The injustice of the girl's thwarted career goes only so far, though Feret pushes it in some interesting directions.

The comic juice tends to spill out in all directions.

What eventually emerges isn't nearly as achieved or convincing as the neighborhood portrait, but even when it ultimately overwhelms the characters, it's full of juice, humor, and nuance.

Satisfying in a purely infantile way, and the familiarity of everything is oddly comforting. In terms of action, moreover, this makes "The Matrix Reloaded" look like a clodhopper's jamboree.

Schwarzenegger is presented as a lumbering slab of dumb, destructive strength--the image is more geological than human--and Cameron plays his crushing weightiness against the strangely light, almost graceful violence of the gunplay directed against him. The results have the air of a demented ballet.

A nervy as well as somber piece of work, not only for the way it confounds and even frustrates certain genre expectations, but also -- and especially -- for the way it confronts the viewer with the moral implications of that frustration.

The purpose of the Bond girl, and of the Bond film, is still to stroke the male ego. Bond changes just enough to stay exactly the same.

As in "My Favorite Year," the laughs all come from seeing a nervous innocent pulled into the star's debauchery, the heart from our growing realization that debauchery is just emptiness with the volume cranked.

A somewhat adolescent if stylish antiauthoritarian romp about an irreverent U.S. medical unit during the Korean war

I'm no boxing fan, but there's something admirable about fighter Johar Abu Lashin's love of his sport, chronicled in Duki Dror's tautly constructed 2002 documentary.

The tone is both goofier and darker than the Potter pictures, and some of the magic battles built around New York City landmarks are eye-popping; there's also a genuinely affecting romance between Baruchel and fetching newcomer Teresa Palmer.

Levin's curiosity and evenhandedness distinguish the movie.

Thomas Hardy it's not, but as far as middlebrow British romances go, better this than "Love Actually."

Michael Sheen, who adds to his gallery of public figures (Tony Blair, David Frost) with a sharp performance here as the legendary UK soccer coach Brian Clough.

Julie-Marie Parmentier is fetching as the vulnerable younger sister, and the duo generate considerable erotic tension; unfortunately Denis' detached and indifferent camera never gets inside the story, its characters, or its milieu.

McCann's tone, perversely comic at first, gradually darkens, transforming this into a savage noir exploration of the war between the sexes.

A small but achingly authentic piece of kitchen-sink realism, this might never have made it across the pond without babe du jour Keira Knightley, excellent in a supporting role as a smacked-out waitress. But the real wonder is Parker, whose vulnerability and wraithlike beauty are devastating.

Morrow and his collaborators so clearly believe in this project that I was carried along, often charmed and never bored.

The actors keep this interesting, but as a story it drifts and rambles.

Concise and thoughtful.

The film is split down the middle, with many elegant symmetries and curling plotlines bridging the two halves: one part is a bracing, funny, almost Keaton-esque comedy starring Harry as a deadpan center of disaster; the other is a brooding, brutal film noir, starring Sondra Locke as a vengeful femme fatale.

Like the painter, it's painstakingly serious about what it's up to.

Fair amount of grit and charm.

Given the tension dogging her every step, I wondered if this would end in bloodshed, but Abu-Assad opts for a more hopeful conclusion, making his film -- strange as it may seem -- a comedy.

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

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.

I found it pretty entertaining, as well as provocative in some of its comments about contemporary life.

Rides high on its old-fashioned sentiments and the precocious charms of its teenage star, who can be both obnoxious and endearing.

Luckily LaGravenese has incorporated some of the real students' piercingly honest diary entries and rounded up an engaging cast of unknowns and young actors (April Hernandez, Kristin Herrera, Hunter Parrish) to channel their anger and hopelessness.

Though Ahola's acting is unschooled, to say the least, Herzog shrewdly uses his blunt sincerity to counterpoint Roth's spectacularly icy performance.

The movie eventually begins to wilt under the sober, plodding direction of Steve Jacobs, but the thoughtful screenplay gives Malkovich a complex, increasingly reflective character arc that he plays with great feeling, making the professor’s redemption seem honestly won.

Grimly mesmerizing saga.

Woody Allen's first film as a director, in which he plays Virgil Starkwell, Public Schmuck Number One. This ragged collection of gags and sketch fragments was reportedly pieced together from an incoherent mass of footage by ace film doctor Ralph Rosenblum.

Diaz, costars Jason Segel and Justin Timberlake, and a sharp supporting cast manage to deliver a crappy good time, mercifully devoid of any heart-tugging teacher-student subplots.

Based on John Nickle's children's book, this computer-animated comedy starts slowly but builds into a rousing adventure capped with just the right measure of sweetness.

I've never read Stella Gibbons's popular English novel of 1932--a parody of the romantic rural novels that Mary Webb wrote during the 20s--but director John Schlesinger and adapter Malcolm Bradbury have gotten plenty of enjoyable mileage out of it.

Even though he's psychologically expanded his source, the material is a bit too schematic to work as much more than a scaled-down thriller.

The real star is the splendid computer-generated Hulk, though his King Kong-like story is compromised by the need to keep him around for the inevitable sequel.

Director Anne Fletcher delivers more bite and brisker pacing than she did with "27 Dresses."

Drawn from a children's book by Croatian illustrator Milan Trenc, this fantasy isn't exactly heavy, but its ideological implications are interesting nevertheless.

Comparisons with Michael Mann's recent Dillinger biopic "Public Enemies" are inevitable, and mostly flattering to this project: director Jean-Francois Richet and screenwriter Abdel Raouf Dafri take advantage of the additional screen time (about 100 minutes more than Mann had) to flesh out their protagonist, who fancies himself an honorable thief and even a left-wing revolutionary but ultimately turns out to be something much simpler: a man who loves his work.

Moody and thoughtful.

Chow's newfound patience and attentiveness to stasis, tinged with nostalgia, are promising indications of where he's taking his art as he attempts to influence the commercial cinema that's long influenced him.

It abjectly collapses into feel-good nonsense.

Jason Reitman follows his pitch-perfect satire "Thank You for Smoking" with another adventurous comedy, though here the cleverness can be grating; the movie is distinctive for its complicated emotions.

The period details are more accurate than in many Hollywood features, and Boebel, a native of Wisconsin, understands his midwestern characters, especially their resourcefulness and stoic resolve.

A respectable entry in the Bicycle Thief school of art-house cinema, which uses a child's coming of age to explore an era of political and social turmoil.

The most telling moments in this 2003 video documentary aren't the statements of the neo-Nazis, a tiny minority who get way too much screen time, but the lies and bigotries of the ordinary citizens.

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.

A low-key but hypnotic portrait of the infamous sex murderer.

Provides a valuable refresher course in our less-acknowledged methods of meddling in the affairs of other countries.

With its black-and-white flashbacks and relentlessly earnest tone, this sometimes threatens to become a PBS documentary, yet its script is exceptionally fluid, tracing the tributaries of art, race, and sexuality that feed one's sense of self.

The most poignant performance comes from Allen, a retired stock analyst who clings to his masculine pride even though his body's falling apart on him.

It's far more ambitious than its predecessor and suffers from too many ideas rather than too few, making it an inspired, fascinating, and revealing mess.

This 2004 French feature seems concerned not so much with the psychopathology of everyday life as with psychopaths who lurk behind the everyday.

A delightful script and an equally delightful performance by Collins.

Director Yojiro Takita uses the changing seasons to echo the characters' moods; the score by Joe Hisaishi (Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle) has a suitably majestic sweep.

What's confusing yet ultimately illuminating is the way his gremlins function as a free-floating metaphor, suggesting at separate junctures everything from teenagers to blacks to various Freudian suppressions.

A moving evocation of longing unfulfilled.

The plot is minimal, but the film is essentially an acting showcase. Allen is excellent.

Based on a true story, the movie was nominated for an Oscar as best foreign film; some might castigate its unabashed sentimentality, but I found myself moved, especially when I recalled that this was supposedly the war to end all wars.

This is somewhat fuzzy as narrative, but it's a potent mood piece, and its portait of urban loneliness has some of the intensity of "Taxi Driver" without the violence.

A judicious mix of the lightly gory, the generously cartoonish, and the unexpectedly atmospheric makes for action that's scary yet unintimidating.

The third remake of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956) may not be a patch on the original, but it does have a few things the other versions lack.

Fascinating: supposedly the crooks kept all the cash and jewelry, but their sponsors in the MI5 were really after sexually explicit blackmail photos of Princess Margaret and other aristocrats that were being held by the revolutionary Michael X.

May be derivative, but it's still engrossing, largely because of its appealing juvenile lead.

The action is so relentless that after a while things start to feel hollow, but Rodriguez still seems to believe the moral articulated at the end of the first film -- that keeping a family together is the real adventure.

The film is very proud of itself, exuding a stifling piety at times, but it works as well as this sort of thing can, thanks to accomplished performances by Fredric March, Myrna Loy, and Dana Andrews, who keep the human element afloat. Gregg Toland's deep-focus photography, though, remains the primary source of interest for today's audiences.

Intelligent supernatural drama.

Though the director is Walter Hill, the dominant personality is John Milius, who wrote the story and collaborated on the script with Larry Gross, and despite some narrative stodginess in spots, Milius’s sense of warrior nobility and his talent for writing juicy parts for actors serve the picture well.

Uekrongtham handles the material with reasonable restraint, and you can't help but cheer on the hero.

This carefully observed film has lots of heart.

Despite the mostly static setting, director Eytan Fox keeps this 2002 Israeli feature surprisingly lively, gracefully balancing the various story lines and making good use of an excellent ensemble cast.

Told almost entirely without words and composed largely of detail shots, Hukkle doesn't quite transcend the gimmickry of its concept, but it succeeds as a bravura technical exercise with some truly amazing images.

Rodriguez's evident delight in the form make this a worthwhile piece of eye candy.

The film is equally good in handling the discrepancy between skilled and unskilled parents.

Moss has an acute feeling for structure and juxtaposition and for the quality and sensibility of his friends.

Nothing miraculous, but it's time pretty well spent.

Greene delivers a wrenching performance, and like "Smoke Signals," the film ends with a cathartic, triumphant flourish.

Light years ahead of Randal Kleiser's 1978 original, this 1982 sequel employs the Shakespearean marriage plot so beloved of classic musicals, in which two mismatched couples are straightened out and the songs express the moral distinctions of love and sex.

The overlapping stories pulse with a tidal rhythm, the film's sensibility flowing between serious and wry, and there are memorable turns from Assi Dayan as the waitress's henpecked dad and Tzahi Grad as a cop with a nonchalant attitude toward babysitting.

The rural setting and the loners-banding-together theme are affecting and the supporting players--especially Michelle Williams and Raven Goodwin as two more outcasts--are all superb.

Packed with dialogue and issues, and it’s most provocative when dealing with the dangers of plea bargaining.

As in the original version, the fights are outweighed by existential angst and Buddhist introspection, but the sequence in which a blind swordsman (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) takes on an army of thieves is still gangbusters.

Neve Campbell, who cowrote the story with scenarist Barbara Turner, plays one of the dancers; although her character isn't especially interesting, her story furnishes a minimal narrative thread to hold the rest together.

The humor is a bit dry for my taste, but director Bent Hamer and his actors know what they're doing every step of the way.

Mildly exciting sports-in-prison movie.

Although the last part of the film becomes repetitive and slightly confused, Eastwood manages the picaresque plot with skill, and his visuals have a high-charged, almost Germanic quality. Wales also possesses a touching emotional vulnerability that marks another significant step away from Eastwood's often-overcriticized macho image. All in all, a very creditable film.

The visual monotony of talking heads and stock footage is interrupted occasionally by the spectral charcoal drawings of veteran Si Lewen, though his art is used to full advantage only when he describes the liberation of Buchenwald.

Time hasn’t been terribly kind to this 1931 gangster drama, which suffers more than it should from the glitches of early sound. But James Cagney’s portrayal of a bootlegging runt is truly electrifying (he’d already made three films, but this one made him a star), and Jean Harlow makes the tartiest tart imaginable.

This has loads of swagger, but for stylistic audacity I prefer Anderson's more scattershot "Magnolia."

The plots of animated features are often excuses for visual showboating, but here the lilting story line, based on west African folktales, complements the alternately sumptuous and austere images.

Children won't get the references to atomic-age monster movies, but the film offers more than nostalgia: there are slyly funny performances by Seth Rogen as an omnivorous blue blob and Stephen Colbert as the U.S. president, who faces down, and then flees, an alien invasion.

Ayoade owes a debt to Wes Anderson (Rushmore), but the parents here are so beautifully written, and Hawkins and Taylor particularize them so well, that the movie manages to hold its own.

High-octane nonsense but gives both the actors and the audience all that's needed to make this diverting--car chases, wisecracks, narrow escapes, explosions.

Director Ron Underwood (Tremors) does a fair job navigating all the key changes proposed by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel's script, and with the actors' help he makes this a diverting if bumpy ride.

Tavernier gives the children vivid, sharply delineated voices; working with a largely nonprofessional cast, he strips bare the characters' frailty but grants them a decency and honesty that redeems them despite the mounting hardships and tragedies.

Despite all the silliness the drift races are gripping, and director Justin Lin captures Tokyo's energy and glitter far better than Sofia Coppola.