With a mug like hers Cervera must have realized this was her big chance to star in a musical, and she gives a dazzling performance.

An excellent introduction to the singular vision of avant-garde stage director Robert Wilson.

This is a new form of obscenity that might be called suicide porn. It's not just the voyeuristic surveillance that's obscene, but the use of suicide footage as counterpoint to other stories as they're told. Steel shows no special insight into the subject, though even that couldn't justify such hideousness.

By the time Herzog tried to pass off jellyfish as Dourif's old pals, my indulgence was nearing its end--but then so was the movie.

Coppola based her script on a revisionist biography by Antonia Fraser, though the film reads most poignantly as a personal statement; like Marie, the director was born to a life of privilege and carries the burden of a proud family legacy.

Murphy seems either incapable of or uninterested in creating a recognizable world, so local comic effects count for everything.

It's a noble undertaking, and Eastwood is stylistically bold enough to create a view of combat based mainly on images that are clearly manufactured. (As with "Saving Private Ryan," the movie's principal source is "The Big Red One," whose director, Samuel Fuller, actually experienced the war.) But this is underimagined and so thesis ridden that it's nearly over before it starts.

Another miscalculation by sophomore director Michael Mayer.

"The Illusionist" also centers on a 19th-century magician, and the elegant contours of its story are even more impressive compared with Nolan's clutter of double and triple crosses.

The nonsensationalistic results are also somewhat ho-hum--and oddly less convincing than Friedkin's lurid mess, let alone the elegant satanism sagas of Tourneur and Polanski.

As contrived as this premise may sound (and it isn't much better on-screen), writer-director Mora Stephens manages to push the odd-couple story in some interesting directions.

Dazat coscripted, felicitously blending elements of documentary and travelogue much as he did in Himalaya. The resulting portrait sidesteps ethnography yet conveys the essence of a magnificent people.

Ali Selim, a highly successful director of commercials in Minneapolis, makes his feature directing debut with this simple and beautifully paced drama, letting the characters breathe and the land speak.

This isn't always adept as storytelling, and Block's coming to terms with his own denseness occasionally tries one's patience, but he manages to make the overall process of his reeducation fascinating and compelling.

Mainly it's a shambles, though for once Williams gets to do what he's best at (his stand-up shtick), and the absurd story, no matter how carelessly assembled, keeps moving.

The outrages of pedophile priests have generated screaming headlines but relatively little understanding of the Catholic culture that permitted and concealed such crimes, which makes this informed documentary by Amy Berg all the more valuable.

Infamous has dramaturgical strengths, whether or not it gets the facts right. Jones's performance as Capote tends to be delivered in a monotone, yet thanks to Craig all of their scenes together are potently realized.

The visual monotony of talking heads and stock footage is interrupted occasionally by the spectral charcoal drawings of veteran Si Lewen, though his art is used to full advantage only when he describes the liberation of Buchenwald.

Enter this diseased Lewis Carroll universe at your own risk.

The gender-bending comedy of Billy Wilder and Blake Edwards gets a teenpic makeover in this 2005 debut feature by Martin Curland.

The nonstop action in this British romp should ensure that its target audience, sugar-buzzed prepubescent boys, stay strapped in their seats.

The characters are drawn with such compassion their follies become our own and their desires seem as vast as the night sky.

The Departed is completely engrossing, a master class in suspense. But in moral terms it may be the least involving story that Scorsese -- an artist much preoccupied with morality -- has ever taken on.

There's a great "Office Space"-style satire to be made about big-box stores screwing their working-poor employees, but Hollywood studios covet DVD rack space at those same stores, so instead we're supposed to get excited about which of these two idiots earns more gold stars.

More or less restages Tobe Hooper's 1974 original, including its much-loved family dinner scene.

This seventh installment is utterly fascinating.

Dramatically objectifies the unfair trade practices that help keep Africa mired in poverty.

Some of Roth's cars become characters, their voices furnished by Ann-Margret, Jay Leno, Brian Wilson, Matt Groening, Tom Wolfe, and others. The pace never flags, and the enthusiasm is infectious.