Sentimental.

The result is a blend of kitchen-sink and magical realism: sentimental, but well acted and freshly observed.

Sly, inventively drawn, brilliantly executed cartoon.

Joel and Ethan Coen wrote the story, using the ancient gag of the toxic Santa as a vehicle for their patented brand of misanthropy; Zwigoff and company wring some laughs out of it, though the tone is uniformly mean and vulgar.

Terence Stamp and Wallace Shawn spend a fair amount of time skulking around as ghostly servants, which kept me amused for the movie's 99 minutes.

This big-budget adventure is based on a recent Michael Crichton thriller, though its premise is too stale to instill the sense of wonder critical to great sci-fi.

Lost me early on with its show-offy shooting and editing, portentous metaphysical conceits about winners and losers, and exaggerated displays of evil, violence, and deceit.

As in "Amores perros," Iñarritu and Arriaga slice and dice the chronology, which helps distract from the warmed-over story elements and focus attention on the superior performances.

Grazer's writing team has filled up the film's 82 minutes with winking product placements, SNL-type goofs, PG gags premised on not quite cursing, a Smashmouth cover of the Beatles' "Getting Better," and a lame subplot about a scuzzy lothario (Stephen Baldwin).

Dopey, violent horror thriller.

Arcand's fondness for the good old 60s can be cloying, but despite an uneven cast, he finds a tonal balance between sentimental and cynical that keeps the conversations real and heart wrenching.

Watching her (Blanchett) and Jones work together is the chief pleasure of this polished but self-conscious drama--Howard delivers some terse and coherent suspense sequences, but Ford looms over the story like a rifleman hidden in the red rock.

So lackluster both as an homage and as a story in its own right that I was already forgetting it before it was over.

Persuasively re-creates the experience of sailing aboard a British man-o'-war during the Napoleonic era, but its story never attains comparable grandeur.

Spirited, quintessential, and often hilarious.

Making Shakur the narrator works pretty well at first...But once he becomes an overnight star at age 20, his relentless self-articulation to Tabitha Soren begins to sound like the usual white noise of celebrity, his ideas about race and power in America potent but undeveloped.

This is an ideal straight-ahead version of Jesus's story, built around Christopher Plummer's offscreen narration, for people who don't already know all the details and can't follow all of "The Passion of the Christ" without a synopsis.

Though still realist in approach, its aura of bitter nostalgia places it squarely among Fellini's most personal and atmospheric works.

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.

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.

Aside from the Pirandellian games and some interplay of different film stocks there isn't much going on here, though von Trier rewards the patient with a strange and horrifying climax.

Absorbing, beautiful documentary.

The film is soon bogged down by fake hugs and a faker climax.

This is cloying, deceitful, and more or less irresistible.

The Holocaust subplot is contrived and schematic. Yet the central love triangle is fairly compelling, aided by Krol's fine performance.

Fiercely uncompromising psychodrama infused with a keen intelligence and a sinister primordiality.

Provides an interesting introduction to a compelling figure in contemporary pop music.

Superior 2002 farce by Walsh, Roberts, and Katie Roberts, all veterans of Chicago's ImprovOlympic who went on to form the Upright Citizens Brigade.

Shot at the same time as "The Matrix Reloaded," this last installment is the shortest of the bunch at 129 minutes, but I still succumbed to special-effects hypnosis in the last hour.

Proves again that the best documentaries currently outshine Hollywood features as the most watchable, energizing, and relevant movies around.

Director Robert Benton allows the cast... to shine, but I was left wondering why such a very literary construction as this needed to be made into a movie.

As absurd and as beautiful as a fairy tale, this chilling, nocturnal black-and-white masterpiece was originally released in this country dubbed and under the title "The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus," but it's much too elegant to warrant the usual "psychotronic" treatment.

This originated as a late-night play, and the humor is correspondingly sophomoric, but I loved Dennis McCarthy's melodramatic score.

Given recent similar incidents of young con artists posing as journalists, this is a timely and compelling film, but I wish the filmmakers had widened their focus to address the kinds of journalistic corruption that go beyond simple fibbing.

A superior soap opera, evocative at times of Warren Beatty's "Reds."

Blaise and Walker cleverly widen the aspect ratio as the hero's consciousness changes and make some lovely pictures of the northern lights, but the atrocious Phil Collins score (with a vocal by Tina Turner) filled me with evil spirits.

The effect is riveting and telling--not always realistic (none of the characters carry cell phones) but often enlightening.

The musical fantasy scenes in the new Singing Detective are raw and purposely amateurish. Although Gordon sometimes fumbles the tonal shifts of the material, the acting is rock solid.

The best (which also means the sexiest) Campion feature since "The Piano," featuring Meg Ryan's best performance to date and an impressive one by Mark Ruffalo.

Offers the same crudely effective variation on the hatred and fear of hillbillies in "Deliverance."

This bracing courtroom thriller is the most entertaining and satisfying John Grisham adaptation I've seen.

Patricia Clarkson is wonderfully acerbic as April's cancer-afflicted mom, and the finale is surprisingly subtle and sweet, but the rest of this DV feature is as contrived as a sitcom.

Suzuki and Kaneshiro keep the first hour afloat with their easy comic interplay, but Yamazaki badly needs editing: the opening escape sequence is needlessly repeated later, and a slow drip of false endings drags this out to a tiring 118 minutes.

Broadly speaking, the popular literary biopic is a hopeless subgenre, but this account of the relationship between Sylvia Plath and husband and fellow poet Ted Hughes manages to test the rule thanks to its unusual seriousness and first-rate performances.

Well-meaning but simpleminded biopic.

The special effects aren't too polished but the script is larded with cutesy life lessons to warm the hearts of dog lovers

The Coens do an efficient job of stamping their signature grotesquerie on sumptuous Beverly Hills and Las Vegas settings and ladling on gallows humor and malice, sometimes with the verve of early Robert Zemeckis.

Quentin Tarantino's lively and show-offy tribute to Asian martial-arts flicks, bloody anime, and spaghetti westerns he soaked up as a teenager is even more gory and adolescent than its models, which explains both the fun and the unpleasantness of this globe-trotting romp.

If you can figure out all the intricate and incestuous family backstory of this domestic melodrama by Claude Chabrol, there's a certain amount to appreciate, though most of this is more cerebral than emotional.

Promises more than it delivers.

Too preoccupied with personality and emotion to qualify as porn, but still very much concerned with the kind of interaction that goes on in such a place, this is a touching if relatively specialized chamber piece.

Debutant director Richard Day, a seasoned TV producer, delivers a steady stream of cheerful vulgarity and a few clever gags.

The performances, especially of Penn and Robbins, are so powerful and detailed (down to the Boston accents) that they often persuade one to overlook the narrative contrivances (particularly the incessant crosscutting), the arty trimmings (including Eastwood's own score), and the dubious social philosophy.

Padilha allows neither easy answers nor ironic commentary, producing on both sides of the conflict a world of inconsolable grief.

Intelligent, moving, but annoyingly self-satisfied.

I guessed the big plot twist as soon as Franklin began setting it up, which gave me a good 40 minutes to appreciate the fine supporting cast and weathered coastal Florida locations while waiting for Washington's character to catch up with me.

The kids, all real musicians performing, are wonderful, and so is Black; Joan Cusack is both charming and funny as the principal.

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.

Cox and three others have produced a swift and economical script, but it's just porn with a different money shot--not graphic violence per se but the sort of blood-soaked crime scene that sells true-crime paperbacks.

Adapted from a story by Joe R. Lansdale, this might have squeaked by as a half-hour "Twilight Zone" episode, albeit with jokes about toilets and erections in old age.

Larry Doyle and John Hamburg's script is full of holes, but this is still pretty damn funny--thanks mostly to Barrymore, who seems to be retracing Lucille Ball's trajectory from sex kitten to comedienne.

Rises only slightly above the level of a Harlequin romance.

Solid performances by Fiennes, Jonathan Firth, and a frail but funny Peter Ustinov keep this watchable.

A Sears catalog of rock 'n' roll cliches.

A magnificent performance by Sarah Polley illuminates every frame of this relatively upbeat melodrama.

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.

It's gripping and provocative, making effective use of Charles Berling and the music of Sonic Youth, though I wish it were a little less indebted to David Cronenberg's "Videodrome."

The film's hatred of Ricci and Channing and its affectionate tolerance of the hero's mousy hypocrisy and his mentor's negativity are familiar Allen motifs, but the faint echoes of his best work only make this one seem grimmer.

It takes forever to get moving, but when it finally does, the Quaid and Stone characters still seem ill defined.

This shopworn premise allows for a series of improbable plot developments, resulting in a story that's about as geniune as Gooding's character.

This is the sort of funny, humane, honorable story that families need more of, though viewers of any age should be hooked by the mystery surrounding the brothers' riches.

This is the silliest horror movie I've seen in years, though some of the special effects are pretty good.

As usual, Sayles's dialogue scenes are as shapely as blown glass, but none of the characters' predicaments has been adequately explored, much less resolved, when the final freeze-frame arrives.

Winterbottom and screenwriter Tony Grisoni were clearly motivated by conscience, but I can't help thinking that Stephen Frears's "Dirty Pretty Things," a much more conventional and contrived movie about third-world refugees, will have a greater social impact than this murky art-house item.

The "Big Fat Wedding" formula dictates a certain amount of ugly-duckling fantasy along with the ethnic scenery chewing.

I appreciated its cogent history lesson, which details China's brutal treatment of Tibetan nationals from the late 1940s through the Cultural Revolution and into the '80s, when it executed 15,000 dissidents.

For better and for worse, this is seductive storytelling as well as investigative journalism, and I wasn't always sure which mode I was in.

Roth puts a sardonic spin on the puritanism of the 80s slasher.

The portraiture is so carefully done that I regret in some ways the tricky plot--which is also carefully done, but seems at times to belong to a different movie.

The result is a dull and campy 97-minute bloodbath offering little distinction between good guys and bad.

Coppola does a fair job of capturing the fish-tank ambience of nocturnal, upscale Tokyo and showing how it feels to be a stranger in that world, and an excellent job of getting the most from her lead actors. Unfortunately, I'm not sure she accomplishes anything else.

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

This is certainly well executed, with a sense of fate and fancy akin to Pedro Almodovar's, but its glibness began to wear on me after the agonizing death of a Great Dane was played for laughs.

Spade claims he latched onto his snide persona to distinguish himself from the pack; it's served him well as an ensemble player and a big-screen foil to Chris Farley, but as a romantic lead he's hopeless.

If this were witty, it might have qualified as a downtown version of "All About Eve"; if it were believable, I wouldn't have come away feeling that the actors (including Dylan McDermott and Chloe Sevigny) were wasted.

This dialectical drama has plenty of creaky moments, but Harvey Keitel compensates with a canny, surprising performance.

Jean Gabin wasn't yet 50 when he starred as a big-time, high-style gangster hoping to retire, but he still looks pretty wasted, and this pungent tale about aging and friendship, adapted from a best-selling noir thriller by Albert Simonin, would be hard to imagine without his puffy features.

The comic juice tends to spill out in all directions.

The tag here is more silly than haunting, but this is still a pretty wild ride, with a fine, knife-wielding score by Bennett Salvay.

Corrupt warden, sadistic guards, new inmate debauched by her surroundings, prison-break hostage drama--could have come straight from an old George Raft vehicle.

Often seems like a Mike Leigh movie viewed in a fun-house mirror.

Despite a brisk opening and some agreeable (if sloppy) choreography at the very end, I was less than tickled by the premise of David Serrano's script, that the characters lie to and betray one another as naturally as they breathe.

I can't remember when I last hated an art-house movie as much as this one...Other reviewers have praised the film's alleged quirky humor, but I was repelled by the two heartless creeps who set the story in motion and baffled by the protagonist's fascination with them.

Occasionally provocative but frequently wearying.

The color-coded cinematography is nice but the jokes are obvious and the dialogue drags whenever metaphysics gets brought up.

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.

An exhilarating and terrifying journey through youth-culture hell.

It's no masterpiece, but I found it consistently good-hearted and sometimes hilarious, and the sparse crowd I saw it with was laughing as much as I was, especially at the outrageous rap numbers.