Played by Ron Perlman, he's the most magnetic action hero I've come across in a long while.

Assorted movie in-jokes should keep parents tolerably entertained, and Alan Menken's songs mercifully favor western swing over the expected twang pop.

Coolidge directs as if the characters were believable human beings--at least until she gets to the end, when Hollywood and fairy-tale conventions have to triumph over humanity and common sense.

Lacks the raw power of the original but offers its own brand of exploitative fun.

This silly, contrived video--plays like a student work.

Grim, phantasmagoric view of recent and not-so-recent Russian history.

Wise, gentle, and simply constructed.

The characters' undiluted self-interest will seem one-dimensional to all but the worst cynics.

If you can make any sense of this you've probably been smoking whatever the animators were when they concocted it.

Combines absurd male fantasy and grating chick-flick cliche.

The Coens' lack of interest in Mississippi is fortunately joined by a healthy appreciation of gospel music, while their smirking appreciation of stupidity extends to every character in the movie while including no one in the audience.

Bored me for most of its 178 minutes and then infuriated me with its cheap cynicism once it belatedly became interesting--which may be a tribute to writer-director Lars von Trier's gifts as a provocateur.

Bloody gangsta crap.

This absorbing documentary by George Hickenlooper (Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse) spends too much time on the celebrities in Bingenheimer's life for its analysis of fame and fandom to rise above the banal.

I'm qualified to report that this piece of junk faithfully re-creates the Hanna-Barbera formula of scary monsters, flimsy mystery, and watery comedy.

A Chayefsky movie isn't hard to identify, but I think it's safe to say that these days a Charlie Kaufman movie is even more recognizable.

On the plus side, it isn't boring, and Jolie and Ethan Hawke, who plays an art dealer and key witness, generate a certain amount of edgy chemistry. But eventually the filmmakers' desire to shock and tease overtakes any feeling for character or common sense.

The new version has its share of disturbing moments, but writer James Gunn and director Zack Snyder have stripped away the social satire of the original and put little in its place.

Thematically the film starts off like “The Believer,” Henry Bean's 2001 drama about an anti-Semitic Jew, and winds up like “Sullivan's Travels” without the comedy.

Irish playwright Mark O'Rowe, who wrote the script, has an admirable sense of dramatic proportion that suits his intertwining stories; theater director John Crowley, making his film debut, has a sure hand with his actors; and an excellent cast enlivens this web of romantic and criminal intrigue, set in a gray suburb of Dublin. R.

It's well mounted and lushly photographed, and Rappeneau deftly orchestrates the crowd scenes as Parisian elites flock to Bordeaux, but the large cast doesn't mesh.

Kari combines Kaurismaki's deadpan minimalism and Truffaut's sensitivity toward adolescent yearning with a hefty dose of gallows humor, and tops it all off with an apocalyptic ending.

The narrative, capped by a brief bad dream and the capture of a mouse, isn't always legible, but it feeds into a monumental, luminous visual style like no other.

As hard as the film tries to pander, the kids at the preview screening seemed a bit disengaged.

The tricky plot has an interesting payoff, but it's a slow and bumpy ride getting there, and Koepp fares better with special effects than with generating either suspense or interest in the characters.

The heroes (Kilmer, Derek Luke) are all totally good, the villains (Ed O'Neill, William H. Macy) are all totally bad, and the macho one-liners are sufficiently adolescent to produce the desired snickers. I tried very hard to imagine I was somewhere else.

Berman delicately unravels the silent resentments festering in the latchkey home, but the pain is leavened by his droll sense of humor.

Scherfig aims at bittersweet irony, but Wilbur's suicide attempts yield neither pathos nor humor.

Whitney frames this as the pilot for a reality TV show, but if that doesn't pan out he can pitch it to al Qaeda as a recruiting tool.

Registers as frighteningly typical and indicates how successful the Bush administration has been at convincing Americans that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and armed with weapons of mass destruction.

Stiller and Wilson are still hilarious as the supercool detectives -- there hasn't been a comedy duo this good since John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd.

This big-budget western bears a striking resemblance to the recent Tom Cruise vehicle "The Last Samurai," though it's more fun and less pretentious.

Wonderful first feature.

Intelligent thriller.

Robin Shou frequently cuts to scenes from one of his recent movies, adding to the impression that this is a vanity reel.

As bad-taste comedies go, this is more clever than gross.

The movie's mix of erotic Latin dance and vaguely liberal politics should have young girls swooning in the aisles.

Director Philip Kaufman's usual flair for erotic detail largely deserts him here, and this thriller seems most interested in lingering over battered and bloodied male faces.

When the movie got serious again at the end I wasn't buying, though the whole endeavor is helped along by an appealing cast.

It's more like a feature-length music video, with grainy images illustrating songs from (Youngs) recent album of the same title and actors lip-synching to his reedy vocals.

If I were a Christian, I'd be appalled to have this primitive and pornographic bloodbath presume to speak for me.

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.

I'm far from being a fan of the sport, but the boxing sequences held me and the overall atmosphere appears reasonably authentic.

A smart script by Gail Parent (Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman) boosts the first half of this comedy.

Seems intentionally slapdash and stupid, but when one of them referred to Europe as a "country," I wasn't sure if it was meant as a joke or not. Even so, I laughed once or twice.

Tierney and Hackman contribute most to keeping this life-size and funny.

Understated but affecting.

Beautifully shot in black and white by Pawel Edelman (The Pianist), this 2000 feature is both funny and unexpectedly touching.

Moving documentary.

As Adam Sandler vehicles go, this isn't quite as dire as "Eight Crazy Nights," but any movie that has to fall back on Rob Schneider rubbing his nipples has some serious script issues.

Sicko horror flick.

A heartfelt, passionate, tragic musical suite made up of these formulas, which the film both celebrates and wryly examines to discover their inner logic: how they actually work, what they do and don't do.

Compelling despite an almost complete lack of subtlety.

This sequel ups the ante, asking whether urban renewal means anything now other than turning neighborhoods into giant malls.

The plot of this PG action thriller, a remake of the 2002 Danish film Klatretosen, is so full of holes that even middle schoolers might give it the raspberry, but a bigger problem is the three leads' lack of on-screen chemistry.

Kurt Russell gives a terse, unsentimental performance as coach Herb Brooks, but director Gavin O'Connor sticks to the "Hoosiers" playbook.

Watchable if far-fetched movie is seriously marred by its three leads; only Garrel manages to suggest a person rather than a fashion model dutifully following instructions.

This didn't make me laugh much, but I liked the music, a patchwork of samples culled from the various atomic-monster epics.

Beautifully structured and emotionally wrenching.

Set in the blue gray gloom of industrial China, this cunning noir focuses on two ruthless coal miners.

It's amiable and smartly paced, if noticeably lacking in conviction.

The performers all move a lot better than they talk, which is bad news for the insipid melodrama but good news whenever the characters hit the floor in furious competitions between rival crews.

This sitcom setup is as bad as it sounds, and Cox never really surmounts it, though the characters deepen significantly after the missionary is caught caressing the waiter and sent home to be excommunicated and shamed by his family.

Behind the camera Belvaux builds suspense with an austere tone and clever false alarms; in front of it he plays Bruno as chivalrous yet ruthless.

Armitage adds a slick veneer of one-liners and slapstick to Leonard's novel, but the story has been so spun around that it barely knows how to end.

Slapdash but good-natured romantic comedy.

Something of a tour de force, this adaptation of Joe Simpson's nonfiction book about his climbing the 21,000-foot Siula Grande mountain in Peru, breaking a leg, and eventually making it back alive is remarkable simply because the story seems unfilmable.

Abysmal thriller.

This remarkable British silent (1929) is special in many ways.

Hampered by the kind of overacting that the cast seems to enjoy more than the audience.

Gary Baseman's Emmy-winning cartoon series arrives on the big screen in a delightful blast of bold drawing, brainy humor, and hard-charging songs.

Delivers state-of-the-art freeway thrills tenuously held together by an absurd plot, cheap but pretty leads (Martin Henderson, Monet Mazur), diner and gas station locations that look like they've been preserved in amber since the 1950s, and plenty of engine porn.

Japanese animator Satoshi Kon has a striking sense of composition, but I'm more impressed by his storytelling skills.

The best Australian feature I've seen in years.

Jeremy Piven and Annabella Sciorra exert some charm as bodyguards tracking the couple; Mark Harmon and Caroline Goodall are OK as the heroine's parents. Andy Cadiff directed Derek Guiley and David Schneiderman's by-the-numbers script.

Although Broomfield's grandstanding has provoked charges of hypocrisy, this is a genuinely moral work that raises unsettling questions about the haphazard application of the death penalty, and it's certainly more complex and affecting than the fictionalized portrait of Wuornos in "Monster."

It's one of the best movies about revolutionary and anticolonial activism ever made, convincing, balanced, passionate, and compulsively watchable as storytelling.

I still can't decide whether it's a masterpiece of sexual provocation or just a really classy stroke film.

The first half involves some dully familiar cross-cultural comedy, as the two grate on each other's nerves. But the descending action veers into unexpected emotional territory, deftly handled by screenwriter Alison Tilson.

Charlie Chaplin finally got around to acknowledging the 20th century in this 1936 film, which substitutes machine-age gags for the fading Victoriana of his other work. Consequently, it's the coldest of his major features, though no less brilliant for it.

Be forewarned: this comedy bears only the faintest resemblance to the classic book and film of the same name.

Kidman and Zellweger are uncommonly good, and I especially liked the timely treatment of war as universally brutalizing: even the outcomes of battles are ignored, as are the motives behind the conflict.

The silliness only slows down for a few hokey romantic interludes. But if you like to see stuff crash or blow up, this is your movie.

It's a bad sign when you can't name or differentiate any of the Lost Boys.

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.

Honest curiosity and observation are what make this work, and in this respect Christina Ricci (as Wuornos's lover, Selby Wall) is almost as good as Theron.

Oscillating between a furrowed brow and her trademark horsey smile, Roberts battles the repressed harpies on the faculty and strives to shake her students out of their conformist mind-sets. Dispensing with character development, Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal's lifeless script shunts its caricatures from one predictable plot point to the next.

The film is watchable as well as informative...But I wish I had a better notion of what story he's trying to tell.

Responsibility for the ensuing tragedy is so finely calibrated that neither can be comprehensively blamed or exculpated.

Inspired by a true story, this slight but charming and nicely balanced comedy tells the tale of a group of middle-aged women in a Yorkshire village who decide to pose nude for the dozen photographs in a fund-raising calendar.

Ties everything together with a dazzling synthesis of pagan animism, heroic quest mythology, orientalism, Pre-Raphaelite imagery, 1950s sci-fi creature features, and Hollywood war epics.

The period detail is more vibrant than the minimal story.

Not quite a thriller and not quite a character study, though with elements of both, the film is limited by its ambiguous relation to history.

Kids who are still subject to the slings and arrows of high school will find this a lot funnier than I did, though I did get a bang out of Kal Penn, Kevin Christy, and Kenan Thompson as Cannon's car-crazy pals.

In the end I didn't believe in their relationship, but I was pleased to see Keaton tearing it up for two hours.

Much of this is hilarious as long as one can stay sufficiently removed from the realities of Siamese twins.

Roy's story is fascinating in its own right, exploring the hero's mingled shame over his class background and homosexuality, and painting a vicious portrait of Britain's coke-snorting upper crust in the late 70s.

The Alabama setting is as phony as the one in Forrest Gump, and for all of Finney's effectiveness as a yarn-spinning geezer, his whoppers seem disconnected from his character and each other--a weakness Burton fails to resolve with an awkward Felliniesque finale.