Maple Palm cannot possibly be seriously recommended to anyone, but a reviewer, sitting through it until the long-awaited finish, cannot but be moved by how Stewart and everyone else involved has hurled themselves into the project with the utmost conviction, sometimes with unintended comical effect.

Even for ultra-low-budget, grade-Z horror movies, this is a truly incompetent film.

A wry romantic comedy of sexual confusion that deftly becomes increasingly serious without losing its sense of humor.

With his corrosive brand of take-no-prisoners humor that scalds on contact, Cohen is the most intentionally provocative comedian since Lenny Bruce and early Richard Pryor, with a difference. For unlike those predecessors, there is a mean-spiritedness, an every-man-for-himself coldness about his humor. The one kind of laughter you won't find in Borat is that which acknowledges shared humanity. Instead, there is that pitiless staple of reality TV, watching others humiliate themselves for our viewing pleasure.

The film offers rousing adventures that kids will love and witty humor that adults can appreciate.

As a full-service holiday movie, The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause gets you into the mood to shop early and often by making the North Pole look like a shopping mall with a never-ending school pageant.

Volver is just as funny as "What Have I Done," but it's also more sanguine and complex. Its humor is brighter and loopier, more a function of the characters' indomitable spirit than of their terminal despair.

There's no social commentary discernible here; merely a rap-video style glorification of the gangsta life, complete with mad money, barely clad babes and that annoying affectation of holding pistols sideways. As to its treatment of women, well, it's not exactly a feminist film.

Aiming for the tough-minded nostalgia of John Boorman's "Hope and Glory," writer-director Paul Morrison catches both the innocence of childhood and its unconscious cruelty.

Unfortunately, producer-director Jonathan Berman only scratches the surface of daily life at Black Bear. We're left with many unanswered questions about the nuts-and-bolts of the place, even the basic social interactions and what it's like today. There are so many voices in the piece that we never get to know any of them; it's a dizzying array of opinions.

While it would like to be nimble, light-footed satire, too often Death and Texas stumbles on its own earnestness, wearing cement shoes when it should be tap-dancing.

The movie's disinterest in character might be forgivable were its plot not riddled with holes.

Unlike Gore's movie, which focused largely on what Americans had done to cause the problem and what they could do to fix it, The Great Warming treats global warming as a global issue.

Pain, poetry and perseverance form the backbone of Mark Becker's compassionate, well-observed documentary.

The beauty of this film is in its lapidary details, which sparkle with feeling and surprise.

Voilà! A genuine tragedy, although not in the Shakespearean sense. A comprehensive list of what's wrong with Romeo & Juliet: Sealed With a Kiss would stretch farther than the unabridged works of William S.

The young American actor (Derek Luke) gives such an intense, passionate performance as South African Patrick Chamusso that he just about dares you not to be involved with the tale he is telling.

Bottom line, those in the "Saw" factory know their audience and have brought along the appropriate buckets and bibs. Even devotees, however, may note pacing problems and tire of Jigsaw's selective omnipotence.

An intimate drama that views the deterioration of a relationship from the inside out. Moving from summer through fall and concluding in winter, it's minimalist cinema that turns on subtle emotion rather than narrative and demands the audience's full attention.

Conversations has all the telltale signs of a religious film that keep your basic moviegoer away: stilted dialogue, overwrought music, the subtlety of a daytime soap.

A technically inventive, thoughtful, but otherwise not particularly earth-shattering movie.

In a sense it's a shame that Cocaine Cowboys is so obsessed by violence, because the film has interesting points to make.

Impressive as is Wilson's output and oeuvre, it's the fully-engaged, aesthetically driven life that fascinates. And Otto-Bernstein's movie is a portrait of an artist at his most essential, in every sense.

Both a beautiful film and a disturbing one, and the connection between those two characteristics makes it the most disquieting of documentaries.

Marie Antoinette gives a wide berth to the conventions of period dramas, especially their time-capsule remove, and instead tries to mainline the singular personal experience of the arch-villainess of French history (and freedom history, for that matter). The result is a startlingly original and beautiful pop reverie that comes very close to being transcendent.

Murphy, who created the creepy, funny, lunatic "Nip/Tuck," is a master of mordant and macabre camp. But here he loses his teeth, seeming to lack any ironic distance from material that practically begs for it.

As he did in "Unforgiven," "Mystic River" and "Million Dollar Baby," Eastwood handles this nuanced material with aplomb, giving every element of this complex story just the weight it deserves. The director's lean dispassion, his increased willingness to be strongly emotional while retaining an instinctive restraint, continues to astonish.

The Prestige does more than focus on magicians. It is so in love with the romance, wonder and ability to fool of stage illusion that it becomes something of a magic trick in and of itself

Rather than the escalating gross-out spectacular it could have been, Sleeping Dogs Lie is an unexpectedly thoughtful look at what it takes to make relationships work.

This calm and thorough film has just the right attitude and tone to deal with a most incendiary story.

In its subtlety, complexity and dexterity, Requiem is a notably original work.

The film has its flaws -- the length of the arduous journey certainly could be conveyed with greater economy, the action is not dynamically depicted and the lack of character development makes it occasionally difficult to follow -- but the earnest minimalism of "Masai" makes it an unusual moviegoing experience.

A type of American independent we don't see often enough.

What makes 51 Birch Street a moving revelation rather than a therapeutic exercise is Block's commitment to understanding his parents, Mike and Mina, on their own terms, regardless of what it does to his image of them.

Smorgasbord of the bizarre. Hair High is not for everyone, but it's not like anything else out right now.

This is not the cool, eerie déjà vu, but the "Hey, isn't that exactly what happened in the first movie?" déjà vu.

The Marine is bad in just the right way, a mindless throwaway that's at least smart enough not to take itself too seriously.

Driving Lessons follows the well-worn path laid down by other, better movies while making strained, ludicrous things happen toward the end.

The problem is that the first half of Infamous is nowhere near as comic as McGrath intends. Instead the picture gives off a tone of arch stylization that plays as artificial, overwrought and off-putting.

This film is smart, funny and, thanks in no small part to David Geddes' cinematography, it occasionally approaches the poetic.

This is a film with a story we have not seen before, a story about American troops so unusual it needed a German director to ferret it out.

Tideland is equally evocative of the pastoral mystery of an Andrew Wyeth painting and the looming menace of "Psycho." The disparity is fitting, because as Tideland unfolds, it's difficult to tell if you're watching a fantasy or a horror movie, or one superimposed on the other.

The film is forever trying to balance between being for younger teenagers and keeping their parents occupied as well, and never quite gets it right.

There's not much joy in One Night With the King, a lavish but listless retelling of the biblical story of Esther.

If Hay's style tends to the theatrical, his use of flashbacks, aided by Edie Ichioka's sharp editing and Matthew Heckerling's resourceful camera work, is entirely cinematic, revealing his clever way with plotting.

Frequently excessive but never dull, The Departed is a little too much of a lot of the things that define Martin Scorsese films but it's also almost impossible to resist. Too operatic at times, too in love with violence and macho posturing at others, it's a potboiler dressed up in upscale designer clothes, but oh how that pot does boil.

The movie is one of the few films I can think of that examines the baffling combination of smugness, self-abnegation, ceremonial deference and status anxiety that characterizes middle-class Gen X parenting, and find sheer, white-knuckled terror at its core.

This may be a just-for-fun comedy, but that shouldn't mean that it must entirely disconnect from the world.

This is not a slick, jokey horror movie in the post-"Scream" mold, but a genuine attempt to strip the coating from the audience's nerves. It's nasty and brutish, if not particularly short.

49 Up is more than a deeply satisfying movie; it's a reminder of the wonder contained in ordinary lives.

Black Gold moves at an inexorable pace, painstakingly building a case until suddenly it looms very large and casts an even longer shadow.

Perhaps in an effort to root the film in the genre, the dialogue reaches for a particular hard-boiled register but grasps only clichés. El Cortez, like so many before it, searches for that nugget in the genre mine but just doesn't find it.

A breezy and lightweight primer, but to really make Roth's work and influence into more than just a nostalgia trip would require a discipline and wit seemingly beyond Mann's easygoing, feel-good survey.

Though it flirts with the hard-core, there is something strangely flaccid about Shortbus, a ragged, uneven quality that, however purposeful, makes it feel less than fully formed.

As it is, Wrestling With Angels is neither compelling enough for people with little knowledge of the playwright's work nor insightful enough for those of us who have followed his career closely.

In a commanding performance that is as compelling as it is unexpected, Mirren has turned The Queen into something you never imagined it could be: a crackling dramatic story that's intelligent, thoughtful and moving.

The overly familiar plot points also make the film feel a little dated.

An amusing if slight excursion into nature with a group of animals who turn the tables on their collective nemeses, the hunters.

This is a modest education-of-a-punching-bag entertainment with a kind of breezily rude compatibility -- a hallmark of sorts for both co-writer/director Todd Phillips ("Road Trip," "Starsky & Hutch") and the wonderful actor assigned to play the self-help instructor from hell, Billy Bob Thornton.

Facing the Giants, which despite its flaws is ultimately a sweet, sincere movie about Christian faith.

In "A Guide," passion and imagination go a long way in transforming seemingly conventional material and characters.

Broken Sky is that increasing rarity, a film that is fully realized visually. Keeping dialogue at a minimum, Hernández and inspired cinematographer Alejandro Cantú create a constant interplay between light and shadow, movement and stillness, dramatic spaces of architectural grandeur and intimate enclosures to evoke the ever-shifting emotions of an all-consuming first love.

Captures the energy and exuberance of a young nation in the throes of optimism and works it into a foreboding frenzy.

Zaillian (an Oscar winner for his "Schindler's List" screenplay) has given us an intricate, subtly rewarding narrative whose uncompromising nature and undeniable moral seriousness make it far from business as usual, even in the ever-decreasing world of quality Hollywood filmmaking.

A sad farewell to the promising Project Greenlight concept, this Feast leaves viewers with nothing satisfying to tuck into.

Whether you are a religious, churchgoing person or not, if you are the least bit liberal or tolerant in your world view, this has got to be one of the most unnerving films of the year.

The documentary is an enlightening journey to a dark corner of contemporary punk's dank little basement. It also will surprise some to hear how articulately some of the former performers explain the dark impulses that propelled them.

A provocative, witty -- and admittedly esoteric -- experimental comedy that is serious, amusing and satisfying, in Rosenbush's words: "a Zen riddle designed more to be experienced than understood rationally."

It's rare for young actors to exude as much charisma and charm as Gainsbourg and García Bernal.

A visually wondrous experience in high-contrast black and white, bogged down by a slow, underwrought story and uninvolving characters. It would be easy to dismiss it as another great-looking film with little else to offer, but that wouldn't be entirely true.

Sophisticated in its ease and spontaneity, it was directed with clarity and rigor by Auraeus Solito from Michiiko Yamamoto's acutely perceptive script.

Miniaturist in its level of detail and evocatively abstract, Old Joy captures the weary mood of a generation that's crested its peak along with an era, quietly making a case for how well suited film can be to capturing the finer points of human interaction while preserving their mystery.

A few scenes are worth the price of admission for their inspired camp alone; Shaw happens to be in two of them.

Subtle it is not. Well-intentioned it certainly is. No one but the youngest in the family will care very much about it, though. And they may well be filled with wonderment trying to figure out what this big Babe person is all about.

Feels terminally generic and tone-deaf.

Most successful in capturing the emotional elements of its story, the film relies on its excellent cast to balance out sketchily drawn characters and the unfortunate obviousness of its plot.

Under the insanity and unsexy nudity, Confetti has a sweet center. Comic timing, themes of tolerance and commitment and the marriage of farce and empathy lift the film above the mockumentary pack.

This thoughtful, sensitive film, perhaps the most emotionally wrenching of all the Iraq documentaries, could have been made after any war.

Haven is far from perfect, with some uncomfortable pacing, wayward accents and less-than-satisfying denouements. But it's a refreshing, character-driven antidote to the late-summer movie-house blahs, and Flowers looks like a talent worth watching.

There may not be a moral, but it's a fascinating human story, one that The U.S. vs. John Lennon only begins to tell.

Weirdly clueless.

Captures comedian and pundit Al Franken evolving from satirist to activist.

This overly derivative motion picture thinks it is doing and saying more than it is. Instead, it ends up as little more than a reasonable facsimile of the real thing, despite a subtle and effective performance by Ben Affleck, of all people.

Positioned as somewhere in between the eggheady activism of Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" and the anger of Spike Lee's "When the Levees Broke," the new Imax film Hurricane on the Bayou examines the effect of Katrina on the famed bayou-country wetlands of Louisiana.

Like Greenwald's previous films, Iraq for Sale is made from a progressive political point of view but spends considerable time talking to regular people who likely voted Republican.

As boredom sets in, the viewer realizes that "The Covenant" does possess one magical power: It afflicts its audience with restless leg syndrome.

Has enough virtues -- principally Sutherland's presence and the quality of the music -- to make it an enjoyable trip.

The problem with Sherry is that, unlike Ryan Gosling's Dan in "Half Nelson," whose humanity transcends his addiction and who is still capable, no matter how uneasily, to maintain relationships with others, she is a terminally uninteresting narcissist with a bad case of arrested development.

A quiet powerhouse of a film, an implacable, uncompromising French police drama, both old-fashioned and modern, that underlines the reasons impeccably made crime stories do so well on screen.

Man Push Cart, largely the work of newcomers and near-newcomers, is a remarkably disciplined, subtle film that avoids striking a "triumph of the human spirit" note or any other cliché.

Neo Ned is exactly the kind of production -- scrappy, flawed and a little odd -- that should exemplify the very notion of "independent film."

Following Woody Allen, Ang Lee and any number of sitcoms, Georgia Lee constructs her well-shot, well-written film around three daughters.

A well-photographed inside look at a fascinating culture and its people.

Neveldine and Taylor empty their handbasket of cinematic tricks. They display visual wit, have fun with pop songs, and shoot much of the film in slightly choppy fast-motion ("under-cranked," get it?).

In the end, LaBute's remake is an interesting idea that never transforms into a particularly satisfying movie.

There's a rawness and immediacy to his (Bujalski's) work that cuts straight to the experience, a starkness that's startling in an age of bloated spectacle.

Unlikely to be ranked as one of Zhang's greatest accomplishments but is clearly the work of a major filmmaker. It is best seen as a heartfelt tribute to Takakura, as heroic and enduring a star as John Wayne.

An impassioned piece of activist filmmaking that's as persuasive and entertaining as it is disturbing.