Though it's aimed at preschoolers, it's tuneful and funny enough to amuse any adult.

The movie's searing conclusion left me numb and overwhelmed.

Frank Whaley and Philip Seymour Hoffman play minor characters so annoying they might as well wear T-shirts reading "Eat My Brain."

Muddled attempt at edgy comedy.

Enjoyable action comedy from the Clint Eastwood mold, though the comic elements are more fun than the action.

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

The cast--including Julianna Margulies, Olivia Williams, James Coburn, and Anjelica Huston--keeps this pretty watchable, and casting Mick Jagger as director of the escort service was inspired.

Especially interesting are the complex relations among the residents of the ghetto.

Inept script delivers a series of juvenile gags.

A wily and dogged inquisitor, Broomfield cajoles and confronts a variety of witnesses, charting a web of intrigue that also involved the LAPD, the FBI, and assorted gangbangers and rogue cops.

This is the usual cartoon of hound dogs, roadhouses, antebellum mansions, and Civil War reenactments. Aside from that, it's not a bad date movie.

Silberling has the nerve to play it for laughs -- This is clearly an actor's movie, but only Sarandon and Holly Hunter (as the attorney prosecuting the murderer) rise to the occasion.

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

By the time the high-octane ending arrived I didn't even care what happened to the kid.

The conflict between Hawn, who prizes her freedom, and Sarandon, who values her family, is pretty rich; it reminded me of the friendship between Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft in "The Turning Point."

The film's opening and closing moments are weirdly reminiscent of "Black Hawk Down," another tale of Western soldiers in over their heads on the dark continent -- clearly no one these days understands manifest destiny.

Wicked little black comedy.

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

Before seeing this film I couldn't understand why the producers had given it a subtitle; afterward I realized "Ecks vs. Sever" was probably the full script.

The dazzling star power of the French screen royalty Ozon has assembled and the film's sheer exuberance in its own artifice make this a delight from beginning to end.

Enchanting and impressively crafted.

As long as Miller simply crosscuts between the machinations of the three mothers, the sociological and psychological parallels are intriguing, but when they're forced to share the same story line, the contrivances and coincidences begin to seem fussily elaborate.

As a literary bodice ripper this is better than average, partly because of its glimpses of early-19th-century bohemianism in France and Italy but mostly because Juliette Binoche and Benoit Magimel manage to keep the story hot and unpredictable.

Misses a chance to use the Manhattan setting to add to his protagonist's displacement, instead treating the city as a bland backdrop.

Some of the verbal jousts are hot, and a Laurel and Hardy routine involving a stolen ATM is fitfully hilarious, but this reminds me of a pilot for a cable sitcom.

Unfortunately Jia --a rather limited actor, judging from the movies excerpted here -- has trouble either articulating or projecting the existential crisis that ultimately landed him in a mental institution, which leaves the emotional center of the film inert.

Director Bruce McCulloch, an alumnus of the Canadian TV show "The Kids in the Hall," lacks the sense of scale and timing needed for a feature film, and Lee's voice-over about fate that brackets the narrative only highlights its shapelessness.

De Niro sinks this crime drama with his vacant, inattentive performance as an affectionally challenged homicide detective.

This is a twilight film, full of sorrow yet lyrical, beautiful, and dark.

Shameless exercise in high-tech sadism.

At 165 minutes this is a pretty long haul, and the shifting alliances mapped out in the dark and claustrophobic first part can be difficult to follow; the payoff comes in the second part, which opens out into dramatic locations and bloody battle as the Mongols lay siege to Otrar.

Fontaine and Jacques Fieschi collaborated on the screenplay, and Jocelyn Pook's chilly string score nicely evokes the menace underlying the film's plush settings.

Notorious on the festival circuit for its excruciating scenes of self-mutilation.

The film never quite achieves the sharp edge satire demands, largely because director Andrew Niccol, who was so good at managing tone in "Gattaca," can't decide whether to go with nasty or hilariously farcical.

In short, I never quite believed the story, but this movie is more about feeling than thinking.

Watchable if relatively threadbare movie.

The plot is as skimpy as their bikinis.

I was wooed by its sexy romanticism all the way through to the mysterious and beautiful coda.

This is better than good, it's wonderful: if facial expressions can be compared to colors, Gedeck works with an unusually broad palette, constantly surprising us, and she helps her costars shine.

A camp musical-comedy hoot. It comes on like an outrageous episode of "The Simpsons" or "South Park."

Coogan delivers a winning comic performance as the pompous impresario, but his story has little dramatic momentum of its own; he functions mostly as a pedantic narrator, imposing some cultural significance on the endless party and pointing out more intriguing personalities.

Director Rob Cohen supplies plenty of gore, attitude, loud music, and extreme-sports action -- in particular, a thrilling aerial drop that's followed by a crushing avalanche.

Ultimately just another Dirty Harry opus.

A finely crafted entertainment that works better than most current Hollywood movies.

This is hardly Flaubert, but it is a fairly beguiling look at moral calculation.

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.

In a sense, Caravaggio has less to do with its ostensible subject than with Jarman's own insistence on sensual, and largely homoerotic, expression, though there's a feeling of stifling enclosure to the images Jarman invents, of eros turned inward, toward private fantasy and longing, rather than outward to a world of real possibility.

Catherine Keener is wonderfully weird as a vicious vice president of human relations, and Nicky Katt is brilliant as an actor playing Hitler in a stage play.

Failing to provide any insight into his plight as a rich African-American celebrity, he moves on to the hard stuff.

Almost frantically intercutting between the characters, the movie spends so much energy trying to charm us that when the emotional stakes are raised we're too exhausted to care.

Borrowing heavily from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," Shyamalan tries to lighten his trademark gloomy tone -- and almost kills the suspense he's working so hard to achieve.

Imagine combining bad imitations of the "Ace Ventura" and "Austin Powers" movies and you'll have a rough idea of this feeble Dana Carvey farce.

Heart-wrenching documentary.

Unfortunately, a conclusion stuffed with so many improbabilities that it left me gaping in disbelief. Prior to that, this is pretty much fun.

If you ever suspected that assholes are running the world, this documentary adapting producer and former actor Robert Evans's autobiography, narrated with relish by Evans himself--the cinematic equivalent of a Vanity Fair article, complete with tuxes and swimming pools--offers all the confirmation you'll ever need.

In the last two decades rock documentaries have become ubiquitous on TV but marginalized as cinema; this is the rare exception that earns its place on the big screen.

It's presented in such a nicely understated manner, and Ambrose turns in such a good lead performance, that it rises several notches above most of today's teen movies.

Writer-director Chris Ver Wiel stocks this diverting crime comedy with familar characters and formulas.

Clever, warmhearted film.

With the jokes coming about one per second, you're bound to find something to laugh at. I found myself laughing a lot--even as I began to feel the whole thing wearing thin.

The film is fairly formulaic, though some of its puns and wisecracks are hilarious, especially those delivered by the Littles' lazy and cynical Persian cat (Nathan Lane).

Perhaps the post-cold-war attitudes behind this film are progressive, but the same old pre-nuclear-war worship of the military goes all but unchallenged.

Both Stanford and Neuwirth are excellent in tricky parts, yet screenwriters Heather McGowan and Niels Mueller abruptly end the story just as the characters are arriving at some uncomfortable showdowns.

A cunning and hilarious update of the giant-insect movies of the 1950s.

Kids used to watching him on TV might find it all perfectly normal, but for adults it's almost an acid trip.

This film by Julio Medem has dreamlike visuals, lush sensuality, a gorgeous cast, and a plot built on elaborate, self-conscious coincidences.

An odd cross between "Mad Max" and "Dragonheart," this movie is all borrowed ideas, but it's still trashy fun.

Results are classy entertainment with little to interest women viewers but very shrewdly and cleverly put together, and probably more rewarding in long-range terms if you invest in Fox or Dreamworks than if you actually see the movie.

The concept was interesting and charming in "Love Letters," up to a point, but here it quickly becomes repetitive, obvious, and dull.

The sets are like islands floating in a void, juxtaposed with sepia shots of Rome and extraneous video clips of the singers and orchestra in a recording studio; the technique purposely draws attention to the movie's artifice, but the performances pull us into the story's elemental emotions.

Departing from a masterful manipulation of space, Lang transforms the futuristic city of the title into a field of dreams centered on death and sexuality.

Rosenthal observes all the ritual elements -- a veteran of the series, he seems to understand that its fans crave certainty over shock.

It's a pleasure to see Jill Clayburgh on the big screen in a story about middle-aged love and sexuality, but she can't rescue this alternately trite and implausible comedy.

The film tends to groan under the weight of his obsessions -- and his sister's fixation on circumcising her son -- yet for much of the 95-minute running time the chemistry between Attal's vulnerable husband and Gainsbourg's sweet, beguiling wife is irresistible. The terrific score is by jazz pianist Brad Mehldau.

This British drama is so overplotted it smothers the two main characters as much as they do each other.

The tense climax stretches the story's credibility to the breaking point, but for the most part this is noir of an exceptionally high caliber, its sequence of events revealing two complicated and compromised people.

A talking bulldog named Frank steals the show.

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

Often seems more old-fashioned than modern.

Though the action is a bit intense for very young kids, it's probably no worse than what they see on television.

Despite the raunchy material, her humor is essentially ethnic, tweaking the stereotype of Asian women as shy and dainty.

What keeps all this from being trite and self-indulgent is Holofcener's willingness to make her characters' neuroses unattractive and self-destructive instead of cute and endearing.

The film suffers from clunky smart-aleck dialogue and an overabundance of jump cuts and crane shots, and despite its libertine air, Toback repeatedly cautions that acid is a fast track to insanity, especially in combination with Heidegger and Wittgenstein.

The simplistic drawing is closer to "Peanuts" than "The Lion King," and the dialogue is strangely anachronistic.

Sandler adapts his sweet-natured doofus shtick to this remarkably faithful remake of Frank Capra's 1936 rube-in-the-big-city comedy Mr. Deeds Goes to Town--which suggests that Capra may have invented dumb movies before their time.

Broder's script makes the weird transition from satire to camp as if there were no distinction between the two. It's a bracing if at times bewildering experience.

The idea of transposing the story to the macho, greedy world of big-time sports is promising, but director Jesse Vaughan delivers only flat dialogue and predictable situations.

When Sayles has a compelling story line he's one of America's finest (Matewan, Lone Star), but when he doesn't he can be dull and unfocused. Filling out the latter category is this ensemble drama about piracy, both personal and economic, on an island off the coast of northern Florida.

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

The first 20 minutes are masterful, as Cruise hunts down a killer-to-be; the last 20 are mediocre, as screenwriters Scott Frank and Jon Cohen untangle the mystery they've grafted onto Dick's story. In between lies a conventional but expertly realized cop-on-the-run drama.

Smart, poignant, and utterly beguiling.

All this could've collapsed into empty shocks if not for Inoue's gripping performance as an exasperated single woman who senses her happiness slipping away with each vengeful blow.

Despite some of the sentimentality that is also Woo's stock-in-trade, I was moved and absorbed throughout.

Coming-of-age drama is pretty familiar stuff.

Desperately wants to be whimsical and charming. But whimsy isn't easy to carry off, and director Alan Taylor, who has directed mostly television dramas, has a heavy hand -- scenes meant to be comical are destroyed by leaden pacing and a puzzling mix of tones.

The full-throttle approach of director Doug Liman (Swingers, Go) is impressive.

The film is music from beginning to end, and nearly every note of it is magical.

As in all Jerry Bruckheimer-produced summer blockbusters, the premise is paper-thin and the action sequences play out with assembly-line regularity.