It’s fascinating that this portrait of the rise, fall and rise of Midwestern organic farmer John Peterson can be read in so many different ways, only some of which appear intentionally in Taggart Siegel’s sympathetic documentary about his friend and fellow artist.

Intermittently amusing, rarely illuminating and ultimately tedious documentary.

Although they’re not revealing in a "Barbara Walters gets the guest to cry" sense, the interview segments are queasily fascinating.

Glory Road keeps its focus frustratingly narrow. There's a nugget of an interesting idea here...But first-time director James Gartner's movie is less a study of race than it is a fast break of underdog clichés and "inspirational" speeches.

Queen Latifah gives a spectacular performance in this hugely enjoyable wish-fulfillment fantasy.

The film's one indisputably great performance comes from Sewell, whose Marke is no mere cuckold, but a good, honorable man caught up in circumstances beyond his ken, and ultimately this Tristan & Isolde's most tragic figure.

And whenever the film shifts from spunky "let's put on a show" fun to overly earnest drama, it slows to a crawl, with mawkish performances that fail to rise above the soggy material.

Sean's grandfather was the colorful longshore Communist Archie Brown, and part of the film's charm lies in its evocation of a generational mural that includes old Marxists, flower children and the progeny of red-diaper babies.

Like "The Pianist," Fateless painstakingly builds up the reality of what it is like to be drawn into a perfectly arbitrary hell you can neither comprehend nor rationalize.

Although he damn near slanders an entire country - expect poor Slovakia's tourism industry to take a hit - Roth is not an unskilled ringleader of gory crisis moments, or breathless escapes. The squeamish should simply stay away, but carnage queens will appreciate some of Roth's less grisly, even amusing details.

Sandler crony Allen Covert, the star, producer and co-writer of this stunted-adolescence classic, hilariously explores a previously untapped nexus of stoner humor, joystick geekdom, elderly women and a martial arts-taught chimp.

There are all sorts of noteworthy people in this silly vampire epic, including acting greats Sir Ben Kingsley and Geraldine Chaplin, but the only artist this critic wants to heap praise upon is the regrettably unidentified Supervisor of Blood Splatter: Nice work, dude.

Some critics are badly selling the film short, when the story it tells, measured strictly in terms of emotional power and overall fun, is as moving and pleasurable as any matinee item by Ford, Hawks or Raoul Walsh.

Match Point is a perfectly presentable, entirely unremarkable domestic melodrama parked queasily between opera and realism, two irreconcilable forms if ever there were.

Full of clever reversals, brief triumphs and bitter setbacks, Wolf Creek is consummately well-crafted, unapologetically vicious and leavened with moments of humor that merely intensify the horror.

The movie cries out for the bawdy, rompy air that filled Richard Lester's "Three Musketeers" movies, and what it gets instead is the same dispassionate "professionalism" that has made Hallström a steady fixture in a Hollywood that could do with an infusion of Casanova's own virile lifeblood.

This Rob Reiner comedy jogs along pleasantly enough to the finish (Costner is charming as always in over-the-hill-ruin mode), which entails a less-than-shattering insight about love and marriage.

Well before The New World's two-and-one-half hours are up, Malick's tree-hugging reveries have become suffocating, no matter the unquestionable tastefulness with which they're rendered -- more painterly vistas, more Wagner (and a little Mozart, too), ravishing re-creations of 17th-century London. Surely, only a Philistine could find any fault with this, or believe, perchance, that Malick's famous poetic beauty had turned poetically fatal.

Maybe Brosnan is so shockingly good in this film because Kinnear gives him the sounding board and safety net that the actor never had in his sadly solitary spy-flick duties.

Munich is at best a muddled prayer for peace whose weakness stems not from its politics but from the misconception of its main character. Avner is not just a fictional character, but an absurdly improbable expression of Spielbergian schmaltz.

The eerily timely subject of Haneke's film is France's unwilling encounter with the disenfranchised minorities it has tried to sweep under the rug. As one who giggled through his widely admired, irredeemably silly "The Piano Teacher," I wasn't prepared to be easily won over by Caché, but it turns out to be his most human and affecting movie to date.

The movie strains so hard to have its heart in the right place that it never really exploits the guilty-pleasure fun of the premise.

For Denis’ film - which may be her most intricately constructed and intensely beautiful to date - is one that transcends words and stories, a movie to be felt rather than rationalized.

What keeps the film afloat (barely) is the sheer charisma of Eugene Levy and the young Alyson Stoner, who manage to find emotion and laughs in the tritest of dialogue and the flimsiest of scenarios.

This is satire made from the inside of the ivory tower, and when, late in the third act, Fun With Dick and Jane decides to come on strong with platitudes about how the petit bourgeois really can stick it to the haute bourgeois, it goes from bad to worse.

I have the greatest respect for Kazuo Ishiguro, whose wonderful novel "The Remains of the Day" became one of the best films in the Merchant-Ivory oeuvre. But the combination of his stately writing and James Ivory's stately directing, even when pepped by Christopher Doyle's fizzy cinematography, makes for fatally low-key viewing.

A potentially interesting tale flailing haplessly in the quicksand of holiday-movie formula.

Making an altogether impressive big-screen directing debut, Jones exudes quiet control over this full-bodied Western, taking pleasure in his measured pacing, mixing somber authority with flashes of surrealist wit and luxuriating in the magnificent, vanishing vistas of his home state.

The musical film version of The Producers is, for better or worse, a faithful record of the stage production, adhering to the same if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it philosophy that informed the recent "Rent."

Not even Gorshin's marvelously dead-on impression of Burns can save a movie that rewrites screwball comedy in the same way King Henry VIII rewrote Catholicism.

With its chatty, overstuffed patter, Hoodwinked strains at the seams to look with it, like one of those dressed-alike Beverly Hills mother-daughter combos. Having said all that, the songs (yes, there are songs, too), mostly written by Todd Edwards, provide an unexpected bright spot.

The clammy eccentricity on display -- is like a wet blanket, while Colin Friesen's lazy screenplay has all the wit of a slushball. "March of the Penguins" was funnier and edgier.

King Kong isn't terrible, but it's something that none of Jackson's previous movies ever was -- it's enervating.

Niftily shot and edited, The Grace Lee Project isn't just a witty unpacking of stereotype. It's also a welcome freshening of the old documentary saw that there's no such thing as an ordinary person.

Since premiering on the festival circuit in 2002, this small masterpiece has been one of the best films around not to secure a proper theatrical release, and while one week on a single L.A. screen at the height of the crowded holiday season may not exactly qualify as proper, it's nevertheless a joyous happening.

It's not a great movie, or even a particularly good one, but it's spectacular. No expense has been spared. The technical crew reads like a roll call of Oscar-night regulars.

Brokeback Mountain is at once the gayest and the least gay Hollywood film I've seen, which is another way of saying that Lee has a knack for culling universality from the most specific identities.

Stephen Frears has had more downs than ups of late, but I would never have thought the man responsible for "My Beautiful Laundrette" and "The Grifters" capable of stooping to pap as pappy as this unbearably chipper take on the real-life story of Laura Henderson.

By staying focused on the children -- frightened evacuees from the London Blitz whose parallel war in Narnia both taps into and finally quiets their unspoken terrors -- Adamson keeps faith with the humanity of Lewsis' tale.

Marebito's ghoulish delight in gore will turn off the squeamish, but tougher souls will recognize that the over-the-top shocks are Shimizu's way of illustrating how terrifying the risk of human connection can be.

Nepotism can't account for the movie's stylistic horrors. Writer-director Arjun Sablok, a TV veteran with visual ADD, has pitched the candy-colored cuteness at a frenzy that verges on hysteria.

A warm, spacious road movie with a stirring sense of the wide-open landscapes of the American West.

The plot frequently resets/realigns itself in the fashion of "Lost" or "Alias," as good guys become bad guys, friends become enemies, and combatants become lovers. To portray confusion and uncertainty is one thing; to make a film this unsure of itself, wracked by its own faulty footing and reticence, is quite another.

Transamerica is about as sexual as "The Brady Bunch." It's about an intelligent woman in excruciating transition to a new body that will line up with an identity she's held all along.

Hardcore fans will appreciate the handful of genuinely gnarly aerial sequences, but these gravity-defying stunts, which can be thrilling as part of a five-minute James Bond pre-credit sequence, grow very tedious when repeated over almost two hours.

Gores certainly seems to be enjoying himself, and diplomacy and plain old good taste prevent one from saying much of anything about his screen performance. Arnold doesn't merit such kindness, nor does producer and director Penelope Spheeris, whose work barely rates above the level of rote competence.

The archetypal Townes Van Zandt song is a low-key ballad filled with sadness and failed humanity. Director Margaret Brown's documentary about the revered songwriter's songwriter (who died at the age of 52 on New Year's Day, 1997) keenly achieves the same tone.

The kids absolutely win your heart, but there's something off-putting in the film's lazy juxtaposition of unexamined Negro dysfunction tropes (absent fathers, violent streets) against an idyllic Africa tended by white benevolence.

Quietly devastating.

In its well-mannered way, this genteel film delicately keeps its platonic May-December love story from turning creepy. But without the sexual undertones and macabre humor of Hal Ashby's classic, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is merely a soft, slightly patronizing movie about the poignancy of aging.

Its jazzy rhythm and economy of form place it closer to a 1950s film noir, shot through with humor so dark you need a flashlight to see it.

The movie pitches itself as a modern-day "Romeo and Juliet," but its execution is so lazy and inept that if the lovers were to die horribly it would come more as relief than tragedy. Sadly, in this respect, as in every other, In the Mix disappoints.

The infectious high spirits of the performers help to carry the day.

If the great movie musicals are the ones that transport us to some heady superreality, the only place Rent takes us to is the Nederlander Theatre.

Likable (if not especially funny).

Despite Menkin's clear belief that he's crafted a rousing true-life drama, his film plays like a cliché-ridden, painfully self-conscious Hollywood melodrama about a noble person with disabilities.

The picture is an enormous disappointment... The result is one of the most self-consciously grimy movies on record - it looks as if the negative were developed in a mud bath.

Seldom have form, content and cultural sensibility been so excitably aligned as in this fascinating, exasperating film about the unholy marriage of power politics and global business.

First-time director Joey Curtis shows inklings of a future as an accomplished cinematographer, his digital videography lending some scenes a mesmerizingly pixellated quality and others the hectic blur of a surveillance video.

Came alive only in the presence of a supposed dead man -- specifically, the nefarious Lord Voldemort.

An engaging biopic that would totally lack surprise were it not for Reese Witherspoon, and a healthy touch of ambivalence about the populist myth that bound The Man in Black to his adoring public.

It's a mean-spirited exercise in stilted outrageousness.

Selected as Italy's entry for best foreign film at this year's Academy Awards, Private was disqualified for not being predominantly in Italian. A pity, since this meticulously nonpartisan film, even as it makes the case for passive resistance, shows what devastating lack of appeal the strategy has for young Palestinians.

Jordan is trying for a surrealist romp, and it's as coy and callow as you'd expect from a movie with a lead character nicknamed Kitten.

All but a silent movie, Frédéric Fonteyne’s strikingly atmospheric film - adapted by Philippe Blasband and Marion Hänsel from a 1937 novel - relies on the extraordinarily mobile face of Emmanuelle Devos to express the pain of a woman who has no language for her inner turmoil.

By crafting its message in mostly understated strokes, The Syrian Bride touches your heart, which you might not even fully realize until its deft, wordless final moments sweep by you.

It's rarely a good sign when a movie feels obliged to add the words "a fable" beneath its main title -- and Undertaking Betty is no exception.

Directed by Swedish filmmaker Mikael Håfström, who's clearly new at the genre, this aptly named movie is riddled with obvious parallels, crude moral talking points, a script so awful it's practically avant-garde, and a vain attempt at comic relief by RZA.

The result is a glorious low-tech pleasure that may be the most lyrical, phantasmagoric boys' adventure story since Joe Dante's Explorers.

McGehee and Siegel's ornate structure and editing stay just this side of tricky, as does their borderline-goofy use of special effects to make us see the world (and the words) through Eliza's anxious eyes.

Fun, scattershot Hollywood spoof.

For all its shock-driven, laugh-out-loud moments, what makes Jesus so entertaining is that it puts you in the presence of a dementedly sharp mind -- one that understands that leftist subversion doesn't have to coddle or breast-feed the choir.

Grounded in the easy rhythms of daily life, this charming little film shows unexpected grit in sequences set in the white household where Lindiwe works, a place so oppressive that it suddenly seems way past time for South African movie characters - and their home audience - to experience a dose or two of Hollywood-style wish fulfillment.

Even more problematic is the script's clumsy, sprawling architecture, Sheridan's clubfooted sense of pacing and his grubby, indistinct visuals. The only upside? The Chieftains aren't on the soundtrack.

Chicken Little is a clunky, arbitrarily plotted, over-caffeinated spritz that, despite colorfully visualizing a world of suburbanized animals, shifts from social-outcast comedy to underdog clichés to War of the Worlds mayhem as if the filmmakers were an improv troupe slamming through genre requests.

Curiously, Jarhead transforms Swofford himself (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) from the book’s duty-bound youth, desperate to live up to his father's military legacy, into an enigmatic voyeur whose feelings and motivations are rarely made clear.

If you cut through Lucas' thickets of self-reflexivity, metaphysical mumbo jumbo and banal potshots at media violence, there are three ace performances here by actors who can elevate and enliven even as mediocre a piece of material as this.

It's fair to assume that most viewers likely to see the film, whose title is the very definition of truth in advertising, already own the knowledge being sold.

The filmmaking is actually quite polished, and Ribisi is fascinating to watch -- his fluttery weirdness has never seemed more grounded and resonant, turning Gray's self-destructive egoism into near tragedy.

The list of ills is endless, well-researched, and cross-referenced repeatedly for emphasis. That makes the film a bit of a slog at times, but the fury and grief of the folks interviewed propel it forward.

More of a Lifetime holiday special than a theatrical feature, writer-director Kate Montgomery's tale of love and mistaken identity at a Native American ski resort is too sticky-sweet to be memorable.

In spite of its sympathy, Derailroaded veers into reality-TV voyeurism whenever the former street singer bemoans his lack of fame or breaks into childish caterwauling.

The Legend of Zorro is a Saturday matinee entirely lacking in Saturday-matinee thrills or brevity -- what's passable for the first 80 minutes or so becomes intolerable as the movie ticks past the two-hour mark.

On and on drags this amour fou, with its one-liners, ripostes, elaborate misunderstandings and chastened reaction shots, all courtesy of writer-director Ben Younger, straining to let out his inner femme after the testosterone excesses of "Boiler Room."

Saw II repels, morally and aesthetically, and while some -- including the filmmakers, perhaps -- may take this as a compliment, it isn't intended as one. Let the game stop. Please.

The Weather Man begs to be taken seriously and can't easily be dismissed; it kicks around in your mind for a good long while after you've seen it. Cage, who does his finest work since "Leaving Las Vegas," has stripped himself bare of the patented tics and mannerisms he honed in one Jerry Bruckheimer movie too many.

Director Black is competent with the camera, but he seems to have instructed the entire cast to deliver their lines in hushed tones and pauses pregnant with hoped-for meaning -- except for Kwanten, whose overenthusiastic impersonation of a red-state rube is as grating as horseshoes on a blackboard.

Conn is exasperating and heroic in equal measure, an altogether riveting portrait of motherly devotion at its most primal.

Overall, Whitely's debut film may just fill you with an unexpectedly deep elation.

Abu-Assad, who made the lovely 2002 film "Rana's Wedding," is a far more gifted observer of the everyday than he is an action director, which is why, in Paradise Now, he productively sidetracks into a persuasive and often very funny portrait of the irrationalities of life under occupation.

Title notwithstanding, Three . . . Extremes really offers only two.

The meat of the film is their wittily edited interviews with company members, now in their 80s and 90s and scattered around the world, many of them still active as teachers and consultants.

Baffling too is The Rock's choice to follow up his acclaimed performance in "Be Cool" with a role that requires him to do little more than widen his eyes and grunt lines.

This is as corny as it sounds, and yet not half as cloying and sentimental as you expect. At the end of the day, the horse may win the race, but the fate of the American heartland looms large and unresolved.

There's something refreshing about a film set in Los Angeles that gets its L.A.-ness right -- the difference in vibe between Silver Lake and the Hollywood Hills, or the types of people at CityWalk versus Saks. It is that sense of specificity, both geographic and emotional, that gives Shopgirl its pull.

A steaming compost heap of high-art pretense and half-cocked psychoanalysis that almost makes you sorry Nicolas Roeg isn't making pictures anymore.

Snappy, fun and outrageously irreverent, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is the work of someone with nothing to lose, which is only to the audience's gain.

Rousing, quietly outraged documentary.