Shyamalan remains a stilted screenwriter, but Roger Deakins's cinematography is spooky, creepy, eerie all the way.

Full of bright colors, offbeat people, tuneful sounds.

The multicultural cast gives a shred of substance to what's otherwise a standard adolescent gross-out flick.

Leconte justifies his vaunted reputation by lending freshness and feeling to what could have been a gimmicky tragicomedy.

Dull despite its suspense-driven story.

Acted as a drama, paced like a ritual, filmed as a slice of rural Iranian life.

Braff makes a striking directorial debut while leading a superb ensemble cast.

Smart, funny, stimulating.

This intensely topical satire tackles a wide range of important issues, from corporate whistle-blowing to the toll sexual license takes on stable family structures.

Stylishly directed and smartly acted, especially by the filmmaker-star, who gives one of his best performances as the unerring swordsman.

This time it's just chasing, fistfighting, and shooting. A disappointment from the director of "Bloody Sunday."

Cartoonish effects and overacting make this more corn than catnip.

At its best, A Home at the End of the World has great emotional strength. But it's not the towering achievement it might have been if Cunningham had stayed truer to his original inspiration.

The parallel stories don't always dovetail with each other smoothly, but the acting is strong and the atmosphere is powerful.

Thoughtful, exciting, moving.

Ingenious, eye-opening documentary.

The director's cut of this 2001 cult fantasy is a deliriously subtle exploration of storytelling possibilities, and a deliciously wry teen-pic to boot. Brilliant.

Even the delightful Duff disappoints.

Less ambitious than "Blade Runner" but more coherent than "Artificial Intelligence: A.I.," which it vaguely resembles, I, Robot is best during homely moments when Smith shows his human side.

Timely, pointed messages about oppression and opportunity come poignantly through in strongly dramatic terms.

Even MacLachlan's surprisingly witty performance can't compensate for the trite screenplay and Mistry's lack of charisma.

Bridges is fun to watch, Fanning emerges as Hollywood's best 6-year-old actress, and Rogers's talents are wasted. A likable drama within its limitations.

Feisty, funny, and smart.

One of a kind, turning Foreman trademarks such as self-satirical acting and out-of-nowhere music into powerful elements of an outlandish story.

Imagine a movie where every character is more self-centered than Ted Baxter in "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" of old, add a caboodle of idiotic jokes, and you have some idea of this ugly, unfunny farce.

Viewers of that age may overlook the contrived situations and the awful acting, which consists mainly of frozen grins. Nobody else will.

The acting is fine, the filmmaking is honest, and the class-conscious story couldn't be more timely.

The quartet appears to be mightily lacking in the brains and judgment departments, but at least it tries to do something about its failings, employing a traveling psychotherapist whose interventions and ruminations provide some of the film's most unwittingly amusing moments.

The movie gives us a Round Table and a flashing Excalibur but no magic, no mystery, no mythic resonance. Mostly there's a lot of slashing swordplay that should appeal to the picture's target audience of young males.

The movie is remarkably touching and engrossing, with Kline's spot-on acting and realistically second-rate singing balancing Judd's one-note performance as his wife.

All told, he's (Linklater) one of today's most versatile American filmmakers, and Before Sunset finds his light shining as brightly as ever.

Redford gives one of his best performances ever in this taut, emotionally engrossing thriller.

The sequel is more exciting and surprising than the 2002 original, thanks largely to Molina's excellent acting. Only the strenuously comic scenes fall as flat as one of Spidey's leftover webs.

Rowlands is superb, as usual, and Garner partners her with the grace of a dancer. Cassavetes's directing style is slow and stilted, though, indicating yet again that his notion of moviemaking is the opposite of everything his father, the great John Cassavetes, stood for.

The animal action is often gripping and suspenseful. As a whole, a giant step beyond Annaud's earlier animal movie, "The Bear," a more gimmicky film of 1988.

It's a standard science-fantasy fable, but the visual effects are mighty impressive.

Imagine a sexually charged "Heart of Darkness" by way of Denmark's bare-bones Dogme 95 and you'll have an idea of what this dark, moody melodrama is like.

This is one of Haneke's least powerful films, although the excellent cast is interesting to watch.

Moore makes no pretense of being "fair and balanced." He makes a passionate case for his own perspective, and invites us to agree with him or not. "I fulminate, you decide" could be his motto.

Stiller strives to be a wild and wacky villain, Vaughn endeavors to be a likable and average hero, and both fall flat on their faces, like everything else in this unspeakably stupid comedy.

As he showed in the recent "Catch Me if You Can," also a Hanks vehicle, Spielberg has little talent for emotional realism, not to mention psychological suspense. He should scurry back to "Jurassic Park" as soon as the next flight leaves.

Riveting and revealing whatever views you have on the partisan issues involved.

Interesting as anthropology, although the subject won't appeal to many people.

Like most of Sokurov's movies, this oblique parable is mysterious, elliptical, irresistible.

The movie is sociologically rich, if not very memorable in the personalities it depicts.

The story's celebration of honesty is commendable, even if the treatment of homophobia is no deeper than the hero's swimming pool.

The story isn't as funny as it tries to be, but it grows increasingly winning as it goes along.

There are many tantalizing bits, but the overall result is a simplistic story wrapped in barely explained quantum physics and new-age sound bites. Fascinating and frustrating in about equal measure.

Gentle and life-affirming, if too sentimental in the end.

Coogan and Broadbent are agile and expressive, but too much time goes to Chan's silly stunts. A colorful disappointment.

The special effects are extra special. The screenplay is idiotic, though, and Diesel speaks his dialogue like a Sylvester Stallone clone who never finished third grade.

The film contains so many endings that it's hard to tell what impressions the filmmakers want us to leave the theater with. Buy a copy of the book instead. It remains an excellent read.

The blend of live action and animation is competently done, but the subtly mean-spirited screenplay has more sour meows than hearty laughs.

May not make you laugh out loud - it's too sly and subtle for that - but it will have you smiling every minute, and often grinning widely at its weirded-out charm. Nerdiness will never seem the same.

The movie is mostly a megadose of good-old-days nostalgia.

Light, lively, informative, fun.

She emerges as an energetic, narcissistic, and totally self-deluded woman.

From its restlessly moving camera work to its heartfelt acting by a splendid cast, "Azkaban" is a horror movie for mature kids.

Blurring all the lines between fiction and documentary, this gentle and amusing movie blends real, unrehearsed material with delightful storytelling scenes.

The material is vivid and harrowing, although the movie provides little analysis or larger-scale context.

All this amounts to a badly wasted opportunity, since global warming is a serious issue that deserves thoughtful treatment. So stay home and read a scientific journal instead. This is a disaster movie that lives up to its label.

This colorful time capsule of a movie was directed by Van Peebles's son, who appeared in "Sweetback" as a child and doesn't minimize the difficulties his father's underfinanced dream entailed for his hard-pressed family and friends.

Excerpts from Schroeder's long video documentary about him, and from the flawed melodrama "Barfly" they made together, add more variety.

The kind of breezy teen-pic that youngsters flock to nowadays, and this particular specimen is imaginative enough to explore an environment off Hollywood's beaten path. It's also broad-minded enough to portray the evangelical milieu with flair, satirize its foibles with restraint, and respect its ideals even as it shows how individuals may fall short.

Great premise, but the ensuing trials and tribulations - not to mention hapless attempts at comedy - are as off-key as a karaoke scene in which Hudson sounds worse than any audition Simon Cowell has ever had to sit through.

This movie equivalent of Robert Rauschenberg's artwork "Erased de Kooning" is funny, ornery, and ultimately inspiring.

Much of the style strains too hard to be cute, but true romantics may shed copious tears of sympathy and empathy.

A riveting new documentary about the Arab-run Al Jazeera network, reminds us that news programming can vary so widely from place to place that journalistic myths of "objectivity" and "impartiality" seem more naive than ever.

At its best, this "Shrek" sequel draws up a brilliant new blueprint for all-ages animation, blending fairy-tale whimsy with edgy social satire. Too bad it ends with worn-out homilies far less imaginative than the story as a whole.

The result is a history lesson both invaluable and horrific.

In sum, this is hardly an "Iliad" adaptation for the ages. But if you're hankering for sand, sandals, and swordplay, this could be the movie for you.

Harrowing, realistic, humanistic.

A series of vignettes...Some are weak, some are superb -- there's a priceless one with Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan as Brits with different feelings about learning they're cousins -- but they get better as they go along.

Taylor is utterly believable even when the screenplay (from an Anne Tyler novel) is too self-consciously quirky, and Pearce nicely portrays the guy she obsesses over.

The story is dramatic and Béart gives one of her best performances, even if Téchiné's style has its usual sense of distance.

Straightforward and informative, but overlong and repetitious.

The cast is cute and the action is colorful, but the comedy isn't as captivating as it sets out to be.

In sum, Van Helsing is yet another video game disguised as a wide-screen epic. Here's hoping the box office drives a firm wooden stake through its hokey Hollywood heart.

Not that Honda's original Godzilla is a message movie first and foremost. It's a horror flick, and an ingenious one at that, with visual effects so vivid that gimmicky spin-offs became an enduring staple of popular film.

Tasty while you take it in, but larded down with empty cinematic calories.

The movie works fairly well as a pitch-dark comedy, and very well as a dead-on satire of upward mobility and its discontents.

How could such a high-octane cast produce such low-octane horror?

Poor writing and directing are the culprits - and whatever possessed the gifted Moore to make her role a nonstop Diane Keaton imitation? There oughta be a law!

The screenplay by Tina Fey -- head writer for "Saturday Night Live" -- is marvelously smart, though, and the ensemble cast is uncannily in sync with it.

True-blue golf buffs should find it a treat. For others it's no deeper than a tin cup on a putting green.

Everything about this subtly directed drama enhances its pathos and humor, especially an astonishing performance by Gorintin, a 90-something woman only a few years into her acting career.

A deliciously weirded-out picture by Guy Maddin, a deliciously weirded-out Canadian filmmaker.

You won't find a load of laughs in 13 Going on 30, but there's plenty of whimsy, which is a close cousin of genuine humor.

The first hour is sharply directed, character-driven drama that ranks with Scott's best work. Then he lapses into his usual mode - more a bombardier than an entertainer, filling the screen with sadistic violence and arbitrary plot twists. In all, a wasted opportunity.

Strong acting and smartly tuned-in directing turn a run-of-the-mill detective story into a striking, sometimes harrowing blend of horror and suspense.

Watching Demme's documentary is both a crash course in the nation's tumultuous past and a provocative visit with one of its most colorful citizens.

Almereyda's movie is riveting for several reasons: its inside look at Shepard in action, its vivid account of how a challenging play is brought from printed page to public stage, and its glimpses of Shepard's troubled youth.

Tarantino has always been an inventive director, and in Kill Bill: Vol. 2 he's at his cinematic best, showing an ingenuity that nothing in his monster hit "Pulp Fiction" surpasses.

The most entertaining scenes focus on the lovable louts and losers who share the boardinghouse where the protagonist - based on a comic-book character billed as a superhero without superpowers - prepares his grisly exploits. The rest is mayhem.

Rich atmospherics and an all-star British cast make this a superior melodrama if you can handle the heavy-breathing sex scenes.

In short, it's dull, derivative, and as lifelike as a heap of historical figurines. Few will remember this Alamo for long.

Olyphant steals the show as a cheeky porn producer. The rest is gimmicky and predictable, except for a clever surprise near the end.

Strenuously unfunny sequel.