Peter Debruge

Take it from someone who can still feel the hollow rubber tang! of old dodgeball scars: It feels great to be blindsided by a little movie like this.

The result is an eye-opening social portrait in the tradition of "Paris Is Burning," the landmark 1990 documentary that introduced drag balls and ''vogueing'' to the mainstream, but it lacks the earlier film's structure and focus.

Baier's style is almost uncomfortably voyeuristic, amplified by the casting of a young, inexperienced actor (Pierre Chatagny) in a part that calls for hardcore sex.

Make no mistake, Arctic Tale is a stunning film, full of all the astonishing, even breathtaking nature photography we've come to expect from the folks at National Geographic.

Each segment introduces new characters and a radically different scenario, which suggests that Hancock's structure may actually be an insecure attempt to deliver a horror movie.

As coincidence would have it, Steve Carell's "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" spun comedy gold from a similar idea just last week. Virgin shares not only The Baxter's basic premise, but also two of its key cast members (Paul Rudd and the beautiful Ms. Banks), allowing audiences to see just how much better The Baxter might have been if Showalter had given us some reason to identify with his socially awkward protagonist.

Brazilian director Gustavo Pizzi crafts a warm and wonderfully universal love story that comes across surprisingly unconventional for something so familiar.

Bardem plays the part with all the pent-up animal rage of a young Robert De Niro.

Most likely chosen for its shaggy-dog looks, Winn-Dixie is actually a great deal more special than you'd expect, a fitting analogy for a film no parent should be too quick to dismiss.

A charming midlife crisis of a movie that bottles the "La Femme Nikita" director's typically high-concept inclinations in a modest indie package.

Offers a charming distraction from the current campaign season by sidestepping real issues and making light of the process.

The remake seems to have been written and directed by people whose only experience with children is the long-distant memory of having been kids themselves so many years ago.

Threadbare sequel.

It's all in the telling, and Loggerheads practically aches with its own heal-the-world earnestness.

In a move reminiscent of Gus Van Sant's "Psycho," some shots are lifted directly from the original and much of the screenplay is identical.

An ambitious disaster, Alexander is the rare historical portrait that leaves you feeling as though you know less about its subject than you did upon entering the theater.

The characters, starting with Lewis himself, are downright obnoxious. Not counting those singing frogs or the time-traveling T. rex (with its big head and little arms), only Lewis' sad-sack roommate ''Goob'' is remotely sympathetic.

The studio wimped out, and the result is a lesser production on every level: talent, script, content, and purpose.

The truth is, Jet Li has gotten soft in his old age. While fans of the "Once Upon a Time in China" star will be pleased to learn that at least half of Fearless is action, what they may not realize is just how mushy everything else is.

Is it an awful movie? Objectively speaking, no (although it does feature one of the worst endings ever inflicted on an audience). But as a Bond movie, it’s an abomination.

Let's be honest: Whether it's Jessica Alba or Paul Walker you're dying to see stripped down to her/his sexiest swimwear, there's only one reason anyone is interested in diving Into the Blue.

Whatever connection Bond had to the real world has now been severed in favor of delivering the most satisfying possible experience for audiences, such as a throwaway scene of Q using an electromagnetic device to beat the slot machines or allowing homosexual henchmen Wint and Kidd to devise elaborate (and yet easily escapable) traps.

It's like "Lock, Stock" as filtered through the mind of David Mamet, with Craig as the suave middleman holding it all together.

The movie is basically a love story between a man and his elephant, and if viewed as such, it's not nearly as ridiculous as the movie it first appears to be.

It's the details that make Dummy such a winner. By way of comparison, consider last summer's "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," in which each actor put a heartfelt spin on his or her one-joke character (the father who believes that Windex cures everything). Well, here's an entire movie built on nuggets like that.

Kevin Spacey is a darn good actor, and he's a pretty good singer to boot. But those traits alone do not excuse the painful experience to be had sitting through Beyond the Sea.

Skillfully manage to adapt some key details of the show -- namely, the high-flying car chases and hillbilly narration.

The magic of the movies is never more evident than with stop-motion animation, and nobody does it better than Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park.

It’s frustrating to watch, but designed in such a way that the boy’s loneliness will haunt long afterward.

Mean Girls depicts the kind of traumatic high school experience that might await spoiled rich girls who grow up in two-parent households with designer clothes and Escalades.

What does set Shrek the Third apart is the quality of its animation, which reaches a level of expressiveness in the faces that would make even Hollywood's heavily Botoxed live-action stars envious.

There's nothing so artistic about it as to attract the same art-house crowd that braved subtitles to discover "Nine Queens," and yet, it's professional enough that Spanish speakers will be glad to have a heist movie on par with "Rush Hour 3" or "The Pacifier" made in their native tongue.

For an inaugural effort, Open Season ain't bad, but the studio shows far more promise with its gee-whiz visuals than it does in the story department.

As science gives way to science fiction, the movie loses its way, squandering time that might better be spent exploring the ocean's floor, where these alien life forms already among us must be seen to be believed.

So many movies seek to distract, whereas this one creates a space — like Eva, left behind in a near-empty city — to reflect and reevaluate.

Conran's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a pastiche of everything from "King Kong" to "The Wizard of Oz," a movie that escalates to a breathless cliff-hanger every 20 minutes or so and reinvents itself with every reel.

Kids will love it. It feels fresh and original and mildly subversive, but it's all a cover for the filmmakers not having the patience or confidence to put together a real story with a beginning, middle and end.

The tension's palpable and the deaths are gruesomely inventive (and jarringly abrupt), but the clincher is so far-fetched you may end up wishing you'd opted for the relative reality of a week in Cancun instead.

What isn't fair is the film's R rating, which makes this charming coming-of-age tale virtually inaccessible to the audience sure to cherish it most.

Illegal Tender is the sort of crime movie in which nothing, not one detail, has been observed from real life; it's composed entirely of fantasies and falsehoods lifted from bad movies and hip-hop videos.

Virtually everything Americans know about Ellis Island they've learned from the movies, and virtually all those movies were American. Golden Door offers the other side of the story, the one that ends at Ellis Island instead of beginning there.

Director Brad Anderson (Session 9) overtly cribs from everyone from Dostoevsky to Kafka.

Every so often, a movie blindsides you, leaving you feeling different, enlightened, possibly even improved. Me and You and Everyone We Know is such a movie.

Riddled with ammunition for what Alfred Hitchcock called the "Plausibles"--those poor-sport moviegoers who insist on pointing out a movie's inconsistencies instead of simply enjoying the ride

The movie itself frustrates by guarding the secret of Walsch's newfound spirituality.

Its compelling cast and sincere matchmaking goals are reason enough to play along.

Kranks is the type of grim holiday movie that reminds you of all that is noxious and insincere about the Christmas season and then chases it down with a sickly-sweet reversal

Slick, well-acted, and smarter than it has to be.

Delivers a polished and well-researched look at America 's largest corporate bankruptcy with a laser-sharp focus on the personalities, practices, and fates of the top executives behind the Enron meltdown.

In post-"Wedding Crashers" Hollywood, the entire exercise feels dated (just as the comedy's PG-13 rating -- this in spite of a recurring rape joke -- makes it feel neutered).

The way I see it, anyone who's made up his mind to see Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo deserves everything they've got coming to them, and with any luck, they might even enjoy the movie's willfully offensive gutter humor.

A devastating disappointment. Badly acted, amateurishly directed and woefully unfunny.

The Sentinel isn't nearly as slick as it must have looked on the page. Those zingers are perfect fodder for a movie preview, but they just don't lead anywhere interesting on-screen.

At best, this movie functions as a brief companion piece to Boy George's new Broadway show, “Taboo.”

This is neither the noir world of old '40s movies, of which he's clearly fond, nor something new and original enough to fit the concept. Instead, it feels like a blueprint for someone else to figure out.

What is most beguiling about The Libertine is that it allows Wilmot to self-destruct without ever giving us cause to care or relate.

If anything, it's the degree to which the animals differ from us that makes March of the Penguins so fascinating.

That rare kind of movie that contrasts "cultured" big-city characters with devout, "simple" folk without being condescending or judgmental of either camp.

Beautiful, yet flawed film.

One of those outrageous stalker thrillers in which so much trouble could have been avoided if the characters had only thought to call the police.

Brothers takes a scenario as old as Genesis – two jealous siblings spar over the affections of the same woman – and renders it fresh and immediate, by virtue of the warm, almost maternal, generosity director Susanne Bier shows her characters.

Reveals more about the German people through sentimental comedy than such overtly political films as "The Nasty Girl" or "The Marriage of Maria Braun."

With My Flesh and Blood, Karsh finds a worthy subject in the constant day-to-day challenges facing a truly extraordinary family.

Berry is giving a performance much too earnest to have been intentionally campy, setting herself up as a veritable shoo-in for this year's "Worst Actress" Razzie. Me-ouch!

By suggesting that the man's life was as riotously funny as his plays, writer-director Laurent Tirard leaves us wishing he'd opted to do a straightforward adaptation instead.

Sure, it's a pleasure to watch Thornton stretch his legs in Matthau's role, but I miss Tatum O'Neal as his firebrand daughter.

Three Burials is beautiful, authentic and brutally observant of human nature. With real Tex-Mex backdrops instead of the usual Monument Valley vistas and characters too complex to withstand simple white-hat/black-hat reductionism, Three Burials is a visionary portrait of the New West. This is the terrain of Eastwood and Peckinpah, saddled with the concerns of 21st-century life.

As a thriller, The Statement is relatively disappointing, but as a moral study, the movie proves far more promising.

Belongs to the same class of cotton-candy romances as "Chances Are" and "Somewhere in Time," although it steers its light-hearted subject into darker territory with the life support subplot.

The dynamic between mother and son is fascinating, with Blethyn creating a character who is more antagonist than villain.

Even as Dark Water's horror-movie component flounders, a different, arguably better kind of thriller emerges.

Paradoxically, the more ridiculous Riley’s gonzo social critique gets, the more boring it becomes, to the point that its out-of-control second half starts to feel like some kind of bad trip.

I'd like to say that Flightplan is one of those white-knuckle, edge-of-your-seat thrill rides that critics are always raving about, but instead, it's more like a transatlantic flight with no clear destination, where the cabin noise makes it impossible to sleep and the in-flight movie is a rerun.

Secret Window's premise is certainly new, even if King appears to be plagiarizing themes from himself.

A thrilling drama interspersed with amusing comedic elements (rather than the other way around).

Plays like a modern-day inversion of "Inherit the Wind," highlighting an astonishing shift in the American legal system over the last 80 years.

There's no question that Civil Brand has an ambitious premise, but it feels boxed in by the standard prison-movie formula.

Though sporadically brilliant, this too-often uneven send-up of Russian politics attempts to maintain the rapid-fire, semi-improvisational style of Iannucci’s earlier work...while situating such madness within an elaborately costumed and production-designed period milieu.

Sober, this kind of material is an acquired taste at best and downright unbearable in stretches. And yet, the movie has the makings of an instant cult classic, sure to grow funnier among its devoted fans with each successive viewing.

There’s a listless, almost meandering nature to the story. The film’s conflict is clear — this is no way to raise a child, and allowed to continue in this fashion, Will risks both his life and Tom’s — and yet there’s no sense of where the script it headed, and no urgency to its resolution.

Like an early Woody Allen film or a classic Marx brothers feature, more of Hoodwinked's gags flop than hit, but they come at such a steady rate, you hardly notice.

Janeane Garofalo is all wrong as the giraffe, whom the animators contort into all manner of weird positions so she can share the frame with pint-size love interest Benny the squirrel (Jim Belushi).

The movie's politics may miss their mark, but its thrills are dead-on.

Over the years, Pacino's Method has become his madness, and now, whether he's playing Shylock or Satan, he doesn't become the part so much as the part becomes him.

Sexy, stylish, and legitimately suspenseful.

An astounding achievement in production design, an original creation so completely in tune with the books' macabre sensibilities that even the movie's (arguably) happy ending can't diminish its satisfying sense of schadenfreude.

In the age of reality television, Paparazzi feels desperately out-of-touch, the jaded grousings of an industry burnout.

An exercise intended exclusively for fans of the genre, another crude, hard-R bloodbath from the studio that brought you "High Tension" and "Saw."

Although director Eytan Fox focuses on Yossi and Jagger's specific situation, he also casts a critical eye on the responsibility military service puts on all young people who are still in the process of discovering themselves.

Has all the makings of another "Ice Storm" -- family tension, teen experimentation, friendly neighborhood wife-swapping and a death in the family -- but falls short in its execution.

As far as titles go, Cote d'Azur doesn't quite cut it for this topsy-turvy French comedy, in which an innocent seaside vacation gets really messy once a family full of busybodies starts poking around in one another's business.

It's frustrating to watch Levin try to reason with far-gone street-corner evangelicals (whose arguments are preposterous at best) when he might be building a stronger case by other means.

I'd gladly take the legend over this dreary pseudo-historical mumbo jumbo.

Marshall's Memoirs achieves something few other high-profile literary adaptations do: Rather than simply inspiring us to hunt down the source material, it actually stands alone as a film, rich in drama and star-crossed romance.

The trouble with Kinky Boots is that director Julian Jarrold doesn't seem to know whether his movie would play better to young hipsters or the blue-haired old lady crowd.

In the annals of Mediterranean island love stories, Respiro reflects the effortless charm of a film like "Il Postino," rather than the untidy manufactured romance of another "Captain Corelli's Mandolin."

In the end, it's not the answer to the kitchen mystery that matters but the revelation that there's ultimately no difference between this bachelor scientist and his bachelor subject.

With material like this, Samuel Fuller or David Lean might have fashioned an epic war movie for the ages, chock-full of hard-boiled characters and against-all-odds heroics. But in John Dahl's hands, The Great Raid never really lives up to its name, delivering everything you might expect from such a movie, but not an ounce more.

Flowers' ''style'' suffers from attention deficit disorder, leaving just enough vital information for you to follow the convoluted plot. But just when one story gets rolling, he's off and chasing another.

As a superhero movie, it's something of an underachiever, missing out on easy opportunities to push the idea to the next level.

Writer/director John A. Davis (Jimmy Neutron) is a wizard at transforming the most mundane setting -- the front yard, for crying out loud -- into another world.

As long as the movie's set in Mexico City, The Matador is a slick and entertaining black comedy, but the instant Danny heads back to Denver, it comes flying apart at the seams.

An unknown commodity to anyone who doesn't follow telenovelas, Becker is sure to be a big star and has already signed on for two sequels. Apart from being scorching hot, he's enormously sympathetic in dramatic scenes.

Films like this have a way of finding their own devoted fan base, and Gypsy 83 deserves to be discovered not only by Goth and gay crowds, but by anyone who runs screaming from all things average.

Less stuffy literary biopic than ever-relevant female-empowerment saga, Colette ranks as one of the great roles for which Keira Knightley will be remembered.

If "Casino Royale" and "The Bourne Ultimatum" represent the new breed of 21st century action, then Rush Hour 3 is Stone Age stuff. The movie aims for irreverent, but delivers irrelevant instead. Let's hope the Rush Hour series stalls here.

A brilliant little exercise. As a horror movie, it packs one genuine scare after another, right up to the moment of its inconceivably ghastly end. As a mystery, it unfolds with an almost supernatural elegance. And as a metaphor for the movies themselves, it's truly exceptional.

Duchovny bookends his story with a modern-day framing device that takes all that has gone so well until this point and turns it cloyingly sentimental.

Downright awful.

Like a cross between "Man on Fire" and "Bad Boys 2," this demolition derby delivers eye-popping action sequences that would make even the Roadrunner roll his eyes in disbelief.

A haunting, poetic film, and yet it suffers two major failings. First, Murray provides too blank a slate for the audience to appreciate whatever insights a more expressive performance might have offered. Second, and far more troubling, is the way Jarmusch refuses to take his female characters seriously.

Instead of watching a professional actor pretending to be intellectually disabled, we're watching a jackass pretending to be a dimwit pretending to be intellectually disabled.

The movie is a clumsy and uninspired mess, which is not to say that it's not funny.

Garden State gets it. Not since "The Graduate" has a movie nailed the beautiful terror of standing on the brink of adulthood with such satisfying precision.

Close is the best and worst thing about the film, delivering a performance that upstages even Christopher Walken (!), taking her over-the-top Cruella de Vil turn to its saccharine-sweet opposite.

Lee’s use of split-screens and dynamic transitions makes the process of actively interpreting his monstrous vision a fresh and unrivaled experience.

Movies in which the same person serves as writer, director, and star should carry a special warning for audiences, even if that individual happens to be an actor as endearing as Luke Wilson.

For anyone who digs hardcore motorcycle racing, Supercross delivers enough engine-revving, dirt-spewing motorcross action to satisfy even the most intense adrenaline craving.

Kids will eat it up, while solid voice work from William Shatner and Wanda Sykes should keep this borderline-feral toon from pushing adults over the edge.

Not since "To Live and Die in L.A" has there been such a raw, cynical vision of living and dying in L.A.

Think of how M. Night Shyamalan redefined the ghost story (The Sixth Sense), the superhero creation myth (Unbreakable), and the alien-invasion epic (Signs)--and you may get a sense of the genius behind this fascinating new horror film.

Doesn't always work -- like its title, the movie straddles two separate worlds, landing squarely in the dreaded realm of "dramedy" -- but it's a noble effort.

Stealth is basically the kind of movie a 13-year-old boy given an infinite budget and creative freedom might cook up between Xbox games.

The most extreme English-language studio release I've seen in years.

Loud, sophomoric and stunningly crude.

This is Gere’s movie, and Sarandon and Lopez graciously let him dance away with it.

Despite its preposterous leaps of logic, it somehow still emerges a reasonably entertaining summer blockbuster.