Replete with so many wisecracks, puns, double entendres and visual jokes that you almost need a flow chart to keep up with them all. But try; the effort is definitely worthwhile, and the results are hilarious.

Watching The Gospel of John is like listening to a religious audiotape while working a picture flip-book of the Bible.

A first-person documentary with the subterranean pull of a superb confessional novel.

Elf tries so hard to be a holiday classic, to be a sweet-natured, charming little piece of holiday gloss, it's tempting to declare it so and simply go with it.

If you feel yourself glowing after Love Actually, you might be suffering from sugar shock.

The Matrix Revolutions blends feather-brained, starry-eyed camp and rock-'em-sock-'em spectacle -- so it's at least more entertaining than the second Matrix film, which hung in the air like a noxious cloud.

Benton's version of The Human Stain feels under-energized and modest to a fault. Yet it still delivers a genuine sad sting.

Taken together, the sum of so many parts is too schizophrenic to be wholeheartedly embraced -- the movie is played for parody, but with a veneer of respectability that leaves the whole endeavor betwixt and between.

A moral, not a moralistic, movie. It's also a bracing aesthetic achievement, creating a fictional version of a factual case that illuminates as it entertains.

In an era of exploding documentary innovation, Girlhood simply follows unfamiliar characters down familiar paths. It's not a negligible experience, but it's not an eye-opener, either.

Beyond Borders keeps angling for a peace prize; it might have won more hearts and minds if it came together as a movie.

Lackluster in narrative and in no way original or innovative, the movie is pretty much generic Disney, a film about universal brotherhood stitched together from parts that worked better in other films.

The film itself is an exercise in frustration.

In the Cut is a disaster. Familiar to the bone, arty on the surface, it could serve as the doomed pilot for a nightmare TV spinoff: Law & Order: Literary Victims Unit.

Simply go out and rent the original. In the thin ranks of killer-power-tool flicks, it's still the standard to beat.

The picture captures a contemporary mood-blend of cynicism, anger and woefully disappointed idealism. Runaway Jury may be just a classy potboiler, but Fleder spices up the stock and keeps it at full boil.

The highest compliment I can pay Pieces of April is that it brings to mind a Paul Simon lyric: "the mother and child reunion is only a motion away."

Never persuasively dramatize the agony, ecstasy and intricacy of composing poetry. Without that aesthetic component, all you see is that Plath's hunger for life couldn't compete with her death wish.

Undeniably charming -- a dog movie that's more lovable mutt than stately pedigree.

The fault isn't Clooney's alone. The Coen brothers contrive a few spectacularly funny bits and pieces but rarely get into a flow. Too often they mistake facetiousness for slapstick invention or wit, and they don't follow through on their best ideas.

"His eye is incredibly sharp and amazing, in regard to visceral cinema," says Uma Thurman, who has worked with Tarantino on both Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill. "He's a great storyteller. He's very seductive as a filmmaker."

Girls Will Be Girls thinks watching outrageous people acting outrageously is its own reward. It isn't.

Mystic River wants to be a Bruce Springsteen-like anthem of life and death in blue-collar America. It's no more than a doggerel rendition of poetic injustice.

Like the particular brand of music Dewey espouses, this is a movie more concerned with exploiting rock than understanding it.

The Station Agent has craft and pace and that far rarer quality, fellow-feeling.

Wonderland marks a "biopic" first: Moviegoers will know less about the real-life subject going out than they did going in.

An action-adventure flick that could turn into this generation's "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

With Anything Else, Woody Allen proves himself an old dog capable of thinking up some new tricks.