Ron Stringer

Country singer and sometime actor Tim McGraw excels as the bitter, besotted ex-Panther who can't cut his kid enough slack to follow his own game plan.

Tenderhearted Staten Island Christmas comedy.

Provides an unfulfilled promise of pleasure (providing one doesn't cave in to the spectacle of bare-chested Elizabeth Hurley sucking on an ice cube) in this heavy-handed exercise in time-vaulting literary pretension.

Occasionally scary, never coherent.

An exquisite metaphor for the high cost and higher returns of an enduring marriage.

Performance after performance -- by Kim Stanley, Marlon Brando, Laurette Taylor . . . Never heard of her? That’s reason enough not to miss this movie.

Doesn't offer much new in the way of news or analysis. What it does offer is inspiration from an unlikely source, via an unsparing look at one such victim.

The film should also wow fans of Herbert Wise's "I, Claudius" and Franco Zeffirelli's "Jesus of Nazareth" alike.

You may as well watch the movie too, if only so that another of life's astonishing possibilities won't have entirely passed you by.

Not to mention the good-when-moody, best-when-raucous art-band soundtrack!

The cast's sometimes capable, sometimes gross mugging is overwhelmed by lavish costumes, shiny vintage cars, hordes of meticulously directed extras, and the here-incongruous seriousness with which the French still regard this momentous, if humiliating, chapter of their national history.

If the trailer for this one left you feeling you'd pretty much got it, plot point by plot point, so really why bother.

Game Over provides no answers.

It manages, in the course of a single tersely delineated story, to say more about the dark pathology of American racism than any five character arcs in "Crash." So go, by all means, but be prepared to take a beating.

While your personal estimation of this conservative counterprogrammer will depend largely on your politics, Chetwynd and company at least attempt to score their points honestly.

What Ratner brings to the proceedings is an awareness that what worked for "Silence" -- namely screenwriter Ted Tally, production designer Kristi Zea and, of course, Anthony Hopkins as Lecter -- will work overtime here, to enhance the project at hand and provide a seamless connection back to Jonathan Demme's multiple-Oscar winner.

Allusive as all hell, Tuvalu's slapstick allegory of European socioeconomic upheaval in the 20th century opens with a spoof of "Breaking the Waves" lofty coda, then races through a mise en scène that's equal parts Tarkovsky, Méliès and the Brothers Quay.

Calculated to titillate middlebrow audiences on both sides of la Manche.

An awesome introduction to the sport and the outspoken personalities -- riders, mechanics, engineers, lorry drivers, commentators, fans and girlfriends -- who support it.

Impressive supporting cast---, in character parts both expanded and invented, enrich the enterprise.

The excellent cast is headed by Gwyneth Paltrow in the mood-shifting title role and Daniel Craig as the helpless, not-so-happily philandering Hughes.

It's a prolonged, maddening, predictable -- yet curiously pleasurable -- descent into incomprehensibility.

They have succeeded in establishing conservative ideologue Ken Starr as one of American prosecutorial history's biggest heels and Clinton loyalist Susan McDougal as a bona fide hero and martyr. The problem, of course, is that the president himself was neither, and no amount of hand wringing -- however justified -- can make him one.

Turgid, melodramatic travesty of Thackeray's gimlet-eyed satire.

Unfortunately, the innovations that attend this updating dilute the iconic weight of the original.

To no one's possible satisfaction -- the non-question of how Paige is to ascend to the throne and retain her personal integrity that The Prince and Me falls, finally and irrevocably, flat.

The final revelation which, however anticipated, however contrived, stings just enough to make it feel like life.

The problem for director Keith Gordon is that Potter's script pares down to virtual nothing the very narrative threads that allowed us, in the full-length version, to identify with his prickly protagonist, and knocks us upside the head with a hyperkinetic, disorienting first act from which audiences -- especially those approaching this material cold -- are unlikely to recover.