Ronnie Scheib

Expansively, dramatically, magnificently Russian, Nikita Mikhalkov's loose remake of "12 Angry Men" plays like vintage jazz from a veteran band.

Chris Browne's sense of humor captures perfectly the contradictions, absurdities and drama at the intersection of class, media, money and sports without dissing any of his player/subjects.

Simultaneously insightful and idiotic.

The documentary's open-endedness offers something for everyone.

Bear Cub casually pulls off an amazing feat--combining innocent childhood nostalgia and graphic sexuality.

In the absence of actors with the tremendous presence of Rutger Hauer and Jennifer Jason Leigh, picture loses its raison d'etre. Yet, directed by video helmer Dave Meyers with a certain fastidious distance from its plentiful gore, picture is also insufficiently over-the-top or corny to incite gleeful audience feedback.

Hadzihalilovic, the wife of cinematic agent provocateur Gaspar Noé and his sometime collaborator, has created a work of limpid beauty and eerie menace that some undoubtedly will dismiss as kiddie porn.

A magnificent performance by Sarah Polley illuminates every frame of this relatively upbeat melodrama.

Brand has assembled a cast of world class improvisers, yet doesn't take advantage of their own particularized, inflected rhythms, as each ritualistically experiences a jump-cut fragmentary flashback in front of the same bathroom mirror.

The women's outspoken commentaries prove consistently colorful and their long-ago stripteases -- feathers flying, tassels spinning -- still pack a sensual, sassy, what-the-hell punch.

Shady mood-piece profits greatly from enigmatic performance by Emmanuel Xeureb.

Directed by the pseudonymous Deagol Brothers, the film invests in spacey horror tropes one moment, plunges into absurdist adolescent angst the next and begs questions every step of the way, but just about holds together with its strong compositional sense, killer atmospheric lighting and wall-to-wall music track.

Veering wildly between paranoia (being judged by "12 people who voted for George Bush") and self-aggrandizement (modestly comparing himself to Da Vinci, Bach and Galileo), Spector makes a fascinating subject.

Though no "Love and Diane," this modest film nevertheless reveals the fragility of hope in survivalist mentalities pre-programmed to expect the worst.

Rollicking story of a rich kid whose wildly successful bid for popularity has him playing drug-distributing shrink to an entire high school boasts pitch-perfect faceoffs between upstart Anton Yelchin and alcoholic principal Robert Downey Jr. that could fuel a chemistry lab.

Endearing documentary, winner of Tribeca's audience award, should delight devotees and intrigue nonbelievers.

Likable but lightweight slacker comedy.

Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel's New World Order is less about an international cabal seeking world enslavement than about those who fervently believe such conspiracies exist and who crusade to defeat them.

Slicker, funnier and more professional than its predecessor, State Property 2, with Damon Dash at its helm tones down the original.

Fascinating glimpse into wholly different body of laws, engrossingly evolving script and standout performances.

This worthy follow-up to Kosashvili's brilliant "Late Marriage" should delight auds worldwide.

Even a magnificently inspired Maria Bello proves insufficiently daring to save Richard Alfieri and Arthur Allan Seidelman's Chekhov-based chamber piece Sisters from pretentious psychodrama.

Evocatively fleshed out with surprisingly iconic homemovies, passionate love letters and well-chosen pop tunes, Kleine's homegrown Jewish "Madame Bovary" escapes the navel-gazing boundaries of the personal-diary docu by the sheer force of its evocation of bygone sensuality.

Wide-ranging educational documentary attaches itself to the rise and fall of a 12-year-old fashion model, and indeed, its sincere, cautionary tone seems best suited to younger auds and small screen exposure.

Gini Reticker's lucidly impassioned film, filled with strong, eloquent spokeswomen, garnered Tribeca's docu award.

Does a superb job of condensing an overwhelming mass of documentation, archival imagery and artistic representation into a concise yet passionate history lesson whose relevance could not be timelier.

Whenever Sutherland comes on scene, any inadequacies in the film's depiction of the well-to-do become irrelevant.

Some viewers will doubtless argue over Ismailos' choices or balk at her adherence to a romantic single-vision theory of a highly collaborative art. Still, her eclectic pantheon weighs in with entertaining anecdotes and illuminating comments, illustrated with well-chosen samplings of the artists' work.

At several points, Chang is the only thing standing between his event and total chaos, as frustrated ticket-holders rush the gates.

Even Sandler diehards may pass on this mostly derivative paean to compulsive computer geekdom and male sexual dysfunction.

Competent but unimaginative horror entry.

Beginning promisingly enough, "Handsome" soon turns monotonously angst-ridden, with all humor and personality falling by the wayside.

Though picture is downbeat and defiantly low-budget, its laid-back absurdist tone and no-nonsense pacing make for an audio-visual delight.

Its extremely narrow focus on the death throes of an art form, rather than the art itself, limits its appeal.

An ambitious, low-budget neo-noir, Stephen Purvis' El Cortez navigates the genre's tawdry twists and crosses and double-crosses with intermittent flair.

A rogues gallery of flamboyant gangsters paint an anecdote-rich portrait of the drug trade, while a steady stream of cops, coroners and crime reporters furnish social commentary.

Despite a comic Yiddishe mama turn by Meryl Streep and a sensitively nuanced performance by Uma Thurman in a convincing changeup from her recent kickass action roles, Prime remains an oddly juiceless older woman-younger man romance, with a Freudian twist.

Excerpted interviews with WWII and Vietnam veterans suggest that every war is hell, yet it is the specificity of the Iraq War combatants' reminiscences that makes their writing resonate so profoundly.

Gay Gotham farce written, directed and starring veteran actor Craig Chester ("Swoon," "Kiss Me Guido") delivers plenty of well-timed slapstick, a brace of oddball zanies and a couple of show-stopper musical numbers. Material is uneven, but rhythm and pacing keep action moving smartly.

David H. Hickey's Lone Star comedy never really develops, stalling this culture-clash clambake at the merely likable stage.

An old-fashioned postmodern hoot.

Neither newly revelatory nor formally innovative.

Gentle, muted film of limited aesthetic ambition.

Distinguishes itself from such last-fling-before-the-wedding comedies as "The Hangover" with the grittiness of its Texas locales and the smug intelligence of its unapologetically narcissistic protagonist.

The ease with which the perky, big-eyed heroine ingeniously succeeds in improving the lot of everyone around her and the painterly manner in which reality in every inch of the frame is "improved" constitute both the "quirky" charm and the pure fishiness of the film.

Documentary seems best suited to cable: Lake's informal, Oprah-like concern invites the intimacy of home viewing. But the chick-chat approach in no way undermines the gravity of the problems the docu addresses.

Spinning a wry, tall-tale version of his autobiography, the septuagenarian audaciously plays himself at every age and every stage of his improbably picaresque adventures.

Though the Pangs prove culturally adaptive on a visual level, they seem completely clueless as to the tonal modalities of Mark Wheaton's admittedly undercooked, all-American script.

A lightly feminist, good-naturedly comic sketch of a Chinese-American family in crisis. But despite pic's earnestness and obvious good intentions, narrative elements, carefully set forth though they may be, fall back on overfamiliar, underdeveloped tropes.

Knockout performances by John Cusack and child actor Bobby Coleman help legitimize a whimsical but sententiously moralizing script.

Magnificent photographs, archival news footage, and location-shot porn add texture and immediacy to Joseph Lovett's fascinating memoir of the sexually explosive 12-year period (1969-1981).

Bubbles along with a jaunty but unoriginal blend of the sweet, tart, cute and weepy.

As fascinating as it is frustrating.

Drearily pretentious, ultra-stagy exercise in middle-age self-loathing.

Far from encouraging "Survivor"-style competitiveness, the desert setting serves as a serene Club Med-type backdrop to the all-male bonding.

Trite, sententious and generally unfunny.

Even if Matteo Garrone's "Gomorrah" hadn't dramatically raised the bar for mafioso movies, The Sicilian Girl would have repped a mediocre entry in the Cosa Nostra canon and a waste of an extraordinary true story.

By the film's underwater finale, director Matteo Garrone has bestowed a tragic stature on the pint-size Othello who loves "not wisely but too well."

Picture touchingly conveys the everyday closeness of the Rashevskis, who are wont to tango their troubles away, but spiritual upheavals and tonal shifts feel artificial and strained.

Filmmakers underline the immediate relevance of their conclusion: In matters of war and peace, who we elect president is crucial.

Brain-teasing, wildly unpredictable animated feature.

Undeniably topical but the lack of emotional investment in its characters renders it more intelligent than engaging.

Once Choose Connor ventures into the larger political arena, it begins to work against itself.

A radiant perf by Annie Parisse and a virtuoso turn by Eli Wallach are insufficient to lift this male intergenerational angst-fest out of the ghetto.

It's all so overdetermined -- each encounter of the present-day lovers mirrors some moment from the long-ago day when they parted -- that it reduces their whole affair to a matter of last-minute revisionism.

Richly layered picture dramatizes a landmark doctor/patient showdown, chronicles a classic case of transgenderism and reveals how aspects of Schreber's story prefigured Nazism.

Documaker Daniel Peddle also works as a casting director, and so it is small wonder his crisp, concise, intimate portrait of six very different, self-styled "aggressives" -- women who stress their masculine sides -- should reveal in each a curious integrity and beauty.

Gloriously flamboyant comedic extravaganza, fuses soap opera and "American Idol"-type competition, following four wildly different women vying for the star role in a feature filmization of a popular telenovela.

Thoughtful, incisive, controversial.

Pic contains its share of viable gags and stars generate a certain degree of convincing chemistry. But eventually, the seams in personality design and artificially stitched-together script construction begin to show.

The actors are charismatic, particularly Ricardo Darin.

Lacks seismic guffaws but elicits many mild smiles.

Paley sustains a consistently funny, sometimes even self-deprecatory comic tone.