The connection between the two narratives is supposed to be a big, heartbreaking surprise, though I figured it out well in advance and spent the interim unfavorably comparing this greatest-generation hanky wringer to the British drama "Iris."

The result is that virtual oxymoron, an intelligent family film.

Haneke is still a masterful director, and his authority carries this well-acted and attractively shot account of a family from an unnamed city trying to survive in the sticks after an unspecified catastrophe.

Romantic entanglements are among the more cliched elements of the script, which nicely captures the rhythms of quiet, small-town lives but taxes credibility in several key scenes.

Doesn't make a lick of sense, and its borderline racism and sexism will offend plenty of people. But comedy is all salesmanship, and these guys sold me; their giddy nonchalance reminds me of kids competing to crack each other up at bedtime after mom has given them Pepsi with dinner.

There are plenty of laughs whenever Moore wants to twist the knife, but the bottom line is that he respects and trusts his fellow Americans a lot more than Bush does.

As the WWF-style villain, Stiller misfires again and again, but Vaughn is reliably funny and Rip Torn has a great part as the underdogs' crotchety old coach.

As usual Spielberg is too bored by everyday life to use his premise for anything but a fairy tale, whose cheap pathos suggests a bad Chaplin imitation. This grows progressively phonier and eventually devolves into "Mr. Roberts," with Stanley Tucci filling in for James Cagney as an airport bureaucrat.

Like the former first lady, the filmmakers go slightly overboard.

Upon closer inspection its story and characters grow more mysterious, ultimately bordering on the unfathomable.

While Cazeneuve's story is about gay love, it also charts universal truths about adolescent romance and high school politics with great aplomb.

Agreeable but overlong.

It's fun, instructive, and stimulating, but never beautiful. Ultimately it's limited by its compulsion to knock our socks off at every turn and to compare itself with "Alice in Wonderland."

Gets a little soapy, but the dismal working-class milieu and the measured performances by Mezzogiorno and Girotti (a venerable Italian actor who died last year ) bolster the sense of solidity.

Jules Verne's novel has been flattened into a standardized Jackie Chan vehicle.

The story is mechanical, but Twohy paces it well enough to showcase the spectacular costumes (by Ellen Mirojnick and Michael Dennison) and production design (by Holger Gross).

Unfortunately this is much tamer than it had to be--Rudnick Lite, meaning on the edge of evaporation.

The cat is computer-generated, as are his one-liners.

Toward the end the freak-show humor begins to yield diminishing returns, but for most of its length this delivers a steady stream of uncomfortable gut laughs.

Word Wars does a better job of capturing the players' various idiosyncrasies.

Maximilian stresses that Maria was an icon in postwar Germany, yet the saddest thing about her isolation and disappointment is that it's so common.

Engrossing documentary.

Like the first two movies, this is loaded with computer-generated imagery, but for the first time there's a sense of dramatic proportion balancing the spectacle and the story line.

Kar Kar's singing is wonderfully expressive, and an improvised song to his wife at her grave site demonstrates the emotional wellspring of his music.

The project was produced in association with National Geographic World Films, a relationship borne out by the movie's cultural detail, rich earth-toned cinematography (by Falorni), and almost complete lack of dramatic tension.

Riveting cinematic essay.

At 92 minutes this could hardly be considered a definitive statement, yet its combination of high drama and carefully articulated principle delivers quite a punch.

An exceptionally stupid movie.