Fair amount of grit and charm.

This movie really belongs to Baye and Lopez, both so skillful that they almost make you forget that what you're watching is close to a stunt--one oddly evocative of Graham Greene in its doomed romanticism but at times also minimalist to a fault.

The inevitable isn't worth the wait.

The clunky plot is set in Santa Fe, and includes a foil character who might as well wear a sign on his forehead.

Solid formula comedy.

I value the flawed Tic Code over a good many relatively flawless features because it has more heart, more life, and more spunk.

This multigenre parody is excruciatingly slow and unamusing; a go-go dancer in the opening and closing credits does as much in a few minutes to shake up our perspective on a bygone aesthetic as the entire narrative in between.

The special effects are beautifully handled and the reflections on death attractively peaceful.

Another piece of phony uplift from producer Jerry Bruckheimer.

It's not terribly interesting on the subject.

Wastes most of its 110 minutes making impotent jokes about male sexual behavior and the repugnance of old women.

The deliberately obvious equating of knife throwing with sex would be funnier if it weren't so serious, and the undercut eroticism is part of what makes the movie themeless, merely a conceptual exercise.

As an interweave of crosscut miniplots, this isn't nearly as interesting or as pleasurable as Jeremy Podeswa's recent "The Five Senses."

There are enough plot points to fill an entire soap-opera season, but writer-director Chi Muoi Lo, who also plays the son, somehow manages to juggle them all, turning seemingly superfluous elements into workable drama and metaphor.

The plot keeps switching tracks.

Intriguing but poorly executed ideas are the basis of this not entirely unappealing romantic comedy.

This made-for-cable opus, halfway between documentary and docudrama, is willing to try anything and everything except for a consistent relationship to its material.

While Milani lacks an overall cinematic vision, she skillfully uses composition and camera movement to underline emotions in each scene.

The sheer neurotic intensity of Techine's characters--characteristically stretching both backward and forward in time, as in a Faulkner novel--holds one throughout, as does Techine's masterful direction and many of the other performances.

Assume that viewers are too hungry for mindless thrills to care whether dead characters spring back to life or live ones change their personalities according to the needs of the moment.

The opening half-hour--the burglary of a jewelry store, filmed in meticulous detail--is as good as its inspiration in The Asphalt Jungle, but the film turns moralistic and sour in the last half, when the thieves fall out.

The feature has some lovely effects.

Formula thriller that exploits homosexuality better than murder-mystery clues.

The story didn't fully answer all my queries about the characters, but did such a nice job of keeping me interested that I wound up appreciating the mysteries that remained.

An intriguing noir whose conceptual sophistication is partly undermined by naive execution.

Exciting mainly because anything can happen and does, the movie drags a bit as it approaches a climax set atop the Statue of Liberty.

It's good to see a gay relationship treated no differently than a heterosexual one would be.

Possibly the most daring and honest drama about sexuality I've ever seen.

Vigilant viewers may spend many of the 101 minutes fixating on tiny holes in the plot, but I was busy being moved by the premise and the filmmakers' confidence in the power of their metaphor: a little boy who's disappointed in the man he grew up to be.

Two generic ideas amount to nothing in this theatrical dark comedy about violence and information overload.

Spheeris, who includes her offscreen questions, evidently sympathizes with her subjects, though this doesn't stop her from pointing out their hypocrisy.

It's hard to think of many more galvanizing definitions of what it means to be an American than Cho's volcanic self-assessments.

Writers Liu Fen Dou and Cai Xiang Jun and director Zhang Yang move freely and gracefully between fantasy and reality in this sentimental film, which never becomes as trite or calculated as you might fear.

As a ditz who's just smart enough to know something isn't right, Lyonne blends hyperbole and sincerity in perfect proportions.

Political incorrectness, gross-out humor, references for their own sake, and some real wit are distributed over the 85 minutes with an unusually consistent sense of timing and proportion, and the tone is just right.

Scary and exciting.

Beautifully regenerates the Jay Ward TV show its characters were based on.

The movie does have a certain amount of star power and occasional bursts of inventive mise en scene, which do a good job of diverting us so we don't realize that not much else is going on.

Doesn't try too hard to be anything other than a vicarious experience that makes you crave the satisfaction you know you'll get when the hero gets his revenge.

A kind of idealist fantasy that seems almost hamstrung by its plot.

A scene set inside the chicken-pie-making machinery proves that the Rube Goldberg formula is infallible.

The modeling of human figures and the sense of depth are both impressive; the characters themselves are mainly idiotic.

As an action thriller with music by Isaac Hayes it's not bad.

I don't much like movies about junkies...but this is easily the liveliest and most inventive I've seen since "Drugstore Cowboy" (1989).

A lot more imaginative and entertaining than one might have thought possible, a feast for the eye and mind.

Dumont's film is unfinished in the sense that some paintings are.

Some delicately interwoven and unresolved subplots help make the young character's rite of passage wholly, disturbingly compelling.

The material is familiar, the Berkeley locations are strictly boilerplate, and there are times when the characters seem more like high school students than college kids.

Divided into sections bracketed by the arrival of each new DJ and is enlivened by the edgy yet trendy environment.

Lots of men cry lots of tears in this supremely self-indulgent, supremely moving documentary about making a documentary.

Many of the plot points seem belabored because they're introduced in the voice-over, then ploddingly dramatized, then analyzed by the family over meals.

Misguided version of one of the Bard's best comedies.

One gets a pungent look at what makes being a pimp look attractive to some people in certain circumstances.

I found it more pleasurable as a time waster than either "Mission: Impossible."

The majesty of the landscape and the sweetness of a plot strand about the horse learning survival skills from a 12-year-old girl might have been more intriguing without the cloying voice-over.

With the devout collaboration of the cast, Williams blurs the boundary between experience and storytelling as if the distinction were not only irrelevant but presumptuous.

It's as entertaining and informative as anything Mann's ever done, and as good an example of grass humor as you're likely to find anywhere.

Neither good nor terrible.

It's an inspired pairing. Wilson is electric as he seduces Chan into a partnership in this self-consciously crafted western, whose cleverness is only part of what makes it so funny.

It's as slick as anything you might find on the Discovery Channel, and the snippets of 3-D computer animation are too cool for words.

Slick and effective escapism with a touch of poetry (a la "The Sixth Sense") that left me vaguely dissatisfied once the mystery was supposedly resolved.

An experimental feature that keeps shooting off its ideas like an endless row of skyrockets, Kikujiro ultimately conveys this grief with such sustained intensity that it can only leave a scorched path of devastation in its aftermath.

Writer-director Peter Greenaway never uses narrative lightly...references to the act of filmmaking exhaust their impact pretty quickly.

Dispenses so many rubber masks to allow the characters to swap identities that no hero or villain winds up carrying any moral weight at all.

This movie's story must have been computer generated along with its animation.

Gordon is so visually and stylistically inventive and the actors are so skillful that you aren't likely to lose interest.

Allen's movies specialize in contemplating the notion that money can somehow remove vulgarity or produce gentility. Small Time Crooks may conclude quite conventionally that money can't buy you everything, but most of it flirts even more conventionally with the opposite premise.

At a relaxed pace, accompanied by restrained pop music.

Sweetly mediocre.

Compensates with a sharp sense of rhythm, using hip-hop and turntablist sounds by Zoel to fuel Anthony Hardwick and Tony Wolberg's aggressive cinematography.

It's hard to tell whether these characters are meant to seem as staunchly symbolic as they do when they deliver some of the back-story-heavy dialogue.

An ounce of self-awareness about its almost gleeful use of cliches would have improved this dance soap opera.

First-time directors Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski must have written the script for this comedy when they were about 12--and not changed a word.

Seems like a miscalculation on multiple levels.

Almereyda's respect for his audience and his queasiness about the present register with equal weight, reinventing the poetry in the most relevant ways possible.

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

Effective portrait of an independent woman with a troubled and unstable sense of herself.

The plot is more convenient than intriguing, the characters more cartoonish than iconic--especially the heroine, who grapples with feminism in a way that should have been fascinating.

Ultimately the movie is alluring and respectful--its sadness may be what saves it from becoming sensationalist or trite.

Unlike Michael Jordan, this 45-minute large-format movie demonstrates mostly unrealized potential.

Clunky and obvious.

The script by producer David Franzoni, John Logan, and William Nicholson is serviceable but not exactly inspired.

As disposable fun, this is every bit as enjoyable and as forgettable as most Hollywood equivalents.

The lawyer is marvelously played by Evelina Fernandez, who wrote the screenplay based on her play.

DeVito's low-key midlife crisis is consistently moving, but Spacey, saddled with the role of provocateur, is demonically boring.

This romantic comedy turns stereotypes inside out as the main character, whose sense of commitment is represented by a tattoo on her finger instead of a wedding ring.

Quaid's buoyant earnestness complements the stunning, low-key performance by Caviezel, whose close-ups give new meaning to the idea that still waters run deep.

The coincidences that bring some characters together and keep others apart in this romantic comedy are plotted with musical grace.

This is thoughtful nihilist provocation at best.

The filmmakers uphold an unfortunate tradition in movies based on TV shows by busily adding superfluous plot elements.

An irrefutable triumph of engineering, and it entertained and intrigued me through two separate viewings...though as a view of the human condition it's astonishingly and depressingly meager.

Moving in fits and starts, mawkish in its sincerity, and at times disjointed in its lumpy structure.

The twists and revelations of this rigorous noir reduce it to canned psychodrama.

The message must have got lost somewhere in the plot twists of this would-be topical thriller about the power of hearsay on a college campus.

This gorgeous expressionist drama makes the comparisons so effectively at the outset that by the end they seem belabored.

Nearly toothless 1998 existential drama.

Yet another unironic war movie.

A very curious and eclectic piece of work--fresh even when it's awkward.