Neither involving as a study in grief nor compelling as a thriller about conscience, the cat-and-mouse tragedy Reservation Road is a misery windup so schematic and obvious it reduces its crisis-stricken characters to little more than emotional bumper cars.

Things are sporadically troublesome about the film. The story goes in and out of being self-consciously earnest and ponderous, a situation that numerous tight close-ups of people's eyes does nothing to help.

It's borderline parody of a kind of fey filmmaking popular at crunchy-granola festivals, but the counterfeit aesthetic is ultimately outshone by the life-affirming message.

Meeting Resistance in theory should have been a revealing documentary. In truth, however, the measures taken to protect the informants' identities dilute the potency of their statements and diminish the film's efficacy as a historical document.

A sincere, slow-paced drama about a Florida family dealing with schizophrenia, Canvas is never terribly convincing, despite being inspired by writer-director Joseph Greco's life growing up with a mentally ill mother.

Gives new meaning to "costume drama" in that it is a drama primarily about costumes. But the drama is about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the temple.

In a movie where the timing of a squeeze bunt is presented as the thing of beauty that it is, and the eradication of small-town culture in a changing world is a genuine concern, the simplifying countrified morality of The Final Season is the real crying shame.

The creators of this film were fiercely determined not to go so much as a millimeter over the line into sentiment, tawdriness or mockery. It's the rare film that is the best possible version of itself, but "Lars" fits that bill.

Language this lethal has all but disappeared from the movies, and it's an unmitigated pleasure to observe Caine and Law attack it with such ferocity. Sleuth is nasty fun.

It is the gift of Terror's Advocate, Barbet Schroeder's riveting new documentary, to simply present Vergès as is, to say "here is the man" and let things speak for themselves. Do they ever.

It's a bare-knuckled crime drama set in 1988 that stylistically could have been made that year and emphasizes Gray's strengths as a director while drawing attention to his limitations as a writer.

King Corn is entertaining enough, but it's also a moral, crucially skeptical road trip down the food chain.

Control keeps you riveted in ways that "24 Hour Party People" doesn't, primarily because of the investment of craft and conviction by all concerned.

Harper and Golda's Balcony generate tremendous influence and timeless meaning.

Only intermittently funny at best, but mostly full of dead air, the film is a let-down on both fronts.

The Good Night has flashes of bookish wit but never quite recovers from the metronomic monotony of its first half, which ticktocks between scenes of Paltrow braying and Cruz voguing.

A grim, shrill, deluded and incredibly depressing movie, so bewilderingly mean-spirited that the trademark Farrelly Brothers gross-out scenes feel like the sweetest.

A smart and suspenseful legal thriller that comes completely alive on-screen.

The longer it goes, the more frustrating it becomes, as Bar Lev declines to come down on one side or the other.

Dreary, spectacle-driven adaptation.

As sad as it is to realize that youth activism in this country is dead, it's sadder still to find yourself agreeing that they have a point. Just look at what happened to Kurtz.

There's nothing particularly revelatory about the interviews recorded over a two-month span, but there's an intimate quality that gives the impression you're listening to a private conversation, which, in a sense, you are.

The India of the movie is more an idea than a reality...Exotic, spiritual and, according to Peter Whitman (Adrien Brody), "spicy"-smelling, it's a magical mystery place where wayward foreigners can go to get their souls back on track.

Trade works fairly well as a thriller ticking down to Adriana's auction. It's less assured when it strains for some buddy picture chemistry between Ramos and Kline. Though both actors are fine, with Ramos' performance being reminiscent of some of Diego Luna's English-language roles, the attempts at humor to ease the tension between Jorge and Ray and some of the speechifying are out of tune with the rest of the film.

Love is a many-splendored thing in Robert Benton's dull romantic fantasy Feast of Love, though none of its splendors rings true.

Pettis is adorable, but she pushes the cuteness dial well past one's tolerance level. Still, if you've got small ones yourself, they'll probably enjoy the messes Joe and Peyton make together. They may also wonder why it takes so long for all the movie's messes to get cleaned up.

THE Kingdom has some power but not enough sense. A ripped-from-today's-headlines thriller, it wants us to feel as if we're watching something relevant when what's really going on is a slick excuse for efficient mayhem that's not half as smart as it would like to be.

A brooding meditation on the unnerving power and terrible cost of emotional and political masquerades, the Chinese-language Lust, Caution gets under your skin with its examination of what qualifies as love and what does not.

Still, as compelling as The Price of Sugar is, it also represents a squandered opportunity. A stronger connection could have been made between the film's subject and our own responsibility as consumers.

Though Penn's fierce identification with the protagonist is a key source for the film's accomplishments, Into the Wild succeeds on screen because Hirsch ("Alpha Dog," "The Lords of Dogtown") throws himself into the part without reservation, projecting an appealing openness and life force that brings a special poignancy to his fate.

It's billed as an environmental horror story, but The Last Winter bears all the hallmarks of an ever-popular genre that has always pitted science, technology and reason against emotion, awe and nature. It bears all the hallmarks of the gothic: ghosts, death, alienated sexuality, decay, secrets, madness and, of course, awe and trepidation in the face of the sublime power of nature.

Sydney White is a carnival of ethnic and social stereotypes that are rising up against the lily-white status quo. In Hollywood, blond princesses and fairy tales die hard.

A film whose reach exceeds its grasp. Hugely ambitious and not without moments of success, this indulgent 2 hour and 40 minute epic ends up as unwieldy as its elongated title. It's a movie in love with itself, and few things are more fatal than that.

Swicord has a playful sense of humor and a good ear for dialogue, and the movie pleasantly accomplishes what it set out to accomplish.

A refreshingly gentle treatment of familiar themes such as the inevitability of change, the dashing of youthful illusions and mutability of family. Enhanced by an exotic locale, the movie overcomes a well-trodden narrative path and unflinchingly brandishes its sentimentality as it stakes out its crowd-pleasing territory.

Fluent in the laughable dialogue of a million bad fantasy flicks:

Expertly realized and gunmetal slick, Eastern Promises whirs along with perfect efficiency, but doesn't stir much in the way of visceral horror despite its penchant for treating the human body like a chicken carcass on a block. (Squeamishness, yes.)

The characters in this somber film have the glum look of individuals delivering a Very Important Message to the world. And though this film in fact does have something crucial to convey, this is not the way to go about it.

This round-robin of marital malaise has a lot more integrity than one might anticipate from its meet-cute beginnings.

The strange, funny and sad story of a bipolar jazz musician and his long-suffering teenage daughter, reunited after his two-year stay in a mental institution.

A movie that commits sins of excess, except regarding Thornton. There's not nearly enough of him.

Though the film aspires to the epic with pretensions of deeper philosophical meaning, it ultimately settles for being the "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)" of historical romances.

Trapped in a no man's land between seriousness and pulp trash, it plays like a combination of "Death Wish" and "The Hours." If that sounds like an awkward fit, it is.

A surprisingly vast and involving topic.

Enthusiastically received at Sundance, "Great World" is an intriguing look at our obsession with being successful and famous.

There are enough reasons to avoid this oh-so-wacky comedy as it meanders from piney Georgia to Port Arthur, Texas, to Monument Valley, Utah, and they include Gourley's sense of direction.

James Mangold directs it with such energy and passion that it's as if he didn't know it's all been done before.

Dunne and Wittenborn, who adapted his book, work too hard at stressing just how ruthless the unspoken standards of the stinking rich can be, leading to a story-pivoting act of brutality toward Finn that careens the movie into a tonal wilderness that it never recovers from.

Even after appropriately lowering expectations, it's kind to call this one a cut below.

The riveting documentary In the Shadow of the Moon, is an unexpected knockout.

Enthusiastically smutty and lyrical, the movie attempts to capture the way we unconsciously set the emotional moments of our lives to pop music, turning fits of passion, anger and righteous indignation into elaborate musical numbers in our heads.

The presence of the two actors and the film's mordant sense of humor buoy the downtime between bloodbaths and genre fans may find enough to love here.

It's only when The Bubble takes a swift turn into domino-tipping tragedy in the final act that a tender, fraught love story feels casually discarded in favor of something psychologically pat and ham-fistedly earth-shattering.

Black comedy becomes funnier as the action becomes darker and more perilous, but The Hunting Party fails to locate the absurdity in the central situations and goes for midget jokes instead. In the end, you're not sure if you're supposed to be watching "The Three Amigos" or "Hotel Rwanda."

It's doubtful Milarepa will be opening in Beijing any time soon; all the more reason it deserves a look.

Where Verhoeven loses his way is when he allows himself to sink into a seemingly endless recounting of atrocities, getting away from the main moral and philosophical questions his film brings up so provocatively.

James and Beth have fun in a grocery store pretending to be different characters meeting in the aisles. As they learn, sometimes the moment works, sometimes it doesn't. The same can be said for this unfailingly modest film.

While there is the requisite amount of shorn limbs and splashing blood one might expect from the director of "Saw," Wan should be saluted for putting the coup de grâce off-screen.

An uneven coming-of-age comedy.

Rather than come across as fantastic or dreamlike, the stories have a vivid, hyperreal quality to them.

It's a more polished, high-fidelity version of a story that's played out on screen many times since 1978, but once Zombie runs out of subtext, he's right back to the same old slasher text: "Blood. Guts. The end."

To packs the moments of contemplation with as much suspense as the action sequences and is a master of ratcheting up tension through small details.

Self-Medicated is not loathsome or lurid, just one-sided and in need of guidance -- ironically so, because that's what its protagonist so steadfastly refuses to accept. The movie's lack of nuance is balanced by its good intentions.

A lifeless pingpong comedy that ricochets from one flat gag to the next.

Disturbing, unnerving and wire-to-wire involving, Deep Water is the story of a dream that got so wildly out of hand that it ensnared the dreamer in an intricate trap of his own devising.

There is a guilty-pleasure quality to watching Atkinson at work even when Mr. Bean has overstayed his welcome. The film's lightness makes you wish you were the one headed to the beach.

The social bite of the popular novel fades into a generic chick flick.

Delivers a heckuva story marred by some credibility problems but lands the majority of its punches via subtly powerful performances and a moving undercard of paternal connection.

A dumb twist can be excused, however, if your characters keep the thing afloat, which makes perhaps the most unforgivable sin of this claustrophobic terror scenario the fact that we have to spend it with arguably the two least interesting people in Los Angeles.

A rare case in which one can't help but wish the film were somehow worse than it is, for it would then be easier to dismiss outright. Jon Voight's turn as a fictional local Mormon leader and, in particular, Terence Stamp's performance as Brigham Young have a strange, unnerving conviction about them, and give the film an oddly engaging pull.

War ties itself in knots trying to bring something new to a stale formula. It's never painful to watch, but that's only because it provokes no feeling at all.

Overly earnest and roughly constructed, the film is bearable largely thanks to the performance as the daughter by Carly Schroeder, recently seen in the girls' soccer pic, "Gracie."

A spoof, sometimes a funny one, and sometimes just plain overkill.

Personal and heartfelt, it's nevertheless bogged down by a lack of perspective on the material and a pointlessly frilly visual style.

There's something to be said for cinema this perversely naturalistic.

What with everyone so focused on the raunchiness, it comes as a complete surprise to find that Superbad is in fact a love story.

Them is surprisingly tight, efficient and economical, conjuring a super-creepy atmosphere and incredible tension seemingly out of nothing at all.

Edgy and provocative but with a weakness for sensationalistic footage.

Thankfully for audiences, 11th Hour is not without hope. The filmmakers save the most exhilarating portion for last when they ask what's being done about the problems.

Still effectively creepy and surprisingly unnerving despite the occasional misstep and rumors of a troubled production, the new film illustrates why and how the power of the original story remains undiminished more than half a century after its creation.

Obsession creates its own fascination, and never more so than in King of Kong, a sprightly new documentary that's as compulsively watchable as the vintage video game it focuses on is addictive.

Not as bad as it sounds nor as good as it might have been.

For while the idea of comparing the Europe of 60 years ago to the Europe of today sounds didactic, the results are anything but. Ferrario turns out to have a delicate, unforced eye for elegant counterpoints, and his style unobtrusively draws you into the journey.

A story peopled by flawed archetypes, it's an achingly funny film that is also a little sad around the edges.

There's a lot that remains unclear about the powers and abilities of the creatures in Skinwalkers, largely robbing the film of tension as events transpire in a slapdash, haphazard manner.

The bones of something more interesting are there -- how people come to mentally and emotionally define themselves and the ways in which they often need to realign those beliefs -- but Yeung can never reconcile his impulses toward humor and human conflict, so things tend to sputter about, feeling disconnected and episodic.

2 Days in Paris is pure Julie Delpy, figuratively and otherwise. Since first becoming known to American audiences in the early '90s, she's revealed herself to be an artist of sundry and unexpected talents, with a distinctive voice and point of view.

Depending on your revenge story preferences, the brutally pretentious Descent is either a payback flick with an agonizingly formless middle, or a soul-darkening head trip bracketed by a crude vengeance tale. Mostly, though, it's indie provocation trapped between shock and blah.

There's precious little that is fresh or new about the movie.

Floating in on an airy breeze of dreams and true love, the lively adventure-romance Stardust offers that elusive quality summer movies are supposed to possess but rarely do -- total escape.

Moody, mannered and supremely irritating, Christophe Honoré's Dans Paris plays like a pastiche of French cinema clichés through the ages.

It says something about Paul Greengrass' directing style that he's able to make a movie as fresh and frank as The Bourne Ultimatum from a genre as moldy and bombastic as the spy thriller.

David Wain, director of "Wet Hot American Summer," brings his popular brand of surrealist yet mundane humor to the big screen with more or less dreadful results.

It's neither very original nor very convincing. "Shakespeare in Love" did something similar by casting its writer protagonist as the hero of a story he himself might have written, but Becoming Jane lacks that movie's wit and playfulness.

Blame It on Fidel is the thoroughly engaging, clear-eyed and charming story of a little girl grappling with the domestic fallout of tumultuous political times.

It's a movie on the wrong side side of the so-bad-it's-good line.

A cheekily fun sendup of Gen X iconography.

There's murder, deception, cruel twists and plenty of scenes at night in If I Didn't Care, but writer-directors Benjamin and Orson Cummings lack the fatalistic glue of true film noir to hold it all in place.