Raimi, who shares script credit with his brother Ivan and Alvin Sargent, strikes an exquisite balance between pop and woe, drama and whooshing adventure.

Playing the character with this much girlish innocence is risky. Barrymore can seem dumb, but as Lucky You unfolds, we realize that the character is just a device to bring viewers into the parallel universe of poker.

Faced with a limited location and concept, Renfroe points his camera everywhere: The movie's seriously overshot, never settling for one angle when five would do.

As an ad for the city's charms, Paris couldn't have asked for a more sweetly jaundiced love letter.

The Treatment fails to do anything interesting with Jake.

Waitress isn't a great film, but it is great, deep-dish fun, with a generosity of spirit that extends first to the sisters on the screen and in the audience, then to the rest of humanity.

Where it works best is in the domestic dance of death between a husband and a wife. Linney flutters with increasingly panicky intelligence throughout the film, while Byrne sinks further into his own bulk.

Just watch Austin on "WrestleMania" instead, avoiding the shower this movie leaves you wanting.

A fully felt, decently crafted teen B-movie melodrama, plenty preposterous in places but alive to the vibrant miseries of being young and misunderstood.

Probably as tolerable as it can be for a comedy with no obvious creative aim. You can imagine the crew cracking up on some outtake reel, which honestly is what this movie feels like.

A watchably absurd popcorn flick about a man who can see two minutes into the future.

Snow Cake is dazlious, too: overly forced, a shade too whimsical, but filling a void other words and other movies haven't the nerve or errant taste to confront.

Mostly Election tracks the shifting of power among men for whom power is all that matters, no matter how much lip service they pay to loyalty. The final sequence is a shocker but it's also completely logical.

The dialogue is brightly self-conscious, and sometimes it clicks. Just as often it curdles into an entitled whining.

The movie is strong and holding as long as it's shambling about in the Montauk dusk; when Dieckmann has to bring things to a resolution, Diggers turns ordinary -- sweet, but you've seen it many times before.

A tasty diversion from the usual Hollywood fare.

Devor's sympathy for both the men and the animals is humane, yet his movie is palpably sad. A sense of shame cuts through all the ambiguity. You know less about what you've watched when Zoo is over than you did when it started. And that's what makes the movie so hard to shake.

Set two years later, the sequel's the better film.

It's to the "Lethal Weapon" movies what left-hand driving on a country lane is to a freeway chase: pokey, more than a little daft, but with a bloody surprise around every hedge.

At its worst, Vacancy is merely the kind of taut B-chiller they don't make any more, other than to riff on them in "Grindhouse."

You needn’t actually see Fracture to know that if the charge is acting that winks, these two are guilty.

In the Land of Women sounds like a piece of cheap science fiction about the last man on earth. If you're the lovelorn mother and daughter in Jonathan Kasdan's first movie, a grating romantic drama, that's painfully close to the truth.

For all the juicy storytelling, Alice Neel remains, in this film, a cipher: brash, grandmotherly, and beyond understanding.

The new movie is tart and weightless, and it entertains without leaving a mark. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but at 85 minutes, The Valet at times feels like a blueprint for a farce rather than the farce itself.

Tamblyn's surprisingly measured performance commands attention.

The movie trades the paranoia of modern omni-cam culture for a tighter, more personal drama, and while it sticks with you, you feel the missed opportunity like a phantom leg.

Essentially, an act of terrorism against entertainment. It's inconsequential, potty - mouthed, extremely silly, and -- the worst sin of all -- dead boring.

Urban and Bloodgood make the most of their parts, locking eyes and arms, and occasionally using American English as if the snowy 10th century were another way of saying, "Where the après ski?"

After "Gothika " and "Catwoman ," a viewer has to wonder: Why does this woman keep making thrillers if she can't bring herself to be thrilled?

An action flick loaded with cars, chrome, and silicone, is everything you'd expect it to be, and yet so much less: less character development, less believability, and most unforgivably, less escapist entertainment.

It's a Tibetan film -- a rare thing -- made by Tibetans, starring Tibetans, and set in the increasingly desperate exile community of Dharamsala .

It's a charming disappointment that retains the elements that make the writer's novels so good without ever bending them into cinematic shape.

Shannon gives the movie its inner life. Maybe the movie will give her back her comedy career.

A veritable rip-off of 1995's "The Usual Suspects," Beach's crime caper not-so-subtly apes Bryan Singer's use of multiple red herrings and flashback-heavy interrogation scenes, but lacks the stylistic flair and sophisticated narrative skills to pull off a similar feat of cinematic intrigue.

Private Fears says that life is a smoldering holding pattern, but Resnais is gracious enough to blanket the embers with eternal snow.

"Rear Window" never comes up in the Disturbia press notes, which is probably just as well since it steals that movie's premise but none of Alfred Hitchcock's wit, finesse, or seduction.

Tarantino and Rodriguez want you to cover your eyes in disbelief and get the unholy giggles at the same time. You do, but in two very different ways, and that's the movie's strength.

The only thing missing from The Hoax might be a couple of songs. It's that breezy and fleet a movie.

A tart, smart, closely observed satire of the television industry.

Long-delayed, pitiful excuse for a horror film.

The movie needs Richard Dreyfuss .

And that dog -- or, rather, that digitally enhanced replicant -- is just plain creepy.

Black Book takes the conventions of the WWII epic -- the prison breaks, the interrogation scenes -- and undermines them with craft and muscle and the ripe lack of restraint we've come to expect from this director.

Killer of Sheep is a drama that’s hardly at all dramatic, which makes it all the more moving. It’s quiet, unhurried, understated, unblinking. Mood matters more than style, dailiness more than incident. All movies are about other movies. A few are also about life. “Killer of Sheep” is one of them.

The film is quick, painless, and more than a little brave: not since John Travolta, Jamie Lee Curtis, and the aerobicizers in "Perfect" has so much Lycra been so abused for our pleasure.

Promises minor pleasures and delivers them. In the process, it's gracious enough to kick in a few extras: a nifty central gimmick, a self-effacing lead performance, and a big slice of ham from supporting actor Jeff Daniels .

Almost as funny as it is hyperactive, the new computer-animated family comedy is luscious to look at and as fizzy as a can of soda popped open in your face.

In After the Wedding Susanne Bier pushes the envelope further, toward operatic passion and the visual symbolism of Ingmar Bergman.

This isn't a great movie -- it's barely good, really -- but it gets something about New Hampshire I've rarely seen onscreen: a defiant pride in the way things don't work out. Live Free is a comedy of vastly diminished criminal expectations. That's the fun of it, and the frustration, too.

A stylish but essentially businesslike smash-and-crasher.

The director, Martin Weisz , doesn't lean on a lot of noise and editing tricks. He can relax, since all the scares are built into the Cravens' script, which invokes both "Goonies" and last year's instant-classic, chicks-versus-cave-dwelling-vampires flick "The Descent."

For smart kids between the ages of 8 and 12, the movie hits the sweet spot with a satisfying cosmic bang. It's a cross between "A Wrinkle in Time" and a middle-school version of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

It's called Pride, and, while it's neither as socially urgent as "Freedom Writers" nor as danceable and soapy as "Stomp the Yard," it's better acted and tougher to resist

In its best moments, Reign Over Me quietly says that we're our problem friends' keepers. At its worst, the movie IS a problem friend.

The movie is a serviceable way to pass the time: Kids will cheer the bright colors and funny new words ("Kowabunga!").

A semiserious documentary about a cult of performance art that until recently was never meant to be taken seriously.

It doesn't know if it wants to wallow in its characters' pity or to flesh them out with their own personalities. So it does both, with half-hearted results.

Color Me Kubrick digs all sorts of devilish ironies out of this "true...ish story," and it's a fine dark farce before turning sad and, worse, monotonous. The con wears off before the movie does, but while it's in the air, "Kubrick" spins with bogus cheer.

It's a slow, moderately involving descent into the inevitable, with Pearce gamely trying to figure what's going on. Better him than me.

Even when its wires are showing, the movie's soul is always evident.

As funny as it is sharp.

The stakes in this story seem too low to justify its audience’s attention. If The Page Turner were a novel, it would hardly be a page turner. Why should we hold films to a lower standard?

It's an angry story, but also a strangely hopeful one, in the sense of new life sprouting through a battlefield. Above all, it's personal and specific, and that IS news we can use.

The movie's a cheeky, low-budget goof on dice-and-slice horror films, but for all the visible seams, it's a lot cleverer than "Scream."

The filmmakers don't appear to know what's important, let alone how to pace an epic for big drama and maximum thrills.

This new movie is a more credible, less grisly act of filmmaking , but it's a less compelling exercise. It doesn't have the ruthless moral reasoning of the first two "Saw" pictures, however grotesque and specious that reasoning was. But it does have a plot that revolves around a ventriloquist and her demon doll.

The movie, instead, is a work of giddy self-sabotage that seems determined to matter and not matter at the same time.

It's a movie only a psychic could love, since a psychic would know to stay home or see "Zodiac" instead.

The historical scope of this story, as well as Loach's interest in absolute fairness, seems to have drained some of the life from its telling.

The movie is one long pose. But it develops into an idea slightly greater than its flippancy. The steady frenzy is whipped into a roux of two reasonably developed characters.

There's a stale, synthetic airlessness about the movie. Imagine a large cast trapped in a series of spectacular screensavers. It could be ancient Greece. It could be somebody's hard drive.

Mostly, though, it's "Godzilla" with a severe case of Murphy's Law, and it is never less than bizarrely delightful.

Sadly, this is the sort of movie in which the white Europeans do all the talking and worrying with each other. The Africans, for the most part, are either terrified, cowering, wincing masses or corpses strewn in the dirt.

James Scurlock's documentary horror show has a critical message to impart -- your credit cards are out to kill you -- and a naive, ham - handed way of imparting it.

The Namesake has a deep, alluvial poetry to it, like a mighty river reaching the sea. It's mysterious and ordinary, insightful and banal, rambling and precise, and it is altogether unexpected.

The message is clear almost immediately: charity not vanity.

Leave it to the French to take the joy back out of sex. The high-minded erotic drama Exterminating Angels has heat but little light; it speaks of pleasure while treating it as a dirty word. The cast huffs and puffs but the exercise, sadly, remains academic.

Part of the shoujo genre of gently fantastic romantic dramas about and for young teenage girls, it's also funny and creative enough to charm parents, brothers, cousins, and anyone else looking for an openhearted fable.

Zodiac is a kind of corrective remake of "Se7en," a renunciation of that earlier movie's psychotic nihilism. That rejection extends to a neat sight gag. Fincher gives us a shot of a cardboard cutout for "Dirty Harry" that mocks the personal abyss that catching Zodiac becomes.

The movie is this year's "RV," a rolling tent show of suburban male anxieties: castration, obsolescence, dismissive offspring, fears of gayness. LOTS of fears of gayness. Unlike "RV," though, Wild Hogs is funny. Eventually.

It takes a special first-time director to stick her neck out, personally as well as professionally. As much as anything else, The Cats of Mirikitani is a testament to good breeding.

This movie is crazy, but the insanity is electric.

One of the transporting film experiences of this or any other year.

Archer isn't necessarily taking us anywhere new, but his movie's rapture is beautiful inside and out.

The real problem with The Astronaut Farmer is that it has no spark.

This low-rent, nonsense cop business filled me with a nostalgic twinge. I didn't know I wanted the "Police Academy" series resurrected with a lot more hilarity, but I'm glad somebody did it.

With a "Lost"-meets-"The Haunting" plot and a handful of convoluted thematic twists involving family, history, murder, and death, The Abandoned limps into a nebulous kind of horror netherworld, peppered with painfully long tension-building sequences and unimaginative dialogue.

It's a doughty movie, stuck halfway between Masterpiece Theatre and Classics Illustrated, but, to his credit, gifted journeyman director Michael Apted understands he's playing the long game.

It's all breezy and predictable.

As with most rock festivals, you had to be there, and if you're British you probably were, one year or another. In that case, Glastonbury is a pointed but essentially nostalgic tour of one country's more noble pop impulses. Otherwise, it's as muddy as Yasgur's farm back in the day.

A compelling and eerily effective little drama.

It's like an After-School Special version of "Pan's Labyrinth ," and I actually mean that as a compliment.

Ghost Rider is the kind of movie that's great stupid fun as long as someone else is buying the tickets.

Aside from pretty people behaving cutely, there's just not much here, and even devoted Francophiles may nod into their cafe crèmes.

This movie just seems like a scattered excuse to make political points without saying much of anything. Worse, it also fails to show us, with any vividness, how Mirit and Smadar think and feel as women.

The admirable feminist agenda occasionally trips up the narrative, but the film's performances keep it on track.

Perry shelves his crowd-pleasing Madea character and aspires for the impossible mix of 1950s social melodrama, gospel-inflected public service announcement, soap opera, R&B video, girl-centric sitcom on the CW, and any episode of "Good Times," featuring Janet Jackson's oft-affronted Penny. Were Perry a visual director or a logical, patient screenwriter, that hybrid would count as a feat of singular ambition. Instead, it seems like the product of an abbreviated attention span.

In the end, the movie's just the kind of enjoyably empty-headed fluff it celebrates and mocks. It sits up, it begs, eventually it plays dead, and still you want to pat it on the head. It's a good dog.