Scott Foundas

The emotional truthfulness of Clean enters into our bloodstreams with its muted vigor, and we find ourselves getting hooked by this tale of getting unhooked.

Anderson and his very fine cast keep things chugging along at a breathless pace, complete with a midfilm reversal of fortune nearly as unexpected as "Psycho's" shower scene. All aboard!

No mere crime drama, but rather the latest in the recent resurgence of independently financed, spiritually themed pics that seek to couch religious dogma within the shells of B-grade genre entertainment.

Nary an original idea abounds in The Island.

An amiable, but cluttered dramedy.

Though the episodic structure results in a whole not quite equal to some of its parts, pic is an unusually tender, perceptive character study buoyed by stellar performances from a who's who of talented (and many underused) actresses.

This is satire made from the inside of the ivory tower, and when, late in the third act, Fun With Dick and Jane decides to come on strong with platitudes about how the petit bourgeois really can stick it to the haute bourgeois, it goes from bad to worse.

Less outre than "Gummo" and "Julien Donkey-Boy," Korine's most lavishly produced pic to date begins as a sweet-tempered tale of social misfits-turned-celebrity impersonators, but falls short of its ambition to say something meaningful about the obsessive nature of celebrity culture.

The bigger-than-big, rambunctious spectacle is way too much of a questionably good thing.

Though an admirable attempt to allow the characters to tell their own story in their own voices, docu may be a bit too freely associative, as it becomes difficult at times to identify individual characters... Picture's second half, which proceeds in a more linear fashion, is resolutely gripping.

Not quite aptly titled, but close, writer-director Ryan Schifrin's cheapo horror opus pits everyone's favorite hirsute hominoid against the denizens of a remote town nestled at the base of a mountain called Suicide Peak. It's not much of a contest.

One of the year's most imaginative and uniquely exciting pieces of cinema.

Falls back on the broad characterizations and stereotypical situations that typified the earliest gay-themed movies, while preaching a familiar (though not entirely ingenuous) message of tolerance.

What he’s (Jonze) ended up with strikes me as one of the most empathic and psychologically acute of all movies about childhood -- a "Wizard of Oz" for the dysfunctional-family era.

Put simply, the film is a dazzling and fearless piece of showmanship.

Quite possibly the most buoyant, exuberant film ever made on such an unpleasant topic.

V for Vendetta is a dud - far too long at nearly two and a half hours, with flat, grungy visuals, choppy editing and no sense of urgency. But as a political work, it's something else - heavy-handed, reactionary and flat-out stupid. (For the record, Moore has publicly distanced himself from the film, saying it bears precious little resemblance to his original creation.)

Ultimately has nothing of any real depth or profundity to say, but a thousand self-consciously complex ways of saying it.

King Kong isn't terrible, but it's something that none of Jackson's previous movies ever was -- it's enervating.

The actors sleepwalk through their roles (save for Rosemary herself, Mia Farrow, chewing the scenery with termitelike gusto as the boy's satanic protector), while Moore, who previously directed "Behind Enemy Lines" and the "Flight of the Phoenix" remake, seems completely at a loss without any planes to crash.

Gets stuck in a rut. Hearing Santa say “f---” isn't nearly as funny the 50th time as it is the first 49.

Not as insightful as "Topsy-Turvy" or "Vanya on 42nd Street" about the process of putting on a show, it's nonetheless a fascinating meeting of the minds -- between iconic New York indie filmmaker Michael Almereyda and laconic American cowboy and dramatist Shepard.

The boldest provocation of Mitchell’s sweet, tender and gently funny film may be its exuberant celebration of community and togetherness at a cultural moment rife with fatalism and disconnect.

Calamitously uninspired and borderline incoherent, new pic lacks even those fleeting pleasures (namely, a sense of humor) that made the first film a passable popcorn attraction.

Of course, a Batman movie is nothing without a Bruce Wayne, and, by a mile, Bale is the best of a lot that has ranged from the square-jawed slapstick of Adam West to the more dedbonair stylings of Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer and George Clooney.

A powerfully affecting documentary.

There are moments of real power here -- mostly courtesy of Phillips ("Dawson's Creek"), who does a remarkable job of turning her caricature into a character -- but even more of astounding naiveté.

It's something of a family affair -- only this time, instead of casting his relatives in the leading roles, Ceylan has cast himself and his real-life wife, Ebru, as Isa and Bahar. And if, in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, such a decision might foster a mood of lurid home-movie voyeurism, both Ceylans are such commanding and subtly expressive performers that any charges of nepotism here are as erroneous as in the storied collaborations of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands.

Less compelling than all the behind-the-scenes Sturm und Drang. Even Baldwin, who waived his directing credit in favor of the pseudonymous Harry Kirkpatrick, has warned fans to stay away.

What makes the movie seem crass is its refusal to present (or even to see) more than one side of any given issue. In the logic of Konner and Rosenthal, here abetted by director Mike Newell, you're either a Jackson Pollock or a Norman Rockwell.

Tim Burton has taken a hallowed classic of the modern musical theater, hemmed in the narrative from well over two hours to well under, cast confessed nonsingers in the principal roles, and somehow managed to make something magical out of it

Rousing, family-friendly item has a big, epic look and state-of-the-art visual effects, which help to make pic -- a high-profile example of the mainstreaming of Christian entertainment.

The romance that ensues between Macy and Bello (both of whom are terrific) is exactly the kind of mature, sexy adult relationship that people complain doesn’t exist in movies anymore.

A case of means exceeded by ambition.

While Gens can splatter gore with the best of them -- early in the film, a human body packed with C4 goes off in graphic detail -- he fails to stage so much as a single rousing action scene, even when he has four double-fisted swordsmen facing off inside an abandoned subway car. Game over. The audience loses.

Surprisingly airy, jungle-set adventure, boisterously winking at Huston, Peckinpah and the same Saturday-morning serials that birthed Indiana Jones. R.J. Stewart and James Vanderbilt's tongue-in-cheek script, a hybridization of "Midnight Run" and "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," provides lots of amusing byplay for its two mismatched stars.

This anemic genre parody from two of the six writers of "Scary Movie" strives for the goofball precision of the brothers Zucker and, long before it reaches the end of its 70-odd minutes, gives you newfound respect for the comic genius of the brothers Wayans (two of the other writers of "Scary Movie").

This is exceedingly earnest stuff, dolloped with Christian goodness and solid production values.

It's one of those rare movie failures that truly warrants being called ambitious.

Begins slavishly faithful to its low-key 1970s predecessor then sledgehammers auds with a numbing succession of shock edits and over-the-top horror effects.

A richly compelling story of family and self-discovery.

Some will see this as a movie about how we're all God’s children. I saw only the misanthropic fulminations of Jensen's runaway ego.

A convoluted comic caper that labors to affect a lighthearted, off-the-cuff feel, and winds up being a copy of a copy of a bad Tarantino-Elmore Leonard forgery, with Tim Allen as a glib cinephile hitman.

This is a dark, vulgar, brooding turnoff of a movie, minus the steady laugh quotient needed to appease Sandler's core constituency.

By turns comic and tender, tragic and absurd. But throughout, it gives off what is surely one of the greatest of moviegoing pleasures -- the sense of an artist seeing the world from some private vantage that is as original as it is truthful.

The Skeleton Key takes its time making a slow, creeping ascent, but once it starts plummeting downward, Softley keeps things moving at a furious pace, and both Hudson and Rowlands enjoy surrendering themselves to the grandiloquent lunacy of it all.

Made up largely of vivid aerial shots of those folks doing the things they do, the film is a less philosophical, introspective look at contemporary surfing than Dana Brown's recent "Step Into Liquid," and is pitched at a smaller, niche audience.

An electrifying modern-dress noir, directed by Ernest Dickerson with a tough, terse, unapologetically brutal attitude that evokes the heyday of Sam Fuller and Robert Aldrich.

Apocalyptic gobbledygook.

Webber spins a slight but considerably enchanting tale of impossible romance and artistic discovery.

The 68-year-old actor (Redford) segues into full-blown irascible-old-man mode, and though the transformation isn't quite as compelling as it sounds, it's easily the best thing going for this Lasse Hallstrom–directed, Wyoming-set weepie.

Sentinel works overtime to suggest what a thrill-a-minute world its characters inhabit; but only during the last 20 minutes does the movie's pulse (or ours) raise above a flatline. The actors look uniformly unhappy to be there - except for Basinger, who seems lost in a lithium haze.

Sketches was produced for PBS's American Masters series, but it's in theaters now and deserves to be seen on the largest possible screen.

It's true, of course, that Trier still hasn't set foot on U.S. soil, but it may be that he sees us, in all our virtue and victimhood, that much more clearly for it.

Johnson pulls us into his world and keeps things oddly plausible, despite the intense stylization

This buoyant, optimistic fable seems to share in the late Ronald Reagan's optimism for America. It does so with the help of a gifted comic ensemble led by Tom Hanks.

If we never do find out exactly why Wilbur is so intent on offing himself, it almost doesn't matter, given Sives' magnetic, star-making performance and the careful, elating mixture of comedy and pathos.

This is a heartfelt endeavor, given weight by Shimono's extraordinary performance, in which the actor uses the subtlest flicks of his weary brow to call forth torrents of sorrow and minefields of regret.

Lacks so much as a single fresh idea; it lacks an entertaining way of presenting its stale ideas, too.

Richly satisfying both as subversive, music-biz primer and as gritty, true-life underdog story.

The visual effects are predictably excellent -- sometimes, in the case of a three-man free fall through space, unexpectedly lyrical -- but most of the movie's dramatic conflicts feel strictly pro forma.

Cherot (who also co-wrote the script with Charles E. Drew Jr.) has made that rare hip-hop movie that doesn't fetishize lurid ghetto clichés.

The direction is lazy and the script thoroughly witless, from its token Bergman references to dialogue that suggests a night in borscht-belt hell.

At nearly six hours, pic's extreme length lets Giordana and screenwriters Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli build up a novelistic rhythm, pulling the audience so deeply and forcefully into their story that it becomes like a enveloping dream; when it's over, parting with the characters is truly sweet and sorrowful.

As before, there are moments, when Schneider is turned loose to do his anything-goes, creepy-funny shtick, that are crudely inspired.

Long before the movie's climax, in which Magneto (Ian McKellen) turns smashed-up automobiles into fiery projectiles to be hurled at his enemies, those in the audience will know what it means to behold a flaming hunk of junk.

Monumentally terrible but far too bizarre to be boring.

All three actors are more than up to the challenge, particularly the radiant Salazar, who feasts upon that rare gift of a role that allows an actress the wrong side of 40 to be funny, sexy and vital without apologizing.

Ultimately something of a softball satire, its climactic evocation of the "true meaning" of the holidays is surprisingly touching.

There's a whiff of exploitation about any movie that claims the Holocaust as a “backdrop,” and Rolf Schübel’s treacly tale of three men lovesick for the same blue-eyed beauty fairly reeks of it.

The picture is an enormous disappointment... The result is one of the most self-consciously grimy movies on record - it looks as if the negative were developed in a mud bath.

If this is what qualifies, as some critics have suggested, as an artistic advance for Mr. Park, let us pray for a hasty retreat.

Mildly diverting caper.

By and large, the jokes fall flat, and the entire film often seems as fatigued as its star.

There's something magical about seeing a packed house of 300 Taveuni locals laugh equally uproariously, and, without a nanosecond’s worth of culture shock, at Queen Latifah in "Bringing Down the House" and Buster Keaton in "Steamboat Bill, Jr."

As in the late-period works of Mel Brooks, the very structure of the film feels irreparably fatigued.

Sublimely trashy, this conceptual sequel to 1997's surprise hit, "Anaconda," doesn't expect to be taken any more seriously than its schlock predecessor, and keeps its tongue-in-cheek thrills flowing rapidly.

Bujalski takes a sledgehammer to the carefully ordered surfaces and dramatic conventions of narrative cinema, favoring instead an unpredictability in which the crosscurrents of quotidian life collide on the screen in a series of brilliantly alive patterns.

Despite a promising setup, pic never really goes anywhere, instead immersing viewers in a kinetic onslaught of flesh (namely, that of Milla Jovovich) and flesh-eaters (most of the rest of the cast).

These resourceful actors -- to say nothing of the audience -- deserve better.

The film skews young, to be sure, and it isn't as memorable as the new Disney classics of the early 1990s, but there's still plenty here to hold the interest of viewers of all ages: delightful performances (particularly by Dench, plowing Angela Lansbury terrain), zinging comic dialogue and a soundtrack that's a wealth of sonorous riches.

May not be a complete success, but it is in some ways that rarest of commodities in American movies: It is a movie about sex and sexuality, in its many perversions and permutations, done without falling back on an exploitatively comic or violent scenario.

Director Jessy Terrero's spasmodically funny air-travel parody unfailingly counters every one of its genuinely uproarious gags with at least two or three others rooted in retrograde racial panic.

When most filmmakers want to say something important about cultural conflicts, they labor to bring tears to our eyes. Dabis, by contrast, makes us laugh at ourselves and, in turn, each other.

Jaglom's quickest and funniest picture in years and the most accessible.

There may be no other actor (Thornton)working today (or as frequently) who is this good each and every time out.

The film's power is undeniable, as a bittersweet valentine to Buzz and the many others who came to Hollywood and found a factory that produced dreams, yes, but nightmares too.

For those of us who find Lelouch an unbreakable habit -- the guiltiest of guilty pleasures -- watching And Now Ladies & Gentlemen comes close to sheer moviegoing bliss.

The script, credited to "Twin Peaks" co-creator Mark Frost and longtime "Simpsons" writer Don Payne, unsuccessfully strives for hipster irreverence.

Has a relaxed poeticism to it; it's a sweetly naive, adolescent Hemingway fantasy with a star-making performance by Shawn Hatosy and good ones from everyone else (including Caan).

Crossing the Line, like its subject, remains a fascinating and frustrating enigma -- a declassified government report still marred by redacted passages.

It’s a film about the excruciating pursuit of money and self-gratification, which Hyams makes strangely analogous to the everyday workplace, suggesting that the conflicts and aggressions being worked out in the no-holds-barred ring are merely a more primal expression of what anyone who works any kind of job encounters daily.

Starts out as an inspired test case for the continued necessity of the Second Amendment, and only near the end does it lose some of its tightly concentrated focus.

Curiously, Jarhead transforms Swofford himself (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) from the book’s duty-bound youth, desperate to live up to his father's military legacy, into an enigmatic voyeur whose feelings and motivations are rarely made clear.

The only character who emerges as more than an ideological mouthpiece, and nearly saves the movie, is the Ambassador's resident hairstylist, who masks her faded beauty with a thick coat of eye shadow and an overteased hairdo. I kept wondering who this deeply sad, earthy actress was, making so much out of so little, until I realized it was Sharon Stone in the most naked performance she's ever given without taking her clothes off.

This is gloriously self-aware hokum, a fantasy movie that is, above all, about our need for fantasy and escapism -- and even our need for movies like The Astronaut Farmer -- to help us combat the depression and disappointments of the everyday.

What you end up with are a bunch of kids acting not like kids, but how adults who've lost all sense of what it was like to be a kid think kids behave.

The Last Winter won’t win many fans among those who place the saving of union jobs above the repairing of the ozone layer. But this is a horror movie with many inconvenient truths to tell about the ways in which we are willingly destroying our planet.

A remarkably clear-eyed look back at a moment in which real revolution seemed possible - even probable - in America's streets.

The comic, tragic and monumentally beautiful new film by writer-director Jia Zhangke (Platform).

The usually zippy and subversive director Mark Waters (Freaky Friday, Mean Girls) plays things straight and suffocatingly sentimental - which actually makes the whole movie seem that much creepier.

Has surprising hipness and good humor to spare, all put across with a funky, low-tech vibe.

What neither Howard nor his screenwriter, Ken Kaufman, seem to realize is that The Missing is that much bleaker and more unsettling when its horrors spring forth from the land itself and from the souls of wayward men.

This meticulously well-made picture is disarmingly funny at times - not least during the ballet of bloody absurdity that is the assassination itself - but also subdued and straight-faced, with one eye planted on 1979 and the other on the violent student demonstrations looming in the distance.

The ultimate test of one's tolerance for King's self-aggrandizing postulations about writer's block, obsessive fans and the potentially frightening manifestations of the writer's id...It's just plain lousy.

Love it or hate it, Northfork is a cinematic vision (visually and textually) unlike any with which most moviegoers, even arthouse regulars, will be familiar.

The movie surely owes something to Polanski, Cronenberg, et al., in its use of an apparently placid, upper-middle-class setting as the background for perverse horrors, but De Van's fearless, high-wire performance is uniquely its own.

Lackluster pic fails both as suspense and as character study.

At its best, Behind the Mask offers some, um, cutting insights about mass-media blood lust and the cult of the serial killer, and in Baesel, who is by turns charming, manic and thoroughly scary, it has a gifted young actor who clearly relishes a role he can sink his pitchfork into.

One of the best part 3's ever made, and Rodriguez's knack for concocting the most imaginatively deranged children's entertainments since "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" remains unassailed.

At the picture’s best, it recalls Michael Winterbottom's "24 Hour Party People" in its tribute to the music of the times and the way in which that music provided a voice to a generation of social misfits.

Compulsively watchable, with its fair share of effective sledgehammer shocks; it just isn't very good.

Dog Days is in fact a bleak but deeply felt humanism -- a yearning that we might all learn to better love our neighbors and, perhaps more importantly, ourselves.

What the movie needs is a director, and what it gets instead is Pitof, a French visual-effects maestro so much fonder of technological wizardry than of human flesh that he manages to turn even his slinky, sinuous star attraction into a digitized synthespian frolicking about endless CGI cityscapes.

Fiercely intelligent, terrifying and absurdly funny documentary.

Has shown its true colors as less a serious religious-themed film than a moth-eaten tapestry of foreign intrigue and badly miscast international stars.

The result is a brilliant and relentless thriller, painted in Melville's trademark shades of charcoal and midnight blue, marked by daring escapes, unimaginable moments of self-sacrifice and unconscionable acts of betrayal.

Attempts to delve beneath the surface of Hollywood's rampant narcissism and fascination with technology, but ultimately feels like just one more in the long line of films this year about the business of making movies.

An odd concoction: an English-language movie made by Dutch filmmakers working with an American cast on location in Russia and Mexico. That strangeness, combined with sharp casting and affectionate performances, is a big part of "Affair's" charm.

Ensemble casts like this are not easy to come by. Adams is something more than that -- a brilliant young comedian bursting into bloom.

A lurid, overheated Southern Gothic that wallows in its own unpleasantness.

The Roost advances a nifty man-vs.-nature scenario that harks back to Fessenden's own "Wendigo" and provides a nice chaser to a summer movie season populated by cuddly penguins and benevolent cheetahs.

The pleasure of La Moustache is that it doesn't feel the need to explain itself at every turn. Part absurdist comedy about the institution of marriage, part paranoid Kafkaesque fantasy, it's a minor-key reverie on the way our own lives can sometimes feel alien to us.

Are We There Yet? traps the affable Ice Cube in a dismal kiddy slapstick saga that even his considerable charisma can do little to enhance.

It's a finely tuned Motor City engine: The action, including a nighttime car chase through a blinding snowstorm, is fast, brutal and efficient; the Motown soundtrack never cuts out; and as a gangster called Sweet, the British-Nigerian actor Chiwetel Ejiofor gives an electrifying performance.

Audiences won't show much clemency toward Death & Texas, an uneasy (and very unfunny) marriage of sports culture satire and death penalty polemic.

Under Mangold’s sure if uninspired hand, the new Yuma is reasonably exciting and terse, and, like its predecessor, built around a memorable villain of ambiguous villainy.

Outside of Sylvia, none of the characters has any real presence or personality in a movie that takes greater interest in shots of pretty flowers than in the human beings onscreen, and in which nearly every major plot turn is the result of blind chance.

Stunningly bad sci-fi/fantasy hokum.

Making an altogether impressive big-screen directing debut, Jones exudes quiet control over this full-bodied Western, taking pleasure in his measured pacing, mixing somber authority with flashes of surrealist wit and luxuriating in the magnificent, vanishing vistas of his home state.

The performers are a bright bunch, especially Snow (even if she's no sane person’s idea of a wallflower), Metcalfe, who has the cocksure swagger of a young Travolta, and McCarthy, who infuses her few scenes with a haggard dignity masquerading as optimism.

Beerfest bubbles with the cheeky irreverence of early John Landis and David Zucker. Yet, like just about every other American screen comedy of the moment, it's far too long in the tooth, with a scattershot final half-hour that seems the work of an editor battling a bad hangover.

For those of us who prefer to judge Gibson solely in terms of his art, the movie is a virtuosic piece of action cinema -- particularly in its second half...And while there has been no shortage of recent films that decry the horrors of war and man's inhumanity to his fellow man, I know of none other quite this sickeningly powerful.

So beneath the considerable talents of its star, Chris Rock, it's dismaying to note Rock is also the movie's director, producer and co-scenarist. Not unlike Richard Pryor a generation ago, Rock has yet to land a movie vehicle that captures the sparky energy and subversive bent of his excellent stand-up performances.

In a boom time for movies about the scars of the battlefield, Half Moon reminds that the unending strife and religious fundamentalism of the Middle East kills not just people but culture too.

Dazzling imagery and a grab bag of wry jokes, no matter how lively, can take a movie only so far when there's no emotional ballast attached.

A mostly superb bit of modern horror from the writer-director-editor previously responsible for the Frankenstein story "No Telling" and the urban vampire pic "Habit."

As bad as the movie is, when it tries to be funny -- a hired killer who sings to his victims, a fat man named Bumpo, and an interminable fight scene choreographed to “La donna è mobile” -- it somehow manages to get several degrees worse.

Far too often, Douglas indulges his preference for the superficial over the substantive: The plentiful performance footage -- shot in overproduced, music-video fashion -- overwhelms the film, as do White’s purplish, faux-poetic musings.

At once playful and thorough, the documentary is also stacked teased-hair high with wicked performance footage.

Surprisingly enjoyable, even if you'd hesitate to call it a complete success. Indeed, Figgis expects you to sit back and roll with the pleasurable moments.

Wallows in the deviant proclivities of the rich, wearing its rancor like a merit badge.

Totally cliched and nearly two hours long, pic takes forever to get to hopelessly obvious places.

A deep-fried piece of Southern Gothic that wears its unpleasantness like a merit badge.

The concept here holds more promise than the execution.

Now, Soderbergh has made a movie so cool it's practically comatose. Sputtering along from one half-cocked gag line and self-satisfied in-joke to the next, Ocean's Thirteen is as slapdash and slipshod a three-quel as any in this summer's box-office sweepstakes.

The Reckoning proceeds with such leaden literal-mindedness that it never seems more than a stodgy (and, at times, blatantly silly) paperback affair.

All might have been forgiven were it not for a needlessly Shyamalanized ending that deserves to earn Wyatt at least 25 years for grand-theft cinema.

Ladies in Lavender oscillates between scenes so relentlessly nice they make you want to scream and others - particularly those depicting the crush Dench develops on her new housemate - creepier than anything in "The Amityville Horror."

Simply put, it represents the work of a filmmaker so exhilaratingly in command of his craft that he can, among other things, turn a single image of two people standing next to each other -- fully clothed, their bodies not quite touching -- into one of the most sublimely erotic moments we have ever beheld on the screen.

Since premiering on the festival circuit in 2002, this small masterpiece has been one of the best films around not to secure a proper theatrical release, and while one week on a single L.A. screen at the height of the crowded holiday season may not exactly qualify as proper, it's nevertheless a joyous happening.

Even by the low standards of high-concept Hollywood rom-coms, this charmless, prophetically titled stinker stands apart, suggesting that the recent mass firings at studio Paramount may not have been such a bad idea after all.

Consistently hilarious.

This is the umpteenth movie I’ve seen this year about guys in their 30s who aren't quite sure what they want to do with their lives, and it's the only one that strikes a real chord, because it's neither an exaltation nor a condemnation of slackerdom, but rather just a sweet little fable about how sometimes the life that you think could be so much better is actually pretty damn good already.

Infamous is the better Capote film, yes, but also the less easily digestible one, the more eccentric one and -- yes -- the gayer one.

The movie is affectionate without exactly being infectious, and Browne, who begins his film with the Michael Moore–esque revelation that Americans bowl in greater numbers than they vote, disappoints by not devoting more attention to bowling in its amateur incarnations.

The film’s appeal is at once sentimental and perverse: It’s not every day that you get to see a 92-year-old woman soloing on “Should I Stay Or Should I Go.” Not surprisingly, a feature remake is already in the works.

The Legend of Zorro is a Saturday matinee entirely lacking in Saturday-matinee thrills or brevity -- what's passable for the first 80 minutes or so becomes intolerable as the movie ticks past the two-hour mark.

By not even attempting to follow Sterne to the letter, Winterbottom and Boyce have triumphantly captured his impish creative spirit.

The film arrives at a familiar conclusion -- that war is hell -- but the getting there is made uniquely unsettling by Dumont's relentlessly anti-psychological disposition.

Those masters of small-scale realism, Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, have created yet another beautifully acted, exquisitely observed morality tale in The Child.

As lead Columbine investigator Kate Battan has herself put it, “Everybody wants a quick answer. They want an easy answer so that they can sleep at night and know this is not going to happen tomorrow.” And now they have Gus Van Sant's Elephant.

At its best, in its early, more subdued passages, Poor White Trash provides a couple of pristine comic moments. At its worst, it spirals uncontrollably into an unfunny void.

The whole movie is curiously distant and flat, like a museum object encased in extra-thick glass.

Snicket's macabre tale of three newly orphaned siblings has been lavishly visualized. But for all its elaborate splendor, production pic lacks the feeling and imagination that have distinguished the best recent kidpics.

Whereas "Nine Queens" was a movie of clockwork precision and blindsiding reversals, El Aura is more internalized and digressive but no less striking, in large part thanks to Darin's mesmerizing performance.

Rich in its love of surfing but curiously short on such footage, well-meaning directorial debut by producer Robert Mickelson is boosted by winning performances, but ultimately about as memorable as a day of 3-4 foot swells.

Torpid, academic vanity project for helmer-thesp Rodolphe Marconi.

Lounguine’s biopic is chilly and convoluted, too eventful to be boring, but never taking the time to immerse us emotionally in Makovski's world.

Wryly comic, sometimes heartbreaking and altogether original film about a thirtysomething Angeleno who pays a visit to his aging New York parents and finds himself unwilling or unable to leave.

Sad, tender, wise and beautiful film... It's a profound tribute to lives lived on the fringes of society -- to the introspective loners who are the most observant chroniclers of our times.

A beautifully nuanced study in friendship and the irretrievability of the past.

The satirical jabs at celebrity culture smell like rotted leftovers from "The Fantastic Four." The token ruminations on the tension between a superhero's public and private lives seem flown in from Bryan Singer's "Superman Returns" (to say nothing of Raimi's own, superior "Darkman"). Most egregious, though, is the way Raimi and the writers reduce Spider-Man 3 to the very sort of abject distinctions between virtue and sin that the series has heretofore studiously avoided.

Miserably unfunny, wholly unnecessary affair.

Billed as a silent film, Guy Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain! is actually closer to a live theatrical event -- a feature-length motion picture screened with the accompaniment of a live orchestra, plus Foley artists, sound effects technicians and assorted vocalists, too. Together, they provide the elaborate soundscape for a typically frenetic, Maddin-esque amalgam of the autobiographical, Freudian and willfully absurd.

The canniness of Bale’s performance (which may be the best of his young but brilliant career) is that he plays Dengler as a fundamentally kind and simple yet rather ingenious man.

"Old Joy" helmer Kelly Reichardt plays to her strengths in Wendy and Lucy, a modest yet deeply felt road movie about an idealistic young drifter, her faithful canine and the wide-open spaces of the Pacific Northwest.

The attempt to draw certain connections between Griffin's material and its autobiographical origins feels slapped together, shortchanging both aspects of the film.

Most impressive in an objective sense, as a technical exercise -- its staccato technique preventing greater involvement.

Begins as a refreshingly subversive departure from the Hollywood studios' cookie-cutter romances, but the thin script can't sustain that initial charge, and it soon flattens out, like a punctured comic balloon.

The Intended is unintentionally risible from frame one to last. But don't just blame Levring: The script was co-authored by none other than McTeer herself, and the result suggests the sort of self-flagellating, anti-vanity project that can occur when perfectly capable actors start taking themselves way too seriously.

It's not a great movie, or even a particularly good one, but it's spectacular. No expense has been spared. The technical crew reads like a roll call of Oscar-night regulars.

He Was a Quiet Man casts its own perversely funny spell thanks in large part to Slater, whose wonderfully shifty, beaten-down performance is easily his best in the 17 years.

If the movie is finally something of a failure as a romance, it's rarely less than a triumph of soulful imagination.

In most horror movies, it's a given that we should root for the heroes to make it out alive, but Diary of the Dead isn't nearly so certain, and so it terrifies us all the more.

Brutally truthful, funny and touching in nearly equal measure.

Art School Confidential reaches its dementedly brilliant peak in the company of Jim Broadbent.

Despite the intriguing set-up, there's something unambitious and scaled-back about Star Trek Nemesis, so that most of the time it feels like a slightly suped-up episode of the "Next Generation" TV series.

An immensely likable, funny comedy that finds a novel approach to that familiar combo of kids and sports.

It all sounds like a recipe for the most noxious liberal jerk-off movie since "Crash," but in the hands of writer-director Richard LaGravenese, Freedom Writers turns out to be a superb piece of mainstream entertainment -- not an agonized debate over the principles of modern education à la "The History Boys," but a simple, straightforward and surprisingly affecting story of one woman who managed to make a difference.

In the landscape of contemporary movie comedies, Kitchen Stories is like a rejuvenating blast of crisp Nordic air.

Despite early-on guffaws, pic suffers from the same problem that has plagued nearly all of the similarly adapted “Saturday Night Live” films: It fails to sustain its initial burst of comic inspiration over the course of its feature-length running time.

The Great Raid cries out for the kind of B-movie industriousness that Dahl brought to his early, low-budget films noirs (Kill Me Again, Red Rock West and The Last Seduction), but instead it has dreams of sugarplum Oscars dancing in its head, and never stops mistaking spectacle for the truly spectacular.

At a time when most American movies, studio made or "independent," seem ever more divorced from anything approximating actual life experience, Half Nelson is so sobering and searingly truthful that watching it feels like being tossed from a calm beach into a raging current.

The most affable and endearing of the recent wave of films about Indian immigrants assimilating in the West.

Is there a Razzie Award for worst casting? If so, it’s one of several that can be reserved early for this fourth, spectacularly lousy screen version of Jack Finney’s 1954 novella "The Body Snatchers," which some bright light envisioned as the ideal starring vehicle for the Cold Mountain herself, Nicole Kidman, and for Daniel Craig, last seen as the most poker-faced James Bond on record.

Far from an embarrassment and a generally fine piece of work.

It's a romantic comedy in which both the romance and the comedy are turned to such muted levels that any lower would require closed captioning.

Like the best pulp, though, it gets its hooks into you faster than you can start to wonder why you should possibly care about what happens to any of its despicable characters, and, before you know it, you’ve been pulled deep into its Dantean vision.

Time of the Wolf is tough medicine, to be sure. Yet, the movie builds to a note of cautious optimism that is as stirring as it is unexpected.

It's "Rain Man" with ageism substituted for autism.

There's no question, though, that the Wayanses have dialed down the outrageousness to nearly sub-PG-13 levels.

It all rings particularly hollow in light of several recent pics ("Last Orders" and "The Barbarian Invasions" chief among them) that have explored similar terrain with much greater emotion and intelligence.

It's a fantastic-looking picture in search of a decent script.

As a spy pic, it has more pizzazz than the last few Bond adventures, "The Sum of All Fears" or "The Recruit."

Morlang has surprises up its sleeve that even the seasoned genre fan may not see coming.

If you cut through Lucas' thickets of self-reflexivity, metaphysical mumbo jumbo and banal potshots at media violence, there are three ace performances here by actors who can elevate and enliven even as mediocre a piece of material as this.

Provided you don't think too long or hard about it (and why ever would you?), Live Free or Die Hard is infectious good fun, and a tremendous encouragement to the middle aged.

With There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson has taken a stab at making The Great American Movie -- and I daresay he’s made one of them.

Moves along at a clip and provides a terrific action lead for Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson.

If Blake Edwards wrote a script and then Abel Ferrara directed it, it might look something like Nowhere Man.

What's appealing about Bond is precisely its unhip classicism -- its promise of clean, crisp excitement delivered without the interference of whiplash-inducing camera pyrotechnics, attention-deficient editing patterns, gratuitous color tinting and/or ear-splitting rock ballads.

This is classical activist filmmaking of the first order, a movie with the power to turn hearts, change minds and, just maybe, right the wayward course of an entire city.

Manna from gearhead heaven, the third and most guiltily pleasurable Furious emits the crude thrills of a 1950s drag-racing cheapie, only with souped-up Toyotas and Nissans in place of gas-guzzling hot rods, and slinky Asian temptresses substituted for poodle-skirted teenyboppers.

After an hour of predictably sophomoric antics involving foulmouthed kids, compulsively self-pleasuring canines and the rampant objectification of women, Click turns into a surrealist death dream in which Sandler's masochistic impulses flower onscreen as never before.

Handsomely mounted, this direly conventional bit of vampire business is enlivened by flashes of humor and game performances. It isn't great entertainment or camp, but pic sets its ambitions so low, it can't help partially delivering on them.

Fascinating and frustrating in nearly equal measure.

As in many of his films, Jaglom establishes a striking intimate rapport with his female subjects, and as the funny and bitter revelations pour forth, an activity that many men may view as something done strictly out of necessity takes on unforeseen narcotic, romantic and therapeutic dimensions.

Further proof that titular antagonist Jason Voorhes is ready for retirement -- to videostore shelves.

di Florio emerges with a serenely powerful, handcrafted film that navigates into a place Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once called "the tangled discords of our nation."

The musical film version of The Producers is, for better or worse, a faithful record of the stage production, adhering to the same if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it philosophy that informed the recent "Rent."

Black Snake Moan is, at its core, a fairly straightforward variation on George Bernard Shaw -- "Pigsfeetmalion," if you will. One day, when he outgrows his terminal adolescence, Brewer might be the perfect filmmaker to tackle Faulkner or Tennessee Williams.

Directing seems an unduly elegant term for what Hollywood hack du jour Tim Story (Barbershop, Taxi) does here -- the action scenes are so choppily constructed that their excitement disappears faster than the Invisible Woman.

An ultra-touchy-feely race-relations, civil-rights drama as imagined by theme-park organizers, with every character painted in broad strokes in a story that eagerly tugs at every available heartstring -- and rings false at every turn.

The actors are superb -- especially Smith, who exudes some of the live-wire charisma of the young Sean Penn in Rosenthal's "Bad Boys," and the smoldering Brewster.

Blessed with a witty script (by Zobel and co-writer George Smith), a talented ensemble of little-known character actors and a Meredith Willson-like feel for just-plain-folks Americans, this is a low-key but enormously charming picture.

The Anarchist Cookbook drops a few scant sparks onto a torch that, hopefully, some other filmmaker will come along and run with.

The happiest marriage yet of the disparate propagandistic and narrative influences inherent in the subgenre of "religious" cinema.

Shakily cobbled together from stock footage and new interviews with authors and family, Stalin’s Wife is nearly barbarous in its denial of aesthetic pleasure. The whole thing looks like a late-night-TV infomercial.

This ridiculously entertaining sequel is that rare part deux that leaves you hankering for part trois. The action is, in a word, spectacular, but also playful, inventive and witty.

Lady in the Water feels very much like something its author made up as he went along; and, if it weren't so damn weird, it would most certainly put you right to sleep.

For all its infectious, go-for-broke wackiness ATHFCMFFT never quite surpasses its opening sequence.

Nearly wall-to-wall climax -- an unwieldy, two-plus-hours third act of a movie, guided by the principle (incubated by "Reloaded" and fully grown here) that too much is never too much.

An orgy of bloodletting and dismemberment that's more monotonous than shocking. Aja and Levasseur are to splatter what Liberace was to rhinestones: practitioners of gaud.

It's forceful and alive and spilling over with crazy poetry.

Cruise is probably the most graceful physical performer to occupy the screen since Burt Lancaster, and in this sort of action role, he's just about peerless...He may not be a great actor, but to find a greater movie star would be a nigh impossible mission.

A perceptive, unsettling psychodrama marking the assured feature writing and directing debut of shorts filmmaker Kyle Henry.

All the trappings of an energetic, extreme-sports adventure, but ends up more of a creaky "Pretty Woman" retread, with the emphasis on self-empowering schmaltz and with the big-wave surfing that gives pic its title seemingly an afterthought.

Rigged toward a sentimental conclusion and overpopulated with cutesy touches (including a curtain-call finale), but there are many remarkable sights along the way.

It's the third feature Miller has shot using lightweight digital video cameras, and the result is a special lightness in the work itself -- the glowing images ease into one another like leaves turning in a summer breeze, while the performances are similarly effortless.

British director Eric Till’s ghastly Euro-pudding co-production (with all the international accents and badly post-synchronized dialogue that implies) manages to make a travesty of its title subject.

Terrifically terrible, Spartan could well be Mamet's first true comedy. Only the movie thinks it's a nail biter.

More often than not, Two Men Went to War resembles a feature-length episode of "Hogan's Heroes," with the brave but clumsy Brits continually managing to outfox the even more bungling Nazis.

A movie as lacking in personality as its amnesiac protagonist.

A small masterpiece of tone and form.

A debut of enormous craft, surety and resourcefulness -- a superlative, soul-baring non-fiction work that will generate torrential word-of-mouth among auds lucky enough to catch it.

Jokes about impotence, menopause and other middle-aged maladies reside where a screenplay ought to live.

It's a pungent study of fads, trends and the way everything once genuine ends up being homogenized and exploited beyond recognition by corporate America -- a fine companion piece to Stacy Peralta's "Dogtown and Z-Boys," but with a more raw, punkish aesthetic.

Even Cohen can't dull the loony romanticism of the movie’s finale and, to his credit, stages one truly spectacular bit of action midway through, when Biel bails out behind enemy lines and narrates each harrowing moment of her earthward plummet.

This remarkable film from Australia, the debut feature of writer-director Cate Shortland, moves to the lyrical rhythms and unhurried pace of a 1970s road movie.

What makes the film transcend its limitations is Carell, whose square, "Father Knows Best" demeanor belies a supreme comic self-confidence and whose implacability in the face of the movie's CGI-intensive animal antics can be marvelous to behold.

Like most of Kaufman's work as a writer, Synecdoche, New York is a head trip that time and again returns to a place of real human emotion--in this case, to the idea that no matter how brilliant we may be or think we are, we're all looking for a little guidance (or, yes, direction) in life.

The movie isn't particularly tasteful or finely crafted -- but it grabs you by the jugular, and only during an overcooked climax does it finally relax its grip.

Like the movie’s mysterious Jigsaw doppelgänger, Saw IV is itself a poor substitute for the original.

If Napoleon Dynamite really is, as reported, a semiautobiographical exercise, it is one of the most astoundingly self-hating such exercises in memory.

Two superb, nervy and delicately nuanced performances by newcomers Clint Jordan and Kirsten Russell enliven and momentarily elevate writer-director Joe Maggio's Virgil Bliss above the familiar post-prison-drama cliches to which it so strenuously adheres.

The more things drag on, the more monotonous they become and, by the end, Hard Candy has devolved into a rather transparent game of one-upmanship in which Hayley and Jeff come across in almost equally repellent measure, their behaviors driven less by organic impulses than by their need to satisfy the script's elaborate series of reversals and counter-reversals.

Given her (Halle Berry) biggest part since winning Oscar, she responds with a zeal that's more than the movie deserves.

The Room marks the writing-directing-acting debut of Tommy Wiseau, who's not just one of the most unusual looking and sounding (with an unidentifiable Eastern European accent) leading men ever to grace the screen, but a narcissist nonpareil whose movie makes Vincent Gallo's "The Brown Bunny" seem the apotheosis of cinematic self-restraint.

Coraline Jones isn't the pluckiest or most ingratiating sprite ever to take center stage in a children's film, and her (mis)adventures aren't especially novel, but Coraline is still a consistent splendor to behold.

The movie rarely overcomes its terminal Scorsese- and Ferrara-isms, or fulfills the promise, evident in the film's early passages, that Montias might be a fine observer of local color with his own unique stories to tell.

Though Lifshitz's attitude toward sex and sexuality ranks among the most progressive in contemporary movies, he doesn't belabor it; seen through his eyes, Wild Side is a love story in which love is unrestrained by matters of gender or sexual orientation or even the number of lovers.

The movie's tag line, which promises (among other things) “No stereotypes,” is one of those rare cases of truth in advertising. That Brown also happens to have captured some genuinely awesome surf footage -- often the only raison d’être for such films -- feels like a bonus.

The movie is so rigged to elicit the audience's empathy that it becomes difficult to watch; it's stifling.

An insufferable, self-conscious cult movie, The Chumscrubber smugly heaps on half-baked ideas about media violence, the homogeneity of suburbia and the disintegration of the American family.

Can a movie about global warming genuinely be called lighthearted? If so, Daniel B. Gold and Judith Helfand's Everything's Cool comes as close as one imagines possible, essaying yet more inconvenient truths about the potential future of our planet in the same buoyant, irreverent style the filmmakers brought to their last activist docu, "Blue Vinyl."

On the plus side, The Company is directed by Robert Altman, who's clearly drawn in by the rare opportunity of putting ballet on film, and who responds brilliantly...The rest of the time, the film fails to catch us up in the workaday intrigues of its characters (most of whom are played by real Joffrey dancers) the way Altman can when he's working in top form.

Structurally, it's ambitious, but emotionally the movie never quite connects, spending so much time laboring over its parallel storytelling and its cosmic connections that the characters remain at arm's length, as intangible as reflections in glass.

Testud, who learned to speak Japanese phonetically for the role, is nothing short of sublime, her expressive face morphing from tear-stained frustration to slaphappy delirium with the speed of lightning flashing across the Tokyo sky.

Most of the time Wedding Crashers is more genteel than it is outrageous (or funny), playing like an only slightly less benign spin on the tiresome fish-out-of-water farce that fueled the two Meet the Parents movies.

A superior example of fearless filmmakers in exactly the right place at the right time.

More palatable than "Texas," Dawn also seems even less necessary, given how effectively the original was reworked last year in Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later."

Ellis and screenwriter Eric Bress even go all meta on us with an "Inglourious Basterds"–esque finale set inside a 3D cinema, though their set pieces never quite muster the giddy brio of "Final Destination 1" and "3" auteur James Wong at his best.

Lucas is a major figure, and Revenge of the Sith may be some kind of historic achievement -- the first movie in which it is fully impossible to tell where flesh ends and digital paint begins.