Marc Savlov

Castle-Hughes and Paratene are nothing short of remarkable in their roles.

Wolverine is a noisy mess, an origin/prequel that's nicely full of Jackman's ace glare as Wolverine and seriously killer snarl – The Boy From Aaarrrgh! – but utterly devoid of any of the borderline subversive smarts that made Bryan Singer's "X-Men" outings so contemporarily resonant.

You’ve heard of guerrilla warfare? Buffalo Soldiers is all about guerilla capitalism.

Towers head and hairpiece above much of what passes for urban comedy these days.

Ultimately, though, Jack Goes Boating is too much of a banal thing. Jack's a good guy, and you root for him all the way to the end, but, wistfully, that doesn't make him an any more interesting everyday Joe than he is.

One of the most deadly dull "SNL" spinoffs.

Depp’s performance aside, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is pure magic, swimming as it is in a black-treacle riptide of astonishing Oompa Loompa production numbers, an eerie patina of CGI airbrushing (Wonka himself looks downright pasteurized), and some almost too-clever in-jokes, and at least two references to Kurt Neumann’s 1958 film "The Fly."

The year's most viciously entertaining psycho-road-movie-revenge-'n'-wreckage-romance.

As a narrative film, it's confounding and oblique – but still gorgeous to behold.

Let Me In is by far one of the best-looking films of the year, genre or no genre. It's a nightmare, sure, but what childhood isn't?

Could be summarized as a vampire tween romance, but that cheap and tawdry sum-up does zero justice to the magnificent emotional resonance of this gemlike bloodstone of a film.

McGuigan's wonderfully ambitious but terribly melodramatic film is chock-full of symbolic references, subtext, and the sort of period detail that made Monty Python's historical comedies so gamely endearing.

Ghosts of Mississippi isn’t a bad film by any means; it’s just not a very good film.

It's a dull, unremarkable comedy.

It's charming, in its own little way, but really, this film has as much substance as a Cirrus cloud, despite fine turns from Boyle as the family patriarch and Warden as Godfather Saul.

It all adds up to a peculiar whole; fun I suppose, but not what you'd call a picnic.

Zoolander's consistent, blissful stupidity is a comic, mental Xanax, soothing in its gormless sense of inspired wack.

Sure, Double Team is a mind-numbingly silly outing, full of gratuitous violence, testosterone-fueled goonishness, and acting turns that make TV's Van Patten family look positively Emmy-bound, but lest we forget, it's also pulse-pounding, often hilarious fun.

It just signals a series that's plainly out of gas.

Impossible to shake off.

It wouldn't feel out of place on a double bill with "Dangerous Liaisons," given Breillat's unrepentantly nihilistic attitude toward the battle of the sexes in which all are pawns, every knight is errant, and the only queen is Queen Bitch.

If you can get past the ick factor inherent in these suddenly adulterized relationships –- and there’s really no way this film should have received a kid-friendly PG rating –- and latch on to the film’s wealth of metaphor, you’ll surely have something to discuss over coffee post-screening.

This isn't some pomo arthouse picture looking to score points by subverting the gangster paradigm; it's a killer film about killers who idolize film but are unable or unwilling to parse the doom that always crops up come Act III.

Niccol's futuristic fable is a gorgeous construct, from its cast on down to the brilliant, clinical nature of the set design that reflects a future in which even a particle of saliva can be one's undoing.

Pure unadulterated animal fun.

Director Apted has somehow managed to take one of the most contrived plots I've ever seen and make it seem, if not original, then at least way above average.

As an extended metaphor on the perils of imperialism and the colonization of both land and heart, Before the Rains works just fine, but as a love story run afoul of the times, it's a soggy affair.

Terrifically dull, full of ear-searing sound design and much yakkity-yakking about the fate of humanity but entirely lacking any sort of soul or sense of good old summer matinee fun.

Amid the endless stream of catch-a-rising-star movie clichés that Honey screenwriters Alonzo Brown and Kim Watson throw up and out are a few new ones, notably "skinny girls always win out in the end" and "hootchie bad, faux hootchie good."

Well worth seeing if you have even the slightest interest in guns and sex and the interplay between the two (and who doesn't?), Burnt Money also has, you'll forgive the pun, style to burn.

The whole of it plays like a dark and dreary tone poem, only marginally interested in explaining the ticking, bloody clockwork of the inner beast and only occasionally touching on his fractured humanity.

As middling comedies go, this is neither as smart as it ought to be nor as dumb as you'd expect.

Even with its scant running time, this nightmarish travesty barrels along with all the whipcord speed and nimble comedic grace of a loved one’s funeral.

Fight Club's dirty little secret is it's one of the best comedies of the decade.

Weaver essays the new hotmama Ripley with wry, good humor -- you can tell she's having a ball playing this unstoppable die-cast she-wolf.

It's inoffensive and sports a positive "be yourself" message that’s obvious enough to be seen from space without benefit of hero-vision, but really, there's very little that's super about it.

Granted, the state of the indie hipster and/or Big-Man-on-the-Quad aesthetic has probably skewed a bit since I was a frosh, but good lord, man, it can't be this pale an imitation of campus life. I implore you: Go rent "National Lampoon's Animal House" and leave this flaccid wanker alone.

Feels like the little animated adventure nobody loved.

Superior in every way to 1995's "Die Hard With a Vengeance," Live Free or Die Hard's goofy generation-gap gambit pays off decently and proves, again, that nattily dressed terrorists are no match for Willis, the once and future Patron Saint of Bang.

Respiro scores high -– if strange -– marks, but I think it’s more in love with the quirky nature of life on a small island, which, unsurprisingly, echoes life in any small town, be it here or on some faraway Sicilian isle.

Obenhaus' documentary on extreme, "big mountain" skiing feels, despite its jaw-dropping camerawork and patently fearless subjects, like a relic from 1998.

Human Resources, which gets my vote for most sarcastic title of the year, isn't a stand up and cheer kind of film.

The good news is Craig, who was riveting as a London pharmaceutical salesman in the recent Brit import "Layer Cake," is equally mesmerizing here.

It's no "Dellamorte Dellamore," but neither is it "Uwe Boll," a smallish favor we should all be thankful for.

There's more at work in this gorgeous and affecting picture than simple culinary sex appeal.

You've got to hand it to Reynolds, director Cortés, and screenwriter Chris Sparling; they milk every single frisson of nail-ripping anxiety from a stunningly simple – yet universally recognized and dreaded – conceit and then cap it with a payoff of molar-pulverizing intensity.

Mines the traditional Western genre and infuses it with fresh, frequently hilarious life.

Its ultimate message is as French as they come: The family that lays together, stays together. What the hell, it's more fun than a riot.

If you're a parent, you could do a heck of a lot worse than taking the spawn off to catch Rugrats in Paris and if you're a kid, well, you probably already knew that anyway.

From the swooping aerial shots of downtown Miami, to the long, long-legged beauties that seem to crop up every time the action threatens to slow down, to the nonsensical lack of logic that permeates the film like the acrid odor of wasted cordite, Bad Boys oozes Eighties Hollywood clichés like no film since "Top Gun."

It's enough to make you weep.

The Nintendo generation may not “get” The Phantom any more than those original Thirties fans would have understood Bruce Wayne's tortured psyche, but that aside, Wincer's updating of an old warhorse is lovingly done. It's a Saturday afternoon matinee for the Nineties, 60 years old and totally new.

Hideously directed with all the comic subtlety of Oliver Stone on speed, A Very Brady Sequel misses almost every single mark it sets for itself, from the disastrously ill-conceived animation that marks Roy's hallucinogenic mushroom trip at the family dinner table to the persistent background hiss on the film's soundtrack. Even Sherwood Schwartz would've hated this dog.

By the time it's over you find yourself wondering why more films don't have the chutzpah to delve deeper into the battle-weary heart.

It's all patently ridiculous, but it's also ridiculously fun.

Death and the Maiden is a streamlined razor-ride of a movie: taut, riveting, and a psychological horror show that will leave nail-marks in your palms for days afterwards.

It's Cronenberg's film, but it's the actors who elevate Eastern Promises from mere thriller to some other, more disturbing plane.

A gorgeously crafted love poem.

Dickerson's newest film is an embarrassment of near epic proportions.

The overall emotion the film generates is one of moist, enervated ennui. Who cares if the apartment is haunted when the best the ghost can do is get things a bit damp and run laps on the floor above?

To be fair, this isn't The Killer. Woo's unique penchant for over-the-top male bonding is basically nowhere to be seen, but then this is, after all, a very American story, despite Woo's name at the top.

Not for everyone's taste, I'd think, but a notably thoughtful effort nonetheless.

A remarkable film. From its performances on down to director of photography Roger Deakins' sun-baked, dirty-ochre cinematography, the film is all of a piece.

Isn't it time to put Robin Williams out to pasture? There's precious little mirth to be had via RV after the comically nasty opening set-up.

Cavite isn't a horror film, per se – its nightmarish sense of unreality is thoroughly grounded in the geopolitical here and now – but the emotions it conjures from the audience can be traced straight back to Shockers 101.

A pleasantly vicarious slice of summertime falderol, innocuous in its presentation and often genuinely fun.

Becker's tight, streamlined direction, along with Nicholas Pileggi's (GoodFellas) excellent script and Cusack's wonderful turn as Calhoun take City Hall far above the standard genre fare. Like real mayoral politics, it's a descent into a snakepit, with no easy answers in sight.

Truly, this is some kind of wonderful. (Horrific, hilarious, disturbing … but wonderful.)

Sandler is a post-Catskills goldmine of potential, he always has been, and when he's willing to break with tradition (a là Punch Drunk Love), he's downright revelatory. Not this time, though. This time he's just dying.

The few gags that hit their mark only serve to point up how flaccid the rest of his material is, and that spells doom for a comic, no matter how much his hometown crowd cheers him on.

Friedkin, to his credit, gives us a nicely compelling car chase through the near-vertical hills of San Francisco, but it's only five minutes long, and this is a 105-minute film. What to do with the other 100 minutes? No one seems to know.

Many have already heralded Poirier as the cutting edge of the new French cinema, and while that may be overstating things a bit, it's worth noting that this is a road movie unlike any other you've yet seen.

Weaver and Hirsch's flawless performances elevate the film above and beyond the ranks of "Ordinary People" pastiches, and in the end it stands on its own merits.

Stupid, yes, but fun nonetheless.

Long distance information? Get me Hollywood, USA: I’ve got a rusty ice pick to bury in the gullet of whoever greenlighted this pointless exercise in masturbatory tedium.

The whole film suffers from a serious case of overplotting, perhaps inevitable when trying to cram two largish novels into one smallish film.

It bears noting that Greendale is an awful lot like the town of Mayberry R.F.D. in that paragon of homespun virtue, "The Andy Griffith Show," but then again, it's probably equally wise to bear in mind that before Griffith was the sheriff of that hamlet, he was in "A Face in the Crowd" playing a character who, with his conniving, manipulative, black-at-heart ways, might well represent Greendale's dark and awful future.

In the end, it's much ado about nothing. Oh, the ennui, the ennui.

Miike's film is a cunning little comedy of manners gone mad. Even when you feel you have to turn away from the screen or lose your lunch, Miike has something interesting to say. I'm not entirely sure what it is but his lips are moving and something horrific is definitely coming out.

By no means a great film, but it is an entertaining one, a nearly bloodless, family-friendly throwback of sorts to a cinematic age when Persian palace intrigue, winsome princesses, and ambitious princes ruled the back lots and Errol Flynn was in like, well, Errol Flynn.

It's a short, sharp, shock to the cinematic system that's virtually impossible to dislike, and if you don't leave the theatre grinning your face off, then buddy, movies just aren't for you.

The Guy Movie to end all Guy Movies, a ridiculously overblown summer testosterone blowout right down to the Wagnerian strains of the soundtrack and its stunningly high body count. It's also a hell of a lot of fun.

It seems almost beside the point to bring up the notion of plotting and characterization in such an effects-driven film ; nobody's going to rush out to catch Dante's Peak on account of the Shakespearean-caliber thespians involved.

Both a headache and a marvel, often eliciting simultaneous groans of despair and sheer wonder at the director's nervy chutzpah.

Quarantine is a one-note nightmare, nicely pitched to the high-C howls of the bitten and the biters but offering considerably less froth than last year's "The Signal," which mined similar nightmares with far more fulsome results.

Transporter 3 is so far over the top that it more than once spills into outright cartoonishness.

Trite? Sure. Obvious? And then some. But a lesson to be taken to heart nonetheless.

Gorgeously lensed and delightfully structured, however, this is, in a word, wonderful.

File this one under What Were They Thinking?

Wisely, a lot like the real event. No answers are given, barely any questions are asked, and the film unfolds at a leisurely, inexorable pace that stymies the traditional filmmaking tropes of tension and release.

It's brutal to watch the bigger-they-are-the-harder-they-fall tragedy of this once-great heavyweight. In fact, it's enough to make you cry.

The Damned United is Shakespearean in its tragedy.

There are moments of great beauty throughout (the film was lensed by Wong Kar-Wai cinematographer Christopher Doyle), and Shyamalan's heart is nowhere if not on his sleeve, but even these moments cannot steer Lady in the Water clear of its director's zealously over-earnest pretensions.

No Reservations succeeds as well as it does (kinda sorta) by virtue of Zeta-Jones' performance.

Forget this dreck: Where's that Michael vs. Jason grudge match we've been hearing about for the last decade?

It’s cheese of the purest stripe, bafflingly bad to the point of being oddly charming in its brain dead naïveté.

A meticulously-researched chunk of underground Americana that traces the poet's full life from his rather dysfunctional childhood (beneath the hoary shadow of his mentally ill mother) to his meetings and eventual friendships with Kerouac, Burroughs, Neal Cassady and other Beat luminaries. (Review of Original Release)

It's certainly one of the most beautiful costume-drama/historical-romance naps you'll ever have, but this effortlessly evocative, endlessly ennui-inducing paean to Hawaii's final princess is, ultimately, a dull, "Upstairs Downstairs" affair.

Young kids will likely enjoy watching all the hubbub the gutsy protagonist stirs up and identify with his plight, but most anyone over the age of 14 will find the film alternately too cute for its own good and too blind to quit while it's ahead.

Unfortunately, The Pelican Brief comes across as a prolonged bout with deja vu: you know you've seen this before, and more than once at that.

Ruffalo, actually, who was so perfect in the little-seen "You Can Count On Me," is the only real reason to sit through The Last Castle.

Half Nelson, with its bleakly hopeful view of humanity both damned and redeemed – simultaneously – is uncomfortably, almost exactly right.

Has those proverbial big laffs in spades.

It's a rich, humid mix of race, murder, and mystery that works well, even if it doesn't work perfectly.

The good news, then, is that The Siege is hardly the ticking time bomb of racial slurs some would have you imagine, and the bad news is that it doesn't matter because it's all too damn pedantically serious to take seriously.

Dreamlike, disjointed, and possessed of a stunningly complex sensual and narrative poetry that may confound audiences not familiar with Chinese director Wong's defining stylistic tropes, Ashes of Time Redux is, simply, one of the most gorgeous films ever made.

This up-from-the-fields slice of Tejano pride is a punchy, melodramatic piece of tried-and-true Americana that mixes cultures (and film genres) with an eye toward knocking down borders both cultural and contemporary.

Genre fans and newcomers alike should skip this monstrosity and go rent "Ginger Snaps" instead.

Feels sterile and chilly; the humor -- Yiddish and otherwise -- falls flat, and sadly so does the film.

Fincher's camerawork gives the movie a jittery feel, and his video-trained eye lends the prison sets the look of a dilapidated cathedral, but again, there's really nothing here that we haven't seen before, and better, at that. Nice title, though.

While much of the film is taken over by enormously entertaining dogfight sequences … much of it also rests on the narrative drive, which seems clipped part and parcel from one of those old “Why We Fight” documentaries that Frank Capra doled out to keep our G.I.s in fighting mode.

Columbus' film version is fine, and it's bound to make kids happy while simultaneously generating untold box office, but if you haven't yet picked up a copy, don't let the film override the novel; set aside a weekend, dive in, and then head off to the cineplex to take in this well-done companion piece.

No other film in recent memory has featured such a terrifically retro maniac or revisited the heyday of Eighties gore films with such gleeful, moist abandon.

Even the requisite gore is sub-par, so it's not even neat when some poor sap explodes and his entrails whiz by. Perhaps Gordon should go back to mining H.P. Lovecraft's territory.

It's a film that you can take home and chew over later, both abrasive in its loudness and reflective in its fleeting, feminine moments of silence. Well done.

Gilliam keeps the audience guessing, and in doing so creates a startlingly effective rumination on the nature of sanity and madness cloaked in the shroud of a sci-fi thriller.

Law Abiding Citizen, ultimately and inappropriately, tips the scales in favor of the Man over mankind. Somebody call Charles Bronson.

In the end, Zentropa is above all unique in its radical take on the inherent confusion of postwar Europe, offering the viewer a glimpse like none he has had before.

Though its reach sometimes exceeds its grasp, Tarantino has created a movie with all the gritty punch of a .44 in the belly.

Like the infamous Japanese water tortures of WWII, Dahl’s film is a steadily mounting series of pesky nonevents paced with all the frenetic, action-packed verve of a wounded lawn sprinkler.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance's byzantine plot appears fairly straightforward at first, but slowly, deliberately moves into uncharted waters with the fluid grace of a tiger shark bumping up against a potential meal.

Aja's version, while a killer ride in its own right, never manages the nagging subtexts Craven so handily injected into the proceedings. It's a topnotch nightmare, but this time you wake up.

A slow-burn stunner, where nothing much of consequence happens, except life itself.

A kicky, knockout thriller that ingeniously taps into the current climate of paranoia surrounding personal privacy in the Information Age.

It’s an impressive closing to the cycle, and, frankly, one that arrives not a moment too soon.

A film that feels far too familiar for the likes of Wahlberg to juice up, hallucinatory valkyries or no.

It's chop-socky vindaloo, pleasing on a platter but awfully difficult to swallow whole.

Henderson's warm and toasty little gem of a film, slight though it may be, reminds you that the Greatest Generation, full of vim, vigor, and – most important – an indefatigable sense of purpose, grew up on both sides of the Big Pond.

In all fairness, the sheer, overwhelming mediocrity of everything about Pandorum – Travis Milloy's hackneyed, ultra-derivative script, Alvart's plodding pacing and dull direction, even the eventual crimson tide of gore that duly arrives just in time to keep audience members over the age of 13 from dozing off – may well constitute a new breed of horror: In space, no one can hear you snore.

Loud, rollicking, alternately ultra-violent and hilarious, Escape from L.A. is Snake redux, and what more do you need, really?

Roughly as entertaining as watching your neighbor's kid's soccer game, not because you want to, but because you have to.

The Rocketeer is a gung-ho all-American summer flick with the guts not to try and be anything else.

The great director's masterpiece of bad juju. [Director's Cut]

It's not perfect -- Thornton's slack-jawed yokel Jacob is played a bit wide of the mark and Fonda continues to irk in some indefinable way -- but it's a revelation for longtime Raimi fans. And it's a hell of a ride too, for both Raimi fans and newcomers alike.

There are moments in Idlewild that resonate with the painful "if only" of missed opportunity, and more than a few that just make you scratch your head. It's like some wildly overlong music video, minus the sexy thump 'n' grind. It's all blow, no pop.

Jim Jarmusch's elegiac, hilarious performance as a man about to smoke his final cigarette is brilliant.

Nobody of Chan's legendary stature should ever have to play second banana to George Lopez, and certainly not in a film that was already made five years ago with Vin Diesel (see: The Pacifier).

It's an out-of-this-world, real-life adventure for kids of all ages, budding Neil Armstrongs and Ray Bradburys alike.

Like the dead dog that it is, though, Pet Sematary deserves to be buried very, very deep.

Kingpin is no classic, but I've got to admit that after sitting though a number of the film's less-than-inspiring previews over the last few weeks, I wasn't exactly expecting the second coming of Laurel and Hardy.

In the end, Meadows' film lacks the bite it needs to make us care about this oddball trio, endearing though they are.

Pure, unadulterated teen exploitation filmmaking at its best -- a heady, rocketing blast of fast cars, loud hip-hop, and a script so cheesy it might as well have “Made in Wisconsin” stamped on it.

A dodgy, hit-or-miss affair that never quiet seems to gel: too many lumpy bits, and not enough crème.

There's more story, heart, and – cutting to the chase, the quick, and the dead – pure, unadulterated fun contained within a scant five minutes of Rockstar Games' new Grand Theft Auto IV video game than there is in the whole of Speed Racer.

Nothing short of horror-hound heaven.

The film may have only the best of intentions, but it tries way too hard and ends up being shallow, superficial, and only sporadically funny.

A Perfect Getaway is, in its own delightfully silly and manipulative way, one of the most effective paranoid thrillers of the new millennium. That doesn't make it a great movie by a long shot.

Juvenile yet compellingly smart humor.

Woo's mainstreaming his vision here, and though Windtalkers has its moments of precious, awful clarity, it can't hold a candle to the man's earlier blood-soaked balletics.

A remarkably solid, streamlined, action-comedy in the ugly-duckling-to-gorgeous-swan genre that elicits more laughs and genuinely affecting moments than you might expect from its tepid ad campaign.

Turnabout is fair play, to be sure, but ultimately virtually everyone in Teeth ends up using sex as a weapon, edged or otherwise, to the detriment of all concerned. Just say "Ow."

Diary of the Dead is meant to scare your pants off, blow your mind out the back of your skull, and then deposit you ungently back into reality, quaking a little, maybe, but still alive and, unlike the undead, thinking.

Something of a snooze.

Grown Ups is exactly, beat for beat, what the previews would have you believe: a depressingly predictable, two-chuckle deconstruction of what Sandler sees as the modern American male.

There's really nothing new here (as if anyone expected there would be), but it's a decent enough entry into the Karate Kid series, if you don't mind having seen it all done before, and better.

Honestly, this ultra-noir adaptation of Frank Miller's black-and-white cult comic series is a visual feast ripped straight from the original medium's blood-soaked pages.

Surprisingly well-done nearly all the way around, this neither plays down to its target audience, nor fumbles the inherent childhood fantasy of the story.

90 minutes of ridiculous, silly fun. Of course, it's still a very bad movie.

Sellbinding, distressing, and possessed of a dark and terrible beauty.

Torture, you may recall, used to be an unparsable, unpardonable sin. Now it's porn.

While the story may be a common one (for the action genre, at least), Rodriguez, who wrote, produced, shot and edited the entire film himself, has a uniquely straightforward wit that makes what might otherwise have been just another shoot-'em-up something more than that.

It's not often you come across a film as unique as this, and while my taste for liver, lights, and sweetbreads isn't what it once was, this is still a fine post-Halloween aperitif, with guts to spare.

Too strange for its own good, Careful is less interesting as a film than it is as a Canadian cinematic anomaly.

Tomei looks far too fresh-scrubbed to be anywhere near a bloody, messy hell like this, but the rest of the cast is grimly realistic, particularly Harrelson, who manages to bring some goofball credibility to what is essentially a very small role.

There are droll comic flourishes in this very brave film, to be sure, but all you really want to do after watching CSA is hang down your head and cry.

It's pornography of the most depressing sort.

Tired and formulaic.

Gentle and comedically nuanced exercise in mourning.

Cyberpunk meets renegade romance, à la Orwell.

A fine, familial elixir to remedy despair and soften hardened hearts, Around the Bend is likely just the first of many feathers in Roberts shiny new directorial cap.

An immersion into the characters' world in toto, from the "Oh geezes" and the "Oh, yaahs" to the dark and flinty core beneath.

Pixar's animation is simply flawless; colorful, deeply realized, and ably conveying both the chaos of the kitchen, and the sensual allure of food well prepared.

Inoffensive fun that kids will love and adults will likely love too, it's a middle of the road affair, but a far cry from roadkill.

Highlander 3 has an edge over its prequels in that it's so shoddily directed that it's probably a great deal of fun to watch after a couple of six-packs. Actually, that's probably the only time it might be fun to watch, and I'm not going to be the guy to put that theory to the test for you.

The most lackadaisical thriller I've ever seen, overly infatuated with not only the inexplicability of random evil, but also its mundanity.

It's all poppycock, of course, but it's done with such vim and vigor and both narrative and visual flair that you care not a jot. Summer has arrived.

There's barely a belly laugh here, and judging from the deafening silence in the theatre where I saw the film, it's not just me.

Sublimely ridiculous film.

This may be a remake of a Swedish film from 2002 (itself based on a novel), but unspooling in the cineplex it feels more akin to one of emo godhead Conor Oberst's more emotionally mopey musical diversions.

In all honesty I'd advise you to go rent the stunning (and brand-new) DVD of the director's great "Le Mépris (Contempt)," which seems to me to be much more Godardian and much less hopeless.

Like an early Clash number, it's by turns lovely and ugly, loud as bombs and quiet as a revolution's first-thrown stone; it acknowledges the legend while uncovering the truth.

Battle for Terra boasts impressively executed battle sequences that, frankly, are light-years beyond anything found in the recent Star Wars animated add-ons.

You don't have to be Jewish to enjoy this light romantic comedy, but it helps.

Remarkably fresh and exciting.

Do yourself a favor: Go rent Hardy's original film, watch it, and then try and get it out of your head. You never, ever will.

Comedic touches aside (nearly all of which belong to Ben Stiller who's off on another, far more interesting, planet as the genuinely goofy Bwick), If Lucy Fell strives hard to be a serious romantic comedy for the Nineties. It almost succeeds. Schaeffer trips up, though, when he lets his philosophies get the better of him. Nothing stops If Lucy Fell faster than its mordant underpinnings, cute though they may be. It's “The Best Date Movie of the Nineties,” number 224 in a series. Collect 'em all.

Terribly Happy isn't, but it is wonderfully unhinged, and a painstakingly constructed meditation on a place where good and evil meet, mate, and make sour times sublime and, dare I say it, beautiful.

Much of the film is frankly ludicrous, but that does little to dispel its overall power and passion.

Make no mistake, I'm not saying Dr. Giggles is a cinematic watershed or anything like that, but it does manage to mix humor and horror in a way that very few films ever manage successfully.

It's Stiller's knowledgeable use of these smaller touches that (along with the excellent cast -- it's great to see Winona relinquishing period gowns and back where she can do some real damage) pushes the film along a solid, fresh line and toward its admittedly Hollywood conclusion. Stiller and company imbue their film with an honest, sarcastic wit that's all too familiar: apparently, somebody's been filming our lives. Does this mean we'll all be getting royalties?

It's a gorgeous albeit depressing mess, as distancing and despairing as a realpolitik wipeout.

It comes across as yet another in a long line of poorly produced horror/paranoia bloodbaths, short on everything except cheesy effects.

Do yourself a favor and go rent any Miike film other than this one.

McCarthy’s film is rich in tone and subtlety, but has precious little dialogue. It feels less like a modern motion picture than some odd poem long lost and then discovered in another age, a timeless, ageless gem of hard-resined emotions melting into real life.

Two Lovers is an intensely felt, character-driven film, and there's no stronger character onscreen – not even Leonard – than Leonard's wise, Jewish mother, Ruth, played with effortless, pure perfection by Rossellini.

Feels for all the world like a Meg Ryan/Billy Crystal heist comedy transposed to the Far East.

Leary rehashes his Bill Hicks persona for the umpteenth time, but if you can get past the blatant rip-off of his shtick, you'll find an inspired, virulent, often hilarious film that apparently was just too much for old Saint Nick.

The Matador is anything but predictable, and therein lies its sublime and fascinating charm.

Even the youngest members of the audience appeared to be more interested in their dwindling soda supply than anything up on the screen. Yabba dabba doom.

It's the pod people's version of a great, contemporaneously resonant cinematic fable, created by apparent committee, and utterly devoid of both meaning and feeling. The tagline warns: "Do not trust anyone. Do not show emotion. Do not fall asleep." Yawn.

The whole production does reek a bit of origin story filminess, but even so, it's light sabers beyond Christensen's sad, revengeful fate in "Episode III" and does offer a nice view of the top of the Sphinx's head no less than three times.

This is Pixar's finest and most emotionally powerful film yet, and it draws on a wealth of cinematic resources that run the gamut from Chaplin's best to Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati, and even Martin and Lewis.

A wholly original creation, crossed with shadows and light and the everyday madness of Savannah and its remarkable citizens.

Awash in the obvious and sports a patently predictable outcome. Somewhere, Stanislavsky is shrieking as well.

"Interview With the Vampire" it's not, but marginally thrilling nonetheless, and besides, any film that features a house party in which the ceiling-mounted fire extinguishers expel freshets of crimson goo in place of H2O gets my vote.

The Kids are All Right, a grin-cracking great portrait of a modern American family in minor and then major crises.

Promises thrills galore but delivers only limp non-frights and predictable yawns.

It's not a total wipeout: Czuchry embodies the Tucker Max(-ims) to a self-obsessed fault, and there are moments of rough comic brilliance scattered throughout, but really, this particular antihero is all anti- and zero hero.

The Dark Half never really comes to life, even in Romero's capable hands, this seemingly surefire story ends up stillborn.

It’s far and away the most original symphony of terror since F.W. Murnau raised hackles and Schrecks with his 1922 Nosferatu.

King Arthur is a snooze, overcast and drizzly both on location and on the pages of the script. Owen is too classy, too James Bond-handsome to realistically portray the not-yet-King Arthur.

By no means an embarrassment to the fledgling DreamWorks, The Peacemaker is instead a grand, noisy step in the right direction.

Ultimately a fluffy bit of caper-noir, the success of Where the Money Is rests heavily with Old Blue Eyes.

After this mediocrity, no one's even going to remember Roger Corman's godawful bargain-basement 1994 version. Which, on second thought, had a lot more heart that this one.

Which brings me to another odd point: for a movie so obviously trapped in the teen-comedy formulaics of the early-to-mid-Eighties, Weekend at Bernie's II has surprisingly few nude blonde women. It is, after all, set in St. Thomas, but even this sure-fire, lowbrow interest-booster is ignored in favor of McCarthy's smarmy mug. Good lord, man, where are Golan and Globus when we need them? I could go on, but why bother? Let's just hope that this projected series of films (and I use the term loosely) dies a quiet, unremarked-upon death unlike that of its title character.

A nearly bloodless slasher film with fewer surprises than a broken jack-in-the-box.

Sweet and wise and often laugh-out-loud funny (just like Grogan's book), Marley & Me isn't just for dog people; it's just not for Cruella De Vil.

Blomkamp and his entire cast and crew have created an instant genre classic that transcends the self-limiting ghetto implied by the term "science fiction" and instead, like precursors such as Robert Wise's "The Day the Earth Stood Still," engages not only the mind but the heart as well. It's magnificent.

It takes so long to get going and fails to generate the necessary suspense to keep viewers engaged, that the horrific final act is too little, too late, while at the same time nearly being much too much.

Neither bloodthirsty enough to trigger the gag reflex of anyone but the most anemic viewer nor clever enough to yield much in the way of particularly engrossing insights.

Amiable fluff that takes its time learning how to walk, talk, and generally act like the kid-centric rom-com that it is.

Little more than a cluttered, noisy, and unsatisfying thrill ride to nowhere.

It's hardly a classic of the genre, but then again, like Armour hot dogs: it's Comfort Food for Men.

Bizarre and beautiful, this French take on the madness inherent in independent filmmaking rivals Tom DiCillo's Living in Oblivion as the most realistic depiction of the myriad trials and tribulations that accompany the creation of a new film.

At it's best, it's a wishy-washy treatise that fails to elicit much of any reaction.

All we're left with is a second-rate J-Horror entry that bores rather scares.

Why the Pokémon fad hasn't died off yet is one of the great mysteries of the universe, right up there with the Pyramids of Gaza and the white stuff in Twinkies.

The Princess Blade opens with one of the most note-perfect action sequences ever committed to film.

A far cry from his earlier films sex, lies, and videotape and Kafka, Soderbergh skillfully pulls off what could have ended up as a sappy glob of treacly nostalgia. Instead, the director populates his young hero's chaotic world with genuinely disturbing people, images, and events.

A vast improvement over the previous two outings, but still and all, it's no "Star Wars."

Plays like a slapdash assemblage of the greatest hits of conspiracy-minded action cinema.

The film is a TKO before it even had a chance to get off a decent hook.

For his first shot at feature filmmaking, Longo does an admirable job of keeping the story line rocketing along, though his seeming attempts to out-Blade Runner Ridley Scott in the decaying cityscape department grow wearisome and the occasional wooden drivel that Reeves spouts adds a bit of unintentional humor to the proceedings.

A curiously unaffecting amalgam of the archetypal coming-of-age tale, here twinned to "outsider" religious overtones (in this case São Paulo's Orthodox Jewish community) and a small but deadly dose of uneasy political melodrama.

A thing of beauty. But then so is a cloud and I wouldn't want to stare at one of those for an hour and half.

Van Bebber's film is tough, difficult, sporadically brilliant cinema, to be sure, and I doubt he'd have had it any other way. And as strange as it may sound, neither should the audience.

Here's hoping someone breaks down and buys Brocka some more toys, if only to distract him from embarking on another flesh-and-blood production.

The images this war photographer shoots are beyond awful, but there's just no looking away.

It really IS fun to watch yet another oddball turn by Sutherland, and a marginally restrained one from Spacek. It's just not THAT fun.

A muddled mess of bad-lad clichés, and Jackson's obvious talents only serve to point out how godawful everyone else seems to be.

Stardust has lost a good amount of its magic in the transformation from page to screen. It's the cinematic equivalent of getting a punch in the mind's eye by a bunch of faeries wearing the coolest Doc Martens this side of Florin.

Consistently entertaining.

To be fair, there are some genuinely funny bits here, but the film's aim is so scattershot that it never really comes together like it should, and, as a result, it rarely rises above the level of Mel Brooks on a bad day.

About a Boy knows exactly what it wants to do: It wants to make you smile, and grin, and then laugh with recognition, and it manages all three, again and again.

The game is great fun -- the movie ought to be taken out back and shot.

The very Thai-specific charms that made the original Shutter such an unforeseen, unpredictable delight when I first saw it – and when I screened it again, last night – are almost entirely absent here, eclipsed by the annoying blonde highlights of Taylor, ex-Transformer babe and forever, as the Thai say, farang.

Ultimately, Cabin Fever isn't going to win any awards for originality - it's too busy twisting the conventions of the genre back in on themselves for that - but it does provide a jarring battery of scares (often depressing ones at that) that make it severed-head-and-shoulders above the spate of recent shockers.

As mesmerizing as watching bread toast. Death, be not proud, indeed.

This American version can't hold a candle to its French counterpart, which was deeply, eerily resonant where this is only frustrating, a Rubik's cube, minus its colorful signage.

A fairly uninspired, albeit entertaining, Muppet movie that falls short of the original outing from Jim Henson's creature shop while still managing to bring in a few lesser chuckles.

The only glimmer of actual characterization in the entire film comes – all too briefly – from Frank's old boss Inspector Tarconi (Berléand).

Is it just me or is Mick Jagger turning into John Hurt?

It’s [Depp's] first genuine “adult” role (not counting the tedious Nick of Time), and it allows him the freedom and emotional range to move, speak, and deal with issues more as an actor and less as a brat-packer.

Brilliant, surreal, and emotionally draining, this first feature from American Film Institute grad Aronofsky recalls such low-budget sci-fi epics as "Tetsuo: The Iron Man" and more traditional paranoiac suspense films (Adrian Lyne's "Jacob's Ladder" in particular, but also Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby") and yet manages to be a wholly original animal.

The only thing here that feels truly, utterly alive is Ledger's maniacal, muttery Joker. The last laugh is his and his alone. It's enough to make you cry.

Merendino's film is lacking the streamlined cohesion it needs to spike itself in your cortex as hoped, but it is about as accurate a punk film as I've seen in some time, especially when it comes to the horrors and boredoms of small-scene life.

Becomes something of a rainswept Korean koan on both the nobility and futility of persistence in the face of obviously insurmountable odds.

This is the sort of masterpiece that will obliterate memories of lesser, later efforts in the "meeting the parents" comedy lineage. Brilliant.

Mitchell's film would be another example of why former SNL cast members should choose their scripts wisely, except that Schneider wrote this one.

There's precious little to like about the witless and decidedly tedious Black Knight other than the fact that it's unlikely to generate a sequel.

The third and final chapter in Araki's teen-angst-run-riot-in-L.A. triptych is as gorgeously messy as the first two opening salvos (Totally F***ed Up and The Doom Generation), but this time Araki employs a far broader and more complex character canvas than previously.

Shoddily constructed out of bits and pieces of previous genre triumphs, She's All That is as dull and droning as the fluorescent lighting in your old study hall.

Snyder’s film isn't likely to be considered a classic 20 years down the road like Romero's film is, but it's a winningly extreme episode in the ongoing adventures of Zombie and Harriet. (And stick around while the end credits roll: The film isn't over 'til it's over.)

There are precious few surprises here, but parents will find director Robbins' breezy remake a painless affair and, judging by the yowls of laughter from the peanut gallery at the screening I attended, the kids will be barking all the way home.

It takes creepy, spooky, and altogether ooky to a hideous new level.

Neither the riveting boy band documentary nor the riveted gay porn its title seems to suggest, Biker Boyz is instead a late-model knockoff of 2001’s outlaw auto racing epic The Fast and the Furious, reconfigured with a predominantly black cast and a whole lotta two-wheeled saké.

Pure, goofy fun.

A humanistic adventure film that's both rich with characterization and concussive cannon bursts, Master and Commander is, surprisingly, some of the best work either Crowe or Weir have ever done.

This is a determined, resolutely paced, and atypical samurai movie, more an epic of the heart than of the battlefield, and all the more powerful for it.