Paul Malcolm

It's finally a hilarious and cuddly flashback from the dog's point of view, to his training as a pup, that marks the moment when the film finds its sweetly moronic legs.

A Rumor of Angels beats its wings furiously, only to sink back into spiritualist goo.

It's the zippy chatter among the Serenity's wised-up space pirates that gives the film most of its punch, but with only serviceable action sequences and largely cookie-cutter effects, you can still sense the void just outside.

A half-baked classic.

Softley starts out a little awkwardly, as he tries to capture turn-of-the-century flux by opening several London scenes from disorienting, too-obvious camera positions.

Torem drifts into formula and his initially promising film goes unbearably soft.

Far too complex and provoking.

A tedious exercise in ethical hand wringing.

While Slums of Beverly Hills may sound like a downer, Jenkins tempers the family's downbeat circumstances with sympathetic humor, a quirky camera style and lo-fi retro flavor.

Shadow Magic is rich with detail.

Though the two-hour film can go slack with excess explication, Shiri compensates with an overheated drive that forces the myopia of current events toward a broader field of vision.

What at first seems emotionally charged, ultimately comes off as contrived.

These live performances and classic music videos drive home the point that part of the Giants' longevity flows from the fact that they can't be explained, only experienced.

It's all part of a larger calculus that the filmmakers hope will translate into a thinking person's thriller. If only they themselves knew how to figure it.

A conventional if appealing tear-jerker, The Way Home would like to grandmother us all.

It would all be too obviously feel-good if Ducastel and Martineau weren't also tuned in to the liberating drift of the open highway and a sharp native humor that adds needed flesh and blood to their walking metaphors.

Director Chang builds some chilling suspense into the cop's grim investigative routine -- as well as generous helpings of blood: It runs, splashes and sprays as the amputations continue.

It's an amusing scenario, until even Miike seems to lose his taste for the oddly sweet concoction and allows the film to drift aimlessly to a rainbow-hued finale.

Fate plays both prankster and deliverer in Firode's never-too-clever scheme, buoyed, like his often-winsome images, by romantic fancy.

An overly mannered film drowning in the symptoms of dysfunction but unable to tap the root causes of this WASPish clan's pain except in the most oblique and cursory ways. This might be Freundlich's point, considering this family deals with its problems through avoidance.

The sharpness of Eyre's opening, however, ebbs away when he takes up the story of Rudy (Eric Schweig) and Mogie (Graham Greene), two brothers with neatly opposed responses to the reservation grind.

Sympathy is disturbingly cast aside so we can wallow in the pathetic. It’s a bad trip, man.

Struggles to achieve a giddy eccentricity that never fully emerges.

Chop Suey really captivates with surfaces; look away for an instant, and the spell is broken.

The movie's real charms lie in its surprisingly dark atmosphere and its almost subversive sense of humor.

A hyperreal, visually layered period style that finds film noir shadows creeping in at the edges of a blue-sky, get-along-to-go-along America.

The film lapses too often into sugary sentiment and withholds delivery on the pell-mell pyrotechnics its punchy style promises.

In the end, Macartney and screenwriter Stuart Hepburn decide that love conquers all, which may have been the way it happened but doesn't leave the film with much going on.

What feels genuine in the film -- mother-son bonds, the wedding party -- is surrounded by overdetermined and formulaic scenes lifted from other films.

Kessler frames it all with an ironic eye (Stiller's misfit mogul holds court in cheap motels and burger joints) and with enough big-hearted tenderness to keep the humor from going sour.

The Kornbluths don't offer much visual style -- the film is as flat and sterile as its corporate environs -- but they build an excruciating tension from Kornbluth's confounding inability to lick a few stamps.

Manipulative filmmaking at its most gently persuasive.

What I mean is that to watch The Phantom Menace as a lifelong "Star Wars" fan is to engage in constant, fragile negotiations between a cherished familiarity and the shock of the new.

Nemesis never feels true to itself, its energy never fully engaged. Even with Earth on the line in its climactic space battle, the film seems embarrassed that it couldn't have found a better way to work through its issues.

None of it rings true, and it distracts from the film's real heart, which, on its own, would have made for a strikingly original first film.

Salva falls back on dull, jumbled action and an awkward subplot as he lurches toward a sequel.

Writer-director Avi Nesher and co-screenwriter Roger Berger -- upon whose real-life investigations the film is based -- deliver on the hard-boiled promise of this low-key thriller with plenty of gritty twists and turns.

The convoluted plot unfolds mechanically and with little atmosphere as if sex and death in the Oval Office would provide enough gravity on its own. That it doesn't is a sign of mediocre filmmaking as well as a measure of just how cynical the times have become.

The film gives good action (amid more tired spy business) but comes riddled with contradictions.

While the film throws a solid pop punch, you could still swear you've seen it all before.

Unfortunately, it's our knowledge of what's actually to come that puts much of the chill and complexity in Hopkins' rather formulaic script.

Shooting Fish wants to hang with the hip crowd--witness the vibrant colors, the flashy camera work and the stream of catchy pop songs--but its heart just isn't wild enough.

The rough, watercolor washes of its city backdrops mark the film with nostalgia while its story carries us along at an amiable, buoyant pace.

It does, however, fairly bubble with speed-freak energy and a dry, laddish wit that keeps the jokes coming.

It's a refreshing change from the self-interest and paranoia that shape most American representations of Castro. At the same time, Bravo anticipates that such a view will drive some nuts.

It's abundantly clear that Lozano and company have been re-watching "Pulp Fiction" for the last decade, pausing long enough to pick up the fluid rhythms of "Y Tu Mamá También" and "Amores Perros" while completely missing those films' social and political edges.

The film's larger, surprisingly mature emotional rhythms are strong enough to pull it through.

It boasts none of the studio's high-gloss animation. That said, Recess is not without its charms.

Director Ernest -- doesn't skimp on style in a film that bluntly exploits social conscience to pump up its taste for gore.

More of the same -- only less so.

For the most part it delivers the goods.

Railsback and Snodgrass struggle against caricature in their own fine performances.

A movie with a lot on its plate, but nothing interesting on its mind.

Bounces through the bush in search of good will and comes up with recycled charm as it reintroduces most of the original's major characters.

Despite their appeal to patriotic horror fans, the makers of An American Haunting end up doing more harm than good to domestic fright production.

Despite the lack of zing in Hogan's frequently self-deprecating zingers, director Simon Wincer repeatedly lets scenes dribble on until an awkward silence engulfs everyone onscreen.

Ironically, for all the paranoia, York's Defiler and his henchman, an always game Udo Kier, are an oasis of wit in an otherwise parched, self-serious script.

Between spy training and sensitivity training, the two (Murphy/Wilson) prove nicely matched comic foils.

Kazantzidis struggles for the flavor of classic romance, with a string of standards on the soundtrack to little avail.

Ultimately, Jolie's efforts to establish a character are dashed against the film's increasingly inane dialogue.

Written by a team of three, the script is more plagued by groupthink than is the film's future Earth.

A satirist such as Shearer should need a license to go hunting on terrain so rich with easy targets; he tries to bag them all, and it leaves the film to founder in aimlessness.

The film at times feels less than objective, in part due to Douglas' often breathless narration.

Whatever the cause, everyone involved takes this blend of slick Verhoeven sleaze and Deliverance-brand musk way too seriously.

Nothing comes together after the first ten minutes.

So many romantic cliches it's laughable.

A film that plays like warmed-over "Cold Mountain."

Director Olli Saarela, who co-wrote the script with Antti Tuuri, offers up a trembling romanticism that gradually hardens -- like Eero's consciousness -- with exposure to the horrors of war.