Ronnie Scheib

Lacks focus, stumbling from one emotionally fraught stopping place to another but arousing less and less curiosity along the way.

This spectacular orchestration of visual elements seems wasted on a threadbare, inanely repetitive plotline.

Rarely has anyone embodied contradictions as happily and harmoniously as octogenarian New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham.

Despite the fine thesping seen in this innocuous piece of fluff, the whole amounts to less than the sum of its parts.

Less cohesive and accessible than "The Maid" (which the Chilean duo co-scripted and Silva helmed solo), picture nonetheless contains unforgettable scenes.

Loveless exerts a low-energy, dread-tinged fascination that intrigues rather than wows.

Nothing here -- technologically, linguistically or visually -- would not be more at home decades ago, when director Stephen Herek helmed "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" and "The Mighty Ducks."

Though the actors don't flesh out or particularly fit their roles, they seem perfectly at ease with them and with each other.

Without fully fleshed-out generic or social contexts, left-wing documentarian Philippe Diaz's preachy mix of graphic free love and polemical diatribe fails to mesh as fiction, though it does make for superior porn.

Tracks the race-to-the-deadline scramble of a personable young designer preparing an underfunded fashion show, but offers few threads that were not already more solidly and stylishly woven into "Unzipped," "Seamless" or "11 Hours."

Winters deserves better.

Teper buries his material in gimcrack mod trappings that trivialize rather than celebrate Sassoon's accomplishments.

This must-see expose entertains as it horrifies.

Initially registers as meandering and disjointed enough to qualify as mumblecore. But remarkably, the film gradually, effectively coheres, building to a climax at once unexpected yet integral to what has transpired before.

As a character study and revelation of a possible answer to addiction, the docu rocks. But Negroponte's low-res video camera, trivializes the film's already crude approximations of psychedelic experiences and its recordings of shamanistic rituals.

Strictly for fans of free-form, DIY hit-or-miss humor (and those who prefer a miss to a hit), pic complacently parades its alienated amateurism in the mistaken belief that half a gag is better than none.

Offering a smorgasbord of violence with liberal sprinklings of sex, Russian import Alien Girl delivers wearisome brutality but little finesse.

Cunningly fashioning found footage into a rabbit's-eye view of events, Polish helmer Bartek Konopka creates a chillingly apt political allegory in Rabbit a la Berlin.

Throughout, the drivers are framed against the various cityscapes they traverse, though their philosophical views on what is unfolding around them differs with age and temperament.

Garden of Eden sends sleek, half-nude bodies glumly cavorting through lush Riviera landscapes in a paradigm of unintentional camp.

But atmospherics notwithstanding, the narrative unfolds unconvincingly in jerky fits and starts.

Family-friendly holiday fare.

Icelandic helmer Baltasar Kormakur ("101 Reykjavik," "Jar City") injects notes of hysteria into the script's frenetic pileup of gratuitous cliches, as Dermot Mulroney pushes his square-jawed, desperate hero to near-masochistic extremes.

An edgier Richard Linklater for a less privileged generation, mumblecore helmer Frank V. Ross captures his characters' dead-end disaffection not through stasis, but through nervous activity.

Though targeted at tots, Ponyo may appeal most to jaded adults thirsty for wondrous beauty and unpackaged innocence

Scripter/helmer Sue Kramer's awkward freshman outing eventually coasts on the genuine charm of its leads. A strong vehicle for Heather Graham, who has never looked lovelier, "Gray" scores most convincingly in its reinvention of Carole Lombardian sexual screwiness as head-spinning gender confusion.

In dangerous and downright cruddy conditions, the personable Palestinians share stories, lodgings and camaraderie with the young Israeli filmmaker, whose handheld camera follows them everywhere.

Despite Almereyda's strong following in arthouse circles, William Eggleston in the Real World --which requires patient if not repeat viewing -- will probably not venture far into it.

Although by now routine, the intertwining of separate story strands is solidly structured, and the different mini-narratives resolved in unsurprising yet satisfying ways.

A bathetic TV-movie-type "learning experience" that provides about as much insight into teenagers as 40s westerns did into Indians--it's all in the costumes and customs.

Its straight-ahead rape, humiliation and ingenious revenge competently executed but not aestheticized, the essential grunginess never overly slicked up.

Utterly engrossing dual-character study, unfolding with a serene disregard for indie quirkiness, Goodbye Solo radiates authenticity.

Culture shock often proves the stuff of comedy, but the sight of a silver-studded, sombrero-topped mariachi band breaking into a rousing rendition of "Hava Nagila" transports diversity into the realm of the surreal.

Entertaining, painlessly educational documentary.

The women's personalities and strengths command attention, their stories neatly dovetailing with the study's hypotheses. But when the film suddenly, almost subversively, shifts gears, and the questioner becomes the questioned, the pic's dynamic changes radically.

With Swaziland providing this mother lode of material, helmer Michael Skolnik extracts only the most pedestrian of films.

This far-fetched, deliberately artificial game of musical chairs -- in which mismatched characters encircle, attract and repel each other -- feels forced, often losing itself in excess verbiage.

Todd Robinson constructs a riveting thriller.

A highly engaging picture with a post-apartheid edge (certain scenes play like a farcical "Invictus").

One long tease -- not in a voyeuristic sense, since its heroine, as nakedly incarnated by pouty Polish sexpot Natalia Avelon, hides none of her obvious talents under a bushel.

A humorless, relentlessly ethnocentric docu about Jews in basketball.

Aggressively upbeat docu, helmed by two males ill-equipped to bring any distance to the camp's pervasive feel-good feminism, tends to relentlessly reiterate points better served by example.

The result is a rough-edged, head-scratching mix of tones. Fortunately, musicvideo vet Rhein's competent helming skills counterbalance her off-putting dialogue and flat acting style so that the picture doesn't come off strictly amateur.

Unlike "Unzipped," with its single focus on the charismatic Mizrahi, Seamless follows three of the 10 finalists, furnishing a quietly fascinating contrast in persona, approach and design.

Piles heavy emotional baggage on a slender story frame. Pic looks ravishing, featuring a nocturnal road trip through a cool kaleidoscopic landscape of shifting colors peopled by three commanding thesps of different generations whose interlocking stories form a cohesive whole.

Confusing lack of historical set-up considerably dims the potential luster of a great true story: Helmer Alberto Negrin relies instead on competently rendered but cliche-ridden melodrama of nasty Nazis and suffering Jews.

Comes off as lame and unfocused as its draggy dramatis personae.

A potent combination of ethnography and concert film, Brit helmer Jasmine Dellal's joyous celebration of tzigane music follows the 2001 U.S. "Gypsy Caravan" tour, which showcased five bands from four countries.

At a leisurely 172 minutes, the pic takes on the desultory rhythms of rural stagnation, its rigorous compositions imparting aesthetic weight and meditative scope to everything in its purview.

The overly simplistic script by Zac Stanford (“The Chumscrubber”) hits nothing but high notes, making the whole dramatically less than the sum of its parts.

A skillfully crafted, highly entertaining documentary.

Scotti's amateur camerawork proves strangely compelling.

Burns' always impressive sense of place lends authenticity to the pals' perambulations, and the stellar cast brings a welcome overabundance of personality to regrettably one-note roles.

Slight, extremely likable picture, a sly variant on recent immigrant movies like "The Visitor" and "Goodbye Solo."

Featuring a strong central perf by Bill Sage, a raincoated detective turn by Roy Scheider and the upscale autumnal serenity of the Hamptons, If I Didn't Care remains a stylistic exercise in elegant gratuitousness.

Lively, intelligent collage, both richly complex and immediately accessible.

Amateurish, half-hearted romantic comedy-cum-heist film twists itself into unconvincing knots to pull off a guilt-free bank robbery.

A terminally lame puberty comedy.

In scope, depth, rhythm and gags, "Pizzas" seems best suited to the small screen.

For every engrossing rank-and-file story, there are endless self-congratulatory explanations and podium highlights.

In striving simultaneously to cover the transplanted rap scene, sample a wide range of groups, and give an unbiased picture of Cuban society, helmers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who have hitherto worked in short-form, blur the overall shape of their picture.

Amiable but uneven.

Zombie Honeymoon scores simultaneously as romantic, tragic, grotesque and screamingly funny

Director-producer Aviva Kempner's well-researched but unchallenging docu, like "The Goldbergs" itself, has cross-cultural appeal for Jews and goyim alike.

Despite its title, Bruno Dumont's extraordinary first feature is not about Christ, at least not on any literal level. The Life of Jesus may not be about religion, but like the films of Bresson, it is about redemption.

The excellent cast in Christophe Barratier's loose remake of a 1945 Jean Dreville film ensures that the predictable, nostalgic ride remains enjoyable throughout.

Sentimental and a bit too cute in evoking a child's-eye view, the picture, nevertheless will please its target Jewish auds.

Superb emotional thesping complements script's measured restraint.

Unfortunately, instead of the usual larger-than-life male figures--Marcello Mastroianni, Harvey Keitel, Bruno Ganz--of Angelopoulos's recent films, we get a distractingly vapid couple who tend to drain the emotional resonance of these extraordinary, ever-shifting tableaux.

Pitch-perfect dialogue, quietly dynamic helming and small-scale action on a widescreen canvas make for a very appealing film.

Uneven but enjoyably titillating black comedy should elate Rickman fans while pleasing aficionados of extra-flakey caper flicks.

Timothy Hutton's fine, loose-limbed perf as a man adrift lifts Multiple Sarcasms, frosh scribe-helmer Brooks Branch's male menopause apologia, out of cliche-ridden territory -- at least temporarily.

A convoluted bilingual thriller about a kidnapping in Colombia, Towards Darkness may be too clever for its own good. Frosh director Antonio Negret intertwines so many disparate characters, each with a flashback-studded backstory, that after a while the exhausted viewer, assaulted by sudden time-jumps, agitated handheld camerawork and tediously protracted suspense, ceases to care.

Hassan Yektapanah's first film attests to the deceptive simplicity of Iranian cinema, transforming the most minimal of props, scenes, and stories into a complex journey of discovery.

The picture's deepest fascination lies in the soldiers' complicated reactions to the war, perceived simultaneously as funny, horrific, stirring and traumatic.

Inevitable comparisons to Quentin Tarentino's femme-centered carnage extravaganza "Kill Bill" are not unwarranted insofar as both films featurefeature an abstract, self-conscious, and decidedly post-modern approach to a moribund genre.

Intelligently written, brilliantly cast and thesped story of a German mail order bride in a Norwegian-American community in Minnesota just after WWI never hits a wrong note.

A vibrant, unpretentious small-town tale.

Sharp dialogue, idiosyncratic characters and a wickedly brilliant structure that subtly derails expectation make Laura Smiles a rarity among mellers.

A delightful, well-crafted documentary.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, big studio Hollywood hitmakers should consider themselves lauded to the max in Jason Friedberg and Aaron Selzer's Epic Movie, the latest (and epically unfunny) entry in the movie parody franchise.

Though fans might miss Perry's genre-exploding daring, the excellent cast injects enough pathos and zing to keep picture percolating.

Pays fitting tribute to Wetlands' unique rebirth of '60s idealism within a '90s urban setting.

Ultimately, nothing can save this pic from the warm fuzzies.

A killer ending does not a movie make, and ultimately In the Bedroom may be more interesting to talk about than sit through.

Though the low-budget picture is not without interest, its uneven thesping, sound quality and special effects might prove more welcome on the fest fringe.

Tyro helmer Sara Lamm satisfyingly stitches together the family soap opera into a comfortable crazy quilt without sacrificing its unique, oddly topical edge.

Happily, "Upwards" picks up immeasurably when three legit luminaries (Andrea Martin, Julie White, Peter Friedman) enter the picture as the couple's parents.

Despite the presence of Glen Matlock, Steve Dior and a handful of other punk rockers, plus a slew of oblique eyewitness who lurked around before and after the fact, the documentary soon bogs down in tiresome minutiae.

Alternating between New York clubs by night and the colorful streets and countryside of Santa Domingo by day, pic captures the spirit of the music and the nation that gave birth to it.

A model of cohesion and clarity as long as it's dealing with Brown's exemplary public achievements. However, pic quickly becomes mired in tedium and confusion when it turns to Brown's scandal-ridden private life.

A bland, perverse round-robin of teen angst.

Pappas' scattershot musings on the social, political and metaphysical implications of extended healthy seniority come off as positively crystalline compared with the random natterings of the director's friends and neighbors, who are invited to chime in.

Laurien van den Broeck's masterful unblinking performance transcends the uneasy all-English dialogue.

Pic relies on nerdy world-weary irony to carry the day, but doesn't convincingly draw its characters.

A sure-fire audience-pleaser, Scott (son of Garry) Marshall's winning comedy bow could have been titled "My Big Fat Jewish Bar Mitzvah."

Celebratory, family-friendly fable.