinson keeps Jennifer 8 moving right along, alternately dropping clues right in our laps and tossing in a red herring or two, but it's the dark town running like a black thread throughout the whole film that keeps your nerves jangling.

Bottom line: costumed Goku and Chi Chi cosplayers may argue the finer points of this adaptation, but it is fairly dazzling it its own overextended, futurist-teenpulp fashion, and Chow makes a vastly more entertaining Roshi than he did a King.

At once perplexing and joyous, Maddin has crafted a film that, for all the confusion inherent in the tale, unfolds on its own unique (and rather tedious) terms. Love it or hate it, this is one film that just doesn't give a damn what you think.

Sporadically funny, the film seems weighted down, literally, with bulging, bulbous Murphys flatulating endlessly.

A disarmingly enjoyable film.

New and amazing -- it takes you back to the days when French filmmaking and French filmmakers were the darlings and saviors of the cinematic cutting edge. It's a great film, simply told, and a pleasure to watch.

Dobkin, in his directorial debut, seems ready and willing to ply the conventions of film noir in the harsh Montana daylight, but Clay Pigeons never manages to reach the crucial suspense plateaus that noir demands.

The character of Valentin is immediately recognizable to anyone who's gone to more than 20 films in their lives -- charming, cuddly, hellbent on making his world tolerable -- but to his credit both Noya and Agresti don't overplay their hand.

At once eerie, picaresque, evocative, and utterly alien to the reality most viewers inhabit, Into Great Silence is a daring and breathtakingly constructed documentary dream. So much so that the more restless among us may find themselves nodding off.

Ultimately, Dark Blue feels roughly a decade too late with its back story of the Los Angeles riots. Gates’ department had its share of dirty blues, to be sure, but that hasn’t been notable since the smoke cleared back in 1992.

It's not a great action dust-up by any means.

It’s hardly the most original teen comedy we’ve seen, but, again, Schaffer, working from a script by himself, Alec Berg, and David Mandel keeps things borderline sweet throughout.

The Collector feels like the final, welcome nail in the bizarrely popular torture-porn coffin.

Brandon Lee's swan song is a kinetic, pounding, adrenalized feast for the senses, if not the psyche. Bursting with startling images, eclectic staging, and gorgeous neo-gothic set design.

It boggles the mind that Saddam Hussein and assorted cohorts have finally won their rightful place in the global noose while various and sundry villains associated with this third entry in the Santa Claus franchise of flaccidly feel-good, winter nostrums will no doubt be allowed to walk the Earth with nary a qualm nor backward glance.

With Turistas, Stockwell dives head-first into a veritable riptide of churning, vicious exploitation cinema, and the result is surprisingly effective.

Has all the sugar-injected horsepower of a 6-year-old on a Big Wheel.

If "The Others" is this year's paean to “quiet” horror, then Jeepers Creepers is its down 'n' dirty, punk rock, rip-your-throat-out-and-feed-it-to-you bastard child.

The only question audiences are likely to be asking their higher power in the wake of viewing the film is, "What the fuck?"

By film's end I was fantasizing that Peter Stormare would drop by with his "Fargo" wood-chipper in tow, but it was not to be. Appalling.

It’s Brisseau's penchant for the flamboyantly perverse and the perversely flamboyant, however, that might have been best left secret.

With token computer graphics thrown in to pad an already overlong script, Ghost In the Machine gamely tries to hop aboard the Virtual Reality bandwagon and only succeeds in crashing the Net.

It’s not a disaster by any stretch, but purists will ache to show newcomers the horrific genius of "Ju-on" over The Grudge as soon as they exit the theatre.

Saw has its moments, and most of them are brutal in the extreme, but ultimately it's one tremendous misfire that will either leave you laughing or, possibly, gagging. Not what I'd call a winning combination.

Stylistically thrilling but ultimately tedious French import.

Sophie Scholl plods along inexorably, one step after another, to its grim, sad end. It's almost unbearable.

Director Bender has fashioned a film without any surprises, though after the first two films, anyone would be hard-pressed to make audience members jump.

To be sure, Snakes on a Plane is going to inspire some highly readable graduate-school film theses. You may even want to re-enroll to pen one yourself.

Forty-five minutes in, I was already glancing at my watch and wondering why the only lively actress in this film was playing the dead girl. Go figure.

Like the doomed vessel from which it takes its tale, Cameron's film is a behemoth, svelte, streamlined, and not the least bit ponderous.

The emotions are turbocharged and the topic is eternally relevant, but that's not enough to save Two Girls and a Guy from being a whiny, snoozy bore.

It's a silly, goofball romp, sure, but this newfangled Josie rocks far harder than her predecessor.

Just doesn't have it.

Unfamiliar to most these days and it goes without saying that Harris performs a great service in the eyes of history with his film.

It also has wild plot holes and requires an almost inhuman suspension of disbelief, but it's still a fun ride up to a point.