Sean Axmaker

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.