Both sad and darkly funny, the film is so sharply conceived and richly populated that it often registers like a Frederick Wiseman documentary, even though everything is scripted and every part played by a professional... This is only the second feature of Cristi Puiu, who claims to have been inspired by his own hypochondria, but he's already clearly a master.

Three Times, one of the peaks of his (Hou Hsiao-hsien) career, may be your last chance to see his work inside a movie theater.

The director of "American Pie" has set out to make a merciless satire of American media culture along the lines of "Network," but his ideas are so commonplace that nothing registers except the bile.

Director Clark Johnson (S.W.A.T.) has a flair for action, which compensates for the flattening effect of Gabriel Beristain's cinematography.

Horror maestro Christophe Gans ("Brotherhood of the Wolf") directed this feature, worth seeing for the zombie nurses who gyrate like a Bob Fosse chorus line before slicing each other to ribbons.

This beautifully understated feature (2004) revolves around sex, but it's neither erotic nor puritanical; its young characters are governed by their urges, but the experience itself seems as neutral and mysterious as sleep.

This sounds like a slender premise on which to hang a feature, but director Ning Hao is more interested in ethnography and landscapes than narrative and often holds our interest by concentrating on how folklore, technology--motorbikes, cars, trucks, films, TV--and imagination affect a nomadic way of life.

Roman Polanski's first film in English (1965, 105 min.) is still his scariest and most disturbing--not only for its evocations of sexual panic, but also because his masterful employment of sound puts the audience's imagination to work in numerous ways...As narrative this works only part of the time, and as case study it may occasionally seem too pat, but as subjective nightmare it's a stunning piece of filmmaking.

The fourth installment in the horror-parody franchise combines plot elements from "The Grudge," "The Village," and "War of the Worlds," with abbreviated spoofs of "Saw," "Brokeback Mountain," and "Million Dollar Baby." The amount of screen time allotted to each movie is roughly proportional to its box office take, suggesting that the first draft of the screenplay was written on a calculator.

The CGI characters seem less like artwork than humans wearing animal suits, but despite the overall ugliness and sitcom timing, this has enough action, violence, and invention to keep kids amused.

Neatly scripted by Tim Firth and Geoff Deane, this sticks to the "Full Monty" formula of starchy working-class types learning to loosen up about sex, but Julian Jarrold's sincere, low-key direction erases any sense of artifice.

Tautly directed by David Slade, this drama probably offers more sadism than anyone could possibly want...The characters are absurd, but if you're up for this sort of thing, then surely you can con yourself into accepting them. Personally, I'd rather have this movie obliterated from my memory.

The notion that Page, like Marilyn Monroe, was too ditzy to know what she was doing is more a mythological construct than an observation.

Watt's script is a bit overstuffed, and by the end the roiling animated sequences (drawn by Emma Kelly and inked by Watt and Clare Callinan) are wearing out their welcome. But the convincing characters and hearty examination of mortality make this fresh and oddly uplifting.

The altitude, extreme cold, quicksand, and crushing poverty are potent dramatic elements, but of course there's no mention of China's complicity in the area's economic ills; instead writer-director Lu Chuan frames the story as a showdown between the head ranger and the leader of the poachers.

Despite the lowbrow story, this is supposed to be tasteful; expect modest nudity, swelling strings, and plenty of water imagery.

Metal culture is a giant topic, and Dunn has made an ambitious stab at it, exploring the music's social, religious, and sexual implications.

Depardieu, a great actor who in recent years has delivered several overblown performances, is here measured and naturalistic, a sympathetic match for Ardant's icy obsessive, and Beart is suitably mysterious as a spy in the house of love.

The result is an insufferable academic cocktail party of declamatory speeches coaxed to life in its middle stretch by the incredible Maria Bello, who wades in like a paramedic at a disaster scene.

With its diabolical ending, this is the movie equivalent of a crossword puzzle: fun, clever, and disposable.

No laughs here, just the dull ache of seeing Heder slotted into a standard piece of Hollywood twaddle.

The humor's vulgar and the plot feeble, but this is a cut above the gross-out comedies aimed at male teens, and its heroine and her gal pals keep the high jinks amiable.

This inspirational vehicle, based on a true story, is as hokey as it sounds, and it sometimes cuts too fast to allow us to see the dancing properly. But as in "Saturday Night Fever," the sense of reality giving way to fantasy on a dance floor is potent, and writer Dianne Houston and director Liz Friedlander are so sincere that they make much of it work.

In her third feature Nicole Holofcener leapfrogs between characters with wit and grace, gathering them in various clusters and adroitly showing how money or the lack thereof really does inflect their lives and interactions.

Humorous touches add warmth without being cloying, but Mullan carries the film with his intelligence and rugged intensity: images of his barrel-chested physique against the craggy shore resound on such an elemental level as to be almost spiritual.

This 2005 farce about a hellish Passover seder panders to middle-class Jews as gleefully as Tyler Perry's movies pander to middle-class African-Americans, though there's less religiosity and a greater degree of self-hatred in the vulgar stereotypes.

Puzzling, intriguing, and often compelling, apparently set in the present but magical and futuristic in tone.

Despite a provocative climax, the movie settles into a ponderous collection of soliloquies.