Dunne is committed, thank good-ness, unapologetic for even the most fluttery sentiment or spookiest chill, enjoying the swellness of the very idea almost as much as any fanciful girl.

An impressive work that's ultimately undone by its excessive style.

A sui generis excursion into sex and race that is by turns terrible...and close to divine.

A hit in Denmark, this impressive debut feature from writer-director Anders Thom as Jensen is decidedly offbeat, with Jensen contrasting moments of brutal violence with the emerging gentleness of Torkild and his friends.

To no one's possible satisfaction -- the non-question of how Paige is to ascend to the throne and retain her personal integrity that The Prince and Me falls, finally and irrevocably, flat.

A schizophrenic outing from habitually hysterical director Tony Scott (True Romance, The Fan), Man on Fire is a movie of two unreconcilable halves.

Fails to allow the talented ensemble time to develop "Sunshine State’s" fine, Altmanesque ensemble feel, again and again missing the human and leaving cartoons that satisfy only as agitprop.

Adds up to little more than a cynical marriage of marketable commodities -- Lohan, NASCAR and the durably profitable Bug himself.

The final match stirs briefly, but when it's over, the movie's energy crashes right back down again. Disappointing.

The Skeleton Key takes its time making a slow, creeping ascent, but once it starts plummeting downward, Softley keeps things moving at a furious pace, and both Hudson and Rowlands enjoy surrendering themselves to the grandiloquent lunacy of it all.

The truth is still out there, like an unsold lawn chair at a garage sale, in this just plain lousy second big-screen outing for erstwhile FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.

A solidly crafted family comedy.

Lazy, infinitely silly cartoon.

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.

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.

Pinned down and smelling death, the men grow into fully realized human beings, which makes for some fine performances, but doesn't exactly propel this epic, richly detailed film forward. The battle, when it finally comes, is brief, admirably non-gory and rather dull.

It's impossible to find an iota of aesthetic worth or an ounce of pleasure in this sludge.

Anne Heche is just another neo-noir minx on the make, while Vince Vaughn, grinning and leering as Norman Bates, sinks the movie.

Karen Black gives her sharpest performance in years as Bambi LeBleau, a roadside-dive karaoke hostess who invites the kids back to her house for a night of booze and lounge classics.

To their great credit, writer Benjamin Brand and director Greg Harrison weave these contradictory variations into an effective puzzle, if one that doesn't quite transcend being a puzzle - it never becomes a mystery, like, say, "Mulholland Drive," or even "The Sixth Sense."

As in "Sexy Beast", Mellis and Scinto’s rhythmically aggressive dialogue becomes arialike. But first-time director Malcolm Venville lacks the visual flair of Sexy Beast’s Jonathan Glazer -- a deficit that, combined with 44 Inch Chest’s wobbly final act, comes dangerously close to erasing the film’s uninhibited look at the measure of a man.

The usually zippy and subversive director Mark Waters (Freaky Friday, Mean Girls) plays things straight and suffocatingly sentimental - which actually makes the whole movie seem that much creepier.

Gibson has made a big, bold, nightmarishly beautiful film not just about the dawn of the Christian faith, but about the awful tendency of human communities (wherever and whenever in the world they may exist) toward self-preservation, intolerance and mob rule.

The infectious high spirits of the performers help to carry the day.

Intermittently amusing, rarely illuminating and ultimately tedious documentary.

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

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

The movie's chief liability, though, is Rose herself, who also co-scripted with first-time director Robert Cary and who registers several notches below Nia Vardalos on the totem of unlikely double-threats.

Stylish, beautifully shot film.

The final revelation which, however anticipated, however contrived, stings just enough to make it feel like life.

Elegantly stylized but emotionally strained.

The movie is executed by director Kwak Kyung-Taek with flair, technical polish and tumescent firepower that the shriveled cinemas of Hong Kong and Japan can no longer match. But every gesture feels synthetic, from the back story about North-South separation to massage the emotions of the home audience, to the 24-style globe-hopping nuclear-terrorism premise.

A film we hereby proclaim the finest fertility comedy ever made, in the faint hope that another will not be attempted.

Helgeland strips the material back to its pulp origins and overlays it with a patina of glib motifs familiar to devotees of Hollywood’s 1970s renaissance.

A solidly filmed great play.

To his credit, Eddie Murphy knows it well enough to deliver a team-playing performance as the critter-phobic physician who reluctantly becomes the Albert Schweitzer of the animal kingdom.

The best news here is Adrienne Barbeau, the 1970s TV star and B-movie queen (Swamp Thing), who invests the role of Anthony's aunt with a worldly-wise sensuality that suggests a long-lost cousin of Tony Soprano.

If you get your jollies from watching women being shot, stabbed and humiliated, you’ll love video director David Dobkin’s pointlessly grisly, tediously derivative feature debut.

Hardwick doesn't have the chops yet to give the movie the caffeinated zip that it needs to really fly. There are too many dull, flat stretches…(however) the soundtrack kicks ass.

Director Glenn Gordon Carron's movie is far more bearable when Kate is spinning lies and sticking her tongue in Kevin Bacon's desiccated bad boy.

Irons' doleful lassitude sucks the energy right out of the story and makes this listlessly directed adaptation droop all the more.

This isn't a terrible film by any means, but it's also far from being a realized work. Jaglom has said that he “writes” his films in the editing room, but for Festival in Cannes he must have been using a crayon.

Crushingly airless film -- Food chokes on its own depiction of upper-crust decorum.

Has all the force of bubbles on air -- fun to look at, but exciting no emotion deeper than fleeting delight.

Yet another unfunny buppie sex comedy in the manner of "The Brothers," "Two Can Play That Game" and "Deliver Us From Eva."

Put simply, the film is a dazzling and fearless piece of showmanship.

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.

Although the hinges connecting the film's elements -- slapstick, political satire, thriller, gross-out shots -- sometimes squeak loudly, they hold the movie together nicely.

Benny Boom built his reputation directing music videos and commercials, and his first feature, Next Day Air, falls somewhere between the blunt-force visuals of the former and the focus-grouped formulas of the latter.

It's true, of course, that Trier still hasn't set foot on U.S. soil, but it may be that he sees us, in all our virtue and victimhood, that much more clearly for it.

The movie is glorious pulp pastiche without the smirks, which is fitting given the author's ironic humanism.

You can see what's coming five minutes into the movie, but capable acting lends it a certain superficial charm.

Although the dialogue initially flakes with awkward exposition, writer Ruth Epstein and director Harvey Kahn have fashioned a riveting thriller full of good scares and learned, muckraking insight into the global labyrinth of oil and politics.

Slight comedy, directed by Jim Field Smith, who tries with modest success to blend the sticky-sweet with the plain ol' sticky.

If King Arthur is as magnificently ridiculous as any Bruckheimer picture, its thuggish charms, which owe as much to Monty Python as to Sam Peckinpah, more than pick up the slack.

Brilliantly edited and gorgeously shot, Esther Kahn is a dream to look at and, courtesy of Howard Shore's minor chords and high-strung strings, definitely something to hear.

The drawback is Tyler, who lacks the vigor and energy her part requires in order to transcend charges of misogyny.

The ultimate test of one's tolerance for King's self-aggrandizing postulations about writer's block, obsessive fans and the potentially frightening manifestations of the writer's id...It's just plain lousy.

It is in the "serious" moments that the film's sentiments don't ring true.

Hoot is flatly directed by talk-show-host-turned-sitcom-director Wil Shriner, but the young actors are spirited and appealing, and the movie's low-key anti-establishment posture is vastly preferable to the knee-jerk fulminations of a Michael Moore.

There may be an audience out there for any movie about gospel music, regardless of how bad it is, but as filmmaking or as drama, it's hard to imagine anyone singing the praises of this one.

There’s nothing new in the movie’s sociocultural insights, especially for those of us already interested in how identity is shaped by pop culture, but the breezy tone and obvious fun being had by the cast make Finishing the Game a slight, low-key cool cinematic essay on identity politics.

Action and ideas -- they get in each other's way, pal. And director Ron Howard didn't want to choose between 'em. Good impulse, not such a good result.

This new feature has replaced the original's benevolence, taste and wit with cynicism, armpit humor and manic, desperately unfunny padding.

The interactions between the realms of the magical and the everyday are carried off with an easygoing charm.

Chai's structure and pacing are disconcertingly slack. Missing the loose ends and ambiguities of actual conversation, the dialogue makes characters sound like they're delivering speeches rather than interacting.

Carrey's schizophrenic new effort gives you both at once -- it drowns his hilarious physicality in an ocean of sap.

It isn't only that there is a dearth of ideas in Hollywood Ending -- however hateful, "Deconstructing Harry" was at least about something -- it's that the whole thing is almost entirely devoid of pleasure.

German filmmaker Stefan Ruzowitzky sticks to the formula that made his 2000 thriller “Anatomie” a German hit, offering up a who’s who of young German stars and plunging them into hot-and-cold color schemes, freewheeling camera work and diabolical master-race conspiracies. If Ruzowitzky were as good a storyteller as he is a stylist, he’d have something.

A story that's so ridiculous you'll at least be entertained by the outrageous plot contortions to come.

If, during a quiet moment of reflection, you have ever thought, "Hey, why hasn't there been a film about Ray Romano driving and eating Subway sandwiches?," you’re in luck: Tom Caltabiano's stupendously uneventful documentary of his and Romano's eight-day comedy tour of the South has arrived.

Nightmare Man is all impenetrably dark nighttime shots, politely telegraphed shocks and limp, transparent misogyny masquerading as genre-savvy hijinks.

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.

This utterly beguiling foray into family comedy from Hong Kong director Stephen Chow (Kung Fu Hustle, Shaolin Soccer) may be the tribute to Spielberg's "E.T. Extra-Terrestrial" the gleefully childlike filmmaker has had up his sleeve forever.

The direction rarely rises above acceptable, but anytime the camera’s pointed at Grant, it doesn’t matter. Like the currently ubiquitous pop song of the same name says, sometimes it’s a good hurt.

Gorier, meaner and uglier than anything Sylvester Stallone has made before, and as such damnably effective in rousing your blood lust, this wind-up groin kicker of a movie seems initially as wary of being pulled back into a dirty job as its reluctant hero.

Beerfest bubbles with the cheeky irreverence of early John Landis and David Zucker. Yet, like just about every other American screen comedy of the moment, it's far too long in the tooth, with a scattershot final half-hour that seems the work of an editor battling a bad hangover.

Sadly, The Break-Up is simply an exercise in confusion. To call it erratic would be to imply there was a course it went off, but the film's intentions are impossible to fathom.

Touch of Pink is really a big glob of "The Wedding Banquet," with some "Will & Grace" mixed in to remind us that gay people are actually quaintly neurotic and funny once you get to know them.

Creepy enough at first, this relatively gore-free film gradually becomes a stifling talk-fest in which superb actors drone on for so long about the nature of belief that one longs for a juror to spew a little pea soup.

At once over- and under-written, and peppered with tiresome coincidences and misunderstandings, Goldberg’s mechanical, joke-one, joke-two, joke-three approach to ensemble screenwriting soon betrays his TV-sitcom roots.

Sitcom humor substitutes for wit, and tedious angst supplies the drama.

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.

Fleming's more than passable, often extremely funny remake.

Irish director David Caffrey and English screenwriter Jeremy Drysdale have, respectively, zero sense of pace and a tin-eared grasp of period speech, and together fail either to let us care about their characters or to create any sense of a living era.

Stevenson manages to deliver a few poignant moments of nostalgia for the pleasures of youth against the stunning backdrop of the Maltese coastline.

This low-budget horror comedy arrives via a lively trailer and a witty print ad, yet the film itself never quite takes off.

It’s a tantalizing idea - a little rom-com sugar to help the Big Pharma exposé pill go down -but Slattery-Moschkau is simply not a writer of the caliber necessary to pull off that delicate balancing act.

Nobody here, especially Martin, looks as if he's having much fun, apart from a dizzy cameo by Ashton Kutcher as oldest daughter Piper Perabo's model-actor beau, riffing heavy-handedly on his pretty-boy image, and loving it.

The Heartbreak Kid is funniest when it leaves the body-humor behind for something truly subversive: a sequence of Eddie’s repeated attempts to cross the Mexico/U.S. border with a bunch of illegals and get back home is wicked, ticklish and inspired--all of the things the Farrellys should get home to themselves.

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.

(Lawrence)'s not just unfunny, he's coarsely anti-funny. The film just lurches from one dull skit to the next without bite or much of a point.

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.

The movie's saving grace is newcomer Goode, who has what they used to call smoldering good looks, and who can, not so incidentally, actually act.

It's bad enough that Australian writer-director Pip Karmel feels she must attempt the alternate-reality gimmick.

Ingratiating trifle.

She’s the Man amounts to little more than softcore porn for the tween set, with aesthetics ripped from the pages of the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog and virtually every scene revolving around Viola/Sebastian’s crafty escape from some impromptu disrobing.

Reiner, in very broad strokes, works in issues of poverty, thwarted dreams and family obligation, and almost pulls it off, thanks to Anthony Edwards, Aidan Quinn, Rebecca De Mornay, Penelope Ann Miller and John Mahoney, who impart humor and humanity to thinly sketched characters.