Like many sequels this is actually a remake, and it suffers from the law of diminishing returns.

The movie's first half hour is a barrage of lazy narrative pointers--endless expository voice-over, freeze frames and captions to identify the numerous characters--and by the time screenwriter Tina Gordon Chism decides to write an extended scene, the story is already dead in the water.

Improved CGI renders the animals' bodies in greater detail, but the laughs aren't as sharp.

Gross-out horror comedy is my least favorite genre, but this movie's so skillful I have to take my hat off to it.

It's worth seeing for the tightly coiled plot, well-realized characters, and novel take on rapacious teen culture.

Eventually the shaky, grainy visuals grow tiresome, but director Nathaniel Hornblower (aka Beastie Boy Adam Yauch) keeps things lively with a variety of editing tricks and sly humor.

Despite the high spirits, most of the comedy is feeble and forced; Steve's career as a therapist seems especially far-fetched.

Johnston's childish, repetitive tunes prove that he's no Brian Wilson (or even Roky Erickson), which makes you wonder whether Feuerzeig is examining the singer's exploitation or participating in it.

This has its moments, but most of these are engulfed by the overall murk.

Underneath the wrapping lies a squalid Tarantino-style crime flick.

A fascinating allegory of modern-day Iran.

The music Bjork wrote for the sound track is at least minimally accomplished, unlike Barney's staggeringly vacant direction.

Despite the fascinating topic, director Yan-ting Yuen offers relatively little history or criticism of the works themselves, squandering screen time on such gimmicks as mock voice-over and scenes of young people performing hard-rock and hip-hop versions of vintage songs. It's enough to make you pine for the good old days when irony was illegal.

A superior nail-biter.

There's a gothic backstory to all this, which makes no sense but looks pretty cool.

How ironic that one form of beauty would be returned to battle-scarred Afghanistan by ugly Americans, but that's just what director Liz Mermin caught in her slim 2004 documentary for the BBC.

At one point screenwriter James C. Strouse name-checks the brilliant Richard Yates, whose fiction similiarly perches between grim humor and utter despair, but the movie's hip detachment is a far cry from the unruly passions of Yates's chronic losers.

Whether the title refers to the baby or the thief remains an open question, and the viewer is left to decide whether the theme of redemption should be perceived in Christian terms. This builds to a suspenseful climax, and as in Hitchcock's best work, that suspense is morally inflected.

Schwaba's uncertainty as a director is underlined by the almost arbitrary jump cuts, freeze-frames, and sped-up action.

This UK drama by Stephen Woolley, a longtime producer for Neil Jordan making his directing debut, presents a fairly convincing version of what might have happened.

Though some of his one-liners are pretty good, his shtick can't sustain this dutifully scripted comedy. Megyn Price, who's done time on the sitcom Grounded for Life, is a welcome distraction as the waitress with a crush on Larry.

This may be the most Brechtian thing Lumet has ever done -- a movie that repeatedly challenges us to think and then to reconsider.

Fickman mostly soft-pedals the play's homosexual panic, generating a comedy that lacks both the verbal sophistication of its source and the sexual sophistication of its target audience.

The swashbuckling first hour is superior to the second, which bursts at the seams with backstory, but a rousing climax makes this the most potent piece of agitpop in years.

As the substantially faithful movie version demonstrates, the story of Thank You for Smoking resides in that libertarian netherworld where the far left and the far right march shoulder to shoulder.

A harrowing drama spun from the most mundane material.

The theatrical monologues come close to defeating him (Wenders), and only Jessica Lange, as one of Shepard's abandoned girlfriends, manages to avoid cliche.

A powerful indictment of the horrendous treatment of children who toil in hellish Bolivian silver mines. The filmmakers are better at fashioning haunting images than offering hard-nosed analysis, yet they never sentimentalize their young protagonists' plight.