Mark Holcomb

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.

A wispy mix of boy-boy romance and noir-lite potboiler, the Shumanski brothers' (Wrecked) latest wastes a promising premise by loading up on tender whimsy and skimping on grit.

There's a certain gutsy allure to the wildly improbable proceedings.

An engagingly grim psychological thriller.

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.

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.

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

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

A diverting pulp time-waster.

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.

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.

As earnest and smart-alecky as an entire season of Designing Women, Ya-Ya is sure to score with its redemptive family melodramatics and stock eccentric characterizations.

At its heart is a deep, unresolved ambivalence about child rearing.

Levant and his screenwriting posse attempt to wring maximum hilarity from this setup, but it's just too schizoid.

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

No "Triplets of Belleville," this French animated feature was hatched as an idea for a video game, and it shows.

The resolution is as surprise-free as it is improbably sunny.

The Great Raid is ultimately scotched by History Channel–worthy nostalgia.

Thematic muddle aside, the film's appeal lies in Burke's ranting charisma, Julie Christie's thankless turn as a sympathetic doctor, and Michael Spiller's radiant cinematography, which frequently captures the mythic grandeur that eludes Hartley's narrative grasp.

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.

Rosenfeld's film doesn't have much of a story to tell and tells it rather routinely.

Stupefyingly benign.

Rifkin milks the generic Bukowski-land setting for all its melodramatic potential, but what little grace his tale of precarious skid-row dignity achieves is pushed into the margins by predictable plotting and tiresome histrionics.

John Schultz's wan, unfunny The Honeymooners is unlikely to tickle devotees of Jackie Gleason's archetypal yuk-fest.

What's unexpected is how thoroughly The ABCs of Death's ample duds overshadow its treasures, and how uninspired it feels as a whole.

Appallingly violent.

It all becomes little more than feel-good-about-feeling-bad window dressing, like an issue of "Utne Reader" in Dolby Surround Sound.

Cynically accumulates plot twists while showing little regard for suspense or audience sophistication.