Ultimately Barker's style drains the life from the film, making it feel like an academic exercise as it becomes increasingly inert, emotionally and dramatically.

Thomsen's transformation from easygoing entrepreneur to ruthless executive is so engrossing I didn't pick up on the story's chilling Freudian subtext until very near the end.

Snippets of the band's brutally percussive music punctuate the endless encounter sessions, which expose the musicians' boundless self-absorption (the 9-11 attacks come and go without so much as a mention) and cowed obedience to their psychological guru.

This is vicarious cinema at its best.

The result is your basic Bruckheimer action spectacle plus lots of leather, shaggy haircuts, and Celtic tattoos.

No movie with access to the Cole Porter songbook could be a complete waste of time, but this biopic of the great tunesmith by producer-director Irwin Winkler is all upholstery and no chair.

One of the most perfect endings of any film that comes to mind.

I expected this to open out into another loud, thumping thriller. Instead it remains quiet and focused, exploring the couple's frayed relationship and the economic divide that separates the husband from his captor.

This is supposed to be a testament to the nation's diversity, but it's so complacent that you'd never imagine said diversity is one of the greatest social challenges of the new century.

As Dr. Octopus, Alfred Molina makes a more baroque supervillain than Willem Dafoe did as the Green Goblin, but the other stars--seem happy to be giving us more of the same.

The connection between the two narratives is supposed to be a big, heartbreaking surprise, though I figured it out well in advance and spent the interim unfavorably comparing this greatest-generation hanky wringer to the British drama "Iris."

The result is that virtual oxymoron, an intelligent family film.

Haneke is still a masterful director, and his authority carries this well-acted and attractively shot account of a family from an unnamed city trying to survive in the sticks after an unspecified catastrophe.

Romantic entanglements are among the more cliched elements of the script, which nicely captures the rhythms of quiet, small-town lives but taxes credibility in several key scenes.

Doesn't make a lick of sense, and its borderline racism and sexism will offend plenty of people. But comedy is all salesmanship, and these guys sold me; their giddy nonchalance reminds me of kids competing to crack each other up at bedtime after mom has given them Pepsi with dinner.

There are plenty of laughs whenever Moore wants to twist the knife, but the bottom line is that he respects and trusts his fellow Americans a lot more than Bush does.

As the WWF-style villain, Stiller misfires again and again, but Vaughn is reliably funny and Rip Torn has a great part as the underdogs' crotchety old coach.

As usual Spielberg is too bored by everyday life to use his premise for anything but a fairy tale, whose cheap pathos suggests a bad Chaplin imitation. This grows progressively phonier and eventually devolves into "Mr. Roberts," with Stanley Tucci filling in for James Cagney as an airport bureaucrat.

Like the former first lady, the filmmakers go slightly overboard.

Upon closer inspection its story and characters grow more mysterious, ultimately bordering on the unfathomable.

While Cazeneuve's story is about gay love, it also charts universal truths about adolescent romance and high school politics with great aplomb.

Agreeable but overlong.

It's fun, instructive, and stimulating, but never beautiful. Ultimately it's limited by its compulsion to knock our socks off at every turn and to compare itself with "Alice in Wonderland."

Gets a little soapy, but the dismal working-class milieu and the measured performances by Mezzogiorno and Girotti (a venerable Italian actor who died last year ) bolster the sense of solidity.

Jules Verne's novel has been flattened into a standardized Jackie Chan vehicle.

The story is mechanical, but Twohy paces it well enough to showcase the spectacular costumes (by Ellen Mirojnick and Michael Dennison) and production design (by Holger Gross).

Unfortunately this is much tamer than it had to be--Rudnick Lite, meaning on the edge of evaporation.

The cat is computer-generated, as are his one-liners.

Toward the end the freak-show humor begins to yield diminishing returns, but for most of its length this delivers a steady stream of uncomfortable gut laughs.

Word Wars does a better job of capturing the players' various idiosyncrasies.

Maximilian stresses that Maria was an icon in postwar Germany, yet the saddest thing about her isolation and disappointment is that it's so common.

Engrossing documentary.

Like the first two movies, this is loaded with computer-generated imagery, but for the first time there's a sense of dramatic proportion balancing the spectacle and the story line.

Kar Kar's singing is wonderfully expressive, and an improvised song to his wife at her grave site demonstrates the emotional wellspring of his music.

The project was produced in association with National Geographic World Films, a relationship borne out by the movie's cultural detail, rich earth-toned cinematography (by Falorni), and almost complete lack of dramatic tension.

Riveting cinematic essay.

At 92 minutes this could hardly be considered a definitive statement, yet its combination of high drama and carefully articulated principle delivers quite a punch.

An exceptionally stupid movie.

This is dumb, raunchy, and obvious, but it's also pretty funny, and delivered with the gusto of a Redd Foxx monologue.

Its mix of personal reminiscence (Mario made his screen debut playing Sweetback as a boy) and cultural history is fascinating. This engages in a fair amount of mythmaking itself, but its lesson in self-empowerment is both vivid and sincere.

This documentary profile of poet and novelist Charles Bukowski exploits the writer's counterculture persona but also works to dispel it, revealing a gifted and extremely complicated man.

Although this shares some of the acidity of Thatcher-era films, it owes more to David Lean's "Summertime" in its generosity toward an aging heroine who learns that any second chance is fraught with risk.

It's been a long time since I've seen a teen movie as lively, as unpredictable, as generous, and as tough-minded as this one.

The picture flogs a fake dichotomy between career and family for 119 minutes until Hudson digests a feeble moral that Laverne and Shirley would have covered in 25.

In short, it's amusing only if you agree not to think very much about it.

It's a powerful psychological conceit, but Samuell subverts it at every turn with his carnivalesque style and canned Gallic wistfulness.

Shot during the March 2003 invasion and the early stages of the American occupation, it tells us more about how the channel decides what to report than we probably know about most American newscasts.

The result was one of Bergman's most haunting and suggestive films.

This has its moments--most of them thanks to Kilmer and Joe Mantegna as the boy's abusive father--but the troubled romance is unconvincing and the big-name actors hang on the story like ornaments on a spindly tree.

Like the first movie this is unassailable family entertainment, with a gentle fairy tale for kids and a raft of mildly satirical pop-culture references for parents.

The efforts of victims and victimizers to come to terms with historical trauma are admirable, but the film is too tough-minded to espouse a facile discourse of "healing" in the face of genocide driven by ideology run amok.

This isn't all gold--there are lame riffs on a booze-swilling dog and a flabby old man with a boner--but it's well above average.

It has plenty of visual sweep, fine action sequences, and, thanks especially to Brad Pitt (as Achilles) and Peter O'Toole (as King Priam), a deeper sense of character than one might expect from a sword-and-sandal epic.

Long, grim, but utterly engrossing.

Like "Mystery Train" and "Night on Earth," this feature by Jim Jarmusch is a short story collection, but it's funnier and more formally adventurous than either--also ultimately greater than the sum of its parts.

Writer-director Toni Kallem generates some touching moments (most of them involving Tom Bower as Taylor's wisp of a father), but this never surmounts the woeful miscasting of its two leads.

This erotically charged drama may not be quite as great as the original, but it's an amazing and beautiful work just the same.

French director Andre Techine (Alice and Martin) powerfully re-creates the mass exodus from the city and draws a fine performance from Beart as a woman struggling to shield her children from her own fear and confusion. Unfortunately the last act goes off the rails.

Gilbert would have done well to stick with these witnesses; instead his History Channel-type video presents a dutiful overview of the Brown case.

Agresti has more on his mind than tugging at heartstrings.

The only thing that really amused me was a subplot involving music and video piracy.

The road of excess leads to the palace of boredom in this overblown monster epic.

It's especially good in its handling of actors and its sharp feeling for characters who can't even describe their own problems, much less analyze them.

It's a fascinating cultural artifact and a stomping good time.

There are a few witty touches (POV shots given to the urn holding the mother's ashes) but the mood swings erratically and ineffectively from deadpan drollery to heartfelt romance.

Skating fearlessly on the edge of tastelessness and sentimentality, Oasis is another strong, provocative film by Lee Chang-dong.

More witty than laugh-out-loud funny.

It's a haunting portrait of a young man who, while genuinely gifted and loved by friends and family, couldn't cope with the world.

Insofar as one can distinguish the investigative research from the career move, this Sundance prizewinner is effective muckraking, but it lacks much of a political program apart from the message that we're poisoning ourselves.

Evoking Curtis's mystique and eccentric personality, filmmaker Craig Highberger also delivers an invaluable chronicle of New York's barrier-smashing underground arts scene circa 1968-'74.

With so many dubious elements at play, even the half-good ideas get lost in the shuffle.

As in most bad thrillers, the number of pointless shocks increases in direct proportion to the drama's decreasing vitality, like defibrilator paddles jolting a dying man.

You may find it pleasantly diverting, especially if you like the leads, but mostly it made me want to see "Adam's Rib" again.

Pleasantly acted and moderately funny, but it lacks the genuine bile that made "Heathers" (1987) so bracing.

Caviezel (The Passion of the Christ) gives a quietly focused performance in the title role, ably assisted by Brett Rice as Jones's father, Jeremy Northam as golf rival Walter Hagen, and Malcolm McDowell as sportswriter O.D. Keeler.

A trio of finely observant performances graces this quiet drama.

All in all it's pretty lurid, but it delivers what it promises.

The contrast between Cadigan in recovery and at his most disturbed provides an excellent antidote to romanticized and sensationalized portrayals of mental illness in Hollywood films and on TV talk shows.

Guy Maddin has reached a new expressive plateau with The Saddest Music in the World.

Retreads a well-worn premise (Freaky Friday, Big) but the formula works, thanks in large part to star Jennifer Garner, who's so radiant theaters should be stocking sunblock.

Washington's stoic persona here conceals a volcanic rage, and the cast of pros--including Giancarlo Giannini, Mickey Rourke and Rachel Ticotin--support him with relish.

A generally effective sex comedy, distinguished by its origins (Brazil) and the considerable appeal of its star, Sonia Braga. (Review of original release)

Gentle, muted film of limited aesthetic ambition.

Demme's moving documentary turns the story of his dead friend into the story of Haiti.

Those craving more visceral kicks will be gratified by the endless crash sequences, but despite the perverse thrill of seeing guys fly off their motorcycles at 150 miles per hour, the crack-ups wear thin after the first hour.

Fascinating and instructive throughout.

This installment delivers more of the pleasures that made Tarantino the wunderkind of 90s cinema: offbeat scumbag characters, narrative sleight of hand, an extraordinary visual sense, and affectionate genre pillaging.

Full of high spirits and good vibes.

There's something to be said for letting a comic book adaptation operate at the level of a comic book--i.e., with cheap laughs and ice-cold sadism.

It still holds up as splashy fun of a sort, if you can handle its sexual politics and its depictions of Native Americans.

Unfortunately the story lurches like the characters' beat-up T-bird...and the film's rebellious attitude wears thin long before its sentimental denouement.

It's a victory of tone over storytelling, though perhaps a Pyrrhic one.

Harsh but moving drama.

Despite the flashback structure, this is a film in which mood matters more than plot, while the hero's heroic stature steadily shrinks.

Thoughtful and complex.

This has wit and energy to burn, but I can't call it escapism, because tackiness and snarkiness are among the things I most need to escape.

This comedy is an ill-fated attempt to remake "Risky Business" (1983) for the 21st century, complete with a wind-chimey score, the hero posing in his underpants, and a cynical happy ending.

Every joke is stretched to the breaking point, and no one seems to be having any fun.