Mike Hale

The whole turns out to be less than the sum of its elegantly constructed and cleverly uncategorizable parts.

Mr. Landis’s sensibility, which combines sitcom jokiness with mumblecore sentimentality, tends to be more grating than amusing in Me Him Her, though scattered moments will make you laugh.

"The Warriors” and the “Mad Max” films will come to mind as you watch Tokyo Tribe, and from scene to scene Mr. Sono’s visual inventiveness and sure hand with action stand up to the comparison. The cumulative effect, however, is numbing.

Mr. Bale, turning in a respectable if oddly chipper performance under the circumstances, has the unfortunate task of playing a character who doesn't really add up.

If you don't get the jokes, there isn't a whole lot else to get, and it's a safe assumption that non-Latino, non-Spanish-speaking viewers are going to miss a lot of them.

The overall effect is distancing; there are some early comic moments that have you laughing along with the movie, but eventually the clashing tones and preposterousness just have you laughing.

Mr. Park's screenplay, pedestrian direction and stolid performance don't set us up to care.

A new wrinkle in how the killings spool out actually makes the film even more predictable, and the deaths, which tend to be squirmy rather than explosive, are so perfunctory and lazily jokey that they leave a decidedly bad aftertaste.

The Harvest, in its modest way, calls to mind "The Grapes of Wrath" but with no glimmer of a New Deal or a union, or even of better economic times ahead.

The depictions of cosmopolitan Germans and mostly avaricious, bestial Czechs are likely to stir strong emotions among some viewers, but over all Habermann is more potboiler than political or historical statement.

It's a hard movie to engage with or even sit through, despite the fact that much of the material is interesting in its own right. Oddly, but perhaps predictably, the problem is the resolutely conventional and soft-headed way in which that material has been assembled.

The overall mildness and inconsequence of Girlfriend is disrupted for a while by Amanda Plummer, who gives a vivid yet gentle performance in a small part as Evan's patient, protective mother.

Carrying far more weight than their screen time would warrant, the "interviews" with actors playing young children are the best part of the film.

The intertwining of the narratives, along with the somewhat elliptical, or perhaps rudimentary, storytelling, makes for a confusing experience. But the stories are mainly an excuse for pretty pictures, some quite striking, of poverty and oppression, and for a closing frenzy of bloodletting.

That things tend not to end, or bode, well doesn't detract from the overall Hallmark vibe.

It's also a pretty familiar story, and "Reindeer," despite Mr. Neuvonen's verve and Jani's charisma, can drag. Like a lot of addiction stories, it starts to mirror the monotony and self-absorption of the addict's life.

As a meditation Some Days has its virtues - if you're in the market for a picture-postcard bummer - but it will leave your mellowed mind pretty quickly.

As uplifting stories of tolerance and self-discovery go, Spork has a messy appeal, but it's no "Hairspray."

Whether you're predisposed to seeing Second Life as liberating or creepy, Life 2.0 would have been more interesting and original if it, like its subjects, had dwelled more in the virtual world, and if it had told us more about that world's mechanics and folkways.

It becomes clear pretty quickly that the only real thought in the movie has gone into the cowboy-gothic costumes and the computer-generated effects.

After a stirring opening battle, however, the fights in True Legend become pretty routine. And beyond some lovely mountain scenery and a tiny cameo by a radiant Michelle Yeoh, there isn't much else to look at.

Frenetic, paper-thin but entertaining documentary.

It has the structure and some of the pleasures of a well-made sitcom or docu-reality show, despite the nervous-looking, unhappy guy at its center; it could have been called "Nobody Understands Phil."

The Robber may have less on its mind than its sheen of seriousness would suggest, but the view is gorgeous.

Producing smarm at the high level of When Harry Met Sally requires special talent, and when you fall short all you're left with is garden-variety smarm.

It's generally fun to watch Mr. Yen move and not much fun to watch him act, and Legend of the Fist is no exception.

That the movie remains consistently watchable is largely a tribute to Brian Hasenfus, a Needham, Mass., contractor making his acting debut as Phillip.

The central conceit of the characters' fates being determined by the "rules" of horror movies feels irredeemably tired; a clever idea that was worth one movie.