Throughout, Sullivan and Braun shine, making for a match so sexy and appealing that it's a shame Swain avoids their love life, an approach that doesn't exactly advance gay liberation -- or cinema.

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.

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.

Save for one startlingly staged battle sequence. . .might as well have been titled "Also Ran."

Everything that could go wrong does, but director Turner never musters the requisite manic energy that might get her proceedings off the ground.

Van Sant ultimately reveals so little about this odd couple that we frankly don't give a damn what happens to them. Nor, apparently, does he.

An entertaining trip, one for which fandom in the genre isn't necessarily a prerequisite, though it doubtlessly helps.

It plays out more like a 12-step program than a human drama.

While the film is not entirely successful, it still manages to string together enough charming moments to work.

Appealingly cheesy, a tribute to the hope that springs eternal in the hopelessly inept.

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

There is, however, a more compelling, more melancholy story itching to break out here, one of two wounded people finding each other at the exact wrong moment in both their lives. But by the time Berri gets around to that idea, The Housekeeper is already finishing up.

The famously lovely mug of Tilda Swinton (cast as Kurtz’s wife) merely distracts, and I couldn’t help feeling that this potent story would have been far better served by a straight-ahead documentary.

At its best, this uneven film by writer-director Dave Boyle suggests that going a bit nuts is a good thing for the rigid paterfamilias.

Overly familiar industrial product, a big-budgeted entertainment defined by its putatively big concept (apes rule), an underwritten script and a few flashes of Burton's visual genius and gently askew worldview.

As both book and film, The Human Stain comes to vividest life in its extended flashbacks, which offer the most compelling exploration of Roth's perennial themes of self-loathing and reinvention.

The best that the good doctor (Murphy) can do, encumbered as he is by Larry Levin's screenplay and its low joke quotient, is discipline the dog, lay into the lizard and shtick it to the bear.

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

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.

Going down with the Titanic was a picnic compared to what Leonardo DiCaprio has to weather (an Alice in Wonderland hairdo, for starters) as Louis XIV in this unwittingly nutso adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' 1850 novel.

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

More problematic is "Inside Out," starring Jason Gould, who also wrote and directed, based on his own experiences as the son of Barbra Streisand and Elliott Gould.

Michèle Ohayon falls into the old documentary trap - the illusion that once you've found yourself a lovable eccentric to follow around with a camera, you automatically have a movie.

Posey and Rudd are the real deal, so it's almost sad when Priscilla and Jack are left hanging in the final act, their issues unresolved. It's as if the filmmakers lost their nerve when it came time to write the kind of intimate, revealing conversation that can make a sex toy unnecessary.

Woodley’s film mostly floats along on its melancholy drift, so well-attuned to the low-key rhythms of its beaten-down characters that it never quite summons up enough energy for the rest of us, who are along for the ride.

Only at the end, when one of the principals makes a decision you don't see coming, does Face fleetingly weigh in as a movie you haven't seen a thousand times before at ethnically correct film festivals.

The finale goes on and on, but the movie is nicely photographed (by John Bailey) and duly empowering, and should please the vast teen-girl audience for which it's intended.

The kids absolutely win your heart, but there's something off-putting in the film's lazy juxtaposition of unexamined Negro dysfunction tropes (absent fathers, violent streets) against an idyllic Africa tended by white benevolence.