Sean Axmaker

Utter lack of irony and curiosity.

The cozy, lived-in atmosphere created by the ensemble and the unlikely chemistry of Carell and Binoche are so genuine that you wish the rest of the film was just as effortless and authentic.

This is a familiar journey and director/co-writer Todd Phillips sidesteps every opportunity to inject a little edge or originality into it.

Harmless and thoroughly unmemorable: colorful, cute, fast paced, and about as involving as an amusement park ride.

Director Casey La Scala directs with enough energy to carry the odyssey over the next ramp, but for all the eagerness of the performances, the conviction is strictly prepackaged.

Backseat satisfies itself with small observations and minor breakthroughs of self-awareness. In the scheme of their lives, this journey is just a speed bump, jolting them awake for a brief moment. The rest is up to them.

Mostly it's a series of dream-image clues scribbled out by juvenile seer Fanning, followed by super-powered smackdowns between agents and mercenaries with slangy titles like watchers, stitchers and sniffers.

It's about as convincing as any other Arnie musclefest, but has a little too much resonance with real world events and ultimately comes off as insultingly simplistic.

Glib, sense-numbing action fantasy.

The film is a shapeless mess and about as convincing as a cartoon, the usual mix of slapstick, doofus humor and raunchy sex jokes lacking even the bite or attitude to make it adventurous.

The most sensuous and intimate work of cinema of the past few years, a film that luxuriates in the immediacy of the moment. There is no guilt to the act, only exhilaration, joy and freedom. At least for the moment.

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

For a film that uses race, class and sexual stereotypes as the starting point, this is disappointingly skin deep.

Varda sees herself as a gleaner as she searches for the people and cultural activities missed by the rest of the media.

It's a gloriously baroque vision and Leconte believes in his sequin and sawdust fantasy with such unabashed enthusiasm that he makes it work even through its most absurd moments.

All about the thrill of the chase, and Friedkin challenges the antiseptic spectacle and fantasy flamboyance of computer-enhanced blockbusters with a lean, mean manhunt thriller and gritty, hard-edged style.

Director Alfredo De Villa doesn't play it for the kind of knockabout comedy so often seen in these films (like the shrill hit "Four Christmases").

For all of its weakness, Ju-On: The Grudge is creepy and unnerving, qualities in short supply in gore-filled American horror films.

An excellent documentary equal parts extreme sports and social anthropology.

A celebration of the human spirit nothing short of sublime.

A sloppy, indifferent action movie with a sadistic edge and a sour hypocrisy.

There's not a lot of story here and the dialogue lacks the snap one usually gets in New York stories of affluent young adults, but the characters have an authenticity.

51 Birch Street, like the best of the recent wave of personal documentaries, is both a compelling story and an eye-opening bit of social history.

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.

Fresh, vibrant and vital, this interpretation reminds us why Shakespeare is timeless.

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.

This vampire story is as soulless as they get.

It's the soulless quality of so many films that value devious plots, smug deception and quirky personality traits over actual story and character.

The result of this blender mash of exotic horror isn't much of anything at all, neither suspenseful, terrifying or inventively gory: Turistas is dead on arrival.

Feels like the effort of a tired artist reworking the same themes.

For all of its admirable intentions, the awkward melding of movie-of-the-week tragedy, non-denominational salvation drama and teen sex comedy mistakes banality for conviction.

Smokin' Aces isn't a story, it's a premise with a madhouse of characters flung into a collision course that ends at the same finish line.

Rock Star roars to life with a promise of something inspired and inventive whenever Wahlberg leaps onstage. Offstage, however, even he can't breathe life into this same old song.

It's often quite funny (when it's not spinning its wheels in rehashed skits and recycled gags), but when Myers gets his mojo working and his mind out of the toilet, he's capable of better.

It is charming and at times disarmingly surprising.

Not as cool as the first.

When Plympton's freak flag flies, Hair High delivers the same whacked-out weirdness of his shorts. The rest of the film simply stretches out the simple premise and marks time between his ideas.

When (Tykwer) connects it's exhilarating and gorgeous, a sight to behold.

Cohen drives the film at a galloping pace, but it's not fast enough to outrun its absurdity.

Black's apoplectic fits and sardonic rants are strictly a bonus for the parents dragged along for the adolescent shenanigans.

This restrained drama of lifelong friends drifting in separate directions is a quietly rich and resonant portrait of disconnection.

Blunt, somewhat artless, but very effective.

All processed sugar and artificial flavor, right down to the sticky but tasteless happy ending.

The results are shapeless, excessively lurid and often unpleasant, with Argento shamelessly vamping the white-trash junkie mother and truck-stop hooker. She apparently forgot whose story she was telling.

The stripped-down dramatic constructs, austere imagery and abstract characters are equal parts poetry and politics, obvious at times but evocative and heartfelt.

At its best when exploring grieving and loss and anger, but Shear turns it into spiritual shock treatment.

The film ultimately swindles its own story.

What begins as an introspective odyssey examining the effects of war on the young Israeli soldiers turns into a provocative exposé on the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

Pitches itself somewhere between "Bound" and "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels," trying to add a feminist twist to the spate of Britain's bloody gangster thrillers and never quite succeeding.

Sweet, sexy, and unexpectedly enchanting, Yana's Friends is the little feel-good comedy that could.

Delivers a clever confidence game, if not much else.

It's messy and painful, eased only the admirable modesty of Stockman's writing and direction.

The sudden turns of temperament are a treat after the smart-ass attitude of American horror flicks, and the film is full of minor surprises, squirming in unexpected directions without leaving the conventions behind.

In the best Altman manner there are no real heroes and villains, only people trapped by their vanity and ambition and the straitjackets of classism.

The ironies and contradictions that give the first half a dark humor give way to gravity and respect as soldiers are killed (off camera).

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

It makes for an unusual angle on the era, and a passionate paean to the power of books, ideas and art.

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

The story -- something to do with an ancient evil returning after 3,000 years -- plays like a multi-episode story arc of the TV series.

Anderson is a hopeless romantic in a cynical world, and for a brief moment he makes the case that true love is the only power that can crack time and space.

Though it's hardly as uplifting or inspiring, it's hard not to appreciate these driven men who know they've found their calling when they start to anagram in their dreams.

The funniest thing I've seen this summer.

Not just a bad film, Hannibal Rising is downright dull, which is a far worse crime.

It's a fantasy of a crime epic, to be sure, but it's a glorious fantasy in which the unspoken bonds of brotherhood bathe every shootout and sacrifice in the light of myth.

Ceylan has an unerring gift for camera placement, and his slow, measured scenes can be as hypnotic as they are lovely -- at times, too much so, with the characters constrained by his poetic perfection.

Vital and alive. Frustration and malaise rumble through every richly textured frame, but behind it all is a restlessness and a desire for something better.

Both blunt and complex, Sauter's illustration of economic Darwinism at its most primal and unforgiving is a harrowing vision of human life as collateral damage in the modern global economy.

Low octane comedy running on fumes.

Buscemi gets a fine performance from Miller and plays his part with a murky mix of self-pity, opportunism and arrogance. A few scenes crackle with their intensity. The rest of it wallows in glib acrimony and cynicism.

It's as if Gondry lets his performers settle into their parts and feel their way through their stories. It gives the film an ambling pace and a unique chemistry that bubbles with strange and unexpected flavors.

Inspired, inventive and funnier than it has a right to be, Larry Blamire's loopy spoof of 1950s bargain-basement sci-fi and horror knock-offs gets it right where so many well-meaning efforts go wrong.

Charged with raucous energy and a satirical slant, this witty history lesson is preaching to the converted, sharing a knowing wink with everyone who's ever inhaled.

Selick proves a clumsy director of live-action scenes and never overcomes the muddled, half-baked script or the scatological gags.

The humorless and self-important execution attempts an operatic scale but only succeeds in sinking the remnants of the story's integrity. By the time it makes landfall, this incoherent production has blown itself out.

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.

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

Takes itself seriously enough to pull off a clever bit of sleight of hand, but doesn't have much to offer once the twist comes out of hiding.

For all its good intentions in exploring the grace of death, November never creates a life outside of its all-too-obvious inspirations and the mystery becomes little more than a groaner.

Presents itself as a sassy twist on "Taming of a Shrew," but what looks like just another contrived sex comedy becomes, surprisingly, an insightful and sensitive look at knots that family ties create in adult romance.

Given the possibilities it's not particularly inventive, but it is nice to see a comedy so affectionate with the conventions it spoofs.

It's hardly original and rarely laugh-out-loud funny -- the filmmakers constantly fall back on the sight of bounding balloon Jimmy squeezing his way out of one situation after another.

The disingenuous attempt to give the tawdry story some kind of social import only makes the tinny caricatures more insincere, while his erotic display of 15-year-old girls isn't a satire of a sexualized culture, it's just dirty.

It is passionate and angry and rousing where you might expect it to become numbing and depressing.

There are some flat moments, to be sure, and Palansky's direction can be a bit unsteady and awkward, but he doesn't wallow in the eccentricities or the modestly self-empowering moral. This fairy tale feels pleasantly down-to-earth.

This is pseudo-cynical comedy, however, not social satire. All the sharp corners are smoothed over and what's left is little more than a big screen sitcom.

Deutch never raises the film beyond its paint-by-numbers blueprint.

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

The sentiment smacks of "Titanic" for teens, but that doesn't make it any less valid, or the quietly told coda any less lovely.

Burger is so respectful of the trio that he never gets under their skin. Apart from the generosity of strangers who pay tribute to the soldiers with little acts of kindness, you get the same generic observations of any road movie.

All the jazzy effects and jumpy editing merely move us quicker to an otherwise predetermined tragedy.

There is no histrionic excess or crackpot camp, only hoary sentiment, the puppy-dog cuteness of the mentally handicapped, and the proposition that the "cure" for lesbianism is one good man brave enough to get in touch with his inner cow.

There's a dark and demented little psychodrama of self-inflicted madness beneath the narrative contrivances. Vigalondo's direction makes it work more like a waking nightmare than a genuine experience, and he gives it the quality of madness.

Entertaining in a trashy sort of way.

Quaid and Russo outshine the script with their presence and chemistry alone.

Has the modesty of a savvy, smart drive-in movie with Hollywood studio polish and a movie buff's loving care.

Director Jesse Vaughan keeps the ball in play through the aw-shucks lessons in humility and generosity, but the teamwork is shoddy, the plays lack surprise and, finally, Juwanna Mann misses more than it hits.

The film is weirdly fascinating in its own maverick way.

The snappy wit of the script make Ol Parker's British romantic comedy the equivalent of comfort food a pleasant cinematic snack.

It delivers everything you expect on a timetable you can predict to the minute. It's filmmaking as a cross between a carefully choreographed dance and an elaborate pageant.

Campbell fans will get a kick out of it. The rest of the world will likely find this spoof a little too insular and indulgent.

This gory, ghoulishly funny horror goof is shameless fun in its own right.

There's no slow descent into ruthless warfare and we get neither the giddy charge of their bad behavior, nor the guilty sting of complicity in their ruthless desire. All that's left is an idea still in search of a script.

The movie's a little thin for the two-hour running time, but likable enough for its schoolgirl audience and painless enough for the adults doomed to be dragged along.

Loses focus of whom the film is honoring.

A spirited, screwball crime-thriller with a sly heart.

In Wonderland, Winterbottom has found a script worthy of his passion.

There is such a joy of play in the film that it's easy to overlook the overdone performances and the lazy script shortcuts.

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

This is no Disney fable and the apocalyptic vision isn't for everyone, but science-fiction fans and adventurous filmgoers will find this ingenious explosion of retro-cyberpunk a compelling dystopian vision with a gleam of hope.

It may not be original, but it's often shamelessly funny and more clever than I expected. Not much, mind you, but enough to catch me off guard with a few surprise throws.

These are mortal souls and unglamorous bodies and Ferran explores their affair in its earthy, physical and fleshy reality.

The Rock manages to play both with a crude candor more genuine than the entertaining if contrived spectacle around him, and a surprising big-screen charisma and ease that makes him a natural-born screen hero.

Lin energizes the grungy palette with stylistic zing, a hopped-up pace and understated humor. His cast carves out vivid characters and the open-ended aftermath takes stock of the moral scarring without moralizing.

Less offensive than embarrassing, at least for the chagrined performers.

A mix of the poetic and the polemic, the film is oddly abstract and untethered.

Yedaya is respectful and sensitive of everyone in Or's life and creates a beautiful, complex and rich relationship between mother and daughter, loving and protective of each other, but not of themselves.

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

Full of compassion and good intentions, but Kirkman never spins the stories into compelling cinema.

It's a chilly, lonely introduction to a man who has effectively stepped out of the social world of adult responsibility.

A good-natured movie.

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.

There's plenty of ammunition here for liberal conspiracy theorists, which surely will limit the audience to those already in Jarecki's political camp. Which is too bad, for it is a sobering history lesson as well as a political polemic on foreign policy and the growth of war into America's biggest business.

In a summer of comic book super-operas dense with psychological torment and sprawling well over two hours, the unpretentious efficiency of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is refreshing.

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

"Network" it's not. Weitz doesn't have the killer instinct for merciless satire but he knows how to stage a gag and deliver a punchline.

It's ultimately just numb, a sober wartime romance roused only by Blanchett's intensity and Crudup's passionate swings between righteous anger and moral zeal. The rest is just tired melodrama.

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

The script doesn't always find the most effective way to the heart of the conflicts and Berg struggles to balance the mix of tones and the conflicts of man and superman, but he never sacrifices the integrity of his characters or their relationships for an easy ending. That alone makes Hancock the most adult of the new wave of superhero dramas.

The script drowns out its ideas with arch melodramatic devices and ridiculous twists while Babbitt smothers even the daylight scenes in an oppressive gloom.

A furiously choreographed martial-arts spectacle wrapped in a fumbling narrative.

It's all about the sheer visceral rush of mega action.

From the first voyeuristic peek into the ruthless world to the haunting, accusatory, unforgettable final image, it's a brilliant, stunning piece of work, perhaps not Assayas' best, but certainly his most fearless and impassioned.

There's no comic spark under Showalter's drab direction, and no good argument in the film why we should ever wonder about the guy left at the altar.

A highly entertaining film that still packs much of the punch and the quirkiness of Willeford's novel.

Redfield's fans will rejoice, if only to see the beloved novel illustrated on the screen, no matter how tediously. The rest of us probably should stay away.

A girlie romantic comedy with tired slapstick pranks but not an ounce of self-respect or intelligence.

Plays in spots something like a stage play smartly brought to screen.

A punch in the stomach of a movie. It is as ugly as it is beautiful, as full of peaks as of lows. It's a character-driven movie about people on an emotional edge who are ridding themselves of the things that can no longer work without inflicting damage.

For all the misery and emotional mess of Snow Angels, Green finds resilience and hope in the kids and even in some of the grown-ups.

If only Outlander was as fun as the premise makes it sound on paper.

They try too hard to be funny. It's hardly a damning fault, but it has a tendency to drown out their satiric observations.

It's recidivist Murphy: bad-skit comedy populated by caricatures in search of a movie.

It's unmistakably the work of aging cinema activist Loach, who wears his social-justice heart on his sleeve and pauses the story for lively debates among the characters, especially as Sinn Fein signs a treaty that many think betrays the cause.

The hit-and-run destructiveness of the rapacious media is nothing new, but Cordero gives his cynical take a unique setting and a queasy climax.

Under the lingerie model façade beats the heart of a celestial Dr. Phil.

The boys and girls are so busy acting out their romantic fantasies or soulfully pining over impossible loves that, however photogenic they may be, they never seem to actually live their lives.

The curiously stylized piece, shot in a muted palette with performances to match (the cast is perhaps too restrained given the theatrical framework), is dramatically colorless, but the moods and moments are crafted with kinky grace.

Mehta's feisty, featherweight romantic comedy makes the case that even the most flamboyant cinematic conventions are as universal as they are exotic, especially when they conspire to produce that glow of happily ever after.

Unusual even for Japanese animation.

This is one of those capers doomed to unravel in comic chaos, but it finally plays less like a con gone wrong than a long, lazy, insubstantial shaggy dog story coasting on nothing but charm.

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.

It's a volatile subject and Abu-Assad's thoughtful thriller stokes the debate.

Ultimately the ballet performances, and notably the work of Stiefel, a star with American Ballet Theatre, are the only moments that deserve center stage.

The language and the landscape is French, but the sensibility and style is unmistakably Eastern European.

Despite the raw gut-punch of its direction, its power lies in compassion, not sensationalism.

It's nothing new, but Hawke captures some evocative textures and honest moments.

Best enjoyed by keeping in mind the latest cinematic proposition that apocalyptic disaster doesn't bring out the worst in people, only the stupidest.

If Laurence Fishburne could only have harnessed his fierce performance to drive his directoral debut, Once in the Life might have made something memorable of the done-to-death tale of small-time crooks on the run after a heist gone wrong.

The entire film is shot in split screen. Each of the unnamed characters is photographed separately in their own slice of space, the images sutured together with a purposeful imperfection, with occasional overlap and rare moments of union. It gives them the appearance of dancing around one another, almost touching but never getting past the years of emotional scar tissue, even as they work their way to her hotel room.

An inspired melding of action thriller, satire and biographical drama through the looking glass of a funhouse mirror.

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

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

Who is Cletis Tout? Who cares?

Singer deftly crafts a sleek, unusually tight film that balances comic-book adventure, pulp opera and the fear of being different.

This beautifully sculpted poetic naturalism has more in common with the expressive use of words in the great screenplays of '40s and '50s than with modern movies.

It's often funny but it flails around like a chicken with its head cut off, flapping and squawking and making a spectacle, but never really going anywhere.

The result is joyous and exhilarating.

An engaging and generous profile of the fascinating folks who have chosen to live at the end of the world.

More than simply a raw-nerve success-gone-sour story. It's a revenge tale, and the directors come out on top.

All the furiousness doesn't really add up to anything, but there is grungy fun to be had in gizmo-laden art direction and the increasingly bizarre battle of wits of the weirdly warped South Korean sci-fi black comedy.

Like many of Chen's movies, which are so precise and composed and lush, it's not really emotionally engaging. It is, however, a dazzling and dynamic spectacle that risks being ridiculous to create an unreal world of the romantic imagination.

The style is pure Hou: richly textured atmosphere, tiptoeing camerawork and long, languorous takes of scenes full of privileged moments of human activity.

It's all about Guevara's education as a revolutionary and his development as a leader in the jungles and in battle.

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.