It leaves you dazed and sated. Compared to the fast food "eye candy" surrounding it these days, Metropolis is a gourmet 20-course meal.

Combine the title with the image of a dazzling female and a frazzled male, and you've got the movie perfectly.

You won't want to miss it if you care about movies that dare to chart intimacies in our age of spectacle, or about up-and-coming female performers and underused male veterans finding roles worthy of their gifts.

An unconventional and engrossing French thriller.

The most refreshing thing about the original Men in Black was that it was relatively small - a modest, slapdash, 98-minute special-effects farce. The most refreshing thing about Men in Black II is that it is 10 minutes shorter.

There's a wonderfully funny and relentlessly cute 45-minute cartoon within The Powerpuff Girls Movie; unfortunately, it's padded out with almost as much filler.

Holofcenere genuinely wants to make pictures that plug into an audience's need for intimate contemporary comedies. But she doesn't do enough to quench that thirst.

The Cockettes is a grand place to visit, even for those who wouldn't want to live there.

Adam Sandler does Frank Capra wrong. His unfunny remake stomps all over the honest values and endearing qualities of the original.

Bottom line: Juwanna Mann is a drag - in every sense of the word.

The only gold in Sunshine State comes from its three female stars.

We'll never know what might have been, as eye candy and food for thought replace real thrills in the cool but cold Minority Report.

A celebration of movie-studio ohana that should warm the hearts of moviegoers everywhere.

Woo's antiwar intentions and his talent are at odds. In Windtalkers, war is a beautiful hell.

Foster is strident, Vincent D'Onofrio has little to do but chain-smoke thoughtfully as an accessible priest, and the physical atmosphere is hazy.

It's sometimes said that the greatest test of a chef is cooking something cheap and simple, like a piece of chicken or a hamburger. In a movie that testifies to simple pleasures, Taylor and company pass that test again and again.

The Bourne Identity keeps you in a state of nervous excitation from the opening shot to the fade-out and has a thread of deadpan humor that vibrates alongside the main action like a third rail quivering next to a hurtling train.

Bland, inoffensive, formulaic and occasionally amusing - just like the animated kids' show that inspired it.

Bad Company is about an undercover brother, but it will never be confused with "Undercover Brother."

As for the Ya-Yas: They're not as much fun as the First Wives' Club.

By all means, buy a ticket to The Fast Runner, but don't go expecting a masterpiece; actually, in its first hour, the dramaturgy and staging of scenes set in igloos are cramped and amateurish.

As a spy film, The Sum of All Fears is flaccid, and as an expose of nuclear threats, there's not enough information.

It has a premise that never stops percolating.

Avoids pretension by never trying to be more than it is -- an acknowledgment that things frequently are not as bad as they seem. That's a concept that deserves a little spreading.

Manipulates the audience.

Nolan pushes the twilight-zone atmosphere so hard that it loses its capacity for mystery. When it's not assaulting us with jolting audiovisual expressions of fatigue, this movie plays like a pedestrian response to David Lynch's effortlessly eerie "Twin Peaks."

Spirit lacks that essential emotional resonance, and suffers because of it.

These actors have a firm playful grasp and a palpable affection for their characters' befuddled dignity and attraction. They understand what Wilde meant by the importance of being earnest.