Equally as perplexing as its lack of perspective is the film's overall shortage of information.

Like "Street Fight," Marshall Curry's account of the 2002 Newark, N.J., mayoral race, "Mr. Smith" captures ground-level political machinations in an utterly fascinating way. The question raised by the title makes for an interesting, if possibly disheartening, debate.

Though the second half contains the fireworks, it's the film's first hour that is ultimately most memorable. Mantel and Skrovan do a commendable job in covering a lot of territory, mixing pertinent and entertaining archival footage with interviews.

It's a relentlessly silly horror/fantasy/romance that is merely the latest twist on a tired premise.

An oddly appealing, if innocuous, movie of considerable charm.

The real problem with Epic Movie is that while it does a decent job imitating films, it never bothers to make fun of or have fun with them, which is what Friedberg and Seltzer did so well with "Scary Movie."

It's a grindhouse-inspired concoction that may not contain a shred of originality, but it is executed with unbridled bombast and glee.

Brosnan and Neeson make fine adversaries mining the terse dialogue for veiled dramatic fervor.

While major stars thrust together on screen often end up undercutting each other, one of the pleasures of Becket is how easily and generously these two commanding actors play off each other, each allowing the other the space to make the most of their individual roles.

Once the farce finds its stride, however, it's generally worth the wait.

The film has a weird, surrealistic feel abetted by a lack of conventional structure, keeping the viewer off-balance. On the down side, that means the movie occasionally rambles. The staging tends toward the static, the cast is uneven and the small film is technically limited.

The original film was intellectually engaging as well as tangibly creepy, while the new remake is just plain bad, and boring to boot.

A remarkably compelling presence, Spiridonov commands attention without pandering or appealing to pity. In fact, for a 6-year-old, he is possessed of an uncanny poise.

A magnificent film almost no one knows about, this hidden classic offers a wider variety of pleasures than most contemporary works can even aspire to.

A pretty engaging tale, and it's refreshing to see a well-acted, suspenseful drama made without a bloated budget or a lot of bloodletting.

In a film with several over-the-top characters bordering on camp, Timberlake's Frankie is the only one who approaches three dimensions, adept at convincingly dishing out some of the movie's disturbing violence as well as registering subtle shifts in Frankie's allegiance.

Strangely self-serious, and without covering the prerequisites of top-shelf nastiness that contemporary horror requires, this giant crocodile movie turns out to be neither fish nor fowl.

Yes, stepping is an age-old tradition at historically African American schools, but this smells of desperation; one more misstep for a film with two left feet.

Quinn discovers an unexpectedly funny, trenchant fish-out-of-water-eye-view of American life.

It is astonishing to realize that the highly confident Tears of the Black Tiger marks the directorial debut of Sasanatieng, after having written two movies hugely successful in Thailand, yet in truth he belongs to a long line of first-rate filmmakers who understand the wisdom of taking big chances the first time at bat.

Putting a spin on classic fairy tales is nothing new, and unfortunately that's just what the "Shrek"-lite animated feature Happily N'Ever After brings to the big screen.

Dramatically, the movie never veers from its predictable course, but Swank's performance renders the point moot. There likely was a better, more original movie to be made focusing more on the Freedom Writers themselves, but if this more conventional direction had to be taken, it's hard to imagine a more affecting version.

Offers no surprises but is good-natured and funny. It's mercifully devoid of car chases, although it does have a truly inane gunfight -- did any of these trained killers ever hear of target practice? -- and some out-of-left-field martial arts.

With Pan's Labyrinth, Del Toro has made his most accomplished film to date, a dark and disturbing fairy tale for adults that's been thought out to the nth degree and resonates with the irresistible inevitability of a timeless myth.

What's missing is less a sense of the protagonist's inner nose (which is very well-trammeled) as a sense of his inner life, motivation or desire.

The movie is at once a flagrant piece of kitsch and an unexpectedly affecting story about an individual overcoming personal tragedy and brutally restrictive circumstances by talent and force of will.

If the segments are uneven, Moncrieff -- with the help of her excellent cast -- nevertheless crafts a gripping overall narrative that exposes a shared dissonance among the protagonists.

It's more like "That Girl" on speed than anything else.

Scotsman not only lacks vision, a true sense of how to mesh Obree's sporting triumphs and personal setbacks, but it also lacks passion. What it needs, as strange and tacky as it may sound, is a bit more madness.

Unconscious is a ribald sex farce of considerable imagination and inspired wackiness and a meticulous period piece of the Art Nouveau era.

Director Luc Besson, best known for "La Femme Nikita" and "The Fifth Element," admits he knew nothing about animation before he started this project, and it shows.

It doesn't seem possible that a film with both the formidable Reno and Waits could be all bad, but The Tiger and the Snow is precisely so.

In bringing Heller's book to the screen, director Richard Eyre ("Iris," "Stage Beauty") and screenwriter Patrick Marber ("Closer") have tossed the book's subtlety out the window, along with its psychological complexity, its running theme of self-deception and its dark, extra-wry sense of humor.

Made with palpable energy, intensity and excitement, it compellingly creates a world gone mad that is uncomfortably close to the one we live in. It is a "Blade Runner" for the 21st century, a worthy successor to that epic of dystopian decay

Like an ugly tie or a pair of slipper socks, Black Christmas is destined to be forgotten the instant it's unwrapped, gathering dust until the season rolls around again.

It's taken a dozen years for Eric Roth's smart, thoughtful, psychologically complicated script to reach the screen under Robert De Niro's careful and methodical direction, and it is easy to see why.

The bulk of the movie is a series of sight gags and set pieces that wreak much havoc but little else.

The film is injected with a refreshing energy whenever McConaughey is on-screen, balancing some of the inherent sadness of the story.

Told with wit, genuine poignancy and all kinds of humor, Venus charts the unlikely relationship between a man in his 70s and a young woman more than half a century his junior.

A period spectacle, steeped in awesome splendor and lethal palace intrigue, it climaxes in a stupendous battle scene and epic tragedy.

Letters From Iwo Jima, takes audiences to a place that would seem unimaginable for an American director. Daring and significant, it presents a picture from life's other side, not only showing what wartime was like for our Japanese adversaries on that island in the Pacific but also actually telling the story in their language. Which turns out to be no small thing.

The Painted Veil has all the elements in place to be a great epic, but it fails to connect, to paraphrase Maugham's contemporary E.M. Forster, the prose with the passion. It's impeccable, but leaves you cold.

Above all this is a film for gluttons for punishment, for those who never ever can get enough of Sylvester Stallone. Everyone else, please leave the building.

Dreamgirls is the entire musical package, a triumph of old school on-screen glamour, and we wouldn't want it any other way.

It does get mired in its obsession with its own style.

Despite very good performances and solid construction, it's a slightly too symmetrical, way too tendentious side-by-side comparison of two families -- Haves, meet the Have-nots -- who come into unlikely contact in the fitfully gentrifying area of Kings Cross.

The new live-action rendering of E.B. White's perennial children's favorite, Charlotte's Web, is so carefully spun that it's lifeless.

Eragon is likely to center on its place among the likes of "Dragonheart," "Reign of Fire" and the rest of the mediocre dragon flicks.

"Inspired by" is an interesting phrase because the movie is more inspiring than inspired. The man's struggles are emotionally engaging, but dramatically it lacks the layering of a "Kramer vs. Kramer," which it superficially resembles.

The movie's mild-mannerness is especially disappointing when compared with such documentaries as "The War Tapes" and the excellent "Home Front," vivid and incisive explorations of post-Iraq anger and disillusionment that have gone largely unseen by a disinterested public. If Americans are suffering from Iraq fatigue, Home of the Brave will do little to rouse them.

There may be no young actress today better at embodying a blend of wounded innocence and stoic pride than Sarah Polley. In The Secret Life of Words, she has a part worthy of her gifts.

Aronson's film is a fond portrait, loaded with bizarre, haunting music and Smith's off-kilter inspirations.

Numerous good things can be said about Apocalypto, the director's foray into the decaying Mayan civilization of the early 1500s, but every last one of them is overshadowed by Gibson's well-established penchant for depictions of stupendous amounts of violence.

Blood Diamond attempts to be an action thriller with serious political overtones, to be as much position paper as "Zulu Dawn."

The alluring surfaces of other people's lives can be deceiving, though generally not in a Nancy Meyers comedy, where the thin veneer of fantasy cloaks ... more fantasy.

Off the Black is a modest, bittersweet character study that hits its mark.

The piece is intelligently made, although the director often doesn't establish place or time, leaving the viewer unmoored.

That "Empire" lacks clear-cut heroes and villains is not necessarily a fault, but the movie's muddle too often comes across as an attempt to avoid assigning responsibility where it belongs.

And though the film also quotes Wiesenthal's exhortation "Hope lives when people remember," the filmmakers are most interested in drawing attention to what is happening now, primarily in Europe, and what it may mean for the future.

Packed tighter than week-old powder, Snow Blind tries to touch on every aspect of snowboarding culture, which sometimes makes it feel like a TV travelogue compressed into feature form.

Shot on grainy, often blown-out and distorted consumer-grade video, scored to a feedback distortion-heavy soundtrack that will be familiar to fans and tinnitus sufferers alike, and clocking in at one merciful minute under three hours, Lynch's much-anticipated follow-up to "Mulholland Drive" signals a hale swan-dive off the deep end, away from any pretense of narrative logic and into the purer realm of unconscious free association. I found myself pining for "The Elephant Man," but that's just me.

As directed by Rachid Bouchareb, himself born in France to Algerian immigrants, "Days of Glory" is a kind of a North African "Saving Private Ryan," a taut, involving film that delivers all the things we look for in war movies and does so with intelligence and integrity.

It convincingly demonstrates that when done right, moral and political quandaries can be the most intensely dramatic dilemmas of all.

This is not a chance to "experience the most timeless of stories as you've never seen it before" but just the opposite: an opportunity, for those who want it, to encounter this story exactly the way it's almost always been told.

To make a movie this charmless and uninspired takes a certain negligence that is rare among even the most cynical Hollywood moneymaking exercises.

Though not as coherent as it might be, 3 Needles, with its stunning cinematography by Thomas M. Harting, is never less than engaging and suggests powerfully the myriad reasons why AIDS, after a quarter of a century, remains so difficult to control and combat.

10 Items or Less is not deep, but it's a charming enough diversion to spend a day with two likable people.

Despite an intriguing premise in which the architect of a housing project is confronted by a resident-turned-activist who wants his help in getting the place torn down, Matt Tauber's The Architect feels schematic and contrived.

Turistas seeks to exploit the current craze for torture-porn, but it lacks the relentless sadism of the "Saw" franchise. More than half the movie is dull buildup.

Despite striking a chord in terms of sibling politics and the inelegant ways we deal with death, Two Weeks too often feels as if it's destined for heavy rotation on the Lifetime Movie Network.

Eating Out 2 is sweet-natured, but like the first edition, lame and way too talky.

This is a bitter, occasionally farcical drama with the most hostile cinematic view of Los Angeles since "Crash."

Despite this lack of narration, Our Daily Bread never fails to enthrall because of the impeccable eye -- for composition, for color, for movement within the frame -- of filmmaker Geyrhalter.

Bloated and logy, and art-directed within an inch of its life, the movie shovels heaps of phony portent and all-purpose mystical imagery onto a thin and maudlin plot.

Like a fatally snarled string of Christmas lights, Deck the Halls promises holiday cheer but delivers only frustration.

What is interesting is not how little sense Déjà Vu makes but how little that matters. If you want your films to add up logically, you're welcome to take your calculator somewhere else. But if you do, you will be missing out on some first-class genre fun.

Not only screams out to be a midnight movie, but one in need of, shall we say, an herbal supplement, and we aren't talking ginkgo biloba.

As a take on celebrity as religious mass derangement, Backstage is nominally interesting. As a study of two characters, it's not very convincing.

An exceptional family film, arriving just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday. Directed with sensitivity by "The Full Monty's" Peter Cattaneo, it is the antithesis of the standard synthetic Hollywood family movie, which is all too often weighed down by ludicrously exaggerated special effects and stunts and glazed over by gross humor.

A lively and entertaining disquisition on the purpose and uses of knowledge in a world that cares less about scholarship than quantifiable results.

Though the film's final break-the-bank action sequence in Venice is worth waiting for, Casino Royale's 2-hour, 24-minute running time is long enough to exhaust all but the series' biggest fans.

No film with as many elements as Happy Feet is successful with all of them, and the romantic-emotional elements of this story feel overly familiar. But the music and dancing are fresh and new, and this strong an ecological message has not been seen since Hayao Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke."

For a druggie movie, Candy is surprisingly dynamic and involving.

If Linklater regards the fake culture that has replaced real places with horror, he has nothing but respect and affection for his characters, and the movie is rescued from nihilism by his humanistic view.

The movie does have its flashes of genius. "Home for Purim," the movie, is set in the Deep South, where Yiddish is spoken with a drawl.

Those who can surrender to the Quays' poetic logic will find The Piano Tuner to be nothing short of a masterpiece.

It's an ambitious film drenched in sincerity and oozing with nostalgia that, despite the energy provided by its title icon via archival footage, falls flat dramatically in nearly every other way.

Sublime psychological thriller.

For all the time we spend watching Justin and Nicole negotiate their needs, we have no idea who these people are.

Russell Crowe is invariably involving on screen, and Ridley Scott is a splendid director when the material is right. No film they collaborate on will be devoid of interest, but A Good Year almost is.

Harsh Times goes down like the vinegar its protagonist chugs to try to beat a drug test. It's carefully crafted, exasperating and ugly, a festival of self-destructiveness, in all ways a reflection of its lead as brought to careening, erupting, implosive life by Christian Bale.

As for Gellar, she seems game but glum, treading water in a role that represses her comic talents and leaves her little to do but suffer in silence.

A refreshingly grown-up comedy, "Stranger" is a charming film that is unafraid to be low-key in ways that studio releases seldom are.

Langley's impeccably nonjudgmental camera knows exactly what details to record. Drawn from more than 300 hours of footage, the film's all too brief 94 minutes mesmerizes with its insight and, rarer still, its beauty.

Yet whenever you get too irritated at Fur's pretensions, the remarkable acting of its two stars pulls you back in and keeps you watching.

Falls prey to bits of psychoanalytic shorthand and narrative predictability, but it offers the rare, meaty role for an actress in her late 30s.

Davaa has made a sweetly meditative film.