Ronnie Scheib

Brimming with energy, elan and the unpredictability of his "Something Wild," Jonathan Demme's triumphant Rachel Getting Married may just lay the wedding film to rest, being such a hard act to follow.

This offbeat charmer succumbs to the same airless artificiality that has claimed many recent efforts in the genre.

Bristling with wry wit and peopled with a rogue's gallery of disaffected losers.

Basically conservative yet titillatingly "eccentric" British laffer could succeed in the "Full Monty" import slot.

Helmer George Butler correctly gauges his film's strengths, with the search for life in the universe becoming a heartfelt tribute to a couple of robots.

Engages but underwhelms.

Uniquely Southern documentary has become surprisingly timely this election year.

Arguably stronger conceptually than visually, surreal mix of the unexpected and the banal is definitely not to everybody's taste. But the music is inarguably sublime.

Cleverly channeling gangster tropes through a British kitchen-sink soap opera, TV scribe-helmer Ben Wheatley has concocted a nifty black comedy, with a little help from his friends, in Down Terrace.

What emerges from Walter's docu is not a sense of failure, but a recognition that the play's the thing, enriched by every flawed performance, perfection almost irrelevant to its cry of anguish.

Now, 50 years later, the Justice Department has decided to reopen the case, due largely to Keith Beauchamp's documentary, which contains testimony from hitherto unseen witnesses.

A lackluster actioner.

A muddled script, spatially confounding direction and four thesps seemingly acting in four different movies are only a few of the problems with the misbegotten political thriller As Good as Dead.

This inordinately likable and consistently funny boxing saga-cum-romantic comedy doesn't so much ridicule the "Rocky"-type inspirational sports fable as gently deflate its heroic overdrive.

Petra Seeger's beautifully crafted documentary about neurobiologist Eric Kandel, In Search of Memory, interweaves experience and experiments, autobiography and science as seamlessly as the Nobel Prize winner's same-titled book.

Beastie Boy Adam Yauch proves he can make a comprehensive, state-of-the-art docu of interest to basketball aficionados.

Partly produced by Lifetime, the pic attempts to elevate the disease-of-the-week movie into a moral dialectic between conformity and imagination.

Lively interviews from a wide range of people, a wealth of excerpted footage stretching over decades, and a story packed with legend are served up by helmer Joe Angio with a verve mirroring the restless creativity of the film's subject.

Frank Langella's note-perfect, tour-de-force turn as a man elegantly shaping his own demise is nicely counterpointed by a shambling Elliott Gould as a bird-watching private eye.

Instead of using its hot-button issues as a present-day hook, sticks with a 19th century mindset which it accompanies with elegant turn-of-the-century decors.

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.