Megan Lehmann

When the world gets too big and scary, the Hundred Acre Wood remains a clearly delineated comfort zone.

This genre-busting hybrid is a scattershot affair - bad jokes land with a thud that seems to echo, but the winning ones prompt hearty laughs.

It's a simple tale of father-and-son bonding that director Huo Jianqi injects with a quiet power, and it benefits greatly from the gorgeous lushness of its backdrop.

Doesn't have the polish of "Ocean's Eleven" - but it does have George Clooney.

Essentially an hour-long monologue, but this talking head is so engaging that you can't blame director Lech Kowalski's camera for not wanting to stray from the late Dee Dee Ramone's party-ravaged face.

Possibly the most unintentionally hilarious film since Ed Wood's "Plan 9 from Outer Space," Steve Irwin's big-screen debut is destined to become an instant cult classic.

A sensual performance from Abbass buoys the flimsy story.

An exploration of the way the sins of the father trickle down to his offspring, is dense with quirky characters and subplots all woven into a rather heavy-handed meditation on the evils of globalization.

The meta jokes come thick and fast - some clunk, but there's no time to mourn - and the references are far from limited to the Warner Bros. world (at one point, Bugs exclaims, "Whaddya know - I found Nemo!").

Bell has added unexpected shadings to what could have been simply a sordid tale of highway prostitution, gradually revealing surprises to the characters that keep a murmur of unease thrumming throughout.

Along with co-writer Emmanuele Bernhein, Ozon...has crafted a contemplative blend of fantasy and reality that illuminates the mysteries of the creative process.

It's not surprising that This Thing of Ours -- the title refers to the literal translation of La Cosa Nostra -- rings with authenticity and solid acting.

Makes a powerful case against the wisdom of budget cuts at universities everywhere.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Very funny. It's also heartbreakingly sad.

Has just enough fairy dust to charm its target audience.

A documentary mosaic of kooky Americana.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Instructive, cathartic or just too painful? You decide.

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

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.

Corcuera's unflinching documentary Back of the World is a real-life horror story told in three parts.

Wants to be an epic in the mold of "Saving Private Ryan," but it's hindered by its modest budget.

Pray will force you to look at the music as more than just gobbledygook created by musical-bower birds who can't spell.

Nair makes Vanity Fair an elegant showcase for an unforgettable heroine.

Apart from some irritating and redundant camera tricks early on in the film, director Blair Treu plays it white-bread straight, delivering an uncommonly inoffensive, after-school-special-style teen flick.

The film is ultimately a one-man show -- and when that man is the singularly crafty Depp, it's hard to look away.

A compelling look at a vexa tious question, Taking Sides is, at times, hamstrung by its own ambiguity.

Smarter than your average serial-killer movie, thanks to unusually fleshed-out characters inhabited by a high- pedigree cast.

Just Brit filmmaker Shane Meadows having some fun with the conventions of the spaghetti western.

The plot is thin as consomme, and the thudding score is distracting, but the heartfelt storytelling and Michael Bertl's disarming cinematography make this a food film to savor.

When the Powerpuff Girls blink those soulful dinner-plate peepers, you could forgive them anything - even their movie's wafer-thin excuse for a plot.

Walking a tightrope between high farce and emotional truth, writer-director Gabriele Muccino's breathlessly paced Italian comedy The Last Kiss manages to stay just this side of melodrama.

The concert footage is stirring, the recording sessions are intriguing, and -- on the way to striking a blow for artistic integrity -- this quality band may pick up new admirers.

Winterbottom's bold film, its gritty visuals offset by Dario Marianelli's lavish score, makes real the desperate lengths that refugees -- those running from poverty as well as dange -- will go to.

Cadigan is honest enough to leave in a disturbing scene in which he talks about the "violent imagery" in his head and fantasizes about using a kitchen knife on his mother, before breaking down in tears. It's raw stuff.

If you like your language blue and your humor coarse, Margaret Cho is for you.

Lacking a solid narrative beyond the worsening marital crisis, this humor-flecked domestic drama ends up relying heavily on directorial tricks such as splashes of magic realism, giving it a self-satisfied air that quickly becomes grating.

Phoenix gives an electric performance as amoral Army supply clerk Ray Elwood.

Lacking quite the zip and zing of "Run Lola Run," this lively indie tale of a drug deal gone awry could be alternately titled "Walk Fast Bobby Walk Fast."

There's nothing particularly startling or new in the script by Siegel and his co-writers Lisa Bazadona and Grace Woodard - except that it, refreshingly, draws its characters in real-life shades of gray.

Suffers from an air of frosty detachment and a disappointingly stiff performance from Jagger, who also provides an unnecessary voice-over narration.

A tightly drawn, propulsive thriller with some pleasingly unexpected kinks in the tale and a couple of believable performances from Charlize Theron and Kevin Bacon in the leads.

Coppola sure knows his late-'60s cinema and he's meticulous in reconstructing the style of the era.

Keaton's overamped girlishness, and the adolescent shenanigans she engages in, make a mockery of this overlong romantic comedy's stance as a celebration of mature love.

Some of the plot points are confusingly vague, the tone lurches wildly between genres, and the film's epilogue pushes the bounds of believability - but The Hard Word could never be accused of being predictable.

The central narrative is ultimately too one-dimensional to sustain interest.

A visual treat diminished by lifeless dialogue and self-conscious acting.

Although deft editing provides neat segues, "Safety" suffers from a case of too many dramas, too little time. Characters are given no chance to develop and, too often, their behavior turns on a dime, hurtling off into a parallel universe of extreme acts.

Often so silly, it's surreal.

Only really little tykes will find the surplus of pratfalls and poo and fart jokes a hoot.

This slow-moving Swedish film offers not even a hint of joy, preferring to focus on the humiliation of Martin as he defecates in bed and urinates on the plants at his own birthday party.

The feel-good finale -- an ending even less in doubt than that of the most predictable Hollywood fare -- is as rousing as you'd hope and the fast-paced, on-ice action is satisfyingly authentic.

Without Branagh's pitch-perfect comedic skills the entire movie could have been crushed under the avalanche of quips and wisecracks tumbling from Kalesniko's too-clever-by-half pen.

S.W.A.T. boasts the kernel of a good idea - but it gets buried in the chaff of half-baked plot threads, partly realized characters and unstructured pandemonium.

Twinkles and glows, but all the surface razzle-dazzle fails to mask the emptiness at its core.

From the incessant rain that blurs the joyless Boston setting to the mysterious decision to make a brunette Hudson look as plain as possible, it's an evanescent fancy devoid of sparkle.

The majority of Dickie Roberts winds up looking like a tame episode of the "Brady Bunch" -- spiked with Spade-esque crudity.

Middleton deals with the various male and female perspectives in an even-handed way, concocting a slice of New York life that's frothy as meringue pie.

Has laugh-out-loud moments of inspired idiocy. The problem is that this one-joke skit (done first and better by Britain's Ali G) has been given the Hamburger Helper treatment and stretched to feature length.

Hokey, overstuffed plot and a messily hand-stitched, often illogical script.

Much of the action is strident and cartoonish -- but the romance at the core remains tender and true.

Stevens has a keen sense of the absurd, but the whole thing is too forced - and his use of "rotomation" (last used in Richard Linklater's "Waking Life") to give a Timothy Leary-swirl to key dramatic moments winds up looking incongruous.

A good edit would have allowed the film's worthy, obviously heartfelt, message to shine.

The tiny stage can barely contain Reno's gale-force personality, as she paces and rants a stream-of-conscious monologue.

Another big, dumb action movie in the vein of "XXX," The Transporter is riddled with plot holes big enough for its titular hero to drive his sleek black BMW through.

All the elements are in place for an entertaining murder mystery, but as Bigelow meanders aimlessly back and forth through time, the plot becomes increasingly water-logged.

A likable trio of actors struggles valiantly but ultimately fails to keep this dopey buddy comedy afloat.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

A hit-and-miss affair.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.