At only 84 minutes, Phone Booth's brevity turns out to be its only saving grace.

It's the disease of Hollywood remakes that they nearly always lose sight of what made the original good in the first place. Where Alexander Mackendrick's film offered a delicately diabolical blend of the ordinary and the brutal -- the new Ladykillers bludgeons you with cartoonish gags about stupid football players, irritable-bowel syndrome and somebody accidentally shooting himself in the head.

The thunderous clashes between armies of computer-generated Trojans and Mycenaeans, when they do arrive, feel decidedly un-epic, as though we were watching a child's toy-box war between plastic figurines. Which makes them perfectly in line with the rest of Petersen's artless approach.

Rich in lovingly assembled silent-film clips, as well as in intimate views of the magnificent Mole, this impassioned yet somewhat too precious fable from writer-director Davide Ferrario feels calculated to make a cineaste swoon, and yet . . . it never quite does.

The main body of the film earns comparison with the military parables of John Ford, particularly "The Long Gray Line" and "The Wings of Eagles."

Just around the halfway point, something unexpected happens -- the movie actually gets good. You can chalk that up to the delightful Alan Rickman.

There are plenty of gorgeous real-life vistas for adults to look at while stuffing popcorn in their ears to avoid the oversignifyin' music and the hurtin' dialogue.

Visibly uninspired, Pacino gives a perfunctory performance -- though surely he must have looked over at Farrell and been reminded of himself 30 years ago, all jacked-up and beautiful, like a stallion at the gate.

The whole movie is curiously distant and flat, like a museum object encased in extra-thick glass.

If "Crash" grew a pair of cojones, it might look something like Larry Clark’s cheerfully defiant Wassup Rockers.

It may be a stretch to call this mugging moron sympathetic, but it’s surprising how enjoyable Mr. Bean can be when he’s actually given a hint of humanity.

As in many of his films, Jaglom establishes a striking intimate rapport with his female subjects, and as the funny and bitter revelations pour forth, an activity that many men may view as something done strictly out of necessity takes on unforeseen narcotic, romantic and therapeutic dimensions.

For this viewer, the climactic scooter-gang rumble, heavy on plot twists and empowerment speeches, felt eternal, but for many, the happy silliness of the film's first half should carry the day.

The characters...are so unlikable that one longs for a bit of cheap sentiment if only to make them palatable.

Suggests that had young Adolf Hitler managed to get his art show, the Holocaust might never have happened. This seems absurd, not to say insensitive.

The images -- including a giant robotic Colonel Sanders with an ax in its head that walks the streets of Tokyo -- reinforce every paranoid fantasy of a controlled future ever concocted.

The movie is monotonous, and by the time it gets to its climactic re-enactment of the Tate-LaBianca killings, it seems little more than the heir to "Survive!, The Zodiac Killer" and other unsavory 1970s horror cheapies that tried to turn a quick buck on real-life tragedy.

As with "The Blair Witch Project," one must swallow one's irritation at paying yet again for big-screen video -- but even so, the spectacle of an America falling apart is acutely and hilariously embodied by Dawn.

For a film purporting to tell it like it is for black gay men, race is the most poorly handled aspect in Punk's equation; it's almost as if it had no relevance. That might have flown if its most telling moment didn't suggest otherwise.

The Terminal perfectly captures Spielberg's ambivalent worship of capitalism. His big boy's love of gadgetry is everywhere apparent in the security cameras, blinking computer screens and one-way glass walls.

Despite some exciting visuals...Schwartzberg intercuts his segments with clichéd swooping helicopter shots of city skylines and desert mesas...undermining the quirky individuality he seeks to celebrate.

de Ayala is required to supply too much of the energy in a film that is, overall, far too staid for its subject matter.

A smoothly structured, earth-toned and well-drawn Japanese anime.

Even amid all the campy, uneven creepiness The Fog unleashes, you have to give it up to Carpenter for continuing his knack of making women just as ready as men to get into heroic, survival mode whenever some strange shit goes down.

Harris and Heche are simply electric together, and "Hill Street Blues'" Charles Haid is wonderfully brash as the venal bishop.

Playing something of a cipher who reinvents himself as the occasion demands, Wood is unusually well cast, but it's Hunnam, with a psychotic twinkle in his eye, who turns the movie on whenever he's onscreen.

A manifesto in the form of an enormously budgeted quasi-sci-fi epic, Cloud Atlas is evidently personal, defiantly sincere, totally lacking in self-awareness, and borderline offensive in its gleeful endorsement of revenge violence against anyone who gets in the way of a good person's self-actualization. The rest of the time, it's just insipid, TV-esque in its limited visual imagination, and dramatically incoherent.

Inglis offers complicated characters and uniformly worthy performances without falsely manipulating us into sympathizing with anybody but tries too strenuously to fuse his warring polarities of character-driven intrigue and plot-driven treacheries into an allegory of redemption. In the end, that feels like one or two big things too many.

A film whose story movingly outfoxes any number of shopworn expectations on its way to a singular, heart-rending outcome.

Twohy moves effortlessly between conventions of the sub and horror genres, with long tracking shots and masterful sound design, shock cuts and mismatched mirrors and reflections.

The movie is so rigged to elicit the audience's empathy that it becomes difficult to watch; it's stifling.

An amiable and colorful, if dewy-eyed, documentary.

The strengths of Dominion, however, have been little diminished by its long shelf life and, in fact, may have grown stronger with age.

The Greatest Game mostly sits there limply -- it lacks the charming swagger Paxton dependably brings to his own acting roles.

Has so many dead moments that singing spots by Gladys Knight, Pastor Marvin Winans and Mary J. Blige simply highlight, rather than alleviate, the inertia.

The story itself falls to earth with a thud, not least because of a casting catastrophe. The boyish, goofily smiling Wahlberg is egregiously out of place as the kind of charming-ambiguous dreamboat you'd have to be Cary Grant to pull off.

This sappy stuff gets better direction by Kidd (who made the far superior Roger Dodger) than it deserves, and Linney gives a wonderfully wistful portrayal of urban loneliness.

For once, it's no stretch for Jerry Bruckheimer to turn a human life into an action movie. Give or take a pack of screaming clichés in Carol Doyle and Mary Agnes Donoghue's screenplay, Joel Schumacher's propulsive thriller is also a smart character study, with Cate Blanchett as the jewel in its crown.

So radiantly awful that, given the egghead credentials of the director and his screenwriter and star Sam Shepard, I initially took the charitable route and assumed I was in the presence of parody.

Jolie has a gangly inelegance that suggests a giraffe trying to hang wallpaper -- but the entire movie is predicated on a spark between its prettier-than-thou stars that seems to have bypassed the screen and ignited in the tabloids instead.

Despite its formula and flaws (chief among them Foster’s sitcom-campy performance), Nim’s Island is a perfectly pleasant, agreeably innocuous ’tweener adventure film.

Unless you're already a true believer, Amma comes across in Darshan as a perfect angel, a frustrating enigma and a rather dull cinematic subject.

"The Blues Brothers" it is not, but in its best moments, the movie feels like a comic exaggeration of the real hardships that a couple of average, decidedly unhip guys went through on their unlikely way to the top.

Knuckleball mostly fills up its running time by being a twisted, even more ridiculous Home Alone.

If you’re going to have your emotional responses shunted around like a gear stick, it might as well be by someone who writes dialogue as funny as Curtis does.

Sympathy is disturbingly cast aside so we can wallow in the pathetic. It’s a bad trip, man.

The women are terrific -- they know a thing or two about modulating pathos -- and watching them is a pleasure, even if the lines they're speaking sound like those of a world-worried, first-time playwright.

This depressingly uninspired action-comedy (based on the 1975–79 TV series) is Hollywood’s latest McMovie -- name-brand recognition as raison d’être or, if you will, creative bankruptcy on a very large scale.

For his first feature in 15 years, Spanish filmmaker Eloy de la Iglesia has made a witty, unsentimental class comedy.

This nastily efficient thriller from British newcomer John Simpson offers a low-budget, high-tech expression of the idea that just because you're paranoid doesn' mean they'e not after you.

A well-made but emotionally scattered film whose hero gives his heart only to the dog.

A fresh, buoyant, mischievous and rather jolly meditation - if that's the word for a movie as divinely nuts as this one is - on the meaning of life in an unhappy world.

The movie is basically on one level and Faris on another -- in that exclusive aerie occupied by Judy Holliday, Carole Lombard, Lucille Ball and a few other blissfully original comedy goddesses.

Joan Cusack and Kim Cattrall bring some nice ambiguity to their thankless roles as the mothers, while pintsize Kirsten Olson and punked-out Julianna Cannarozzo, both professional skaters, leaven this Disney sugarplum with much-needed wit.

A curious mixture of banality and revelation.

To their credit, screenwriter Dianne Houston and director Liz Friedlander (both making their feature debuts) go relatively easy on the urban-life clichés and instead stick tight to dance class.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that had Jane Austen lived to see the profits that have been squeezed from her most marketable premise, she'd doubtless have wept, then lobbied for her share of the royalties.

Anjelica Huston, a gifted and sometimes extraordinary actress, has given herself the title role in her second outing as director---a bitof miscasting for which the director, and not the actress, must be blamed

R Xmas offers a poetic and profane ambiguity that's vintage Ferrara. The drug dealers are community leaders, the cops are corrupt, and the materialistic wife has unimagined emotional reserves.

I've never quite figured out what the poker-faced Peter Riegert does as an actor, but his matter-of-fact minimalism is always funny and affecting.

Crafted by hand and computer, Mirrormask is as breathtakingly beautiful to behold as it is tedious to slog through.

This is gloriously self-aware hokum, a fantasy movie that is, above all, about our need for fantasy and escapism -- and even our need for movies like The Astronaut Farmer -- to help us combat the depression and disappointments of the everyday.

Why 3-D?

The movie has a script (by Paul Pender) made of wood, and it's relentlessly folksy, a procession of stagy set pieces stacked with binary oppositions.

A wonderful movie. For every misstep there are the sublime expressions of agony and ecstasy of which Herzog is a master.

For all the highfalutin dialogue and mysterioso goings-on, the only true mystery Hicks and Goldman conjure up is whether the mellifluously voiced outsider is dangling his new friend a little too closely on his knee.

It all feels rather laddish and belabored, but it will eat up 90 minutes of your time without making you regret the loss.

Though his work has been little seen outside of France, writer-director Jean-Claude Brisseau's reputation as one of the most terribles of his country's filmmaking enfants precedes him. This 2002 film offers ample evidence as to why.

Structurally, it's ambitious, but emotionally the movie never quite connects, spending so much time laboring over its parallel storytelling and its cosmic connections that the characters remain at arm's length, as intangible as reflections in glass.

Startlingly raw and honest, playing at times like one of those blistering Donald Goines blaxploitation pulp novels, only with Jesus.

So many documentaries about genocides play art-house theaters that it can be easy to get jaded, but combining one with tour footage from the most innovative metal band in the world is genius, banging the viewer's head before he realizes it's being filled with awareness too.

What neither Howard nor his screenwriter, Ken Kaufman, seem to realize is that The Missing is that much bleaker and more unsettling when its horrors spring forth from the land itself and from the souls of wayward men.

The only history that bears a real influence on The Last Samurai is the history of Hollywood moviemaking, and the unfortunate way it has of turning extraordinary stories into hopelessly ordinary ones.

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.

Until the IMAX 3-D format is used to produce effects that are not trivial, it will never be anything more than what it is right now: a grandiose amusement park attraction.

Singleton has neither the emotional nor intellectual depth to do justice to his thesis. He is too in awe of the stereotypical hood lifestyles and macho posturings that he's trying to critique.

Schumacher has gone into the cinematic heart of darkness and emerged with his own peculiar kink on the war movie: Vietnam beefcake.

For a while, Vaughn's slobbo guy charm and Stiller's creepy Flash Gordon aesthetic are amusing, but it isn't long before Vaughn looks like a Bill Murray disciple trapped among circus freaks, and Stiller runs out of weirdo tricks.

Genially moronic, Road Trip will tide you over until the next slice of "American Pie" comes along.

The film only rarely harnesses the power of the anachronistic, funk-driven, beat-heavy rap music that swells its soundtrack. Even the intricately choreographed crowd dance scenes, filled with frenzied movement, are more often stillborn than stimulating.

When a movie opens with the diner scene from "When Harry Met Sally" as performed by cadavers, and later proceeds to sex scenes involving scalpels and needles, the actual plot is inconsequential. Fans of hard-R exploitation will love this; everyone else will likely be appalled. Screw 'em.

Like "Wall Street" before it, The Bank never amounts to more than a glossy comic book, and first-time writer-director Robert Connolly stumbles with his plotting and his direction of Wenham.

The 1978 frat-house classic "Animal House," starring the late, great John Belushi, is the model for testosterone-mad comedies such as this, and while it hasn't that film's scope or finesse, Old School does have Ferrell, a man clearly in touch with his inner Belushi.

The Hulk is a beautiful movie, but it's unlikely to win points as a monster flick -- it's too elegant, too whimsical.

While sometimes messy, this material is emotionally resonant and cinematically alive.

Here, the volcanic villain behaves like a smart terrorist, taking over almost immediately and holding a collection of excellent actors (Tommy Lee Jones, Anne Heche, Don Cheadle) hostage for two hours of "real time."

While writer-director Jim Hosking’s commitment to weirdness (also seen in his previous outing, The Greasy Strangler) warrants appreciation, especially when so many others play it safe, his latest, comedy An Evening With Beverly Luff Linn, is a chore to get through.

The Messenger may be a caricature of theology, but then Besson is a cartoonist of genius.

For those of us who find Lelouch an unbreakable habit -- the guiltiest of guilty pleasures -- watching And Now Ladies & Gentlemen comes close to sheer moviegoing bliss.

While the acting is top-notch, the real star of the film is the script.

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.

It's a prolonged, maddening, predictable -- yet curiously pleasurable -- descent into incomprehensibility.

First-time screenwriter James C. Strouse (in whose hometown the film was shot) provides so few clues to the source of Jim's malaise, or that of his entire sad-sack family, that the movie remains rudderless and not the least bit believable.

What gives the movie its coltish charm is Harrison's scene-setting feel for the indomitable brio of kids.

140 minutes of flat vignette, as dreary and uninvolving as the driving rain that never lets up on the benighted streets of Limerick.

A refreshing antidote to those E! True Hollywood Story documentaries on adult-film figures like John Holmes, Savannah and Traci Lords.

An intellectually steelier case against Bush, his cabalistic administration and the Iraq war than Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, Hijacking is even more chilling because it eschews the heartstring symphony conducted (albeit very effectively) by Moore and sticks to irrefutable facts and no-bullshit analysis.

Attack of the Clones' high-definition surfaces are certainly impressive, but they offer no lifelight, nothing to put your arms around.