What at first seems emotionally charged, ultimately comes off as contrived.

Whaley successfully balances his scenes on a knife-edge of tenderness and anger that was Truffaut's trademark.

Audiences are destined to debate the film's final scenes, where Hanley piles on plot twists, leading to a coda that turns a creepily ambiguous story about God and the terrifying power of paternal love into something closer to an X-File.

A bracingly sarcastic political comedy -- it opens on a bound copy of Mexico's Constitution, stuffed with cash -- possessed of a baleful satiric eye for hypocrisy and greed, a delicious anti-clerical bent, and pitch-perfect comic timing.

Without its cast -- the cream of France's female acting elite -- François Ozon's ambivalent musical-comedy homage to the 1950s wouldn't be much.

The Girl From Paris may not have half the smooth technique of "Swimming Pool," but it has 10 times the heart and soul.

While it comes on like a flag-waver, it actually delivers something more nuanced. Its underlying skepticism about the Korean War seems to have jibed with the current national mood: The picture was, deservedly, a huge hit.

While it's true that most of us make our way through life without a plan, the studied arbitrariness of Page's accommodating ramble from Hicksville to Smutsville doesn't make for thrilling cinema.

Amusing, beautifully drawn one-hour film.

Like Max Cady in "Cape Fear," the prototypical prole-stalks-bourgeois thriller, Sy is employed simply to scare the family members silly and, in so doing, make them stronger. Call it an exercise in threat management.

So stuck is the movie inside the heads and hearts of its indisputably gifted makers, it never quite makes the leap into ours.

For Sokurov, the relationship between a father and a son surpasses physical, even human intimacy -- it’s something approaching the sacred.

There is something quite heartening about watching these kids earnestly guide others around their memorial.

Aranoa's bleak yet warmly humanistic Princesas deftly and sympathetically ponders the interlocked destinies of two Madrid prostitutes.

Grisman's warm, loving home movie in the guise of a documentary.

For a movie conceived and executed in the mainstream Hollywood idiom, it has uncommon depth and honesty.

In its formal daring and exquisite style, the movie is itself an act of resistance against what Godard sees as a modern triumphalist culture that turns historical truth to lies and love to images created to make money.

Marshall isn't exactly a cinematic poet, but he does a fine job delineating each individual dog's personality, as well as the shifting hierarchy of power within the pack, which is why it's so exasperating that he and first-time screenwriter Dave Digillo are forever cutting away to dull Jerry and his stateside quest for rescue-mission funds.

I’m happy to report that I have no idea what’s going on in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake, and that’s wonderful. The two Suspirias function more as companion pieces than as mirrored twins.

It's all part of a larger calculus that the filmmakers hope will translate into a thinking person's thriller. If only they themselves knew how to figure it.

Thraves escapes formula by shaping the film around low-key incidents instead of speeches or overt lessons. There are plenty of side streets here.

Bardem, given the only fully fleshed-out character to play, is a marvel to behold...If only he had found a more soulful, less didactic movie to be plunked down into.

Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan lets the tension rise slowly, leads you everywhere you don't expect, doesn't rip you off and totally freaks you out -- all without stale effects or gore.

These live performances and classic music videos drive home the point that part of the Giants' longevity flows from the fact that they can't be explained, only experienced.

Smart, goofy and endearing, Cho and Penn make a terrific team, and the fact that they're starring in their own movie suggests that, in the Hollywood comedy frat house, there's finally room for everyone.

Watt seems to want to say something about the role of fate and happenstance in creating connections between people, but she never quite brings the strands of her ideas together.

No new narrative ground is broken, but there's a lived-in, musical feel to this tale of a fiercely independent, thoroughly screwed-up building contractor (Ashley Judd, in a pleasing return to the directness of her first significant role, in Victor Nunez's "Ruby in Paradise").

Director Tonie Marshall has taken a very simple story and laced it with potent details that make the film a rich map of her lead character's inner life.

Cooney's achingly clever script has more up its sleeve than just Agatha Christie -- he also evokes "Psycho," "The Sixth Sense," "Poltergeist" and "The Omen" -- and the final third dishes up a twist that isn't just surprising, it's revealing

Cloaking (Bateman's) world in a hyperrealist light so sharp you could cut yourself on it, Harron keeps the violence minimal, over the top and ghoulishly funny.

Beyond that surface grit, Intermission is still a fairly saccharine collage of self-redemptive gestures and happy endings that, true to its title, only fitfully compels.

Accomplished yet uneven feature.

LaGravenese (writer of "The Fisher King," adapter of "The Bridges of Madison County," making his directorial debut) eschews distractions of style and molds our attention to the performances.

While the women go through a few of the motions, shifting decorously under the sheets and sucking face, there's no lust in their coupling, just choreography and the conceit of two filmmakers with nothing more on their minds than fake dykes and bloodshed.

Schizo is an earnest also-ran, sadly muffled by the opaque performance of non-actor Oldzhas Nusupbayev.

While the entertainment value of Cloverfield is highly negotiable, it's clear that Abrams has consciously aligned himself with those filmmakers who have used the template of a grade-B monster/invasion movie -- Don Siegel, George Romero, Steven Spielberg -- as a stealth vessel for social commentary.

It's fine stuff, beautifully played, but there's no denying that viewers will have to be patient with this 80-minute chamber piece, the first third of which feels cold and false, only to suddenly shift into unexpectedly deep emotional territory.

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.

A smart, romantic, heartbreaking pleasure.

A labor of love hobbled by a stubborn desire to eke its delicate love story out of a premise that all but sits up and begs to be treated as a political thriller.

Tykwer may want meaning to go with his special effects, but the problem with his filmmaking, both here and earlier, is that he's more interested in his own bag of tricks than in actually saying something.

So never mind the Xmas schlock -- go treat yourself at once to this sensationally entertaining soul food.

Seeks to establish a pioneering role for the movie in liberating America’s sex life. To me it’s far from clear that that cheerfully cheesy slice of hardcore, made for $25,000 by a middle-aged hairdresser named Gerard Damiano, has spawned much in the way of a cultural legacy.

By inviting us to take on trust the Tipton Three's accounts of what they were doing in Afghanistan, Guantánamo falls into a familiar trap of agitprop filmmaking - turning the victim into a hero. The movie gives us no particular reason to believe that they were up to anything nefarious - or that they weren't.

The U.S. vs. John Lennon offers up the singer's famous, filmed confrontation with the ludicrously snotty New York Times writer Gloria Emerson, who calls Lennon "dear boy" as he heatedly attempts to defend the role of the artist in political discourse. No devious editing required here: Although Lennon seems to lose his composure in the encounter, Emerson looks an utter clown all on her own.

It's a loving film, but Kushner's own characters are more richly textured than Mock's depiction of the playwright and the divided, divisive world he's trying to fathom.

Devotees of Motorhead frontman/certifiable rock icon Lemmy Kilmister will be in heaven watching this gushing love letter to the man who straddles rock subgenres, but anyone who's not already a fan will cry for mercy long before the nearly two-hour film ends.

Doggedly refusing artifice as if cinematic beauty were a filthy capitalist plot, Yedaya drowns her characters in realist grit, a colorless screenplay and no score to speak of, rendering this open book of a movie alienating in all the wrong ways.

Where Káel stumbles is in having his stars lip-synch, sometimes poorly, to a recording. It's a devil's bargain that allows for more natural staging, but that fails to convey that an opera's power lies less in cinematic shadings of character than in raw emotions refined by the spectacular art of a rigorously trained human voice.

While there are scenes of wrenching emotional openness and spontaneous charm -- largely due to the irresistible allure and impeccable craft of its ensemble cast -- the degree of calculation apparent in its plot and images undermines its efforts to move and seduce.

Aims for crowd-pleasing impact over subtlety. But it's still a welcome corrective to the current "zero tolerance" fad.

Blades does capture the obvious eccentricities of the skating world, and is funny up to a point, but by now Ferrell & Co. have the formula for a mild comedy down pat. What they need is a little soul.

The strength of One Bright Shining Moment lies in its reminder of McGovern's critical role in reforming the way his party chose its convention delegates, and how prescient he had always been about the looming disaster of Vietnam.

The problem, dare I say it, is that the movie just ... isn't ... that ... funny.

Robbins has made a drastically different film from the one Welles envisioned -- it's wacky where Welles is absurd, cynical where Welles is canny.

The film's strength and its entertainment lie in John Myhre's production design, its generally appealing cast...and, perhaps most importantly, a canny degree of self-parody.

There's no denying that Fry's movie is all the livelier for its gay embellishment.

The movie blows a fresh wind of disrespect, high drama and lush romanticism through that stolidly middlebrow subgenre, the period drama.

Most of the time Wedding Crashers is more genteel than it is outrageous (or funny), playing like an only slightly less benign spin on the tiresome fish-out-of-water farce that fueled the two Meet the Parents movies.

Full of last-minute surprises, this willfully slippery movie seems to make the case both for mixing it up and sticking to your own kind. Which is all of a piece with the sensibility of this wonderfully ambiguous filmmaker, a visionary of our changing times.

There's no use griping about the superfluous white-on-white romance that generates so much dead space in Zwick's movie, for without it Blood Diamond would never have been made. Which would be a pity, for as liberal hand-wringing goes, it's a winner.

It all sounds like a recipe for the most noxious liberal jerk-off movie since "Crash," but in the hands of writer-director Richard LaGravenese, Freedom Writers turns out to be a superb piece of mainstream entertainment -- not an agonized debate over the principles of modern education à la "The History Boys," but a simple, straightforward and surprisingly affecting story of one woman who managed to make a difference.

Something New never feels remotely like the world we live in - it's a fabrication of a gauzy romantic-comedy movieland where people of all colors can be equally trite and dull.

With its young-vs.-old plot conflicts, its vid-game-reminiscent setups and its prominent positioning of a 12-year-old in the cast, the ninth Star Trek movie explicitly stalks kids, and probably snares neither them nor their parents.

Engrossing.

The movie belongs quite rightly to Wendy, the most enchanting little girl in English fiction, and to the untrained actress, Rachel Hurd-Wood, who plays her.

Although that's enough plot for two movies, Niccol proceeds to clog up his meticulously mounted story with a murder and a romance (hence Uma Thurman), allowing needless intrigue to distract from his ideas.

On a storytelling level, Robots is in dire need of an upgrade.

The film is being sold as a comedy, and it is amusing. Secretly, though, it's a romance, with Merchant's roving camera discerning the tempestuous love triangle at the heart of Naipaul's novel.

Roger Nygards’ sweet, gently funny documentary about the wild and woolly fans of all things Star Trek doesn’t really reveal much about the original landmark series and its various spinoffs, nor does it ever really get to the heart of the shows’ enduring appeal.

On its own, the story is tepid, and less than original. What draws us in is the way in which Gatlif sets it against a rich Andalusian backdrop.

The movie looks like it cost a fortune, with Dean Cundey's glistening widescreen compositions and Bill Brzeski's towering, storybook sets providing the backdrop for seamless visual effects. What's more, it's equally rich in ideas.

If there's anyone to credit for The Butterfly's eventual triumph over the inherent fatuousness of the material, it's the great Serrault and his tiny leading lady, who matches her elder nearly line for line and look for look.

Almost nothing comes as a surprise in this stately old fogy of a movie. The pacing is glacial, the screenplay is stiff as a board, and things heat up only in the movie's final scenes.

The boldest provocation of Mitchell’s sweet, tender and gently funny film may be its exuberant celebration of community and togetherness at a cultural moment rife with fatalism and disconnect.

Like two of the year's other standout American films, Kelly Reichardt's "Old Joy" and Ryan Fleck's "Half Nelson," it's a movie of ideas in which the ideas flow effortlessly out of the material instead of being plastered on top with a heavy cement roller (as in "Crash," "Babel" and "Little Children").

I was astonished to find myself weeping copiously over von Trier's latest, which is another parable of monomaniacal sainthood.

This is some of the best filmmaking ever done by director Richard Donner, a longtime Hollywood journeyman known more for his proficient deployment of three long-running movie franchises (The Omen, Superman and Lethal Weapon) than for his lyricism.

Director Paolo Virzi (who co-wrote the script with Francesco Bruni) errs badly by creating totems and types in lieu of characters.

The Shapiros, whose film is intercut with hilarious clips from vintage TV interviews with Mike Douglas and Charlie Rose, ultimately reveal a frail but mentally robust old man.

Best seen as a performance movie, featuring music (by Iris DeMent and Taj Mahal, among others) too wonderful to be overpowered by director Maggie Greenwald's plodding direction and leaden screenplay.

The irony is, it's his vulgarity, this mixture of the gaudy and the glossy, that distinguishes Lyne, that makes his work identifiable and, when the story's right, such a guilty pleasure.

No matter how tactful and sensitive Franklin's direction, he has made himself complicit in a polarization that panders to anti-intellectual populism even as it caters to women's movement backlash.

Those who are already in her (Breillat) camp will find much to feed on in this at once intellectualized and accessible, documentary-style peek inside the head of a passionately driven woman and artist.

Andy Abrahams Wilson builds a decent, if stylistically dull, case that Lyme disease is far deadlier and more neurologically debilitating than most doctors want to admit.

The rewrite went well, and the crew did a fine job; but you insult us, Mein Disney, serving up leftovers on such expensive china.

The love that grows between Fish and Poinsettia could have turned treacly in the wrong hands, but director Charles Burnett -- has the direct observational style of the silent masters.

Secretary's treatment of female sexuality is as matter-of-fact as its handling of self-mutilation, and the key to both is Gyllenhaal's remarkable performance.

It's like a musical with no big numbers, or an action film withholding the explosions.

Mercifully there's more Hitchcock than Lacan in this slickly enjoyable little number, which cannily plays off the ingénue image of "Amélie's" Audrey Tautou.

The film's best and scariest moments come when Miles is confronted with scenes that he translates into proof of the Wendigo's power.

The movie is casually, glamorously multiracial, and Washington is great fun, but the final glory belongs to actor John Billingsley, who plays one of those rumpled minor characters plugged into thrillers to keep you guessing whether they're light relief or something more sinister, and who, in a few memorably funny scenes, shuffles away with the movie.

Patriot reflects on nothing, except perhaps that the American Revolution was a golden opportunity for Mel Gibson to go postal.

It all collapses under an atrocious performance by Pacino, whose laughably bad accent and scene-chewing delivery serve up thick slabs of that rarest of delicacies: Jewish ham. There may be grounds here for a class-action lawsuit.

In its depiction of a fleeting, but nevertheless factual, peace in the Middle East, Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven may seem a more quixotic Hollywood fantasy than all six Star Wars movies lumped together.

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.

Writer-director Sebastian Cordero wrings nerve-racking suspense, and complex performances, from these dynamics.

This very funny, very British movie -- directed by newcomer Garth Jennings -- has sci-fi effects that are impressive yet appropriately cheesy.