Razor sharp and funny as hell, Incident at Loch Ness is the harpoon hurled into the hot-air balloon of “reality” entertainment.

Undeniably precious, it may make some viewers fidgety, but others will find that the reflective melancholy that overcomes both director and cast (all superb) is a sweet contagion.

By the time of its medical-operation climax, Stuck On You has focused so much on ennobling the disabled that it comes to resemble a segment of the Jerry Lewis telethon.

Leitman has unearthed a terrific collection of vintage footage - yet, as if doubtful about holding our interest, she skims too quickly over the historical background.

Our traumatized soldiers deserve better representation than this irretrievably ridiculous drama, which will do nothing to revive the flagging fortunes of the man whose career lay down and died after "The Exorcist" and "The French Connection."

The complex narrative counterpoint is anchored by a rock-solid performance by one of the world's great actors, the Beijing theater veteran Hu Jun.

How refreshing it is to see a studio picture where plot development is revealed not so much by grandiose action as by the small, interior shifts that are witnessed through a character's eyes.

Gaily seduces you into its fantasy life, then whacks you over the head with a finale that, intentionally or not, functions as a rebuke to the mad optimism of Benigni's pandering film

The movie feels oddly undercooked and aimless.

Vardalos is a pleasing mix of Elaine May and Bonnie Hunt; in other words, she's not a sex kitten, but she's funny and smart.

Egoyan has always constructed dense ensemble films, and here again the writer-director hopes to reinforce his themes by piling layer upon layer of character. Unfortunately, the layers end up cluttering the story.

(Emile Hirsch) a miraculous young actor.

All three actors are more than up to the challenge, particularly the radiant Salazar, who feasts upon that rare gift of a role that allows an actress the wrong side of 40 to be funny, sexy and vital without apologizing.

Somewhere buried beneath all this ballast something is being said, again, about flawed middle-aged men falling from grace and redeeming themselves. This time I'm damned if I know what that something is.

The less ticklish bad joke of Scream 2 is that self-referentiality has its limits.

While some may bail early, those who stay to the end are likely to dwell on Zahedi's unwavering (some would say unrelenting) belief in his own artistry, as well as the film's many funny, quotable lines.

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.

First-time director Anahí Berneri, who wrote this involving, if slow-moving, film with Pablo Pérez (based on Pérez’s own diaries), doesn't shy away from the whippings, rope work and carefully calibrated humiliation that make up a good night of dungeon play. Yet A Year Without Love isn't a sex movie (so don’t expect one), but a studied examination of how one man folds jarring events into the everyday fabric of his life.

Between such shots of inspiration, Matsumoto’s mock-doc framework seems a lazy stock device, interviews playing more dead than deadpan and failing to exceed an over-familiar comic-pathetic attitude toward the lives of functionaries.

When it comes to the United Nations, though, the movie turns to Jell-O. Whether Pollack was softened up by his meetings with U.N. brass (all the way up to Kofi Annan), or by his own gentlemanly Midwestern liberalism, he is alarmingly circumspect about that august body.

The Great Water hangs heavy with sepia photography and Christ-like symbolism -- I felt as though I were watching it from the inside of a dank Russian Orthodox church.

A sharp, upbeat, well-wrought meditation on love and race that kicks the new year in movies off to a terrific start.

This tough, crackling thriller from director Gary Gray is one of those rare action movies with something on its mind other than moviestar sneers and incessant big bangs.

What's most frustrating about the movie isn't that it thinks so little of its heroine that it can't let her figure out the moral of her own story, but that it thinks so little of us as to suggest that, after a couple millennia of human struggle, it's indeed possible to answer the unanswerable.

Frankel has cut, pasted and rejiggered the novel, mostly for the better. As adapted by Aline Brosh McKenna, The Devil Wears Prada is crisper, less self-righteous and mercifully shorter than its intermittently funny but interminable source.

One's laughter builds on such a rising curve that memories of its flaws burn away.

The set design is gung-ho Hallmark (Tinkerbell lights, that sort of thing) with a strong whiff of Fellini (the fairy glade looks like a pre-Raphaelite red-light district).

Crazy/beautiful has a leisurely local specificity, and Stockwell has a tender way with his actors.

The films, both narrative and nonfictional, range from the engagingly elliptical...to the simple-minded... to the cloying and incomprehensible.

As in all his films, there's a sense that honest human emotion bores Fleder, but he gets points for packing the trial with fine character actors.

Several potentially compelling narratives jockey for breathing room in this disappointing documentary about the unsolved 1990 heist of 13 paintings (valued at $500 million) from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

De Niro is damned if he's going to make a standard thriller out of this view from within the CIA, which might be refreshing if his solemn moral parable weren't so lacking in any other kind of juice, and if its hero were less of a round-shouldered, whey-faced organization man.

Filmed only with direct light and sound, Bush's stunning camerawork adroitly captures the majestic landscapes and icons of Buddhism: its murals and artworks, monks and nuns.

It's a shame no one gave the three voice stars of this appealing animation -- Ray Romano, John Legui zamo and Denis Leary -- a shot at the script.

So cleverly executed that one forgives -- just -- the frenetic pace and absence of down time.

With masterful tonal balance and control, and a visual sophistication as yet unusual among Israeli directors, Gabizon catches both the absurdity and the sadness of what it means to live with such daily threat and confusion.

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.

Charming documentary.

The result is another powerful children's story dulled into mediocrity by the worship of technology.

It manages, in the course of a single tersely delineated story, to say more about the dark pathology of American racism than any five character arcs in "Crash." So go, by all means, but be prepared to take a beating.

The cinematography, by Dan Stoloff (Tumbleweeds, Miracle), is beautiful throughout, but the individual stories occasionally verge toward silliness...Still, there's an affectionate authenticity here that Hollywood baloney like "Crash" can't touch.

It's difficult to see the characters as anyone but Barney and Björk, and the film's binary system, opposing hard and soft, East and West, male and female, etc., feels clumsy and simplistic. That said, there's creepy delight in seeing American consumption carried to its logical extreme.

A tight blend of self-awareness, humor and fear.

Reynolds, working in close harmony with cinematographer Andrew Dunn (Gosford Park), brings an infectious brio and an occasional sweeping grace to the classic trappings of Dumas.

It's one of many references to the movie-wise, but a resonant one, for Glover's performance turns out to be shockingly emotional, drawn as daringly close to the bone -- within this story's limited thematic range -- as Anthony Perkins' work in Hitchcock's seminal film.

Initially amusing, ultimately wearying mock documentary.

The problem with Rush Hour is that the film isn’t a partnership, it’s a Chris Tucker movie with Chan as straight man.

With its open, spontaneous elasticity, White Oleander is that rare Hollywood film -- an attempt to understand, without judgment, a world on its own terms.

Its characters are as flimsy and expendable as the title suggests, while only the most gullible of viewers (i.e., those who've never seen a David Mamet picture) will likely be duped by the painfully et cetera who's-conning-whom antics or the mounds of forced sentimentality under which they're ill-disguised.

Absolutely exhilarating...Pound for pound, it's more kinetically thrilling than anything Hollywood has produced in years, not least of all because it's real.

Call Her Ganda works best when it’s focused on Laude and the case of her murder, an overwhelming showcase of empathy and persistence in the face of American racism and transmisogyny.

It's (Stuart's) utter believability that lets us follow him into the ecstasy of absurdity that is the rest of the film.

Storaro's gorgeous cinematography imbues every frame with an enthralling subjectivity.

Aside from isolated flares of unchecked emotion ...Bouquet's Lucie is too far removed from our ken of romance and overriding purpose, or from Berri's for that matter, to be embraced entirely.

Stellan Skarsgård's deceptively low-key performance as the beleaguered musician -- furtive, indignant, drowning in self-pity blended with a kind of ruined nobility -- pushes the emotional temperature to a quiet fever pitch.

There's something oddly moving about the film purely as a love story between two people who were more alike than was good for them, yet somehow stuck it out. What we see in Frida is not Kahlo the painter, but Kahlo the love of Rivera's life, as he was of hers.

Whether Quitting will prove absorbing to American audiences is debatable: After all, it's not like we don't have enough rehab stories of our own, and Jia often comes across as a sullen, unreachable brat.

Barbieri is a natural filmmaker, with an eye for film space and a gift for pacing. Both of his leads are wonderful, but it's Picoy who will break your heart.

For a movie whose bad guy bamboozles unsuspecting Latinos with false promises, Ladrón could be cited for precisely the same offense.

Turturro keeps Fear X fascinating, practically in spite of itself.

Ladies in Lavender oscillates between scenes so relentlessly nice they make you want to scream and others - particularly those depicting the crush Dench develops on her new housemate - creepier than anything in "The Amityville Horror."

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.

Jabberwocky is not a Python film, a fact most obvious in its marked lack of humor.

For the most part, the action, shot entirely on Hawaii's famed North Shore without blue screens or tanks, is awesome, all swirling turquoise tubes, thundering foam hammers and sleek, graceful riders.

Had Xiaoshuai trusted audience sympathies to stay with a slightly more forceful character, he'd likely have crafted the heart tugger that the film aims to be.

With a dream cast that also includes Patricia Clarkson and, in a cameo, a tattooed George Clooney, fullness of narrative may not have struck the filmmakers as key, and their film feels slight, as if it were an extended short, albeit one made by the smartest kids in class.

Though engaging from beginning to end, be warned that this is also harrowing, utterly depressing stuff.

Cholodenko's new film relies on easy caricature over true character such that the film fails to build emotional momentum or resonance.

At least the formulaic race footage itself is vigorous; the schmaltzy mythmaking script, on the other hand, deserves a one-way trip to the glue factory.

The movie charts a journey from belief to despair with occasional touches of humor, but by the end I was so deadened by its minimalist style and method, I could barely summon the energy to ask why.

Though far from expert filmmaking - visual clichés fly thick and fast - the movie has a swooning feel for the stark beauty of the African kingdom in which it was shot.

Bitton is Frederick Wiseman-obsessive about the practical details that make this horrific arrangement work, but she's also an unabashed polemicist.

El Angel is a crime spree as improvised reverie, one with a subject who is as quick to give away his loot as the director is to make the subtext explicit.

So moving and so timely.

Giuliani Time energetically deflates one trumpeted myth after another about Giuliani's success at turning the city around from its doldrums in the 1970s.

The cast is brilliant, not least of all Reilly -- vaguely despicable, smooth as an oil slick and altogether mesmerizing in the most impressive screen performance he's yet given.

A fascinating tragedy, easy to underrate.

Håfström doesn't soft-pedal the abuse meted out by either his antihero or his nemeses, which will disturb audience members who want a clean demarcation between good guys and bad.

It makes for an intriguing combination of tones and rhythms — urgency running up against paralysis — that speaks to the twisted dynamism of our political process, then and now.

Director Chang builds some chilling suspense into the cop's grim investigative routine -- as well as generous helpings of blood: It runs, splashes and sprays as the amputations continue.

Famed animator Bill Plympton's legendarily skewed aesthetic and worldview are in top form here, bringing life to a script that plays like "Carrie" on a wicked acid trip.

By the time the movie ends, having traversed numerous plot twists and character revelations, the viewer is emotionally drained in a bittersweet sort of way.

Adds to the current crop of great kids' fare with a most-welcome old reliable.

British director, Roger Michell, strikes an assured balance between intense mood piece and Gothic chiller.

The movie's biggest misstep is a complete lack of the classic Transformers theme song. How do you not use the coolest ’80s toyline-turned-cartoon music ever?

This frenetic potboiler about a love triangle on the Salvador waterfront smacks of liberal slumming and bristles with faux authenticity.

The best parts of the film...are often distractingly slick enough to cover the film's overriding lack of soul.

The temptation for an easy score is one of a handful of shopworn plot elements in Anthony Onah’s debut feature The Price, yet the interaction of t

A postmodern morality play stripped nearly bare by its precocious creator, until only its boldness, cutting insight, intermittent hilarity and bracing violence remain.

Mired in noir cliché, the movie manages to be simultaneously overwrought and undercooked, with the Bambi-eyed Akhtar giving such a relentlessly inscrutable performance, one wants to poke him with a stick.

A threadbare plot peeks through the shameless run of shopworn jokes about Viagra, stashed-away dildos, eager old dames delivering unsolicited casseroles to freshly widowed men.

An illuminating, infuriating document that paints McKinney as a true American heroine and patriot and confirms your worst fears about just how rotten our "democratic" process is at its core.

In a way, though, it’s all Bale's show. Withering down to an alarming 120 pounds, he delivers a deeply obsessed performance that leaves us both fascinated and sickened.

As our warriors encounter the Kenyan equivalents of Cyclopes and Sirens, the languid pace and the lulling voice-over (French subtitled in English) make for a nice bedtime story rather than a window on primal struggles.

Domestic farce always has a potentially compelling dark side when it reveals the tenuousness of love and the fragility of all human relationships, but Belvaux seems far too busy orchestrating the copious action to pause for anything approaching insight.

Although character arcs are a little too abruptly truncated as the story moves, Natali never fumbles the big picture.

Morlang has surprises up its sleeve that even the seasoned genre fan may not see coming.

Pretentiously impressionistic, sloppy almost to the point of self-parody, Temple’s film is New Journalism without the journalism -- or, alas, the drugs.