Egoyan has always constructed dense ensemble films, and here again the writer-director hopes to reinforce his themes by piling layer upon layer of character. Unfortunately, the layers end up cluttering the story.

(Emile Hirsch) a miraculous young actor.

All three actors are more than up to the challenge, particularly the radiant Salazar, who feasts upon that rare gift of a role that allows an actress the wrong side of 40 to be funny, sexy and vital without apologizing.

Somewhere buried beneath all this ballast something is being said, again, about flawed middle-aged men falling from grace and redeeming themselves. This time I'm damned if I know what that something is.

The less ticklish bad joke of Scream 2 is that self-referentiality has its limits.

While some may bail early, those who stay to the end are likely to dwell on Zahedi's unwavering (some would say unrelenting) belief in his own artistry, as well as the film's many funny, quotable lines.

Its jazzy rhythm and economy of form place it closer to a 1950s film noir, shot through with humor so dark you need a flashlight to see it.

First-time director Anahí Berneri, who wrote this involving, if slow-moving, film with Pablo Pérez (based on Pérez’s own diaries), doesn't shy away from the whippings, rope work and carefully calibrated humiliation that make up a good night of dungeon play. Yet A Year Without Love isn't a sex movie (so don’t expect one), but a studied examination of how one man folds jarring events into the everyday fabric of his life.

Between such shots of inspiration, Matsumoto’s mock-doc framework seems a lazy stock device, interviews playing more dead than deadpan and failing to exceed an over-familiar comic-pathetic attitude toward the lives of functionaries.

When it comes to the United Nations, though, the movie turns to Jell-O. Whether Pollack was softened up by his meetings with U.N. brass (all the way up to Kofi Annan), or by his own gentlemanly Midwestern liberalism, he is alarmingly circumspect about that august body.

The Great Water hangs heavy with sepia photography and Christ-like symbolism -- I felt as though I were watching it from the inside of a dank Russian Orthodox church.

A sharp, upbeat, well-wrought meditation on love and race that kicks the new year in movies off to a terrific start.

This tough, crackling thriller from director Gary Gray is one of those rare action movies with something on its mind other than moviestar sneers and incessant big bangs.

What's most frustrating about the movie isn't that it thinks so little of its heroine that it can't let her figure out the moral of her own story, but that it thinks so little of us as to suggest that, after a couple millennia of human struggle, it's indeed possible to answer the unanswerable.

Frankel has cut, pasted and rejiggered the novel, mostly for the better. As adapted by Aline Brosh McKenna, The Devil Wears Prada is crisper, less self-righteous and mercifully shorter than its intermittently funny but interminable source.

One's laughter builds on such a rising curve that memories of its flaws burn away.

The set design is gung-ho Hallmark (Tinkerbell lights, that sort of thing) with a strong whiff of Fellini (the fairy glade looks like a pre-Raphaelite red-light district).

Crazy/beautiful has a leisurely local specificity, and Stockwell has a tender way with his actors.

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

As in all his films, there's a sense that honest human emotion bores Fleder, but he gets points for packing the trial with fine character actors.

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.

De Niro is damned if he's going to make a standard thriller out of this view from within the CIA, which might be refreshing if his solemn moral parable weren't so lacking in any other kind of juice, and if its hero were less of a round-shouldered, whey-faced organization man.

Filmed only with direct light and sound, Bush's stunning camerawork adroitly captures the majestic landscapes and icons of Buddhism: its murals and artworks, monks and nuns.

It's a shame no one gave the three voice stars of this appealing animation -- Ray Romano, John Legui zamo and Denis Leary -- a shot at the script.

So cleverly executed that one forgives -- just -- the frenetic pace and absence of down time.

With masterful tonal balance and control, and a visual sophistication as yet unusual among Israeli directors, Gabizon catches both the absurdity and the sadness of what it means to live with such daily threat and confusion.

Selected as Italy's entry for best foreign film at this year's Academy Awards, Private was disqualified for not being predominantly in Italian. A pity, since this meticulously nonpartisan film, even as it makes the case for passive resistance, shows what devastating lack of appeal the strategy has for young Palestinians.

Charming documentary.