Paul Malcolm

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.

For all its simplicity, however, the film is entertaining, even uplifting, with Lopez giving a stellar, confectionary performance.

Maquiling offers us the unexpected pleasures of taking the side streets in a film about how even minor-key adventures can make a life stuck in low gear something to look back on.

Shadow Magic is rich with detail.

Remarkable exploration of sexuality and the Jewish faith.

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.

A meta-horror film that hilariously parodies the genre's clichés with smarts to spare. It's also the scariest fucking movie Craven has made since the first "A Nightmare on Elm Street."

Climaxes in a flood of revelations that, like so much of the film, take us where we least expect to go.

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

Grisman's warm, loving home movie in the guise of a documentary.

Thraves escapes formula by shaping the film around low-key incidents instead of speeches or overt lessons. There are plenty of side streets here.

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.

While there are scenes of wrenching emotional openness and spontaneous charm -- largely due to the irresistible allure and impeccable craft of its ensemble cast -- the degree of calculation apparent in its plot and images undermines its efforts to move and seduce.

Despite the film's aspirations to soul healing, its uplift remains mechanical, like an escalator's.

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

The stadiums and performance halls of Pyongyang become staging grounds for massive, highly choreographed political pageants that make the Nuremberg rallies look like dinner theater. You’ve never seen anything quite like these dazzling displays of groupthink.

The Jackass boys achieve true genius, however, when they take their penance public. Before stunned, inert onlookers, these skate-punk Situationists transform official zones of work and leisure -- office parks, golf courses, bowling alleys -- into arenas of dangerous stupidity to remind us that, in the end, we’re all just meat.

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.

Baldwin's perfectly impacted performance as a tough-love provider (the actor gets some of the best lines in the movie).

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.

Temple doesn't just highlight the contemporary relevance of Coleridge's liberated words and themes, he shows us how high they still soar.

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.

It's Garrison and Burnam who hold the film's center, however, with a natural magnetism. Newcomers both, they take the same clean approach to their roles that their characters bring to their tags.

Performances that are natural yet weighted with history and frequently heart-wrenching.

Extraordinarily witty (nothing new for this director) while coming off as a taunt to anyone who'd dare to follow in his wake.

A rosy, hearthside fantasy of acceptance that's so assured in its writing and direction, it's nearly impossible not to believe.

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