Writer-director Byler, in his first feature film, also proves to be a noteworthy new voice, even if his cinematic sense outweighs his narrative sense in this initial outing.

An altogether more viscerally engaging film, from its relentless pacing and slam-bang effects work to the fine, appropriately heroic score by John Ottman. That the movie has an obvious gay subtext neither adds nor detracts from the film’s smashing popcorn appeal.

Falters in small but important ways -– the suspense, carefully ratcheted up throughout, just plain goes busto in the film’s final moments -– while Malkovich stays resolutely behind the camera, a consummate professional who, this time, misses his mark by the merest of degrees.

The situation is not too far removed from that of Jayson Blair and The New York Times. The corporate oversight in place to catch deceptions is lulled into becoming part of the deception. Mahowny wanders through this film as if waiting to get caught, forced into deeper gambling debt because no one applies any brakes.

There’s more narrative happenstance loaded into the script of Blue Car than its running time should effectively allow, but the real keeper moments in Moncrieff’s movie are the small, quiet ones in which a simple glance speaks volumes.

As good, old-fashioned dorkfests go, it doesn't get much better than the National Spelling Bee, with its arcane words, bespectacled competitors, and stinging little bell.

Shoddy craftsmanship and uninteresting subjects (it's amazing how tedious some conversations can be when there's no one to put words in the subjects' mouths) sink this spring-break movie faster than an outbreak of Leginnaires’ disease on a vacation cruise liner.

The use of Bryan Adams as the madwoman's imagined paramour is indicative of just how mediocre this movie is.

It all boils down to trying too hard, when everybody knows a good grift is one that appears effortless.

Far and away the most original thriller to come out of a major studio (in this case Columbia Pictures) in a long while.

Schepisi underscores each emotional note by pulling the camera away from his actors and pointing it at family photographs, a saccharine conceit that becomes more irritating each time it appears.

As moving wallpaper, Winged Migration is the cat’s meow: One almost wishes the wondrous images had been filmed in the even bigger IMAX format. But as an informative documentary, Winged Migration’s birdbrain comes to the fore.

Frankly, I'm shocked that Disney, frequent purveyor of sleeping beauties and singing animated animals, is the studio behind this wonderfully black comedy/morality tale for children, but maybe Disney, too, saw past the material's deliciously macabre bent to find also a thrilling little essay on friendship, fate, and the restorative powers of onions.

The film feels like a truly awful "Saturday Night Live" sketch padded out to such unholy lengths as to make "It's Pat" seems like a comic masterstroke.

There’s much to enjoy, even if the funny bits don’t add up to Spinal Tap greatness. And the titular anthem, performed in a star-studded closing jamboree, has a wickedly funny payoff.

Monk would probably make a nice rental on a dull evening, with some kind of salty snack and a drinking-game accompaniment. (Drink whenever Scott cries, "Oh, shit!")

Ultimately sinks under the weight of its good intentions. It’s like watching Univision or Telemundo on the big screen.

The cast is an impossibly beautiful bunch of actors who could hold your attention even if they spoke nothing but gibberish, which sometimes is the case in the pillow-talk dialogue provided by director/screenwriter Chick.

uUltimately Better Luck Tomorrow feels nearly as hollow and unknowable as its characters’ hearts.

It’s best to situate yourself in the middle of the row; a seat at the end will most likely leave you feeling cross-eyed for an hour.

Sandler has become one of our primary symbols of the modern rage-repressed American male. Let’s hope that one day he will learn to channel that rage to greater effect.

The film is a mess, going all over the graveyard but never finding the grave. It's the work of a fan with too much time (and money) on his hands, eagerly awaited but best forgotten.

The few gags that hit their mark only serve to point up how flaccid the rest of his material is, and that spells doom for a comic, no matter how much his hometown crowd cheers him on.

I suspect that, like the Coen brothers, David Lynch, and Wes Anderson -– our American masters of idiosyncrasy -– Kaurismäki has a limited appeal. Those who get him, really get him.

It's a movie perfectly designed for tossing back popcorn (the jumbo kind so you don't have to leave your seat during the show); not until later do you get the empty feeling that you've swallowed an entire bucket of popped air.

Instantly forgettable but good-natured all the same.

Suffocates under its own good intentions and inexorable sense of doom.

The film falls just shy of both Diesel and Gray's mark.

These visual techniques also serve to emphasize the Japanese anime fetishes for violence and female body parts -- you can always count on a gun or a breast to be in the foreground' but I'll take this opportunity to again stress that this is an adult cartoon.

"By practicing his art, he revealed himself to us." Fellini: I’m a Born Liar provides proof positive: The art indeed reveals far more than this pedestrian documentary ever does.

One of Jordan's best films, and almost certainly in Nolte's top two percentile.

It’s just not quite bad enough to be considered good, although Stanley Tucci’s hairpiece comes awfully close.

There’s only the faintest glimmer of Rock’s talent for piercingly funny humor here, a shortcoming for which the comic can only blame himself, given that he also produced and directed the movie.

Sollett’s first feature is a small, but indelible picture, one that approaches the most universal of themes -– first love, confused hormones, parental clashes -– with originality.

It begins in a muddle and ends in confusion.

Piglet, your time has arrived. Sooth us.

There are bad movies, and there’s Boat Trip, a puerile comedy so appalling and unfunny, it’s like contracting the Norwalk virus at sea.

The damn thing is boring. Dull as dirt. Despite the many fine actors involved, View From the Top is a third-class production through and through and, frankly, I'd rather be pelted in the head with stale, salty peanuts than sit through it again.

So much is going on, and so many bizarre and seemingly random subplots collide in Dreamcatcher, that the film feels like some crazy patchwork quilt sewn by a schizophrenic seamstress. It’s not only confusing, but dull, as well.

The one thing that is clear from Japón is that a major new visual stylist has hit the screen and that Reygadas’ first film represents the beginning of an auspicious career.

Cooly feral in dark suit and tie, Glover’s the man in the gray flannel suit gone way, way over the edge, and it’s one of the most fully realized screen performances in ages, rats and all.

Cody Banks would probably be appropriate for the 13-and-older crowd, but it’s far too dopey for teenage sophisticates.

The movie is both harrowing and funny, but I’m not sure the filmmakers would agree with everyone about which scenes are which.

There's nothing terribly bad about Bend It Like Beckham -- in fact it's a fine Friday-night-out film -- it's just that it strikes me as being an awful little piffle cloaked in the garb of something so much more.

Authenticity is strangely lacking in Laurel Canyon, although Cholodenko’s exquisite eye for framing remains uncorrupted. Laurel Canyon is often visually captivating.

Thanks to the superior performances by all four leads (including incredibly expressive Karoline Eckertz, who appears as the teenage Regina midway through), Nowhere in Africa is a meditation on everything from race and class and cultural impermanence to the inexhaustible malleability of youth.

Some fine comedy performances bolster this thinly plotted film.

The terrific ensemble acting and Troche’s genuine, nonjudgmental interest in exploring the weird places wounded people go, both internally and externally, amount to an insulated but moving portrait of the real nuclear family.

Viewers should be warned that Irréversible means what it says: Your experience of this movie can not be forgotten once the die is cast.

It’s as deadly dull as the blunt end of a rifle.

Tom Arnold and Anthony Anderson become an official comedy duo as they deliver an extraneous (and questionably funny) comedy riff, as they did in "Exit Wounds" over the film’s closing credits.

A documentary whose content might possibly have further reach than the book.

The Dogme pedigree rarely distracts; there is too much emotional investment to care much about dogmatic fidelity.

What if the filmmaker had found a way to reconcile his two storylines into a cohesive whole? Wouldn’t that have made a wonderfully affecting film? Why yes, it would have.

Ultimately, Dark Blue feels roughly a decade too late with its back story of the Los Angeles riots. Gates’ department had its share of dirty blues, to be sure, but that hasn’t been notable since the smoke cleared back in 1992.

It comes off like so much poppycock -– to use the vernacular of the day.

Phillips and co-writer Scot Armstrong waste too much time on a silly love-interest subplot for Wilson; that time is much better served by the frat-boy idiocies, like Frank beer-bonging himself into streaking.

Finds a way to impart this sad history while raising our spirits at the same time.

Like the man to whom this film is dedicated, Ken Kesey, Gerry just wants to go "further."

Poses a problem for reviewers. The entire story hinges on a plot device that occurs roughly midway through the film and alters everything that has come before. To give away this massive, unavoidable spoiler would be disastrous and unforgivable.

It’s a movie made of moments, the antithesis of "plot-driven," but the sum of these moments is magnificent, the culmination of so many elements: acting, scripting, score (by locals Michael Linnen and David Wingo), and cinematography.

In short, the actors deserve a big round of applause -– especially Affleck, for finally wiping the smug look off of his face (OK, 80% smug-free); Garner, for her dead sexy mix of attitude and adrenaline; and the grunting, googly-eyed Farrell, for … well, for being "fookin’" nuts, I guess.

The film’s major drawback is the broad strokes with which the henpecked trio of males is presented -- they’re not quite caricatures, but their individual quirks feel as though they were cribbed from other, better films.

In the end, we know Andie and Ben will kiss and make up -– how could too alliteratively aligned pretty people not? -– but first we must wade through the protracted and wholly unwarranted period in which both huffs about the other’s deceptions.

If you’re the type of moviegoer who finds the idea of 19th-century characters using phrases such as "Be cool" and "You must work out" in their conversations, this is the film for you.

Writer-director McKee’s arch comic dialogue (i.e., "We’ll hang out and eat some melons or something") is out of synch with the creepy horror he wields.

Neither the riveting boy band documentary nor the riveted gay porn its title seems to suggest, Biker Boyz is instead a late-model knockoff of 2001’s outlaw auto racing epic The Fast and the Furious, reconfigured with a predominantly black cast and a whole lotta two-wheeled saké.

Throughout, the documentary is fun and engaging, even whimsical when using (to good effect) illustrations and Gilliam’s own storyboards.

There’s not a whole lot of heft to von Scherler Mayer’s romantic comedy with ethnic Indian entanglements; it’s like overdone naan, too flaky and ephemeral for its own good, but still somehow appetizing.

It’s most definitely not for the squeamish nor the easily offended -- the death scenes in Final Destination 2, of which there are many, are immensely bloody and imaginative affairs, full of exploding limbs, squashed bodies, and graphic, gory ultra-violence.

The pleasure of watching two alpha males -– Al Pacino and Colin Farrell -– circling each other mano a mano substantially beefs up this otherwise routine spy thriller.

You can barely tell what's going on half the time, but what you do see is effective.

Most important, Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary makes us wonder, in a very human sense, about the various blinders we all adopt to make our peace with life.

Too bloodless to satisfy except as a political exercise.

It’s ridiculous and smart, hilarious and terrifying, difficult to swallow and probably a necessary antidote to the cacophonous history of a land that all too often seems anything but holy.

As middling comedies go, this is neither as smart as it ought to be nor as dumb as you'd expect.

In the final analysis though, the only real thing being smuggled in National Security is unwitting patrons' admission fees.

Indeed, the largely computer-generated Jack acts the pants off his co-stars, which can and should be taken with a whole trough full of salt.

A marvelous achievement that refuses to avert its gaze from the poetry and the insane savagery of the hopeless.

Overall, Just Married doesn't really take -- it has a shelf life about as short as the disastrous honeymoon -- but in the moment, it's cute, if corny. It'll do.

A great, bizarre, and ultimately very, very unique film.

Me, I’ve now seen the movie three times and I’ve laughed and I’ve cried. It comes the closest to any movie experience I’ve had in re-creating the aftermath of unexplained suicide. Sometimes there just aren’t any answers.

Although Nicholas Nickleby occasionally evidences a simplicity that resembles a Junior Scholastic production, the movie's enthusiasm is contagious.

Ultimately, Meyjes focuses too much on Max when he should be filling the screen with this tortured, dull artist and monster-in-the-making.

Near-perfect in every way, The Hours is a compelling meditation on making the most of what we're given in life. For some, it may be too cerebral a film experience, but for those who blissfully fall into its finely tuned modulations, The Hours is timeless.

Szpilman takes to performing sonatas in thin air, eyes closed, those jittery fingers stroking nothing but air. It's a wonderful moment in a wonderful, ghastly film, and one of the most moving arguments for the redemptive powers of art ever made.

Delicious.

By film's end I was fantasizing that Peter Stormare would drop by with his "Fargo" wood-chipper in tow, but it was not to be. Appalling.

Everything about this swift and gorgeous and tremendously enjoyable film is played out in a rush of staccato edits, crisp performances, and charmingly giddy subplots that coalesce into Spielberg's most purely entertaining movie in years.

Isn't going to make anyone's head explode with joy, but it is sweet and sporadically funny in its own loopy way.

It's a botched job through and through, made all the more distressing by Bullock's recent announcement that she's throwing in the romantic comedy towel for a while.

Ramsay is experimental, unconventional, and forever reaching at the gorgeousness in grief and despair. Her film moves slow as molasses, slow as paint drying -– and all the better to see the colors and the complexities.

Cronenberg’s nonlinear narrative is trying at times – it keeps you nearly as off-kilter as the characters, and surely that’s intentional – but as a character piece about madness and stymied dreams, it’s remarkably realistic.

Fresh and raw like a blown-out vein, Narc takes a walking-dead, cop-flick subgenre and beats new life into it.

The best Scorsese we've seen in a decade.

If treats like this are evidence of Washington's special gifts as a filmmaker, Antwone Fisher promises great things for the future.

Isn't Lee's most personal piece, but it may very well be his most mature.

God forbid this should ever play on an IMAX screen -- the concussive soundtrack and relentless visuals would likely strike viewers deaf and blind (but what a way to go!). Simply breathtaking.