Chilean-born actress Leonor Varela (TV's Cleopatra, a few seasons back) plays Chavo's mother, who, in her rage to see her children survive, powerfully embodies the film's moral center.

Undeniably precious, it may make some viewers fidgety, but others will find that the reflective melancholy that overcomes both director and cast (all superb) is a sweet contagion.

A lovely wallow in the sweaty pains and joys of mostly gay adolescent love.

This meticulously well-made picture is disarmingly funny at times - not least during the ballet of bloody absurdity that is the assassination itself - but also subdued and straight-faced, with one eye planted on 1979 and the other on the violent student demonstrations looming in the distance.

Might make a fun Lifetime TV movie -- if it weren't quite so morose.

The flawed, fascinating Land of Plenty is easily Wenders' most vital work in more than a decade -- a troubling meditation on terrorism paranoia, poverty and homelessness.

Though I'm not fully convinced that cool and jazzy is the way to go with one of the great civil-rights battles of 20th-century America, George Clooney's elegantly muted take on Edward R. Murrow's fight with Joe McCarthy offers many riches, notably a wicked character study of Murrow and a sexy homage to the pleasures of teamwork when the team is a bunch of smart-ass liberal reporters making common cause against a wannabe dictator.

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.

Diaz and Collette are believable as sisters, but their performances rarely surprise -- in a more interesting movie world, they'd have switched roles.

Dramatic failings are only exacerbated by D.J. Caruso's direction: He composes every frame as if for television -- despite the fact that the film is shot in widescreen -- and his visual style is about as cinematic as sports talk radio.

McKittrick cites "Dazed and Confused" as well as "Clerks" as influences, yet he lacks the raw edge of early Smith and the existential drift of Linklater. And if side-splitting laughter is what you crave, Waiting . . . will leave you hungry for a slice of American Pie.

When movie clichés are presented with rigor and feeling, they can pack a fresh punch.

Has no stylistic flair and little forward momentum, yet nearly every scene contains an amusing bit of business, much of it off to the side of the main action.

Baumbach weds his verbal gifts to a fresh visual acuity that brings layers of rich detail to a portrait of a family coping, poorly, with self-inflicted change.

Who could resist a movie in which a garden gnome holds the front line in high-tech home security?

The Greatest Game mostly sits there limply -- it lacks the charming swagger Paxton dependably brings to his own acting roles.

Into the Blue is a likable bimbo of a movie, all surface and -- despite breathtaking underwater photography and a marked resemblance to Peter Yates' "The Deep" -- zero depth.

It's the zippy chatter among the Serenity's wised-up space pirates that gives the film most of its punch, but with only serviceable action sequences and largely cookie-cutter effects, you can still sense the void just outside.

The triumph of Capote is that it both grants and shares with him that twisted brew of obsessive identification and monstrous detachment that is the fertile burden of the artist.

As in many of his films, Jaglom establishes a striking intimate rapport with his female subjects, and as the funny and bitter revelations pour forth, an activity that many men may view as something done strictly out of necessity takes on unforeseen narcotic, romantic and therapeutic dimensions.

At its best, there's a strong (albeit live-action) echo of Charles M. Schulz's "Peanuts" in Little Manhattan. The movie's hero, Gabe, is a world-weary 10-year-old who addresses us in eloquent voice-overs. Like Charlie Brown, he's in love with a red-headed beauty.

Crafted by hand and computer, Mirrormask is as breathtakingly beautiful to behold as it is tedious to slog through.

There's something terminally small about this big-screen melodrama, with its trite characterizations of fighting parents, empty pockets and kind hearts.

Mired in noir cliché, the movie manages to be simultaneously overwrought and undercooked, with the Bambi-eyed Akhtar giving such a relentlessly inscrutable performance, one wants to poke him with a stick.

Okuda creates that slightly surreal atmosphere of ghost-town emptiness that will be familiar to fans of Takeshi Miike, but he infuses it with a romantic's sense of deep yearning.

The result is both a hypnotic mood piece -- where characters' blank existential stares are framed through rain-beaded car windows -- and a murky riff on urban Midwestern ennui (by way of the Russian steppes).

Chabria lacks the effervescent touch, in both his clichéd, logic-challenged writing and his leaden direction, to make you care. Though the film is crammed with music -- the soundtrack is stellar -- the production numbers fall completely flat, leaving you to pine for the over-caffeinated touch of Baz Luhrmann.

The cinematography, by Dan Stoloff (Tumbleweeds, Miracle), is beautiful throughout, but the individual stories occasionally verge toward silliness...Still, there's an affectionate authenticity here that Hollywood baloney like "Crash" can't touch.