Juliette Binoche is the only reason to see Diane Kurys' florid, incoherent movie.

Culkin, a revelation here, mines every last nuance of the confusion and anger that results. Bursting with grenadelike one-liners and full-bodied performances, particularly from Sarandon (batty) and Goldblum (creepy) -- Igby Goes Down inaugurates a career that should be well worth following closely.

Despite the fact that you can see every plot twist a mile off, director Tim Story keeps the script by Mark Brown, Don D. Scott and Marshall Todd rollicking with a jazzy spontaneity.

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.

Whenever Green shows up to do his semi-improvised, non-acting shtick (detaching pit bulls from testicles, kamikaze wheelchair rides, etc.), this otherwise sprightly and intermittently amusing movie suddenly feels like a ship dragging its anchor.

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

The film may be rife with emotional declarations, but rather than the studied sentiments of news anchors and politicians, these ruminations have the quotidian ring of real people struggling with a standard vocabulary to describe something unthinkably new.

Gerber has a sharp cast at hand -- All work furiously, yet the director, with his fake backdrops and stately pacing, never settles on a consistent tone. Surely the novel had more bite.

For the first time in years, De Niro digs deep emotionally, perhaps because he's been stirred by the powerful work of his co-stars, including a subtle Frances McDormand and a ferocious Patti LuPone, as well as the heartbreaking (and achingly beautiful) Franco.

In its formal daring and exquisite style, the movie is itself an act of resistance against what Godard sees as a modern triumphalist culture that turns historical truth to lies and love to images created to make money.

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 overall vibe is druggy and self-indulgent, like a spring-break orgy for pretentious arts majors.

The film, whose clumsy editing and dearth of establishing shots keep the viewer in an unintended state of confusion, is a corpse in its own right: It’s filled with the rotting ideas of far better movies.

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

With flashbulb editing as cover for the absence of narrative continuity, Undisputed is nearly incoherent, an excuse to get to the closing bout (shot through bars and barbed wire in case we forgot the combatants are incarcerated), by which time it's impossible to care who wins.

The result is an intelligent, moving and invigorating film, just the thing for adults bored with the shock-horror posturing to be found in the work of so many young European directors.

Why Crop Circles now, if not to ride the hype of M. Night Shyamalan's "Signs" to some quick cash? The movie’s rambling, slapdash, repetitious nature suggests as much.

Despite its extraordinary theme, the film wades again and again into the kind of ordinary territory befitting its muted if glossy made-for-TV look and its tinkling, whimsically modern piano score.

It's supposed to be post-feminist breezy but ends up as tedious as the chatter of parrots raised on Oprah.

All Serving Sara can offer is Perry with his arm shoulder-deep up a longhorn steer's backside, a wasted supporting cast that includes Vincent Pastore and Cedric the Entertainer, and a huge, comedian-shaped hole where Hurley's performance should be.

Niccol gives audiences a very amusing puzzle about authenticity, fraud, and the uses and abuses of technology. That is a fine and funny feat. The very folks responsible for our obsession with celebrity will likely love it. And in loving it, they will no doubt let themselves off the hook.

Predictable as Satin Rouge's plot points may be, it ultimately resists characterization as an amiable and conventional tale of sexual rebirth.

Like Max Cady in "Cape Fear," the prototypical prole-stalks-bourgeois thriller, Sy is employed simply to scare the family members silly and, in so doing, make them stronger. Call it an exercise in threat management.

Murphy slogs his way through this dismally dull sci-fi comedy.

If one were to parody Iranian cinema, packing into one film its common tropes and themes to the point of bursting, it would probably be a lot like Iraj Karimi’s Going By.

While the film has the feel of an illustrated radio play, it teems nonetheless with pleasing ambiguities and subtle doubts, and its elusive qualities force the viewer into active and rewarding participation rather than simple passive spectatorship.

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.

Watching Possession is a movie experience not much deeper than you'd get on your couch watching Masterpiece Theater or Mystery! -- pleasant enough, but oh so soft.

Nettelbeck's storytelling grace, however, only highlights her clumsy script, which drags the viewer through an all-too-predictable menu of catharsis and romance that can overpower the film’s subtler, more complex flavors.

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.

The movie is loaded with good intentions, but in his zeal to squeeze the action and our emotions into the all-too-familiar dramatic arc of the Holocaust escape story, Minac drains his movie of all individuality.

I’m Going Home is as much an ambiguous poem to Paris as it is a study in artistic and physical mortality, and an elegy for a more decent past as it gives way to a brassier, more corrupt new century.

The movie's a rave and a half.

With the supremely gifted Rudd as his point man, Peretz is often ruthless in depicting Americans abroad as deluded cretins; by film’s end, however, he finds their optimism useful for re-firing the defeated hearts of his characters, even the hope-leery French ones.

While the film throws a solid pop punch, you could still swear you've seen it all before.

This is such a dazzlingly self-assured directorial debut that it's hard to know what to praise first.

The film gives good action (amid more tired spy business) but comes riddled with contradictions.

Almost nothing comes as a surprise in this stately old fogy of a movie. The pacing is glacial, the screenplay is stiff as a board, and things heat up only in the movie's final scenes.

Payami uses an exquisitely delicate juxtaposition of long shots and close-ups, mobility and stillness, music and found sound, comedy and pathos to suggest both the longing for self-expression and communication, and its limits in a repressive society.

Aniston plays her depressed character with enough conviction to guarantee that practically every scene will be stolen out from under her by minor characters, among them a pricelessly funny Zooey Deschanel as a Retail Rodeo employee who vents her rage and frustration on the customers.

This time around, writer-director Robert Rodriguez has stumbled badly, creating a clunky, gadget-happy film full of characters -- even returning ones -- about whom it is hard to care.

The movie remains fragmented, elliptical and overplotted to the point of being hard to track. Still, it's worth hanging in for the finish, a birthday party for Gus (David Duchovny), the producer of the film and the one person they're all linked to. Then Soderbergh pulls off a delicious trick, a gesture of pure, tender, unabashed movie love that makes up for everything.

It's Lawrence who throws Runteldat (as in "run and tell that") off key, repeating an admonition about "the trials and tribulations of life" that sounds suspiciously insincere coming, as it does, from a guy smothered in diamonds.

The air of self-imposed misery can dampen the film's humor, but Muccino never stays still long enough for the emotions to become leaden, and the strong cast carries the film to its striking, bittersweet conclusion.

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.

The Master of Disguise represents Adam Sandler's latest attempt to dumb down the universe.

The story proceeds, by minuscule tonal shifts and barely perceptible changes in the atmospheric temperature, from touches of ghoulish comedy -- to the creepy stillness of death that pervades the house.

Evans is a fascinating character, and deserves a better vehicle than this facetious smirk of a movie.

As Tweedy talks about canning his stockbroker and repairing his pool, you yearn for a few airborne TV sets or nude groupies on the nod to liven things up. And what do we get? Diet Coke! Tonight is definitely not the night.

On the surface, this coming-of-age tale feels slight and unremarkable, yet the director's final close-up of Frankie packs a punch -- a testament to the power of a gifted young actress happily lost inside her first big role.

What should have been a smart, stylish crime caper that nourishes film buffs with its multiple cinema references feels more like force-feeding.

Kids will probably enjoy the sight of huge, bumbling teddy bears -- Parents will exit wondering why this piece of unnecessary cross-promotion wasn't released straight to video.

The laugh always comes first, and Myers' puppy-dog tenacity to that cast-iron tenet of low comedy, disarming and even somewhat charming in the first film, now has an air of careerist desperation about it.

Anchored by two fine performances, this bittersweet comedy about second chances just might signal a new beginning for the director as well.

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.

If the screenwriters never satisfactorily reconcile these charming misfits with the unsettling fact that they're also bomb planters, albeit clumsy ones, they make up for it with smart, character-driven dialogue that's brought to life by an equally sharp ensemble.

Returning director Rob Minkoff (The Lion King) and screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin (Ghost) have done a fine job of updating White's dry wit to a new age, led in no small measure by Lane, who could probably make the IRS code book sound funny.

The clash between a winning cast, a witty script and Lansdown's technical weaknesses produces a pleasant, if not memorable, film blanc.

K-19 is so unnervingly square that it seems eerily like Party-sanctioned Soviet filmmaking: Its Motherland-loving sailors, myth-making shots of K-19 and displays of heroism are worthy of the Young Lenin Pioneers' Handbook.

It requires nothing more of a viewer than quiet complaisance, which is rewarded in turn by pleasant scenery, a few mild laughs, and the dependably involving presence of Weaver and, especially, Neuwirth.

It's the filmmakers' post-camp comprehension of what made old-time B movies good-bad that makes Eight Legged Freaks a perfectly entertaining summer diversion.

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.

Thankfully, the film, which skirts that rapidly deteriorating line between fantasy and reality -- Irwin as "himself" as croc expert as suspected international spy -- takes a tongue-in-cheek attitude even as it pushes the Croc Hunter agenda: Mother Nature? Don’t muck with her.

Climaxes in a flood of revelations that, like so much of the film, take us where we least expect to go.

Bowman and production designer Wolf Kroeger do an excellent job of evoking a twice-baked England, while writers Gregg Chabot, Kevin Peterka and Matt Greenberg keep the script devilishly pitched just shy of preposterous (it's McConaughey who stumbles beyond).

Like a date who's primped too long to arrive at dinner with something to talk about, Road to Perdition is beautifully groomed and a perfect drag to be with.

One of the most haunting, viciously honest coming-of-age films in recent memory.

This filmed Tosca -- not the first, by the way -- is a pretty good job, if it's filmed Tosca that you want. I'll stay with the stage versions, however, which bite cleaner, and deeper.

If, as it appears, Rosenthal is competing with the knife-wielding Myers for the title of biggest hack, he wins by unanimous decision.

Schaeffer fails to develop the relationship beyond clichéd signpost events.

Calculated to titillate middlebrow audiences on both sides of la Manche.

Somehow poor pacing and this lack of visual variety manage to make a great show seem boring.

Some psychobabble ("We're all trying to be who we are") is inevitable, but somehow or other the thing works, largely because the acting, though primarily reactive, invests the movie with enough immediacy and specificity to turn the most excruciating banality into an original thought.

Me Without You is at its truest and most affecting when it steps back from the gig gling, bitching and nail biting to reveal how the compulsion to control and appropriate can be born of simple love and admiration.

Improbably, Read My Lips escapes the cynicism of much contemporary neo-noir, if only by a hair, by ending as a love story of delightful crackpot idealism, in which Paul has made a crook and a hussy out of Carla, and she's made a gentleman out of him.

Smith and Jones sometimes have to paddle hard to keep their heads above the toilet water in which screenwriters Robert Gordon (Galaxy Quest) and Barry Fanaro (Kingpin) occasionally dunk them. But if the presence of Smith and Jones is indeed the tinker-proof ingredient of the Men in Black formula, little else seems to have survived the production unaltered.

A solidly crafted family comedy.

All you really need to know, finally, from a consumer angle, is that it is not boring, and looks fantastic, and maintains the wit and spirit of the original, and that -- it takes care of the grown-ups first. There are obscure puns and cultural references for Mom and Dad, dog pee and monkey poo (metaphorical) for the kids, and fighting for . . . everybody!

When she unabashedly puts herself in the same category as Richard Pryor (the master of identity politics and cultural reportage), it's not just presumptuous posturing on her part. She's earned her place there.

As with most of Toback's films, there are Big Ideas being bandied about that never quite coalesce, a failing that, this time at least, mirrors his hero's own hyped-out search for meaning.

A fascinating, richly detailed documentary about the legendary queer collective based in San Francisco in the late '60s and early '70s.

The rough, watercolor washes of its city backdrops mark the film with nostalgia while its story carries us along at an amiable, buoyant pace.

Sandler is -- à la "The Wedding Singer" -- in his washout romantic mode here, and no amount of spastic-colon jokes, cartoon violence or good-buddy cameos (Al Sharpton, John McEnroe) can distract from the fact that Gary Cooper he ain't.

Off sorority row, the movie goes flat for increasingly long stretches, with the filmmakers displaying so little understanding of or genuine feeling for the mentally challenged that they never advance past stutter-and-stumble humor.

So what in this high-concept lame-a-thon makes screenwriter Bradley Allenstein think he can diss the Clippers?

The movie rarely overcomes its terminal Scorsese- and Ferrara-isms, or fulfills the promise, evident in the film's early passages, that Montias might be a fine observer of local color with his own unique stories to tell.

If Sayles had maneuvered these stories and performances into even a shade more sentimentality or gravitas, the weight would have collapsed them like a house of cards. As it is, they breathe easily, delicately into each other.

The purest of horror films.

Terrifically entertaining specimen of Spielbergian sci-fi, incomparably better than "A.I." and as dark a movie as the director has made since "Schindler's List."

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

In the studied excess of his Hong Kong action movies, Woo's swooning sentimentality plays like grand opera. With its dogged Hollywood naturalism and the inexorable passage of its characters toward sainthood, Windtalkers is nothing but a sticky-sweet soap.

The British music-video director Peter Care (making his feature debut) and screenwriters Jeff Stockwell and Michael Petroni have retained much of the wry, teen-wise dialogue from the late Chris Fuhrman's cult-hit novel, while giving his story arc a fuller, more rounded shape.

Though it's clearly meant to be character-driven, the movie is thrown out of whack by a total lack of chemistry between the leads, and some great acting (Clive Owen, Chris Cooper, Brian Cox) on the side.

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

Director Raja Gosnell apparently doesn't even try to pump life into this wan film version of the beloved Saturday-morning cartoon.

Deft, funny and intelligently scary.

To the degree that ivans xtc. works, it's thanks to Huston's revelatory performance.

May be scant on character and plot development, but it’s rich with affection for daydream believers