Robert Koehler

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.

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

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.

Stirring up a humid Gothic mood and amassing a gifted roster of actors, The Skeleton Key is unable to ward off the nasty spirits of formula screenwriting.

A rather stodgily directed pic by Michael Hoffman which extols the virtues of Greek and Roman thinking in the guise of Kevin Kline's classics teacher.

Relies on ensemble allure, with mixed results.

Picture seemed certain to either fly high on outrageous humor or crash under the weight of tastelessness. Instead, the movie just sits there and never comes alive.

Sequel is no more than a cheapo campy goof, but this edition does contain a higher quota of laugh lines and an unsubtle message that efforts to make gay youth "go straight" is destined to fail.

A creaky melodrama that wants to be a musical.

Grounded in bedrock formula and earnestness.

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.

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.

Costner is as uneven as the storytelling itself, stone cold at moments, shimmeringly real in others.

The effect is often soporific.

Fortunately bypassing a re-run of "Days of Wine and Roses" but finding little inspiration to freshen an old concept, this tragedy about a lover and a friend helplessly watching the writer's fade-out comes up short of its potential impact.

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.

Girls -- a big part of the Pokemon crowd and what makes it such a humongous commercial success -- will feel left out in the cold.

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

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.

Sweet if slight Israeli comedy.

Darts back and forth from being a psychological thriller to a vaguely metaphysical drama to a fate-driven romance -- it all becomes a blur.

The screenplay by Daniel Tendler, Fernando Bonassi and Lula biographer Parana succumbs to many of the most unfortunate narrative tendencies of biopics, including a proclivity for piling on incident after incident as a substitute for real character insight.

Film struggles to balance its past-present memory drama and a rather standard take on an American immigrant family. Although accented by fine cinematic flourishes, pic is harmed by an abrupt conclusion and technical glitches.

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").

Writer-director John Hamburg does everything he can to pair up Ben Stiller's stiff, safety-first corporate man with Jennifer Aniston's free spirit in Along Came Polly, but the two are so fundamentally incompatible that story loses credibility long before the gags stop coming.

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.

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.

Lame and inoffensive.