Novelist Douglas Coupland (Generation X) brings his millennial irony and middle-class angst to the big screen with this offbeat Canadian comedy about the lure of easy money.

Alain Resnais' 2006 adaptation of a British play by Alan Ayckbourn is a world apart from his earlier Ayckbourn adaptation, "Smoking/No Smoking"; that film tried to be as "English" as possible. But this time Resnais looks for precise French equivalents to British culture, and what emerges is one of his most personal works, intermittently recalling the melancholy "Muriel" and "Providence."

Despite the gimmicky direction and a disappointing climax, this is a distinctive and unsettling comedy.

Shelved for over a year, this incompetent mystery thriller stops periodically so some character or other can deliver an expository speech and pull the plot back on track, but by the end the story has turned into a hair ball.

He resisted commodification by continuously reediting his other films and reworking his live performances--a dazzling legacy that influenced everyone from Warhol to Fellini to John Waters. In some ways Smith's art became commodified only after he died and his estranged sister gained control over his work, though that did lead to this documentary, a fascinating introduction to his special world.

This isn't about the verities of hip-hop so much as the chaos and confusion of mounting a big production with a slew of stoned MCs.

If you're happy to watch a thriller about a tenth as good as Alfred Hitchcock's, director D.J. Caruso and screenwriters Christopher B. Landon and Carl Ellsworth hold up their end of the deal, at least until the proceedings devolve into standard horror-movie effects and minimal motivations.

I enjoyed the invented trailers the directors fold into the mix, but despite the jokey "missing reels," these two full-length features are each 20 minutes longer than they need to be, and neither one makes much sense as narrative.

It's pretty perverse for William Wheeler, who scripted this feature, to get most of the facts wrong, inflating details that don't need any spin. (As Irving himself remarked, "You could call it a hoax about a hoax.")

The main characters are a couple of revered high school table-tennis champs (one short and aggressive, the other tall and moody), and their efforts to win a big national tournament accommodate plenty of Zen aphorisms, glaring showdowns, and slow-motion paddle swinging.

Various news stories have noted the movie's accuracy, which I don't doubt, but the blanket antipathy makes for a wearying and predictable story.

The film features subtle, honest performances by Daniel MacIvor (who also cowrote the screenplay) as the perplexed prof and engaging newcomer Aaron Webber as the sensitive student.

A singular and essential figure of the Argentinean new wave; [Alonso] is not quite the minimalist some claim, but he can make the simple act of filming feel so monumental that storytelling seems secondary.

This high-decibel shocker is an insult to intelligence and faith alike.

Director Steve Carr continues his streak of numbingly mediocre family comedies.

Like much of Verhoeven's best work, it's shamelessly melodramatic, but in its dark moral complexities it puts "Schindler's List" to shame. Van Houten and Sebastian Koch (The Lives of Others) are only two of the standouts in an exceptional cast.

Ben Stiller produced, and the movie is so reminiscent of "Zoolander" that I wish he had rounded up Owen Wilson and starred in it himself. Farrell and Heder are pretty funny, but they're consistently upstaged by supporting players William Fichtner, Will Arnett, and Amy Poehler.

Sleekly tooled but eminently forgettable thriller.

It's striking not for its originality but for its energy in juggling familiar elements.

Jensen's dramatic structure is so visible this sometimes seems like a late Rod Serling teleplay, but Bier has proved highly adept at merging conventional drama with the immediacy of the Dogma 95 movement.

Shot on a year's worth of weekends on a minuscule budget (less than $20,000), this remarkable work--conceivably the best single feature about ghetto life that we have--was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry as one of the key works of the American cinema, an ironic and belated form of recognition for a film that has had virtually no distribution. It shouldn't be missed.

Concise and thoughtful.

Nothing much is original in this soggy tale of two German women whose friendship persists despite adversity and their own bad choices.

The film is never dull and often rousing, but this is essentially a conventional version of a classic opera--the attempt to transform it into a critique of macho hubris comes off as an afterthought, and the poverty is just a backdrop.

The story is often ridiculous, but director Antoine Fuqua provides plenty of fun distractions.

For a family picture this is still superior.

Canned racial uplift and tear-streaked faces abound, though they're offset somewhat by a nicely funky blaxploitation vibe.

Though the pain of this 9/11 story doesn't pierce as deeply as it should, the laughs are consistently humane.