Stephen Holden

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

If repetition has stripped Iran's post-revolutionary cinema of some of its modish luster, The Deserted Station is still a valuable addition to a literature whose characteristics are now internationally well-established.

If it isn't easy being any of the troubled people wandering through the film, Loggerheads makes it easy not only to believe in them, but to care about them as well.

Are they fools or heroes? Because the movie can't decide, neither can we. And without an emotional payoff, Play It to the Bone ends up stranded in serio-comic limbo.

As impressive as it is in the abstract, all the detail ultimately drags the movie down and lengthens it unnecessarily.

Maddeningly, purposefully evasive.

If the film's old-movie homages are affectionate, they're slavishly imitative and scattershot, and the story is so willfully daffy that not even the hint of a subtext asserts itself. The film rides on the dubious assumption that camp and infantilism are the same thing.

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.

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.

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

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.

The screenplay’s pseudo-Austen tone is so consistent that its lapses into modern romance-novel fantasy threaten to derail the film.

A hopeless jumble of visual and linguistic styles.

A deeply silly movie, but it is sumptuous to look at, and it never stands still. Its creators, Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, have given the story a lilting rhythm and glittering surface of the most extravagant jewel-encrusted fairy tale.

Although Wimbledon is a much more conventional film, it still has cleverer-than-average dialogue and sharply drawn subsidiary characters.

Incoherent mess of a film.

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

Sleeping Dogs Lie doesn't pretend to be more than it is: a blunt, provocative comedy sketch whose visual look is almost as bare as that of an episode of the underappreciated Home Box Office series "Lucky Louie." The acting, especially by Ms. Hamilton, is better than serviceable.

More than Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mr. Hogan behaves like a self-invented comic-book character sprung to life. No Holds Barred is as cartoonish as its star.

Until it plunges into gore, the movie remains above the typical splatter 'n' scream fest. These careless hedonists are convincing, and the ensemble acting feels believable; the orgy looks very real. But the realism turns to caricature once the panicked party monsters begin viciously turning on one another.

What holds the film together, more or less, is the steady stream of mostly slapstick clips from early cinema.

For all the talk nowadays about a revival of swank, nothing in contemporary fashion can compete with the glamour of upper-class English life in the 1930's as it is elegantly caricatured in Ian McKellen's updated Richard III.

A clever if muddled collection of riffs on the "Blair Witch" juggernaut, dressed up with intellectual pretensions by Joe Berlinger, who directed this film with a chortling zest.

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

Gives you the delirious thrill of ripping off your enemy's head and watching the blood gush by providing a ringside seat.

Terminally glum and waterlogged.

The movie works so diligently to convey a spirit of heroic uplift and fails so completely that it feels like a tragic misfire.

If Cremaster 3 is an innovative artwork that has been credited with breaking down the distance between sculpture and film, is it also a great movie? Probably yes.

Working within the confines of the teen-age genre film, Pump Up the Volume succeeds in sounding a surprising number of honest, heartfelt notes.

The indoor scenes are so dark that you can barely make out the outlines of the bodies, much less distinguish who is who. Because almost half the film is this dim, it makes for a frustrating viewing experience. The jerky cinematography compounds the irritation.

Hugely expensive, weakly formulaic.

Gonzalo Arijón’s documentary offers an incontrovertible argument for the necessity of team spirit in the face of catastrophe.

Might have generated a laugh or two had it not forced the actors into uncomfortable extremes of caricature.

Almost every frame of this modest gem of a movie, directed by Carlos Sorin from a screenplay by Pablo Solarz, conveys the emptiness of the environment in which three interwoven vignettes unfold.

A film divided against itself. The more the cat-and-mouse game between prisoner and reporter points it in the direction of "The Silence of the Lambs," the closer it inches toward the sort of exploitation it condemns; for me, that's too close for Crónicas to be taken without a big grain of salt.

Strives desperately for a zaniness that is largely absent from the screenplay and from comic performances that are too blank and unfocused to register as parody.

Wants to make a grand statement about the mystical power (both celestial and demonic) of great music. But give or take some scattered musical moments, the frame in which that message is couched is too kitschy to let that vision catch fire.

Recoing's performance is a sensitive portrayal of a man in the throes of an excruciating spiritual crisis.

The movie's steadily elegiac tone precludes it from creating a more lively, idiosyncratic portrait of a man who, by many accounts, was a wonderful raconteur whose gift of gab was complemented by a rollicking sense of humor.

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.

The brilliant, sinister French thriller Red Lights is a twisty road movie in which every sign points toward catastrophe.

Had John Cassavetes directed “Love Story,” it might have turned out looking and sounding something like Mercy, a portrait of a sub-Mailer-like literary pugilist and the woman (named Mercy) who wins his heart. Odd as that juxtaposition may seem, it’s not a bad mix.

This visually stylish work, with its vintage glamour photos, film and television clips, and snippets from a 1951 B-movie, "Racket Girls," is more of a scrapbook than a coherent history of the sport during its rough-and-tumble infancy.

As long as it is fixated on gadgetry, FX2 is reasonably entertaining. But when the movie focuses on plot and character, it turns quite dotty in an amiable way.

Does an almost dismayingly good job of conveying its characters' grim, bare-bones existence and the stultifying sexual and religious taboos that the lovers flout.

So snug, airtight and insulated from reality that the nice, well-scrubbed "Cheaper by the Dozen" seems almost rambunctious by comparison.

And as you watch her (Moreau) sink into this semiautobiographical role (she was herself a touring performer in the 1980's), the character emerges as a deep, multilayered woman: kind, gentle and happily partaking of life's simple pleasures much of the time, but when necessary, as tough as her stage character through whom she relishes expressing her residual anger at life's hardships and disappointments.

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.

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.

The humor bubbling through Finding Nemo is so fresh, sure of itself and devoid of the cutesy, saccharine condescension that drips through so many family comedies that you have to wonder what it is about the Pixar technology that inspires the creators to be so endlessly inventive.

Leaves a sour aftertaste since it's obvious that the filmmaker's intrusion on these unhappy people, fictional or not, only further worsens their discomfort and their difficulty communicating.

A grisly sick joke of a film that some will find funny, others simply appalling. On one level, it is an in-joke about movie making, since one reason given for Ben's rampage is the need to steal enough money to make the documentary. On another level, the film satirizes real-life television shows that purport to take viewers into the thick of the action. It suggests how profoundly the presence of the camera affects events, and thumbs its nose at the very notion of documentary objectivity.

A gem of contemporary neo-realism, the movie offers a ground-level view of a poor but vital community where many residents survive by scavenging bits of recyclable steel and plastic.

High-minded but hopelessly wooden film.

The movie's extensive martial arts sequences, in which combatants bounce off each other doing triple handsprings, suggest a slightly more earthbound version of the aerial ballets in Hong Kong action-adventure films.

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.

If it's all very clever for a teen-age film, it also feels terribly forced.

Mr. Harris's coach is not a flashy role. But the actor, who effortlessly embodies an all-American ideal of strength and decency, drains as much of the syrup from his character as any actor could hope.

Although Mr. Leguizamo wisely underplays a role that is just short of saintly, the character is still a filmmaker's bogus, bleeding-heart contrivance in a movie that is much less truthful than it pretends to be.

Tenderness is a movie undone by its formulaic plot conventions, and its need to give its star more screen time than his characters merits.

Almost in spite of itself, The House of Mirth is powerful, at times even moving.

If American Gun avoids the most obvious kinds of sensationalism, it has the flaw common to many editorial broadsides of overstuffing its episodes with melodrama and symbolism.

Rie Rasmussen and Jamel Debbouze, the stars who portray Angela, the celestial therapist, and André, her star patient, display enough screwball romantic charm to keep this sugary trifle afloat longer than you'd expect.

If Deliver Us From Eva is amusing, it is not uproarious.

A swaggering journey into hell that conveys a chortling amusement at its own apocalyptic imagination.

A cheerful teen-age adventure film that in its snappier moments resembles a far less clever and less expensive Back to the Future. Despite a plot that has few interesting twists and a shoestring budget, the film glimmers with moments of drollery.

While you watch the movie, it can seem ridiculously long-winded. But once it's over, its characters' miserable faces remain etched in your memory, and its cynical message lingers.

Drop Dead Fred wants to be an offbeat cross between "Harvey" and "Beetlejuice," but it is more like a shrill, interminable episode of "I Dream of Jeannie."

Though certainly not for the squeamish, the film is by no means the ultimate horror movie it aspires to be. The volume of stagy gore quickly reaches a point of diminishing returns. And rather than trying to sustain a mood of grim suspense, the writer-director Dan O'Bannon has conceived this cinematic cousin of Night of the Living Dead as a mordant punk comedy.

As cinematic Armageddons go, this one is a real bust...Although it succeeds in crudely outlining the fable of a magic toy box and the demonic secrets carried down in the bloodline of its inventor, it is otherwise incoherent and (except for Mr. Bradley's Pinhead) wretchedly acted. Farewell, Pinhead and company. You won't be missed.

The meek, mopey comedy In the Land of Women is the film equivalent of a sensitive emo band with one foot in alternative rock and the other in the squishy pop mainstream: a softer, fuzzier "Garden State."

This 95-minute movie is so overstuffed with characters, it would take a whole television season to sort them out and give them any depth. And even then, these people have so little on their minds that 13 hours might not do the trick.

The cinematographer-turned-director likes his MTV-style editing so much that in his drive for hyperkinetic overkill he sacrifices coherence to wallow in barely contained chaos.

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

Feels like a movie whose story was slapped together during filming. Its three phases -- Southern pastorale, Sudsville and Kablooie -- don’t really connect.

Powerfully gritty.

Methodically ticks off the forms of oppression visited on gays and lesbians in the days before the gay rights movement.

Ultimately lacks the epic dimension of "Y Tu Mamá También," but its vision of that awkward age when sex threatens to overwhelm everything else is acute enough to make everyone who has been there squirm with recognition.

Despite the humanity and courage exhibited by the members of Exit, the film is inescapably grim.

Nightwatch spends so much time churning up eerie atmospheric effects that it doesn't have time to develop its preposterous story in which Martin finds himself accused of the murders.

Powerful sweat-stained swatch of Argentine neo-realism.

For those who accept the absurd simulations as realistic, Sex and Zen will have soft-core pornographic appeal. For others, its appeal should be as a cheeky if predictable sendup of erotic obsession and its unhappy consequences.

Albrecht brings out a side of Mr. Nolte rarely seen on the screen, and he gives a deep and touching portrayal of a haggard, beleaguered older man.

The worst flaw of Willard is a clunky tone-deaf screenplay based on Gilbert Ralston's original and updated by the director. Barely a line flies by that doesn't land with a wooden thud.

Funny? Yes. Revealing? No. By and large, the movie is content to offer amusing caricatures and leave it at that.

As long as it focuses on its feverishly needy central characters, neither of whom you would ever want to have as a friend, it remains true to itself.

The movie, written and directed by Vidi Bilu and Dalia Hager, is really a study of people coping with excruciating boredom and the absurd aspects of military life.

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

As operatic cinema, it ranks alongside the best of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.

Yes, it's all terribly hokey. But once you accept the premise as a conceit that allows the director, Jean-Jacques Annaud, to offer an intimate, utopian vision of the animal kingdom, Two Brothers succeeds as an inspirational pastorale and passionate moral brief for animal rights and preservation.

Sloppy but smart-enough-to-make-you-squirm comedy.

Consistently amusing and smart in its choice of targets, but it lacks the manic edge of some of Waters' earlier movies.

Each person's story is so compelling it is worthy of a feature-length documentary itself. If The Last Days has a flaw, it is that the stories have been so abbreviated to keep the film moving quickly that they feel incomplete.

Until it fizzles in an anticlimactic train crash, it is extremely entertaining.

A pictorial tone poem of astonishing visual intensity and emotional depth.

The downbeat story unfolds in quick, incisive slashes in which the combination of minimal dialogue and gorgeous black-and-white photography lends the movie a chilly documentary realism.

Everybody loves a David and Goliath story, and this one is told almost entirely from David's point of view.

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.

Almost until the end, Loverboy maintains a shaky integrity. But in its final moments it caves in to convention with a mawkish epilogue to a story that ends with an appalling act of selfishness.

Archetypes and symbols solemnly parade through Seraphim Falls, a handsome, old-fashioned western of few words and heavy meanings that unfolds with the sanctimonious grandeur of a biblical allegory.

As this chaotic barrage of muscle flexing, swordplay, fireballs, crude digital effects and comic-book quips hurls itself off the screen, it's like having several garbage cans clogged with stale pizza, lukewarm cola, soggy French fries and greasy, ketchup-stained napkins emptied over your head.

The movie is so inept in almost every particular that even its love scenes, when a grimacing Kris Kristofferson mashes his grizzled face against an impassive Cheryl Ladd, are likely to produce giggles.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster* left me convinced that the steroid scandals will abate as the drugs are reluctantly accepted as inevitable products of a continuing revolution in biotechnology. Replaceable body parts, plastic surgery, anti-depressants, Viagra and steroids are just a few of the technological advancements in a never-ending drive to make the species superhuman.

A standard, gadget-crazed exercise in whiz-bang adventure with its tongue lodged deep inside its cheek.

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.

With its icy cynicism and desolate settings, the film evokes the work of the young Roman Polanski in his sadistic trickster mode.

A quintessential American independent movie, Diggers isn't going to change the history of cinema. But it has integrity. It feels like life.

The only heat that rises from the movie is mechanical.

What makes the film bearable is the knowledge that a few people did what they could to hold the line against humanity’s worst instincts. The voices in Nanking speak for the persistence of good in times and places where a moral crevice opens to reveal a vision of hell on earth.

The documentary, which subscribes to the Great Man school of reverential portraiture, is not a biography but an interview (in French, simultaneously translated into English) conceived as a master class on art appreciation, with guest commentators augmenting Cartier-Bresson's own sparsely chosen words.

Supremely entertaining.

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.

The movie's rejection of even a tinge of melodrama lends it a special integrity.

An incisive but static and occasionally confusing character study of Lucy Fowler, a disheveled, hard-drinking single woman who has a day job as a contractor and a dissolute night life.

Instead of seriously investigating corruption, money laundering and the buying of politicians, Manda Bala would rather spend its time showing slimy brown frogs slithering over one another as they are dumped from one container into another.

There are many moments when what is on the screen stops looking like acting and becomes life itself, and you're watching real people change and grow before your eyes.

Exudes a randy, robust charm as it unapologetically thumbs its nose at respectability and everything the word implies.

What ultimately sinks this stylish but heartless film is a flat lead performance by the eternally snippy Meg Ryan.

This modest, unassuming documentary about an illegal Mexican immigrant living in San Francisco is a case study of a life defined by poverty.

You may view Untraceable, as I do, as a repugnant example of the voyeurism it pretends to condemn.

While most films in which the angry past confronts the guilty present degenerate into mawkish reconciliations, Emile errs on the side of restraint.

For a film devoted to celebrating intimacy and the breaking down of emotional barriers, Pop and Me is oddly withholding of information about the travelers.

Endearing, very funny and utterly unpretentious.

Because the cinematography of The Governess is so richly panoramic, the movie forces you to contemplate the emotional power exerted by film.

At around the halfway point, its characters’ haranguing voices begin to grate on you. People in their early 20s, even pretty people, lose their appeal when they dwell this obsessively on their own inchoate turmoil.

A rancid little nothing of a movie that baldly recycles plot elements of "There's Something About Mary."

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.

Next Stop Wonderland isn't really much more than a beautifully acted, finely edited sitcom, but it creates and sustains an intelligent, seriocomic mood better than any recent film about the urban single life.

Has some good performances (Ms. Moore's ongoing snit is a terrifically sustained bit of glowering), but it only barely begins to knit its self-pitying characters into a credible family unit. They are oddballs with attitude.

Teeters unsteadily between dystopian fable and Saturday-morning cartoon.

Along the way, Paradise Now sustains a mood of breathless suspense. Politics aside, the movie is a superior thriller whose shrewdly inserted plot twists and emotional wrinkles are calculated to put your heart in your throat and keep it there.

Gives you the steady pulse of life in a beautiful city viewed through the eyes of a character who, in spite of tragic loss and increasing decrepitude, knows in his bones that he is one of the luckiest men alive.

Remarkable concert documentary.

While enticing you to hate the gang and take delight in everything bad that happens to its members, the film also gives you the vicarious thrill of being one of the gang.

A subtle, humorous, illuminating study of politics, power and social mobility.

As this powerful, minutely documented film reveals, the tragedy wasn’t caused by the failure of the Peoples Temple to realize its goals. In many ways, it was succeeding as a self-sufficient community.

As the director of the documentary Shine a Light, Martin Scorsese is a besotted rock ’n’ roll fan who wholeheartedly embraces its mythology.

Doesn't deliver.

As the movie methodically plods forward on a screenplay (by Shawn Slovo) consisting entirely of clichés and watered-down exposition, it becomes sadly apparent that its only reliable asset is the gorgeous view.

A movie of extremes, and that goes for its aesthetics. As gory as the scenes of torture and self-mutilation may be, they are pitted against shimmering cinematography that lends the setting the ethereal beauty of an Asian landscape painting.

As the film loses its grip on its multiple stories, the title begins to suggest an overheated stew bubbling out of its pot. By the end of the film, the intersecting dramas and histrionic performances have spilled all over the floor, so to speak.

This bright, entertaining movie focuses on Curtis, but it is also a portrait of a scene, whose survivors look back with a mixture of pride and a screwball sense of mischief.

Amusing one-joke film.

A disturbing, somewhat repellent portrait of a depressed middle-class woman's struggle to live comfortably in the world.

The best jokes in this scattershot screwball satire of job insecurity, upward mobility, political correctness and yuppie marital tensions have claws that leave scratches.

Although Maxed Out would like to be this year’s "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," it doesn’t measure up. "Enron" was a stronger film because its focus was specific, the personalities under its microscope were outsize, and its story had a beginning, middle and end. Maxed Out, which has no narrator, gathers facts, opinions and impressions and tosses them into a blender. And its story is still unfinished.

Ends up stranded between two concepts, either of which might have yielded a more satisfying film.

A profound and provocative exploration of cultural inheritance, communications technology and the roots and morality of terrorism, the Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan nimbly wades into an ideological minefield without detonating an explosion.

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.

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

These cinematic feats are accomplished with meat-cleaver editing and awkward, jittery computer-generated imagery. The well-cast voices for the expressionless animals are at least good for a few smirks.

May be as exhaustive a study of one man's midlife crisis as has ever been brought to the screen. But as the movie lopes along, exhaustive becomes exhausting.

The biggest weakness in Nina's Tragedies, is the character of Nadav. His shadowy presence leaves the movie without a solid center around which to spin its tales.

Hotel de Love, the directing and screenwriting debut of Craig Rosenberg, is like a Valentine's Day box of heart-shaped chocolates that all have the same too-sweet cherry fillings.

In a year overcrowded with wonderful performances by lead actors, Mr. Murphy's immensely appealing turn ranks among the strongest.

Like most documentary polemics, it simplifies the issues it confronts and selects facts that bolster its black-and-white, heroes-and-villains view of raw economic power.

Makes a jolly absurdist stew out of its sources.

A streamlined, adrenalized thriller that is not as deep as it would like to appear, treads a retrospective political tightrope.

So narratively garbled and its screenplay so underwritten that you have to strain to piece together the story.

Together, however, they add up to a film that may be the closest movies have come to the cinematic equivalent of a collection of Chekhov short stories.

Very funny, extremely obscene movie spinoff from the popular animated Comedy Central series.

A visual adventure worthy of that much degraded adjective, awesome.

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

The only thing about the movie that isn't a transparent paste imitation is Douglas' hard, gleaming performance.

Makes the best possible argument for a cautionary drama that contemplates the absolute worst in us.

A very shallow comedy. For the real thing, rent “The Ref,” in which Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis, with a boost from Glynis Johns, set the house on fire.

Beyond the Sea, with all its gaping faults, is the genuine article. It succeeds in being deeply and sincerely insincere.

(Shue's) sweetly likable performance is the only coherent element in a film that has the impersonal feel of a television drama slapped together in a rush.

Throughout Grbavica the desire to forget and the need to remember are at loggerheads. At Sara’s school the psychological wounds of the war are being handed down to her generation through the separation of heroes and nonheroes. Fathers pass their weapons down to their sons. Even as you leave a war behind, you bring it with you.

The wonder is that The Great Debaters transcends its own simplifying and manipulative ploys; it radiates nobility of spirit.

Until it transforms into an improbable thriller, Turn the River is a finely observed portrait of a desperate working-class woman who refuses to play by ordinary rules.

There are brave, boundary-breaching movies, and there are mad, foolhardy ones. Harry and Max belongs to the latter breed.

One of the rare documentaries you leave wishing it was a little bit longer.

Despite its sociological tidbits and flashes of musical vitality, Saudade do Futuro never goes anywhere.

Gathers you up on its white horse and gallops off into the sunset. Along the way, it serves a continuing banquet of high-end comfort food perfectly cooked and seasoned to Anglophilic tastes.

Loses tension (and ultimately credibility) as it wanders through three possible endings before grinding to a halt.

Julie Gavras’s wonderful film, Blame It on Fidel, views its ideological conflicts through the eyes of a smart, willful child.

Audacious as it is, the movie is also a little scary.

Easily the most inept episode of the Halloween series, The Curse of Michael Myers, which opened yesterday, is so busy cramming half-baked supernatural rigmarole into its formula that it has forgotten how to be suspenseful.

Led by Ms. Bettis's discreetly campy May, the performances are a cut or two above what you would find in the average slasher film. But in the end that's all it is.

The Singing Forest was written and directed by Jorge Ameer, whose film "Strippers" opened three years ago and remained the single worst movie I had ever reviewed -- until now.

A jewel-heist frolic so stale it feels like a retread of a retread.

A political movie that, partly through the powerful lead performance of its star, the relatively young Yves Montand, transcends its own politics.

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

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 inspiring as it is, Doing Time, Doing Vipassana is too sweet for its own good; it plays like a spiritual infomercial.

Quietly inflammatory film.

Settles for being an atmospheric scenes-in-the-life biography of someone's most unforgettable character. It could have been so much more.

The masterstroke of this small, heartfelt directorial debut (by Peter Care, from a screenplay by Jeff Stockwell) is its integration of animated sequences (by Todd McFarlane) in which action-adventure caricatures of the comic book characters parallel or comment on events in the boys' lives.

The scruffy, outspoken train-hoppers in Sarah George's exhilarating documentary, Catching Out, are a sure sign that the pioneer spirit still flickers in pockets of TV-wired America.

Like an over-dressed Christmas tree, Look Who's Talking Now is a movie so eager to shine that it arrives draped in several layers of sentimental tinsel and cutesy-pie decorations.

Grounding the zaniness is the chemistry between its two likable stars. Beneath their crusty eccentricities, Max and John are teen-agers at heart, a Wayne and Garth for the "Modern Maturity" set. As Max, his leathery face beaming with pleasure, might put it: "Holy moley, is this a dumb movie!" But it is also fun.

This candy-colored movie, whose soft hues match the colored cereal loops that Alby devours at his mother's house, is a post-Freudian fable that wants to be a kind of anti-"Wizard of Oz" for a culture inundated with toys and toons.

The franchise, which had begun to run out of steam in Part 2, has been given a shot of adrenaline with the replacement of the Wayans Brothers as the prime creative forces by Hollywood's original spoof-meister, David Zucker.

The most moving aspect of Collateral Damages is the firefighters' sense of brotherhood and duty to their jobs. It is expressed matter-of-factly, without a shred of smugness or superiority, almost with embarrassment.

Scary enough to make the faint of heart decide never to venture into the woods or to lie on the grass again without protective covering.

A choppy, forgetful, suspense-free romp that substitutes campy humor for chills.

Calm, deliberate and devastating, Jessica Sanders's documentary After Innocence confirms many of the worst fears about weaknesses in the American criminal-justice system.

Good intentions do not guarantee good movies, or even watchable ones. A sad case in point is The Kid and I.

Inspiring enough to make you wish that the filmmakers had reined in their sentimental excesses.

Instead of building sustained comic set pieces, it takes a machine-gun approach to humor. Without looking at where it's aiming, it opens fire and sprays comic bullets in all directions, trusting that a few will hit the bull's-eye. A few do, but many more don't.

The lead performances of Home Room go a long way toward camouflaging the severe flaws of this exceedingly earnest movie.

Handsomely photographed and inspirational, but not cloyingly so, it is the rare contemporary documentary that doesn't leave a residue of cynicism and outrage.

So busy building its symbolic frame that it forgets to develop its characters, or even to make them likable.

Mr. Garfield's performance makes Jack so endearing and vulnerable that as he takes his first wobbly steps, like a baby bird shoved from its nest, your instincts are protective.

A very funny for-kids-of-all-ages delight that should catapult Mr. Black straight to the top of the A-list of Hollywood funnymen.

Ms. Zellweger accomplishes the small miracle of making Bridget both entirely endearing and utterly real.

This spare, minimalist film is not realistic. It has the simplicity of a silent movie, and the blocking of the actors, especially in the scenes with Koistinen and Mirja, emphasizes the distances between them.

Mr. Newell is master of the feel-good ensemble piece whose shallowness is partly masked by the expertise of a high-toned cast.

If Sweet Sweetback is unforgettable, it is also deeply flawed. The acting is mediocre at best. And in depicting women as grotesque, flailing sex machines serviced by the indifferent stud hero, it matches today's gangsta rap in arrogant misogyny.

Although the screenplay by Roy Blount Jr. comes up with some potentially sidesplitting situations, the director, Howard Franklin, who shepherded Mr. Murray through the equally limp Quick Change six years ago, methodically subverts them.

To warm to Manderlay, the chilly second installment of Lars von Trier's not-yet-finished three-part Brechtian allegory examining United States history, you must be willing to tolerate the derision and moral arrogance of a snide European intellectual thumbing his nose at American barbarism.

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

For all its flighty charms, The Extra Man never really lands. It hovers like a hummingbird madly beating its wings to stay aloft.

Insurrection is breezily paced, and Michael Piller's screenplay has enough good-natured humor to keep things from bogging down into sentimental pomposity.

A powerful and disturbing reminder of how a civilization can suddenly crack under certain pressures.

An upbeat meat-and-potatoes movie.

Aside from appreciating the movie's sturdy performances, my reaction to this satire of the middle-class, all-German family swung from revulsion to mystification.

Spike Lee has grabbed a tiger by the tail in his scabrously risky new comedy, Bamboozled. The wonder is how long he succeeds in hanging on.

The film's elegantly tricky cinematography and ominous, pounding score by Hans Zimmer (provocatively juxtaposed with the Rolling Stones), only underline the emptiness behind its technical flash.

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

Somewhere around its midpoint, Across the Universe captured my heart, and I realized that falling in love with a movie is like falling in love with another person. Imperfections, however glaring, become endearing quirks once you’ve tumbled.

Mr. Strathairn's complex, exquisitely nuanced portrayal of a man who goes over the line allows his character to be both hero and villain, sometimes at once.

This is high-speed action realism carried off with the dexterity of a magician pulling a hundred rabbits out of a hat in one graceful gesture. The crowning flourish is an extended car chase through the streets and tunnels of Moscow that ranks as one of the three or four most exciting demolition derbies ever filmed.

Helmer's wildly whimsical debut film, Tuvalu, is the kind of movie that might one day find itself in the hall of fame of surreal movie weirdness alongside cult favorites like "Eraserhead," "Delicatessen" and the avant-garde frolics of Guy Maddin.

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.

Elling believes so fervently in humanity that it feels almost anachronistic, and it is too cute by half. But arriving at a particularly dark moment in history, it offers flickering reminders of the ties that bind us.

A thorny masterpiece.

Heavyweights is really two movies in one, and they don't mesh.

The harder this desperately obsequious circus of a movie tries to entertain, the more it falls short.

Brilliantly realized but bone-chillingly bleak.

Hal Holbrook strips the stereotype of the grumpy old man of sentimental shtick and cutesy old-codger mannerisms.

Upbeat.

You have to admire the effort its attractive cast expends pumping life into stilted, flowery dialogue that confuses pretentious attitudinizing with profound insight.

The Arrival, like so many science-fiction films, begins as a promisingly eerie mixture of pseudo-scientific exposition and chilly paranoia. But once its plot has been bared, it turns into a muddled chase movie filled with glaring inconsistencies.

Doesn't really know how to end. But if its melodramatic final moments are ludicrous, they don't seriously dilute the acidity of the sour little swatch of urban sociology that has come before.

A surprisingly unpolished piece of work that plays as though it were written for the stage and only slightly modified for the screen.

How was this careless, self-destructive human rhythm machine able to outlast almost all her peers? Maybe the vitality of the jazz she made kept her alive. She was one tough lady.

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)

Melancholy.

Documents of a flourishing below-the-radar culture, often involving older musicians who won't be around much longer, they are archival records as well as entertainments.

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

The movie is an amusing ball of fluff that refuses to judge its characters’ amoral high jinks. Winking at the vanity of wealthy voluptuaries and hustlers playing games of tainted love, it heaves a sigh and says welcome to the human comedy.

A meditation on the scale of a catastrophe so enormous that all the assembled resources seem paltry and inadequate.

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."

Too fixated on 1939 for its own good. Its passionate immersion in a past that only dimly resonates with younger audiences may be a badge of its integrity, but that immersion trumps its vision of the future and leaves us in a land of nostalgia.

Advance word of mouth has suggested that Ms. Basinger...turns in a performance comparable to Meryl Streep's in "Out of Africa." Would that it were so. Ms. Basinger certainly works hard at her role.

A movie that pits a substantial actor like Mary McDonnell, playing a New York madam, against a bogus story that crossbreeds noirish affectations and romantic comedy into an unpalatable mush that suggests strawberry ice cream slathered with beer.

These stylized images by the Australian artist Peter Coad create an aesthetic distance from the cruelty, lending the atrocities the stature of events in a historical mural that freezes the past into an eternal present.

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.

Born to Be Blind, for all its haphazard structure, takes you about as far inside Maria's world as a film could reasonably be expected to go, but at moments it also feels uncomfortably exploitative.

If Mr. Shicoff ultimately comes across as a short-tempered, egotistical prima donna, the upshot of all the fuss is worth it: his Viennese performance is transcendent.

A candy-colored, unabashedly sentimental movie.

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.

Drugstore Cowboy, Gus Van Sant Jr.'s glum, absorbing film about a clan of heroin addicts who travel around the Pacific Northwest Looting pharmacies of their supplies the way Bonnie and Clyde cleaned out banks, gives Matt Dillon the role of his career.

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.

Although it is not a comedy, Lion’s Den is suffused with sense of life lived in the present. Even the grimmest moments are not exploited to instill fear and loathing.

A pleasantly sappy fable of new beginnings that suggests a Frank Capra film sweetened with an extra layer of sugar glaze.

What sets this syrupy swatch of kitsch apart from other films peddling a dogmatic religious agenda is the serious money that obviously went into it.

It is wonderful at conveying a sense of suffocating ennui. Too wonderful, since the story is so sketchily told and the dialogue is so fragmentary that it doesn't quite cohere. The characters remain hazy ciphers in the torpid atmosphere of a place you'll never want to visit.

Winter Sleepers has many such breathtaking moments in which sounds and images synergize with an explosive precision.

Maintains a tone that remains as light and easygoing as the Australians living in the area.