Scott Foundas

While the entertainment value of Cloverfield is highly negotiable, it's clear that Abrams has consciously aligned himself with those filmmakers who have used the template of a grade-B monster/invasion movie -- Don Siegel, George Romero, Steven Spielberg -- as a stealth vessel for social commentary.

An unusually bright, inspired look at the perils of breaking into the acting business.

Its jazzy rhythm and economy of form place it closer to a 1950s film noir, shot through with humor so dark you need a flashlight to see it.

As before, Bujalski's preference for nonprofessional actors, his ear for the rhythms of conversation among bright young 20-somethings and his adept use of a roving, hand-held camera (this time shooting in fuzzy black and white) lend the film an invigorating energy.

Serviceable, wholly uninspired.

They ought to be a whole lot scarier than they are in this tepid genre offering from director Robert Harmon, whose debut film "The Hitcher" set a high bar for screen terror in the 1980s. Pic looks like a holiday gobbler.

It's an unconscionably funny sex farce that, by its end, turns into a tender and honest romance, an acute portrait of loneliness and, believe it or not, a musical. This is a movie Blake Edwards might have made.

Almereyda has crafted an uncannily revealing portrait of a major American artist at work, all the more remarkable for the deceptive casualness with which it unfolds, as if Almereyda had just shown up.

A perceptive character drama both delicate and tragic.

Pretty formulaic stuff: bland self-empowerment tinged with warm fuzzies in all the right places. But what makes this "Somebody" something is Pasquin's deft touch and understanding with the material.

Its characters are as flimsy and expendable as the title suggests, while only the most gullible of viewers (i.e., those who've never seen a David Mamet picture) will likely be duped by the painfully et cetera who's-conning-whom antics or the mounds of forced sentimentality under which they're ill-disguised.

Unabashedly tasteless, wholly trashy and, also, hugely entertaining.

At the movie's core, disguised with pitch-perfect Minnesota accent and bushy comb-over hairdo, the perpetually underrated Kurt Russell (as the late coach Herb Brooks) delivers a brilliant performance of immaculate control.

By the time of its medical-operation climax, Stuck On You has focused so much on ennobling the disabled that it comes to resemble a segment of the Jerry Lewis telethon.

The quiet and intimacy of what is essentially a two-character piece are well juxtaposed by Brooks against the vast desert expanses of her home country, captured in sumptuous wide-screen cinematography by the great Ian Baker.

It's all fitfully amusing, thanks in large part to Bouchard's richly comic performance, but the movie is never very involving, and it overstays its welcome by a good, long while.

Watching the passionless Phantom, with its geriatric story-framing device, gooey dimestore romanticism and tawdry pop ballads about unrequited yearning, feels akin to dying and waking up in your parents’ easy-listening-radio hell.

What seduces most about Ask the Dust isn't its verisimilitude, but its gloriously old-fashioned backlot sheen - the L.A. of old Hollywood movies and of our collective fantasies.

Result is imperfect and overlong, but hugely ambitious and often breathtaking.

A stunning work, revisiting controversial events with journalistic objectivity and a meticulous eye for detail.

It's rarely a good sign when a movie feels obliged to add the words "a fable" beneath its main title -- and Undertaking Betty is no exception.

Part dewey-eyed paperback romance, part acid-trip planetarium show, this extravagantly silly movie comes on like the second coming of "2001."

Southland Tales pilfers large chunks of its plot and visual style from Alex Cox’s "Repo Man," Kathryn Bigelow’s "Strange Days" and Shane Carruth’s Sundance-winning "Primer," and unlike the makers of those films, Kelly hasn’t digested his influences and made them his own -- he’s more like the slacker college kid who’s just enough of an intellectual poseur to bluff his way to an A. That said, Southland Tales isn’t entirely without its pleasures, chiefly The Rock.

Open Water is just one tedious scene stretched out to feature length. It's terrifying all right, but only for what it says about the extents to which a couple of hungry actors and a bullish director will go to turn themselves into overnight celebrities.

A steaming compost heap of high-art pretense and half-cocked psychoanalysis that almost makes you sorry Nicolas Roeg isn't making pictures anymore.

Though Akel and Mass share writing credit, Chalk was actually shot in a loose, improvisational manner in the mode of Christopher Guest's films, and its best set pieces are like devastatingly effective pinpricks puncturing the Hollywood hot-air balloon of inspirational teacher/coach melodramas.

Tries to combine the suspense of old Saturday morning serials with the gusto of producer Jerry Bruckheimer's action pics. Falling short on both counts, this long, and long-winded, series of middling cliffhangers won't pump the adrenaline of action aficionados or -- the family crowd.

Three words of advice to those who haven't yet seen it: Run, don't walk. Composed of excerpts from hundreds of locally shot movies past and present -- from grade-A prestige pictures to unrepentant grade-Z schlock -- Los Angeles Plays Itself serves as Andersen's exhaustive but never exhausting attempt to reconcile the myriad identities of the world's moviemaking capital.

Worms is one of those rare kiddie flicks that successfully adopt a child’s-eye view of the world, where nothing is more important than saving face on the playground and where parents are as distant and clueless as storybook giants.

The Lives of Others wants us to see that the Stasi -- at least some of them -- were, like their Gestapo brethren, “just following orders." You can call that naive optimism on Donnersmarck's part, or historical revisionism of the sort duly lambasted by the current film version of Alan Bennett's "The History Boys." I, for one, tremble at the thought of what this young director does for an encore.

The most enjoyable film Besson has had his name on in eons.

The flawed, fascinating Land of Plenty is easily Wenders' most vital work in more than a decade -- a troubling meditation on terrorism paranoia, poverty and homelessness.

A one-joke movie if ever there was, but the joke happens to be a good one -- a Tracy-and-Hepburn-style battle of the sexes in which Kate can fly and blast through walls -- and director Ivan Reitman (who made Ghostbusters) feels at home with the mix of screwball and supernatural.

The picture shows vital signs only in a few scenes where Cedric takes on the additional role of his own lecherous uncle, but it's too little too late.

The Weather Man begs to be taken seriously and can't easily be dismissed; it kicks around in your mind for a good long while after you've seen it. Cage, who does his finest work since "Leaving Las Vegas," has stripped himself bare of the patented tics and mannerisms he honed in one Jerry Bruckheimer movie too many.

A cobwebbed, mummified horror entry that makes obvious, cartoonishly grotesque demands for attention.

Put simply, this second feature by the young Austrian director Hans Weingartner is a put-on -- a glib anti-capitalist rant in which the rhetoric rarely rises above the you-too-can-save-a-child-for-less-than-the-price-of-coffee level.

A scabrous, provocative and often funny social satire about the American dream, Spike Lee's flawed but fascinating She Hate Me addresses everything from corporate malfeasance to the African AIDS epidemic, barely catching its breath in-between.

This appalling multiculti upgrade of the ’50s sitcom is about as funny as a bus accident.

The imagery is startling not just for its symbolic resonances, but for the breathless intensity with which it sears the screen.

A screwball road movie set in a middle-of-nowhere town, Kwik Stop suggests "It Happened One Night" as reimagined by David Lynch or Hal Hartley.

Queen Latifah gives a spectacular performance in this hugely enjoyable wish-fulfillment fantasy.

The Chorus is sham art and questionable entertainment, but at the very least it sends you whistling out of the theater.

McKinnon's direction is nothing if not atmospheric -- his best scenes unfold with a pungent languor that suggests the power of the backwoods to turn hours into days and days into years. If only the sum total were a movie more "In the Bedroom" than it is everything-but-the-kitchen-sink.

Kinnear and Romijn-Stamos appear to be vying for the title of filmdom's least-convincing married couple, while Robert De Niro, as the movie's modern-day Dr. Frankenstein, takes his own expert career slumming to a new depth -- he's become an evil clone of a once-great actor.

Not just the funniest but the smartest comedy around by a mile.

Welsh director Sara Sugarman and the great cinematographer Stephen Burum (Hoffa, The Untouchables) keep the visuals bouncing along in bright, primary-color-intensive fashion, but the movie has no real heart and even less soul.

Chandrasekhar is a master forger of images and situations from horror movies past, but unlike Wes Craven did in "Scream," he doesn't build on them in any way, and the result is the opposite of what's intended; the movie is stultifying.

Looks with fresh eyes at a new millennium in which, seemingly, the entire world is bought and sold in neatly wrapped packages engineered for mass consumption.

In its depiction of a fleeting, but nevertheless factual, peace in the Middle East, Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven may seem a more quixotic Hollywood fantasy than all six Star Wars movies lumped together.

The result is (no pun intended) a powerful wake-up call, not just for Hollywood but for a nation that once fought passionately for the eight-hour workday and now, ever more willingly, works itself to death.

After a lively first half-hour, the scenes start to feel heavy, as though Serrano suddenly decided he was actually making a meaningful drama, and the ensuing, halfhearted political satire is like an extra weight on top of that.

Though the story hardly lacks for event as it traces Khayyam's ascension from the peasantry to the royal court, the period costumes and sets look to be on loan from Medieval Times, as do most of the actors, and the boxy, harshly lit compositions make everything feel even more cardboard.

The vaporous Wonderland never moves beyond its grungily romanticized view of the past.

Moments of genuine insight alternate freely with those of banal psychologizing, but even then there can be no denying that the filmmaker has an ear for a certain brand of self-absorbed discourse often overheard in restaurants and bars in the shadow of the Hollywood sign. And given the choice, I’ll take Henry’s home movies over Jonathan Demme’s any day of the week.

This won't be remembered as one of the prodigiously talented Armstrong's great films (My Brilliant Career, High Tide, Little Women), but it's still 90 percent better than everything else out there.

Astonishingly inept alleged satire.

A warm, spacious road movie with a stirring sense of the wide-open landscapes of the American West.

The film unfolds at a deliberate pace, with a soundtrack occupied less by dialogue than by the sounds of water flowing and crickets chirping. And if you listen carefully enough, you might just hear the sound of one hand clapping.

It's a rich idea for a comedy, even if the filmmakers seem timid about making the pic the full-on satire it might have been.

It's a timely, noble undertaking ill-served by a dry, history-textbook style that is at once too much and not enough.

Assembled in a straightforward, television-style presentation that gets the better of it.

What gives Rocky Balboa its unexpected pathos is the titanic humility of Stallone's performance, the earnestness with which he plays a man knocked down (but not out) by the ravages of time.

The movie is basically on one level and Faris on another -- in that exclusive aerie occupied by Judy Holliday, Carole Lombard, Lucille Ball and a few other blissfully original comedy goddesses.

The thunderous clashes between armies of computer-generated Trojans and Mycenaeans, when they do arrive, feel decidedly un-epic, as though we were watching a child's toy-box war between plastic figurines. Which makes them perfectly in line with the rest of Petersen's artless approach.

Far from a complete success: It takes too long to get to its central premise and, once there, too often meanders away from it. But Campbell is close to astonishing whenever she's onscreen.

Tyro helmers David Barison and Daniel Ross have sunk their teeth into a heady intellectual stew, and results are invigorating thanks to the filmmakers' inspired linkage of images and ideas and commentaries from three of the world's leading philosophers.

The movie's chief liability, though, is Rose herself, who also co-scripted with first-time director Robert Cary and who registers several notches below Nia Vardalos on the totem of unlikely double-threats.

This is some of the best filmmaking ever done by director Richard Donner, a longtime Hollywood journeyman known more for his proficient deployment of three long-running movie franchises (The Omen, Superman and Lethal Weapon) than for his lyricism.

Rebound is a sports comedy so by-the-numbers that you don't really have to watch it -- you can just check in on it every once in a while between trips to the concession stand and the bathroom.

Above all, it feels like a summation of everything he (Eastwood) represents as a filmmaker and a movie star, and perhaps also a farewell.

Like the abominable "Napoleon Dynamite," director Jared Hess' second feature will doubtless capture the hearts and minds of 12-year-old boys everywhere, even if Nacho Libre sacrifices the earlier film's aggressive mean-spiritedness in favor of gentle slapstick lunacy.

I’d be lying if I said that The Band’s Visit isn’t touching and uplifting and all those other audience-friendly emotions against which film critics are believed to religiously steel themselves. But in a season rife with movies (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Grace Is Gone, The Kite Runner, et al.) that aggressively pry open viewers’ chest cavities and yank on their heartstrings, Kolirin’s film is the only one that plucks at them gently, tickling the funny bone as it goes.

A great sports drama first and a heart-wrenching triumph-over-adversity weepie almost never.

Between them, first-time screenwriter Carl Ellsworth and director Wes Craven don't come up with a single clever way to generate suspense, and the movie's onboard atmosphere is so phony.

Fine new chapter in the long-running franchise should score well with family audiences.

Director Rob Reiner’s atrocious cancer “comedy” marks a new low in Hollywood’s self-flagellating “things to be thankful for” tradition.

Things could be worse. At the end of the day, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is nothing if not consistent -- taking care of business solidly, professionally and without a lick of the genuine wonderment or inspiration that you can find in surplus in Jon Favreau's Spielberg-influenced "Iron Man."

As factoids do-si-do with testimonials from the likes of drinking buddy Sean Penn and fan-boy Bono, the movie all but becomes the very A&E Hagiography for which Bukowski would have had little or no patience.

You'll be begging for mercy well before the end of this self-righteous, thoroughly unsavory "farce" about a lonely gay man who - gosh darn it - can't seem to stop getting mistaken for a pedophile.

I suspect that Death Proof will throw some of its director's admirers for a loop, though it may be the most revealing thing Tarantino has yet done -- a full-throttle expression of a singular artistic temperament disguised, like so many gems of grindhouses yore, as a glittering hunk of trash.

A brilliant portrait of adventure, activism, obsession and potential madness that ranks among helmer Werner Herzog's strongest work.

Swank's character and her performance are good enough to merit a movie of their own, instead of serving as fourth wheel to this lifeless ménage à trois.

Lacks sufficient appeal beyond niche aficionados of its featured performers.

A breathtakingly original nonfiction work by Seattle-based filmmaker Robinson Devor (whose "Police Beat" was among the highlights of Sundance's 2005 dramatic competition).

In fairness, the movie isn't the absolute worst of its kind and there's a certain charm to Butcher's amiable, puppy-eyed performance. But Michael McGowan's direction is as flat as an asphalt road, and his script is gasping for air long before it enters the final stretch.

Core has a touch with actors, too, and there are surprisingly fine performances here.

In his best film to date, Nick Cassavetes directs with ferocious energy, taking scenes past their logical stopping points and pushing his actors (particularly Foster, who can be as terrifying as Edward Norton in "American History X") to, but never over, the precipice of absurdity.

DiCaprio harnesses a terrific, buggy intensity reminiscent of "GoodFellas'" hopped-up Henry Hill (Ray Liotta).

The movie looks like it cost a fortune, with Dean Cundey's glistening widescreen compositions and Bill Brzeski's towering, storybook sets providing the backdrop for seamless visual effects. What's more, it's equally rich in ideas.

Offers a highly engaging immersion into a culture of larger-than-life characters driven by their thrill-seeking instincts.

Playing something of a cipher who reinvents himself as the occasion demands, Wood is unusually well cast, but it's Hunnam, with a psychotic twinkle in his eye, who turns the movie on whenever he's onscreen.

A handsomely produced, deeply passionate, but seriously flawed historical epic whose reach far exceeds its grasp. Somewhere inside this overlong, sometimes engaging, often tedious affair, there may be a solid, 100-minute movie.

It's not that Noya is bad as kid actors go, but a pair of dewy, crossed eyes and a beyond-his-years melancholy do not an entire movie make.

The result is a film marked by eruptions of brutal violence, but also passages of extraordinary tenderness.

As both book and film, The Human Stain comes to vividest life in its extended flashbacks, which offer the most compelling exploration of Roth's perennial themes of self-loathing and reinvention.

Scottish director Andrew Black keeps the pace brisk and the images sunny, while screenwriters Anne Black (his wife), Jason Faller and Katherine Swigert afford lively dialogue that, without pressing the issue, hones in on some insightful parallels between the morals of Austen's society and those of contemporary Mormon culture.

The dancing is dazzling in director Emilio Martínez-Lázaro's The Other Side of the Bed, but the movie itself is a dud.

Up emerges as a gentle hymn to adventure of both the soaring, storybook variety and the smaller, less obvious kind -- the perilous, unpredictable and richly rewarding journey of ordinary, everyday life.

A full-throttle body shock of a movie. It gets inside you like a virus, puts your nerves in a blender, and twists your guts into a Gordian knot.

An erratic, psychobabbling jumble of scenes that never builds to any discernible point.

Promising young cast flounders amid comic material that's staler than week-old bread.

Came alive only in the presence of a supposed dead man -- specifically, the nefarious Lord Voldemort.

This superb debut feature by Korean-American director So Yong Kim seems to be constructed entirely of the ineffable and intangible, those fleeting moments that most movies treat as throwaways.

American independent movies about awkward adolescence are never in short supply, but this highly assured first feature by commercials and music video director Mike Mills is the first since "Donnie Darko" to view the latter stages of teenagerdom as fodder for a phantasmagorical odyssey of Lewis Carroll–like distortions.

The heist at the heart of Inside Man is brilliant, and so is the movie.

It can be thrilling to watch Stander and his gang of gentlemen bandits rack up the loot without ruffling their (or anyone else's) shirt collars. The movie isn't content to rest there, though; it wants to be a caper with a conscience.

The infectious high spirits of the performers help to carry the day.

Though his work has been little seen outside of France, writer-director Jean-Claude Brisseau's reputation as one of the most terribles of his country's filmmaking enfants precedes him. This 2002 film offers ample evidence as to why.

Enormously absorbing.

Like most of the men in the film, we would happily follow her anywhere.

Offers a fast, efficient and richly satisfying look at an iconoclastic artist and his groundbreaking work.

Scaled like an epic but possessing the narrative simplicity of a fable, The Warrior unfolds over a brisk 85 minutes of screen time, keeping dialogue to a minimum as it celebrates the power of stories told through handcrafted, CGI-free images.

Pic's quirky-for-quirky's-sake antics are neither particularly coherent nor enjoyably incoherent.

Like two of the year's other standout American films, Kelly Reichardt's "Old Joy" and Ryan Fleck's "Half Nelson," it's a movie of ideas in which the ideas flow effortlessly out of the material instead of being plastered on top with a heavy cement roller (as in "Crash," "Babel" and "Little Children").

Surprisingly unsexy, uninvolving affair.

Reverts to a fire-sale slapstick scenario that includes multiple tumbles into toilets/sewers/ dumpsters; a visit to a Harlem beauty shop that's all homily-spouting mammies and swishy, finger-snapping dandies; and the attempted inducement of a constipated dog's bowel movement.

Only Williams makes any real emotional connection: I'm not sure I'd call his performance good, but there's something fascinating about seeing the man once heralded as "the black Clark Gable" three decades removed from heartthrob status, heavy and sullen-looking, weighed down by the burdens of time and age.

Although in many respects a more stylish, authentic, tougher-minded film than "Hotel Rwanda," director Michael Caton-Jones' respectable and well-intentioned Beyond the Gates (aka Shooting Dogs) still falls into the trap of filtering an inherently African story through the eyes of a noble white protagonist -- in this case, two of them.

Rick McKay's exceptional new documentary Broadway: The Golden Age presents a veritable avalanche of interviews with some of the biggest names in the history of the American theater, preserving for posterity their wise words and disarming anecdotes.

The genocide of some one million Rwandan Tutsis by their Hutu neighbors remains a disgraceful and too-little-known episode in recent world history. Alas, Terry George's ineffectual Hotel Rwanda only partly rectifies that problem, taking what ought to have been a complex, powerful inquiry and simplifying it to a story about the resilience of the human spirit.

Infernally boring for much of its running time, and then, just as the pulse starts to quicken: To be continued.

A highly enjoyable programmer about those brave young men and their rickety flying machines.

It casts an increasingly hypnotic spell, thanks in no small measure to Wright -- a fearless actress (and the real-life wife of writer-director Ruscio) who brings this sometimes despicable, often heartbreaking character to life with every atom of her being.

The director of 13 Going on 30, Gary Winick, was unable to infuse this material with either the sustained screwball cadences of his earlier "Tadpole" or an emotional resonance comparable to that of his superb "The Tic Code."

Yet even when the movie is at its most schizoid, Precious still packs a wallop.

The dance sequences might have saved it, were it not for the fact that director Guy Ferland seems to have learned everything he knows about (over) shooting and (blindly) cutting such scenes from watching "Moulin Rouge" and "Chicago."

This depressingly uninspired action-comedy (based on the 1975–79 TV series) is Hollywood’s latest McMovie -- name-brand recognition as raison d’être or, if you will, creative bankruptcy on a very large scale.

Viewers of this Sam Raimi-produced, sub-"Amityville" scarefest are likely to hold the real grudge.

Cold Creek Manor's prime reason for being seems to be a set piece involving poisonous snakes, directed by Figgis with a drunken gusto the rest of the film could use, and as a comeback vehicle for Stone, who tries hard at motherly warmth, but can't quite wash the Catherine Tramell out of her hair.

While slight comic concoction is so airy it seems in danger of floating right off the screen, the pleasant retro vibe and a handful of effervescent moments carry this film no self-respecting heterosexual male would dare see except on a date.

Touch of Pink is really a big glob of "The Wedding Banquet," with some "Will & Grace" mixed in to remind us that gay people are actually quaintly neurotic and funny once you get to know them.

Razor sharp and funny as hell, Incident at Loch Ness is the harpoon hurled into the hot-air balloon of “reality” entertainment.

Festooned with cute, mugging kids; lots of jazzy redos of beloved Christmas tunes on the soundtrack; and enough tug-at-your-heartstrings moments to make an entire theater feel warm on a blustery winter afternoon.

Snakes was the most exuberantly trashy delight of this summer movie season or last.

In the post-Columbine era, Koury's film has its finger on something particularly potent.

Margot at the Wedding gives its characters (and us) something to laugh about.

Too often, though, Jakubowicz falls back on his relentlessly pirouetting DV camera, attention-deficient editing and ear-splitting sound effects as a substitute for real tension, or a more piercing inquiry into the bubbling tension between South America's haves and its poverty-stricken have-nots.

Not just instantly forgettable, but beginning to fade from memory even as its images still play across the screen.

That may not exactly thrill those who admire the Saw films only for their splatter quotient, but all told, this is a more affecting study in grief, guilt and human frailty than "Babel."

They only want us to play that tiresome guessing game: Is it all a dream or is it really happening? Instead, you may find yourself asking: Is this cinema or merely Cinemax?

The movie is enormously, convulsively funny, and it never lets up -- it has no shame.

Shot quickly and cheaply in high-definition video and almost entirely on one set, the movie has almost zero visual energy, but it teems with snappy dialogue and the same carnival anarchy Lumet brought to "Dog Day Afternoon" and "Network."

Emerges as the most conventional and least imaginative of the recent crop of high-class fright movies that includes "The Others," "Session 9" and "Wendigo."

The problem, dare I say it, is that the movie just ... isn't ... that ... funny.

The real-life calendar girls were actual human beings, and here they're merely comic patsies, lacking the distinctive personalities that made the men of "The Full Monty" so endearing, their final act of revelation so peculiarly dignified.

iInstead of a buoyant, imaginative superhero movie on the order of Sam Raimi's "Spider-Man" films or Bryan Singer's "Superman Returns," we get a lumbering, paint-by-numbers origin story.

As kitsch, however, it's pretty enjoyable. Jolie and Owen perform with such conviction, and the film -- blissfully unaware of its own badness -- takes its paperback-romance shenanigans with such goofy gravity, that it's easy to get caught up in the whole, soap-opera thrust of the thing.

Bell forces us to see characters from the proverbial wrong side of the tracks in a distinctly human light, neither ennobling nor pitying.

Examines 50-odd years in the life of its eponymous subject -- a most compelling character -- and in doing so literally provides the viewer with food for thought.

The movie is leaden and self-serious, with an unusually hollow performance from Norton, who's not for a moment convincing as a man of raging passion. Far better is Paul Giamatti.

Witty, insightful portraits of hyperverbal, self-conscious young people falling in and out of love.

It's tough to decide just what's more offensive: the movie's musty depiction of gangsta rap as public enemy No. 1, the notion that all an uptight white girl needs to loosen up is a few puffs on a Philly blunt, or the idea that any of this might be remotely funny.

Outside of "Grindhouse," it may be the most bang for your buck to be had in a Los Angeles movie theater this season.

This Thing of Ours is infatuated with the romance of gangsterism -- with an absurdly straight face, it asks us to feel mournful for the loss of “respect” and “integrity” in the mob community.

This is still powerful, undiluted stuff -- a jolt of backwoods moonshine whiskey injected into the veins of the atrophied American relationship drama.

Those viewers who found anti-Semitism lurking under every stone in The Passion of the Christ may rejoice in this celebration of Jewish heroism; all others should rest assured that falling asleep in the cinema is not a mortal sin.

There's nary a comic idea in Van Wilder that isn't ripped off from a recent Farrelly brothers movie. But that doesn't stop Van Wilder from being very funny, provided you're not easily offended.

Turturro keeps Fear X fascinating, practically in spite of itself.

As repellent and repellently opportunistic a piece of work as the various shock-horror provocations (The Isle, The Coast Guard) that helped to launch this worrisome career (Kim Ki-Duk).

The overall effect makes for a far more resonant film than that offered by concurrent narrative feature "Hotel Rwanada."

With her bulging blue eyes, elaborately braided hair and slinky spandex costumes, she's an indelible icon of action-heroine chic, and, quite frankly, the films don't deserve her.

A noteworthy piece on a difficult subject.

Unfortunately, whenever Ledger isn't onscreen, Lords of Dogtown takes a spill.

While the respectable result is a more meaningful film than just about anything Mandoki worked on during his 17 years in Hollywood ("Angel Eyes," "Message in a Bottle"), pic suffers from an overindulgence of triumph-over-adversity cliches and a meandering narrative.

There may, somewhere in the premise of Incantato, lie the inspiration for a fine farce, but under Avati's shaky stewardship, the picture is leaden and charmless.

McG's Marshall lies at the nexus of Thornton Wilder and Norman Rockwell -- it's David Lynch without the irony -- and if he overdoes things a touch, there’s nothing disingenuous about it.

Peet is triumphant as the beguiling object of desire with wounded-bird eyes and devilish smile -- sexy and tart, then, in the space of a breath, totally, tenderly tragic. Like Oliver, we'd happily follow her anywhere.

The film's one indisputably great performance comes from Sewell, whose Marke is no mere cuckold, but a good, honorable man caught up in circumstances beyond his ken, and ultimately this Tristan & Isolde's most tragic figure.

Repeatedly, Iñárritu and Arriaga stop themselves just short of suggesting that we're all going to hell in a hand basket. Had they not -- well, then Babel might really have been onto something.

Much of the film is as strange and oddly beautiful as one of Arbus' own photographs, bold in its attempt to find new ways of cracking the biopic chestnut and sensitive in its portrayal of a 1950s woman who, like so many of her contemporaries, finds herself imprisoned in a "Good Housekeeping" nightmare.

But while some may leave the theater tapping their toes and whistling the lyrics to such inimitable original ballads as "Hard for a Pimp" and "Whoop That Trick," they should hang their heads low and mourn the sorry state of the contemporary African-American movie.

Director Black is competent with the camera, but he seems to have instructed the entire cast to deliver their lines in hushed tones and pauses pregnant with hoped-for meaning -- except for Kwanten, whose overenthusiastic impersonation of a red-state rube is as grating as horseshoes on a blackboard.

Beguiling and intoxicating.

Like this summer's other slapstick cause célèbre, "Pineapple Express," it's a comedy with as high or higher a body count as the movies it purports to be parodying, and the problem isn't the violence per se but rather the fact that neither movie ever finds a satisfactory balance between tongue-in-cheek and guts-in-hand.

Life goes far past the boiling point for most of the characters in this hilariously overwrought ghetto soap opera from cult writer-director Buddy Giovinazzo.

The Puffy Chair is the funniest, saddest and most emotionally honest "romantic comedy" to come along in years, even if I've yet to encounter many over the age of about 35 who like the film, or even get it.

As merry pranksters they have no match, and as they age (Knoxville is 35 now), they only grow in appeal. As they proudly hurl their tattooed (by ink and battle scars) bodies into harm's way, a devilish glint in their eyes, it's as if they've discovered the fountain of youth, and its name is Jackass.

Campbell is flat-out great, muting his beloved Sam Raimi shtick in favor of a genuine character turn, an act of transformation that makes you wonder why he's never been called on to interpret Elvis before.

At the center...lies the stunning Golbahari, a nonprofessional who recalls some of Bresson's most haunting model-actors in her intense, anguished grace.

Honoré never gets beneath these characters' sunburned skins, and well before the end, the film tips irretrievably over into the realm of absurdity.

The movie is enjoyable, but not passionately engaging in the way we've come to expect from Almodóvar, and it leaves you somewhat cold in spite of the warmth of Cruz's galvanic performance.

Cosgrove and screenwriter Dean Craig aim for the kind of close-quarters chaos that John Cleese and Connie Booth turned into high comic art on "Fawlty Towers," but Caffeine's roundelay of sophomoric urination, masturbation and pedophilia gags isn't half as funny as the atrocious British accents of the largely American cast.

There is something sweetly naive about pic's astonished contention that this is because morals were taught in a nonreligious context. But it's not a compelling argument for the Apocalypse.

If the great movie musicals are the ones that transport us to some heady superreality, the only place Rent takes us to is the Nederlander Theatre.

Always good with actors, Hanson brings out a beaten-down charm in Bana that works nicely against the hotheaded authority the actor shows in the gambling scenes, while Duvall is, like the veteran card shark he plays, a master of subtle gestures. The low card here is Barrymore, somewhat awkwardly shoehorned into this boys' club to provide some romantic relief.

A crass, condescending piece of corporate bamboozling, Grind plays like a movie conceived by monkey-suited honchos who regard their targeted audience as impressionable nincompoops susceptible to every new trend in sports, clothing and music that comes down the pike.

Big Trouble in Little China is a far more enjoyable mash-up of classic Westerns, Saturday-morning serials, and Chinese wu xia than any of the Indiana Jones movies, with Kurt Russell in full bloom as Carpenter’s de rigueur hard-drinkin’, hard-gamblin’, wise-crackin’ loner hero—a bowling-alley John Wayne.

It's the director's most complexly ordered film to date - a labyrinth of ids, egos and alter egos waiting around blind corners - and may be the movies' most deliriously inventive narrative spiral since "Adaptation."

Newcomer Short has charisma, charm and athleticism to burn, but it's mostly for naught in a movie that spends two tedious hours pulling out every stop in the gold-hearted-kid-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks- meets-gold-hearted-girl-who-values-true-love-above-privilege playbook.

It's screen comedy at the end of its tether, Capra-corn gone rancid.

Strictly for the birds.

A dreary, weary psychosexual thriller that's neither sexy nor thrilling.

Begins as a serious, straightforward account of the origins of the cocaine trade and "gangsta" culture in 1980s Harlem, but then downward spirals due to a weak plot and gratuitous violence.

She’s the Man amounts to little more than softcore porn for the tween set, with aesthetics ripped from the pages of the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog and virtually every scene revolving around Viola/Sebastian’s crafty escape from some impromptu disrobing.

There's greater consistency to it, and considerably more humor, with macabre slapstick and fun-house ghoulishness that, at their best, recall early Tim Burton.

An anemic sitcom pilot dragged out to an excruciating 108-minute running time.

The result is a glorious low-tech pleasure that may be the most lyrical, phantasmagoric boys' adventure story since Joe Dante's Explorers.

A superb, eye-opening and often absurdly funny deconstruction of the myths and realities of global terrorism that is marked by a balance, broadmindedness and sense of historical perspective so absent from many recent political-themed documentaries.

Despite agreeably short running time and committed performances, Edmond is rendered inert by its stagy atmosphere and failure to fully mine the depths of its protagonist's complex psyche.

It is the point -- and the power -- of Deep Water that the vast, unknowable fathoms of the sea are rivaled only by those of the human psyche.

The strengths of Dominion, however, have been little diminished by its long shelf life and, in fact, may have grown stronger with age.

Grim, grueling and triumphantly powerful.

Pic has a stagy, boxed-in feel. Both visually and energetically, it suggests something that has been done onstage to the point of mechanized repetition. And even though Whaley is supposed to be playing a disillusioned character, it's the actor himself who seems fatigued and over-rehearsed.

This thoroughly unhip, unfunny political comedy is the kind of movie TV actors like Ray Romano make on hiatus from their successful series, and movie actors like Gene Hackman and Marcia Gay Harden make on hiatus from taking their careers seriously.

Something of a deceptively packaged Oscar-season bonbon--a seemingly benign, classily directed year-I-became-a-woman nostalgia trip that conceals a surprisingly tart, morally ambiguous center.

Inoffensive adolescent escapism laced with surprising amounts of genuine charm.

The sentimental novelty of watching two childhood antiheroes have at it dissipates once you realize the lugubrious lengths to which the screenplay must go in order to make that happen.

In a true-life sports tale like the recent "Invincible," you buy into all the inspirational clichés because the characters have inner lives and the movie is about something bigger; here, you keep hoping for something bad to happen to somebody just for the sake of balance.

While the premise does lead to a few moments of inspired physical comedy -- the movie repeatedly falls back on poorly staged, choppily edited fight scenes between Chan and a gloomy, power-mad villain.

No doubt, Levinson thought he was making this generation's "Dr. Strangelove." What he's actually made is a desperate, ponderous sop to progressives that caters to all of the left's worst fears about voter fraud, corporate malfeasance and the impossibility of effecting real change.

The results are far from perfect: For one thing, Lipsky is so far from being a fluid visual storyteller that the garishly lit, appallingly composed Flannel Pajamas makes another two-hander talkfest Lipsky famously distributed -- "My Dinner With Andre" -- seem like "Lawrence of Arabia" by comparison.

An often thrilling, always compelling intro to the sport.

A stimulating scientific inquiry that may cause audiences to look at (and think about) the world around them in dramatically different terms.

Hidalgo can still be a wonder to behold, especially in its dynamic racing sequences, but the movie bogs down in its midsection with a needless kidnapping subplot that ultimately becomes quite tedious.

It's all cliffhangers, with no downtime in between.

Like "Life Is Beautiful" before it, Imagining Argentina juxtaposes horrific images of torture and humiliation against gooey optimism and thinks it's saying something profound about human resilience in the process.

Depressingly thin and exhaustingly contrived. Only masochistic moviegoers need apply.

Could have used two rangier lead players than Stiller (doing his patented aggrieved-yuppie shtick) and Barrymore (who's so perky you want to slap her); the 81-year-old Essell, however, is a wicked pleasure throughout.

Above all a rousing entertainment.

Intolerable Cruelty seems the kind of movie that results from two essentially erudite, anarchic talents playing down to the masses.

Harris tries his best to make something more out of his one-dimensional white-knight character, while Gooding plays his vaudeville Rainman routine to the rafters.

If "Crash" grew a pair of cojones, it might look something like Larry Clark’s cheerfully defiant Wassup Rockers.

Despite the considerable imagination that has gone into realizing period scenes on a modest budget, all the episodes (past and present) feel hurried and clipped, like they've been passed through too many impatient editing-room hands, and the picture never fully absorbs you.

A superior all-ages adventure pic made by a filmmaker who knows more than a thing or two about the genre.

The result is 90 minutes in the company of some of the nicest and most boring people you can imagine ever having a movie made about them.

Pic makes up in strong performances and wry observation what it sometimes lacks in narrative drive. Result is a perceptive (and unexpectedly moving) portrait of lives in crisis.

Superman Returns is a lush and enthralling piece of adventure storytelling that's both revisionist AND reverential, putting a timely spin on a timeless character without violating his primal appeal.

There may not be two equal sides to every argument, but in giving such little credence to those who might oppose him, Jarecki makes us wonder what exactly it is he’s so afraid of.

Few surprises lie in store for connoisseurs of torture cinema, though unlike its 2003 predecessor, this Massacre owes less to Bay’s attention-deficient aesthetics than to the measured, Georgia O’Keefe-on-acid sensibility that guided Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel’s much-cannibalized original.

Where "Amores Perros" was a feast of energy, wit and imagination, 21 Grams is like a starvation diet -- a movie that wallows so profoundly in its own misery that watching it is like atoning for some sin you didn't commit.

"The Blues Brothers" it is not, but in its best moments, the movie feels like a comic exaggeration of the real hardships that a couple of average, decidedly unhip guys went through on their unlikely way to the top.

Bardem, given the only fully fleshed-out character to play, is a marvel to behold...If only he had found a more soulful, less didactic movie to be plunked down into.

It’s the sort of buoyant, all-ages entertainment that Hollywood has been laboring to revive in recent years (most recently with Hairspray) but hasn’t managed to get right until now, and the glue holding it all together is the incomparable Adams (an Oscar nominee for 2005’s Junebug), who gives the kind of blissful screwball performance that seemed to go out of fashion after "I Love Lucy" left the airwaves.

Mann has done something transformative with Farrell: The Irish actor has never had this much charisma and natural authority in a role, and as he navigates that gray area between Crockett's real identity and his fabricated one, revealing subtle fissures in the character's cocksure facade, he's fascinating to watch.

Strikes me as one of Godard's most accessible works - one in which the graying, stubbly maestro, who turns 74 today, presents himself and his ideas to the audience in a less combative way than he sometimes has in the past.

The resulting film is one of too much reverence and not enough satire.

As in his previous "In Good Company," Weitz wants too much to like all of his characters, and he wants us to like them too. The result is a movie devoid of any threat, or many laughs, with barn door–broad performances.

This Hannibal is a stick-in-the-mud altogether lacking in the wit, gourmet appetites and romantic flair required of any surrogate for Sir Anthony Hopkins. By the end of two full hours, it's only Harris' head you long to see on a plate.

Doesn't risk ruffling any feathers, and that's exactly what's wrong with it: It's less a satirical bite at the hand that feeds Guest than it is a toothless nibble, and it isn't particularly funny.

It aims simply to relate a great and enveloping story -- one that may lead us to ponder the things that unite (rather than distance) peoples of differing belief systems, and may compel us to marvel at the many wonderful and horrible endeavors undertaken in the name of religion.

The deep satisfaction of The Return of the King is in surrendering ourselves to the finale, in letting Jackson's superb storytelling (with due credit to co-screenwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens) surround us like a blazing campfire tale -- which it does, gloriously.

Matthew Barney delivers his masterpiece in Cremaster 3, unquestionably the 35-year-old sculptor-performance artist-filmmaker's most linear, most narratively inclined work to date.

Despite its intelligence and a great, funny concept for a movie, this "Picnic" never gets past the appetizers; pic lacks the development needed for a full-length feature and, following a hilarious opening sequence, it becomes tiresomely one-note.

The acting is uniformly superb.

This is "Crash" with gun violence substituted for racism, although the tone of director–co-writer Aric Avelino's debut feature may be closer to one of those pious public-safety films that used to be shown to schoolchildren in order to frighten them out of potential bad behavior.

Burns' films are invariably better directed and scripted than they are performed, and Ash Wednesday is no exception. Pic's biggest drawback is that the helmer has again cast himself in the leading role.

This is also an acidly funny work, even if the humor is that of a man who drinks to stave off the pain and madness of sobriety. In his finest performance since "Drugstore Cowboy," Dillon plays Chinanski with funereal grandiosity.

Crammed into a lively 85-minute package delivered with loads of dark humor and cinematic flair, this is a worthy winner of Sundance's Grand Jury prize for documentary.

The most measured, classical film of their (Coen Brothers) 23-year career, and maybe the best.

To call Shine a Light a documentary doesn’t quite nail it; it’s more of a macro-mentary, shot in such tight close-up that you can see the fillings in Mick’s teeth and the sweat stains in the armpits of his sequined magenta top.

Initially promising, but quickly disappointing.

Like a really, really high-tech version of a high school class trip to the planetarium.

Resultant picture -- one of Herzog's best and most purely enjoyable -- may lack the built-in curio factor of "Grizzly Man."

Watching *Corpus Callosum and marveling at its sprightliness, its joyous, imaginative air, its effortless attenuation to all that is wonderful and horrible and comical about modern technology, makes you want to jump up and shout for joy, too.

A routine memory piece about long-buried family secrets that bubble back to the surface to wreak havoc.

Kiarostami shoots Africa with an uncanny verisimilitude, coming close here to his idea of a "poetic cinema" indebted more to poetry and music than the theatrical novelistic storytelling tradition.