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.