Megan Lehmann

Khouri seems never to have met a "chick flick" cliché she didn't like, from the ubiquity of emotional telephone conversations to the lachrymose (but entirely predictable and dramatically flabby) reconciliation at the end.

Part urban thriller, part unorthodox love story, this well-acted portrayal of the shadowy realm occupied by London's illegal immigrants is buoyed by stinging social commentary and a surprising twist of intelligent humor.

Falls far short of capturing the hedonistic spirit of this ephemeral art community. It's more like a routine home video with arty pretensions.

The cheerfully inane comedy Connie and Carla all but suffocates beneath a high-stepping, show-stopping, ear-splitting deluge of musical theater staples, from "Cats" to "Oklahoma!," "Jesus Christ Superstar" to "Fiddler on the Roof."

The biggest problem with the corny horror film Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid is that its titular reptiles are about as scary as jellied eels.

Ironically, what's lacking in Howard's stark, often brutal, late 19th-century chase drama is emotional punch.

The jaw-droppingly nasty second act is intriguing, but it veers into territory so dark that it sucks the air out of the bouncy chick flick that surrounds it, making for one confused -- and confusing -- comedy.

It all falls apart when the Wendigo unleashes its fury - no doubt upset at being neutered to look about as frightening as Bambi.

Predictable and uninspired romantic drama fizzles like a wet squib.

Kalem's grasp of dramatic storytelling is no firmer, and the disorderly film merely chases its tail for the second half, going nowhere fast.

Purists will probably have a conniption at the mere idea of messing with the form, but the worst thing about Jacquot's post-modern treatment is that its incongruity wrenches you out of the story.

De Palma fools around with split screens and slo-mo, but no amount of cinematic artifice can varnish over the fact that this is simply a bad film.

This contemplative drama manages to dodge mawkish potholes to emerge as a strangely life-affirming work.

A stinker.

Chases its tail for so long, it morphs from a whodunit into a who-cares.

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.

Incoherent, laugh-free comedy.

Prywes has produced a technically accomplished nostalgia piece on a shoestring budget, but the plotting is too sitcom-lite to support its aspirations to magic realism.

Combined with the eyestrain produced by the cheap cardboard 3-D glasses, the resulting vertigo is decidedly unpleasant -- although having moon rocks and blobs of cream pie flying out from the screen is kinda cool in a retro way.

Bart Everly followed Frank around for two years, yet his film seems to consist mostly of regurgitated C-Span and news footage from the period, interspersed with asides from the outspoken liberal.

A true fan's nirvana.

An earnest undertaking that unfortunately plays like a trite Lifetime movie.

Overripe dialogue and a fevered score fail to inject any real tension, and the accentless English spoken throughout a film set entirely in France is ludicrous and jarring.

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

Leigh's uncanny ability to mine emotional truth packs the usual punch. And the trademark flashes of humor sprinkled throughout ease the bleakness of the landscape.

Seems to exist solely to drive this observation home in the most heavy-handed way.

An overlong melodrama-by-numbers.

A sporadically amusing curiosity that falls short of effectively satirizing the public's fixation with the minutiae of celebrity lives.

See it only for Paul Bettany's performance.

At some point, all this visual trickery stops being clever and devolves into flashy, vaguely silly overkill.

Against all odds, director Steven Shainberg has managed to craft an oddly compassionate -- and often very funny -- tale of an emotionally symbiotic affair.

Another repulsive, fetishistic trawl through the life and crimes of a serial killer.

Clarkson, the reigning queen of the indies, is simultaneously funny and heartbreaking, following up killer performances in "The Station Agent" and "All the Real Girls."

As this Woodstock-on-wheels careens through the countryside, stopping only to play for thousands of hirsute revelers -- and, once, to stock up on booze in Saskatoon -- its famous passengers celebrate with delirious joy the pure, unadulterated magic of music.

Lizzie McGuire's "Movie" doesn't try to be anything more than a superficial escapist fantasy for fans of the show.

Most of Ultimate X is comprised of truly exhilarating footage of men -- and one woman -- pushing their bodies and their nerve to the edge.

It manages to be both kinetic and dream-like at the same time -- "Run Lola Run" by way of David Lynch.

So serious-minded it occasionally teeters on the brink of absurdity.

No light leavens the ashen wash of writer-director Tim Blake Nelson's relentlessly downbeat Holocaust drama The Grey Zone. None.

Lurches so wildly and meaninglessly between genres and time frames that all it creates is motion sickness.

Commendably, Carrera steers clear of preachiness in his exploration of a timely and relevant issue, and Bernal's transformation from naive priest to tortured adulterer to hard-nosed careerist is riveting.

The gay sex scenes that punctuate Eloy de la Iglesia's limp Spanish comedy, Bulgarian Lovers, are frequent and graphic, and it often seems as if the lackluster story exists solely to showcase them.

Exploitative rubbish.

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

Conforms to many of the tropes of a formula thriller but, aided by an evocative Philip Glass score and Tim Orr's beautifully naturalistic cinematography, it transcends the genre.

A compelling portrait of a matchless man, who's still going strong at 72.

Riddick-ulous.

Violent and unoriginal actioner.

A thumping soundtrack, including David Bowie's "Rebel Rebel" and Pink Floyd's "Us and Them," fuels this high-energy look at a pack of underdogs who sowed the seeds for today's extreme sports craze.

It's awkward, listless and fails to reach any sort of climax.

A well-intentioned, semi-autobiographical pastiche, is trapped in a straitjacket of political correctness, self-conscious acting and spurts of try-hard dialogue that come off as precious.

An atmospheric and subtly engrossing relationship saga, which wowed the critics when it played on British TV and is just now getting a theatrical release.

Brilliantly idiosyncratic.