Sean Axmaker

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

Less cartoonish and more generous than the original.

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.

What it lacks is an intensity, a passion at the center...It is, nonetheless, a lovely and often powerful film.

Hardly sophisticated, but it's as inspired as teen sex comedies get.

Erin Gruwell (Hilary Swank) is real, and for all the dramatic license that writer/director Richard LaGravenese takes in his film, her story -- and the stories of her students -- are moving.

The earthy imagery is delicate while the drama is oddly elliptical, creating a lovely film of storybook images and parables. It's both obvious and elusive and, historical specifics aside, almost timeless.

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.

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

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.

It's a pleasure to see mature portraits of adult characters who put their vulnerabilities on the line. I enjoyed my time in the company of these strangers.

Surprisingly sweet and infectious.

Chabrol's deliberate and drawn-out observations often work against the dramatic tension, but his gift is making the audience believe that emotion and obsession trump logic for these deluded characters.

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.

It's Kang's first feature and it suffers from rocky moments and an unsure eye, but his sense of detail is rich with prickly contradictions and he resists tidying up the story.

It's an old-fashioned Soviet road movie, filled with kind souls of the otherwise desperate (and at times predatory) world.

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.

A summer movie that knows it's a summer movie. You don't go to this film for the story, but for the scenery: Bikini-clad girls riding waves, surf photography as beautiful as it is breathtaking, sun, surf, sand, even a little PG-13 romance.

Never comes alive.

Almost 30 years later, it's just as primal.

Romero's satire is largely replaced by a sardonic gallows humor (the zombie-shooting contest is as funny as it is grotesque), but otherwise it's a bloody entertaining zombie apocalypse.

The film attempts to put Zizek's philosophy into practical, accessible terms. Accessible, of course, being a relative term.

If Arlyck's own life feels unworthy of the attention, Sean's illuminating, unconventional and contemporary story makes up for it.

The live camel birth (shown in all of its excruciating beauty) is enthralling, and the cultural details, however staged, provide a vivid window into a world that is fast disappearing.

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.

Garcia's dialogue is wonderfully crafted, short, sharp and resonant, and her elegant direction is delicate and handsome.

Behind the dry humor is a sense of hollowness in the two men who obliviously fall back into old patterns of reckless, loveless sex without missing a beat.

This is full of talk in the European art cinema tradition: intellectual conversations (often in multiple languages at once), gentile dinner conversation with an international all-star guest list.

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.

Looks to be this season's family animal comedy.

Kassovitz directs with an unrelenting intensity that helps you to suspend disbelief almost all the way to the credits.

It all feels like a performance for the camera: von Trier as madman producer taunting the elder filmmaker.

As dazzling as they come, a visual pageant of strange undersea creatures hunting and scavenging and floating across the screen.

The messy emotions and illogic of human nature defines this drama.

Imagine the sequel to "Clueless" reconceived as a peroxide "Paper Chase" and punched up with a valley girl version of "My Cousin Vinny" for the climax.

Silverman is funny and, more often than not, so is the film.

It's the strength of the actresses and their nurturing community that makes this Eden so satisfying.

A welcome return to the courtship, cuddling and sweet nothings of yesteryear.

An impressive, adrenaline-boosted action showcase.

What's left at the end is an emotionally restrained vision of harsh, impoverished lives, more thoughtful than affecting, and never less than gorgeous, but so unfocused it leaves only scattered impressions.

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.

So stuffed with Maddin-ess that it never manages to get past the glorious surfaces. McKinney strides through his role with a knowing wink, and the sheer volume of creative imagery is as distracting as it is entertaining.

It's crowd-pleasing stuff, to be sure.

For all the testosterone-driven soap opera, this entertainingly confused coming-of-age story is a seductive fantasy, a rare portrait of urban underworld machismo without the violence and the viciousness.

No more or less than it appears to be: a paean to the benevolent fate we'd like to believe watches over us.

It's still too shrill and silly to take seriously, but the high spirits and naïve message of tolerance and pride is oddly, innocently winning.

Ultimately feels hollow and slapdash.

Wholesome, warm and energetic -- if predictable.

Playful, predictable and more than a little precious, this entertaining if slight romantic farce makes it's hard not to mourn the loss of the adult romantic comedy.

It's so earnest it hurts.

The texture of Manic feels honest and the chemistry of the kids is well observed, but even the modest breakthroughs are dramatic conventions that favor the symbolic over the genuine.

Most Bond parodies tend to flatten because they fail to evoke the production design overkill and slick cinematic style of its target. Johnny English is no different. Director Peter Howitt delivers action like a journeyman, but Atkinson saves him time and again.

Yet for a film so affectingly steeped in loss, resignation and the ghosts of memory, the revelation that pulls it all together, while satisfying and even touching, lacks emotional resonance.

A thoughtful and often evocative drama of identity and assimilation, but she leaves Nazneen so cocooned in her protective shell of disconnection that we can't connect emotionally.

For all it's warmth and wonder, it carries little more power than a storybook fable.

As exasperating as it is conventionally satisfying.

Part treasure hunt, part disturbia.

Is it too much to ask that the fictional scenes have at least some of the complexity and unpredictability of the real-life theater?

Never quite transcends its origins as a high-concept action thriller, but the clean professionalism of Donner's direction, the low-key turn by Willis and the street-level heroics make it a satisfying piece of genre filmmaking.

This isn't the Bollywood blast of color and song or the brassy razzle-dazzle of "Chicago," but a quieter, sweeter approach that works against the chaotic comedy while humanizing the characters.

The insistent crosscutting suggests there is something powerful between the two stories, but apart from vague connections of jealousy, emotional tension and conversations that constantly dance around the real issues, they don't resonate across the years.

Salva spins a backwoods serial killer setup into something really scary.

Less a story than a film of emotional textures, this is a study in stasis.

The film never earns the irony of the title or offers anything profound in its observations of fractured family dynamics in an atmosphere of lingering resentment, but Allen and Costner enrich and elevate the film and give the growth of their characters a hard-earned gravitas.

It's often helplessly hilarious in its adolescent gross-out way, yet the cast periodically invests the film with sweetness.

Robinson makes these characters breathe, and they bring the film to life.

There's nothing sophisticated or inventive about it, but Cube has fun with his characters and first-time director Marcus Raboy drives the film with enough momentum and energy to make the gags flow together almost like a real story. That's enough to carry it through another Friday.

I'd like to think it's all a joke, that far from a dream this is actually Linklater's idea of a nightmare.

It's not the dance but the kids' passion, and the boisterous support of their friends and family in the audience, that makes the contest so entertaining.

Verbinski, Depp and company just want to make it the best ride you've had all summer. If that's all you demand of a frothy summer blockbuster, then this delivers the goods.

At its best, The Good Girl is a refreshingly adult take on adultery, where the dark humor and offbeat fringe characters don't get in the way of the consequences or the quiet declarations of devotion slipped between the words.

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.

How She Move is the latest urban music drama from MTV Films, and it manages to give a familiar story a vivid jolt of character.

What Spottiswoode lacks in subtlety and restraint, he balances with a heartfelt passion for the material.

Zack and Miri is funny, and Rogen is a natural as Smith's alter-ego, spewing profane dialogue like he was born to it.

All about the thrill of the chase, and Friedkin challenges the antiseptic spectacle and fantasy flamboyance of computer-enhanced blockbusters with a lean, mean manhunt thriller and gritty, hard-edged style.

An excellent documentary equal parts extreme sports and social anthropology.

There's not a lot of story here and the dialogue lacks the snap one usually gets in New York stories of affluent young adults, but the characters have an authenticity.

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.

It's often quite funny (when it's not spinning its wheels in rehashed skits and recycled gags), but when Myers gets his mojo working and his mind out of the toilet, he's capable of better.

It is charming and at times disarmingly surprising.

Blunt, somewhat artless, but very effective.

Delivers a clever confidence game, if not much else.

It's messy and painful, eased only the admirable modesty of Stockman's writing and direction.

It's colorful and determinedly kooky, with "Kung Fu" references and an H.R. Pufnstuf interlude between performances.

Charged with raucous energy and a satirical slant, this witty history lesson is preaching to the converted, sharing a knowing wink with everyone who's ever inhaled.

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

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.

The snappy wit of the script make Ol Parker's British romantic comedy the equivalent of comfort food a pleasant cinematic snack.

It delivers everything you expect on a timetable you can predict to the minute. It's filmmaking as a cross between a carefully choreographed dance and an elaborate pageant.

This gory, ghoulishly funny horror goof is shameless fun in its own right.

It may not be original, but it's often shamelessly funny and more clever than I expected. Not much, mind you, but enough to catch me off guard with a few surprise throws.

A good-natured movie.

The script doesn't always find the most effective way to the heart of the conflicts and Berg struggles to balance the mix of tones and the conflicts of man and superman, but he never sacrifices the integrity of his characters or their relationships for an easy ending. That alone makes Hancock the most adult of the new wave of superhero dramas.

They try too hard to be funny. It's hardly a damning fault, but it has a tendency to drown out their satiric observations.

It's more thrill ride than movie and Wong plays it that way: no sentiment, no complications and no pesky story to get in the way of an arsenal of flashy special effects.

A handsome documentary on a brutal subject.

A gentle and often beautiful study in opposites.