The obviously authentic love these couples shared should settle the question for all but bigots.

A runaway hit in Hong Kong, this 2002 crime thriller reinvigorated the genre with its airtight script, taut editing, and sleek cinematography.

Pegg and Wright are out of their depth in the second half, when they try to engage the more disturbing elements of Romero's movies, but their disaffected slacker take on the genre is a welcome alternative to the usual bloodbaths.

Whitaker directed this flaccid romance from a script by girl-power hacks Jessica Bendinger.

Outlandish but gripping paranoid thriller.

It never conjures up any coherent drama of its own, focusing instead on the historical destiny of Bernal's beefcake messiah.

Unfunny and instantly forgettable comedy.

Compelling documentary.

An unusually successful attempt to mate good drama with political analysis.

Writer-director Pupi Avati has a such a fine sense of narrative proportion that this Italian feature unspools like silk.

Smart and fast-paced.

Breillat's mix of dramatic skill and feminist intimidation has cowed plenty of critics in the past, but no political agenda could redeem this movie's joyless pedantry.

Predictable outrage.

A moving evocation of longing unfulfilled.

More good-natured than Michael Moore, these guys score by raising the issue of just how much their amateur antics exaggerate the neocon principles of the WTO.

Anticapitalist propaganda that persuades and uplifts is in short supply these days.

There are no big surprises, but Mac and director Charles Stone III (Drumline) hit all the right dramatic notes.

Never quite settles on a tone, veering from wacky comedy to earnest sports drama to romantic farce. The results are predictably muddled, if mostly harmless.

A triumph not only for its technical mastery but for its good taste.

On paper the story may seem hopelessly contrived -- another nostalgia piece for art-house liberals -- but on-screen it's presented in purely emotional terms, which allows Duigan and his excellent leads to inhabit and ultimately transcend the period.

If Sayles had persuaded me he knew anything about Bush, his background, or his entourage that isn't already well-known, I might have felt more like laughing.

Tries to break free of formula but finally succumbs to the warm glow of predictability.

That rare sequel that surpasses the original.

For all its minimalism, Tsai Ming-liang's 81-minute masterpiece manages to be many things at once.

Turns out to be surprisingly layered.

Nothing's quite so painful as failed comedy, and this atrocity is equivalent to a compound fracture.

Cohen and a crew of script doctors have thrown in some of the oldest cliches in the book.

Not a fraction as scary as George Romero's low-budget "Night of the Living Dead." Fans of the first installment will probably like this too--it's essentially the same movie, plus helicopters and lots of flying glass.

The filmmakers have lovingly retained and expanded on that film's only flaws, some implausible plot details. But even without the same cultural significance, it's still a good story, and the interesting cast.

It's ultimately hamstrung by storytelling that seems both underdeveloped and overdetermined.

Directed with confidence, but it's extremely pretentious--the boy-meets-girl equivalent of Lars von Trier's “The Element of Crime”.

All the male pulchritude can't make up for a muddled script.

Slapdash plot, paper-thin characters, misogynist undertones, and mechanical crosscutting are all soft-core standbys.

The sanitized content clashes with the narrative style, which mimics true-crime TV like “American Justice.”

In essence this is a celebrity revenge fantasy, something few of us can relate to, but director Paul Abascal has the sense to keep the homilies short and the pacing fast.

I was haunted afterward by its seething rage at the malicious paternalism and sexual hypocrisy of fundamentalist Christians.

There are some striking visuals and Hartnett is a magnetic presence.

The facts of their grim treatment, often exacerbated by their estrangement from their countries of origin, sometimes recall the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

This is one dull party.

The cloying score aside, this is a searing depiction of war in all its savagery, waste, and folly, with artfully choreographed sequences that surpass the conventions of the genre.

Never gets around to explaining how he (Michael Morra) picked up the moniker Rockets Redglare. In fact, the intimacy of this portrait may be a disadvantage.

The first half is better than average for an opulent Classics Illustrated film, thanks to realistic period detail, brisk storytelling, and Reese Witherspoon as the saucy rags-to-riches Becky Sharp. Then the whole lumbering weight of the production catches up with the filmmakers, slowing the proceedings to an interminable crawl.

Only in the last third, when he gets down to the business of telling a story, does The Brown Bunny become a porn movie -- though not in the sense you'd expect.

The result is both thrilling and thoughtful.

Funny, suspenseful, and well paced, this is definitely the summer's best time waster.

This excruciating sequel tries to squeeze a few more bucks from the "Spy Kids" espionage formula.

A novel twist in the second half succeeds in distinguishing this from the pack but also wrenches it away from the meager characters.

Distributors are clearly scraping the bottom of the barrel with this flimsy exposé of presidential adviser Karl Rove.

One reason Bright Leaves is McElwee's best film since "Sherman's March" is the richness of his reflections on this multifaceted material.

Aside from a few good zingers the humor is crude and homophobic, and you could drive an ATV through the holes in the plot.

The serious Catholic themes that made the original film genuinely disturbing have been flattened out into a cartoonish backstory.

In its embrace of human imperfection the movie recalls with elegant formal simplicity the populist threads of 30s French cinema.

Under his (Fry’s) direction this 2003 British feature becomes a flat, depressing affair.

Genuinely sad: few bands have burst onto the scene with such a perfectly realized look, sound, and philosophy or been more trapped by their own meatheaded genius.

Strictly routine as filmmaking, adhering fairly consistently to the sound-bite approach. But given the subject, there's still a great deal of interest here about the life, art, milieu, and political activity of Ginsberg. (Review of Original Release)

A lot of effort appears to have gone into the glitzy period re-creation, but this is mainly a tearjerker.

Everyone in the cast conveys that messy mix of teen self-consciousness and bravado, but Josh Peck is particularly nuanced as the bully.

Director Cedric Kahn, Laurence Ferreira Barbosa, and Gilles Marchand collaborated on the well-honed script, derived from a Georges Simenon novel. The film works well with quiet tensions, but becomes less convincing and interesting once it moves beyond them.

The master principle of film noir -- that everyone is corruptible -- turns a pinwheel of plot complications in this fleet, stylish little crime drama from Mexico.

Dumb.

Like the gods, the trading cards are capricious, with ever-changing rules and strategies so intricate that only Yu-Gi-Oh-ologists will fully enjoy this adventure.

Well-acted drama.

The film's superb first two hours, which weave social and historical themes into rich personal drama, turn out to be only a prelude to the magnificent final hour--an extended ballroom sequence that leaves history behind to become one of the most moving meditations on individual mortality in the history of the cinema. (Review of 1983 Release)

Andrews is still a treasure, but the series's currency is plummeting.

The overall feel is phantasmagoric--pitched, like most of Maddin's work, in the style of a half-remembered late silent feature or early talkie.

Has an affable charm, but the script is paint by numbers.

The best thing Mann brings to his picture is a strong sense of time and place.

This deviously funny comedy doubles as workplace satire and anthem to the American career woman.

The battle scenes are bloody, visceral, and expertly edited, though arterial spray consumes so much screen time that the numerous subplots, involving 11 legendary Siamese defenders well-known to Thais, may feel perfunctory to Westerners despite some strong performances.

This film sounds better than it plays; there are too many echoes of "Alphaville" and of the dreamy drift of "Blade Runner." But the style of the opening and closing credits is pretty spiffy.

Superlative chiller.

While largely effective, Greenwald's documentary is not a complete success.

Allouache's script is so packed with incident that the characters have little time for debate, but the tension between fundamentalist and modern morality is woven into the action.

If you don't care about the first version, or what director Jonathan Demme's name once meant, the cast does an OK job with Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris's routine thriller script.

This live-action feature actually has less of a pulse than the puppet version.

Every eerily tranquil shot, weirdly elliptical scene, and peculiar line reading contributes to a mood of detachment rather than creeping dread.

The concert footage is generally quite good, and Joplin is astonishing, but with so many hours of footage you'd think there would be more unexpected moments.

For the most part this reminded me of a hysterical passenger pushing random buttons in the cockpit of a plunging airplane.

This held me, but I was grateful when it released me.

At times Shahriar succumbs to self-conscious poeticism, and her male characters are invariably thieves and oppressors, but the film draws a good deal of power from the passive anguish of the girl.

The movie never finds a consistent tone -- the humor is dynamically offbeat, the dramatic moments a bit canned -- but Braff's affection for his misfit characters and skeptical take on how people sell themselves short in America make this the truest generational statement I've seen since "Donnie Darko."

Mesmerizing.

Spike Lee's fans have learned to take the bad with the good, but this is pretty damn bad.

Though the filmmaker has by now ridiculed the martial-arts drama virtually out of existence, the final dance number -- actually closer to festive stomping than tapping -- somehow manages to transcend irony, conveying instead only Kitano's childlike exhilaration, with a sense of ease regained.

The action sequences are expert studies in controlled chaos.

Cinematographer Thierry Arbogast is the real superhero; his homage to noir thrillers compensates for the spotty CGI and rescues the movie from sex-kitten kitsch.

The cast is good and the story affecting, though at times Michael Mayer's direction makes the production seem a little choked up over its own enlightenment. Sissy Spacek is memorable in a secondary role.

At first I thought this was a Michael Haneke knockoff, but it's more depressing and less edifying than most of those narrative experiments, which is why I eventually tuned it out.

This video profile by Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller allows his significance to register and his charisma to shine despite a pedestrian approach that's especially awkward in its use of archival footage.

In a recent "Sun-Times" article Jeff said he purposely avoided taking a son's perspective, which leaves him without much perspective at all.

This surreal, subversive teen drama tanked at the box office but has since become a cult favorite, prompting this new release with 20 minutes of additional footage.

Having defused the fairy tale, first-time screenwriter Leigh Dunlap pads this out to 96 minutes with stale high school politics and the usual claptrap about believing in yourself.

It's much more of an action flick than either "Metropolis" or "Blade Runner," but there's a provocative and visionary side to this free adaptation of Isaac Asimov's SF classic that puts it in the same thoughtful canon.

An engaged and knowing look at the underground world of improvised rap, concentrating on artists less interested in commercial success and cutting records than in the "spontaneous right now" of "nonconceptual rhyme."

The depiction of her risky voyage and what happens afterward is highly suspenseful and entirely believable.

It's formulaic but still fun, thanks to the quick and genial players.

Like some of Joan Crawford's and Bette Davis's studio vehicles, this soapy romance exists only for what Gong Li can bring to it: a certain amount of soul and nuance.

By the end the story is more satisfying than you might expect.