By herself, Bullock isn't enough to hold up this enervating movie, which lumbers along ponderously until, at the end, it takes a giant leap into the suspension of disbelief that lost me altogether.

Like the abominable "Napoleon Dynamite," director Jared Hess' second feature will doubtless capture the hearts and minds of 12-year-old boys everywhere, even if Nacho Libre sacrifices the earlier film's aggressive mean-spiritedness in favor of gentle slapstick lunacy.

A toxic combination of obvious bromides and talentless filmmaking, writer-director Ted Fukuda's schmaltzy, tone-deaf romantic drama sets your teeth on edge from the outset and doesn't let up for 103 minutes.

actor-turned-director Kevin Bacon (Sedgwick's husband) can't seem to decide if he's making a film about a loving eccentric or a sociopath.

This frenetic potboiler about a love triangle on the Salvador waterfront smacks of liberal slumming and bristles with faux authenticity.

It's a dud. To be fair, the source material (to which the film is unfortunately faithful) is itself a wan assemblage of creaky one-liners, overly familiar gay ghetto types and sitcom-inspired shenanigans.

A Spanish dinner-theater comedy, this intermittently hilarious contraption by the husband-wife team of Dominic Harari and Teresa de Pelegri heaves Jewish-Palestinian conflict onto a prop-room table already groaning with loaded guns, impromptu sex toys, a wounded duck paddling in a bidet, and a brick of frozen soup that doubles as a sandbag for unlucky pedestrians below.

Wordplay offers a running tutorial in how crosswords are created - lessons that are enhanced by the onscreen graphics of designer Brian Oakes, which, come tournament time, allow moviegoers to see the clues and grids the contestants are working on, theoretically allowing us to solve the puzzles along with them.

Exciting though the car-racing scenes are, with their millions of fan-cars swaying fluidly around the stadium, it's the drives through the canyons and passes, and the quiet old ruin of a town (which recalls the abandoned mall in Miyazaki’s "Spirited Away"), that truly quicken the pulse.

For a film about death and endings, A Prairie Home Companion is a cracking good time - a warm, golden bauble within which to shelter, like the radio show that inspired it, from the misery and ennui that engulf us in and out of the multiplex.

Elegantly stylized but emotionally strained.

This sensational documentary, which follows German avant-garde musician Alexander Hacke around the city with his mobile recording studio, crosses all kinds of bridges.

Rather than simply releasing the uncomfortably amusing clips on DVD as a "Jackass"-style compilation, executive producer Vin Di Bona and Gold Circle Films president Paul Brooks have spliced them into the umpteenth unfunny cinematic variation of the "sensitive guy and obnoxious womanizing best friend try to get laid" story, with nary a laugh to be had unless you're one of those who finds toilet scenes and prison-rape jokes to be automatically hilarious.

It's a mildly enjoyable romp.

The actors sleepwalk through their roles (save for Rosemary herself, Mia Farrow, chewing the scenery with termitelike gusto as the boy's satanic protector), while Moore, who previously directed "Behind Enemy Lines" and the "Flight of the Phoenix" remake, seems completely at a loss without any planes to crash.

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.

Elevated by fantastic performance footage of Sa and his young protégés singing, dancing and rhythmically banging on cans, plastic bottles or anything else that can be fashioned into a drum -- and a cultural revolution.

Go for the dazzling, if repetitive, human stunt work. Endure the appallingly simplistic politics.

You'd have to be either an avid New Ager or willing to see Nick Nolte in absolutely anything to get fully onboard for this visually overexcited tale of salvation-by-gas-station-guru.

With its weary disillusionment, The War Tapes shouldn't be criticized for its seeming lack of outrage. Indeed, from the overwhelming grief and anger it uncovers, the film feels appropriately, uncomfortably numb.

The Puffy Chair is the funniest, saddest and most emotionally honest "romantic comedy" to come along in years, even if I've yet to encounter many over the age of about 35 who like the film, or even get it.

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.

Heartfelt but insipid drama, the naiveté quickly becomes exasperating.

Long before the movie's climax, in which Magneto (Ian McKellen) turns smashed-up automobiles into fiery projectiles to be hurled at his enemies, those in the audience will know what it means to behold a flaming hunk of junk.

Writer-director Caroline Roboh's moralistic paean to Jewish self-knowledge is so solemnly high-minded that one almost feels bad admitting that the film's only spark comes from its occasional tawdry ludicrousness.

As you stagger out of the theater after 78 breathless minutes of Gamazon and Dela Llana's electrifying location shooting and disquieting insights into Christian-Islamic tensions, you may well feel that your eyes have been opened too.

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.

The pleasure of La Moustache is that it doesn't feel the need to explain itself at every turn. Part absurdist comedy about the institution of marriage, part paranoid Kafkaesque fantasy, it's a minor-key reverie on the way our own lives can sometimes feel alien to us.

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.

Deftly held together by bags of good humor and zany action sequences, tethered to a heartfelt conviction that green is good and family is better.

The killer in this nasty yet taut slice-and-dice 'em horror flick is a collector of eyeballs, which he removes from his screaming victims with an efficient single swooping motion of his talon-like index finger. If that image makes you grin not cringe, then this movie's for you.

A lurid, overheated Southern Gothic that wallows in its own unpleasantness.

Like Michael Haneke's "Caché," this effectively creepy little customer from Dominik Moll (With a Friend Like Harry) fires yet another shot across the bows of French bourgeois complacency, while throwing in a wink and a nudge about the perils of surveillance.

A rough but boldly imaginative first feature by British-Canadian writer-director Alison Murray.

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

The effects are terrific, from the two-and-a-half-minute opening sequence that tracks around the brilliantly lit liner from below, above and round about, to some amazing exterior shots of the groaning vessel rolling around in the churning sea like a giant, wounded whale.

Looking tired and sallow and drained of her customary glow, Lindsay Lohan marches grimly through this mechanical tween comedy as if it were a particularly tedious homework assignment. Which it is.

Like so many movies of its kind, Dead Man's Shoes gets hopelessly lost in vicious process, and so loses all sight of anything you might optimistically call insight.

Giuliani Time energetically deflates one trumpeted myth after another about Giuliani's success at turning the city around from its doldrums in the 1970s.

As director, Scott Marshall displays an unsurprising flair for selling a joke, but also a fine sense of dramatic pacing and, even better, a gift for brevity, neither of which, it could be argued, are innate skills of his famous filmmaking family.

Saving Shiloh takes place in 2005, but in its setting and sensibility, it feels like 1930s Walton's Mountain.

Though far from expert filmmaking - visual clichés fly thick and fast - the movie has a swooning feel for the stark beauty of the African kingdom in which it was shot.

Sketches was produced for PBS's American Masters series, but it's in theaters now and deserves to be seen on the largest possible screen.

Precisely observed, charming and - for better and worse - light as air.

Cruise is probably the most graceful physical performer to occupy the screen since Burt Lancaster, and in this sort of action role, he's just about peerless...He may not be a great actor, but to find a greater movie star would be a nigh impossible mission.

Art School Confidential reaches its dementedly brilliant peak in the company of Jim Broadbent.

Despite their appeal to patriotic horror fans, the makers of An American Haunting end up doing more harm than good to domestic fright production.

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.

Writer-director David Jacobson has an excitingly clear-eyed, unsentimental feel for the intensity of adolescent passion.

The Proposition is a very hard and harsh movie, but it also has a hypnotic, lyrical velocity. As Arthur, Huston exudes dead charisma.

Formulaic but refreshingly low-key weepie.

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.

The final meet felt eternal to me, but little girls may love it all, and even if they don't, they're almost sure to practice their handstands when they get home.

It is the highest compliment I can pay Greengrass to say that he is a master of the mundane, the routine and the everyday.

While it can't have been easy to find action points for a drama about vocabulary drills, Atchison comes up with a steady stream of plot-propelling business, including Akeelah's flair for jump rope, a skill that serves her beautifully in a clinch moment.

In RV, the downwardly spiraling career trajectories of Robin Williams and director Barry Sonnenfeld intertwine like the ropes of a tangled parachute, and all the helpless viewer can do is look on aghast as the whole abortive fiasco plummets toward Earth.

With its clean narrative lines, easily grasped message and literal kick-line of affable, non-threatening gay characters, the film is carefully calibrated for mass appeal. It leaves no shortcut or pratfall untaken, and it will be all the more popular for it.

Compelling in fits and starts, actor-director Andy Garcia's The Lost City possesses grand aspirations but troublesome execution.

Hitches some of the most irresistible conventions of Hindi movie melodrama to an earnest agenda of social protest.

In the end, Sturminger's virginal insistence on draining the mother-son relationship of all eros also drains it of interest.

Be aware that RevoLOUtion is a remarkably well-made 75-minute inspiromercial.

If this is what qualifies, as some critics have suggested, as an artistic advance for Mr. Park, let us pray for a hasty retreat.

The result is a brilliant and relentless thriller, painted in Melville's trademark shades of charcoal and midnight blue, marked by daring escapes, unimaginable moments of self-sacrifice and unconscionable acts of betrayal.

Unlike the zippy American medical dramas it apes, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is paid out with the deliberate slowness of a dray horse straining up a mountain path. With every painstaking turn of the screw that seals Lazarescu's sorry fate, Puiu flirts with tedium, but tedium is the point of this hyperrealist tale, paced in what feels like real time.

I urge you to see the ineffably beautiful Three Times however you can, lest you go on thinking that Hou's greatness is merely the supposition of obscurantist critics intent on reserving their highest praise for those films that nobody else can actually see.

As in his previous "In Good Company," Weitz wants too much to like all of his characters, and he wants us to like them too. The result is a movie devoid of any threat, or many laughs, with barn door–broad performances.

Sentinel works overtime to suggest what a thrill-a-minute world its characters inhabit; but only during the last 20 minutes does the movie's pulse (or ours) raise above a flatline. The actors look uniformly unhappy to be there - except for Basinger, who seems lost in a lithium haze.

Buried beneath Silent Hill’s hyper-stylized stupidity (the film looks like a collaboration between David Fincher, Trent Reznor and music video director Mark Romanek) is the hollow effort to bottle something of the zeitgeist unease surrounding religious fundamentalism.

If Fleming actually believes in this stuff, he should beware: When you put a movie this lazy and uninspired out into the world, you've got something coming to you - and it ain't good.

This remarkable film from Australia, the debut feature of writer-director Cate Shortland, moves to the lyrical rhythms and unhurried pace of a 1970s road movie.

The script (by Matthew Perniciaro and Timm Sharp) is trite, and the direction so flat that every scene looks like it was shot in a broom closet, but the bright young cast makes things more bearable than they should be.

Several potentially compelling narratives jockey for breathing room in this disappointing documentary about the unsolved 1990 heist of 13 paintings (valued at $500 million) from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

The film taps the same spiritual thirst and anxiety that has made cultural phenomena of "The Da Vinci Code" and the "Left Behind" series. And it’s just as cheesy.

The sort of movie you like in spite of yourself, Scary Movie 4 is obvious and dumb, but it possesses such a giddy, good-hearted spirit that even its terrible jokes (and there are tons) get by on something resembling charm.

The animation is cheesy; the banter isn't funny; the score is noisy and grating; and the critters look like stuffed animals. The best that can be said for The Wild is that it's a most insincere form of flattery. The worst is that it's a sincere form of theft.

Kinky Boots is diverting, but it's only worth shouting about thanks to Ejiofor' quietly subversive take on what has become a stock movie character.

The more things drag on, the more monotonous they become and, by the end, Hard Candy has devolved into a rather transparent game of one-upmanship in which Hayley and Jeff come across in almost equally repellent measure, their behaviors driven less by organic impulses than by their need to satisfy the script's elaborate series of reversals and counter-reversals.

While it's true that most of us make our way through life without a plan, the studied arbitrariness of Page's accommodating ramble from Hicksville to Smutsville doesn't make for thrilling cinema.

Watt seems to want to say something about the role of fate and happenstance in creating connections between people, but she never quite brings the strands of her ideas together.

Not quite aptly titled, but close, writer-director Ryan Schifrin's cheapo horror opus pits everyone's favorite hirsute hominoid against the denizens of a remote town nestled at the base of a mountain called Suicide Peak. It's not much of a contest.

Filled with great archival footage from throughout Hancock's five-decade career, and with elder-statesman words of wisdom from the man himself, Possibilities celebrates an impulse that's too rare in modern music: the love behind the labor of creation.

Mountain Patrol: Kekexili is sometimes slow going, yet it builds in power as nature begins to take its toll on the patrol, and its cumulative effects are haunting.

La Mujer lumbers along, trapped in a long-faced score that appears to have been borrowed from a thriller, and without a smidgen of the saving irony that might have made of it a decent screwball comedy.

At once playful and thorough, the documentary is also stacked teased-hair high with wicked performance footage.

The Sisters may be worth a look, however, for the work of the magnificent Bello and Tony Goldwyn, who's never been better than as the married man with whom Marcia has an affair. Their final clench is pure, guilty-pleasure melodrama, which means it's not the least bit Chekhovian.

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.

Inspirational stuff, and often hysterical to boot.

Another drearily sadistic and pointless crime thriller.

It's hard to buy the movie as an underdog success story, since even the actors barely seem to exert themselves.

Mo’Nique's character here is so underwritten that the actress doesn't get a chance to really capitalize on her extra screen-time. Her sassy forte may be talking so straight-up she sounds crazy, but she seems a little advanced to be doing "yo mamma" jokes.

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.

If Friends With Money is about the meaning of success in a town obsessed with wealth, it is also, more universally, about our defining incompleteness, and the sad, uproarious inconclusiveness of life.

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.

On a Clear Day is in most respects "The Full Monty," only with swimming, not stripping, and no bursts into song or dance - only the usual canny sequencing of tears and laughter, interspersed here with fetching underwater photography and father-son issues up the wazoo.

A debut film that's more well-intentioned than funny.

It's typical poor-schnook-in-over-his-head stuff, spiked with some nervy, Pi-esque montages of eyes, horses and racing forms that illustrate Michael's fraying nerves (and distract us from the flatness of the other scenes).

Zeiger's superb documentary about the Vietnam War era's GI protest movement is jammed with incident and anecdote and moves with nearly as much breathless momentum as the movement itself.

It's Garrison and Burnam who hold the film's center, however, with a natural magnetism. Newcomers both, they take the same clean approach to their roles that their characters bring to their tags.