Sean Axmaker

He (Chan) still can turn a silly little action comedy like this into a high-spirited, butt-kicking good time.

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.

The sensuality is never salacious, merely curious, and the message is empowering ... at least within the confines of the insular community.

The resulting hodgepodge has the feel of filmmaking by committee, the look of last-minute reshoots and the whiff of desperation. Not even Braff's cartoonish smirk is distracting enough to hide that.

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

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

A handsome documentary on a brutal subject.

It's a little sloppy and full of convenient coincidences, but at its best roils with edgy character tensions.

The result is a painful and poignant film at once empathetic and critical, more soberly unnerving than exciting, but never less than compelling.

A gentle and often beautiful study in opposites.

Oliviera's mastery is a joy to experience and his bittersweet comic touch adds a loving absurdity to what could have turned maudlin or morose.

The film has good design, effective animation and generic if endurable songs, but Sandler wants to slam his sentiment and wallow in it too, and he compromises with the worst of both worlds.

Under De Palma's cool disconnection is an anger, and it's this anger that drives his act of political theater.

It's all too much and too little: a history lesson in institutional racism that falls into character cliches, a human drama that gets lost in melodramatic detours, a war movie put together by a fan rather than a filmmaker.

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 should have warned us that logic was also hitting hard times.

The rough, exposed emotional candor of Cheung's singing voice carries into her performance.

My Brother Is an Only Child isn't a critique of the left but a film about the consequences and responsibility of "political action." Luchetti measures social justice not in ideals but in positive change and the compassion with which it is accomplished.

A preachy parable stylized with a touch of John Woo bullet ballet.

Linklater powers the film with the energy and attitude and beat of his soundtrack.

A one-note farce that struggles just to remain on key.

It's both innocent and bizarre, with a mischievous sense of fantasy marked by simple but striking cinematic magic.

A film more textural than narrative, it's for viewers willing to lose themselves in a truly sensual jungle experience.

Wry and dry.

But as an artist, von Trier's contempt for humanity is becoming harder to hide with stylistic flourish. He doesn't even try here, and his arrogance is topped only by his misanthropy.

The skewering of spiritualism, dogma and passive-aggressive prayer groups has an exaggerated absurdity that borders on cartoonish and Dannelly's satire is more clever than cutting.

Cruise is a man whose youthful cockiness has aged into self-assurance and cool confidence. It's a masterstroke of casting. The dynamism of Collateral, however, comes from Jamie Foxx.

Kurosawa leaves much of the explanation enigmatic but he fills the film with an eerie emptiness, where suicides erupt out of nowhere and mankind dissolves in an oily smudge of hopelessness, adrift between life and death.