Blitz shows us these kids in all their quirkiness and dorkiness, letting them do much of the talking as he records them and their families at home.

Managed to pull the rug out from under me about three-quarters of the way through, and I still hadn't found my feet when the credits rolled.

Paul Giamatti steals the picture as a sardonic grifter with a phobic terror of dirty toilet seats.

Sluggish comedy drama.

Scripted by Pitre and his wife, Michelle Benoit, this is more interesting for its historical setting than for its rather wooden drama, but Tim Curry gives a pretty good performance as the town's whiskey priest.

Brutally honest and brilliantly acted.

This is very much the work of a cinephile, calling to mind such middle-period Orson Welles jumbles as "The Lady From Shanghai" and "Mr. Arkadin" as well as dozens of other movies I only half remember, a familiarity that's essential to its charm.

This is obviously a sincere undertaking, and there's a certain homemade charm to the special effects used in the combat scenes.

Two of MTV's stupidest programs, "The Real World" and "Spring Break," have been rolled into one staggeringly dumb feature film.

As one might expect from IFC, actors and directors dominate the interview segments, which may be the reason the narrative never finds its way to Heaven's Gate.

Superior summer entertainment.

The racial satire is about as subtle as a sledgehammer, but there's something exhilarating about so blunt a weapon being swung with such wild abandon.

The result is grimly "effective," but it made me long for Hollywood junk.

For a Disney movie, Holes is mercifully low in saccharine.

The most astounding cinematic testament to flock mentality since Hitchcock's "The Birds."

A fair amount of visual panache, but the fight scenes are routine, the humor juvenile, and the Toronto locales rendered drab through muddy cinematography.

Frantic and unfunny.

Dworkin unobtrusively uses small moments to build an engrossing story of courage and hope most narrative films can't match.

Half-funny mockumentary.

This bleak little drama started as a play, and I'd bet that even onstage it felt contrived.

It has all the virtues of fine stage drama: narrative economy, honest emotion, and characters so closely defined that the most pedestrian encounters between them are revelatory.

As a comedy duo Nicholson and Sandler pose no threat to the legacy of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, in part because Sandler is so outclassed, but mostly because everyone involved is playing it safe.

I was engaged by Chick's characters...But that point passed pretty soon after the credits rolled, and nothing has come back to haunt me since.

The performances are strong without calling attention to themselves--which is more than I can say for the occasionally hackneyed use of rock on the sound track.

The experience couldn't be more realistic, though Cameron also superimposes imagery of passengers recalling the fateful night, to haunting effect.

Griffin's stand-up material is consistently upstaged by sequences of him interacting with old friends and family members.

Haven't we seen this already?

It certainly fulfills all the conventions of the genre: sci-fi premise, noir stylings, martial arts, snarky dialogue.

Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki perfects his trademark formula of deadpan humor and arctic circle pathos in this brilliantly ironic 2002 comedy.

Pleasant bubblegum romp, which was inspired by the old Sandra Dee picture "The Reluctant Debutante."

Proves that a movie can be true to life and still seem utterly preposterous.

The script for this action vehicle is like something you'd find under the cushions of Steven Seagal's couch, but Diesel, to his credit, digs into his role as if it were Hamlet.

Melville's seedy characters and engrossing friendships are well preserved, thanks largely to strategic redeployment of his crisp dialogue. As revamped caper films go, this offers considerably more texture than Steven Soderbergh's "Ocean's 11."

There's something self-defeating about approaching an unconventional artist so conventionally, and the story becomes touching only insofar as it overrides much of what made Duras special.

Offers a fascinating inquiry into memory and art, mixing clips from Fellini's films with contemporary shots of the same locales in and around Rome.

The talented cast--manages to rescue the movie as well as the earth.

Warmly recommended to viewers who like their romantic comedies small-scale but life-size.

The tragic tale that emerges is full of powerful lessons and impenetrable mysteries

The thriller plot, while serviceable, registers as somewhat gratuitous, but the Buenos Aires locations are nicely used.

This effective, well-paced antimilitary thriller has more conflicting flashbacks than you can shake a stick at.

I wondered if the movie would end with a round of knock-knock jokes, but instead there's a hilarious trash-talking session with the four guys sitting around gutting one another like fish.

The gags come fast and furious, and though some are a little stale, Rock and cowriter Ali LeRoi strive for wit over crudity.

The tone seesaws between comic wackiness and romantic sincerity, with Paltrow better suited to the latter.

For most of the running time I was mainly confused, as well as mildly nauseated by the gross-out details of a tale that tends to be more slimy than scary.

Cuba Gooding Jr. is the kind of guy who does ten minutes of shtick every time the little light in the fridge comes on, and for years I've been waiting for him to just go away. If this dud comedy is any indication of the scripts he's getting, I may not have to wait much longer.

Indifferently scripted and shoddily animated feature.

The film asks us to embrace not only the death of beauty but the beauty of death.

The chills are functional at best and the attempts at pathos negligible.

A turkey of Rubenesque proportions.

In one slack exchange, Del Toro intimates that the government wants to shut him up because he knows too much, but apparently someone decided that this thing was silly enough already and the matter was dropped.

Though the film lacks the frantic imagination of its inspiration, Robert Rodriguez's "Spy Kids" franchise, grade-schoolers should still enjoy its fresh-scrubbed humor and fantasies of youthful omnipotence.

Fine character work by Juliet Stevenson, Archie Panjabi, and Bollywood regular Anupam Kher make this well worth seeing.

Flat and unconvincing.

By turns morally compelling and racially paternalistic, this provocative drama may be the first halfway truthful war movie to hit multiplexes since "Three Kings."

For the most part this is a scenic and well-scored Holocaust survival tale.

McDormand has never been better, but all the performances are interestingly nuanced, including Natascha McElhone's as one of Bale's fellow psychiatric interns.

Eugene Levy is the only actor who emerges relatively unscathed in such a fetid climate; as for Joan Plowright, I hope she took home a healthy check.

Stupid, vicious, and pretentious, though you may find it worth checking out if you want to experiment with your own nervous system.

The film offers a fascinating glimpse of the Iranian urban middle class, and though it eschews most of the pleasures of composition and landscape found in other Kiarostami films, it's never less than riveting.

The movie can't live up to Robert Rossen's 1961 classic, "The Hustler" but with its strong performances, neatly crafted script, and low-budget feel, it comes a lot closer than "The Color of Money."

Martial arts hero Jet Li takes on all comers--with one hand in his hip pocket most of the time--in this absurd but breathlessly paced actioner.

Fascinating and troubling documentary.

Tom Hollander gives a strong performance as the considerate and quietly grieving young man.

On paper this may sound like soap opera, but Bier and screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen (Mifune) have a good feel for character, and they're aided by a fine cast.

Eleven years on, someone in Hollywood has finally worked up the nerve to address the LA riots--but only on the slickest terms imaginable.

I was seduced part of the time, thanks largely to Bonham Carter's sensuality, but the whole is unsatisfying, and it's tempting to see the imposed recutting as a major source of the problem.

Starts out silly, gets sillier by the minute, and frequently had me and most of the people around me in stitches.

A new low for director Alan Parker, this trite mystery thriller does for capital punishment what his "Mississippi Burning" did for civil rights: with its muddled message, liberal piety, and slick Hollywood plot mechanics.

Maxwell continues his textbook emphasis on military maneuvers, but despite literally thousands of Civil War reenactors recruited for the film, the wide-screen canvas fails to map the tactics or evoke the terror of battle.

At times Hirsch seems afraid to trust the material's inherent drama and becomes unnecessarily manipulative, staging performances in striking landscapes and playing the footage in slow motion.

This is a lyrical heartbreaker that skirts most love-story cliches and is brave enough to be as inconclusive as the characters.

It's certainly a provocation, with a few funny moments, and for my money it's less phony and offensive than "Finding Forrester."

Old-fashioned, beautifully crafted biopic of painter Jang Seung-up.

Watching this quick-buck sequel was about as pleasant as having my wisdom teeth pulled.

This dull actioner, written and directed by Mark Steven Johnson, uses voice-over to hurry along Daredevil's genesis tale, and Affleck's rigid performance is a perpetual drag on the story.

We finally learn much more about Moskowitz than about Mossman, and more about Mossman than about his novel, but Moskowitz's passion for books is irresistible.

Despite his advancing years, Chan delivers some fleet slapstick; like his hero Buster Keaton he works intuitively with levers, pulleys, ladders, and umbrellas.

So stale and complacent that it could be a rerun of "Love American Style."

McKee's direction of actors is as clumsy as the stabs at rapid editing.

The plot contrivances that bring them together to torture each other are so deftly handled that I almost bought them, and the two leads are charming and funny enough to offset the characters' obnoxious motives.

As a romantic comedy this is a cut above the norm, satirical in its treatment of both spiritually bereft New Yorkers and materialistic Indian immigrants.

The equation of Gilliam with Quixote is so obvious to everyone involved that Fulton and Pepe can hardly be blamed for adopting it.

This motorcycle melodrama is so stupid that during the press screening my colleagues' laughter threatened to drown out the roar of the engines.

It milks the characters' father-son relationship for drama without making the fairly obvious connection to the agency's paternalistic view of the world.

The plot is just a delivery system for a series of gruesome, convoluted, and--depending on your tolerance for sadism--hilarious freak accidents.

This 2002 German documentary (in English) by Marta Kudlacek is the best portrait of an experimental filmmaker that I know.

Viewers hoping for new revelations will have to be content with learning that Hitler suffered from severe stomach problems. Yet there's much more here than a trickle of unsatisfying tidbits.

An absorbing and compelling account of a historical episode that should be better known.

This moronic horror movie has the earmarks of a disastrous shoot patched up in editing.

I didn't buy half of the movie's scattershot gags, but the leads are sharp and the supporting cast sturdy.

The plot is astoundingly senseless.

Likable but negligible.

Slight film of mostly comic tableaux.

Predictably, the violence is overwhelming. But the massacres are glamorized, and the characters look like they're posing for tourism posters.

Kiarostami's brilliantly suggestive script, which is quite unlike anything else he's written and is marred only slightly by one of his obligatory sages turning up gratuitously near the beginning.

The romantic denouement is so predictable it must have driven the animators mad as they worked, but their modest art is eerily effective.

Key action points are edited with finesse, but the denouement, with its dutiful hail of gunfire, is heartless and mechanical.

To my knowledge there's no one anywhere making films with such a sharp sense of contemporary working-class life -- but for the Dardennes it's only the starting point of a spiritual and profoundly ethical odyssey.