Sean Axmaker

All the furiousness doesn't really add up to anything, but there is grungy fun to be had in gizmo-laden art direction and the increasingly bizarre battle of wits of the weirdly warped South Korean sci-fi black comedy.

This community finds its balance with an easy effortlessness.

It's both innocent and bizarre, with a mischievous sense of fantasy marked by simple but striking cinematic magic.

The echoes of Douglas Sirk melodramas and Lassie movies just add to the fun.

It's great to see action stars cast for their moves -- their grace in motion is thrilling -- but they also have the charisma to pull off the characters.

Strong, evocative storytelling pared to the bone and braced with a sensibility perfectly matched to the material.

A sweet little comedy, as easygoing and warmly innocuous as the benign irony of the title.

It has a tendency to overextend its outrageous arias, but this pop-art confection both spoofs and celebrates the crazy conventions of movie melodramas and genre cinema with pure affection.

It's a little visually precious and obscure but still a marvelously wistful film of regret and retreat, in which even the magic wine of forgetfulness erases only the memories, not the pain.

Director Len Wiseman, confidently stepping up from the smallish budget "Underworld" films to mega-budget Hollywood mainstream.

Outside national borders, this naive vantage point is an entry into a country's history and culture, explaining without seeming patronizing.

For all its darkness and tragedy, Monster's Ball is a film that wants to be liked and Forster stumbles over his good intentions to win the audience over.

He (LaBute) pulls the farce and the violence and the fantasies together with a deft touch and a sweetness rare in American films -- especially his.

There's a real gee-whiz kick to the fantasy of being the brainiest kid on the planet, and a down-to-earth quality to Jimmy and his not-so-bright, but ever-so-stalwart best buddies.

Based more on rumor and supposition than fact. It's a highly entertaining set of hypotheses.

The most sensuous and intimate work of cinema of the past few years, a film that luxuriates in the immediacy of the moment. There is no guilt to the act, only exhilaration, joy and freedom. At least for the moment.

Mamet is more respectful than exciting as an action director, but his fascination with how things work, be it the mechanics of designing and promoting a big pay-per-view event or battling a world-class Jiu-jitsu master, makes it all quite mesmerizing.

An impressive, adrenaline-boosted action showcase.

Fascinating memoir of coming of age in Iran.

There's no particular tragedy or triumph, merely another step in the lives of two fallible people finding a little comfort while stumbling toward happiness.

At times a bit stilted, a common quality of first-time directors who try too hard to sculpt every scene, but it's refreshingly bereft of slick cynicism and smart-ass snideness.

Techine has a delicate touch and these lovely moments flow with a life that Martin's heavy, stumbling psychodrama can't match.

The impressive marriage of CGI backgrounds and traditional hand-drawn characters gives Oshii more tools to sculpt his vision in color and light.

The most imaginative and delightful computer-animated movie of recent years outside of the Pixar brand, Monster House is a Halloween ghost story by way of monster-movie adventure.

It's a rare film that gets smarter as it goes along, injecting a satisfying dash of pragmatism every time it seems ready to slip into either unearned idealism or cynical fatalism.

Kurosawa leaves much of the explanation enigmatic but he fills the film with an eerie emptiness, where suicides erupt out of nowhere and mankind dissolves in an oily smudge of hopelessness, adrift between life and death.

There's plenty of ammunition here for liberal conspiracy theorists, which surely will limit the audience to those already in Jarecki's political camp. Which is too bad, for it is a sobering history lesson as well as a political polemic on foreign policy and the growth of war into America's biggest business.

There's a dark and demented little psychodrama of self-inflicted madness beneath the narrative contrivances. Vigalondo's direction makes it work more like a waking nightmare than a genuine experience, and he gives it the quality of madness.

Rich with emotional turmoil and searing beauty, but it could have used a little more time in the editing room to make sense of it all.

Pitt won the Best Actor award at Venice for his Jesse...Yet it's Affleck who impresses most as the wary, skittish Bob.

It's remarkably bright, funny and sweet for a film that wades through so much sleaze, though it can't escape all of the weirdness it worms through.

The funniest film you'll see this year about a political assassination.

For all the misery and emotional mess of Snow Angels, Green finds resilience and hope in the kids and even in some of the grown-ups.

Sweet, sexy, and unexpectedly enchanting, Yana's Friends is the little feel-good comedy that could.

For all its pronouncements, it's a frothy romantic lark.

A quietly, somberly effective American indie drama.

The story is pure speculation, Van Sant's fantasy on what may have happened during those final days of self-isolation, but he loads the film with distinctive imagery.

It's smart, instructive political cinema that tackles complex issues of the globalization with practical examples and vivid images and presents its effects in immediate human terms.

Lin energizes the grungy palette with stylistic zing, a hopped-up pace and understated humor. His cast carves out vivid characters and the open-ended aftermath takes stock of the moral scarring without moralizing.

Plays largely like a performer's showpiece, with all the showboating and not so surprising character twists that entails, but Stettner comes out the other end with a pleasantly modest and satisfying revelation.

Presents itself as tragedy with the insensitive Joe as its tragic hero, but Joe's fantasies of artistic rebellion and individualism have rotted into simple, solipsistic selfishness.

The colorful cultural history lesson in an idiosyncratic key is entertaining and informative, if a little indulgent in its adoration of Roth and his counter-car culture.

It's almost too devastating for words, yet never less than compelling and heartbreakingly affecting.

It's the warmest, most generous portrait of American hospitality you've seen from a European movie in some time.

You don't have to be a teenager to appreciate the raunchy humor and the uninhibited overkill of Seth's porn-obsessed chatter, though it probably helps to be a guy.

It's a bracing reminder that before Hitler took power, it was handed to him. The lesson resonates long after the credits roll.

The story is slim but the script is snappy and the film moves with a fluid rhythm that charges up to a rollercoaster pace.

Oddly fresh and naively chipper.

Welcome to the tawdry end of paradise, where no melodrama is too obvious and no conflict too contrived.

It's a big enough film to hold all the contradictions. Green has an ego and a gift for stealing the spotlight with a wink and a grin. Yet his respect for the kids is genuine.

From the first voyeuristic peek into the ruthless world to the haunting, accusatory, unforgettable final image, it's a brilliant, stunning piece of work, perhaps not Assayas' best, but certainly his most fearless and impassioned.

Ultimately a primer. Without actually putting it in direct terms, it proposes a revolutionary solution, not just in Argentina but everywhere that the corporate culture has failed its workers and their communities.

There is a heart-warming familiarity to much of its 2 1/2-hour tale, but the surprises around its edges gives Zelary a refreshing perspective.

Perhaps the most ingeniously imaginative element in Son of Rambow, a film exploding with imagination (some of it scrawled directly over the film in animated expressions of Will's private world), is its very conceit.

A smart, savvy and satisfying Hollywood comedy.

Campbell fans will get a kick out of it. The rest of the world will likely find this spoof a little too insular and indulgent.

A delight, a vigorous, vibrant romantic comedy that mines emotional desperation and frustration for all its comic potential, but never at the expense of its temperamental heroine.

In a summer of comic book super-operas dense with psychological torment and sprawling well over two hours, the unpretentious efficiency of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is refreshing.

Don't expect scary from this trilogy of short horror films from a trio of Asia's most interesting directors, which are not so much extreme as twisted.

The film's take on media and personal responsibility recalls Brian De Palma's faux Iraq documentary, "Redacted," here dropped into a homefront turned guerrilla war zone.

For such a harrowing portrait, Mandoki remains oddly distant but for a few scenes. He makes his points boldly when he should be making his points sting.

Wholesome, warm and energetic -- if predictable.

The sentiment smacks of "Titanic" for teens, but that doesn't make it any less valid, or the quietly told coda any less lovely.

It's part Jules Verne arms-race nightmare, part James Bond gadget war and part boy's own adventure.

I can't imagine how Smith can capture a big enough audience to pay off this private joke, but the inner geek in me had too much fun to care.

So Close is the film "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle" dreams of being: sleek, silly, completely ridiculous and irresistible.

The Pangs are at their best playing in the style sandbox, creating shivery imagery and eerie moods while exploring nothing deeper than irony and unease, as their climax so effectively demonstrates.

A few scenes are a bit coy and the "big secrets" threaten to pitch into melodrama, but Birmingham keeps bringing the film back to the delicate dynamics of the relationships at its heart.

This is an unmistakably Asian variant on the action movie, a sleek, slick, entertaining espionage thriller in the John Woo mold.

While Margot's casual cruelty and the scenes of squirmy discomfort are sometimes painful to watch, the rendering of this disastrous family reunion is seriously, savagely droll.

Energetic and inventive, it's a satirical, smart, grown-up thriller.

Even if you don't like the stories, the filmmakers seem incapable of finding a corner of Paris that is not photogenic.

Olivier Dahan's sprawling portrait of the life of Edith Piaf is the kind of grand, passionate historical drama that no one seems to be able to pull off any more.

Rodriguez has the chops of a smart-aleck film school brat and the imagination of a big kid, and they come together to remake the world in the image of its young audience. It's more amusement park ride than adventure, which in this case is exactly the demographic he's reaching for.

The real gift of Elf is the simple pleasure of a sweet and funny comedy that genuinely embraces its message of holiday cheer and still has fun goofing with it.

A masterpiece.

Many will be left scratching their heads at the point of the entire enterprise, but fans of Jarmusch's askew view will clink coffee mugs and toast to the glories of human eccentricity.

It's all quite deftly played with a maturity and introspection that may take you by surprise, though Sachs is perhaps too restrained in parts.

Surely played better on the page than on the screen. What's left is the same old drill driven by brutal master race fervor.

It makes for an unusual angle on the era, and a passionate paean to the power of books, ideas and art.

Haggis drops exclamation points after his symbolic gestures, but in the rush to drive home his message on the confused mission in Iraq he offers a queasy revisionism that all but denies the legacy of Vietnam. Considering Deerfield is a Vietnam vet, it feels doubly false.

It's a fine moral and an admirable statement, but it's the portrait of an icon rather than the story of the person thrust into that position.

A pointed satire of the dumbing down of network TV with a sour tone and a broad execution.

It makes for one of the best and most haunting of the recent Asian horror films.

Ingeniously engineered, self-consciously clever and directed with snazzy style, it's played as a violent black comedy with often-gruesome punch lines.

A quirky little film with an offbeat trajectory that rattles through the bones of story with eyes open to the texture of experience and the dimensions of character.

An uninvolving film.

Fumbling characters find that survival is not a matter of economics alone, it's also a matter of hope.

The cozy, lived-in atmosphere created by the ensemble and the unlikely chemistry of Carell and Binoche are so genuine that you wish the rest of the film was just as effortless and authentic.

A convincing and compelling community of characters with a sure comic sense and an at times screwball sensibility.

A bland Bond.

Kahn manages to turn his feast of flesh, navel-gazing talk and self-destructive jealousy into a thoughtful reflection on the subject.

The attitude is older, maybe a tad sentimental, and as adolescent and reckless as ever. Whether that's a good thing depends on your appreciation for dead-end conversations, geek debates and the Smithspeak sandbox of creative vulgarity.

The lack of irony, let alone ambiguity, in an upside world in which mobsters are the underdogs, should sink the film, but Lumet's laid-back professionalism and Diesel's big-hearted performance give it an affable buoyancy.

With the story's vivid and passionate women and the power of emotional healing (not to mention the intense eroticism of his hothouse romance), gives Sex and Lucia a dynamic, vigorous life.

The film is thrown off balance by the weight of Norton's compassion for this troubled soul.

Surprisingly sweet and infectious.

If you're sick of the gross-out gags and sex jokes of contemporary teen comedy, this defiant blast of idiosyncratic individuality just could be your tonic.