Stephen Holden

As it rubs our noses in our own fascination with vanity and the silliest values in life, it's charming enough to make us like it.

The unabashedly sentimental film is a juicy morsel for the great British actress Dame Joan Plowright, who endows Mrs. Palfrey with stoic charm and decency.

If its tone is considerably tougher than that of movies adapted from Nicholas Sparks novels, it is still a grown-up soap opera. And as the overly determined plot progresses, it feels increasingly Sparks-like, although there are no dewy young lovebirds to swoon over.

What "Tales From the Crypt" does best is sustain a look and tone that bring a comic-book's broad strokes into the realm of a live-action movie without seeming too mannered or arty. The film's gooey monsters with their electric green eyes and ferocious voracity are among the more convincing zombie demons to be found in a recent horror film.

With its freewheeling mixture of gore, surrealism and Freud, it will do almost anything to grab attention. If the movie's metaphors are as obvious and as portentous as the heavy metal music that punctuates the action, Shocker at least has the feel of a movie that was fun to make.

The shriller its didacticism, the more unhinged it becomes. But even at its most ludicrous - when it is shouting into your ear - its sheer audacity grabs your attention.

Nostalgia gives way to melodrama, and dramatic truth to soapy histrionics, and Blue Jay falters on a formulaic revelation about mistakes made and lessons learned too late.

Aside from the change of setting, Ms. Ullmann’s version is quite orthodox. Much more convincing than Mike Figgis’s 1999 screen adaptation, starring Saffron Burrows, it is a grueling slog through a hell of torment, cruelty and suffering.

Trucker sometimes feels like a performance in search of a movie.

Kisses may strike you as either ingeniously magical or insufferably cute, depending on your taste. But more than the story, which circles back on itself, the natural performances of its young stars, Shane Curry and especially Kelly O'Neill, nonprofessional actors, lend the movie a core of integrity.

What Dreams May Come, based on a novel by Richard Matheson and directed by Vincent Ward, the New Zealand filmmaker noted for his skill at creating lavish cinematic dreamscapes, represents the uncomfortable collision of two ideas about filmmaking, one commercial, the other eccentrically, ambitiously dreamy.

Once you accept the notion that Tea With Mussolini aspires to be little more than a kind of British-Italian ''Steel Magnolias,'' with a patina of World War II-movie uplift, it becomes a pleasure to watch its stars shamelessly hamming it up.

Mr. Van Der Beek, manlier than in his “Dawson Creek” days, gives an able performance in a movie whose Asian actors tend to overplay the intrigue in an exaggerated 1940s style, exchanging sinister meaningful looks and, in general, hamming it up.

Would seem hokey if it didn't have powerful, extraordinary central performances and cinematography that lends the English landscape around Cornwall a mythical cast.

As Maria crumples before our eyes, many will find Stations of the Cross heartbreaking and infuriating. Others may laugh out loud at her mother, a walking nightmare of pious, punishing rectitude.

Its humor is softer and more ambiguous than that of Ms. Shelton’s earlier films, and its characters are harder to pin down.

The insensitivity of the news media and law enforcement is an implicit acknowledgment of the gap between men and women on the issue; in the film's view men just don't get it. And the submerged rage that wells up in Nira and Lily is boiling hot. The film is less successful in depicting their personal lives.

Suffused with a glow of apple-cheeked nostalgia that often clings to baseball movies. The movie may be set in the present, but its likable clean-cut twins exude more than a whiff of gee-whiz 1950s innocence.

Reminds us that when it comes to comedy, it's all in the writing. Mr. Kalesniko's satirically barbed screenplay, whose spirit harks back to the comic heyday of Blake Edwards, stirs up an insistent verbal energy that rarely flags.

The best scenes are the contests in which the competitors hammer away, executing the kind of grand flourishes with each return of the carriage that Liberace exhibited at the piano.

Honeydripper is agreeable, well-intentioned and very, very slow. Sadly, it illustrates the difference between an archetype and a stereotype. When the first falls flat, it turns into the other and becomes a cliché.

Ms. Rappoport’s sturdy performance helps keep this outlandish melodrama from collapsing into unintended comedy.

A candy-colored never-never land that Peter Pan might envy.

The access to Fassbinder that the relationship provided was a boon to the film, but a disadvantage as well because the close-up view results in a patchy portrait rather than a coherent biography.

Propelled by astute, straight-faced performances, it succeeds in stirring up some maniacal laughs.

The kind of exercise in semi-autobiographical reflection that is almost impossible to carry off without its seeming self-absorbed.

Once you've accepted the notion that On the Line gives product placement in movies a blatant new prominence, the film turns out to be a soothing cinematic snack of milk and cookies.

In Ms. Smith’s tough, levelheaded performance, Mary is an irascible termagant full of batty notions clutching on to life as best she can. She is hard to like, and that’s good.

This loose-jointed ensemble comedy is funny in a squirm-inducing way.

You can feel this niche-marketed tweener fantasy of athletic glory frantically trying to balance a decent sense of values against a market-savvy awareness.

This small, observant movie, directed and written by Kerem Sanga, is the better for not going in predictable directions. A story that you half-expect to turn into a melodrama stays true to the sensibilities of its immature, painfully sincere characters, who are faced with life-changing decisions.

The movie looks and feels like a frantic, live-action psychedelic cartoon.

When it deepens its intellectual focus, Hockney begins to lose coherence, with rushed sequences that cover his stage designs, his landscapes and his experiments with photography.

King of California may look and feel realistic, but it is really a Don Quixote-like fable about nonconformity and pursuing your impossible dream to the very end.

Although I find the term "chick flick" odious, I imagine that Columbia Pictures regards Catch and Release as exactly that, although there are signs that Ms. Grant was reaching for something more layered and subtle than the usual fairy-tale formula

It feels mostly authentic until a contrived ending that leaves a saccharine taste.

What makes A Royal Night Out palatable are the lead performances.

For all its sensitivity to the subject, The Farewell Party makes a number of tonal missteps of which the most glaring is the insertion of a musical number that upsets the movie’s otherwise sensible balance between the comedic and the morbid.

For all its bleakness, the movie, filmed in nearly a dozen states and in half a dozen countries, is not without a certain beauty. There is comfort to be found in blandness and homogeneity.

The movie they have concocted has the feel of a visual sampler or an elaborate color swatch submitted for a design that remains largely unexecuted.

The Hunt doesn’t know where to stop. It is undermined with a short, unsatisfying epilogue whose shocking final moment isn’t enough to justify its inclusion.

Mr. Firth gives a reserved, compelling performance.

This intriguing, sometimes frustrating, in some ways amateurish movie is a work of vaulting artistic ambition.

Watching it is like receiving a hard slap in the face from someone who expects you to laugh it off, even though the sting lingers.

Satellite is not a profound film, but it touches a chord. It captures the wistful underside of the rampant materialism embraced by the young professional class.

By far the grimmest of these nonnarrative, nonverbal cinematic tone poems with epic ambitions. Although none of the three could be described as cheery, Naqoyqatsi, whose title is the Hopi Indian term for war as a way of life, reeks of doomsday.

If Mr. Hurt gives a meticulously detailed performance, he is still so innately refined that Brett never quite registers as an authentic blue-collar type, either vocally or in his body language. Ultimately, men like Brett are just not in Mr. Hurt’s DNA, and you are left with the impression of observing a silk purse artfully (but only partially) disguised as a sow’s ear.

Heartbreaking stories of families who have lost loved ones alternate with the voices of experts from academia, law enforcement and politics who give their views on the causes of the crisis.

So hopelessly cartoonish and wrongheaded in its details that there's not even a semblance of reality.

Where the original film was a cut-and-dried Pop-Art-flavored allegory pitting scientific hubris against the unpredictable, ungovernable forces of nature, the sequel is an all-stops-pulled, edge-of-your-seat adventure film whose messages are not so neatly packaged.

It's the rare German movie calling itself a comedy that is actually funny, even if only in bits and pieces.

An unpretentious, well-acted ensemble piece that doesn't aspire to be a portentous generational time capsule like "The Big Chill," "American Graffiti" or "Diner." But it has enough markers - a grown-up, married white rapper who break dances; a karaoke bar - to suggest an approximate date.

Man in the Chair has few surprises. Once its machinery is humming, it settles into a soothing fable of a last hurrah.

Mike may be a bumbling sad sack, but Mr. Zahn gives him just enough spunky appeal to lend this unlikely fly-by-afternoon coupling and its consequences a shred of credibility.

A clever, entertaining yarn that doesn't bear close scrutiny.

If Return to Never Land -- doesn't have a story to match the original's in breadth and imagination, it does a smooth job of recycling its characters and themes.

What elevates the movie above the run-of-the-mill singles blender is its surreal sense of humor and technological finish.

A cleverly plotted movie that offers ample opportunity for spoofing anything and everything that can be found on television. Unfortunately, most of its takeoffs -- of a black-and-white gangster film, a spaghetti western and a period swashbuckler -- show no feel for genre and no genuine wit.

If the movie has loads of nerve, its ambitious fusion of cartoons and live-action comedy is only fitfully amusing.

The sustained force of Mr. Dumont's vision of existence as a swirl of brute instincts may not be easy to absorb, but it marks him as a major filmmaker.

The screenplay is vague not only about politics but also about the history of Jimmy’s unconsummated relationship with his former sweetheart, Oonagh (Simone Kirby), now married, whose wide Susan Sarandon eyes express a wistful sadness.

The impact of these stories is not in the words but in the way the mood, texture and the acting build each situation into a visually intense parable about the similarity of spiritual, erotic and aesthetic aspiration.

As the movie picks up speed and undergoes sudden, confusing plot reversals, it loses its satirical edge.

The movie's surreal style, with its film-noir camerawork and ominous lighting, turns the story into a fable about fear and nonconformism, and Mr. Macy's and Ms. Dern's carefully shaded caricatures match the mood.

A satire of contemporary sexual warfare that leaves you smiling but also stung.

Beneath the Harvest Sky reaches a dramatic climax that is so rushed and confusing, you are left scratching your head. But for all its missteps, the film feels authentic. Through thick and thin, it stubbornly maintains a thorny integrity.

Superior acting elevates a small, overcrowded ensemble piece set in rural upstate New York into something a little deeper and truer than the mawkish disease-of-the-week movie it threatens to become.

Bad taste is timeless. And sometimes it can be so funny that you can't help laughing.

The movie has holes galore. It has abrupt tonal shifts, an incoherent back story and abandoned subplots. It doesn’t even try for basic credibility. But buoyed by hot performances, it sustains a zapping electrical energy.

Although Mascots is neither as funny nor as satirically acute as its forerunner, it would be churlish to complain too loudly. And the sharpest verbal jokes in the screenplay by Mr. Guest and the actor and writer Jim Piddock are as inspired as ever. Mr. Guest’s gift for the archly comedic mot juste is undiminished.

The love story doesn't quite work. Mr. McGregor and Ms. Green make an attractive couple. But the movie's notion of two self-centered people ill suited to each other, shedding their defenses and clinging together, feels forced and sentimental.

Halloween 5, which was directed by Dominique Othenin-Girard and opened yesterday at area theaters, is a bit more refined in its details than the conventional horror movie.

A better and more serious film than its forerunner, "American Desi."

There are lots of oohs and ahs in this nasty shoot-'em-up story of a psychopathic terrorist who hijacks a jumbo jet. But beneath the thrill-by-numbers surface of the film, nothing makes much sense.

Though less reassuring and not as dramatically coherent as "Hotel Rwanda," it still packs a hard punch.

There is so much to admire in The Weight of Water, Kathryn Bigelow's churning screen adaptation of a novel by Anita Shreve, that when the movie finally collapses on itself late in the game, it leaves you in the frustrating position of having to pick up its scattered pieces and assemble them as best you can.

If Conan O'Brien Can't Stop is consistently watchable, it isn't especially funny, nor does it give any deeper insight into its star than you might get from seeing his late-night shows.

From its flickering, inky cinematography to its wavering late 1920's-style sound track, to Veronkha's kohl-eyed vampish look, the movie is an expert parody of a period movie style.

Does a better-than-average job of conveying the panic and helplessness of men terrorized by a sadist in a degrading environment, but it is still not especially scary.

An abrasive but innovative fusion of farce, satire and drama that blurs their boundaries in uncomfortable ways. It's a noisy movie whose characters tend to talk at medium-to-high volume.

The material isn't organized in any formal way but works as a mosaic that has the feel of a jam session.

Spike Lee's messy, meandering, bluntly polemical Red Hook Summer has one crucial ingredient: a raw vitality.

That the movie exists at all attests to the courage of the participants to see it through to the end. Out Loud bleeds with sincerity.

Diverting and often charming, but it never really holds together.

A movie that reserves its final sickening wallop for a grueling half-hour that leaves you as emotionally battered as the soldiers are forced to return to hell for one last senseless round.

If The Operator, which is Mr. Dichter's directorial debut, has a clever concept, it clasps it much too fiercely to its chest.

Behind the clunky machinery is a lyrical meditation on life, death, heroism, regret and forgiveness written in a florid style that might be described as Tennessee Williams on testosterone.

Choppy, high-energy documentary.

Mr. Harris's depiction of a saintly, soft-spoken, bow-tie-wearing middle-school teacher lends the movie a moral weight it probably couldn't have summoned had another actor played the role.

Keeping Up With the Steins would have been a much better film if it had waited twice as long before retracting its fangs.

Although crudely acted, with laughably inept action sequences and a story that makes little sense, it has the feverish pulse of a classic B movie, boldly angular cinematography and a blaringly cheesy jazz soundtrack.

Has neither the star power nor the epic sense of itself that infused “Cadillac Records,” the 2008 film on the same subject.

Not half as exotic or as compelling as Mr. Aïnouz’s 2002 film, “Madame Satã,” which examined the fantastic life of a transvestite prostitute and underground entertainer in 1930s and ’40s Rio de Janeiro. But it shares the earlier film’s deep sympathy with sexual free spirits in a rigid macho society.

From its sly, amused performances to its surreal comic book gloss to its artfully nervous camerawork, Lucky Number Slevin sustains the blasé tone and look of a smart-aleck thriller that buries its heart under layers of attitude.

Once Avery's mission assumes a Freudian dimension, the allegory loses its moral force and changes from a meditation on justice, power and inequality into a gory melodrama.

What lifts The Trench above the run of the mill is the intensity of its disgust.

The Toxic Avenger may be trash, but it has a maniacally farcical sense of humor, and Tromaville's evildoers are dispatched in ingenious ways. One is dry-cleaned to death, another made into pizza, a third partly french-fried.

The movie comes alive only when the camera lingers over the actual paintings and allows their power to speak for itself.