Sean Axmaker

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.