A movie saved by great acting.

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

The dancing is dazzling in director Emilio Martínez-Lázaro's The Other Side of the Bed, but the movie itself is a dud.

The 26-year-old Argentine director Diego Lerman shows a sure hand in his debut, from his contrasty black-and-white compositions to his sly, jumpy edits, reminiscent of Godard.

Dog Days is in fact a bleak but deeply felt humanism -- a yearning that we might all learn to better love our neighbors and, perhaps more importantly, ourselves.

Perhaps only a filmmaker from a country steeped in Catholicism could turn out a consistently sharp and profane "divine comedy" (the title means "blessed hell") that is also, for the most part, theologically correct.

Whatever ghost-story intrigue the film musters gives way to a tedious cycle of fighting, screwing, shouting and storytelling stuck together by two hours worth of hard-boiled dialogue gone gummy.

The movie's wistful tone leavened with breaks into farce recalls Elia Suleiman's superbly controlled "Chronicle of a Disappearance."

Empty details pile up, awful performance art is doled out, talking heads are intermittently identified, and the late Brandon Teena is evoked to little real purpose.

While decidedly green, at least isn't mealy or tasteless. And if the juice in tyro screenwriter Erica Beeney's witty dialogue can't quite flow through the hard tissue of underripe gimmicks and derivative set pieces, there's enough sweetness in the performances, and tautness in the direction (by Efram Potelle and Kyle Rankin), to forestall any serious bellyaching.

Stickler goes straight to the source, combining terrific archival footage with interviews of Tony Hawk, Stacy Peralta and others who knew Rogowski back in the day.

It's tough to decide just what's more offensive: the movie's musty depiction of gangsta rap as public enemy No. 1, the notion that all an uptight white girl needs to loosen up is a few puffs on a Philly blunt, or the idea that any of this might be remotely funny.

While the premise does lead to a few moments of inspired physical comedy -- the movie repeatedly falls back on poorly staged, choppily edited fight scenes between Chan and a gloomy, power-mad villain.

This may be celebrity prankster (and pinup du jour) Ashton Kutcher’s most elaborate practical joke to date: the gag being that this is a real movie and that he’s a real movie star.

More than once, while watching the film, I thought: The camera should really just turn away from those grating teen brats and follow the mom (Holly Hunter).

The sentimental novelty of watching two childhood antiheroes have at it dissipates once you realize the lugubrious lengths to which the screenplay must go in order to make that happen.

One almost pities the unnervingly twitchy Murphy, whose shiny makeup is dreadful, and who doesn't stand a chance alongside the focused intensity of Fanning, who commands the screen with the precision of a 30-year veteran.

It's our great good fortune, and Pekar's, that this movie -- which won the Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival, followed by the FIPRESCI Award at Cannes -- is as true to the dyspeptic spirit of its source as anyone could have imagined.

Nearly drowns in languor, only to be saved by Milos and Isaacs, who are sexy, movie-star talented and, together, really good kissers.

Here is a Western without irony or innovation, without any of the overt efforts toward “revisionism” we’ve come to expect even from Eastwood -- a movie that waxes elegiac about the end of the West, but remains sure that cowboys and cattle and ramshackle frontier towns will live on in perpetuity at the cinema.

A crass, condescending piece of corporate bamboozling, Grind plays like a movie conceived by monkey-suited honchos who regard their targeted audience as impressionable nincompoops susceptible to every new trend in sports, clothing and music that comes down the pike.

A smart, seamless commentary on race, class and the expectations (or lack of) that are often attached to them. Kennedy is helped greatly by deep currents of heart and humor that pull you into the unfolding tale, and to the edge of your seat as the countdown to opening night begins.

For a film that deals with adultery, racism, immigration and class struggle, Loco Love is a startlingly weightless work. It has the antiseptic look and feel of an Olsen Twins video.

The movie has a rambunctious and likable energy that compensates for its unsteady, only intermittently amusing narrative.

The movie's tag line, which promises (among other things) “No stereotypes,” is one of those rare cases of truth in advertising. That Brown also happens to have captured some genuinely awesome surf footage -- often the only raison d’être for such films -- feels like a bonus.

For a movie that boasts a murder, a would-be suicide and the usual generous helping of screwing around à la français, Le Divorce is remarkably calm and contained even as it builds to its climax.

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."

Serviceable, wholly uninspired.

Waters directing, from a perky script by Heather Hach and Leslie Dixon, is bouncy and assured enough to give a cheeky lilt to what otherwise might have been an earnest PSA for intergenerational peace, love and understanding.

Grim, grueling and triumphantly powerful.

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 it's Dave's madly humming brain that propels the film, Davis, whose every glance is a short story in itself, makes Dana's internal crisis equally resonant.

Paymer is the key to this mild-mannered comedy built on easy setups and borscht-belt one-liners.

The jewel in this well-rounded collection of gay-themed shorts is Alan Brown's "O Beautiful."

The movie is enormously, convulsively funny, and it never lets up -- it has no shame.

How fortunate that the J. Lo bod, majestic butt and all, finds itself in excellent working order in Gigli: There is precious little other consolation in this formless windbag of a romantic comedy.

As social satire, though, the movie is a nonstarter, completely lacking in the zany lunacy of "M*A*S*H" and "Dr. Strangelove," or the whacked savagery of "Catch-22."

Surprisingly enjoyable, even if you'd hesitate to call it a complete success. Indeed, Figgis expects you to sit back and roll with the pleasurable moments.

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.

One of the best part 3's ever made, and Rodriguez's knack for concocting the most imaginatively deranged children's entertainments since "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" remains unassailed.

With her bulging blue eyes, elaborately braided hair and slinky spandex costumes, she's an indelible icon of action-heroine chic, and, quite frankly, the films don't deserve her.

Two-thirds of the way through, Seabiscuit awakes to its duties as a perfectly presentable race movie, rising to a crescendo of satisfying --- if somewhat gaga -- inspiration.

After a lively first half-hour, the scenes start to feel heavy, as though Serrano suddenly decided he was actually making a meaningful drama, and the ensuing, halfhearted political satire is like an extra weight on top of that.

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

After a zippy first hour, the wackos wear out their welcome and the director, perversely, fails to show the big concert.

What's fresh for these people is, frankly, old news for anyone who has seen even one or two documentaries on similar subject matter.

Essentially a TV movie souped up by the divinely skittish cinematography of Chris Menges, the film suffers from a screenplay full of labored attempts at wit by Steven Knight, and characters who barely make it off the page alive.

As a story it’s nothing much, but as eye candy it is world-class.

Dazzling imagery and a grab bag of wry jokes, no matter how lively, can take a movie only so far when there's no emotional ballast attached.

The Anarchist Cookbook drops a few scant sparks onto a torch that, hopefully, some other filmmaker will come along and run with.

Mahieux, who is superb, methodically paint Peppino as a man for whom solitude is torture.

How much can one girl grapple with over the course of an hour and a half?

The bigger-than-big, rambunctious spectacle is way too much of a questionably good thing.

This Thing of Ours is infatuated with the romance of gangsterism -- with an absurdly straight face, it asks us to feel mournful for the loss of “respect” and “integrity” in the mob community.

Despite a hopelessly corny score, the movie is redeemed by a goofily touching final scene.

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

A funny summer frolic.

There's lots of half-naked flesh on display, and an enticing sense of hot action afoot (especially between the two gay guys), but the directors seem timid about sex, and really, what's the point of being Spanish if you're afraid to show the good stuff?

Recalls the structure of Danis Tanovic's 2001 black comedy, "No Man's Land," but not that film' hyperknowing urbanity or strident political savvy.

The film, like the beleaguered country it depicts, has a raw, neurotic, brawling yet tender vitality.

Wise and moving.

Extraordinary is the very last adjective that comes to mind.

There is, however, a more compelling, more melancholy story itching to break out here, one of two wounded people finding each other at the exact wrong moment in both their lives. But by the time Berri gets around to that idea, The Housekeeper is already finishing up.

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

The booty here is 100 percent fool's gold.

Indulging his taste for Grand Guignol and the stylistically baroque, Schwentke never quite overplays his hand, though his occasional lapses into visual extravagance can be irritating, and the result is a nasty, intelligent and complex thriller.

Surprisingly unsexy, uninvolving affair.

By the time we get to the big finish, it feels as if we've merely been poked repeatedly in the ribs with a really good-looking stick.

Ray Harryhausen's original stop-motion Sinbad classics are a hard act to follow, but Tim Johnson and Patrick Gilmore's update, couched in a gorgeous palette of indigo and dark rose, is a big, beautiful thrill all its own.

All shiny surfaces and clever moves designed to blur the lines between fantasy and reality and uncover the kinkiness that lies within us all.

"Legally Blonde" was a splashy, wide-screen near musical, a movie made in the spirit of Elle Woods herself. Legally Blonde 2 is Elle Woods' eulogy.

Here's a picture that you actually want to see a second time, not for the sake of further wrapping your head around its gnarly conceptual matrix, but because of the sheer visceral charge it provides. Here, at long last, is a summer movie -- like its precursors in the Terminator canon -- worth its weight in cybernetic organisms.

Beguiling and intoxicating.

As the characters mix and mingle, pouring out their tales of woe online and fumbling real-life connections, Weintrob leaves no cliché unturned in getting to root causes of behavior.

The movie is mercifully uncontaminated by the smarty-pants self-reflexiveness that has sucked the lifeblood from nearly all post-"Scream" horror pictures. Clever enough not to be too clever, Boyle and Garland play their story straight -- they just want to give you the creeps -- and, by so doing, bring the undead back to cinematic life.

Can't sustain its manic pitch, or work the McMiracle needed to overcome a script (credited to three writers, though more were no doubt afoot) that's less a story than a sales pitch.

Full of gumption, Clarkson and Guarini soldier on, seemingy unaware that the perfectly adequate singing voices that brought them to the big screen are being drowned out, on a half-dozen same-sounding songs, by an overlayered backup group.

It's like a three-times-too-long sitcom pilot missing the laugh track.

The characters are flat creatures of duty, and the film is more a tale of the collective will of a state than of the rugged individuals behind it.

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

Heartfelt yet overly schematic debut feature.

Levy, Luis Guzman, Cheri Oteri -- utterly wasted. At 82 minutes it feels longer than “Lawrence of Arabia” -- and a lot less funny.

The Hard Word’s greatest betrayal, however, is of its cast, of Pearce (hamming it up as the charismatic antihero) and Griffiths (as sexy as ever, but more or less abandoned by the movie midway through), who give it their all but get very little in return.

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.

Paramount Pictures proudly informs us that the PG rating is for “mild, crude humor.” Too mild, too crude by far. If I were you, I’d take the wee ones and run for the vastly superior “Finding Nemo.”

Nothing, in fact, really fits together, most notably the partnership of Ford and Hartnett: Looking weathered yet professional, Ford carries what he can, but pretty and sullen Hartnett barely comes to life, leaving his partner stranded, and straining.

Lounguine’s biopic is chilly and convoluted, too eventful to be boring, but never taking the time to immerse us emotionally in Makovski's world.

While director Thaddeus O'Sullivan has some interesting visual ideas -- his period London is a heavily aestheticized, matte-painted dreamscape -- he never makes an emotional connection to the material the way he did in his fine Irish gangland drama, “Nothing Personal.”

Eric Eason's assured debut succeeds in the way Larry Clark's “Kids” succeeded -- through a feel for the rhythms of street life, and some extraordinary casting.

Danièle Thompson's romantic comedy is excellent fluff français, leavened with charm, wit and smart observation about the way we love now.

Maher's filmmaking is competent -- the sets are inventive, and all the camera angles match up -- but someone should have warned her that neither she nor her young cast is experienced enough to pull off the line “The only people buying it are the faggots.”

Long-shelved 2001 clunker.

Genuinely scary, especially when it strays from its lame plot to orchestrate some beautifully chilling set pieces, including one in the world's slowest elevator that'll raise the hairs on the back of even the most weary genre fan's neck.

This shaggy-dog sequel is ultimately satisfying for the most low-tech of reasons: The competitive bond between the two central characters.

Writer-director Niki Caro, who adapted the screenplay from the novel, has crafted a script replete with both crowd-pleasing touches and subtle but powerful insights into all the characters.

Through masterful editing, nimble music selection and smart use of documentary materials, the filmmakers shake the dust off cultural clichés to provide a provocative survey of the past. It’s a subversively sleek enterprise.

The only real-life situations the movie evokes vividly are the circumstances of its own production: underrehearsed actors in hastily staged scenes speaking page after page of awkward expository dialogue.

The film does, in the end, raise something of an existential dilemma: If you set out to make a new version of something you know to be bad, and you make something that is in fact bad, have you somehow succeeded?