Stephen Holden

The steady performances of Tom Wilkinson, playing a kindly priest, and Emily Watson, an angelic mother, in Alejandro Monteverde’s Little Boy do little to offset the cloying sweetness of a movie that has the haranguing inspirational tone of a marathon Sunday-school lesson.

Ludicrous, impenetrable and headache-inducing.

Putrid comic stew.

As tightly plotted as a standard French farce.

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.

After barely stirring to life, Night Train to Lisbon mercifully expires.

It doesn't get worse than Grown Ups, Adam Sandler's sloppy entry into this year's man-child-comedy sweepstakes. Lazy, mean-spirited, incoherent, infantile and, above all, witless.

The feisty, lovelorn Ray is far and away the strongest, most complex character, and Mr. Beauchamp gives him his due, even though too many of his speeches sound like a mix of biographical filler and boilerplate sloganeering.

This is a movie that runs on magical thinking.

Far from a future cult classic, it turns out to be smarter and more diabolical than you could have guessed at the beginning.

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.

Buried somewhere under the gross-out jokes and the wet-lipped ogling at an endless parade of jiggling bikini-clad flesh in Grind is the kernel of a cheerful little movie about the world of competitive skateboarding.

Except for the usual double entendres in which titles of mainstream Hollywood hits are twisted into salacious puns, Finding Bliss (Bliss is the name of the company's resident star) isn't especially funny. Nor is it sexy, despite flashes of nudity and fleeting glimpses of Grind's works in progress.

The movie, like its lovers, is really two films smushed together in the faint hope that sheer incongruity can grind out laughter.

Miss Beals's performance sinks this already muddled mess of a movie like a stone.

Tasteless at times, but where's the yuck?

Spike Lee carries his political exasperation beyond outrage into chaos. The carelessness with which he hurls his feelings about hot-button topics onto the screen is the filmmaking equivalent of last-ditch marketing: grab everything in sight, roll it up into a big messy mud ball, and hurl it against the wall, hoping that something sticks.

Although the early scenes hold out some promise...the movie quickly runs out of ideas.

True to Saturday-morning cartoon tradition, GoBots is a jerky, semi coherent series of chases, laser-gun battles and explosions, with an allegorical plot about how no one can handle too much power.

Although the concept seems promising enough, it is undone by disastrous casting decisions and an utter lack of ensemble unity.

Pushes its ugly humor further than most.

The sloppy, absent-minded Premonition is a giant step backward for Ms. Bullock.

Rob Schneider runs an obstacle course of taste and emerges remarkably unsullied, considering the choices he faces.

What does it add up to? Nothing much. A tense, paranoid nightmare with a chilly metaphysical overview has been trampled into a blustering, bad cartoon.

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

Watching Ms. Zellweger’s joyless performance, you have to wonder what happened to this formerly charming actress who not so long ago seemed on the verge of becoming a softer, more vulnerable Shirley MacLaine.

Doesn't have a genuinely human moment.

Impenetrable mess of a movie.

Darting around a futuristic Los Angeles on motor scooters that can fly, these plucky whiz kids are so indomitably cheery that they seem more mechanical than the demented cyber-messiah who tries to destroy them. At least he has a temper.

Whether something did or didn’t happen, and the comic confusion as the future bumps into the past: those are the smart parts of a movie that is not as idiotic as it pretends to be.

Like "Cruel Intentions," Swimfan is entertaining enough to be considered a guilty pleasure. But to transcend the teenage movie genre both movies would have needed a baby Glenn Close, and both came up short.

Many of the faces that emerge through the murk appear bug-eyed. And much of the dialogue, which is frequently shouted, is only semi-intelligible.

Barely watchable.

If 1st Night had a glint of social satire, it might have amounted to something more than a frivolous fatuity. But it plays as an arch, hammily acted farce.

Every truly awful movie epic has a point of no return, a moment when the accumulated bad lines and bogus sentimentality become so cloying that the best defense against a mounting queasiness is an awed amusement. The Postman, offers a new opportunity for levity every few minutes after its first hour.

The fact that her story of triumph over unimaginable odds doesn't come freighted with mystical and religious bromides makes it all the more inspiring.

The screenplay is so haphazardly constructed that when the movie seems to be ending, it refuels with preposterous new developments.

Although the odds are against them, Mr. Gazzara and Ms. Moreno succeed in cutting through the forced sitcom banter to create a credible and touching portrait of a marriage of two proud individuals who respect each other even in moments of strife.

There is not a laugh to be found in this rancid, misogynistic revenge comedy.

(Patricia Arquette's) irritated reactions to her dire situation have all the force of a pet owner's whiny complaints when her feline refuses to use the cat box.

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

What redeems the film…are its three outstanding performances.

So preoccupied with delivering its effects that it doesn't bother to make sense of its story.

Love Sick Love deteriorates into a series of pranks that are not funny enough to register as comedy or brutal enough to qualify as horror.

A comedy that is so scatterbrained and long-winded that much of it feels invented on the spot. (It’s also a half-hour too long.)

The characters' quirks lend The Big Shot-Caller a certain authenticity, and it is easy to empathize with Mr. Rhein's Lonely Guy in the City. But this minuscule indie variation of "Saturday Night Fever" moves only in fits and starts. When it ends on a cautiously upbeat note, you feel that you have seen just the stumbling first act of an unfinished drama.

An incoherent mess.

Slackly directed and thinly written, "Airborne," which opened yesterday, exists mainly for its scenes of the big race, in which two teams rocket down a series of winding hills, jumping over cars, scooting under trucks and bouncing down stairs. The camera work in this extended sequence has a nice gliding energy, but the participants are so thickly encased in helmets, goggles and padding that it is impossible to see how the two sides are doing as they elbow each other around the course's hairpin turns.

For all its seriousness, Kalamity lacks a steady narrative drive; its speeches are too long, and its themes become repetitive.

To say that Justin Zackham’s farce The Big Wedding takes the low road doesn’t begin to do justice to the sheer awfulness of this star-stuffed, potty-mouthed fiasco.

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

At least Mr. De Niro, who disappears from the movie until the end, seems to be enjoying himself. The force of his bonhomie gives this murky-looking, empty conceit of a film a desperately needed lift of facetious humor.

For all its visual pizazz A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III has the jerky momentum of a collection of disconnected skits loosely thrown together with only the vaguest notion of where it’s heading or what it all means. At best it is a mildly diverting goof with a charmless lead performance. Its underlying misogyny leaves a sour taste.

Just when its parts should come together, As Cool as I Am crumbles to bits.

For all the cinematic crimes against him, there has been no book-to-screen translation of his work quite as atrocious as Hemingway's Garden of Eden.

The range of Ms. Locklear's lobotomized acting runs from mild irritation to mild melancholy, expressed without expression.

If you're nostalgic for the third grade and all those little wads of wet paper bouncing off the back of your neck, Beverly Hills Ninja is the movie for you. It is one extended fat joke, tricked out in ceremonial robes.

What a frantically dull spectacle this vanity project is.

There are barely enough titter-worthy one-liners in Marc Lawrence's good-natured romantic comedy Did You Hear About the Morgans? to prevent it from sinking under the weight of its clichés.

Everything she (Spears) does seems diluted and secondhand and is never transformed into something original or indelibly self-expressive.

Most of the meager charms of the chaotic romantic farce A Guy Thing spring from the deft comic contortions of Hollywood's ultimate nerdy sidekick, Jason Lee.

Dramatically as well as visually, The Musketeer conflicts with itself by trying to blend grand old- school costume drama and MTV- style rhythm and attitude into the same movie. The juxtapositions are often preposterous.

Ms. Paltrow is not the only star in the film who tries gamely to churn this cinematic glass of diluted skim milk into something resembling butter.

A bland, well-meaning mishmash that never coheres into a dramatic whole.

An excruciating demonstration of the unsalvageability of a movie saddled with an amateurish screenplay.

Despite its occasional flashes of brilliance (every Rudolph film has them), this unsavory stew never comes to a boil.

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.

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.

It's a little sad to see actors of the quality of Christopher Plummer and Jonny Lee Miller struggling straight- faced to dignify this sewage.

Within the genre of supernatural thrillers, Split Second is fairly dull. Mr. Hauer's Stone is an expressionless, unsympathetic lug who grunts his lines in a near monotone that sometimes becomes unintelligble in the movie's muffled soundtrack. The film is so desperate to create tingles that poor Miss Cattrall has to endure two protracted nude scenes -- one in a shower, the other in a bathtub -- in which she is menaced. Neither is especially spine-tingling.

I felt tentative stirrings of admiration for an indie movie that so aggressively flouts the hard-shelled conventions of romantic comedy. But more often than not, I felt suffocated by the gaseous sentimentality and lightheadedness of a story that drops in subplots that it can't begin to develop.

A mediocre gross-out movie that barely pushes the envelope.

"Hee Haw” meets “Pulp Fiction” at the meth lab: That describes the style of Pawn Shop Chronicles, a hillbilly grindhouse yawp of a movie that belches in your face and leaves a sour stink.

When a sheriff's deputy (Carla Gugino) visits the house, I Melt With You turns into a ludicrous, cheap horror thriller that sheds any claims to integrity. By the end, you feel nothing, not even contempt.

The movie's computer animation is so cut-rate and its direction (by Joe Chappelle) so slack that the attacks are virtually terror-free.

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.

Under Bob Radler's direction, the sequences involving tae-kwan-do, a lethal ballet-styled hybrid of kick boxing, judo and karate, carry very little visceral charge until the last 15 minutes, after which the movie expires in a saccharine slush of blood, sweat and tears.

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

With its red lighting and Hades-like smoke and fog, the lurid look of The Big Bang suggests a tacky disco inferno. I have a mental picture of the film's creators, stoned out of their minds on who knows what, cackling crazily as they outline a movie that would have more appropriately been titled "The Big Goof."

Even though its characters tote cellular phones and live in ultramodern high-rise apartments, the film still has a sleazy 1970's ambiance. And while Mr. Bronson goes through the motions of revenge with his characteristic deliberation, he looks puffy and sounds terminally bored.

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.

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."

The moment the movie loses its lighthearted spirit is the moment it loses touch with reality

One long, 1980s-style inspirational cliche.

Even for a fairy tale, A Cinderella Story, directed by Mark Rosman from a screenplay by Leigh Dunlap, fails to make sense.

The movie’s most disturbing aspect, of which the filmmakers could not have been unaware, is the physical resemblance between Mr. Elba and Ms. Larter to O. J. and Nicole Brown Simpson. It lends Obsessed a distasteful taint of exploitation.

The best and maybe the only use to be made of the catastrophic screen biography Modigliani is to serve as a textbook outline of how not to film the life of a legendary artist.

May be the opposite of trash, but it is something just as disposable: dead literary meat. Dragged down by a stuffy screenplay clotted with generic period oratory, overdressed to the point that the actors seem physically impeded by their ornate costumes, and hopelessly muddled in its storytelling, the movie is edited with a haphazardness that leaves many dots unconnected.

The movie's biggest strength is a story that refuses to quit and almost makes sense within its own screwball logic.

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 sloppy, exploitative act of star worship created (if that's the right word for cynical hackwork) around Mr. Lautner, the pouty 19-year-old heartthrob of the "Twilight" franchise.

What does it add up to? Um ... I have no idea and don’t really care. Just because the characters waste their time doesn’t mean you should waste yours watching them circle the drain.

In the end you have to wonder why the highly reputed director Michael Apted ("Coal Miner's Daughter") and the gifted screenwriter Nicholas Kazan ("Reversal of Fortune") chose to go slumming in territory like this. They must have been offered wads of money to do the dirty job.

One thing you can say for Ed, a chimpanzee whose baseball-playing expertise propels the Rockets, a minor-league team, to glory: his behavior is a lot more human than any of the other characters in this flimsy, laugh-free family comedy

Flagrantly old-fashioned, triple-hankie tear-jerker.

This clumsy, poorly written action thriller is such a complete catastrophe that you wonder how actors with the stature of Mr. Hopkins and Mr. Pacino were bamboozled into appearing in it.

The only reason I can think of to watch Vivi Friedman's flat, satirical farce The Family Tree - and it's not a good enough reason - is the opportunity to play a game of spot the semi-star.

These characters may serve an obscure metaphorical agenda, but they make no psychological sense. And as the movie contemplates the rewards and perils of giving and receiving, it winds itself into stomach-turning knots.

An interminable mess of a film that juggles more characters and undeveloped subplots than it can handle and even manages to bungle the setup.

Ms. O'Neal's Grace is a fluttery Blanche DuBois type who transforms into a ranting madwoman wreaking havoc. Instead of an ax, she wields scissors. From here on, the movie is a grotesquely overacted, ineptly staged screamfest.

The movie is so incoherent that its screenplay, by Mr. Drolet and Mr. Richards, might as well have been scrawled between takes as it was being filmed.

Mr. Leguizamo, 50, still has charisma, but with his maniacal stage persona barely seen and the themes recycled from earlier projects, Fugly! is a dud.

The movie's endless action sequences are so stylized and overedited that they lack any visceral punch. And Mr. Van Damme's Gibson is so opaque that he makes Mel Gibson's Mad Max seem weepy by comparison.

Just Before I Go, the directorial debut of Courteney Cox, lurches along a wobbly line between salacious comic nastiness and nauseating sentimentality. The two strains are so poorly integrated that the screenplay (by David Flebotte) feels like pieces from two different projects mashed together with little oversight.

The movie equivalent of a box of Froot Loops followed by a half-gallon Pepsi chaser.

This strident exposé may gladden the hearts of some anti-’60s conservatives, but it is a shapeless mess steeped in prurience. Its grain of truthfulness, however, is just enough to leave you unsettled in the pit of your stomach.

All it really wants to be is a hiphop answer to one of Elvis Presley's sillier vehicles. But the movie, which was directed by David Kellogg and written by David Stenn, fails to deliver an ounce of musical energy.

Terminally scatterbrained gangster farce.

About as scary as a ride on a minor roller coaster, it unrolls its amplified butcher-block shock effects within the first five minutes.

Teeters from a noisy sitcom (only one step removed from "The Beverly Hillbillies") to brickbat satire until it collapses in a pool of redemptive mush.

Long before it ends Dark Tide capsizes and sinks with a sickening glug.

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.

A depressing two-hour infomercial pitching Times Square as the only place in the universe you want to be when the ball drops at midnight on Dec. 31. (Believe me, it's not.)

Strains to be the ne plus ultra of arch, hyper-sophisticated fun, but the laughs are few.

You might reasonably assume that any movie starring Mr. Rourke and Mr. Murray would have to have something to recommend it. But aside from a haunting musical interlude, in which Mr. Rourke, with pathetic ineptitude, mimes playing a trumpet, Passion Play is barely palatable.

The glimmers of wit and carnival humor in the “Fast & Furious” franchise are nowhere to be found in Getaway.

Picturesque seascapes are about the only thing to recommend in Summer in February.

Slick and treacherous.

The movie acts like screwball comedy, but there are no laughs as Daisy and Jay’s connection lurches toward implausible romance.

A catastrophe worth noting only for the presence of its name cast.

For all its intimations of fire and brimstone, the film isn't remotely frightening, and the high-school-level acting doesn't help.

It is the kind of film that only a certain breed of cinematic cultist could tolerate. Its grade-school-level acting, for instance, is so rudimentary that it makes the cast of "The Blair Witch Project" (which Ice From the Sun seems to be consciously parodying at times) appear Stanislavskian.

(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.

All you really need to know about Say It Isn't So,the latest flatulent noisemaker from the Farrelly Brothers' gross-out comedy factory, is that late in the movie, Chris Klein punches a cow from behind and finds his arm stuck inside.

An empty, farcical blood bath that's virtually shock-free except for one preposterous plot twist.

A murky ecclesiastical horror film, may be the nadir of the subgenre that produced "The Exorcist" (at its high end) and "Stigmata" (at its middle-to-low end).

Homecoming is coldly efficient for what it is. But what it is is trash.

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.

Less a movie than an essay.

Beyond its eye candy, this wisp of a movie, inspired by Arthur Schnitzler's play "La Ronde," offers only hints of the complicated personalities behind the characters' sleek, well-toned surfaces.

This is the kind of comedy in which the characters are construction-paper cutouts whose abrupt changes of heart are dictated entirely by the preposterous plot and not by psychological or social reality.

This imbecilic, mean-spirited farce, which sneers at adults, leaves you wondering: where are the Three Stooges when we really need them?

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

As you watch the comedy lurch along, the woozy, sinking sensation it produces suggests a movie slapped together after the consumption of far too many gallons of that spiked eggnog.

Even if it ends on a hopeful note, this is a feel-bad movie that leaves a bitter aftertaste.

Little more than a loose- jointed succession of goofy "Saturday Night Live"-style sketches and sight gags inspired by an actual event that is nearly half a century behind us.

The movie... hasn't the foggiest notion whether it's a soap opera or a horror film, and wanders around in a generic fog.

Leaky PT boat of a comedy, descended from the television series.

With the dog days of August upon us, think of this dog of a movie as the cinematic equivalent of high humidity.

The kindest thing to be said of Movie 43, a star-saturated collection of crude one-joke vignettes made with big-time directors, is that most of the participants seem to relish being naughty.

Deteriorates into a gory shoot-'em-up gangster movie with a quick-fix ending that leaves many threads dangling. It could have been something more.

You might blame Nora Ephron, whose screenplay for “When Harry Met Sally” established the formula that I Hate Valentine’s Day runs into the ground. Compared with this, Ms. Ephron is Chekhov.

A largely incoherent movie that generates little suspense and relies for the majority of its thrills on close-up gore.

A much more high-pitched movie than its forerunner. [10 July 1993, p.15]

It is painful to watch an actor as skillful as Mr. Dorff reduced to delivering flat repetitive dialogue that would make any actor look foolish.

A film that desperately wants to be a music video circa 1983.

Wants to be an outdoor, barbecue-grilled "Barbershop" but lacks the pungency and honesty of its prototype.

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.

Robert Kane Pappas’s documentary about scientific experiments in life extension, makes a digressive, disorganized hash of a fascinating topic.

They play cotton candy effigies of themselves named Kelly and Justin, and the best that can be said is that they don't embarrass themselves.

The only heat that rises from the movie is mechanical.

A preposterous, prurient whodunit.

So lazy and slipshod it confuses the mere flashing of kinky soft-core imagery with naughty fun.

Incoherent mess of a film.

One of the worst films to sport the label “romantic comedy.”

Bottom-feeding monstrosity of a comedy.

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.

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

So inept on every level, you wonder why the distributor didn't release it straight to video, or better, toss it directly into the trash.

Even by the standards of its bottom-feeding genre, Dirty Love clings to the gutter like a rat in garbage.

It is not a compliment to suggest that a demonically possessed piece of machinery embarked on a bloodthirsty rampage has more personality than most of the flesh-and-blood characters in The Mangler, a horror movie based on a Stephen King story.

As the jaundiced, disjointed, drug-infested story heads toward its dismal conclusion, its reputable actors vainly struggle to infuse the goings-on with a deadpan psychotic zaniness. But even when viewed sideways, Perception is not funny; it's hardly anything at all.

A confusedly misconceived hybrid of interracial buddy comedy and imitation Marx Brothers farce.

This stomach-turning exercise in gratuitous sadism -- wears a nasty smirk on its face right down to its end title comment, "Gotcha."

Cheesy, amateurish film.

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.

Thoroughly incoherent... A dreary fizzle. [12 Jan 1996, p.C12]

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

Sergio's urban melodrama Under Hellgate Bridge suggests the contemporary equivalent of any number of 1930's B movies.

Ultimately as sycophantic as it is needling.

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.

The movie isn't entirely despairing. Near the end, it suggests that contemporary Tunisian women with enough fighting spirit can achieve a measure of autonomy, although the personal cost may be bitter. And the movie's sun-drenched views of life on the southern Tunisian island of Jerba are beautiful.

Despite being edited in a style that jarringly blurs the past and the present by switching from one to the other without preparation, Almost Brothers is strong stuff.

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

A convoluted, hysterical mess of a movie with grandiose spiritual airs and not a drop of humor.

For all its honesty, Home has only the most tentative narrative coherence. It's a collection of beautifully acted fragments that leave you longing for a story to connect them. The pretty but rather shallow poetry doesn't begin to do the job.

For all the trials its characters endure, you might almost describe Ramchand Pakistani as a happy movie: too happy to be entirely believed.

The quiet humanity of the performances infuses the movie with a truthfulness that outweighs its flaws.

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

It would be comforting to imagine that The Optimists, Goran Paskaljevic's viciously funny gloss of Voltaire's "Candide," was a site-specific satire of this Serbian director's homeland in the post-Milosevic era.

There is much more to be explored than this noble documentary, made on a tiny budget, has the resources to examine.

Heist feels rushed. Many of its points could use elaboration. Its final section is a to-do list delivered in the tone of a high school civics teacher.

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

Three-Headed Bird Village - the setting for Xiaolu Guo's stingingly funny satire, UFO in Her Eyes - is a quiet agricultural hamlet in the Guangxi province of southern China that is uprooted by instant globalization.

This 2 ½-hour film, which is described by Mr. Tiravanija as "not a documentary and not a narrative" but "more of a portraiture," rewards concentration once you adjust to its glacial pace and its radically minimalist aesthetic. It has no screenplay or story line.

The optimism and good humor of John Lavin's crude, endearing documentary Hollywood to Dollywood are so unquenchable that its disturbing underlying theme - growing up gay in the South is no picnic - is partly obscured by its openheartedness.

Like a Bela Tarr film it leads you to consider the breadth of eternity, the limits of human consciousness and the possibility of reincarnation.

The close-ups of faces convey reams of inchoate emotion and enhance the stumbling poetry mouthed by characters whose urge to connect conflicts with their innate sense of caution.

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

Ms. Benoit’s screenplay is unapologetically schematic in its depiction of a cross-section of Haitian exiles, but each story forcefully registers.

The kidnapping and ensuing complications make for a harrowing spectacle of cruelty and bumbling from which the camera doesn’t shrink.

Even done so lightly, the film still carries a sting.