It's an amusing scenario, until even Miike seems to lose his taste for the oddly sweet concoction and allows the film to drift aimlessly to a rainbow-hued finale.

It's the brilliance of The X-Files to have turned Mulder's paranoid style into a function of cool. Mulder and Scully aren't just beautiful, smart, well-armed and seemingly impervious to the banalities of everyday life, such as cheap haircuts and ruinous love affairs--they're cool.

Enthralling documentary.

Subtlety was never Taylor Hackford's long suit, but that's an asset in this mischievously fortissimo poke at lawyering and capitalist competition.

I haven't admired a De Palma film since "Carrie," or even enjoyed one since "Scarface," so it must mean something that Femme Fatale gave me one of the best times at the movies I've had this year.

The elegant gambol through ideas, combined with Gordon's clear love of luminous motion -- literally -- is a welcome treat.

This hastily slapped-together festival of talking heads is so staid, one longs for some of Moore's look-at-me theatrics, and despite the movie's sober-citizen approach, it's no less one-sided than "Fahrenheit 9/11."

It's Garrison and Burnam who hold the film's center, however, with a natural magnetism. Newcomers both, they take the same clean approach to their roles that their characters bring to their tags.

Without serious political and ethical stakes, the story limps to a halt, shrouded in platitude and faux drama.

The Australian actor taps into something miraculous here -- LaPaglia's ability to convey grief and hope works with Weaver's sensitive reactions to make this a two-actor master class.

The tragic ending they tack on to the film reinforces the same fear-mongering notion of cause and effect that gives the Church its power to abuse and exploit, and the film winds up muffling its own powerful protest.

A diabolically enjoyable documentary on unearned self-esteem.

It's the spark and surprise of good sketch comedy that makes this film really work--the laugh-out-loud moments are worth the wait.

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.

Though the acting is uniformly excellent, especially Petren in her bilious rage, Daybreak doesn't provide anything like the cumulative catharsis of, say, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf." We don't really care about these people - we just want someone to make them stop.

Beautifully acted film remains deeply intelligent and always fascinating.

The one saving grace is a sweet, affecting performance by Werner de Smedt.

Mercifully, the supporting cast saves the day by grasping clearly that in a comedy of manners you have to act mannered, though not to the point of situation comedy.

Its schmaltzy manipulations are pure 1940s Hollywood. Still, if you can get past the corn, the story exerts a not-unsatisfying emotional pull thanks to Yun's soulful gravity and a tenderness that Chen hasn't shown quite so openly since his 1984 debut, "Yellow Earth."

Unsatisfying as crime drama but haunting as a meditation on marriage.

Eventually it all starts to feel like an extended European perfume ad: pretty but eye-rollingly pretentious.

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.

Unbearably talky and earnest in equal measure.

By cinematic standards, not exactly scintillating stuff: The mix of archival materials, talking heads and dramatic readings is strictly PBS 101. Filmmaker Peter Gilbert's great achievement lies in his integration of disparate historical threads and voices into one steadily paced, riveting tale.

Firth is all panicked reserve in the role of Crowhurst, and Rachel Weisz invests the familiar stay-at-home role with antsy, agonized spirit as the wife of the doomed man, facing the truth that her family’s lives will never be what they once were.

There's a whiff of exploitation about any movie that claims the Holocaust as a “backdrop,” and Rolf Schübel’s treacly tale of three men lovesick for the same blue-eyed beauty fairly reeks of it.

Sandler smirks a good deal less than he did in his last two movies, and with a couple of acting lessons, he might develop into a screen presence.

With its clean narrative lines, easily grasped message and literal kick-line of affable, non-threatening gay characters, the film is carefully calibrated for mass appeal. It leaves no shortcut or pratfall untaken, and it will be all the more popular for it.

Cliché, or experiment with cliché? Really, it’s not worth sticking around to find out, since the action mostly involves the monotonous Romain Duris standing around in his underpants or sitting on the toilet banging on about why love has fled.

Battle in Heaven cannot be so easily dismissed - indeed, it is that rare failed film that leaves you as eager to see what its maker will do next as you were when you walked in the door.

A peppy if uneven charmer with a fetchingly wistful edge.

Performances that are natural yet weighted with history and frequently heart-wrenching.

Very much a fully realized cinematic experience. John Turturro, even if you have to act less, be sure to direct more, and often.

Try as they might, the two central performers can never overcome the film's underdeveloped core, and are left flailing about amid Nutley's listless, glacial pacing.

Diaz and Collette are believable as sisters, but their performances rarely surprise -- in a more interesting movie world, they'd have switched roles.

As dull to listen to as it is gorgeous to look at.

Levin crawls into America's woodwork to ferret out anti-Semites of all stripes, then rushes at them with Socratic reasoning -- a futile and often hilarious project, since they prove immune to thought reform, however rational.

Everything that could go wrong does, but director Turner never musters the requisite manic energy that might get her proceedings off the ground.

Having built his cast from friends and family, the director is left with some stilted acting, but that's easily outweighed by the film's infectious enthusiasm.

Burger at first toys with his unlikely premise, panning through the streets of this stuccoed suburbia as if meditating on the banality of evil, and indeed, our first few encounters with the assassin.

Looks drab and doesn't take very good advantage of its New York locations, but the neurotic intensity and emotional honesty of its two leads more than make up for it.

Like almost everything in this clever, brutal and strangely soulful movie, the time and place are accomplished by suggestion.

Terrifically terrible, Spartan could well be Mamet's first true comedy. Only the movie thinks it's a nail biter.

The whole thing skims along on suspension of disbelief.

Trimmed to an hour, and tucked between a documentary on snails and an episode of Coronation Street, writer-director Mark Herman's Brassed Off could prove lively watching indeed. As it is, however, his pedestrian if sweetly well-meaning inspirational about a coal-mining town done in by Thatcherism is too long, too laborious and 15 years too late.

Watching Ramis struggle with his two stars is like watching someone try to juggle lead weights.

What Ratner brings to the proceedings is an awareness that what worked for "Silence" -- namely screenwriter Ted Tally, production designer Kristi Zea and, of course, Anthony Hopkins as Lecter -- will work overtime here, to enhance the project at hand and provide a seamless connection back to Jonathan Demme's multiple-Oscar winner.

Extraordinarily witty (nothing new for this director) while coming off as a taunt to anyone who'd dare to follow in his wake.

Melamed's debut film, Manic, set in a juvenile mental institution, has all the uncertainties of a first run-through.

The real-life calendar girls were actual human beings, and here they're merely comic patsies, lacking the distinctive personalities that made the men of "The Full Monty" so endearing, their final act of revelation so peculiarly dignified.

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.

Writer-director Levy occasionally relies on cheap gags, but his light tone and breezy visual style are a nice contrast to Go for Zucker's metaphorical subtext about familial - and German - reunification.

Too long, too slow, too self-consciously chatty and too much at the mercy of a slim premise that doesn't wear well under endless repetition.

Give writer-director team John Musker and Ron Clements (The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Hercules) credit for trying to update the formula and grow with the kids weaned on their earlier hits, though it's doubtful the "tweens" they’re aiming at here still embrace Disney, and little kids don't care about back story.

Intelligent, moving film.

What's missing from Fantasia 2000 is the shamelessly pandering Disney cutesy that made the original such a full-blooded nostalgic memory.

Like "Run Lola Run," Drift circles back on itself to present a trio of possible outcomes, but it's R.T. Lee's sterling performance that rivets.

The whole thing is kitsch of the most pricey sort, and it's a good guess that it will be a smash.

The rather sad performances boast more clams than a Pismo beach party.

A rosy, hearthside fantasy of acceptance that's so assured in its writing and direction, it's nearly impossible not to believe.

Surprisingly airy, jungle-set adventure, boisterously winking at Huston, Peckinpah and the same Saturday-morning serials that birthed Indiana Jones. R.J. Stewart and James Vanderbilt's tongue-in-cheek script, a hybridization of "Midnight Run" and "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," provides lots of amusing byplay for its two mismatched stars.

Beowulf may ultimately be viewed as a failure, but it’s a fascinating one.

A capable, if modest, charmer.

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.

The satirical jabs at celebrity culture smell like rotted leftovers from "The Fantastic Four." The token ruminations on the tension between a superhero's public and private lives seem flown in from Bryan Singer's "Superman Returns" (to say nothing of Raimi's own, superior "Darkman"). Most egregious, though, is the way Raimi and the writers reduce Spider-Man 3 to the very sort of abject distinctions between virtue and sin that the series has heretofore studiously avoided.

Every car chase, every plane crash, every potential drop off a cliff is a masterpiece of grace and surprise.

It's all fitfully amusing, thanks in large part to Bouchard's richly comic performance, but the movie is never very involving, and it overstays its welcome by a good, long while.

Too much of a mess to say anything with assurance, pieced together as it is from mismatched institutional movies such as "Cool Hand Luke" and "Shock Corridor" -- with "Lord of the Flies" thrown in for good measure -- and turning on plot points that simply don't wash.

Where Okiura leads the art of animation into truly uncharted territory is in his character work, the precise behavioral strokes that bring people to life in two dimensions.

Catches the volatile beauty of what it was to be alive and politically aware in the early '70s with a rare accuracy and depth.

A labor of love -- a swan song repaying a lifetime of happy debts to the theater, by grace of two terrific performances.

As exasperating as it is insightful. The film ultimately falters, though, because it's so resolutely old-fashioned.

I can't think of another contemporary novel -- unless it be Cunningham's far more ambitious and less successful "The Hours" -- less suited for the journey to film under any direction but that of, say, Russian dreamer Alexander Sokurov.

One is left yearning for the overheated melodrama of Bernard Rose's 1994 Beethoven biopic, "Immortal Beloved," which was trashy, but fun.

Though sprung from the mind of a woman, the film plays like a hetero male fantasy of tortured love.

Compared to the glib, pandering rosiness of most current chick-flicks, Anywhere but Here is a class act.

Fate plays both prankster and deliverer in Firode's never-too-clever scheme, buoyed, like his often-winsome images, by romantic fancy.

Too sensitive for this world or any other, this stifling portrait of a family stuck in bereavement offers the painful sight of at least two highly accomplished actors frozen for lack of direction from novice writer-director Josh Sternfeld.

O'Donnell's directing is assured and glossy as befits a former maker of television commercials, and Jeffrey Caine's exuberant script sidesteps cliché -- just.

One of those passionately atmospheric movies, like Jane Campion's "The Piano," that sounds idiotic on paper, but whose ambiance, charged with eros, rage, regret and optimism, is strangely moving.

Despite its origins, nearly every visual and storytelling idea in this green-and-black-tinted martial-arts fantasy seems to derive from "Mad Max," "The Matrix" and/or "The Lord of the Rings."

Routinely assembled live document.

Although the digital dinos look great, especially the clumsy stegosaurs, Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp have failed to absorb the single most important lesson from the movies they've looted: If your people aren't interesting, at least make your monsters memorable.

What Lurie has made is "The West Wing" without the constraining niceties of prime time.

Yet the pride and sympathy McNally brings to his characters reminds us how far gay film has progressed from the long, self-lacerating whine of "The Boys in the Band".

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.

Cocaine Cowboys' pulpy entertainment value merely lures us into a grim, kaleidoscopic look at how one city was both destroyed and, ironically, eventually saved by some of the worst human beings to walk the Earth.

The causal combination of pop culture and Holocaust imagery is an arresting start to a film about contemporary European anti-Semitism, but the doc quickly turns to well-worn themes.

The movie still retains the goofy charm, stylish visuals and attention to character of its fine 2002 predecessor. Queen Latifah is a warm and plummy new presence as a voluptuous lady mammoth whose only drawback is that she was raised by possums and thinks she's one herself.

Mamet's fixation on language is, nonetheless, more effective onstage than onscreen, where the technical and visual requirements distract from the sounds of the words -- the heart of Mamet's work.

Filled with the kind of frank, nonsensational sensuality that eludes American filmmakers, this movie proves again that the most interesting cinema about teenage life -- gay and otherwise -- is being made far from our provincial shores.

Even if Signs suffers a little from uneven pacing and mismatched tones of reverent homage (to "The Birds" and "War of the Worlds"), soul-searching and silly comedy, the jokes are clever, the tension continual and expertly calibrated, and the performances -- are both deep and moving.

A movie that's nearly as good as its publicity campaign.

Despite his (Jeremy Irons) showboating turn and Dench's lascivious energy, it's Annette Crosbie, in her quiet way, who gives the most commanding performance, as the sister who sees all too clearly what's coming.

The story is bound together with gaming set pieces that are strange, inventive and mesmerizing.

With her ductile physicality and undeniable charm, Witherspoon remains acutely present even when everyone else -- director, writers and cast -- has checked out.

Both funny and telling about the messy passages of grief.

The film's only creative spark comes from Bill Butler and Kishaya Dudley's lively skate choreography, and that you can see in the trailer.