This vivid exploration of the human animal creates a romantic alchemy that's raw, unsettling, and touching.

The film is ultimately so extraordinary because it deals with something so ordinary: the desire to be better than we are, without knowing how to do it.

Overall it's reasonably thrilling anyway. If you're hoping for a brilliant revisionist take on the franchise, forget it.

Connoisseurs of horror are bound to play favorites here (this amateur votes for Box), but there's one more thing that connects these three films--the brilliant cinematography of Christopher Doyle.

As a date-night movie for women of 50 or thereabouts, chances are it'll do the trick.

Alternately heartrending and buoyant, tragic and sweetly humorous, the film leaves an indelible impression on the heart and mind. It's among the best of the year.

This lovely movie, simply and beautifully shot in Brazil's northeastern countryside by cinematographer Breno Silveira, is satisfying from start to finish.

This film about sex is so joyless, so astonishingly unsexy, it's like watching porn with your grandfather going tsk-tsk-tsk over your shoulder for two hours.

Sigourney Weaver and Julianne Moore share their pain in a depressing World.

Much of Steamboy is actually reminiscent of "Wild Wild West," with a giant moving tower substituting for the giant spider, and the personalities of Will Smith and Kevin Kline being replaced by . . . no personality at all, really.

What makes Crash so gripping--so terrifying in spots, so moving in others, and even a little funny at times--is how nothing happens as we think it will.

Fright fans could do a lot worse than The Eye; the Pangs have talent, but when they realize that a film isn't the same thing as a feature-length commercial, perhaps they'll provide us with some more original visions.

Bright, lively and liberating movie.

The overall effect is scintillating and very engaging -- literally history in the making.

An hour of dour stagnation is a lot to take, even with good acting. So when the action finally does shift, toward the end of the film, it is a welcome relief.

The film successfully walks the thin line between slick commercialism and "serious" realism. It is sentimental, but it comes by its sentiment honestly, through well-observed performances by the leads and a keen insight into the quirks of the Japanese middle-class culture.

Craven's other accomplishment here, besides resuscitating the genre, is the way he keeps things scary even when they're at their funniest. The grand finale, while thoroughly bloody and tense, has some genuinely hilarious shtick.

A major weakness of A Soldier's Daughter is that it has no real plot.

Bellyflops into the increasingly complicated American high school experience with a healthy reservoir of wit.

You might feel constrained when it comes to a standing ovation, but there's certainly enough substance and yuk here to go along for the ride.

Elf may be no more than a pleasant, amusing trifle, a grin that fades well before Thanksgiving, but it also will endure in the way all decent Hollywood-made Christmas fairy tales last if they're rendered with good cheer and good will.

The result is a constant feeling of summary, saddled with four times the usual number of after-school issues. Tamblyn is a treat, playing intelligence and anger, and there are some real moments of connection between characters, but the film is hysterical with self-promotion.

Scott and Olds' is an essential movie, and one of the year's very best.

Aside from a single jazzy image of Hunt taking a nosedive off a Shanghai skyscraper, Abrams' movie is too oppressive, too enamored of its brutality to deliver anything like real thrills; its deeply unpleasant tone nearly makes you long even for Woo's cartoon absurdities.

Pak's writing has a simplicity that belies the film's emotional impact.

It's a movie about discomfort and distance, like an episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" or "The Larry Sanders Show" shot in deadpan black-and-white.

What about the activists (gay and straight) who want to secure legal benefits for all citizens, not just married ones?

The film is beautifully shot and well-acted, but, like the book, it never achieves anything like the import of the stories that inspired it. Balzac is even a little dull, especially toward the end.

Full of intellectual stimulation as well as low, dark pleasures--"Carnal Knowledge" redux!

Maugham's signature wit and tragic colorations are well served by director Istvan Szabo (Mephisto) and screenwriter Ronald Harwood (The Dresser).

Satisfying in its setup and execution, and the Catholic guilt streaked through its dank, rainy atmosphere serves it well. Nonetheless, the story's subtleties in this version are often outweighed by melodrama, sometimes verging on sap.

Pecker is a satire, but an incredibly good-natured one, which is not quite the contradiction in terms it might seem.

An engaging preapocalyptic fantasy.

No matter how hard the filmmakers work their narrator (Geoffrey Rush, as Oscar's great-grandson), he can't make the damn thing explicable, much less bring it to life.

It's nothing more than a very long movie about someone, literally and metaphorically, having to get back up on a horse.

Instead of slick heroism, the saving grace of The Matador (which was obviously made on something less than a blockbuster budget) lies in the comic interplay between Brosnan's ignoble Mr. Noble and the hapless square he picks to serve his purposes.

Linklater, whose intimate "Before Sunset" was an art-house wonder last year, proved he could make mainstream money with "School of Rock." With Bad News Bears, he proves he can waste it, too.

We become so absorbed in the ramifications of the techniques involved that a more challenging plot might have resulted in sensory overload.

Part of the reason that it doesn't quite succeed is that these messages are so tried and true.

The trouble with 12 and Holding, which pits four young protagonists in intertwining battles for spiritual (and, well, literal) survival, is that it's just too much.

A fascinating documentary by Bruce's longtime friend Rupert Murray, uses footage taken by both Bruce and Murray to document Bruce's harrowing, enlightening and occasionally hilarious experience. It's a wild ride.

The characters may be based on real people, with much of the dialogue culled directly from court transcripts, but Find Me Guilty plays the whole thing as comedy, and as everyone knows, putting a self-serious egomaniacal movie star in a bad hairpiece is comedy gold.

Explores a wealth of issues and conflicting ideologies.

Hasty pacing makes for a rich and exciting movie, but not an especially spooky or spellbinding one.

A small but grand expression of the beauty of the feminine, which brings everyone together with revised and deepened appreciation.

A disappointingly flat, disjointed affair.

Writer-director-actor Cedric Klapisch simultaneously shows great moviemaking flair and reveals a very peculiar worldview.

A psychotic we can't help falling for, Edward Norton's beautifully drawn and richly nuanced dreamer could, in time, prove to be one of the most memorable movie characters of recent years.

Altman gladly admits there's not much of a story here; his movies are driven by characters.

It's charming. It's hilarious. It is perhaps the most beautifully crafted, lovingly rendered portrait of extreme geekitude ever to grace the screen. It's Napoleon Dynamite.

The filmmakers' investment in their weird visions is wildly unorthodox, but the payoff is oddly satisfying.

The producers of this glorified latter-day frieze have gone nuts for computer-generated extras without clinching the essentials of character and catharsis.

Generous in spirit and fearlessly observant, this tale of an outcast Vietnamese man's journey to freedom deserves a place of honor among the great films portraying emigrant tenacity.

Whatever else is weak or indulgent in this fledgling effort -- self-consciousness and a certain grim solemnity come to mind -- it has the jolt of truth about it, like a lot of thinly veiled fiction.

Smart, sassy and much more fun than most political diatribes.

Mangold never ventures beyond the obvious. We're set up with righteous anger against the liberal establishment and then fobbed off with goombah melodramatics. The film should be called Cop Out.

Neither a mock-heroic cockeyed success story like "Ed Wood" nor a "Walk the Line"-style hagiography, Mary Harron's facile but hugely entertaining black-and-white biopic seems most interested in its subject--a studious southern girl who became the world's most celebrated fetish pinup--as an object.

This latest adventure proves to be a suitably sweet addition to Pooh's cinematic canon.

Northfork may be doomed, but the Polish brothers and cinematographer M. David Mullen (who worked with the brothers on their previous features, "Twin Falls, Idaho" and "Jackpot") make the place feel like heaven on earth.

Emotionally powerful.

Eight Below splits into two movies--the compelling tale of the dogs' struggle to pull together and survive and the much less interesting one about Jerry Shepard's emotional trauma and his search for redemption.

Neorealism it ain't, but if you have a sufficiently long attention span, there are moments of laugh-out-loud absurdity that are worth the price of admission.

The flashy sensationalism of The Sixth Sense -- maybe the best thing about it -- is at war with its desire for contemplation.

Funnier when high -- what isn't? -- Harold and Kumar may also serve as the first infomercial for weed and burgers.

Identity is an outright blast, so fun it's--pardon--scary.

An ethereal, creepy, almost breathtaking meditation on the life of a mind snapped in two.

Stupid camera shenanigans aside, theater veteran Crowley deftly directs his large, stellar cast, and playwright-cum-screenwriter Mark O'Rowe serves up a wild knot of character arcs pitched somewhere among the neighborhoods of Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and Danny Boyle.

Bottom line: It's hilarious, vicious, offensive, thoroughly profane and a joy to watch, just like you'd expect. Be sure to sit through the end credits for a bonus song from Kim Jong-il to Alec Baldwin.

The writing-directing team of brothers Larry and Andi Wachowski has chosen as its filmmaking debut a tightly constructed, stylishly (but rarely self-consciously) executed, gripping little noir parable that couldn't be more firmly grounded in American movie tradition if the filmmakers created a wacky romantic farce about mismatched paramours.

The whole project feels lazy and half-hearted.

The Dancer Upstairs would have made a suitable double feature with "The Quiet American"; both films unfold slowly, build toward an anxious climax and end with a shrug of grief.

Alternately fascinating and distracting.

The film falls short only in its refusal to take a stand on whether star Linda Lovelace was a victim, as she claimed.

If Hallström has a problem with tone, it lies in his almost supernatural niceness. Thus, what arrives on-screen is purely a man's feminism, simple and trite and beautiful and vital.

In the end, it's all just too damned much. It's more exhausting than edifying.

An ambitious, frustrating drag.

Fry establishes himself as an inspired, world-class talent behind the camera and delivers my favorite film of the year thus far.

The design is gorgeous, the dialogue delicious, and even the supporting characters prove resonant.

Here's a tip: When Vaughn and Wilson are outed as impostors and forced to leave Walken's estate, grab your stuff and walk out. You'll think you just saw a comedy masterpiece.

Like most films of its type, Something New is not tough to sit through, but the thought of paying full price to see it isn't especially desirable.

Its characters are complex and engaging, its central mystery pulls the action forward at a clip, and the performances by Paltrow and Davis are excellent. At the same time, it's a little too slick.

The movie has tremendous scope and charge and a dense period fabric, along with a volcanic performance by Djimon Hounsou, the West African actor who plays Cinque.

The film provides solid entertainment for kids but lacks any real sense of wonder and magic.

Robots doesn't rely on being current, which will ultimately render it as timeless as any great fable. At its center is a big, beating heart.

This valentine to Trekkiedom (produced by, who else, Paramount) doesn't go in very deep--probably doesn't intend to--but it's also not quite the promotional piece the studio may have envisioned.

A mind-numbing, achingly post-modern advertisement for itself, which attempts to distract us from its highly merchandised nature by constantly referring to it. In other words, it's morally corrupt, but your kids will love it.

Bjork holds the movie together, her natural charisma and the overwhelming intensity of her emotions should blind a lot of viewers to the ludicrousness of the story and the intentionally rotten videography.

In a confused world, this is a movie with answers.

An engaging, family-oriented romantic comedy that should appeal as much to fans of the original movie as to viewers unfamiliar with the 1961 Hayley Mills version.

If you were ever in marching band, you'll love this; if not, stay far away.

Standing on its own, it's comme ci, comme ça, self-serious when it should be adventurous, coy when it should be revelatory. One must afford it props, though, for its proud celebration of insanity. Now that is truly creepy.

Kind of meaningless--a thriller with delights that wear off before the credits even roll, a movie you might have watched on cable some Saturday afternoon and decided you didn't really waste that much time.

Sentimental, overbearing, flag-waving--and a crowd-pleaser.

Radford has made a gripping, highly cinematic adaptation of a gorgeous work of theater.

So, if you want to see this loud but rather ordinary epic, don't expect its tricked-up cultural and theological messages to carry much water. For entertainment value, it's hard to beat the climactic siege of Jerusalem, a Ridley Scott-perfect half-hour that matches anything in "Troy" or "Gladiator" for sheer, bloody, helmet-bashing mayhem.

What makes Silverman a truly gifted comic is her timing and delivery.

John Leguizamo, in a rare watchable performance.

The droll has been made dull, a most inexplicable and unfortunate turn of events for so adored a genius, goofball work as this.