The concept here holds more promise than the execution.

Mid90s, for all its darkness, is uplifted by its hilarious moments and joyous skating shots.

Bad Reputation comes off more as a fanboy’s declaration of reverence to the queen rather than an interrogation of one of the most iconic women in music.

Bessed with a gleamingly polished, very funny script.

Despite the fact that you can see every plot twist a mile off, director Tim Story keeps the script by Mark Brown, Don D. Scott and Marshall Todd rollicking with a jazzy spontaneity.

This time around, writer-director Robert Rodriguez has stumbled badly, creating a clunky, gadget-happy film full of characters -- even returning ones -- about whom it is hard to care.

Can he do the thing? Well, yes and no. He -- Mamet, David, celebrated celebrity playwright and less-certain maker of movies -- can do some of the things, like assemble a cast sleek as a cat.

Charmingly irreverent.

The movie is affectionate without exactly being infectious, and Browne, who begins his film with the Michael Moore–esque revelation that Americans bowl in greater numbers than they vote, disappoints by not devoting more attention to bowling in its amateur incarnations.

The finale goes on and on, but the movie is nicely photographed (by John Bailey) and duly empowering, and should please the vast teen-girl audience for which it's intended.

As the film works toward its negative Eden ending, having illustrated just how little a life is worth, one of its most potent points is how brutally destabilizing hope can be when despair has become the norm.

Director Derek Doneen opens hearts wide with his documentary The Price of Free, his tale of enslaved children working in factories in India. But he’ll also crush many of those hearts with the revelation that viewers are among the villains activist Kailash Satyarthi is fighting.

Once the Quay brothers confidently establish their film's astonishing look, they merely repeat their techniques until the images no longer delight or surprise, leaving all too visible the Quays' struggles with the trickier demands of storytelling and character development.

Superb documentary.

The film's power is undeniable, as a bittersweet valentine to Buzz and the many others who came to Hollywood and found a factory that produced dreams, yes, but nightmares too.

Cruise is probably the most graceful physical performer to occupy the screen since Burt Lancaster, and in this sort of action role, he's just about peerless...He may not be a great actor, but to find a greater movie star would be a nigh impossible mission.

Mystery Men gives proof that satire isn't dead.

Wright is a find, while Rowe may surprise those who dismissed him as a Brad Pitt look-alike when he first came to attention in "Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss." Here, Rowe displays new authority and confidence, as if lately he’s been looking in the mirror and seeing himself, rather than that other, more famous blond.

A witty exploration of cultural mythology, while simultaneously contributing to that mythology.

Sweet but slight pièce de fluff.

This is a heartfelt endeavor, given weight by Shimono's extraordinary performance, in which the actor uses the subtlest flicks of his weary brow to call forth torrents of sorrow and minefields of regret.

The film's self-limiting pacifism precludes a closer look at the poetry of war, which is not synonymous with poetry against war.

A witty, well-crafted comedy that combines primal slapstick with sharp satiric banter to keep children and parents laughing together.

It's worth fidgeting through the mediocre stuff to get to three good pieces. In one, Cate Blanchett turns in a tour de force as both herself and her aggressive, resentful Aussie cousin in an awkward encounter that captures the pathological relationship between ordinary people and celebrities.

Absorbing documentary about gay marriage is most persuasive when most specific.

As Future untangles the many ways in which our food supply has been co-opted and tainted in pursuit of a booming bottom line, you realize that beneath its tasteful façade, Garcia's documentary is actually nothing short of a pure horror film.

The downside to what is, in essence, an authorized biography is that the movie plays like an inflated "Today" show profile; the upside is that Busch has given Catania and Ignacio complete access to the old footage from his Limbo Lounge days.

From its riveting opening to its gripping conclusion, . . . So Goes the Nation is arguably the most intelligent, kinetic analysis of the modern election process since "The War Room."

Like Michael Haneke's "Caché," this effectively creepy little customer from Dominik Moll (With a Friend Like Harry) fires yet another shot across the bows of French bourgeois complacency, while throwing in a wink and a nudge about the perils of surveillance.

When movie clichés are presented with rigor and feeling, they can pack a fresh punch.

By turns merry, tough-minded and sweetly nostalgic.

A clumsily directed, painstakingly faithful adaptation thats heavy on plot, light on nuance, and features in its title role a young newcomer whose most striking quality is an almost preternatural absence of oomph.

For a film hinged on one of the more passionate art forms, it's all a little bloodless.

This bleak debut feature from writer-directors Alex and Andrew Smith would be all but impossible to sit through if it weren’t for Ryan Gosling and Clea Duvall.

This illuminating, often rousing film fits snugly alongside the various anti-Bush/corporate/globalization documentaries that continue to pack the art houses.

Strip away the cavernous lofts, the minimalist art galleries and the pricey consulting rooms, and you have four characters unable to earn their keep with the audience.

Elevated by fantastic performance footage of Sa and his young protégés singing, dancing and rhythmically banging on cans, plastic bottles or anything else that can be fashioned into a drum -- and a cultural revolution.

As a thriller, Eden Lake absolutely works, but feel-good entertainment it isn’t. Don’t bring a date.

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.

A smart, quietly moving film.

Unapologetically dopey and undeniably ingratiating, the supersized Kenny Chesney: Summer in 3D makes a surprisingly convincing argument for big, dumb likability.

What enrich the film are its layers of detail -- moronic racial protocols, turf wars, pecking orders, men as livestock -- the authenticity of the dialogue and the rich range of characters.

Scenically beautiful, rhythmically uneven comedy.

But for all Bening’s high emoting and her trademark giggle, here overused to the point of annoyance, for most of its length Being Julia offers little insight into a woman whose life is ruled by theatrics.

Watching this well-behaved adaptation of one of Greene's most personal novels, you can't help but wish that the novelist had been around to write his own script.

Jindabyne wears its class politics lightly, weaving them into a ghost story about the intimate connection between how we treat our living and our dead that will hover around your shoulders long after you leave the theater.

Writer-director Todd Haynes (Safe, Poison) still makes movies like a first-time filmmaker afraid he won't get another chance; he crams every idea, every image ever dreamed, onscreen.

Spielberg's infidelity to Aldiss (and perhaps to Kubrick, who knows?) would be pardonable if it didn't ruin his movie. In the end, he has failed to make a persuasive, smart movie about robots and people.

Where the young writer-director impresses is in the unforced sketching of era details (gas lines, the tacky energy of roller-skating rinks), in the sharp psychological insight into his lead characters, and in the performances he pulls from his actors.

While all the pieces don't quite add up in the end, as memory, fantasy and delusion collide, the film succeeds again and again at pulling you to the edge of your seat and keeping you there.

Despite its flaws, Arlington Road romps home as an absorbing, unpredictable thriller.

By the time Leila's brow furrows in concern for the father, the film has absolutely earned its tug at your heart.

Things could be worse. At the end of the day, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is nothing if not consistent -- taking care of business solidly, professionally and without a lick of the genuine wonderment or inspiration that you can find in surplus in Jon Favreau's Spielberg-influenced "Iron Man."

It's no doubt rude, and perhaps irrelevant, to point out that John Waters still doesn't know how to make a movie.

Indeed, one of the nicest things about this jewel of a film is that there isn't much of a story at all -- just a handful of delicately drawn characters moving through life that is at once familiar and yet slightly elevated by a director who loves the good in people more than the bad.

The air of self-imposed misery can dampen the film's humor, but Muccino never stays still long enough for the emotions to become leaden, and the strong cast carries the film to its striking, bittersweet conclusion.

Strangely uplifting, a kind of ode to how on Earth we think we're passing the time.

Above all, you've got Jennifer Grey, as a rich girl summering in the Catskills and falling for her working-class dance instructor, played by Patrick Swayze. The chemistry between them is red-hot, and they're wonderful dancers.

As to be expected, it's all very beautiful; too bad it's also often annoying, save for a heartbreaking final half-hour.

Blakeson's feature-length calling card has storyboarded austerity and sadomasochistic promise but in the end lets the game play out in a familiar flurry of double-crossings, two-timings and false deaths, content to only fetishize itself.

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.

The film is at once breathtaking and ridiculous, and it's the tension between these two extremes, as well as Carax's own intoxicating style, that makes it essential viewing.

Leaves you reeling from the force of the humanity it captures and -- in its own gut-wrenching way -- honors.

The limp title says it all.

Always adept at hitting emotional cues cleanly, Foster in this role also lets herself get lost in the moment, which is something she hasn't often allowed herself to do since "The Silence of the Lambs."

Gradually, and with a kind of inquisitive generosity, the filmmaker's scope expands to take in Casim's parents and two sisters, whose public shame and private despair at having the only son move in with a “goree” - a white girl - is made palpably, wrenchingly real.

There may be no other actor (Thornton)working today (or as frequently) who is this good each and every time out.

We're afforded the illusion of an omniscience so complete as to mark a pioneering breakthrough in movie storytelling, one not to be missed.

Though some will see this fast-paced film as proof that hoop dreams really can come true, the real strength of Through the Fire lies in its careful, often indirect questioning of the moral universe of professional sports and big-money endorsements.

All you really need to know, finally, from a consumer angle, is that it is not boring, and looks fantastic, and maintains the wit and spirit of the original, and that -- it takes care of the grown-ups first. There are obscure puns and cultural references for Mom and Dad, dog pee and monkey poo (metaphorical) for the kids, and fighting for . . . everybody!

In her charming debut feature, writer-director Alice Wu works hard to sidestep both pathos and antic comedy, an admirable ambition that makes for a relentlessly low-key film that nonetheless builds to a third act rich in surprising turns of character.

Director Darnell Martin (I Like it Like That) races through the script's bullet points with a brisk superficiality that leaves crucial plot points underdeveloped and unresolved, and refuses to engage the dark side of Leonard Chess’ paternalism.

Ali boasts a whole tribe of outstanding secondary performances, of which Jon Voight's Cosell, in an outrageous rug and several tons of pasty-face makeup, is easily the funniest.

Cuesta works well with underage actors, but there's no hiding the fact that these kids amount to little more than the sum of their suffering at the hands of cardboard parental incompetents

This is the umpteenth movie I’ve seen this year about guys in their 30s who aren't quite sure what they want to do with their lives, and it's the only one that strikes a real chord, because it's neither an exaltation nor a condemnation of slackerdom, but rather just a sweet little fable about how sometimes the life that you think could be so much better is actually pretty damn good already.

Murray honors his buddy by presenting him as a sympathetic enigma - the puzzling center of this very human suspense thriller.

Promising yet problematic.

Shot quickly and cheaply in high-definition video and almost entirely on one set, the movie has almost zero visual energy, but it teems with snappy dialogue and the same carnival anarchy Lumet brought to "Dog Day Afternoon" and "Network."

Its suggestion that Israel, of all nations, should know better than to persecute minorities within and across its borders, give the film a thrilling universal appeal.

The documentary, directed by Chris Metzler, Jeff Springer and Quinn Costello, and narrated by Wendell Pierce, uses cartoon diagrams and a cheerful score by the Lost Bayou Ramblers to make its tale of inherited destruction and trauma as charming as possible. The way that initial ease peels back is the film’s greatest asset.

Climaxes in a flood of revelations that, like so much of the film, take us where we least expect to go.

There's so little going on with either the film's story or its characters, however, that there is plenty of time to get lost in cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's eerily beautiful visuals.

The movie's pleasures draw on old-fashioned Italian neo-realist simplicity.

McKinnon's direction is nothing if not atmospheric -- his best scenes unfold with a pungent languor that suggests the power of the backwoods to turn hours into days and days into years. If only the sum total were a movie more "In the Bedroom" than it is everything-but-the-kitchen-sink.

Lacking energy and pace and enslaved by a ghastly score, this tepid movie left me longing alternately for David Lean's thrillingly grim 1948 masterpiece, and Carol Reed's chipper 1968 sing-along, with pretty tunes by Lionel Bart.

It was a hellish encounter, as well as a portent of the 10 years to come, and as such deserves far better than Mel Gibson's glower and writer-director Randall Wallace's guns-and-Moses platitudes.

The characters are well-observed and mercifully unrepresentative of their home countries. (Kevin Bishop is laugh-out-loud funny as a clueless British visitor who shows up to offend more than one national sensibility.)

Scaled like an epic but possessing the narrative simplicity of a fable, The Warrior unfolds over a brisk 85 minutes of screen time, keeping dialogue to a minimum as it celebrates the power of stories told through handcrafted, CGI-free images.

Writer-director David Jacobson has an excitingly clear-eyed, unsentimental feel for the intensity of adolescent passion.

And though at over two hours the movie is too long and too slow, de Caunes sustains a sense of mystery and ambiguity to the end of what is both a satisfying character study and a stately quasi-thriller for amateur historians.

An enjoyable, sneaky-smart fable about the collision between innocence and experience.

About the only good thing to say about this mess is that it's rotten enough that even Altman cultists may be forced to reconsider their devotion.

While the film strives to prove its cool, it's also built on the insufferably antique idea that some flattery and a good fuck are all any woman needs.

If Napoleon Dynamite really is, as reported, a semiautobiographical exercise, it is one of the most astoundingly self-hating such exercises in memory.

For Conran, after they finished shooting pesky actors, the real fun began at the computer screen with his delirious imagination in free-fall.

Precious little history of any kind shows its face in Marie Antoinette. The omission is strategic.

Itself an observational relationship comedy, Cold Weather's underlying tension is reminiscent of an old-fashioned comedy of remarriage.

As you stagger out of the theater after 78 breathless minutes of Gamazon and Dela Llana's electrifying location shooting and disquieting insights into Christian-Islamic tensions, you may well feel that your eyes have been opened too.