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."

Now there is inconclusive but reasonable doubt, based on a letter that turned up in 2005 from Upton Sinclair, who had heard their disgruntled first lawyer say they were guilty. You'd think this nugget might show up in a new documentary about the case, but Peter Miller, known for his 2001 film about that other beloved song of the left, "The Internationale," has recast the story into a tale of prejudice against Italian immigrants and the violation of civil rights.

The Painting is a sleekly crafted quilt of moldy racial insight and feel-good kumbaya-isms set against the backdrop of the civil rights era. The acting is competent, TV-movie-of-the-week quality (network, not cable), while every single character is a type you've seen a million times before.

Though Beloved sags into repetition after two of its three hours, this beautiful movie is suffused with an intensity that holds our attention for the conclusion.

Brave, gifted, haunted and poor, these kids are so heartbreaking that you wish Shou had the good sense to give their lives the attention he lavishes on himself.

It's "Rain Man" with ageism substituted for autism.

The film is never less than lovely to gaze upon, shot in saturated colors, richly appointed in period trappings and peopled only by the very beautiful. But it is also, by its end, too silly to take seriously.

It's abundantly clear that Lozano and company have been re-watching "Pulp Fiction" for the last decade, pausing long enough to pick up the fluid rhythms of "Y Tu Mamá También" and "Amores Perros" while completely missing those films' social and political edges.

Formulaic but innocuous little movie's one clever moment, a sing-off between choirs standing on their respective church steps, trying to lure in Sunday-morning worshippers.

In more experienced hands, perhaps a great story could be told, but Ten ’Til Noon has two major factors working against it. First, the acting is wildly uneven...Second, once the conspiracy is more or less revealed, the story ceases to be interesting.

Though targeted to the same female filmgoers who flocked to the self-realization via food porn of "Julie & Julia," EPL is a comparative downer, letting viewers experience the rush of self-improvement without having to do any of the work. I cried. Mission accomplished?

The various disruptions Miike visits upon his stories, and upon his audience, serve mainly to focus attention on the manipulating intelligence behind the scenes. They're a fancy way of yelling, "Look at me!"

Unfortunately, the innovations that attend this updating dilute the iconic weight of the original.

Sure, it’s kind of entertaining to see the studly, studious Mortensen slap on a few pounds and go way out with the fuggeddaboutit talk as he tries to shoot the shit with Ali’s pedantic, closeted virtuoso. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him ham it up. But the leads mostly are saddled with literal, middle-of-the-road material.

The musical film version of The Producers is, for better or worse, a faithful record of the stage production, adhering to the same if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it philosophy that informed the recent "Rent."

If only the whole thing didn't collapse in on itself, and quickly become a parody of artistic reach and terminal folly.

Benicio del Toro’s a squinty-eyed genius, and the only reason this film is halfway worth seeing.

You see where this is going, but, apparently, kids don’t know the formula.

Railsback and Snodgrass struggle against caricature in their own fine performances.

If you're out shopping with the brood and need a 40-minute break, you could do worse.

The movie strains so hard to have its heart in the right place that it never really exploits the guilty-pleasure fun of the premise.

The movie’s entire first half turns out to be an elaborate fake-out, a setup for a plot reversal so extreme it could induce whiplash even in seasoned Bollywood hands. As clumsily engineered by writer-director Kunal Kohli (Hum Tum), the sudden changeover from romance to political techno-thriller is likely to be especially startling for non-Indians.

Director Christopher J. Scott hits all the technical marks with his look at the history and current status of snowboarding, yet he doesn’t find a strong enough hook to pull in any except the already converted.

The Salton Sea isn't without interest or ideas, though some of the better ones are cribbed from David Fincher and, especially, Martin Scorsese.

Proyas merely assembles a mess of spare parts from better movies.

David Duchovny’s debut as a writer-director puts little flesh on the bones of the roguish tricks he got up to as a lad in Greenwich Village in the 1970s.

McKittrick cites "Dazed and Confused" as well as "Clerks" as influences, yet he lacks the raw edge of early Smith and the existential drift of Linklater. And if side-splitting laughter is what you crave, Waiting . . . will leave you hungry for a slice of American Pie.

Poor special effects, a silly looking werewolf and clunky comic writing help to spoil what should have been a fun B-movie.

For all its infectious, go-for-broke wackiness ATHFCMFFT never quite surpasses its opening sequence.

Nearly wall-to-wall climax -- an unwieldy, two-plus-hours third act of a movie, guided by the principle (incubated by "Reloaded" and fully grown here) that too much is never too much.

On and on drags this amour fou, with its one-liners, ripostes, elaborate misunderstandings and chastened reaction shots, all courtesy of writer-director Ben Younger, straining to let out his inner femme after the testosterone excesses of "Boiler Room."

Many a comic potentiality is underworked, and the film's prevailing tone is obnoxiously erratic -- surely the supporting eccentrics (Jason Biggs and Lindsay Sloane) aren't supposed to be so off-putting? -- but it rests safe when entrusted to the charisma of its principals.

Ultimately, what’s most noteworthy about this middling effort is how aggressively un-contemporary it is.

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.

Though The Page Turner clearly aims for ambiguity of meaning, you'd have to be blind, or deaf to the strenuously long-faced score, to miss the signs and portents that keep piling up in this dispiritingly transparent movie, which brandishes its foregone conclusion 20 minutes in.

His is a valiant story, though it doesn't quite work as a nearly 90-minute documentary -- the Cadigans simply don’t have enough material.

The Amateurs is nothing if not easy to watch. Yet, as a writer, Traeger is consternatingly adolescent and glib.

Tatou evinces that innate self-possession in which Frenchwomen specialize, and lets it fly here. That, in turn, keeps this flawed movie aloft.

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

Cuesta works well with underage actors, but there's no hiding the fact that these kids amount to little more than the sum of their suffering at the hands of cardboard parental incompetents

Phoenix, who initially seemed the kind of actor who was too cool, too angry, to appear in studio pap such as this, is a magnetic presence, despite the numbing pathos surrounding him, but isn't that what we used to say about Travolta?

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.

Even Cohen can't dull the loony romanticism of the movie’s finale and, to his credit, stages one truly spectacular bit of action midway through, when Biel bails out behind enemy lines and narrates each harrowing moment of her earthward plummet.

One expects razzle-dazzle dance sequences to lift this movie above its clichés, but they are few and far between, which is not only disappointing, it's downright baffling.

It does, however, fairly bubble with speed-freak energy and a dry, laddish wit that keeps the jokes coming.

Roth can obviously direct actors sympathetically, and he paces the movie adroitly.

Narrow definitions of femininity limit the comedy and the romance.

A solidly filmed great play.

Given her (Halle Berry) biggest part since winning Oscar, she responds with a zeal that's more than the movie deserves.

Jeanne is no fun at all. This is no fault of Swank, who's caught in the overall confusion of a movie crippled by its ambitions to be both caper and heartfelt melodrama, to say nothing of a cautionary tale about the politics of celebrity in our own culture.

The sharpness of Eyre's opening, however, ebbs away when he takes up the story of Rudy (Eric Schweig) and Mogie (Graham Greene), two brothers with neatly opposed responses to the reservation grind.

Where the young writer-director impresses is in the unforced sketching of era details (gas lines, the tacky energy of roller-skating rinks), in the sharp psychological insight into his lead characters, and in the performances he pulls from his actors.

What's memorable here is the sparkling chemistry between Bates and Woodard, whose scenes together are a pleasure to watch, even as one thinks that their next outing should be to co-teach a master class entitled, "How To Rise Above Cliché."

The problem is that Ortega offers only the public Michael.

For all their foul jokes and embarrassments, the brothers have a talent for creating characters whose goodness, and lack of ironic self-consciousness, shield them against life's insults.

Jack, the actor, smiles obligingly, but you can practically feel him rolling his eyes.

A gorgeously burnished vintage post card come to life, Motorcycle Diaries has about as much depth and emotional currency as the cardboard that post card would be stamped on.

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.

Routinely assembled live document.

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

The camaraderie in the Eagle Shield Transport locker room is strained stuff, despite a capable ensemble cast that includes Matt Dillon and Larry Fishburne.

Ellis and screenwriter Eric Bress even go all meta on us with an "Inglourious Basterds"–esque finale set inside a 3D cinema, though their set pieces never quite muster the giddy brio of "Final Destination 1" and "3" auteur James Wong at his best.

Plays cleverly to adults, but will fly straight over the heads of minors, who have little but a lone fart joke and wave upon wave of flying fur to keep them laughing.

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.

It is a dull and boring film, pretty as a Turner landscape and as sweetly becalmed as the glassy Sargasso Sea in which the men of the unfortunately named “Surprise” find themselves trapped for what felt, to me at least, like weeks on end.

This ensemble drama is passionately acted and nicely shot, but the storytelling of first-time writer-director Dan Kay is infused with an archaic naiveté.

At its best, there's a strong (albeit live-action) echo of Charles M. Schulz's "Peanuts" in Little Manhattan. The movie's hero, Gabe, is a world-weary 10-year-old who addresses us in eloquent voice-overs. Like Charlie Brown, he's in love with a red-headed beauty.

A great ensemble cast can't lift this heartfelt enterprise out of the familiar.

To explore seriously the question of Kissinger's crimes wouldn't merely take hours, it would require the patient, unblinking vision of a Frederick Wiseman or Marcel Ophuls. Gibney and Jarecki just want to string the bastard up.

Abeles sheds little new light on why few parents, teachers, politicians or administrators seem willing to get off the bus.

The film is too broad and tacky to engage on a universal level, or at least Stateside: The choreography is sloppy and lifeless; the outmoded blend of vintage rock, country and Broadway styles doesn't click; and the characters are such caricatures that it's no wonder the entire cast is overacting.

Check off all of Perry’s motifs: vilification of the black bourgie princess, tough-love Christian messages, Academy Award–nominated actresses (Viola Davis, this time) managing to maintain their dignity.

As with all of Egoyan's films, this new one comes cloaked in an atmosphere of dread, but for the first time there's no real purpose, intellectual or emotional, to all the free-floating anxiety.

Don’t Tell is intelligent on the schizoid mental strategies of incestuous families, but its style and mood are so heavily drawn from television soap opera, I found myself more absorbed in the seriocomic lesbian subplot that rambles along entertainingly, if irrelevantly, on the periphery.

During the all-important underwater sequences, the three-dimensional effects are surprisingly muted.

It's short, this movie, an attribute Sandler himself might take heed of, and if the teenagers in the back row are laughing harder and more often, you might at least find yourself smiling (guiltily) every few minutes.

Writer-director Avi Nesher and co-screenwriter Roger Berger -- upon whose real-life investigations the film is based -- deliver on the hard-boiled promise of this low-key thriller with plenty of gritty twists and turns.

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

Less about music than about the possibilities of the IMAX system itself.

Iguana runs hot and cold, being engaging and dull by turns depending on the plausibility of the character before the camera.

Becomes guilty of the very prejudice that his film has so obviously tried to subvert. It's too bad -- the rest of it is hilarious.

Despite good performances from Gregory, Considine and especially David Morrissey, the movie's true merits are all on the surface: its uncannily authentic period reconstruction and its successful use of stressed and textured film stocks. The filmmakers care more about this than about their characters, and it's hard for us not to feel the same.

This is the kind of amiable time-killer that belongs on a basic-cable weekend afternoon.

Too often, in this version, Green doesn’t seem to know where to put the camera to elicit that sense of surveilling or being surveilled. Worse, that incompetence often works hand in hand with overwrought comic dialogue. But let’s get to what really works here: Curtis.

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

Match Point is a perfectly presentable, entirely unremarkable domestic melodrama parked queasily between opera and realism, two irreconcilable forms if ever there were.

Shall We Dance?, which roams all over the emotional map without landing anywhere, is an unwieldy mess that gives every impression of having been made under a mandate to fill the Miramax crowd-pleaser slot.

In this serviceable remake of the fondly remembered 1959 Disney comedy (which starred Fred MacMurray), an impressively dexterous Tim Allen plays Dave Douglas.

The story may not be new, but Australian director John Polson, making his American feature debut, jazzes it up adroitly, with a nifty, staccato editing technique that suggests Madison's inner turmoil and, in the process, fills in some of the shading missing from Christensen's performance.

The career of the lovably tense Zahn may benefit more from this movie than that of Lawrence, who’s funny, here and there, but who appears to be working at half speed.

Stettner's vision of both women lacks fullness, relying on stereotypes of feminine strength and vulnerability.

This is a gay men's movie whose primary function is to doll Fonda up like a drag queen and let her rip.

Peter Segal's film, a predictable, choppy affair at best, boasts an understated, likable performance by Sandler, but here we never feel, as we did with the original, invested in the outcome of the final game, or convinced of the redeemability of the movie's sordid protagonist.

As sticky as "Strictly Ballroom," if far better behaved, Shall We Dance was written and directed by Masayuki Suo, a man who really knows his way around clichés both benign and tiresome.

While its blowout finale is telegraphed long before the first act ends, and too much else is just as obvious and bland, Judd, Freeman and Franklin never stop adding filigree. The big picture isn't much to look at, but the detailing isn't bad.

Gibson and Good deliver such emotionally honest performances that we wish them a happy ending, no matter how many movie clichés have to be trotted out to get there.

It's when adults with whitewashed notions of childhood get hold of a camera that kiddie fare - like this uninspired effort from writer-director Eric Hendershoot - goes limp.

Hobbled by a schizoid desire to make a deep human drama on the one hand and a blistering IRA shoot-'em-up on the other, Alan Pakula's new movie is less a story than a plodding sequence of debates punctuated by gunfire.