Images about imagery can be diverting, even insightful, but this painterly 1999 feature piles up studies in elaborately choreographed motion that are their own reason for being.

Gets a little soapy, but the dismal working-class milieu and the measured performances by Mezzogiorno and Girotti (a venerable Italian actor who died last year ) bolster the sense of solidity.

This comedy-drama was written by Simon Beaufoy, who brought us "The Full Monty," and it has some of the same gamy mix of alternative sexuality and working-class heart.

The film flits from one relationship to another, dispensing some well-acted bedroom scenes and a fair amount of angst and philosophical dialogue in a neighborhood bar.

Though it easily surpasses most American action flicks, it suffers from the old commercial imperative of making the protagonist a nice guy, something Refn has seldom bothered with in Europe.

An engaging look at what baseball might have been like in the era before big money, with players who love the game struggling to survive.

There are plenty of funny moments, as well as a sweet subplot involving the unkempt drummer and the guitarist's no-nonsense mom (Christina Applegate).

Cher generates much of the movie's limited interest with her powerful screen presence, and Maggie Smith's skill as a diplomat's widow who believes she has a special relationship with Mussolini is undeniable. Yet the story, structured by the fragmented perspectives of too many characters, is more often lightweight than funny.

But the inspirational aspects of the tale--which mainly has to do with the determination of Close to form a vocal orchestra at the camp, despite the class divisions between the women--never quite carry the dramatic impact they're supposed to.

For a kids' picture this is relatively funny.

It's smart, swanky, and good-looking, but strangely, it's not all that funny.

A few of the bad-taste gags are funny, and Carrey's grimaces have a certain inspired delirium, but this is a long way from the social comedy of Jerry Lewis.

This leads to some fairly amusing gags involving surreal ads for actual products (e.g., for Jaguar: “Sleek and smart. For men who'd like hand jobs from beautiful women they hardly know”). Moore's boss is so horrified by this development that he sends him to a sanitarium, at which point the movie takes an abrupt nosedive into the sort of tacky media lies it is supposedly attacking.

This doomsday scenario takes up the first third of the movie, after which the tension dissipates badly and the husband and wife, now separated by plastic sheeting, wait for help to arrive.

Broomfield, whose celebrity exposés are known for their intrusiveness and innuendo, lost me with his gentle shower scene between an Iraqi woman and her husband; even if it wasn't invented, is it really any of our business?

A rather ho-hum if watchable neo-noir.

One can have a reasonably amusing time with this predictable sequel, which is a bit longer on action and shorter on wit and character than the original (hence less good, in my opinion), but still diverting and harmless enough.

Not to be confused with the 1959 Mamie Van Doren-Mel Torme exploitation item, this is an uneven first feature (1996) by independent filmmaker Jim McKay about the friendship of three rebellious high school seniors.

Fortunately for the company, Largo turns out to be a formidable knife fighter in the corporate sense; fortunately for this sleek, empty thriller, he turns out to be a formidable knife fighter in the street sense too.

The best, Shaking Tokyo, stars the versatile Teruyuki Kagawa.

Whether or not she's alive is the question that's supposed to animate this ostensibly metaphysical horror movie, but thematic rigor mortis sets in long before the final reel.

Stylish color schemes make this pleasing to look at, though the uneven narrative is both a minus and a plus--in one of the best scenes, beggars do an impromptu celebratory dance in the salon.

Whether the character is supposed to be a stand-in for Cody, who grew up in the western 'burbs of Chicago and has since won an Oscar, is more than I can say, but the movie suffers from the sort of self-pitying fog that can envelop a writer when he dives into his own malaise.

Glodell seems to be reaching for the nihilistic buddy romance of a movie like "Mean Streets" (1973), but without the serious intent; despite all the roiling emotions, this begins to feel like a pile-up of macho fetish items and stylistic affectations.

Like some laid-back distant cousin of Tim Burton, writer-director Goran Dukic manages to balance the ghoulishness with whimsy and melancholy, at least for a while. But the strain is obvious in the story's last third, as the filmmaker struggles toward a resolution that fits the logic of the hero's netherworld.

As in most of Wang's films, a memorable cast of characters compensates for a serviceable plot.

The argument is so tilted against windmills (sorry) that this comes perilously close to an advocacy video. But Israel deserves credit for delivering the bad news that wind power, like natural gas and nuclear, comes with its own array of social and environmental headaches.

Unfortunately, as in many such big-screen comic books, the backstory beats the hell out of the present-tense plot.