McGehee and Siegel's ornate structure and editing stay just this side of tricky, as does their borderline-goofy use of special effects to make us see the world (and the words) through Eliza's anxious eyes.

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

First-time screenwriter James C. Strouse (in whose hometown the film was shot) provides so few clues to the source of Jim's malaise, or that of his entire sad-sack family, that the movie remains rudderless and not the least bit believable.

What gives the movie its coltish charm is Harrison's scene-setting feel for the indomitable brio of kids.

140 minutes of flat vignette, as dreary and uninvolving as the driving rain that never lets up on the benighted streets of Limerick.

A refreshing antidote to those E! True Hollywood Story documentaries on adult-film figures like John Holmes, Savannah and Traci Lords.

An intellectually steelier case against Bush, his cabalistic administration and the Iraq war than Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, Hijacking is even more chilling because it eschews the heartstring symphony conducted (albeit very effectively) by Moore and sticks to irrefutable facts and no-bullshit analysis.

Attack of the Clones' high-definition surfaces are certainly impressive, but they offer no lifelight, nothing to put your arms around.

The only decent actors in Entrapment are high-tech tools of global robbery.

Though the progress of this ill-matched love triangle is fun to follow in its self-consciously wacky way, the movie's chief pleasures, at least to a Western eye, are anthropological.

As usual, the final fight-scene extravaganza is outstanding, but it’s hardly worth the dreary hour and a half that precedes it.

The nonstop jumping around undercuts Meily's momentum, especially in the film's overly languorous final third. Still, there's a refreshing optimism fueling his take on working-class life, as if Meily views friendship and neighborly generosity as currencies equal to cold, hard cash.

Hidalgo can still be a wonder to behold, especially in its dynamic racing sequences, but the movie bogs down in its midsection with a needless kidnapping subplot that ultimately becomes quite tedious.

It's not a great movie, or even a particularly good one, but it's spectacular. No expense has been spared. The technical crew reads like a roll call of Oscar-night regulars.

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

This film is lean, tight and irredeemably vile. People are gonna love it.

From its austere opening credits to its screechy women, this 35th film by Woody Allen looks and sounds like a dozen other Allen movies.

Predictably, the jokes are raunchy, yet they're few in number, as if the writer's sleaze well is running dry. First-time director Mark Rucker has a nice feel for period detailing but fails to build on his star's rare flashes of high energy.

A feather-light comedy about losing emotional baggage and finding love in upper Manhattan.

This debut feature from writer-director Shonali Bose has a powerful finale, in which the filmmaker uses imaginative camera angles and a vibrant sound design to re-create the turmoil and terror of the riots.

Where else could this flabby excuse for a women's movie go? Straight to the Oxygen Channel, if it's lucky.

Their discretion makes From Hell less a horror movie than a classical film noir.

Looks like no other recent release...certainly rich enough to warrant more than one viewing.

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.

Fulfills all the conventions of raw Cantonese gun opera.

Deftly mixing the visual exuberance of “Trainspotting” with the familial pathos of “Angela’s Ashes,” the gifted van Groeningen offers gleeful depictions of drinking contests and naked bicycle races that gradually give way to a sense of moral peril for young Gunther.

The only character who emerges as more than an ideological mouthpiece, and nearly saves the movie, is the Ambassador's resident hairstylist, who masks her faded beauty with a thick coat of eye shadow and an overteased hairdo. I kept wondering who this deeply sad, earthy actress was, making so much out of so little, until I realized it was Sharon Stone in the most naked performance she's ever given without taking her clothes off.

The predicaments of this whiny, unprepossessing crew inspire about as much sympathy as a celebrity divorce.