Brougher has taken material that sounds contrived and potentially exploitative and used her gift for careful observation and restrained emotionality to give it surprising authenticity.

As writer as well as star, Dedio expresses passionate concern for the lost young souls of Lower Manhattan but by and large doesn't define his characters strongly enough to involve the viewer in their fates very deeply.

A spellbinding, intelligent thriller that takes its time to get where it's going but is well worth the trip.

A little of this junk-drawer fusillade goes a long way.

One of the funniest films of the year. That's not good news for this attempted action-adventure, which clearly lost its way in its own copious fog.

It is an acceptable enough thriller, neither the worst you've seen nor the opposite.

Redline isn't exactly a car wreck, mainly because it's far less exciting, and you can, in fact, look away. Perhaps at your shoes.

The film's tone is on the sitcom side, but its likable cast and zany subplots make it palatable.

While not much of a detective story, Robinson's period film does provide a captivating look at the dynamics that turn Fernandez and Beck into serial killers.

With pathos competing equally against the often pungent laughs for the audience's attention, it's a movie that is both unsettling and amusing, most comparable to "Chuck & Buck" in tone.

Beach's storytelling tactics, much like the film as a whole, would simply be annoying if they weren't also borderline insulting.

A masterpiece by any measure, is fresh, immediate and contemporary, but its wintry yet warm perspective is suffused with the wisdom and experience of a great filmmaker who turns 85 on June 2.

Stressful to watch, but its entertaining stage performances and document of people under pressure should interest even non-rap fans.

What the new movie lacks in craft, suspense and metaphoric richness it makes up for with, um, gadgets.

A fascinating exercise in genre reinvention, a showcase for two radically different approaches to homage.

The result is an unexpectedly satisfying fantasia of reality and imagination, a meditation on the nature of lies and deception, on how we come to embrace not the truth but what it suits us to believe.

In general, the movie doesn't necessarily reveal anything we don't already know but delivers it in a personable, entertaining manner.

More satisfying than not, and it plays out credibly.

A solid first film that suggests Edwards might well consider moving beyond conventional plotting, even though it serves his purpose here, enabling him to discover ways in which to bring to his images and style the intensity and punch of his words.

Writer-director-producer Glen Stephens does occasionally have grim fun, but something as irredeemably sadistic as this packaged as entertainment is almost depressing.

The seeds of most Biblical horror movies are sown in the Book of Revelations; The Reaping at least gets marks for originality for springing from Exodus.

Although Ice Cube is still happy to haul out his old snarl when it serves his purposes, he's clearly trying to reinvent himself as a family entertainer. But the milder he gets, the less confident he seems. What's a reformed gangsta rapper to do?

Though it never completely catches fire, there's enough earnestness and warmth that makes it a welcome alternative in a family film arena dominated by computer animation and associated toy lines.

As epic as its two-hours-and-25-minute running time indicates, Black Book is as subversive as it is traditional, both enamored of conventional notions of heroism and frankly contemptuous of them.

Many small things happen in Killer of Sheep, nothing of much consequence. But the enlargement of life itself is profound.

The movie is at its funniest and most original when zinging the sometimes pretentious milieu of competitive figure skating. Whatever combination of choreography, camera trickery and special effects were required to render the over-the-top, hyper-real skate numbers, they're executed with wit and ingenuity.

A writer's thriller. True, it's cleanly and efficiently directed, and it showcases some crackerjack acting, but the reason it's a real pleasure to watch is that a writer's sensibility is the foundation everything is built on.

Zippy if forgettable, Meet the Robinsons keeps the tone mildly tongue-in-cheek and ends on a dutifully inspirational note.

After the Wedding would never pretend to have any answers, but in hands this skilled the act of exploration itself couldn't be more illuminating, or more dramatic.

Race You to the Bottom has an ending that is rightly open yet thoroughly satisfying -- as is the entire film.

A triumph of ingenuity over budget, a taut, darkly comic thriller with a dart of pathos that holds attention like Super Glue from the first frame to the last.

Regardless of your opinion about Sacco and Vanzetti, the documentary should prove thoughtful and thought-provoking.

Carrying Shooter through its difficulties is, finally, not its crisp action sequences and definitely not the torture. It's Wahlberg's performance, which is the film's most old-fashioned element, and its best.

You'd like to think such bankruptcy of imagination means we've seen the last of these subterranean creeps. But you know they'll be back soon to collect their royalties from the gore hounds who apparently don't care how dull or warmed over the accompanying package.

Being a "family film" may excuse many faults, considering the intended audience, but it's hard to think of a recent movie that has more determinedly married the engaging with the banal.

Howard seems to be in an altogether different and substantially more idiosyncratic film. When the story calls for him to be Patton, he plays Kurtz.

Movies about male friendship are often trivialized with the "buddy" tag, but this one resonates beyond that.

That's really what TMNT lacks most -- humor. Despite the doll-like cartoonishness of the human figures, the filmmakers seem to expect us to take this animated romp seriously. Too seriously.

It's one of the charms of Air Guitar Nation that much of it plays like a mockumentary in which you're not quite sure who's pulling your leg. But it's real, even if the guitars are not.

At times a little callow around the edges, Boy Culture upon reflection, displays considerable insight. It is buoyed by some incisive acting and writing and anchored by a standout portrayal from Bauchau, a versatile veteran of international cinema.

Scarcely an insightful biographical portrait, Color Me Kubrick is still interesting, perhaps even intimidating, as a study of the way fandom can so readily be turned against itself.

An example of sophisticated, impassioned filmmaking involving mainly people who lived through the harrowing experiences so unsparingly depicted, Journey From the Fall powerfully illustrates the refugee/immigrant experience.

A charming, character-driven film that conveys enormous feeling for its people

Though this film is as formal and predetermined as a carved palace of ice, it builds interest through the strong performances of its pair of costars, the veteran Catherine Frot and relative newcomer Deborah Francois.

Oddly enjoyable at its most implausible.

The film becomes a dizzying descent into a world of contradictions, military illogic and ineffectual bureaucracy.

Devotes itself to inflicting serious pain upon innocent moviegoers who wander into what is perhaps the single most poorly conceived and ineptly executed movie released to theaters in quite some time.

Withdrawal's most glaring omission is the lack of any serious criticism of the settlers, whether from the Jewish left or any Palestinian point of view.

Behind the Mask is original and weirdly delicious, and executed with gory aplomb.

A conflation of the horror genre's laziest tropes, plot angles and shorthands, this inept creation isn't so much a film as it is a smorgasbord.

Despite the creakiness of the vehicle, there are some genuinely funny moments and observations.

Its biggest failing -- and the ultimate one for a lightweight entertainment such as this -- is that it's a deadly bore from start to finish.

Detailing the sexual and romantic misadventures of the employees and patrons at a London cafe, Caffeine is about as appetizing as a pot of dishwater coffee.

My Brother is brimming with would-be life lessons. But the movie goes in so many directions, and follows through on so few of them, that all it transmits is a vague glow. It's watered-down chicken soup for the soul.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley turns out to be a more complicated, more dramatically potent story than it appears at first. It's concerned at its core not with how bad the British were but with what the cost of dealing with them was for the Irish.

The movie is all surface, loudly clamoring for attention and then losing its voice.

The film and its makers simply try too hard. Director and co-writer Judy Hecht Dumontet can't stop "helping" with overactive editing and scoring, such as tinkling bells every time the sacred tortilla is shown early on.

Audiences probably often wonder when the reality genre is finally going to eat itself. American Cannibal stands ready for that moment with a bib and vinegar.

300 is something to see, but unless you love violence as much as a Spartan, Quentin Tarantino or a video-game-playing teenage boy, you will not be endlessly fascinated.

With a subversive streak as wide as the Han and a title open to interpretation, The Host confounds our expectations while providing top-notch entertainment. For Bong, the monster movie is an ample vessel, one that he can fill with social criticism while discovering exuberant amusement in the process.

Tense and gut-wrenching, Beyond the Gates is a horrifying story told with grace and compassion.

Scurlock does well to counter the more dire aspects of the film with a razor-sharp sense of humor.

Despite being rooted in knotty issues of identity, Lahiri's novel forgoes didacticism in favor of vivid portraiture. Nair and her uniformly superb cast take the same tack: The characters are individuals before they are emblems.

The film constantly teeters on the fulcrum of its own treacly good intentions and simplistic parable-like storytelling, and the extent that it stays balanced is largely thanks to its agile cast.

The film -- buoyed by its cast of excellent actors -- loses its momentum in the final half-hour when it starts to take itself too seriously.

Zodiac is primarily a complex character study, despite the film's grim and gruesome subject matter. It's a role reversal of sorts for a director who normally emphasizes the brutal tension in his movies.

By the time it sputters across the finish line, Wild Hogs feels as if it's gone on forever -- like a trip in a hot car with the windows rolled up. The air is stale and hard to breathe, and it sure feels good when it's over.

Though Black Snake Moan is unadulterated deep-fried silliness from "Hustle & Flow" filmmaker Craig Brewer, Jackson makes it indisputably more palatable. It's still not a very good movie, but it's intermittently entertaining (and sometimes unintentionally funny).

A new teen fantasy movie, is indeed loaded -- with things you've seen many times before.

A transcendent, transporting experience, a trance movie that casts a major league spell by going deeply into a monastic world that lives largely without words.

The film is a persistent spectacle of audio-visual mood and twee posturing: Strange musical currencies underscore almost every scene, and Logan's acts of scoping and cocooning, in and out of Joey's planetary-themed bedroom, are punctuated with fuzzy video of animals on the hunt.

Much of the credit for the movie succeeding goes to Thornton. In his able hands, Farmer is not so much someone who simply has faith in what he is doing but a man who believes with incontrovertible knowledge of what can be accomplished.

Often mildly amusing but rarely laugh-out-loud funny, the film works best in scenes with a distinct Miami flavor.

Fortunately, director Michael Apted and his team understand the challenges of this kind of story and have met them with intelligence and energy.

Kramer shows zero feeling for the nuances of a midlife sexual awakening.

If the journey is familiar, at least the company is good.

The film does a fairly remarkable job of capturing the attitude of the festival, covering its evolution from quaint little Woodstock knockoff into something much larger that is both hallucinatory and hypnotic. It's Mardi Gras meets Burning Man with an excellent, revolving house band.

Filled with tension, deception and bravura acting, Breach is a crackling tale of real-life espionage that doubles as a compelling psychological drama.

A wonderfully heart-wrenching love story for tweens, teens, and even adults who fondly remember when a friendship could be ignited by a gesture as simple as offering a stick of Juicy Fruit.

It's entertaining to watch ol' hothead do his thing with his fiery chain and his "penance stare," but for a comic book with a rebel spirit, the adaptation feels obediently conventional.

Although Alvart lays on the biblical allegory too heavily at times, the film's pace is brisk enough to maintain our full attention. Antibodies is not so much an art house movie as a well-made, commercial thriller that happens to be in German.

Avenue Montaigne may not be a centimeter deeper than it needs to be, but you also won't be feeling that your pocket was picked when it's over.

Close to Home is a slender slice -- a sliver is more like it -- of a very rich cake.

It is terrible in every aspect -- wretchedly written, directed with a ham fist (by Matthew Levin) and over-acted.

While excellent films like Danis Tanovic's Oscar-winning "No Man's Land" and Vinko Bresan's "Witnesses" have dealt with the war itself, few have dealt with the aftermath, and none with the aching power and empathy of Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams.

Something about Eklavya: The Royal Guard suggests a lost film by David Lean. With some muted echoes of "Hamlet." And a whiff of "Rigoletto."

More surprising is Perry's inability to write back-and-forth dialogue with any real wit or verve. He is at his best when writing speeches, and some of the film's best moments come when Union is given snappy monologues on the state of contemporary relationships and African American maleness.

Bamako is an attack on globalization that is endlessly cogent, confrontational -- and, best of all, as captivating as it is illuminating.

Bad as Harris' Hannibal Rising screenplay (his first) is, at least it's an improvement on his dreadful book, streamlining its convoluted action and discarding large chunks of unspeakable dialogue.

Murphy and his brother Charlie, who collaborated on the screenplay, seem to have drawn the wrong lesson from the latter's stint on "Chappelle's Show." Where Dave Chappelle used stereotypes to confront prejudice, the Murphys (and their co-screenwriters Jay Scherick and David Ronn) merely squeeze a few grudging drops from caricatures that were wrung dry in the age of vaudeville.

Consistently imaginative, revealing and funny.

A project such as Operation Homecoming should shed light on their experiences, but Robbins' film just falls short. [06 Apr 2007, p.E17]

Not so much phoned in as it is auto-dialed with a text-to-speech prerecorded message in one of those creepy robotic voices.

The Messengers is at once ruthlessly efficient and shamelessly distended.

The romance makes an awkward, contrived fit with the nominally serious political stuff, and even those momentous events come off as generic and unconvincing.

Fired! is missing the one thing it could have used most: a career objective.

Bisexuality certainly increases the geometric possibilities of the romantic comedy, completing its triangles and allowing for quadrangles and other, more amorphous layers of amorous involvement.

Walker-Pearlman's strengths lie in these characterizations and his ability to draw subtle performances from his actors. However, the powerfully understated moments are undercut by the film's unwieldy structure. Any emotional momentum that builds is lost with the interminable flashbacks.