Sean Axmaker

Ultimately less psychological thriller than polemic about the effects of living in an atmosphere of paranoia fed by daily threat-level assessments and round-the-clock TV news-channel coverage of fear-mongering speeches.

It's the kind of stunt that gets Oscar nominations and accolades. Theron turns it into a raw, bristling performance that deserves them.

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.

Scott owns the film from scene one.

The total effect is mesmerizing, an eye-opening tour of modern Beijing culture in a journey of rebellion, retreat into oblivion and return.

John Jarratt is perfectly creepy as the outback loner gone psychotic survivalist who gets his kicks from the systematic degradation and torture of hapless victims. And make no mistake, the ordeal is excruciating.

The poetic justice strains the verisimilitude of a film otherwise grounded in a tough reality, but there is a guilty satisfaction to it all.

Grand and imaginatively designed epic that forgets that the spectacle -- and this is nothing if not spectacular -- is just the flourish.

Where the Wayanses flogged every last chuckle from their belabored ideas, Zucker spring-loads his gags and lets them fly in rapid-fire succession. Not everything hits the target, but he tosses so many of them off with a wink and a grin that they catch you by surprise.

Dracula, who, as played by Dominic Purcell, has all the dark charisma and burning threat of a baked potato.

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

Much of the film is oddly ambiguous, as if Tran used it to explore conflicts of tradition and modernity and never came up with any answers.

A slick, smart-alecky rat-a-tat crime comedy.

It's the warmth and resolve and humility of the young men that keeps us going. It may be more ennobling than introspective, but these three earn their nobility.

There are no surprises in this match, but director Fumihiko Sori makes the games visually thrilling.

Bright, bouncy, kooky and comically tone deaf, CJ7 is the most bizarre kids movie I've ever seen.

Bruckner's restrained performance reveals a girl drowning in her own lack of self-esteem. When she finally comes up for air, she shatters the surface with a force that, in the hands of a less thoughtful director, could send her spinning down the melodramatic road to ruin.

Has moments of inspiration, but the scattershot spoofing never achieves enough momentum to get this flight airborne.

Densely layered, demanding and beautiful, Ruiz has found the perfect venue for his passions and created the most cinematically breathtaking film of the new millennium.

It's more admirable than enjoyable, beautifully crafted and artfully unpleasant.

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

Beck wants to dazzle the audience. I'd settle for a story.

Delivers the expected adrenaline-driven thrills with a fresh eye and a refreshing attitude.

It's a romantic fantasy of the gangster brotherhood and their doomed lives, executed with Takeshi's unique mix of stoic ruthlessness and giddy energy.

Dark farce, a four-handed game of sexual trumps.

Cronenberg's most disciplined exploration yet of that shadowy realm: the world refracted through the prism of a schizophrenic mind.

Director Bill Duke may believe the message but he never invests himself in the characters or their story, which becomes an illustrated lesson with reflective interludes and comic relief.

The camera drinks in the angles, curves and textures, and the way it all shapes the light as if it's yet another of Gehry's non-traditional materials, and Pollack creates his own video sketchbook of Gehry impressions.

The familiar majesty of the Statue of Liberty and the New York skyline is replaced with anticipation and imagination. The sense of hope and wonder is the greater for it, and the sense of promise glows from the screen.

The film's greatest triumph, at least on a technical level, is the amazing texture of the water, which has never looked so dramatic or convincing in an animated film.

As empowering and triumphant a film as you'll see this or any year.

Some may find it slow. I found it utterly spellbinding.

In the face of intolerance, Two Family House lovingly celebrates the triumph of love and acceptance over prejudice.

Does its job colorfully and entertainingly, as long as you don't lean too hard on such niggling details as logic, legality and the laws of physics.

Breiman brings nothing new or insightful or even all that clever, for that matter, to the familiar questions of love and sex.

Neither clever nor heartwarming, Four Christmases is the coal in the stocking of holiday movies.

Inkheart feels a little confused in its tone and direction, but only a little, and I appreciate the way it both celebrates the power of literature and reminds us that stories have a life beyond the page, even if they are only in our hearts and minds.

Though it's rarely dull, first-time feature director Yasuo Inoue has a better eye for intriguing and unusual imagery than dramatic staging, and he illustrates his points long before he runs out of un-endings.

Ben Stiller provides a jolt of personality as a past victim who rouses himself from exile, but otherwise Todd Phillips' fitfully funny script never delivers the crude creativity or the raw energy that feeds this genre of proudly crass male-centric comedies.

It's entertaining if not exactly enlightening.

This tale of kooky social misfits finding their place in the world is an audience pleaser, for all the reasons such tales usually are.

No, it's not the big screen version of "24." For one thing, Sutherland is in the wrong role.

Cut down to a frantic 88 minutes, you wonder if all the human moments were trimmed away to get to this abstract, humorless exercise in empty flourish.

There's not enough insight to the social phenomenon presented onscreen, but that doesn't make the utterly human horror of this thriller any less unsettling.

Sommers is a pure pop Steven Spielberg who's put his deft technical skills in the service of the ultimate rollercoaster movie ride. It's sometimes more exhausting than exciting.

Tries to both spoof the fairy tale and retell it from a fresh angle. Curiously enough, its strength lies in the clever approach, and not the goofy comedy around the edges.

It all feels pretty empty.

A collision of medieval fantasy and commando action movie, where you can almost believe in the high-concept mix-and-matching.

Herman's intentions are admirable, but his results are unsettling in the worst ways.

Makes a great time capsule, a shot-on-the-streets glimpse into the texture of a bygone time, place and attitude, but a listless, lightweight odyssey.

In place of the dysfunctional family Christmas story we've come to expect for the holidays, The Family Stone gives us a cheerfully uncensored, generic counterculture clan and tosses a tightly wound control freak into the center of their holiday celebration.

Isn't about a May-December romance or a brief encounter in a faraway place. It's about being alone in a crowd and the power of unexpected friendships.

It's bloody brilliant.

It's inconsistent and it fudges the script's murkier details, but Lawrence keeps the story on track and doesn't cheat the world of Constantine."

There may be no more sensual director in the world today than Hong Kong's Wong Kar-Wai.

At more than two hours, Kippur is something of an ordeal.

Shallow Hal begs for the Farrellys to unleash their arsenal of offensiveness, but they want to be liked so much they appear afraid to offend. The result is safe, well-meaning and dull.

The film's strength is compelling character relationships and Whedon's trademark dialogue, a smarter version of the cliched action-movie barrage of wisecrack under fire, only better executed, laden in personality, and enriched with evocative western colloquialisms of a frontier culture.

Under Schnabel's direction, it becomes stilted and static, if not simplistic.

It's so ruthlessly witty and meticulously plotted -- unexpectedly so, given its messy dramatic sprawl -- that it delivers a satisfying kick.

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 tough movie with a fearless performance by Bacon and brave filmgoers will be rewarded with a bracing experience.

Director Jean Stewart isn't merely clumsy with character; she hasn't the chops to show us the joy and exhilaration Christine feels in the freedom of solo runs.

Sober and serious and downright glum, ultimately an all-too-familiar portrait of lonely souls unable to break through their own isolation.