A story that's reminiscent of the seminal "Panic in Needle Park."

Many reviews have suggested that this is as politically mild as a John Sayles movie, but Linklater clearly agrees with the frustrated kid who says, "Right now, I can't think of anything more patriotic than violating the Patriot Act."

This has its moments, but don't expect many fresh insights.

So keenly felt and so deeply imagined I couldn't help but be moved, even grateful for its bleeding-heart nostalgia.

While never boring and sometimes quite gripping, Bielinsky’s manneristic style becomes distracting; he seems more concerned with generating an ominous atmosphere than with telling a compelling story.

The script is overwritten and has too many themes--suicide, abuse, anti-Semitism--to support, but Nicholson does remarkable work in an unsympathetic role, helped by Lipsky's fine control of his characters.

There's a lot of self-conscious talk about the importance of timing, but the tony sense of entitlement tends to dampen any laughs. The movie functions best as a middle-class Euro-postcard along the lines of "Chocolat" or "Under the Tuscan Sun."

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.

A soporific ghost story.

It's soon apparent that a closer model for this charming romantic comedy is "Bell, Book and Candle." The direction by Marc Forster (Monster's Ball) is so fluffy it's easy to drift along and ignore the logical lapses.

Much as Emile de Antonio's neglected "In the Year of the Pig" (1968) may be the only major documentary about Vietnam that actually considers the Vietnamese, this film allows the people of Iraq to speak, and what they say is fascinating throughout.

This arty and moody account of her formation as an artist, as its subtitle declares, is basically invented. Its nerviness only pays off in a few details and in Nicole Kidman's resourcefulness.

The plot points verge on the familiar and obvious, but Adams's work with the actors (especially Judd and among the others Jeffrey Donovan, Diane Ladd, Tim Blake Nelson, and Scott Wilson) is so resourceful and focused that she makes them shine.

Despite the exotic locale and the photogenic moppets, that's not enough for a satisfying movie.

Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa, The Secret Garden) directs with obvious feeling rather than cynicism, and I was swept away by it despite the story's anachronisms.

If you're wondering how Steve Anderson managed to make a 93-minute documentary about the ultimate four-letter word, which uses the epithet over 800 times, you're underestimating his capacity to entertain and educate in roughly equal doses.

Wade lampoons our tendency to rigidly define sexual preference, but eventually the high jinks start to resemble an episode from the old TV series "Love, American Style."

As clever as he is crude, Cohen alchemizes bad-taste comedy into Strangelovean satire.

This delightful computer animation is less twee than Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, with more action and a broader American sensibility.

This gritty melodrama is tempered by surreal black humor.

Despite the syncopated score and subtitled patois, this is just another "Scarface" knockoff, with the usual array of bling, booty, and ballistics.

Feeble exercise in brain-teaser noir.

Carmelo, the central figure, returns home when his mother's health begins to decline, and his love of family, something of an abstraction in the first part, leaves him deeply divided: he wants to care for them personally, but he can better provide for them by returning to the U.S.

The film never strays much beyond the obvious, despite a conscientious effort by Tim Robbins to humanize a white security officer.

Unlike many colleagues, I'm not a fan of "Amores Perros" or "21 Grams," scripted by Guillermo Arriaga and directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu. This conclusion to their trilogy is easier to follow as a narrative, but it's even more pretentious, generalizing about the state of the modern world.

The husband learns nothing, and his monstrous behavior makes the movie relentlessly downbeat. No one, including the viewer, achieves catharsis.

Has some of the ring of truth, even though the movie lingers far too long over its own epiphanies.

The movie endorses the liberal conception of the Chicks as free-speech heroes, which doesn't quite wash: Maines shot her mouth off to a receptive overseas crowd, then issued an apology as soon as the backlash began back home.