The Warners-style slapstick and gentle Anglophilia charms children and adults alike, but what kills me are the fingerprint ridges that fade in and out of the characters' mugging faces, a reassuring reminder that handmade art can still captivate.

Sports films about underdogs overcoming long odds run the gamut from flinty intelligence (Million Dollar Baby) to mushy sentimentality (Seabiscuit). This Disney drama...falls somewhere in the middle.

Accommodates some great water photography.

Chiwetel Ejiofor (Dirty Pretty Things) is the sinister operative dispatched to retrieve the ship's psychic passenger, who as played by Summer Glau kickboxes better than Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi combined.

The depictions of novelist Harper Lee (Catherine Keener) and editor William Shawn (Bob Balaban) aren't convincing, but Miller is mainly interested in Capote's identification and duplicitous relationship with Perry Smith, one of the murderers he was writing about, and that story rings true.

Every scene ends with a gag line, punched up by Jaglom's harried intercutting, and threaded through the story are close-ups of women discussing their obsession with new clothes, an exercise that yields its wisdom in the first 20 minutes and then keeps repeating it.

Like the recent Japanese import "Steamboy," this is worth seeing for the artwork alone, but it's so furiously overimagined it may leave you feeling dulled.

This screen adaptation never quite jells, veering from family drama to stale 50s consumer kitsch, but it's anchored by strong performances from Julianne Moore.

A few plot details strain credibility, but the characters (particularly the friend's sister and little boy) are persuasively depicted.

Leone brought back a masterpiece, a film that expands his baroque, cartoonish style into genuine grandeur, weaving dozens of thematic variations and narrative arabesques around a classical western foundation myth.(Review of Original Release)

The technically uneven performance footage is redeemed by excellent sound and charismatic interviews with popular bachateros.

This is familiar but atmospheric, with good performances by Peter Falk, Blythe Danner, Joey Bilow, Michael Santoro, Merle Kennedy, and former football pro Don Meredith.

It might have looked good on paper, but the results are mixed at best; despite a few early chuckles, the whole thing gets tired after 20 minutes.

This thriller is effective if you can accept that--as with some of John Dickson Carr's locked-room mysteries--the trickiness counts more than any plausibility.

Seriously uneven but often charming.

The protracted shoot-out at the end of Dear Wendy is even more pornographic than the moment when a female member of the Dandies exposes her breasts. The audience is clearly expected to enjoy the bloodbath even while it disapproves.

Bardwell manages a sincere portrait of what it's like to be young and closeted.

This masterpiece, an art film deftly masquerading as a thriller, seems to celebrate small-town pastoralism and critique big-city violence, but this position turns out to be double-edged.

Filmmakers Garrett Scott and Ian Olds offer a damning chronicle of failure and chaos.

Polanski honors the craft of classical storytelling and never flinches from the book's melodramatic extremes in portraying the horrors of poverty.

The source material has undergone some sentimental softening, though Hope Davis, as the heroine's sister, does a swell job of making sanity seem obnoxious.

This isn't very good--the puritanical impulses of the slasher genre collide head-on with the sweet-butt requirements of gay exploitation flicks--but a gender studies major could have a field day with it.

As a movie genre, the ghostly romantic comedy dates back at least as far as "Topper" (1937), and the stale premise, combined with the leads' typecasting, makes for an eminently forgettable date movie.

A caustic satire masquerading as an action-adventure. Or maybe it's Hollywood escapism masquerading as satire.

Alternately mawkish and strident, with lots of fades to white and dog reaction shots, this can be recommended only for its good intentions.

This may be light family entertainment, but it's also a pleasingly perverse celebration of Victorian morbidity.

First-time director Penny Panayotopoulou's approach to the delicate subject matter is commendably tactful and tasteful--it's also underdramatized, monotonous, and short on humor.

Vince Vaughn in a wonderfully low-key performance.

Falk throws himself into the part and almost single-handedly enables this comedy drama to transcend some of its sitcom limitations.

Baier's interweaving of documentary-style sequences with poetic, dreamlike imagery underscores the competition between Loic's harsh external circumstance and his lyrical internal yearnings for a better life.

Seems like a dopey idea to me, but if you aren't familiar with the Fitzgerald novel, you may enjoy this; at least Jones and his costars play the story as if they believed in it.

At 85 minutes the movie is beautifully focused, reaching deep into its characters as they confront terrible secrets but never sacrificing momentum as the mystery unravels.

Absorbing and intelligent.

I tend to approach green documentaries with all the enthusiasm of an unemployed logger, but this hard-charging digital video about genetically modified organisms kept me on the edge of my seat with its lucid exposition and frontal assault on Monsanto.

What makes the strongest impact is the superb documentary photography and the "found" audio segments--telemarketing ads left as voice messages.

Unfortunately, instead of the usual larger-than-life male figures--Marcello Mastroianni, Harvey Keitel, Bruno Ganz--of Angelopoulos's recent films, we get a distractingly vapid couple who tend to drain the emotional resonance of these extraordinary, ever-shifting tableaux.

The only characters in this formulaic crime comedy that I halfway liked were a couple of barely glimpsed wives, but the two leads keep it going through sheer determination.

If the plot seems overly familiar, Lasse Hallstrom at least directs the action with conviction and style, and his drama is greatly abetted by the scenic big sky locales.

The script is a lifeless succession of attorney-client debates and stormy horror flashbacks, though I had a good time watching Jennifer Carpenter, a comic Buffy type in "White Chicks" and "D.E.B.S.," hurl herself around as the title character.

Real-life partners Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau wrote and directed this frothy sex farce, incorporating musical numbers that recall Jacques Demy; the results are middling, but the actors' verve compensates for the clumsy choreography and lackadaisical camerawork.

Kerrigan returns with his best work to date, at least in terms of narrative drive and suspense.

The darker aspects of tribalism come under scrutiny here as nonconformists (unmarried men, women alone) are shown being marginalized.

The gentle Wood isn't very convincing as a bare-knuckle brawler (which bodes ill for his forthcoming role as Iggy Pop), and the movie settles into a payback soap opera reminiscent of "West Side Story."

Evelyn Glennie has worked with everyone from Bjork to Brazilian samba groups and also gives solo concerts, and the best segments simply show her at work in her mid-30s, explaining what she does.

The original movie's lean production complemented its pell-mell fights and car chases; here, third-rate CG effects make the strained action sequences look even more improbable.

This is supposedly a big-budget production, though on several occasions the scientist hero (Edward Burns) seems to be walking in place before a rear-projection screen.

Fernando Meirelles stresses old-fashioned storytelling and takes full advantage of his cast, including Danny Huston.

This brisk, free-falling fantasy about the famous collators of German fairy tales, played here as a kind of comedy act by Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, is Terry Gilliam's most entertaining work since the glory days of "Time Bandits," "Brazil," "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen," and "The Fisher King."

Involves a team of divers exploring a vast cave system, an appropriate setting given the hollowness of the story and acting.

It isn't bad enough to be good.

The performers are fresh and offbeat, with the diminutive Peter Dinklage (Elf, The Station Agent) especially funny as a gay wedding planner named Benson Hedges.

Director Erik Van Looy skillfully profiles both the assassin (Jan Decleir, suggesting a tougher, over-the-hill version of Michel Piccoli) and the Antwerp detectives investigating his crimes.

This smart and rocking video documentary by Tim Irwin follows the trio from its origins in suburban San Pedro, California, in 1979 to the death of singer-guitarist D. Boon in a 1985 car crash, which ended his deep and creatively fruitful friendship with bassist Mike Watt.

Carell and Apatow collaborated on the script; it does manage a few laughs, but the characters seldom progress beyond the two-dimensional.

If you're willing to suspend disbelief, this is a pretty good ride.

The violence is minimal, and the humor is inoffensive enough for tots, but everything is damned soft--from the fuzzy backgrounds to the enemy's diluted Germanness.

A seamless mix of satire and suspense, with inspired performances by Toledo and Monica Cervera.

Offers the same dramatic visual style and cruel plot twists, but the mechanical retribution is even more boring.

Like the drive-in classics of Roger Corman and Samuel Z. Arkoff, this develops the principal characters and conflicts with just enough depth and keeps the narrative moving at a brisk pace.

Jones's script leans too heavily on the familiar device of blurring illusion and reality, but his view of the urban landscape is beautiful and distinctive.

The film is absorbing enough as an intimate family portrait, complete with friction.

Superior in every respect to the PBS documentary "The Murder of Emmett Till."

The surprise ending is neatly done, but the characters are so thin that waiting around for it is no fun whatsoever.

Penis jokes fly fast and furious, and while they're hit-or-miss they're occasionally very funny. Schneider always plays a variation of the same put-upon schlemiel, a formula that worked fine for, well, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.

A career low for Mark Wahlberg and director John Singleton (Boyz N the Hood), this ridiculous mean-streets adventure starts out like a Hell's Kitchen melodrama from the 30s and eventually spins off into a series of gunfights, beat downs, and trite Motown numbers.

Benjamin Bratt lacks the dynamism one would expect of the commanding officer of a U.S. Rangers rescue unit; James Franco, however, is solid in the less flashy role of the mission's mastermind, and as the POW leader Joseph Fiennes manages to be heroic while prettily languishing from malaria.

David Mackenzie, who directed the remarkable Scottish drama "Young Adam" (2003), delivers another masterful, disturbing tale of illicit passion, erotic obsession, and sudden death set in the 1950s.

This is an engrossing look at obsessive behavior gone terribly awry.

Tries to be an audacious, irreverent satire about youth culture like "Lord Love a Duck," but most of the laughs get strangled at birth by the uncertainty of Siega's tone.

But the big scare scenes seem particularly isolated here, supported by neither the flat characters nor the vague plot.

Cheung can't make the woman very interesting in her own right--the most compelling performance here is Nolte's.

Revolting exploitation feature.

As soon as it became clear that this remake has nothing to do with real Georgia moonshiners and everything to do with car chases, smashups, and explosions, I could sit back and enjoy it as good, stupid fun.

Jarmusch's narrative setups are often artificial and implausible, but his stories are usually charming anyway because the sense of character runs deeper than plot.

Wong uses his brief evocations of the future mainly as a way of poetically lamenting the past.

Moderately watchable but awfully predictable.

Slick, violent thriller that could seriously dampen tourism to Venezuela.

This is superior family entertainment--warm, thoughtful, and connected to the landscape.

Written by Angus MacLachlan, this indie drama explores the lingering tension between north and south with vinegar and precision.

The script by sitcom veteran Gary David Goldberg has weaknesses--it soft-pedals bitterness, and the ending is annoyingly pat. On balance, though, this is a funny and smartly paced love story.

While it's loaded with visceral thrills, it never rises above the level of an extended video game or an advertisement for the military.

You won't be too bored.

The hues are so muted you may remember this as a black-and-white film, but its emotions are as vivid as primary colors.

The ethereal private moments and inspired passages are beautifully shot by Jean-Marie Dreujou, but Dai never quite organizes the material dramatically, and the tone is too often jagged and disruptive.

Honkasalo's bleak, meditative 2004 documentary, about children who have been orphaned or dispossessed as a result of the Russian-Chechen conflict, eschews any attempts to make sense out of this long-running war.

While not particularly cohesive, this 2002 film has some nice moments of comedy and father-son poignancy.

Despite occasional patches of hokey dialogue, this drama by writer-director Craig Brewer is solid and genuinely uplifting.

Steve Buscemi supplies the only spark of intelligent life in this numbingly flat universe, despite the fancy gadgets, the high-speed chases, and a skyscraper collision reminiscent of the World Trade Center attacks.

Fortunately almost everyone acquits himself coolly and admirably; only costars Greg Kinnear and Marcia Gay Harden ham it up.

The sadism of "1,000 Corpses" is ameliorated here by the addition of an action plot and open spaces, and the comedy is more skillfully played, mingling agreeably with Zombie's ardor for southern trash culture (the final showdown plays out to the strains of "Freebird," for heaven's sake)

For a movie that consists almost entirely of real sex and real rock 'n' roll, 9 Songs feels remarkably conventional.

Though the story drags for the first hour, this becomes a solid character study once the principals arrive at their hiding place.

A film about a junkie rock musician, played by Michael Pitt at his most narcissistic, doing nothing in particular for the better part of 97 minutes isn't my idea of either a good time or a serious endeavor.

This parallel-reality shtick would be OK if the gun violence weren't so awful--but staging a murder again and again for the sake of some undergraduate head game is no more defensible than using it to pump up an action flick.

Tim Burton finally fulfills the promise of "Beetlejuice" with this imaginative masterpiece.

Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson are enormously funny in this farce.

The lovers' seduction in the sand borders on laughable soft porn; later in the film, an act of genital mutilation (part of a prenuptial ritual) injects an unexpected note of terror that reverberates to the end.

The sensibility is Southern California Witless, and the jokey intertitles that periodically take up half the 'Scope frames ("This is a comedy. Sort of.") are even more smarmy than the characters.