The ensuing adventure has a few giggles and a warm, sweet ending, but The Rugrats Movie is more like a pleasant Sunday drive in a big smooth sedan than the TV show's riotous joyrides in a fast, shiny convertible.

Despite its narrative familiarity, the film is suffused with such contagious enthusiasm, distinctive performances, and local color that it stands out nevertheless.

More like watching a Polaroid picture develop without ever getting to see the finished picture.

As usual with anime features, just because it's animated doesn't mean it's for kids; heads roll and blood spurts, so know that going in, mom and dad. For the older crowd, though, it's gory and gorgeous bliss.

A nice-looking, nice-feeling exercise in conventionalism that sure could use a couple of transvestites and maybe a house falling from the sky.

The characters in The Claim suffer under the weight of very big things -- betrayal, abandonment, disease, death -- but they do so quietly, stoically, until, by God, they just can't take it anymore.

Carrey is a bit of a conundrum: He's the best and worst thing about Lemony Snicket.

If tradecraft is what you like best about the espionage genre – the dead drops and dead-of-night tailings – then All the Old Knives will feel comparatively pokey, especially put up against the kind of spry spy entertainments long-form television so capably produces.

There are droll comic flourishes in this very brave film, to be sure, but all you really want to do after watching CSA is hang down your head and cry.

Meghie’s film is a paean to the push and pull between enchanting possibilities and chimerical probabilities. You don’t need to bring a handkerchief into the theater for fear of ocular leakage, but The Photograph’s modestly hopeful denouement is, truly, picture perfect.

Then along comes a movie like Deconstructing Harry, which marks the writer/director/actor's return to top form, once again using the stuff of his life to create the stuff of his fiction.

Maybe some grasp of the dynamics of the modern publishing industry would have added some grit, making it more than it is: a formulaic and forgettable pulpy beach read.

Cats Don't Dance is an inspired movie movie, one that celebrates and spoofs cinema with wit, verve, and a breathless enthusiasm for the form.

If you weren't afraid of heights before, then Fall will give you the fear. Welcome to vertigo hell, mainly due to the work of cinematographer MacGregor.

As an updated version of the old western TV show, it does a pleasant enough job.

As a vehicle for Moore's acting abilities (and Mortensen's, for that matter), G.I. Jane is terrific. But as the end-of-summer blockbuster it's doubtless intended to be, it's pretty much a washout.

For fans of full-throttle gore, The Void delivers, but for better or worse, it doesn’t really stop along the way to explain itself.

Unlike any coming-of-age movie you've seen before. Equal parts sweet and perverse, this Scottish film is unpredictable in places where it might be twee, and subversively fanciful in others where it might be punishing.

Given the outlandish premise, you'll wish the film twinkled with a more savvy sense of humor and adventure, like the chapters of the "Toy Story" series, for example.

The story is so meandering and unbelievable that Westerners are still likely to roll their eyes. I have no idea what Indian audiences will make of Kites. The film is rousing, but it does not soar.

Despite its compelling nature, Greenaway’s film is not always an easy one to sit through.

Suffers mightily from sequelitis. Forced to explain what’s going on and what’s going to be going on in the next and final installment (due out in November), the Wachowskis have laced the film with a series of crushingly dull and often incomprehensible scenes of exposition and yakky gabfests.

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.

So what's not to love? For starters, there's the inescapable fact that Ted is, no matter how you stuff it, yet another man-child buddy movie – and all that that implies.

What Reggio’s ultimate point or conclusion might be is, as ever, left up to the viewer for interpretation. And while this is patently not a film that big-box cineplexers are going to rush to in droves, Visitors remains a wondrous work of artistic achievement.

Collins, who also wrote this woeful, dolefully humorous take on mankind’s endless struggle to overcome the banal but no-less soul-sucking minor mishaps of modern life, ends things on a surprisingly encouraging, optimistic note.

Kind of funny and kind of scary, Baghead's central horror motif is merely a structure on which to hang its four-character story about the depth of relationships and the drive to find meaningful work.

The film is wonderfully atmospheric and full of little frights, but its overall impact is only glancing.