Megan Lehmann

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.