It smarts, and shocks, and just for a moment blows your mind.

The eye candy can't quite compensate for the murky mess of a plot.

The jokes just aren't there, which makes it very hard for the stars -- who are trying very, very hard -- to really make a dent.

Somehow the film doesn't quite cohere; it's hobbled by its awkward exposition, with salient facts about the characters' lives.

Some of The Anniversary Party's titillation factor rests on the awareness that these are actors playing actors, in roles written specifically for them that at times appear awfully close to home.

Depends on the two actors who all but carry it.

The action is constant, often pointless, definitely gratuitous, and breathlessly fun.

This a deeply humane and affecting movie, surprisingly gentle in spite of its black-comic tinge, and without the slightest hint of schmaltz.

The actors do a fine, if unsoulful, job, but the real problem with A Love Divided is its unwillingness to unromanticize its heroes.

Yet as wonderful as it is to see a breezy, earnest romantic comedy that is so matter-of-factly gay-themed, Big Eden suffers somewhat, unsurprisingly, from some of the usual perils of a breezy, earnest romantic comedy.

It's pornography of the most depressing sort.

Hardly a comic masterpiece -- the jokes are awfully broad and obvious -- but I couldn't help feeling relieved at the film's absence of malice.

This frothy little crime comedy isn't half bad, bubbling with caper-farce energy supplied by a game ensemble cast and a source novel by prolific pulp writer Donald E. Westlake.

It's the tortoise and the hare, Nepalese-style, and it's surprisingly dramatic.

A thing of beauty. But then so is a cloud and I wouldn't want to stare at one of those for an hour and half.

Abundant arthouse crowd appeal.

A crowd-pleasing blockbuster if ever there was one, features as its centerpiece a jaw-droppingly vivid re-creation of the Japanese attack on the U.S.'s fabled (and extremely vulnerable, as it turned out) Pacific fleet.

While the dour pacing and tone rank right up there with watching water freeze in terms of gutpunching suspense, by the time the final, grisly revelation is at hand you're hard-pressed not to sweat.

It's too bad the language prevents this independent film from being rated PG-13 because this is the kind of movie that might be capable of realistically reflecting teens' lives to other teens.

It's not wrong to wish these actors were working in the service of a better script or more assured direction, but it's probably also possible to simply take pleasure in their performances.

Viewers with a low tolerance for schmaltz may suffer; one heartfelt speech even drew nervous titters from the otherwise indulgent preview crowd.

A crazed, lovestruck, wholly original (and yet amazingly referential) beast, part pop-culture wasteland, part glowing tribute, and part wild-eyed roller coaster (of love).

Charmingly subversive animation like this is a rare thing indeed, and the fact that you don't have to be under 10 years of age to thoroughly enjoy Mr. Shrek's wild ride is an added bonus.

The filmmakers no doubt had a hell of a time whittling the material down; unfortunately, what they came up with was something long on the mundaneness of GovWorks.com and short on the personalities behind it.

Either you like your movies to be, well, movie-like: imitations of life, with musical accompaniment and artificial lighting and tracking shots and looped dialogue; or you like them to be re-creations of life, sans the artifice. The King Is Alive clearly falls into the latter camp.

It would be easy to pigeonhole this as "Norma Rae" en L.A., and Padilla is at least as ingratiating and as much of a guy magnet as Sally Field was in that movie.

Smirking at the audacity of it all is part of the fun, and if nothing else, A Knight's Tale is a hell of a lot of fun.

Manages the most delicate of hat tricks: It gives definition to uncertainty.