Stephen Holden

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.

Warm and fuzzy documentary.

So much care has been taken to build a mood of hushed suspense that the rushed, tragic conclusion, in which too little is shown and too little explained, leaves you deeply unsatisfied.

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

Surprisingly Rocky Balboa, is no embarrassment. Like its forerunners it goes the distance almost in spite of itself. It's all heart and no credibility except as a raw-boned fable.

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

Blurs the line between comedy and epic drama so adroitly that the two styles fuse into something quite original: a lyrical farce that pays homage to its period in any number of ways.

For a political thriller, Storm is remarkably restrained. There are no flashbacks to the wars in the Balkans or to the atrocities in the hotel.

In Changing Times, Mr. Téchiné, the great French director, is near the peak of his form. Weaving a half dozen subplots, he creates a set of variations on the theme of divided sensibilities tugging one another into states of perpetual unrest and possible happiness.

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.

Plays like a middling episode of “Law & Order: SVU,” drawn out an extra half-hour and embellished with pretentious literary and cinematic flourishes.

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.

For all its distractions and additions, The Importance of Being Earnest is still a reasonably entertaining costume comedy. Wilde's satirical voice may be muffled, but at least it is audible.

As fictional characters in a movie that is fetishistic in its attention to period detail, Mr. Leto and Ms. Hayek work well together as an unsavory couple two rungs down the social ladder from Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in "Double Indemnity."

Continually squanders its opportunities for hilarity.

Ron Howard's bittersweet adult comedy, Parenthood, lays out an entire catalogue of psychological stresses afflicting family life in white middle-class America, then asks if the rewards of being a parent are worth all the agony.

This poorly acted, ramshackle tour of the lower echelons of the Los Angeles rock scene has the feel of a largely improvised home movie filmed without retakes, and its sense of humor could only be fully appreciated by struggling musicians.

If it all adds up to too much for one film to encompass with ease, Monsieur N, is certainly richer than most of what you'll find on the History Channel.

What sets the "Stuart Little" franchise above most of the competition is its emphasis on sharply drawn character and its profusion of witty remarks (mostly from the mouth of Snowbell) that are cutting enough to amuse grown-ups without sailing over children's heads.

Melancholy little gem of a movie.

Combines pieces of an extended interview with this Canadian singer-songwriter, poet and author, now 71, with a tribute concert organized by Hal Willner at the Sydney Opera House in January 2005.

Over the course of 105 minutes, the brutal high contrast begins to strain the eyes. Effectively moody as it is, the style makes a convoluted story of corporate greed, high-tech espionage and science run amok even more difficult to follow.

The movie, which imagines its principal characters as metaphorically ticking time bombs, never convincingly portrays their passions.

An astonishing documentary of culture clash and the erasure of history amid China’s economic miracle.

Barely watchable.

Gently, affectionately and with wit, this lovely movie gives the 1950's its due, but not for a moment does it go overboard and make you want to go back there.

Because it unfolds like a garish hybrid of Simon Birch and What Dreams May Come, with some horror-movie touches thrown in to keep us from nodding off, "The Sixth Sense" appears to have been concocted at exactly the moment Hollywood was betting on supernatural schmaltz.

Essentially two movies stuck together like chewing gum on a subway platform. One is a dumber-than-dumb teen comedy crammed with farcical sight-gags and raunchy adolescent humor, the other a no-holds-barred satire of professional sports, and the greed, egotism and pomposity surrounding them.

A clumsy remake of the 1987 cult thriller.

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.

Difficult to swallow.

In the film's production notes, Mr. Glawogger wonders, "Is heavy manual labor disappearing or is it just becoming invisible?" In this visually impressive but proudly unscientific hymn to progress, the answers are yes and yes.

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

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.

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 most remarkable achievement of the film is its presentation of Lilya's story as both an archetypal case study and a personal drama whose spunky central character you come to care about so deeply that you want to cry out a warning at each step toward her ruination.

Never finds a comfortable fit between its biographies and its theorizing.

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.

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.

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.

A hectic free-for-all with no point at all.

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

For all its incongruities, The Yards is a serious film that strives for a moral complexity and a textural density rarely found in contemporary dramas.

Indelible, deeply disquieting film.

The shallowness of this idealized depiction of European cultural homogeneity is largely camouflaged by the comfortable fit of its director's sensibility with the actors' likable, lived-in performances. An apt alternative title for Russian Dolls might be "Lovers Without Borders."

Fatally true to the hypocritical values of its niche market. While pretending to teach a lesson in compassion, it wallows in the perks of privilege.

Angels have proliferated in popular culture in such profusion lately that maybe they needed a comeuppance. A few more movies like The Prophecy should stop the whole celestial bandwagon right in its tracks.

A cinematic ballad of such seamless construction and exquisite tonal balance it transcends most of the pitfalls of movies that aspire to a classic, lyric simplicity.

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

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

Makes no psychological sense. Even within the convoluted realm of film noir, the development of the relationships defies any logic.

Powerful and very bitter comedy.

The screenplay by Mike Rich is so far-fetched and riddled with holes that Mr. Van Sant's urban realist touches only underscore the falseness of what's on the screen.

Begins semirealistically, then veers off course, hurtling into the wild blue yonder of myth and allegory. On the way to a climactic shootout that begins on the set of a Hollywood western and ends on a foggy hillside, it makes several screeching, hairpin turns.

If Unconscious consistently overplays its hand, its fusion of a Sherlock Holmes-style detective story (Alma is the master sleuth, and Salvador her Dr. Watson) with a delirious bedroom farce in the spirit of early Pedro Almodóvar is frequently very funny.

Together may not be overtly political, but its vision of contemporary Beijing, where brazen, fashion-crazed gold diggers like Lili bait their hooks to snare arrogant, slippery wheeler-dealers who end up playing her for a sucker, has bite.

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

It is impossible not to be fired up by Kurt Kuenne's incendiary cri de coeur, Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father.

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

The guiding philosophy of The Price of Milk seems to be that if you throw something on the screen and call it a fairy tale, it has to mean something. But it doesn't.

So relentlessly trippy in a fun-house sort of way that it could very easily inspire a daredevil cult of moviegoers who go back again and again to experience its mind-bending twists and turns. Although its story doesn't add up when you analyze it afterward, the movie does take you on a visually arresting ride that offers many unsettling surprises right up to a sentimental sunburst of an ending that has a paranoid undertone.

Whatever else it may accomplish, Garden Party, which is clumsily structured but well acted, with pungently realistic dialogue, puts you in a world without a center in which you can't tell upside down from right-side up.

The re- enactments, however fascinating they may be as history, are too crude to serve the work especially well.

Intimate, compelling film.

It succeeds at showing how one man's psychic wounds contributed to an art that transmutes personal pain into garish visual satire.

Watching it, I kept imagining the depth of feeling Ingmar Bergman and his troupe might have brought to the same material. As much as A Song for Martin hurts, it doesn't quite go the distance.

As Harry and Julie, Mr. Edwards and Ms. Winningham make an unusually refreshing pair.

These characters are mostly too sketchy and their connections too contrived for Shrink to jell as an incisive ensemble piece.

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.

The dialogue and the ensemble acting maintain a near-perfect pitch.

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.

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.

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.

A wrenching, richly layered feminist allegory as well as a geopolitical one.

May be the first Hollywood movie since Robert Altman's "Nashville" to infuse epic cinematic form with jittery new rhythms and a fresh, acid- washed palette.

In the knockabout world of animated movies, Piglet's Big Movie is an oasis of gentleness and wit.

This is the sort of gallows humor that Hitchcock relished drawing out in cruelly amusing cat-and-mouse games, not to be taken too seriously. The same is true of Married Life. The murder plot is not to be taken any more literally than the lethal games of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”

Shirley’s instant metamorphosis from insecure high school student to ruthless madam is ludicrous in spite of the best efforts of the talented Ms. Waterston to convince you otherwise. The Babysitters has the increasingly jerky momentum of a film that was butchered in the cutting room, sacrificing continuity and character development to whip the plot forward.

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

Louisiana's delta country has never looked more darkly, lusciously sensual than it does in Eve's Bayou, a Southern gothic soap opera, written and directed by Kasi Lemmons, that transcends the genre through the sheer rumbling force of its characters' passions.

The movie itself is a shell. The characters, especially the unstable Hadley, barely exist. And even by the loose standards of film noir, the mechanics of the murder plot, and the story’s jolts and twists toward its abrupt surprise ending, are unconvincing.

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

At its most provocative, Severe Clear pungently evokes a heroic Marine Corps mystique.

It's all very beautiful, not to mentioned high-minded. But the loftiness comes at a sacrifice.

Brokedown Palace is good enough so that you wish it were better.

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

Terminally scatterbrained gangster farce.

This intelligent, well-acted movie is not helped by the fact that its story in some ways parallels that of "Stigmata," the trashy supernatural spookfest that flared briefly at the box office earlier this year.

As blunt as it is in depicting child abuse, El Bola is a movie steeped in an ambiguity that lends its conflicts a symbolic resonance.

What lifts the film above many other high-minded documentaries dealing with poverty and the welfare cycle is this filmmaker's astounding empathy for both Diane and Love.

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

The movie is so witless and confused in tone that its seedy racetrack clientele only emerge as dim, inarticulate cartoons.

The movie's sense of emotional claustrophobia is underscored by a complete lack of interest in Middle Eastern politics, or in anything outside the troubled family unit.

A moving documentary that approaches the Holocaust from a fresh, intimate perspective.

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 demureness, Restless captures some of the excitement of youthful romance in which the partners aren't just separate individuals but the products of divergent cultures.

Because movies have become so invested in the unleashing of violent emotion and the escalation of hostility, that expressions of restraint, reconciliation and forgiveness can easily be read as corny cop-outs. Cry, the Beloved Country is not corny, and it doesn't cop out.

Long before the film is over, one is left frustratedly grasping after characters and an ambiance that have evaporated into formulaic freneticism.

Might be described as a low-rent answer to Douglas Keeve's documentary about Isaac Mizrahi, "Unzipped," a movie that also revealed the fundamental silliness of fashion, though it had some glamour attached.

It places Basquiat's art in a cultural context with an enthusiasm and zest that make the many pictures shown come blazingly alive.

As Mr. Maher, in his feature directing debut, brings in surreal touches and puts on literary airs, the film’s grip loosens, and its vernacular turns increasingly wooden.

The movie's triumph -- if that's what it is -- is in the force of its assault. It takes one man's unbearable truth and bashes us in the skull with it.

Ms. Montenegro's rough-hewn integrity is the one quality that ennobles The Other Side of the Street, an otherwise confused mixture of cat-and-mouse thriller and sentimental old folks' love story that is well below the level of "Central Station."

Pola X has enough fireworks to keep you in your seat. When it's over, you'll know you've had an experience.

This is a film that wears a smile button on its sleeve along with its happy heart. It believes that most people are absolutely wonderful, and it is well enough made so that a dusting of that dogged optimism is bound to rub off on you.

The biggest hole in a movie that falls sadly short of being another "Diner" or "Trees Lounge" is Mr. Burns's failure to make his alter-ego character anything other than the best-looking and most affluent member of the pack, standing there and discreetly gloating.

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

Bottom-feeding monstrosity of a comedy.

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

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

Mr. Scott's is something that must be seen. It is, in a word, compelling.

A perfectly silly movie for a silly season that in recent years has forgotten how to be this silly. Directed by Angela Robinson, this latest installment in the movie-television franchise about a tiny car named Herbie with a will of its own and the temperament of a rambunctious 7-year-old knows exactly what it is and what it isn't.

Offers the clearest analysis of globalization and its negative effects that I've ever seen on a movie or television screen.

Metamorphoses from a character study into a confusingly edited sampler of sexual possibilities that feels both programmatic and old-hat.

Maintaining a winking distance from his comic persona, Mr. Spade radiates a cunning show-business cynicism that lets you know he's aware that he's slumming to make a buck.

If the film's easygoing, catch-it-while-you-can approach yields some unexpected nuggets, it also makes for lopsided storytelling. But when Nenette et Boni is studying the faces and following the moods of its likable if terribly confused title characters, it captures the stubborn spirit of youth itself.

A semicoherent, overacted mélange of travelogue, farce and suds.

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.

It's a good thing the movie has so little dialogue, because when it talks, the words dilute its almost surreal visual spell, and the fructose turns to saccharine.

"Miramax porn." The term refers to manipulative tearjerkers like Dear Frankie whose sensitive performances, along with a light dusting of grit, allow them to be marketed as art films. This one is clever enough to fool a lot of people.

Bluntly downbeat.

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

The film's depiction of the raw fear lurking below the brothers' braggadocio is the most pronounced emotion in a movie whose focus on the personalities of its criminals suggests an Australian answer to "Goodfellas," minus the wise-guy humor.

The movie, adapted by Terry McMillan from her semi-autobiographical novel, is pointedly boundary-breaking in its positive portrayal of a May-September relationship between a younger man and an older woman.

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

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

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.

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

There is not a decent (or even half-decent) male character to be found in Chaos, a gripping feminist fable with a savage comic edge.

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

Mr. Hynes, who wrote the screenplay, seems well aware of the challenge of breathing fresh life into a familiar formula. Much of the dialogue is so quirky it sounds overheard instead of scripted. The performances are correspondingly spontaneous.

Sustains a documentary authenticity that is as astonishing as it is offhand. Even when you're on the edge of your seat, it never sacrifices a calm, clear-sighted humanity for the sake of melodrama or cheap moralizing.

If Liberty Heights is much too soft at its center, it still offers a deeper immersion in that old '50s feeling than any other Hollywood film in recent memory.

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

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

The movie, though lovingly handmade by Mr. Craven, has a frustratingly disjunctive rhythm.

A barbed reflection on the great divide between secular and ultra-Orthodox Judaism in Israeli culture. But its digressive screenplay lacks focus and momentum and is too oblique to connect many of the dots between its characters and their behavior.

Fits squarely into a Gallic tradition of wistful, worldly-wise comedies that reflect on the weakness of the flesh.

It is an appealing, gently comedic prologue to a love story.

The integrity of the film, whose directorial team has collaborated on numerous Belgian documentaries, extends to its sad final moments, in which nothing is left neat and tidy.

May be reasonably diverting, but the story never matches the movie's fantastic visual imagination.

Jesse Wigutow's screenplay is one of those marvels of economy, idiomatic facility and well-chosen detail that knows exactly when to cut away from a scene without grinding it into your face.

Although Igby has its share of glitches and tonal inconsistencies, it packs an emotional wallop similar to that of another cultural golden oldie as beloved in its way as "The Catcher in the Rye": "The Graduate."

If Sweet Home Alabama, directed by Andy Tennant from a screenplay by C. Jay Cox, has the ingredients for a classic screwball comedy, the movie is in such a rush to entertain that it barely connects the dots of its story. But it still has its effectively goofy comic moments.

Stuck, while not strictly a horror film, is steeped in gore and carries a seam of mocking gallows humor as relentless as that of "Sweeney Todd."

The lesson of Showboy is how disturbingly easy it is for an audience to trust what it sees when confronted with a film posing as factual documentary.

A film that's alternatingly intriguing and frustrating and that leaves too many loose ends dangling.

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

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.

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.

Paxton's Dad may be the most terrifying father to appear in a horror film since Jack Nicholson went crazily homicidal in "The Shining."

Retooled into a sleek pop fable that doesn't bother to connect all its dots, the movie aspires to fuse the mystical intellectual gamesmanship of "2001: A Space Odyssey" with the love-beyond-the-grave romantic schmaltz of "Titanic," without losing its cool. It's a tricky balancing act that doesn't quite come off.

For all the grimness and desperation on view in Mango Yellow, the characters emerge as robust, full-dimensional people in touch with their explosive feelings.

The structure of When Will I Be Loved seems deliberately flimsy, and many of its details don't add up. But as a contemporary fable about getting and spending in the new gilded age, When Will I Be Loved strikes a chord that echoes.

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

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

Among this year's bumper crop of shallow teen-age movies, it is the shallowest and the most prurient.

Years from now, if Mark Christopher's timid, meandering film 54 is spoken of at all, it will probably be lumped together with Whit Stillman's ''Last Days of Disco'' as one of two movies released in 1998 to bungle the same opportunity.

In Good, the anemic screen adaptation of C. P. Taylor's play about a respectable "good German" who passively acquiesces to Hitler's agenda, Viggo Mortensen, miscast and ineptly directed by Vicente Amorim, plays John Halder, a liberal, mild-mannered literature professor who becomes a Nazi.

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

As thorough an examination of the sport as you could hope to squeeze into 90 taut, well-organized minutes.

In portraying this threesome, Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard and Uma Thurman give the most psychologically acute performances of their film careers.

By showing how fiercely dedicated idealists are making a difference, it is a call to arms.

For all its harsh allusions to slavery and hardship, the film is an extended, wildly lyrical meditation on the power of African cultural iconography and the spiritual resilience of the generations of women who have been its custodians.

Observed through emotional gauze, its four likable women are symbolic cheerleaders for personal loyalty and wholesome living.

In the manner of a Satyajit Ray film, The Pool avoids melodrama, the better to capture the texture of Venkatesh's vagabond life.

When a film as profoundly quiet as In the Bedroom comes along, it feels almost miraculous, as if a shimmering piece of art had slipped below the radar and through the minefield of commerce.

In the movie's cheapest, most exploitative gesture - just as it is about to run out of tricks - a snake slithers into the pine box in which Paul awakens bound and gagged, not knowing where he is. With that gimmick, the movie sacrifices its last shred of integrity.

The movie ultimately belongs to Mr. Dorff, whose villain is as frightening as any human reptile to have slithered onto the screen in quite some time.

The movie uses the talent show Afghan Star as a prism through which to examine the fragmented tribal culture of Afghanistan as reflected in the backgrounds of four finalists (two of them women) and the public responses to their performances.

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

Our turbulent political climate is so clogged with the instant hysteria demanded by the chattering class to keep its voice in shouting condition that a sedate documentary examining the long-term weather patterns is a welcome respite from the noise.

As it abruptly crosscuts among the five friends, it fails to lend the characters' individual stories enough dramatic resonance to make us care about them.

Despite some gorgeous sequences. . . Titan A.E. is bland.

In its harshly realistic scenes... it stirs your blood.

A compulsively watchable but repugnant portrait of a selfish eccentric born to privilege.

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

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

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

An unsalvageable mess.

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

Uplifting, witty.

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

Despite some pretty seasonal photography and evocative scenes of the nuns’ rigorous daily rituals, which involve many hours of prayer, The Monastery is a flighty, disorganized film with a blurry timeline and a wandering attention span.

Its view of the near future may be vaguely plausible and its performances persuasive, but its formulaic construction, internal inconsistencies and fuzzy ending undermine its integrity. It has nothing to say about the big issues -- manhood, war and friendship -- that hasn’t been explored with more depth and honesty in a hundred other movies.

A brave film simply for daring to portray a nightmare lurking in the minds of middle-aged workers, people who might fear a film that addresses their insecurities this bluntly.

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.

The film could be described as Exhibit A in a study of media celebrity and collective forgetfulness in the age of information overload.

A sleek, whooshingly entertaining update of the vintage television series.

Short on laughs, if supremely inoffensive, this sleepy nonentity of a movie finds Mr. Lawrence in his huggable teddy bear mode.

The evenness of its emotional pitch almost incidentally helps the film become an unusually deep exploration of sports, machismo and the competitive spirit.

A grindingly conventional comedy that insists on tying up its subplots in pretty ribbons and bows.

The movie, adapted from a novel by Carl Sagan, presents one long chain of teasingly open-ended questions about reason versus faith and technology versus religion, and ends up tentatively embracing mysticism over rationality.

Overcompensates for its sloppiness with loud, knockabout farce.

You have the queasy sense that the whole thing is just an elaborate stunt, and in this case an exploitative one.

Fast, light, frequently funny comedy.

Tasteless at times, but where's the yuck?

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 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.

Neither the screenplay nor the film's visual vocabulary begins to evoke a charged spiritual tension between the protagonist and the world.

As A Rumor of Angels reveals itself to be a sudsy tub of supernatural hokum, not even Ms. Redgrave's noblest efforts can redeem it from hopeless sentimentality.

In the endearing but somewhat scatterbrained British film Nanny McPhee, Emma Thompson creates an indelible character reminiscent of Mary Poppins as conceived by the author P. L. Travers and the illustrator Mary Shepard.

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.

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

Stylistically Ushpizin belongs to a classic tradition of raucous Yiddish comedy that is easy to enjoy if taken lightly. At the same time, it sustains a double vision of ultra-Orthodox life.

If this handsome, faithful, intelligent screen adaptation of the novel doesn't leave you devastated, its ominous sense of a rarefied moral and aesthetic world bending before the accelerating streetcar of history will leave you with a mournful sense of loss.

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

This gripping true story, directed in a cool, semi-documentary style by the German filmmaker Marc Rothemund from a screenplay by Fred Breinersdorfer, challenges you to gauge your own courage and strength of character should you find yourself in similar circumstances.

In Ms. Irving's affectionate film, Mr. Bittner is more of a sage than a deadbeat.

Ms. Silverstone's pouty all-American brashness counts for little in a film whose flat screenplay doesn't give her a single funny line.

May be the first movie about a painter to transcend the gushy clichés found in movies that try to unravel the mysteries of artistic creation.

The movie's relentless comic excess is ultimately a little exhausting. But the longer the series endures, the more likely it is to achieve classic cult status.

The man who emerges is a likable, unpretentious musical enthusiast and roll-up-your-sleeves problem-solver who apparently led a charmed life.

Definitive and engrossing documentary.

Although Free Radicals overflows with messy feelings, it maintains such a measured distance from the gathered cries and whispers that it is difficult to empathize with the characters' fears and sorrows. Most of the women are victims, most of the men selfish pigs, and their stories are jarringly punctuated by brutish, joyless bouts of sex.

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.

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.

When they discover they've been made fools of, they accept this performance event with surprising equanimity. There is a lot of grumbling but no riot. They get the joke.

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

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

What fortifies Shrek Forever After are its brilliantly realized principal characters, who nearly a decade after the first “Shrek” film remain as vital and engaging fusions of image, personality and voice as any characters in the history of animation.

When it comes to actual historical details, Farewell crams too many notions into expositional blips of dialogue. And the scenes of conferences in the corridors of power, whether in Moscow, Paris or Washington, are strained and abrupt.

In painting an unabashedly romantic picture of a nation whose songs spring directly from the lives of the people, the movie exalts the Marxian dream of honest working folk, with little to show for their labor, living harmoniously, joined in song.

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

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

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.

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

Handsome but empty film.

The film offers a concise history of hijras, who used to officiate at births, weddings and other religious rituals.

If there were more experimental films as entertaining as The Decay of Fiction, Pat O’Neill's luminous Hollywood ghost story, the notion of a thriving avant-garde cinema might not be so intimidating to the moviegoing public.

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.

Fails its stars in fundamental ways. Mr. Nicholson has played wealthy rogues before (most recently in “Something’s Gotta Give”), but this particular bon vivant is unsalvageably repellent.

A skillful assemblage of newsreel clips, cartoons ridiculing the American interlopers, television commercials and interviews with power officials and ordinary Georgians. It gives new and darker meaning to that comfy adage "We're all connected."

Forever stumbling over itself and breaking its own spell.

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

Just when it seems as though the language of insult and humiliation couldn’t get any nastier, the movie escalates the barrage.

Feels a little like a science-fiction Sunday school pageant.

Works up a reasonably delicious tingle.

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

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

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

Because the waves get progressively higher in Riding Giants, Stacy Peralta's historical surfing documentary, some of that thrill is sustained throughout this overlong but entertaining movie.

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.

The Boys of Baraka is so rich that you wish there were more of it.

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

In its groggy way The Lost City holds your attention. Incoherent, but splendidly panoramic and drenched in wonderful Cuban music, it has the texture of a vivid, intoxicating dream that seems to mean something until you wake up and feel it slipping away. All that remains are feelings and impressions connected by a mood.

The movie maintains a refreshingly light touch in spinning a fable about individualism and conformity.

The semi-improvised performances, which seem so natural that it is tempting to confuse the actors with their characters, bring Baghead into the realm of group therapy observed through one-way glass.

Watching the movie is a little like gorging on chocolate and Champagne until that queasy moment arrives when you realize you’ve consumed far too much.

A soft-hearted, squishy-minded prototype for a network sitcom, is mildly ingratiating but never laugh-out-loud funny. Even Ms. Hudson's intrepid radiance can't camouflage the premise's leaky foundation.

Exquisite.

Despite its ultimate lack of intellectual substance, Me and Isaac Newton is still inspiring. All seven of its subjects are fascinating, and most are extremely likable. Mr. Apted has done them all a huge favor.

The director, as he showed in movies like "After Dark, My Sweet," and "Fear," specializes in conjuring conspiratorial atmospheres in which anxiety and sexual menace hang in the air like a heavy, bitter perfume. Long after you've dismissed the movie's ridiculous, convoluted story, traces of that scent may linger.

Its scrupulous, even-toned gentleness makes " The Butterfly suitable for children, while its clear-eyed intelligence and refusal to condescend should make it appealing to adults.

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

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

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.

A dawdling affair that never finds its own rhythm. Early on, it gets lost in its own earnestness and never finds its way back.

No amount of splenetic ranting by Brian Cox, a wonderful actor, when given the right role, can salvage The Good Heart from terminal mawkishness.

Woody Allen proved long ago that the self-pitying introvert is a fit subject for a movie, but only if the film has a strong enough sense of humor to make us laugh at ourselves. But Brooks Branch, who directed Multiple Sarcasms and wrote the screenplay with Linda Morris, was either too lazy to come up with the absurdist aphorisms that might give Multiple Sarcasms a lift, or he labored under the delusion that Gabriel’s metaphysical malaise is such a fresh idea that it deserves microscopic inspection.

What appears on the screen has a starkness that is almost indelible.

Yet the movie sustains a mood. It passionately believes in itself and in the value of the messy artistic lives it glosses, and some of that belief rubs off on you.

A singularly depressing film. In the face of such unrelieved, grinding poverty, hope fades.

If Bella (the title doesn’t make sense until the last scene) is a mediocre cup of mush, the response to it suggests how desperate some people are for an urban fairy tale with a happy ending, no matter how ludicrous.

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.

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

With the ferocity of a drill instructor and the boundless confidence of a self-help guru who combines psychobabble clichés with embarrassingly explicit confessions, Ms. Lynch's Gayle redeems the movie from utter banality.

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

Loses some its bearings once it turns into a caper movie. The movie hardly bothers to explain the mechanics of the jailbreak or of the robberies themselves, which take place in a flurry of disguises and stickups that has a Keystone Kops flavor.

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

Invites you to contemplate the symbolic vibration of every hue in its teeming, overcrowded canvas.