Stephen Holden

As for the man who invented it all, he remains a mystery in the film, living out his days in sybaritic bliss.

A crude but irresistibly effervescent movie cut from the same sequined cloth as "Fame," Camp couldn't be better timed to ride the coattails of "Chicago" to cult popularity.

There's no escaping that "Dominion" is finally an act of commercial scavenging. You may retrieve the eggshells, coffee grounds and banana peels from your trash and assemble them into a cute, novelty gift basket. But if you bend down and take a whiff, your nose is still met with the scent of garbage.

Art executed under the most excruciating conditions deserves a far more searching study than this too short film, which has the structure of a hurried checklist. Even so, a lot of the art shown in the documentary, often side-by-side with photographs of the same places and events, is compelling.

As it drags along, the movie makes you feel trapped in the shoes of someone destined for failure.

A surprisingly skittish fable of adolescent powerlessness, grandiosity and the nursing of psychic wounds. As the witchcraft escalates, the movie exchanges its psychological acuity for garish special effects that hammer home a ponderous warning to once and future witches: be good or else.

It uses a terrific score of bluegrass and old-timey songs, many of them written by Nick Hans, to underscore the connection and to evoke a fundamental American spirit epitomized by traveling musicians with banjos, fiddles and guitars.

The highly emotional documentary is narrated by Dustin Lance Black, the screenwriter for “Milk,” who, like Mr. Cowan, is gay and grew up in a Mormon household.

Filled with haunting visual panoramas. One of the most resonant is a nighttime shot of the Elko skyline dominated by a glittering casino. Evoking a once and future gold rush, it says more about the Old West and the New West than all of Mr. Shepard's elliptical, stagy dialogue can muster. Such powerful images make Don't Come Knocking well worth contemplating.

At only 95 minutes, the movie feels as though it had been shredded in the editing room. In Hollywood-speak, it has a weak second act.

As it wobbles from one episode to the next, The Pick of Destiny is a garish mess, and some of it feels padded. But it has enough jokes to keep you smiling, and the spirit Mr. Black brings to it is a fervent (and touching) affection for the music he spoofs but obviously adores.

In this quintessentially Germanic film, Berlin - where they live, work, and create and voraciously consume culture - is as much a character as any person. The collective sensibility on display is determinedly forward looking; you might even say avant-garde.

An unusually pure example of American kitchen-sink realism.

Superbly acted, without a trace of coyness and with considerable heat.

With a cackling nihilistic glee, the movie rubs our faces in the stinking, screaming muck of raw human appetite and insists that that's all there is.

Some of the pieces in its jigsaw puzzle are too fragmentary, and there's a sense of racing against time to fill in the blanks. Yet the movie's even-handed portrayal of two cultures uneasily transacting the most personal business resonates with truth.

Jack of the Red Hearts is so good-hearted it doesn’t want to leave audiences without a glimmer a hope.

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.

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.

For all its artificiality, Playing by Heart percolates with an earnest charm.

Take the Lead, despite its nifty concept and fiery leading man, feels sloppy and rushed.

This expressionistic portrait of the American West is an oddity that only a director from another country could have conjured.

Party Girl aspires to be a mid-90's answer to the Susan Seidelman movies "Smithereens" and "Desperately Seeking Susan." Although it has some of the same frothy energy, it has no real story to tell.

Muddled, pretentious assemblage of film clips of the band shot between 1966 and 1971.

Has an episodic rhythm and little dramatic tension.

Once Ice-T sticks his mug in the window of the couple's BMW and begins haranguing the wife in bad stage dialogue, all credibility flies out the window.

Astonishing and frustrating, the fusion of live action and computer animation created by the Jim Henson Company in MirrorMask is an example of too much lavished on too little.

If Invincible is soft at the center, its visual grandeur and mostly full-blooded performances make it gripping, for this eminent German director has pulled off the tricky feat of elevating a true story into a larger-than-life allegory.

Mush, delivered with a trembling, quasi-biblical solemnity, is what emanates from Anthony Hopkins most of the time in Hearts in Atlantis, a nostalgic fiasco so shameless it makes movies like "Simon Birch" and "Frequency" seem as austere as the work of Robert Bresson.

Despite its surreal touches and an improbable story that piles on the metaphors, the movie, which has a rich, honey-dripping score by Andrea Guerra, maintains a tone of refined heart-tugging realism.

It conveys plenty of wonder while mostly avoiding any saccharine preachiness.

Does an impressive job of relating the complicated history of the war and of filling in the background.

There is more raw vitality pumping through Romance & Cigarettes, John Turturro’s passionate ode to the sensual pulse of life in a working-class neighborhood of Queens, than in a dozen perky high school musicals. This is a movie in which a dirty mind is a good thing. Call it “The Singing Id.” Prudes, be forewarned.

The harder Mr. Radnor strains to make you love his alter ego, the more resistant you become.

Moment by moment, it all adds up. The scenes of the family huddling and hugging, greeting and parting, and reaffirming primal bonds are quietly moving.

5 Flights Up would be nothing without its stars, whose humanity warms up a movie that otherwise portrays New Yorkers as coldblooded, slightly crazy, hypercompetitive sharks.

Lacking epic pretensions and modest in scale, running under 90 minutes, Anesthesia is really closer in spirit to Rodrigo García’s delicate 2005 gem, “Nine Lives.” And it doesn’t waste a word or an image.

The movie, whose cacophonous soundtrack, when turned up, conjures your worst nightmare of sirens, car alarms, jackhammers and sundry aural assaults, is a one-trick film that rapidly wears out its welcome.

Milk and Honey is the kind of nightmare-in-a-box you might expect if Neil LaBute remade Martin Scorsese's "After Hours" on a shoestring.

Watching Paul Cox's impressionistic film based on the diaries of that legendary dancer and choreographer, it is impossible not to contemplate with a shudder the shadowy line between art, ecstasy and psychosis.

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

Nobody eviscerates the scary depths of male narcissism with such ferocity, and it is a huge relief to find Mr. Stiller flexing his oiled, low-comedy triceps with such vengeful glee.

The upshot is a whopper of an ending that is as silly as it is satisfying.

The movie aspires toward a solemnity that Dana Stevens's prosaic psychobabbling screenplay cannot support. The movie is so busy being seriously romantic that it forgets the poetry, the whimsy, the airy mystery, the dreamy what-if of angelic contemplation.

The movie should have been a steadily escalating rampage that results in outrageous property damage. Instead, it wastes too much of its time developing the cardboard characters of the hotel manager, Robert (Jason Alexander), and his two mischievous sons, Kyle (Eric Lloyd) and Brian (Graham Sack).

Transfixing in the way that well-told life-and-death adventure tales inevitably are. It is the film’s more mundane elements -- an awkward, under-nourished love story and half-baked politics -- that are problematic.

These characters are fully alive. But the movie attaches them to a conventional, not to say creaky, hip-meets-square drama.

What balances the movie is Mr. Caine's exceptional portrayal of old age as the accumulation of a lifetime's experience. In his performance the child, the youthful rogue and the forgetful codger all live at once.

Imagine a cut-rate "Titanic" stripped of romance and historical resonance and fused with "Jaws," shorn of mythic symbolism and without complex characters, and you have the essence of this live-action horror comic.

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

Cézanne et Moi offers a pungent, demystifying portrait of the rowdy late-19th-century Parisian art world where famous painters and poets mingled and jostled for position at dinner parties and art openings filled with shoptalk, backbiting and intrigue.

Like "I Am Sam," it is a film that tests your cynicism.

If the attention span of Charlie Bartlett didn’t wander here and there, the movie might have been a high school satire worthy of comparison with Alexander Payne’s “Election.” But as it dashes around and eventually turns soft, it loses its train of thought.

Lone Scherfig (“An Education”), the Danish filmmaker who directed the movie from a screenplay by Ms. Wade, has coaxed wonderfully nasty performances from a young cast.

Mr. Buscemi wrote and starred in the small gem of a movie ("Trees Lounge"), which had more psychological nuance than this emotionally cauterized slice of minimalist malaise.

The movie never transcends a screenwriting formula that makes you uncomfortably aware of the machinery driving it all.

The film, to its credit, never tries to pluck your heartstrings. As it follows the Geldharts around New York, they are figures in a meditative dialogue on human values that reaches no easy conclusions.

Because all of this looks blatantly unreal, and because the timing of the shock effects is so haphazard, Dead Alive isn't especially scary or repulsive. Nor is it very funny. Long before it's over, the half-hour-plus bloodbath that is the climax of the film has become an interminable bore. [12 Feb 1993, p.C16]

In many ways Cracks is lurid and rickety. But its gripping ensemble performances lend it an emotional intensity that outweighs its shortcomings.

A drama is only as convincing as its characters. The people awkwardly forced together in Battle in Seattle are rhetorical mouthpieces tied to the sketchy plotlines of a so-so Hollywood ensemble movie.

12-12-12 is not really a concert movie so much as it is a densely compacted scrapbook of moments onstage and off.

A sardonic, smart screwball comedy.

A small Canadian horror film that makes the most of its minuscule budget.

In many ways Sparkle is a bumpy ride. The editing is haphazard, the cinematography too dark, and there are holes in the story. If the new songs on the soundtrack are effective Motown pastiches, most of them pale beside their prototypes. But diluted Motown is better than none.

Makes a jolly absurdist stew out of its sources.

Just below the movie’s attitude of pep-rally cheer is a mood that approaches despair. Mr. Gelbspan has probably amassed as much hard evidence of climate change as anyone alive.

It all adds up to the kind of bad family entertainment likely to raise only a few eyebrows.

It all looks easy when it's carried off this smoothly. But as any number of stilted duds can attest, applying a Philip Barry or Woody Allen sensibility to 21st-century New Yorkers in their 30s is as delicate a craft as diamond cutting.

Flailing and pummeling the air, with body language that's part prizefighter, part baggy-pants clown, Reno is famous for her bluntness.

Has no interest in exploring Mr. Frank's family background or love life. This frustrating lack of context leaves you wanting a lot more in the way of texture.

This movie is a more conventional, but also more believable, exploration of the potential cost of thumbing your nose at society.

When F. Scott Fitzgerald remarked that the rich “are different from you and me,” he might have been thinking of someone like the moody billionaire from Fierce People.

Made of Honor retains enough sweetness to satisfy the cotton-candy addicts. For true believers in fairy tales, no romantic fantasy is too extravagant if the heroine is a sweetheart. The rest of us can sit there and roll our eyes.

There isn't a dishonest moment in Fairhaven, Tom O'Brien's piercing, wistful portrait of three longtime buddies in their mid-30s who reunite around a funeral in a southeastern Massachusetts fishing community.

Escape From L.A., which the director wrote with Mr. Russell and Debra Hill, is much too giddy to make sense as a politically astute pop fable. As amusing as some of its notions may be, none are developed into sustained running jokes. [09 Aug 1996, p.C5]

A slender Chekhovian vignette about the joys and regrets of old age and the pleasures of sociability.

This contemporary sex farce, directed by Jeff Pollack, has the attention span of a hyperactive child, but its bawdy sexual humor rarely flags.

What begins as a blushing, priapic opera buffa about coming of age turns into a verismo shocker, before softening into something mellower.

The House of Yes was adapted from a play by Wendy MacLeod. And the movie, with its brittle, outrageous dialogue has a shrill stagy feel. That would be fine, if the dialogue sustained the stylish crackle of a drawing-room comedy gone berserk, but there are many gaping holes between the funny moments.

Despite the movie’s gripping performances and the verisimilitude of many elements, I simply don’t believe the story.

With all its quirks, Gerry seeps into your pores like the wind-whipped sand that stings the faces of these disoriented hikers.

A smart seriocomic playlet with some emotionally harsh moments, although it refrains from plumbing its subject in agonizing depth.

Originally released seven years ago on home video, is only now surfacing as a theatrical release. Although it's no classic, it's a cut or two smarter than the average Hollywood comedy. At its best, it plays like a less acerbic, less Jewish triple episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." (review of re-release)

Small Time is agreeably sentimental meat-and-potatoes fare with strong dashes of humor, executed with a sincerity that’s hard to resist.

The bits of Aboriginal lore imparted along the way by Tadpole add flavoring to a sugar-coated romp that has the craft of a high school revue.

The scenes between the young lovers confronting adult authority have the same seething tension and lurking hysteria that the young Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood brought more than 40 years ago to their roles in "Splendor in the Grass."

A peppy romantic trifle from France that rises above the mundane on the strength of its beautifully detailed lead performances.

Would like to think of itself as a film on the edge, a contemporary descendant of "Sweet Smell of Success." But as it dawdles along, it fails to find contemporary corollaries to the super-charged language and caffeine-fueled pace of that grimy 1957 masterpiece.

The movie knows its audience, which is roughly between the ages of 5 and 13 and enjoys inane, goofy slapstick that seldom lets up.

Content to go only a third of the way to the bottom of its characters, the movie gives each a few comic tics and leaves it at that.

Leaves a movie that wants to be a searching moral examination of human motivation under stress frustratingly opaque at the center.

Far from the first movie in which a fearless woman coaxes the inner tiger crouched inside a mild-mannered milquetoast to spring into action, but it is one of the most charming.

Rookie of the Year, which was directed by Daniel Stern from a script by Sam Harper, has an appealing central performance by Mr. Nicholas, who manages to be cocky without seeming obnoxious. As a summer diversion, the film has about as much substance as cotton candy.

The Program, much to its detriment, concentrates almost exclusively on the history of the doping effort.

The Book Thief is a shameless piece of Oscar-seeking Holocaust kitsch.

Avoids succumbing to the preachiness that is the bane of so many family films, and for a movie like this, that's no small feat.

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.

The film leaves you with a sense that Kastner’s name is a casualty of rhetorical crossfire.

Bang Gang goes out of its way to avoid stereotyping. Where a Hollywood equivalent would almost certainly punish George, “Bang Gang” refuses to designate clear-cut heroes and villains.

The Emperor’s New Clothes is moderately effective agitprop.

Piles too many small disasters on top of the initial tragedy, including a drunken car accident, a drug bust and a cancer scare. It also swerves unsteadily into farce.

At a certain point, Mr. Norris forsakes realism for theatricalized fantasy, and Broken ultimately loses its stylistic cohesion, if not its humanity.

It’s refreshing to see Dame Maggie in a lighter mode than usual. The role of a genteel psychopath is a piece of lemon tea cake she consumes in one delicate bite.

A free-for-all comic spoof that brings the "hood" genre of Hollywood films full circle. Crude and chaotic, the movie stridently stands every serious theme and anguished emotion from those two groundbreaking films on its ear. [13 Jan 1996, p.21]

Vanity Fair has a deeper conceptual confusion. In mixing satire and romance, the movie proves once again that the two are about as compatible as lemon juice and heavy cream.

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.

A movie so lifeless and drained of genuine joie de vivre it makes you long for the largely fictional earlier film.

By the time it reaches a weak, ambiguous conclusion, the movie has gone everywhere and nowhere, much like its psychotic main character, Bob Maconel (Christian Slater).

The deeper Ricky plunges into allegory, the shakier its grasp of the material.

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.

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

Had it had the concision and symmetry of a classic French farce, Après Vous could have been an irresistible laugh machine.

Silly, featherweight comedy.

A movie like We Are Marshall stands or falls on its ability to make you feel the pain and loss of individuals in a place where community pride and football are one and the same. As the film, directed by McG (the "Charlie's Angels" movies) from a wooden screenplay by Jamie Linden, follows a handful of Huntington residents during the months after the accident, not one of them comes fully to life.

Gets lost in a fog of indecision and compromise.

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

As more characters, including the couple's three children - enter the picture, Late Bloomers loses its narrative thread and becomes so choppy that you have the sense that it was butchered during the editing process. What remains is the skeleton of a story that leads to an abrupt, icky-cute ending.

When put into the mouths of American actors with no feel for Wilde's high-toned repartee, they simply hang in the air and die.

Most disappointingly, the music is tepid, mediocre pop pastiche.

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.

Bachelorette is more tartly written, better acted and less forgiving than male-centric equivalents like the "Hangover" movies.

A Goofy Movie is engaging in its mild-mannered way, but the story is too rambling and emotionally diffuse for the title character to come fully alive.

There is some fun to be found in this goofy riff on Shakespeare.

It must be said that Café de Flore is true to its hyper-romantic belief system. And unlike most movies in the "Touched by an Angel" school of storytelling, it doesn't descend into cheap sentimentality. It may be hokum, but it is sophisticated hokum.

Washington leans into an otherwise schlocky movie and slams it out of the ballpark.

For the most part, Paul Laverty's screenplay and the strong, naturalistic performances lend it a specificity that sets it apart.

What the movie lacks is contrast. The sped-up ribbons of traffic in a city look as pretty as the interior of a redwood grove. As for the perils of logging, one brief shot of a clear-cut forest flashes by so quickly it is almost subliminal.

However authentic and heartfelt this film's depiction of life on the meaner streets of the Northeast corridor may be, it doesn't begin to match "The Sopranos'" epic vision of violence, class struggle and upward mobility in a barbarous culture.

The end product suggests tepid, bottom-drawer Merchant-Ivory in which the emotions rarely catch fire.

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.

Teeters unsteadily between dystopian fable and Saturday-morning cartoon.

Most of the supernatural sightings are flickers at the corners of the screen, so that at certain moments watching the movie feels like taking an eye exam. You see it, then you don't. But the film is not especially scary, and even its boo! moments lack a visceral shock.

Bland, obsequious adaptation of John Grogan’s best-selling memoir.

Any movie that lumps Mr. O'Neal, Ms. Derek and Snoop Dogg (as the voice of a gangsta-rap answer to Stuart Little) under the same title can't be all bad.

Although the movie follows the standard Hollywood formula of pictures dealing with athletic competition, it is snappily paced and unusually well acted.

Although the film is well acted from top to bottom, its dramatic spark plug is Mr. Doyle's terrifying portrayal of Father Stafford.

Bounce may be far from a great film, but its pleasures are consistent enough to remind you of how few movies nowadays come anywhere close to matching it in intelligence and emotional balance.

The movie's biggest disappointment is the vague, unfocused performance of Ms. Ricci, an actress known for taking risky, unsympathetic roles. Here she seems somewhat intimidated by her character.

It is an emotional journey for these grown children, now in their 40s and 50s, who engage in sometimes heated conversations, several taking place on the actual sites where Joseph and other prisoners endured unimaginable suffering.

The film’s method of circling around its subject, then closing in at the end, feels coy and withholding, as if Mr. Greene reserved the few juiciest moments for last.

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.

As the truth tumbles out, the dialogue and the carefully timed revelations make My Old Lady seem increasingly stagy. But the performances go a long way toward camouflaging the screenplay’s clunky mechanics.

Too elliptical and poetically structured to cohere as more than an intense mood piece with social ramifications. The movie is so enraptured with its own romantic desolation that its narrative drive becomes sidetracked.

A sour portrait of Gen X yuppies who settle for adult lives that appear at once soulless and overprivileged.

Famuyiwa's dialogue is easygoing and witty, and the warmhearted comic performances mesh beautifully.

Don't Tell, which was unaccountably nominated for an Oscar for best foreign language film, is no better than a second-tier candidate for the Lifetime Channel.

Ultimately, even after momentarily falling apart in a fit of paranoia, Martin remains a cipher in a movie that never fulfills its potential as melodrama. If The Good Doctor isn't a bad movie, it tells only half the story.

Besides Ms. Linney’s excellent performance and Mr. Hopkins’s good one, the best things about the movie are its sensuous cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe (“Talk to Her,” “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”) and a gorgeous soundtrack.

Too light-headed to qualify as satire, too poker-faced to register as comedy, Fay Grim belongs in its own stylistic niche: the Hal Hartley film.

It strings along its joke just long enough to keep from wearing out its welcome.

Like "Twelve and Holding," another film from last year's New Directors series, Wild Tigers achingly sympathizes with the desperate lengths an obsessed adolescent will go to in pursuit of love. As you watch the movie, you pray that, in the language of "Tea and Sympathy," the future teachers of Logan's life lessons will "be kind."

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

The first third of The Switch, directed by Josh Gordon and Will Speck, is so bizarre that it leads you to wonder if, through some miraculous lack of oversight, the movie will blaze an unpredictable path. No such luck.

As truthful as it is, Boulevard conveys little insight into characters who are believable and well acted but incapable of change.

A fascinating double-edged portrait of 1950s Los Angeles.

Its tepid satire of art world pretensions culminates with a visual dirty joke that is mildly amusing but still not worth the wait.

Bomb the System, which rides on a subtle hip-hop soundtrack, might be described as soulful pulp; cult recognition awaits it.

Cultivation and fine manners are nowhere to be found in the foul urban cesspool of William Monahan's London Boulevard. This palpitating mess of a movie certainly doesn't lack for pungent atmosphere.

Expressive touches are finally inadequate. Ms. Huppert's hard work notwithstanding, they don't take the place of psychological texture and narrative weight.

The Man of My Life is a sumptuously illustrated but shallow fable of the grass-is-greener conflict between freedom and commitment.

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.

Paints an alluring picture of a pan-European cosmopolitan culture whose characters hopscotch from one country to another with hardly a second thought in a lighthearted floating party.

Although Under Siege 2 isn't credible for a single moment, its director, Geoff Murphy, has done a smoothly efficient job of coordinating the action sequences.

Just like its main character, this smart, slyly witty movie with few laughs undersells itself.

We Are the Giant builds up quite a rhetorical head of steam, but it doesn’t try to analyze the conflicts it observes or to fill in the history, except in the broadest sense of placing these uprisings on a list of rebellions that stretch back through millenniums.

The film's flamboyant portrayals of characters you love to hate have a malicious comic edge. If ever there were a movie to gladden the hearts of misanthropes, this is it.

May be pure hokum, but at least it knows how to spin a yarn.

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.

For much of the movie, the kinetic furor of the game sequences helps camouflage the weaknesses of a screenplay that is a mechanically contrived series of power struggles.

Handsome but empty film.

Almost a textbook example of what can go wrong when an artistic bad boy decides to be good.

Short-circuits the novel's quirky charms and period atmosphere by its squeamish attitude toward gritty circus life and smothers the drama under James Newton Howard's insufferable wall-to-wall musical soup.

Rudderless, the misbegotten directorial debut of William H. Macy, is so dishonest, manipulative and ultimately infuriating that it never recovers after its bombshell revelation two-thirds of the way into the movie.

As beautiful as it is, Epic is fatally lacking in visceral momentum and dramatic edge.

A great big juicy gob of apocalyptic paranoia.

A 1950's movie magazine fantasy dressed up just enough to pass for contemporary.

The belated sentimentality of the movie is as thudding as its fire-and-brimstone moralism; they're really two sides of the same counterfeit coin.

Think of it as a kind of “Twilight Zone 2007” in which the paranoia endemic to an industry that runs on illusion, hype and extravagant grandiosity comes home to roost.

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

The movie’s principal saving grace is Ms. Winslet’s convincing portrayal of Adele, a despairing woman of low self-esteem just a twitch away from a nervous breakdown. In almost every other respect, this overbaked romantic hokum is preposterous.

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.

Can a feature-length movie be built on minutiae like jammed copying machines, unsent business letters and orientation programs for new employees? This innocuous wisp of a film, as weighty as a scrap of fax paper caught in an updraft, suggests that the answer is no.

There is enough discomfort on display to reinforce the cynical adage that sex is God's joke.

No amount of gorgeous costumes and painterly chiaroscuro can endow this terminally silly film with even a patina of class.

The saving graces of the film, written and directed by Chris Kennedy, are its performances, especially Mr. Roxburgh's portrayal of a floundering lost soul with little to show for an itinerant life, and Ms. Otto's ditsy, mercurial and ultimately touching country singer.

Its insistent zaniness makes Soul Kitchen very different in spirit from Mr. Akin's two previous films, "Head-On" and "The Edge of Heaven," which established him as a major European filmmaker. Seriously silly, it evokes the same high-spirited, pan-European multiculturalism in which people of all ages and backgrounds blithely traverse national borders as they aggressively pursue their destinies.

Once the film softens, it starts to come unglued.

[A] wonderful, lighter-than-air movie.

Quitters is repellent but believable, which makes it a little scary.

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.

In aggressively sunny picker-uppers like the Marigold movies, there is a thin line between adorable and insufferable. And in the second “Marigold,” Mr. Patel has succumbed to his tendency toward cuteness.

A more accurate name for Feast of Love might be “Feast of Breasts.” At every opportunity, Mr. Benton turns the camera on his actresses’ gleaming torsos. These beautifully lighted soft-core teases lend an erotic frisson to a movie that in most other ways feels enervated.

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

A small, intense period piece with a tough-love attitude toward lazy, self-indulgent little girls flirting with madness.

Mighty Joe Young, directed by Ron Underwood from a screenplay by Mark Rosenthal and Lawrence Konner, is saddled with dialogue so wooden that Mr. Paxton and Ms. Theron almost seem animatronic themselves. Little children won't notice. In Joe, they can identify with the biggest, cuddliest simian toy a 6-year-old could ever hope to own.

Soon after that the movie simply stops dead in its tracks, as though the money had run out and the project had been called off in the middle of a scene that makes no psychological or dramatic sense. It leaves you frustrated and annoyed.

Think of Death at a Funeral as a comic quickie. As it presses buttons, a few laughs come out, but that’s all there is to it.

“Saturday Night Live” deserves much better than the documentary equivalent of what a book editor would surely dismiss as a rushed, careless clip job.

For all its violence and road rage, Snitch doesn’t disintegrate into noisy popcorn nonsense.

She's All That is essentially a formulaic comedy, but it has enough glimmerings of originality and wit to make you wish it were much bolder and funnier than it turns out to be.

As his movie-in-progress goes along, his pursuit of a childhood dream looks increasingly like an excuse by a canny aspiring filmmaker to create a work sample.

As this strained, foul-mouthed exercise in gallows humor proceeds, God’s Pocket sustains a facade of meanspirited deadpan comedy. But there are no laughs, not even smirks to be had.

This crude, inspirational tear-jerker is as sweet as a bowl of instant oatmeal smothered in molasses. It should please those who honestly believe that Santa Claus and God are synonymous; others may retch.

Little more than a sanitized blend of nonsense and adventure and just a teeny bit of romance, interspersed with the occasional pop song.

So intent on pushing its virtuous agenda that its characters often sound like mouthpieces parroting predigested attitudes.

It would be tempting to dismiss Nobody Walks as a trivial erotic divertissement, even more so because it doesn't apply the kind of symbolic gloss found in a '60s film of serial seduction, like Pasolini's "Teorema." Banal as its situation may be, it picks at every scab you may have left over from wounds suffered during the mating games of your youth.

Is the movie psychologically accurate? Yes. But that doesn't keep it from being a little dull.

If the actors playing the brothers show little fraternal similarity, their performances are convincingly natural.

By the end of The Walker a movie that begins as a dazzling round of charades has deteriorated into a plodding game of Clue.

If the title "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" didn’' already belong to Hunter S. Thompson, it would perfectly fit Peter Tolan's viciously funny satire, Finding Amanda.

Though it includes some moderately funny snippets of actual performances, Wild West Comedy Show is not a concert film. We never see a complete performance or even a quarter of one.

Because Mr. Thurston and Mr. Wigdor lack the hard shells necessary to make their characters credible, White Irish Drinkers feels synthetic. Mr. Lang and the older cast members fare better, but they can't save a movie that runs on clichés.

Apart from Ms. Mirren’s performance, Woman in Gold smugly and shamelessly pushes familiar buttons.

As this sweet, ineffectual comedy follows two sad sacks competing for the job of manager at a new branch of a Chicago grocery chain, it pointedly avoids the raucous bad-boy clowning of the typical Everyguy farce. Think of it as a polite, tightly muzzled "Clerks."

If the strong performances of its three stars infuse this metaphorically clotted movie with some life, the screenplay (some of which was improvised) has a weak narrative pulse. This political essay posing as a movie makes the mistake of confusing longwinded storytelling with compelling drama.

At the very least, Moog should persuade you that the history of music over the last century is as much a story of technology and sound as a family tree of stylistic influences. It's a very useful reminder.

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

With its strained, quasi-poetic language that fitfully tries to soar, The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond is a significant, though less than monumental feat of reclamation.

The movie, directed by Gavin O’Connor (“Tumbleweeds”), makes little sense. The screenplay, by Bill Dubuque, is so determined to hide its cards that when the big reveal finally arrives, it feels as underwhelming as it is preposterous.

At its most provocative, the movie explores the masculine mystique and the myth of the black stud.

It all makes for a poignant mix, the boy inside the man, pressing his nose against the glass, longing for the journalistic authenticity of someone like Burrows while still believing in Lassie and the unconditional love of True.

A nasty little thriller that starts out on a somewhat higher plane but eventually trades in its level head for conventional scare tactics and violence.

Mr. Schoenaerts’s dour André may make conceptual sense, but he leaves a hole in this handsomely mounted costume drama that would have profited from more intrigue and a steamier erotic atmosphere.

As its momentum accelerates, and its special effects transform it into a pulpy cartoon, Predators loses its judgment and turns into a frantic, clichéd chase film. This chaotic stew of fire, blood, mud and explosives is so devoid of terror and suspense that any metaphorical analysis is rendered moot.

Although you wouldn't want an entire movie devoted to such shenanigans, Hotel for Dogs isn't half as zany as it might have been.

A formulaic sports romance with the texture of a strawberry smoothie.

If Mr. Duvall's finely textured performance is a testament to the power of good screen acting to lift a film above the mundane, the movie's many irritating tics demonstrate that he is much more at home in front of the camera than behind it.

As My Mother Likes Women gallops along, it picks up speed and takes its characters on a whirlwind tour of Prague before rushing back home. As it accelerates, its texture thins and its story turns strained and eager to please. But it never loses its cheeky sense of humor about love and the havoc it can wreak.

For its courage to address a ticklish subject with warmhearted humor, Breakfast With Scot, adapted from a novel by Michael Downing, deserves a light round of applause.

An amiably klutzy affair whose warm, fuzzy heart emits intermittent bleats from the sleeve of its gleaming spacesuit.

Doesn't have a genuinely human moment.

For Ms. Watts, it is a small, brave acting tour de force.

Ms. Weber (Mr. Farr's wife) anchors the movie with a gritty, honest performance that has the same to-the-bone quality as Melissa Leo's in "Frozen River." There's not a false note or inflection.

If Campfire is solidly acted, it is visually drab and has a haphazard narrative momentum.

That Mr. Grant can bring Keith back from the edge more or less persuasively is a testament to his ability to convey genuine humility without mawkishness, once he sees the light.

Because the film, which affects the style of “United 93,” offers no new insights, theories or important information, you’re left wondering why it was made.

A crude but stirring video documentary filmed over last year and this by Amos Poe, while Mr. Earle and his band were on tour.

As intense an immersion in military ambience as a Hollywood movie could hope to provide in just over 90 minutes.

Super rides on the carefully bent performances of its stars.

One of the juiciest male characters to pop up in an independent film this year.

A paint-by-numbers story that offers no surprises and a hero and villain etched in white and black with few shades of gray.

And while Mr. Duke's direction has visual panache, the movie is unevenly paced.

The movie feels like a grown-up version of little boys making whooshing noises and staging collisions while playing with toys on a living room floor. It belongs to the same star-and-his-pals-cutting-up genre as the lesser comedies by Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack.

Elektra Luxx has some scattered witty notions, but it is not funny.

Most of it has to do with the ways younger Indian-Americans keep their culture alive in the United States and the ways they don't.

The harder the movie tries to shock, the shriller it rings.

With the exception of Marie Little White Lies focuses mostly on the men: whiny, strutting little boys whose exasperated, tight-lipped wives put up with their bad behavior and sometimes have to act like mommies.

The movie offers a grab bag of oddball characters who seem unfocused, and its visual rhythms are jerky and spasmodic.

The low-key realism is so meticulously maintained that Summer in Berlin feels somewhat trivial. There is nothing larger here than meets the eye. It is "Sex and the City" on a stringent budget with fewer characters.

If the new film doesn't exude quite as much fairy-tale magic as the original, it is still a thoroughly entertaining family romp.

Darts nervously between soap opera and sitcom, rarely blending them in a way that lets the two genres enhance each other.

So awful it just might put an end to Hollywood's hypocritical infatuation with men in drag as symbols of its own supposedly liberated sexual attitudes.

As flimsy and manipulative as the shallowest Hollywood fantasy.

What links these three stories besides their African settings is the calm, majestic presence of Queen Latifah, who introduces each one. The rapper, singer, actress and television personality towers over the movie, a stern but benign fortress of maternal common sense and wisdom.

Whether or not you wince, this meticulously acted movie, which won Ms. Soloway a directing award at the Sundance Film Festival, paints an accurate picture of how a segment of youngish, educated, affluent, white Americans converse. It is anything but inspiring.

Tombstone is a movie that wants to have it both ways. It wants to be at once traditional and morally ambiguous. The two visions don't quite harmonize.

A sweeping but disorganized and sometimes monotonous exploration.

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.

The chief pleasures of this mild-mannered dud lie in watching two resourceful comic actors go through their paces like the pros they are.

Despite the glorious singing heard in archival footage from various periods of her career, the film is frustratingly sketchy.

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.

The only distinguishing characteristic of this mildly agreeable variation of a worn-out formula is that the boisterous family under examination is Puerto Rican, and the screenplay includes a smattering of Spanish.

The story has enough nasty twists and tantalizing clues for its ingenious mechanics to remain engaging.

Appeal[s] to the delicate palates of an audience that craves the movie equivalent of tea and biscuits: stiff upper lips conceal hearts of gold, and all psychological conflicts are resolved with tearful confessions of vulnerability.

Thoroughly blurs the line between high-minded outrage and lurid torture-porn.

Trash is a shameless bid to recycle the mystique of “Slumdog Millionaire,” its likable, overrated prototype.

Above all, it loves its characters and the actors who play them. A fearless, talented filmmaking auteur working on a limited budget, Mr. Lipsky insists on doing it his way and letting the chips fall where they may. More power to him.

Probably serves some useful purpose, despite its ham-fisted preachiness and mediocre acting.

Played in a loud sketch-comedy style that might be described as "Gay Mad TV." The haranguing, badly acted farce wears out its comic welcome within half an hour.

Long before the story culminates with a preposterous final revelation, whatever hopes you had that Now You See Me might have had anything to say about the profession of magic, rampant greed or anything else have been dashed.

Wide Awake imagines it's a seriocomic "coming of age" film radiating waves of healing sweetness and light. But beneath its suffocating, smug sentimentality, you have to look hard to uncover a single moment of truth and genuine feeling.

At the very least 28 Hotel Rooms, the first feature written and directed by Matt Ross, is an impressively executed acting exercise for Chris Messina and Marin Ireland.

In case you have forgotten, all women are prostitutes, and all men are johns.

A lightweight comedy that has more than enough laughs to justify its silly, scatterbrained premise.

The full explanation for the movie's graphically depicted horrors is preposterous even by the almost-anything- goes standards of the action-thriller conspiracy genre.

Shot in a quasi-documentary style at the actual locations where the events took place, including the sidewalk outside the Dakota, the movie is extremely uncomfortable to watch.

Starting as a coldly realistic thriller, this film eventually loses its bearings as the director Miguel Ángel Vivas succumbs to a fit of nihilism, transforming Kidnapped into gruesome tit-for-tat torture porn.

Ms. Ryan's lean, eagle-eyed golden girl is enough to curdle milk.

A story that should have been a taut poker-faced French farce that pushed its premise to the brink of absurdity stalls, unsure of its balance between comedy and drama. The movie's one reliable constant is Ms. Huppert. You can't take your eyes off her, even when she is misused and misdirected.

Starbuck is up to its eyeballs in mush.

Mr. Gyllenhaal’s strong performance still doesn’t add enough substance to a film that is hollow at the center. It’s mostly the fault of Mr. Sipe, who seems to believe that saying nothing is saying something.

An upbeat meat-and-potatoes movie.

An unpretentious, sociologically pointed slice of life.

As Shadows vacillates between the historical and the occult, you may snicker at the way hackneyed horror movie conventions are redeployed for more serious ends. But you won't be bored. The movie is well acted (especially by Ms. Stanojevska) and very sexy.

Set Fire to the Stars barely skims the surface of characters you wish had been given more dimension, but as a snapshot of postwar academia and its pretensions, it exerts a creepy fascination.

For all its energy and fine acting, Tycoon has a frustrating lack of narrative coherence.

Ends up stranded in the wilderness between comedy and rushed, halfhearted melodrama.

My Fellow Americans, doesn't get to the heart of any issue, constitutional, legislative or otherwise. But it has a fine time imagining our leaders as bumbling, thin-skinned, ultimately likable misfits who are as lost on the American highway as everybody else.

If Richie Rich has the ingredients for a sweet-natured fantasy of ultimate childhood bounty, the movie, directed by Donald Petrie, lacks any sense of wonder. Its visual perspective is decidedly grown-up and demystified.

The question is why. Why would a star of Michael Douglas's stature and intelligence attach himself to a Washington thriller as deeply ridiculous, suspense-free and potentially career-damaging as The Sentinel?

Filmed without a trace of sentimentality, Big Sur is an achingly sad last hurrah.

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.

An illustrated civics lesson that strains to make its complicated, shadowy subject - electoral redistricting - a political hot topic.

Rebecca Miller’s fourth film is a wry, acutely observant drama.

This version of The Mummy has no pretenses to be anything other than a gaudy comic video game splashed onto the screen.