Brilliantly conceived and competently executed.

Cuesta directs the lead actors with such feeling that their misery seems authentic.

After 9/11 and Katrina, this megabudget remake by Wolfgang Petersen benefits from a similar cultural oomph, though it's just as enjoyably silly as the original.

Whimsical fantasy tends to work best when its premise is used sparingly, but in this case the fantasy element takes over the story, becoming mechanical and often confused.

If you can abide booming orchestral punches during verbal confrontations and ubiquitous Adidas product placement, you'll be rewarded by exciting soccer sequences and the joy of watching a likable character triumph on a global stage.

A shocking revelation near the end explains the soldier's nihilistic rage but simultaneously tears a gigantic hole in the plot, leaving little to admire but Considine's typically penetrating performance.

Maybe because director Scott Marshall is Garry's son, he allows his affable father to steal the movie from everyone else, and his performance proves to be a small gift worth having.

An honorable, squeaky-clean children's drama, this is notable for its relatively penetrating morality and for Scott Wilson's fine performance as the meanest man in town.

This is a hokey, old-fashioned melodrama in which the actors scream more often than necessary.

Critics, clients, and colleagues all weigh in on the architect, but Pollack is more interested in the mysteries of the creative process, and his studies of Gehry's buildings, deftly edited by Karen Schmeer, capture their dramatic sense of movement and resolution.

Klapisch self-consciously throws fistfuls of quirky film style at us, as if he were Francois Truffaut, but his characters are still interesting and his party sequences are especially good.

Producer-star Tom Cruise handed this one to alumni from the TV spy drama "Alias," and the result is nearly as good as the series' best, Woo's Mission: Impossible 2.

It's far more ambitious than its predecessor and suffers from too many ideas rather than too few, making it an inspired, fascinating, and revealing mess.

I'm guessing Donald Sutherland agreed to do this tedious horror flick because he heard Sissy Spacek was on board, and Spacek agreed to do it because she heard Sutherland was on board.

Writer-director Wil Shriner tends to sit on almost every shot, killing any comic momentum (sequences with Luke Wilson as a dim-bulb cop are particularly witless), and ominous scenes involving cottonmouths and Rottweilers are glibly resolved.

Both actors work hard to give this disturbing crime story some flavor and substance, but the narrative is overextended and poorly organized.

Directed by John Hillcoat, this Aussie feature perfectly re-creates the charbroiled landscapes and cruel psychodrama of the old Sergio Leone westerns, with John Hurt particularly fine as a raging old mountain goat.

At its best this 2005 feature wickedly satirizes the politics of pity--how healthy people buy off the dying with gifts and imminent death becomes a kind of stardom. But the sap begins to flow.

The story lurches from heavy-handed satire to heavy-handed drama. Heigl gives a winning performance, though Slattery-Moschkau seldom misses an opportunity to show her prancing around in her underwear.

Despite the familiar story arc and MTV visuals, Bendinger puts this across with a certain amount of pizzazz, and the competitive gymnastics are often spectacular.

Greengrass takes pains to keep events believable and relatively unrhetorical, rejecting entertainment for the sake of sober reflection, though one has to ask how edifying this is apart from its reduction of the standard myths.

This small gem about a South Central LA girl with a gift for spelling restores luster to the family genre.

This miserable comedy is enlivened occasionally by Jeff Daniels and Kristin Chenoweth as a cheerfully tacky couple who keep crossing paths with the dysfunctional clan.

Following the same general blueprint as "The Bad News Bears" or "The Longest Yard," this engaging, well-paced German film directed by Sherry Horman includes a vibrantly funny script by Benedikt Gollhardt.

Garcia seems to be aping the "Godfather" movies and Warren Beatty's "Reds," but the movie's gracefulness is limited to its handling of the music (some of which Garcia wrote).

A potent feminist protest--all the more so because some of the laws depicted are still in force today.

Adapted from a novel by Gabriel Loidolt, this is most interesting for its textured family history and pained religiosity.

Chan-wook Park completes his "revenge trilogy" with this ravishing black comedy about a notorious child killer.