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.

Tender irony and dark humor abound in Israeli director Eran Riklis's latest account of bureaucracy colliding with burgeoning compassion.

Porterfield intersperses these delicately underplayed scenes with doc-style question-and-answer exchanges that, while initially jarring, achieve maximum cumulative impact.

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.

This earnest, well-observed weepy has more depth than its genteel trappings might imply.

Unfortunately, Rae's film is split down the middle, and the appeal of its latter half depends on your tolerance for earnest politico-poetry set to wailing rock guitar and Native American chants and extraneously endorsed by celebrity talking heads. The backstory portion of the film, though, is riveting.

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

Continues Disney's trend of crafting animated movies as much for adult viewers as for their pre-adolescent progeny.

An exhilarating serving of movie fluff.

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.

Unusually impassioned indie.

The scenario recalls everything from "High Noon" to "Unforgiven," but Costner is less interested in grappling with the grim ambiguities underlying those films than in codifying them. There's still much to like, including the warm, thoughtful performances and cinematographer James Muro's fearless use of natural light.

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.

Stupefyingly benign.

Despite its affinity for whimsy over realism, Small Voices effectively captures the embittered desperation and ragged dedication of its exploited teachers.

It's a remarkably assured and humane feature debut.

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

Happily, beneath the film's nostalgic veneer and tooth-rattling visual and aural effects lies a mature ambiguity that's unusual for a holiday blockbuster -- and all but unheard of in a Tony Scott movie.

The result is a film as tenacious, peculiar, and likable as Burt Munro himself.

By turns whimsical and painful.

The results are predictably lachrymose, especially with the reinstated "unhappy" ending from the original French version.

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.

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

What keeps Murderball from devolving into redemptive drivel is its insistence on treating the players it profiles as jocks first and disabled men second.

With its lukewarm gender politicking and clumsy performances, Make a Wish achieves only one real distinction: It has to be the dullest lesbian campout movie ever made.

Eschewing the jock-like aversion to "artiness" inherent in most sports docs, John Hyams's contemplative snapshot of professional bull riding, Rank, ups the ante for the form.

What finally makes Town Bloody Hall so compelling -- and unsettling -- is the impression that such serious, spirited debate is a thing of the past.

A fresh and uncompromising account of emotional self-immolation and romantic flux. And it has a happy ending to boot.

Charles Bukowski, the bard of post-war L.A.'s working-class underbelly, was no ordinary cult writer, and John Dullaghan's thorough, compelling doc Bukowski: Born Into This does a credible job of showing why.

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.

It may not be particularly innovative, but the film's crisp, unaffected style and air of gentle longing make it unexpectedly rewarding.

McTiernan's Rollerball is a movie masochist's delight.

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

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

Largely sidesteps sentiment in favor of a tentative hopefulness.

Manages--before faltering under the weight of its own pretensions--to be pretty scary.

The pivotal plot twist isn't hard to predict, and Brit theater vet Hamm and screenwriter Mark Bomback rely on jolts that date back to the silent era.

With its toilet-bobbing and blood spurting and Elwes's fey, Vincent Price–like mugging, Saw succeeds in capturing something like Takashi Miike by way of William Castle. Happy Halloween, indeed.

Danny Provenzano's mafioso melodrama is the immoral vanity project to end immoral vanity projects.

A must-see for opera lovers and a snappy diversion for cinephiles.

Burt Reynolds turns up as scruffy mountain man, sparking unfulfilled expectations of some primo Deliverance jokes.

Sure to appear in everyone's worst-of lists at year's end, to say nothing of a few bad dreams, Bryan Johnson's Vulgar is an unclassifiably awful study in self- and audience-abuse.

Appallingly violent.

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

Like a jigsaw that's more fun to assemble before you know how all the pieces fit, Greg Harrison's brain-teasing meta-thriller November is less compelling the more apparent its solution becomes.

Stilted and gloomy as it sounds (and sometimes is), The Tenants gets by on its nimble approximation of Malamud's robust prose, subtle turns of deadpan humor and gut-tingling menace, and remarkable performances. McDermott does credible work here, but Snoop's casting is a stroke of genius.

A diverting pulp time-waster.

Skeleton may be 100 percent cult-in-a-can, but aficionados should feel sated. All others are advised to bring copious amounts of controlled substances.

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.

Cloaks a familiar anti-feminist equation (career - kids = misery) in tiresome romantic-comedy duds.

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.

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.

Close enough in spirit to its freewheeling trash-cinema roots to be a breath of fresh air.

This Phoenix screams hack job.

About as threadbare as a favorite childhood plushy. What's more, trying to keep the story line of strained meta-sequel Freddy Vs. Jason straight requires too much of a cogitative investment.

Comes off as an overlong, overstuffed promo for an "industry" that hasn't needed promoting since the movie's target audience was in diapers.

It has Adrien Brody in his last pre-"Pianist" role, leading one to assume that the film -- which veers torpidly from antic humor to mortifying sentimentality -- would have remained shelved were it not for his Oscar coup.

This Dick & Jane is precisely the kind of social-problem comedy you'd expect from well-intentioned millionaires unaccustomed to putting their money where their mouths are.

Spear has all the earmarks of a middling Indiewood product, from its competent second-tier cast (including "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" hunklet Chad Allen in a dual role as a slain missionary and his grown son) to its earnest plotting and leaden pacing.

Director Goyer, who wrote all three Blade films, deserves credit for sticking with the character, but aside from the effectively staged action sequences Trinity is cheap-looking and laughably inept.

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.

The film's real flaw is its limited focus.

A quietly impassioned, genuinely stirring indie rarity.

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

Despite Herrington's skill at capturing the physicality of the game, Stroke is strictly for golf nuts and masochists--assuming there's a difference.

Fans of Hellblazer are bound to be disappointed.

Actually manages a fresh perspective. The director, camera in tow, had unimpeded access to the devastation for a full day before being shooed away by officials, and the footage he captured (sans commentary) is both gut-wrenchingly familiar and disconcertingly foreign.

There's something refreshing about a pulp drama that turns on the notion that redemption is a sucker's fantasy. That knowledge may not have saved Goines, but it informs Dickerson's adaptation and results in stellar neo-noir.

Weird, frivolous, and impossible to dislike.

Despite a couple of inventive CGI effects (one involving mass evisceration), the results are more predictable and less frightening than a Con Ed bill in mid August.

Avoiding this lump of low-camp lion poo couldn't be easier, what with MGM dumping it into a lone Manhattan venue, but if you're in the mood for some unscripted belly laughs or a catnap, Fascination should do the trick.

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.

The most that can be said for Slackers -- aside from the unqualified pleasure of Schwartzman's unfaked, puppyish weirdness -- is that it doesn't abandon its putrid ideals for the sake of a neat finish.

Woo's film is in some ways closer to Dick's -- and his own -- pulp roots, and if he lazily quotes himself (and, inexplicably, Aldrich's "Kiss Me Deadly") once too often, he at least gets loose, spirited performances from his cast -- Uma's post-"Kill Bill" gravitas notwithstanding.

To call this action gambit formulaic is to sell it short: The Rundown runs down more formulas than a month's worth of complimentary premium cable service.

Griffin and Solvang's obliviousness, and the filmmakers' habit of mugging condescendingly while conducting interviews doesn't help either.

Like the action movies of yore (you know, the 1980s), Catwoman is simultaneously overstuffed and undernourished.

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.

While far from perfect, Hitch is a rare studio product that earns the goodwill it smugly demands.

A callous piece of work that exploits images of children in pain or jeopardy.

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.

The climactic shocker is far too exacting, but Lewis nails the milieu, and has the sense to not spell out every motivation in capital letters.

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

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.

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

A kind of "Sex and the City" for L.A. bottom-feeders awash in clichéd, self-loathing misogyny that would make Howard Stern flinch.

A competent if overlong blend of policier, sci-fi conspiracy thriller, daikaiju eiga (giant monster) stompfest, and tragic romance. It's also anime (short for "cheaper than live-action").

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

The rapid-fire satirical sophistication (scatology notwithstanding) and lovingly rendered pulp surrealism of this sequence should delight adults, while kids will get a charge out of the heroines' grown-up-defying chutzpah.

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

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

Rote sequel that surely no one was waiting for: Like the serially thwarted Death (the only "character" to return from the first two Final Destination movies), audiences are required to endure banal exposition and junior-high-level foreshadowing before being treated to the nauseatingly detailed scenes of CGI slaughter.

In the end, Milk and Honey's contrived connections blossom into a disarmingly effective reckoning with loss and regret.

Wanders all over the map thematically and stylistically, and borrows heavily from Lynch, Jeunet, and von Trier while failing to find a spark of its own.

Too brisk and plucky to dislike.

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.

A clumsy graft of Chekhovian high dudgeon and harsh, Albee-esque psychological realism that probably worked better onstage.

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

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 valueless kiddie paean to pro basketball underwritten by the NBA.

It's nauseating, unfunny stuff, unmitigated by the revelation that Griffin's mom physically abused him.

Makes for unexpectedly giddy viewing.

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

Laughably unscary.

Suited only for unwitting under-twelvers (though even they may not outlast the midpoint evaporation of Lawrence's shtick).

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.

Good intentions or not, ineptitude and cloying sentimentality don't do anybody any favors.

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.

It's the summer's most disingenuous movie -- a real achievement in a waning season that included Tim Burton's "Banana Splits" remake.

Sanaa Hamri's brisk, refreshingly understated romantic comedy Something New is the rare movie that delivers on its title's promise.

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

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