Megan Lehmann

Frustratingly superficial.

What the filmmakers do to the splendid Moore is simply criminal.

Enough SpongeBob-meets-Monty-Python silliness to give adults a kick as well.

Clayburgh is the most dignified thing about this dreadfully overwrought, often preposterous romantic comedy.

The movie is saved by its well-trained four-legged stars and the likable Liam Aiken ("Road to Perdition"), who plays 12-year-old loner Owen Baker.

The trouble with authenticity in a punk rock film is that it comes off as amateurish, and while "Dolls" has a feverish energy -- and some good songs -- it suffers from crude performances and a trite rise-and-fall plot.

A promising film that is dragged down by the weight of its gray morbidity.

Diva du jour Beyoncé Knowles may be the draw, but the real star of The Fighting Temptations is the sensational gospel soundtrack.

Makes an earnest stab at illustrating the hardships and sacrifices humanitarian workers contend with - but in the end, all the suffering merely forms an amorphous backdrop for a Harlequin romance.

Uniformly excellent performances keep this destabilizing tale ticking, yet one can't help wishing Hollywood had combined this cast and these timely themes with a little bit of imagination to come up with something fresh.

Delivers its provocative message in the measured tones of a college professor -- yet there's no danger of falling asleep in this lecture.

They resort too often to infantile flatulence jokes and fairly obvious gags about errant G-strings, with the anorexic plot culminating in the brothers having - yawn - learned to respect women's feelings.

This furious finger-pointer's doc is so one-sided, it undermines its own integrity.

The story is so slight, a low-wattage hair dryer could blow it away.

Apart from the slightly sanitized look of Reagan-era Harlem, this raw ghetto drama rings true, from the smooth dialogue to the unaffected performances of the central actors.

An amusing side dish to the sober political documentaries flooding the art houses, The Yes Men effectively uses high farce to mock the status quo as a way of questioning it.

If you give yourself over to it, this romantic tale of a liberating one-night stand proves oddly seductive and generates a warm afterglow.

An energetic, feel-good blend of comedy, romance and benign drama -- with a side dish of social commentary -- that works despite its strict adherence to the culture clash/generation gap formula.

Devoid of 21st-century irony, this visually stunning, action-packed yuletide treat is sweet and, yes, magical in a way that will enchant kids and give older viewers a twinge of nostalgia.

Where Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill: Vol. 2" radiates freshness and vigor, Man on Fire feels vaguely like something left over from the 1980s, when action heroes were one-note tough guys methodically picking off baddies.

De Villa has created a truthful representation of a colorful community.

Paints a vivid portrait of a compelling young man but, perhaps inevitably, goes overboard on the deification.

Much of the movie's gentle charm comes from Mehta, the director's younger brother, making his acting debut.

Spun is quickly exposed as being all flash, no substance.

A cheerfully trashy, dead-on spoof of the B-movie genre, boasts the kind of cheese-tastic effects, overcooked dialogue and rigid performances that would make Ed Wood proud.

A cheaply made, occasionally repetitive, but passionately argued documentary.

Very funny. It's also heartbreakingly sad.

There's also enough laconic humor, warming camaraderie and hopeful stabs at dignity to keep the story from assuming the glum gunmetal gray of its setting on the coast of northwestern Spain.

Even with Burton's imagination turning its trademark cartwheels, the film's big beating heart holds the whimsical offshoots steady.

A hit-and-miss affair.

Has just enough fairy dust to charm its target audience.

Kidman gives an other stunning performance in Birth, but it is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma that ultimately reveals . . . not much.

A documentary mosaic of kooky Americana.

As if the witless cultural stereotypes weren't bad enough, misogyny is rampant -- bare-breasted women abound, yet the protagonist remains fully clothed while having a bullet removed from his butt.

Light, doggedly formulaic romantic comedy that's almost instantly forgettable despite the sunny presence of teen queen Mandy Moore.

Screenwriter Tom Schulman, who won an Oscar for "Dead Poets Society," gives us a narrative reminiscent of a pup chasing its tail, as characters struggle to catch up with inexplicably chopping and changing motives.

Seem to have spliced together two different concepts which, on paper, may have seemed complementary but wind up giving the film a schizophrenic feel.

Basinger appears to be literally phoning in from another movie in the highly improbable, maniacally action-packed thriller-cum-comedy Cellular.

How do you inject life into a film whose central character is dull, slow, stupid and grim?If you're Arnaud Desplechin, you don't.

A stunning display of a filmmaker adventuring on the far side of what's possible.

Disaster movies, from "The Poseidon Adventure" to "Towering Inferno," are impossible to take seriously and "Day" is no exception - it's simply a fast-moving pageant of end-of-the-world eye candy.

Delivers a sugar rush without the calories.

A tour de force that is weird, wacky and wonderful.

Not as bad as rumor would have it. It's worse.

Despite its shock value, Thirteen rises above dysfunctional-family-drama cliches, thanks to the truthfulness of its script and the keen eye of a sympathetic director.

This is what IMAX was made for: Strap on a pair of 3-D goggles, shut out the real world, and take a vicarious voyage to the last frontier -- space.

Beautiful Brit actress Sophia Myles ("From Hell") is so arch, canny and amusing as the posh, pink-obsessed spy Lady Penelope, it's as if she is acting in the movie this should have been.

Infused with the hazy golden glow of nostalgia and unfolds at a leisurely pace, reminiscent of "The Virgin Suicides."

Despite oblique references to "Psycho" and "Children of the Corn," Freddy vs. Jason lacks the knowing wit needed to keep it afloat in an age when even the horror spoofs have been spoofed.

Hilariously overblown, "Cruelty" fairly pops at the seams with the beloved eccentricity of Joel and Ethan Coen, from the fiendishly ludicrous scenarios and casually tossed off visual gags to the razor-sharp repartee.

Ben Stiller's overbearing schtick officially reaches its expiration date with the desperate and puerile Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story.

Indie hipster Jarmusch's distinctive brand of effortless cool and quirky humor percolate through each of 11 vignettes, all shot fairly statically in crisp, aesthetically pleasing black and white.

It's all entertaining enough, but don't look for any hefty anti-establishment message in what is essentially a whip-crack of a buddy movie that ends with a whimper.

Less of a "You go, girl" manifesto than its title would suggest.

Jenkins doesn't stint on the sickening reality of Wuornos' abhorrent behavior -- it's Theron's complex, deeply felt depiction of a thoroughly messed-up soul that forces us to look beyond the monstrous nature of her acts.

Fairly cringe-inducing, full of witless double-entendres and the requisite "gags" involving bodily fluids.

A joyous, toe-tapping celebration of a musical style born of sorrow.

A worthy addition to the cinematic canon, which, at last count, numbered 52 different versions.

The finished product looks like it was thrown together during a lunch break -- by a drunk person. The level of ineptitude on display in this urban version of "Three Men and a Baby" is simply gobsmacking.

Presumably, Deville wants to show life returning to normal after WWII, but in the context of this inert movie, "normal" equals "tedious."

A gentle comedy, brimming with hope and faith in human resilience.

Occasionally stagy and flat, "Die" is worth seeing for Busch's grand performance, which won him a Special Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

Makes its biggest misstep in failing to persuade the viewer the five family members are charming eccentrics rather than irritating weirdos.

Amateurish, irritatingly gabby indie.

The problem lies with the paucity of sizzle between the romantic leads, Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor. They just don't look like they're having any fun together, particularly the bony Zellweger, who has trouble filling out the wow-worthy ensembles and perpetually looks like she's sucking on a lemon.

Psst! Wanna vicariously experience a consciousness-raising LSD trip and watch Sarah Michelle Gellar star in some explicit sex scenes?

It is an important, thoroughly bewitching work of art.

Contains much more prosaic ingredients. Like props and sound effects that could have been borrowed from an off-off-Broadway play, a host of painfully strained performances and a plot that's almost unbearably stupid.

This pursuit farce is harmless (if stale) entertainment, but the sledge-hammer attempt to appeal to the country's fastest-growing movie-going demographic makes for a clunky narrative and one-note characters.

The animated, Hanukkah-themed musical is, in fact, 75 minutes worth of belching, barfing and poo-jokes braided into a Grinch-meets-Scrooge-meets-"It's a Wonderful Life" storyline that's as stale as last year's potato latkes.

Follows a narrative arc as choppy as a messy windswell, and the result is a dog's dinner of profiles, repetitive narration, safety tips and banal "insights" into the joys and dangers of cresting waves that sometimes reach 70 feet.

This witless action comedy begins to insult the audience's intelligence from the opening scene.

The film is lousy with cartoonishly off-putting characters.

Dialogue is sparse in this leisurely paced chase; instead, the bluesy vocals of indigenous singer Archie Roach -- singing de Heer's lyrics -- are layered over the action as a kind of musical narration.

This modest little film out of Africa suffers from largely rudderless direction, relying for any sense of profundity on the breathtaking beauty of Abraham Haile Biru's cinematography.

Offers an idyllic, comforting surface of tree-shaded lanes and sunshine-dappled fields - but a disturbing tale throbs beneath.

This Alfie has been castrated.

The documentary's director, Arnon Goldfinger, may have had a chance of expanding on the limited audience for such a film if said clan, the Bursteins, exhibited either talent or likability.

Builds steadily from its smarter-than-your-average-horror-film beginnings to a genuinely cunning psychological thriller with a third-act twist guaranteed to shock even the most eagle-eyed watchers.

This one-joke comedy vehicle is flying through a laugh-free zone.

Instructive, cathartic or just too painful? You decide.

This wonderful party of a movie, as totally original as its hero, stamps on a smiley face that will linger for hours.

There's obviously some philosophical comment on the alienating effects of ho-hum toil buried somewhere in this weird mess, which features an irritating, theremin-heavy score. But can you be bothered stifling a yawn and searching for meaning? I would prefer not to.

Settles into an unflinchingly honest coming-of-age portrait.

Enough to give you brain strain -- and the pay-off is negligible.

Delivers one of those classic movie moments in which two screen legends go toe to toe, both barrels metaphorically blazing.

The spaniel-eyed Jean Reno ("Ronin") infuses Hubert with a mixture of deadpan cool, wry humor and just the measure of tenderness required to give this comic slugfest some heart.

The strapping Damon's lived-in performance makes us happy to follow Bourne wherever he may go.

A love letter to a New York neighborhood that is rapidly disappearing -- a tight-knit Dominican community.

It's really just about a bunch of pathetic losers whiling away the hours with their hands jammed down their pants.

One of those all-too-rare cases in which a riveting premise is expertly executed.

Ultimately, though, the lively whirl of debauched, drug-fueled parties and toffee-nosed exchanges between heiresses and aristocrats fails to mask the essential hollowness of the narrative.

It's hard to go wrong with documentary subjects as articulate and intriguing as childhood friends John Flansburgh and John Linnell.

A sluggish meander through the life of the man considered by many to be a deity of golfing.

Behind the glitz, Hollywood is sordid and disgusting. Quelle surprise!

If you can overlook its TV-episode look, occasional lapses in logic and detours into lurid overkill, this old-school psychological thriller, which marries a tracking-the-serial-killer narrative with occult themes, is a creepy diversion.

Anderson gives The Machinist a sickly noirish look that contributes to the creeping horror - but it's the emaciated Bale's spectral presence that leaves the imprint.

The two leads have strong singing voices, but they're not helped by songs with titles like "It's Time to Disco."