The rationale behind this unattractive animated comedy, a U.S.-German coproduction, seems to be that since it can't create a fairy-tale world of its own, it might as well riffle through many of the more familiar ones, with particular emphasis on Cinderella's, pretending to deconstruct them with postmodernist glosses, adolescent wisecracks, and a few high-tech anachronisms.

Luckily LaGravenese has incorporated some of the real students' piercingly honest diary entries and rounded up an engaging cast of unknowns and young actors (April Hernandez, Kristin Herrera, Hunter Parrish) to channel their anger and hopelessness.

Never really generates any serious laughs.

The vile sadism of the Saw movies has been replaced by decorative references to Saint Augustine and Immanuel Kant, and there's a beautiful but brainy police profiler (Waddell) on hand to dispense a thick layer of psychobabble.

The twee romance was too much for me, though the movie's first half follows in fascinating detail the innovations Warne introduced to popularize illustrated picture books for children.

Unlike most horror movies, this chiller gives equal prominence to reality and fantasy, though the reality is far more frightening. The only precedent that comes to mind in terms of a lyrical treatment of a child's experience of terror is "The Night of the Hunter."

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.

Confounds expectations -- about slasher stories and about film narrative in general, in part by being closer to a collection of interconnected short stories than to a novel.

This semianimated adventure is enjoyable and imaginative despite its formulaic qualities.

The bar for historical accuracy in Hollywood biopics hasn't always been this high -- paradoxically, it's been rising even as the public has become more ignorant of history.

Brian Cox does sturdy work as the minister who helps Obree combat depression, and first-time director Douglas Mackinnon gets a big assist from Obree himself, who doubled for Miller in some shots and filmed others with a camera strapped to his handlebars.

The skillful Patrick Marber (Closer) adapted this gripping drama from a novel by Zoe Heller, and it's both literate and urgently plotted, with a voice-over from Dench that cuts like broken glass.

It exchanges the police subplot that gave the earlier film its steady pace for a lot of pointless backstory about the mother-fixated stalker.

The film gradually devolves into action-adventure, then the equivalent of a war movie. But the filmmaking is pungent throughout, and the first half hour is so jaw-dropping in its fleshed-out extrapolation that Cuaron earns the right to coast a bit.

Perhaps it's fitting that a movie about the early CIA be tangled and opaque, but this drama loosely based on the life of uberspook James Angleton verges on incoherence.

Drawn from a children's book by Croatian illustrator Milan Trenc, this fantasy isn't exactly heavy, but its ideological implications are interesting nevertheless.

Matthew McConaughey injects some much needed life as the oddball coach who sets out to rebuild the football squad, and David Strathairn, Ian McShane, and Robert Patrick do their best with sketchy characters and artless dialogue.

This comedy drama is an exercise in self-indulgence for O'Toole, but an enjoyable and touching one.

The movie has plenty to engage one's interest but little to sustain it.

It has few stars familiar to Americans, and it shares with "Pan's Labyrinth" the rare distinction of being a mainstream commercial movie with subtitles.

This handsome period drama is a big step up for director John Curran (We Don't Live Here Anymore), who shot in China with predominantly Chinese crews. Norton and Schreiber seem too American to be English colonials, but Watts navigates a challenging transformation (in a role first played by Greta Garbo in 1934.

As usual with Stallone's Rocky sequels, the schmaltz is unbearable, but the fight is plausibly handled, and Stallone's sincere sadness at growing older makes this an unexpectedly satisfying conclusion to the series.

I can't think of a better portrait of contemporary Paris or the zeitgeist of 2001-'04 than Chris Marker's wise and whimsical 58-minute 2004 video...no one can film people in the street better than Marker or combine images with more grace and finesse.

Elegant, unabashedly theatrical, and packed with lush concert scenes and period-perfect costumes.

Set in postwar Berlin, the story involves prostitution, black marketeering, and the death camps, and the tension between the visual style and the adult story makes the movie pretty engrossing -- it's an R-rated "Casablanca."

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.

This passable live-action feature from Christian mogul Philip Anschutz (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) also relies heavily on the voices, though the actors are sometimes miscast (Julia Roberts as the spider) or chosen more for their on-screen personas than their pipes (Steve Buscemi as the rat).

With the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy completed and the next "Chronicles of Narnia" movie two years away, fantasy aficionados needing a Yuletide fix may have to settle for this dull sword-and-sorcery epic.