Is The Break-Up worth your time? Let's put it this way: Whenever Vaughn is onscreen, it is. When he's not, it ain't. The movie's a comedy, but it's also about a breakup, so it gets a bit maudlin toward the end.

And remember, this is just part one of a trilogy. While all may not be clear yet, there's certainly enough here to make you curious about the other two parts.

This pitch-perfect, richly detailed portrait of raw greed works very well.

Its substance and high ambitions, salted with humor, make for a rewarding two hours in the dark.

Unlike in, say, "Fight Club," director Hans Weingartner does not hedge his bets on the notion of whether simple-minded anarchy is any better than societal conformity -- his heart is with the Edukators, period.

Broken Wings' great strength is that it doesn't overreach. These characters undergo no enormous sea changes, no crazy upheavals. Instead, they find themselves trying to roll with the punches--trying to maintain and survive.

We have a whole new reason to appreciate cinema's most creative chameleon (Depp) since Peter Sellers. The film itself is pretty and sweet but a tad soggy.

A former yeshiva student himself, Gorlin turns this tale of political intrigue and the search for divinity into an act of liberation -- if not outright defiance.

A solo "Thelma and Louise" crossed with a gender-reversed "The Fugitive" with a dry twist of "Fletch."

A lovely little comedy that--like its predecessor--will, one hopes, buck the odds and find its audience.

What isn't hard to say is that Noé really isn't a very talented filmmaker.

Be forewarned: Scenes of the protagonist learning to swallow the drug pellets will make many viewers queasy. Rarely has the power of suggestion been so unsettling.

Ferrell owns the screen.

Nothing, however, can diminish the sense of horror we feel at what happened that day in September, while Macdonald's revelations and the candid comments he elicits more than make up for the film's less successful elements.

God bless Johnny Depp. For the second time this year, the man has almost single-handedly redeemed an action movie that would otherwise be indistinguishable from the pack.

The Ladykillers fits snugly among the Coens' lighter and breezier movies--the ones you forget after you see them once and begin to appreciate and finally adore the more often you revisit them.

Neil LaBute is back to his old self, and the cinematic world is a better place for it.

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

Zucker!'s a bona fide hit in Germany, where, apparently, there's been a shortage of Jewish comedies since, oh, 1939, give or take. But it deserves its imported rep; rare's the movie that has an Orthodox Jew tripping on Ecstasy while getting a massage from a Palestinian prostitute hours before his mamala's funeral.

While Mononoke is often gorgeous to look at and has a far more sophisticated story than most Japanese animated features, it still feels overlong and dramatically unengaging.

A pensive, reflective movie, more or less equal in tone to Ang Lee's "The Ice Storm," yet, because of its temporal breadth and tight emotional focus, it packs a more intimate punch.

It makes for a nice lightweight evening.

The Lost World is a smoother, scarier ride than its predecessor, with twice as many dinosaurs twice as well designed eating twice as many people...But he's not particularly playful with his terrors here, and that's a disappointment coming from a filmmaker who can mix scares and laughs the way no one else ever has.

A fun and loving biopic

It's during the shift to seriousness that The Ice Storm makes its missteps. The intrusion of tragedy, while altogether believable, still seems like a device, a calculated tug at the heart strings. It is, in short, a once-effective ploy that now feels like a cliche. A near-miss might have been more effective.

Horror fans will have a blast, though it's unlikely anyone else will be won over.

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

Watching Cowboy del Amor is like sitting in a room with someone who's making funny racist cracks; you can't help but laugh, but you feel sullied by the implicit collusion. For that reason, the film tips over into the camp of tragedy. Or if it is a comedy, it's the Shakespearean kind, where the marriages at the end are utterly unsettling.