Mark Holcomb

Nawal's travails are more in the vein of a Latin American soap opera than Greek tragedy, and Jeanne and Simon's climactic, genuinely god-awful discovery plays like artistic sleight-of-hand rather than the profoundly tautological revelation it aspires to be.

Few clichés go unexercised, but there's also something quietly amazing going on here: For once, American Indians are portrayed not as spiritually attuned mystics or powerless patsies but as ordinary working stiffs, or at least the cinematic equivalent thereof.

Best in Show succeeds only insofar as you're willing to laugh at a bunch of sad freaks.

Anand manages to work in shamelessly exploitative September 11 footage between numbers, but aside from this sequence, Love couldn't be more giddily benign.

Makes for unexpectedly giddy viewing.

Uneasy mélange of occult thriller and insane-asylum-as-social-microcosm parable.

First-timer Wayne Kramer brings pathos to Bernie and Shelly's fraught relationship, but his film never amounts to more than a cute idea stretched to poker-chip thinness.

This sly, sobering doc exposes the grievously fucked-up priorities surrounding the sport in a small town with little else on which to hang its hopes.

The film's real flaw is its limited focus.

Comfortably familiar. It lacks the tension between grandeur and intimacy that characterizes the films it apes.

An exhilarating serving of movie fluff.

He (Jacobs) and cinematographer Chris Menges compose the film largely in close-ups, and the effect is appropriately unnerving. Regardless, unfavorable comparisons to "Nine Queens" are inevitable.

Becomes more satisfying than the stock thriller–star vehicle it begins and ends as.

Suffice it to say that if you've always wondered how a fish out of water and a band of resourceful yokels would behave in the Quebec hinterlands, this is your movie.

Who is this movie's target audience, anyway? Preteens will be bored stupid, while adults are unlikely to want to revisit puppy love in such grueling detail. The lingering, soft-focus, slo-mo shots of Rosemary that punctuate the action suggest a constituency I'd rather not contemplate.

All the shell-shocked wryness, irredeemable remorse, and unaccountable will to survive that the movie attempts to embody are realized in Gyllenhaal, and the actor makes it possible to root for Moonlight Mile despite its flaws.

Guaranteed to polarize audiences. Is her insistence on taking every measure possible to save little Nicholas heroic or monumentally self-serving?

Thanks to an uninhibited screenplay and the easy, unforced chemistry of its ensemble cast, Punks is mostly good, snappy fun.

Ouimet versus Vardon probably was the greatest golf game ever played, and Paxton and Frost do it justice, but I wouldn't sit through another simulated hole of it for Tiger Woods's salary.

Falling somewhere between fratboy porno wish fulfillment and Europhobic sex-tourism scare flick, Eli Roth's taut, wily, but ultimately pointless shocker Hostel is neither as transgressive nor as grueling as it aims to be.

If Michiko Yamamoto's screenplay overdoes Magnifico's holy-fool virtue to the point of hysteria, de los Reyes's fluid compositions, dead-on pacing, and knack for eliciting naturalistic performances make the story uncommonly cathartic.

Most Wanted isn't aiming for social commentary, but it isn't too difficult to enjoy its good-natured humor.

A diverting pulp time-waster.

Treading the same supernatural turf trampled by "Somewhere in Time" and "Frequency," director Alejandro Agresti's gooey, ostensibly spooky romance yarn The Lake House flounders less on its thudding familiarity than on its mood- killing dourness.

There's nothing wrong with a little creative license, but the abundance of self-serving fabrication in City by the Sea not only diminishes LaMarca's experience and cheapens McAlary's work, it all but desecrates the memory of the real murder victim.

Fans of Hellblazer are bound to be disappointed.

These after-school specials are distinctly depoliticized and seem tailored for Western audiences, so the African settings feel oddly superfluous.

As with the director's other films, all that keeps Unfinished from being a complete, treacly bore is its robust performances.