The film amiably runs through all the standbys associated with vampire movies, putting a personal and goofy spin on most of them. Sharon Tate also appears, at her most ravishing.

The film clearly means to celebrate the power of imagination, but while younger kids may find it charming, some parents may begin to wonder if the girl's obsessive fantasies don't warrant a trip to the local shrink.

Wood is notorious for his 1952 transvestite saga Glen or Glenda? (aka I Changed My Sex), but for my money this 1959 effort is twice as strange and appealing in its undisguised incompetence.

At its core this is just another piece of big-studio nothingness. The characters are so underwritten they barely qualify as types, and the movie is badly paced, bookended by high-ordnance action sequences but painfully static in the middle.

Insipid, TV-bland drama.

The absence of any moral center makes this a bitter pill.

Director Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) and cowriters Andrew Birkin and Bernd Eichinger preserve some of the novel's storytelling flair, and Dustin Hoffman does a swell turn as the antihero's Italian mentor. But despite a fairly spectacular climax, the material's generic limitations eventually catch up with the plot.

I found it pretty entertaining, as well as provocative in some of its comments about contemporary life.

Definitely worth checking out.

Director Jim Fall smoothly paces the action while staying true to the girlie thrills (luxury hotels, scenic jaunts, a fashion makeover), delivering an empty-headed but enjoyable romp.

There's tenderness, humor, a gratuitous body double, and splashy lighting in this ho-hum action drama, which takes itself at times too seriously and at other times not seriously enough.

Maybe I've seen too many James Bond movies by now, or maybe the trouble with this 20th installment is that the filmmakers are trying too hard to top the excesses of the predecessors.

John Boorman's 1981 retelling of the Arthurian legends is a continuation of the thematic thrust and visual plan of his Exorcist II, though the failure of that bold, hallucinatory, and flawed film seems to have put Boorman into partial retreat.

This is a sensitive and at times gently humorous love-and-war story; the flight scenes are exciting and exquisitely crafted, the characters lovingly drawn.

Slower, more earnest, and not as gory.

Writer Barry McEvoy and director Barry Levinson might want to brush up on the use of metaphor.

A few of the set pieces are fussy or overly extended, but the rest is tolerable bone-crunching diversion.

To call this "Farrelly brothers lite" may be a little redundant, but aside from the odd vomit gag, it goes relatively easy on their usual working-class taboo busting.

The tendency that often sinks Angelina Jolie's performances - overemphasizing certain naturalistic behaviors at the expense of well-rounded characterization - more or less sinks her first film as writer-director.

Playwright Adam Rapp, making his feature debut as writer-director, details the family dysfunction to the point of hyperbole, but over the long haul he rewards one's observation and intelligence and a more interesting story emerges.

There's enough whimsy and Capracorn here to choke a horse, and things get even more complicated when the four dead people enter the body of Downey in turn—to help him help them. Fortunately the talents of the actors—especially Downey and Woodard—sometimes make this effective (i.e., funny or moving) in spite of all the goo.

If a bullet hadn't killed John Lennon, this Beatles-scored musical might have.

Debuting as director, Ayer once again points his loose cannon directly into the body politic: the protagonist of this sour but haunting tale is a crazed army ranger just returned from overseas (Christian Bale) who's so full of war that even the LAPD won't hire him.

All the characters are uniformly obnoxious, and director Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover) lingers over suffering even more than in his other features.

At their best, the Jackasses combine low-brow humor with delectable absurdity (one of my favorite gags from Jackass: The Movie had a guy creeping up on a cougar while dressed as a giant mouse), but here it's almost pure punishment.

Would be sweeter if the fair maiden weren't such a pill and more exciting if the villain weren't quite so nasty.

Characters remain stuck in their cliche profiles, and the direction -- by music video specialist Michel Gondry -- doesn't improve matters.

All the comedy, tragedy, and various obstacles to romance seem to have been contrived to divert the story from its tendency toward pulp erotica.

Predictable outrage.

This is a worthy successor to Chinatown - full of ecological and geological insights into Los Angeles history that recall Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald and give a view of southern California that could have been conceived only by a native.

None of the characters ever rises beyond the level of his or her generic functions, and by the end the overall emptiness of the conception becomes fully apparent.

This movie feels like it was made by a bank rather than a person.

None of the moral ramifications of this dilemma is avoided, and to the film’s credit the behavior of the American press seems more questionable than the machinations of third-world justice.

As in New Jack City, Van Peebles displays a distinctive visual style of tilted angles and frequent camera movement, and the script by Sy Richardson and Dario Scardapane also keeps things moving, but perhaps the best sequence of all is the opening one, which features the great Woody Strode.

It's a slick, empty spectacle, with antipathetic stars and a director with no basic sympathy for the myths he's treating.

The original movie's lean production complemented its pell-mell fights and car chases; here, third-rate CG effects make the strained action sequences look even more improbable.

Even the melodramatic score can't ruin the essentially serious tenor of this old-style non-self-referential horror story, whose characterizations are unassailable--stereotypical shtick you buy because the performers are working so hard and their faces are so skillfully lit.

Packed with dialogue and issues, and it’s most provocative when dealing with the dangers of plea bargaining.

As with the earlier movie, this one turns in on its own morality like a Möbius strip, endorsing kindness by practicing slaughter, and pulls us along for the ride. Detractors will call its reasoning ridiculous, and they'll be right - though I doubt that will bother Goldthwait, who makes a living being ridiculous.

A major disappointment because here, unlike on "Real Time," Maher aims for laughs instead of insight--and aims low.

Perceptive, faith-based romantic comedy.

The potential for moral confusion in a liberal-minded family -- unpacked so ruthlessly in Noah Baumbach's "The Squid and the Whale" -- is scrutinized with more ambiguity in this good-natured comic subversion of the holiday get-together.

Poor distribution doomed the original movie, though Romero has stuck around long enough to serve as executive producer of this respectable update by Breck Eisner.

Harlin's arsenal of conceits and visual effects--pirouetting overhead angles, dancing trigonometry formulas, a pizza flavored with tiny human heads, a lot of fancy play with a water bed, and much, much more--keeps it consistently watchable and inventive.

As predictable as the alphabet but should hold particular appeal to women whose maternal impulses inflect their mating instincts.

The melodrama form allows Tornatore to examine such current issues as human trafficking and black-market babies within a yarn that, for all its sentiment, is never less than gripping.

The characters--their motives at once obvious and obscure--are almost painfully fascinating.

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

Upon closer inspection its story and characters grow more mysterious, ultimately bordering on the unfathomable.

Aspiring fashion designer Jay McCarroll, who triumphed in season one of the Bravo reality show Project Runway, tries to "make that leap from reality-TV designer to real-life designer" in this irreverent documentary.

Sean Penn's first film as writer-director, steeped in sullen Method acting, pretentious symbolism, and mannered slow motion, is obviously a sincere and considered effort, but I found it insufferably tedious, self-indulgent, and reeking with self-pity.

Director Q. Allan Brocka (Eating Out) keeps the tone downbeat for too long, but one can't fault his ambition in tackling the elusive connections between love, sex, and money.

Director Zack Snyder races through the story, faithfully reproducing this bit of dialogue from Moore and that bit of imagery from Gibbons but never pausing to develop a vision of his own. The result is oddly hollow and disjointed; the actors moving stiffly from one overdetermined tableau to another.

Not bad, but far from a classic.

There's an uplifting message about heroism, dispensed in dialogue so familiar you can practically lip=synch it.

The excellent cast in Christophe Barratier's loose remake of a 1945 Jean Dreville film ensures that the predictable, nostalgic ride remains enjoyable throughout.

Excruciatingly narcissistic.

It's eminently suitable for children, fully inhabiting their world and finding real laughs there without resorting to sentiment, condescension, or snarky in-jokes for the adults.

Having made the mad mistake of selecting the project, screenwriters Dan O'Bannon and Don Jakoby and director Tobe Hooper seem utterly baffled by it; they hesitate between camping it up (and thus destroying a film for which they have an obvious affection) and trying to recapture Menzies's sublimely naive presentation (which, 80s hipsters that they are, they can't sustain for long).

Easy to take but even easier to leave alone.

The film would have been more satisfying if director Jan Kounen (Darshan: The Embrace) had shown more of the ferment of the times.

The movie gathers steam as these little terrors up the ante with each new gross-out recipe. Former child star Hallie Kate Eisenberg, blooming into a beautifully poised young woman, grounds the film as Benward's loyal supporter.

Though the idea of the therapy appears to be the demystification of sex, the filming, with its voyeuristic detachment and curious prudishness (no genitals are shown), serves only to perpetuate the familiar fetishistic mechanisms.

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

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.

Conveys little sense of a connection, as if di Florio had made it mainly because she had access to a celebrity.

Neither the characters nor the events are exactly the same as those of the novel, but some of the same spirit comes across.

We're never allowed to feel much of anything for these characters, and as a result their agonizing over their lost past and uncertain future seems like whining.

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

Australian mockumentary offers plenty of cheap laughs early on.

Franklin and Murray manages to live up to the demands of a thriller without sacrificing character to frenetic pacing, and the film exudes a kind of sweetness that never threatens to become either sticky or synthetic.

A tired, generic crime story.

Amiable comedy western, with James Garner expanding on his Maverick image as a boom-town sheriff who’d rather use his cunning than his guns.

Eastwood essentially uses the Lady Chablis the same way he did a few extended Charlie Parker solos in Bird--as unbridled, inventive improvisations that challenge the well-rehearsed "head" arrangements of everyone else.

The gags are slighted in favor of John Denver-style homilies, mouthed by John Denver, while the film collapses under the weight of missed narrative connections, the apparent victim of excessive recutting.

As a suspense movie, this works pretty well: director Bryan Singer (X-Men, The Usual Suspects) maintains a crisp pace as the plotters set out to kill the fuhrer with a briefcase bomb, and the historical details of the botched coup, which exploited one of Hitler's own contingency plans to mobilize the army reserves and disarm the SS, are inherently interesting.

The remake plays like a shallower, more clichéd variation on his masterpiece, "Pan's Labyrinth," but its mix of gory effects and deliciously old-fashioned visuals make for a classy, scary horror show.

Director Shawn Levy delivers his usual middle-of-the-road product.

A musical number or two might have balanced the overdetermined politics and spectacle in this version.

The comic juice tends to spill out in all directions.

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.

Has an affable charm, but the script is paint by numbers.

Baier's interweaving of documentary-style sequences with poetic, dreamlike imagery underscores the competition between Loic's harsh external circumstance and his lyrical internal yearnings for a better life.

This is basically Hollywood nonsense with all the usual dishonesty, but it goes down easily.

Minor grisly fun, but don't expect the movie to linger when it's over.

What might have been a serious drama about coming to terms with violence and loss turns into a crowd-pleasing and increasingly far-fetched remake of "Death Wish."

Holiday counterprogramming at its finest. This gut-churning horror indie is based on true stories of tourists disappearing in the vast Australian outback... This scared the hell out of me.

A more honest film would have been a greater tribute to this brave and tenacious fighter.

The sensibility of this movie is so adolescent that it's hard to take it as seriously as the filmmakers intend us to.

Unfortunately, the dialogue here is littered with cliches, and Ruben Blades as the dying father is the only character that registers with any degree of authenticity.

The snow and haze that Spanish director Jaume Collet-Serra (Orphan) keeps pumping into the street scenes seem to have drifted into the script as well.

Despite some scattered moments of bad craziness involving the hero and his drinking buddies (Michael Rispoli, Giovanni Ribisi), the spine of the story is no strange and terrible saga but a conventional morality tale.

For the grown-ups there are sweet, sincere performances by Ginnifer Goodwin, Sandra Oh, and, as Ramona's endlessly game father, the likable John Corbett, relieved for once of his drippy rom-com duties.

Lifeless, uninspired, and crammed with enough hints of intellectual consistency to give the socially conscious critical establishment shivers of excitement.

Juliette Binoche won an Oscar for her role in Anthony Minghella's adaptation of "The English Patient", but in many ways I prefer her soulful performance here: portraying a Bosnian Muslim working as a tailor in London, she's reason enough to see Minghella's overcontrived though absorbing 2006 feature based on his original script.

Reminiscent of the TV series "Northern Exposure," this 2001 indie comedy by writer-director Kate Montgomery smoothly transplants 30s-style screwball comedy to an Apache-run ski resort.

This is basically sloppy, all-over-the-map filmmaking with few hints of self-criticism and few genuine laughs.

Lacks the toughness of Eastwood's best work.