Machiavelli epigrams and 70s soul classics embellish this slice of thug life, which succumbs to the usual hypocrisy of condemning Barnes while grooving on his cars, clothes, and jewels.

Not so much ill conceived and misdirected as unconceived and undirected, this is folly on a grand scale.

Forget about a stake through the heart: sheriff Josh Hartnett discovers that decapitation is the best way to stop the bloodsuckers, who suggest feral, steroid-crazed gymnasts as they scale buildings and leap onto moving vehicles.

Someone should tell these guys you can't score a touchdown throwing lateral passes.

Ben Affleck directed and cowrote the script; his biggest gamble was casting his irksome little brother as a pistol-whipping tough guy, but the picture is so superbly executed in every other respect that Casey seems more quirky than miscast.

Occasionally a movie's subject outweighs any aesthetic flaws, as it does in this unsettling thriller about the extraordinary rendition of terror suspects.

A powerful Christian parable, painful but illuminating, about crime and redemption.

Bier is one of the cinema's most acute observers of intimate relations, her Scandinavian reserve muting the inherent melodrama of her material, and she draws piercing, modestly scaled performances from Duchovny, Del Toro, Alison Lohman, and John Carroll Lynch.

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.

It provides a more detailed and perhaps more reliable picture of the early movement's motives and practices than anything I've seen in the mainstream media.

The panoramic backgrounds have a silky beauty, but the characters are cheaply rendered with doll faces, enlarged musculature, tiny joints, and clunky movement. It's like watching Max Headroom lead his people out of Egypt.

This bloated 2006 historical epic flatlines early and never regains a pulse.

Cate Blanchett returns to the role that made her a star, and though this sequel to "Elizabeth" (1998) is less defensible as history, as florid costume drama it's just as entertaining.

This takes place in the same sort of pathologically sports-obsessed hamlet as "Friday Night Lights," though in contrast to that movie's grim honesty there's enough heartland schmaltz here to embarrass John Mellencamp. Remarkably, the movie rights itself once the actual season begins, focusing on game strategy more than the usual heart-stopping pep talks.

This is well staged and photographed, with stirring aerial images and balletic pans and dolly shots, but the story is muddled by the arrival of a free-spirited girl and her musician pals, 60s-style longhairs battling a government conspiracy.

Both hilarious and poignant, with a Capraesque humanity that caught me completely off guard.

Director Kenneth Branagh has mercifully pared the action down to 88 minutes (the first movie dragged on for 138), but the final act, with its obscure homosexual flirtation, still seems to go on forever.

Perry hasn't lost his touch for stroking his loyal audience of Oprah women; his enforced happy endings are the car keys taped under your seat.

The story takes place in 1988 in the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Coney Island, but I could never figure out why; with its pitiless gangsters and virtuous boys in blue, it could have been set anywhere.

In this 2006 entry the insights are worthwhile.

Sam Riley is fascinating as Curtis, a hypersensitive young man hobbled by his incurable disease, and Samantha Morton is poignant as his put-upon wife.

The ethnic humor that gave May's movie its charge is replaced by crass mean-spiritedness. If I were in movie hell, I'd rather see "Good Luck Chuck" again than return to this atrocity.

Like "The Verdict," this is a big, crowd-pleasing Hollywood redemption drama in which the lonely hero not only thwarts the corporate villains in the end but silences them with a killer riposte.

The mystery has never been resolved, but to his credit Bar-Lev acknowledges that he himself has become part of the story, torn between sympathy and suspicion.

With a score by the Residents, cartoon art by Warren Heise and Timothy Stock, and scenes of the actors commenting on and interacting with the real-life Kurtz, this 2006 advocacy video brings a jumpy energy to its Orwellian tale.

You may not leave the theater having switched sides, but you'll probably respect the other side more, and that in itself would be a victory for human life.

Only loosely connected to the story, the visuals quickly grow monotonous, and as the chronicle arrives at Cobain's late years of curdled fame and fortune, his bitterness and cynicism make even the narration hard to take.

What this movie has going for itself in spite of its cloying pleas for indulgence is a playful and interesting narrative structure that precludes much development and comes to the fore only toward the end. The whole thing may drive you batty, but as with "Rushmore," the melancholy aftertaste lingers.