Robert Koehler

As beautiful as it is unrevealing, James Longley's Iraq in Fragments rests on a debatable but firm premise -- that the embattled country is irrevocably separated by its three dominant groups, Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds -- but brings back nothing journalistically substantial from the war front .

Latest pic directed by Gil M. Portes, could be called "To Madam With Love"; vet Filipino helmer is out to open maximum tear ducts with sentimental tale.

Though tinged with the sheer gumption and personal resolve of amateur vidmaker and would-be rapper Kimberly Roberts, this is ultimately a minor doc contribution to the bulging library of Katrina-related films and TV reports.

Writer-director Craig Ross Jr. offers both rigorously effective dramatic sections and terribly pedantic and melodramatic strokes of overkill.

The time away from the ring has done Rocky and the franchise some good, although it takes pic a good long while to gather momentum and clout before a surprisingly satisfying third-act heavyweight bout.

Imax 3-D process has lost its original novelty, and little is done in Deep Sea to find new and exciting ways of using the medium.

The film toys with audience expectations and perceptions by playing fast and loose with circumstances and clues, while leading to an almost unavoidable and dismayingly obvious conclusion.

It's a wipeout once the pic skids into melodrama and an overly schematic sense of how success tore the group apart.

Before the music takes over, the film inserts a few bits of charm, such as Emmylou Harris excitedly following the latest Major League Baseball scores.

Succeeds in displaying the physical drive and demands of cheerleading.

This makes the film feel perilously close to widescreen sitcom, as do montages of New York set to Beethoven's Sixth Symphony.

Sometimes veering close to being a promotional film for the Special Olympics, pic will be applauded by the disability community and its advocates but quickly ignored by longtime fans of the Farrellys and Knoxville.

Fascinating if overly self-involved Slamdance entry is among the few U.S. pics that deliberately smudges the line between non-fiction and invention as it tells how Crumley and Buice meet online and develop a relationship.

The temptations of allowing a promotional video to seep inside a genuine non-fiction study nearly overtake East of Havana and its look at a bubbling hip-hop culture in Cuba.

Zhang Yimou's strangest and most troubled film, abounds in hysterical, mannered Tang Dynasty-era palace intrigue and dehumanized CGI battle sequences.

Unlikely to draw new fans but destined to please followers who couldn't catch the live act.

An especially dramatic, if needlessly frantic, work of polemical reportage on racism in America.

Pic's not-so-hidden agenda is to promote the fusion of science and New Age religion, making it a close cousin to ventures as Bernt and Fritjof Capra's "Mindwalk."

Von Trotta’s Arendt biopic feels like a movie stuck in another era, stolid and rote, more of an outline for a dramatic treatment than the real thing.

Result is a loose personal piece of reportage that places people over ideas and larger issues, and reveals the pic's severe limitations long before a surprisingly upbeat ending.

Falco, light years from "The Sopranos," is exquisitely vulnerable and her scenes play well with Hutton, in his finest role in years as a good man who knows he's sold out.

Alternates too deliberately between jaunty comedy and serious message-making.

The latest and most calculated re-do on the formulaic fantasy of an innocent conquering Gotham.

Although guided by considerable empathy toward its small circle of kinfolk eking out a living in southern Texas, Eska's tale of a woman's unconditional support of her father-in-law is told with a faux-poetic sensibility that never really connects with his characters' lives.

Couldn't be less involving and more sentimentalized.

Writer-director Montiel creates a movie of many parts that don't always congeal. Mix this with the many meaty scenes and a roster of often exceptional actors and the effect is one of a fabulous acting showcase more than a wholly finished work.

A sweetly raucous adventure. Widely quoted comparisons to "Billy Elliot" and Tim Burton overstate the case for what is really a modestly eccentric entertainment.

Deeply influential, even to his enemies, Atwater's career is viewed here with fascination and some sympathy.

A satire for its time. What Judge is less sure of here than in his previous, perfectly pitched live-action comedy "Office Space," is how to build a complete movie around his key ideas.

Burdened with a complex flashback structure and an unemotional core, this multi-decade saga of an imprisoned Iranian poet and his family has surprisingly little resonance.

May leave itself open to charges of being little more than a promo feature posing as a documentary, but pic nevertheless is a warts-and-all look at a group of musicians -- and the music biz -- likely to make most record label flacks flinch.

Mexican-born helmer Alejandro Monteverde's debut will be remembered as a curious case of a mediocre film that wows crowds.

Genetically-modified (or GM) fruits and vegetables are a topic of raging debate in scientific and ecological circles, so it's a shame writer-director Deborah Koons Garcia opts to show only one side of the argument.

Campbell's performance is attuned to the extremes of unnerving calm and intensely erotic; unlike the pic, she pulls it off.

Too self-serious to work as a straight-ahead whodunit and too lacking in imagination to realize its art-film aspirations.

Alternately seduced and repelled by its subject, the garish and power-hungry Harlem gangster and '70s cocaine kingpin Nicky Barnes, Mr. Untouchable is one seriously confused documentary.

A golden opportunity to analyze the most vital and probably most creative contempo American playwright is missed in Freida Lee Mock's docu, Wrestling With Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner. Kushner's art demands a filmmaker of equally challenging artistry, able to plumb an opus based in polemics, politics and Brecht, instead of psychodrama.

Seldom boring but also rarely electrifying.

Renee Zellweger, in another Blighty role, struggles to make Beatrix credible.

Picture's leaps into the fantastic and rampantly farcical tend to be overextended, but finally don't detract from what is a well-judged, light entertainment.

Takes a notorious true story about a loyal soldier-turned-bank robber, and pumps it up into charged if uneven entertainment.

A former rock 'n' roller withers on the vine in California Solo, Marshall Lewy's forgettable sophomore effort (after a promising beginning with "Blue State").

Despite a reliable cast led by Scott, Patricia Clarkson and Peter Sarsgaard, the human impact is ultimately lost in a too calculated scenario.

Though it isn't the entirely original creation "Metropolis" was, Bebop is more satisfying.

Without Smith's graceful presence, which more than once resembles Zach Braff's slightly older but observant New Jerseyite in "Garden State," Nearing Grace would be pure video fodder.

The effect is often soporific.

Extraordinary perfs by a mostly young cast likely will be cancelled out by the grim subject.

Preaches purely to the converted.

This is son-of-John-Waters with most of the grossness but none of the essential anarchism -- silly pop trash set for vid-classic status in gay households.

Superior family entertainment.

An honorable but failed attempt to dramatize the dynamics that propel a basically good man to become a suicide bomber, The War Within contains provocative points inside a dull package.

If all that Ian Inaba's latest Guerilla News Network missive, American Blackout, wants to do is get left Democrats worked up into a lather of righteous anger at crafty Republicans, it does so at the expense of speaking to any other group of Americans. As such, docu is extremely limited and almost without purpose except as an organizing tool for party foot soldiers.

The cool hand of Canadian writer-director Jeremy Podeswa proves a disappointing match for Fugitive Pieces, a generally dull and unmemorable adaptation of Anne Michaels' extraordinary prose-poetry novel.

Largely undone by a script that self-destructs in the third act of an otherwise well-made thriller.

A work that continually seems on the verge of genuine excitement but sabotages itself at every turn...results will intrigue only those interested in the nooks and crannies of Mamet's career.

Because plot is the sum total here, the alarming holes, inconsistencies and impossibilities in Chris Morgan's script corrode this drama of distress.

While the picture's reporting on government repression of alternative cultural ideas and lifestyles is noteworthy more than anything, it's a blatant promo for Chong's career.

A movie at war with itself -- tuned into its characters' vicissitudes one moment, stumbling with awkward stabs at goofiness the next.

Sweet if slight Israeli comedy.

While there's the sense that this old guy/young guy spy angle has been done better by films like "Spy Game" a decade ago, Gere, never looking tougher or handsomer, and Grace, adding some action skills to his relatively cerebral persona, invigorate the proceedings in roles that would seem to benefit the actors' career arcs.

Obediently follows the verities of the submarine movie and its true story origins but without the imagination needed to refresh the genre.

Seems to be playing the author's music, but like a string quartet that plays a half-beat off.

Not content with a straight psychological police procedural, Alvart mixes in distracting -- and unconvincing --Biblical symbolism in a curious bid for weightiness.

Arguably the finest athlete in living memory deserves better than Michael Jordan to the Max, an honorific but unmoving portrait of the Chicago Bulls' No. 23.

Game 6, the first screenplay by one of America's great living novelists, Don DeLillo, is poorly served by Michael Hoffman's flat, soporific direction.

Family drama appears content to present the situation without going for anything remotely close to the emotional jugular. Result is unsatisfying and even dreary, despite some fine work from Zooey Deschanel and a becalmed Will Ferrell.

A meandering, semi-improvised tale of a terminal Gotham loser who works as Santa when he bombs as an actor.

Ochoa is such a masterful actor that he makes things fairly interesting despite the script, with Hernandez and Espindola well-cast as two young men operating by different moral compasses.

Every bit as cliched as it sounds, picture offers a dramatically crude, overly familiar take on the bad-boy-turned-good story. At its best, it offers young thesps E.J. Bonilla and Veronica Diaz-Carranza a showcase for their range.

Another superficial film about music from Scott Hicks ("Shine"), picture runs a distant second to the superior new film on John Adams and Peter Sellars, "Wonders Are Many," which really captures how a composer works.

Powered by exceptional displays of physical filmmaking, Deep Blue Sea is pulled back to shore by the usual suspects -- weak plotting and weaker dialogue.

Interplay between a jaunty Freeman as an unemployed movie star and the magnetic Paz Vega as a no-nonsense grocery store checker gives pic humanity and lift.

A determined and often affecting romance that doesn't speak down to audiences.

Grounded in bedrock formula and earnestness.

A mixed bag of near-risible storylines, second-rate CG effects, some fabulous set pieces, somewhat cartoonish martial arts fighting and difficult international casting.

Writer-director Matt Mulhern confidently anchors his drama-comedy about an alcoholic Atlantic City pit boss with good writing and sharp dialogue. Script never treats characters as less than human.

The effects prove extremely uneven, with sub-par touches alongside astonishing and truly unforgettable shots.

Respecting Mother Earth should never be as dull as watching Sacred Planet, a repetitive, globe-hopping Imax project that dresses up well-known ecological truisms with pretty nature photography.

The winner by a knockout is Eddie Jones...Without Jones, pic is a standard drama on the sweet science with the usual tropes and a slight tweak on the usual conflicts.

Bridges gives the movie its only genuine pulse as a gym coach known for his hard and manipulative ways.

The pic plays like one long chase. Nevertheless, fashioned with ultra-sophisticated means, Sky Blue will be a must-see for anime fans around the world.

Ultimately implodes, letting down the 'hood, hip-hoppers and Jamie Kennedy fans looking forward to his first major starring role.

The rush of watching images made in such rare locales as Andorra and Sao Tome quickly wears thin as the montage whips through considerably meaty topics (water issues, climate change, immigration, religious faith) like an impatient Web surfer.

Heartfelt and formulaic in equal measure.

This rambling and episodic autobiographical saga of three friends coming of age in Inglewood, Calif. (aka The Wood) in the '80s is so determined to be likable that it forgets to be interesting.

Director Mark Pellington hardly lets a moment pass without suggesting some bad vibes creeping onto the edges of the screen, but he's let down by Richard Hatem's script, based on John A. Keel's book, which delivers an ounce when it promised a gallon.

Never quite sure what it wants to be -- a magical-mysterious love story, a psychodrama, a sprawling family saga, or an uneasy combination of these.

A film that ultimately feels stagebound and excessively talky, but which showcases an exceptional performance.

Exudes a pre-fab quality.

A warm embrace of broadly but humanely sketched characters plus some scrappy casting of rising young stars led by an incandescent Kate Bosworth help overcome the half-realized comedic situations.

Pic displays filmmakers Kevin Harrison's and Kemp Curley's love of snowboarding, but suffers from an unjustifiably long running time, considerable repetition and a generally awkward structure.

A powerful premise turned into a stubbornly flat, derivative war movie.

The tilt here toward a hyperactive, buddy-movie action-adventure with loud comic archetypes is a poor fit for a film that relies on fairy tale icons and themes.

Lacks the consistent tone, pace and point of view for either a science fiction thriller or medieval war adventure.

An unembarrassed, high-octane demonstration of the virtues of a U.S. military with a mission, the latest war pic from 20th Century Fox -- a studio with a proud tradition in this field -- couldn't be better timed to fit the popular mood.

Great for ADD-style viewing but not for advancing Iranian cinema's currently challenged profile.

Sharp wit but shaky storytelling.

Clearly inspired by, though not in the same dramatic league as, "Schindler's List," pic is marred by uneven perfs and lacks the intensity.