Robert Koehler

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

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

More ambitious than her 2002 debut, "Blue Car," Moncrieff's new film maintains her focus on women, expanding to include a range of ages, circumstances and psychologies. Picture's drama, however, is deliberately fractured into a quintet of stories that vary considerably in their overall impact.

There seems to be no bottom to Going Down, a lame also-ran in the rapidly declining teen gross-out comedy genre.

Perky and effortlessly smooth.

Burning with a quiet intensity, Monster's Ball is bolstered by a poetic, intelligent sensibility not seen in an American film since Terrence Malick's "The Thin Red Line."

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

Certainly not a piffle, nor an impressive departure into a new filmmaking realm, Allen's second film in a row about crooks ranks in the middle range of his work.

The funny stuff continues for a quite satisfying conclusion during the wedding prep and ceremonies, which Stifler single-handedly transforms into his own personal gross-out comedy masterpiece.

Thesping and production values are solid and sometimes even attractive, but pic's overall American-style gloss becomes extremely odd and discomforting given the setting.

Unusually slick, mini-budgeted and broad piece of slapstick that liberally borrows from Neil Simon and "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight'' with the twist that gay hit men are the romantic heroes.

Surely one of the most frantic, virulent and foul-natured Christmas season pic ever delivered by a Hollywood studio.

Giving Jonathan Rhys Meyers the kind of manly yet paternal role Spencer Tracy once mastered, this carefully wrought international production relates the basic story of reporter George Hogg without any vibrancy, emotion or style.

Ghobadi in this pic displays a complete command of his art as he shifts between -- and even blends -- wrenching tragedy and amusing comedy.

Belzberg's unsparing camera sometimes portrays a level of cruelty that tests viewers' tolerance, but her fearless aesthetic is also a measure of the film's brilliant indictment of any society that can allow its most vulnerable to slip into oblivion.

Every stab at comedy in this mirthless slog is botched.

The star in this case is Martin Lawrence, who is not only thoroughly upstaged by nemesis Danny DeVito but is completely boxed out of his comfort zone for broad physical comedy.

A shoddy vehicle for Jamie Foxx to ride into the summer season on.

Unlike the disturbingly mysterious original, Saw III is a neatly wrapped-up package that explains everything -- including Jigsaw's evil contraptions and the background of his crazed female assistant.

Unconvincingly attempts to update the futurist dystopian traditions of Orwell, Huxley and William Gibson.

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

Even with ties to the true story of high school hoops coach Jim Keith and his unlikely triumph with a 1960s Oklahoma high school girls' squad, the hackneyed, overlong Believe in Me is much too similar to a recent flood of inspirational basketball pics to distinguish it.

A textbook case in which the parts are greater than the whole.

Though the superhero's fans have long awaited his close-up, the Devil's bounty hunter -- complete with a burning skull for a head and a killer motorcycle in flames --materializes in a movie that never measures up to his infernal potential.

A horror movie without horror, a spook pic without spookiness and a metaphysical drama without the slightest spiritual tug, Soul Survivors virtually dwindles away on the screen.

This deliberately pre-'90s slice of rock 'n' roll-tinged sci-fi horror, decorated with anything but the latest in special effects, seems particularly grungy and marginal.

Exceptionally strong cast is pictures beating heart.

The concert film has never looked or sounded classier than Jonathan Demme's superbly crafted Neil Young: Heart of Gold.