Sean Axmaker

It's more theatrical pageant than action movie, with the showy but rudimentary martial-arts action coming off like just another ritual with the players going through the motions.

For all the clumsy scenes and cloying performances, director Patricia Riggen puts her adults through tough choices and hard consequences.

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

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.

The plot is often bewilderingly complex and the dense layers of subterfuge hard to follow, but by the climax the fairy tale has been twisted into a fascist fable of realpolitik mercenary opportunism.

It's not sleepy, it's comatose, and writer/director Josh Sternfeld never wakes it up with anything as crass as a plot.

It lacks both complexity and compromised characters. While the cultural backdrop is intriguing, the story is frustratingly conventional and familiar.

Not as cool as the first.

The most pure of Mamet's works to come to the screen.

Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo creates the same world of devils and innocents that grounds so much of Spain's modern, seeped-in-Satanic-evil horror, recast in a secular cinematic vocabulary.

Shyamalan has learned the lessons that so many horror directors ignore: Suggestion is scarier than revelation.

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.

Apparently there's a fresh generation ready to take this at face value. That, in its own way, is refreshing.

Delivers a clever confidence game, if not much else.

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.

Park is neither glib nor pedantic as he charts the vicious circle that leaves victims in its wake, unintentional and premeditated, and takes its dehumanizing toll on his increasingly brutal heroes.

Less cartoonish and more generous than the original.

Abigail Breslin, the preteen Oscar nominee for "Little Miss Sunshine" and the most effortless actress of her generation, plays the precocious little girl part without overdoing the precociousness.

It's a passionate vision thick with eroticism, but the musky atmosphere gets a little thick and murky.

Like a boulder bouncing down a long hill, the momentum keeps the film barreling along to the tragic inevitability promised in the opening titles.

It may be too intense at times for wee ones, but kids of 5 and up testing the limits of their independence in the big world should relate to Lucas, dig the crazy insect world and embrace the imagination behind the colorful adventure.

Bekmambetov's tone is so gravely serious that the drama tends to become arch and theatrical, despite sardonic punches of dark humor. But his imagery is striking (his imagination overcomes his limited budget), his style is assured and he's given the subtitle adaptation a dramatically dynamic dimension by giving the words the presence of an incantation taking physical form.

Farce is a genre best served with building momentum and crack timing. This lazily paced piece seems more concerned with winking at the audience and putting quotations around the performances than anything so crass as playing this farce for laughs.

A date film with a hook for men.

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

Behind the sad and vulnerable eyes of Bernal's damaged Elvis is both a fierce rage and a desperate need for his father's recognition, but he's more enigma than person. Hurt is more nuanced as the sincerely spiritual man faced with a past that threatens his family and his future.

Whether Mann's film will make a difference, however, is another question. He devotes little time to really exploring the issues, leaving the film a patchwork of assertions that, while they may be true, have to be taken on faith.

Hip-hop is not the beat I dance to, but you don't need to be immersed in the culture to understand the heartbeat it sets in the lives of Brown Sugar's main characters.

The simple, unpretentious storytelling of Unleashed is a rarity in the glut of underwritten and overproduced action films that dominate American screens today.

Explores cloudy, discomforting realities of the Holocaust not usually addressed in such films.

Well-meaning portrait of intolerance concludes as grand tragic melodrama, executed with a stately beauty in somber colors.

Gozu is prime evidence in the argument that gonzo gangster movie maverick Takashi Miike is a major director goofing on minor works.

It wants to be a "Carrie" with a modern-day "Frankenstein" twist, but it lacks the smarts behind the weirdness.

A fumbling attempt to create the European equivalent of a Japanese manga thriller in the conspiratorial mold of "Akira" and "Ghost in the Shell" has a stunning look.

This coming-of-age tale is ultimately about self, not sex.

It's entertaining if not exactly enlightening.

Surprise of surprises, it's a blast.

The nuttiest big-screen video game you'll ever have the pleasure of seeing somebody else play.

Ball's snide humor and cynical arrogance undercut his message at every turn.

As fresh as a highlight reel of day-after replays, Mr. 3000 is a case of major-league talent stuck in a minor-league story.

Ledger mumbles his entire performance (some of it barely legible) as a fuzzy, friendly, happily passive heroin addict and sometime poet, as if he's too blissed out to even open his mouth as he simply drifts along with his addiction.

While not a grand-slam comedy, the offbeat humor and easy byplay gives The Grand a winning hand.

The result is joyous and exhilarating.

If Chadha never quite overcomes her cliches, her good-natured humor and familial faith gives it a warm, winsome dimension.

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

It could be more involving, but it's funny enough that you won't care.

A jargon-filled documentary less interested in culture and history than mechanics, machinery and the rush of speed.

The "guest cast" includes Philip Seymour Hoffman, Allison Janney and Sarah Jessica Parker, but all are upstaged by Greg Hollimon's cheerfully corrupt Principal Blackman and Sedaris.

Not a comedy of guffaws and goofy gags, but a wry, underplayed little piece with an undercurrent of loss and abandonment.

A disturbing, and disturbingly funny, twist on adolescent love, and Shiota captures the emotional avalanche with understanding.

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.

It's more clever than smart, but Paul Fox directs with the same easygoing attitude of its slacker hero and finds some modest truths (also lower case) behind the props.

Looks simultaneously ahead of its time and delightfully quaint, a simple romantic comedy that revels in the dreamy artifice of a meticulously re-created fantasy Las Vegas.

It's a passionate film powered by the righteous anger of injustice.

This is a film about anger, shame and helplessness, and it offers no answers, merely hard questions and angry challenges.

At 140 minutes, the film becomes a humorless, long-winded spectacle.

It's Waters' way of saying: It's only a movie.

A reminder of the offbeat comic sensibility and visceral charge that marked him (Sabu) as a director to watch.

There isn't a spark in the familiar emotional situation or a reason to care how these amiably bland characters end up.

Well-intentioned but not very well directed, it makes for a better psychological profile than a film.

It may not be art, but A Dirty Shame is shameless fun.

When the spectacle turns ridiculous, the movie just becomes another big-screen video game.

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.

Completely -- and quite cleverly -- contrived, a cascade of stupid mistakes and miscommunication stirred into a visceral stew of gooey blisters and flaying layers of bloody flesh.

Hodges cuts the film like a diamond, but it's just an exercise in cut glass, an impressive surface that only looks tough.

An excellent documentary equal parts extreme sports and social anthropology.

Mostly it's tedious as we watch the photogenic but emotionally blank Chatagny bounce between anonymous sexual encounters.

It's pure romantic fantasy, almost too cute and naively innocent for its own good. Jeff Balsmeyer, a former storyboard artist making his directorial debut, stumbles through the clumsy establishing scenes, but his playful direction smoothes out as the characters settle in.

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.

It's an interesting experiment that doesn't quite work.

There's an unconvincing warm, fuzzy happy ending, in which recognition is treated as cure and understanding heals all. But, until then, Phoebe in Wonderland is an involving and empathetic drama of mothers and daughters.

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

An acid movie flashback a la Oliver Stone.

Ayala gives Joan a fiery, full-blooded passion and Aranda challenges Pedro Almodovar in the arena of self-destructive love, obsessive passion and sweaty cinematic sex. It's the lustiest costume drama in years.

A satisfyingly nasty piece of work so black and cruel it's often more sick than funny.

It becomes simply another banal gang film so familiar and predictable you have to wonder why so much potential is wasted on such a confused dramatic mess.

Despite Clement's best efforts to make Jarrod a deadpan oddball nerd, it becomes apparent early on that excessive teenage eccentricity and terminal self-delusion isn't quite as cute in the adult male and absent father.

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

For all of its minor pleasures, this encore lacks the depth of its conviction.

The Will Ferrell comedy engine is running on empty in Step Brothers.

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

It's funny. Dumb, yes, but funny.

Peter Riegert's is a labor of love film where you feel love much stronger than you feel the film.

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

Inspiring without sinking into sentimentality or cliche, Hearts of Atlantis is intelligent, heartfelt and genuine, a rare story of childhood for adults.

For all the tough-minded talk and frank portraits of inner-city life, however, the film is not altogether convincing.

Writer/director Michael McCullers sprinkles the film with sight gags and comic characters (the lisping birth coach becomes funny out of sheer doggedness), but his pacing is poor and doesn't know how to showcase the small-screen chemistry of Fey and Poehler on the big screen.

As exasperating as it is conventionally satisfying.

It's more ambitious and passionate than thoughtful. Singleton is better at criticizing than understanding, and he leaves too many characters lacking a legitimate voice.