If Crossing Over is less self-congratulatory than "Crash" about confronting its designated problem, it's just as inept at dramatizing the complex ways that problem unites and divides us. Here every cause is something you can wear around your neck.

There's nothing in Echelon Conspiracy as suspenseful or entertaining as your average episode of "24."

Its swooping 3-D visuals let fans briefly feel they can touch a group that barely exists behind a wall of beefy security men.

This is a movie for the overcaffeinated, undereducated teenager in all of us.

Over the course of the film's 88-minutes, Taylor cuts away to what's happening around her subjects (the unexamined life, I suppose). Perhaps she's attempting to make connections the thinkers don't.

There is, however, Viola Davis, who might win an Oscar tomorrow for her one scene in "Doubt." Her part here - a minister combing the street for crack-whores to rescue - is about three times as large.

Fired Up feels like everybody's first time doing anything - writing, acting, directing, cheerleading.

A history lesson for a country and a people forced to forget at gunpoint.

Both a staggering realist thriller and a jeremiad.

The storytelling here is at times as awkward as its hero, and since it is a Gray film Two Lovers takes itself dreadfully seriously. Yet it's one of the few movies I've seen recently that improves on a second viewing, in part because Phoenix does such remarkably subtle work.

The movie might have worked if it winked more - or if it played things completely straight.

It's all a treat to behold, and, at least where the turtle and the jellyfish are concerned, it's transcendently beautiful, too. I just wish there was more of it.

"The Corpse Bride" with teeth, Bruno Bettelheim retooled for the multiplex, a nightmare of daft and creative consequence. I really liked it.

Good comfort food for most of its running time, thanks to a cast of attractive, unchallenging pros and Ken Kwapis's smooth direction.

Playing Clouseau's exasperated boss, Cleese rams his head into a wall minutes into the action. That's a powerful image, insofar as his headache was mine.

At the very least, a movie like this requires coherence to stay afloat. Barring that, it needs a star to distract us.

This movie has no light to shed on the matter. It is its own contradiction: a film about confessions in which nothing much is confessed.

I can promise you a fairly good thriller with mixed-bag elements: preposterous plot, smartly elegant direction, one of the worst recent performances by a major actress, and a dynamite stick of an action scene that can stand close to the greats (the car chase in "The French Connection," the single-take battle sequence in "Children of Men") and from which the movie never really recovers.

At times, Fanboys is every rowdy low-budget '80s road movie you've ever seen on Cinemax at 2 in the morning. What keeps the movie near, if not actually in, hyperdrive is its love of deep-dish geek culture and a gaggle of cameo appearances.

Taken? You bet.

A brutally inane movie.

You've seen New in Town before, and you've seen it done better. Still, it's a sweet-hearted bit of anemia, pleasant and obvious, and there are a few honest laughs to it.

Merry, filthy, unstoppably hormonal, Serbis feels very much like the sort of movie that happens when no one is minding the store.

A thriller whose title remains printable only because the right people probably don't know that it refers to a violent sex act.

Most of the time it looks like we're on the back lot for a Romanian production of "Lord of the Rings IV."

By taking nonsense seriously Outlander never achieves camp. It's a comic book that's mistaken itself for scripture.

Although Americans may be overwhelmed by the dizzy mix of music, dancing, and kung fu, they should have no trouble appreciating the talent of this extraordinary entertainer.

It's a strained but heartfelt work of muted sentimentality, obvious in its symbolism but grounded in a sense of life's preciousness and brevity. Depending on your mood and indulgence, you may weep or you may be left out in the cold.