A wonderfully eccentric piece of filmmaking -- to demand it cohere to formula would be to miss the point.

If The Core finally has to be classified as a mess, it is an enjoyable one if you're in a throwback mood. After all, a film that comes up with a rare metal called Unobtainium can't be dismissed out of hand.

Rock can't set up a decent-looking shot, and he doesn't care about niceties such as character development and all that narrative downtime in between jokes. But he nonetheless wrings biting humor from serious issues with the sort of ferocity that made Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce men of respect as well as comedy.

His film may be something of a beautiful lie, but what's true about Sollett's characters is that their dreams, their grace and their struggles are as real as it gets.

So unashamedly confusing, so intent on piling twist upon twist upon twist, it makes your head hurt just trying to figure out what's happened.

Anders Thomas Jensen's Flickering Lights may have been a huge hit in Denmark, but it doesn't travel well. A bleak male-bonding comedy that's a queasy blend of brutal humor and escalating sentimentality, it is overlong, heavy-handed, slow and unpersuasive.

Director CB Harding captures the relaxed rhythms of the comedians while keeping the film well paced.

Parents may find their attention wandering, but the simple tale contains valuable life lessons for their youngest offspring, who will likely be enchanted.

Style is content in action movies, but when all the style originates elsewhere, it's just plain lazy.

The music is sensational, the energy level high, and Down and Out With the Dolls is a wise and funny treat.

Boat Trip is happily a no-holds-barred, all-out farce in which zany complications escalate rapidly and continually.

Worth commenting on only for its shocking ineptitude.

Wise, understated, warm and witty, it presents stars Michel Serrault and Mathilde Seigner in roles that fit them so perfectly they could have been tailor-made.

Simultaneously jokey and scary, sentimental and ruthless, tediously everyday and grotesquely out of the ordinary.

Some filmmakers give us dreams and false worlds in which we can find refuge. For others, though, like the young Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas, the movies aren't an escape from the world but a way more deeply into it.

The new Willard, which has taken the original's humanity and the psychological validity, leavened with a dollop of dark humor, and replaced them with a technically impressive but essentially heartless spoof.

This splendid film is no mere polemic, for Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, often called the first lady of Iranian cinema, is above all an accomplished storyteller and dramatist who understands the evocative power of sound and image.

What keeps you watching isn't the story or the actors, none of whom are at the top of their form, but the relentlessness of Friedkin's vision. The film has great forward thrust -- Friedkin's a full-throttle guy -- and the director knows where to put the camera.

A clever and lively action-adventure with a warm sense of humor and smart dialogue that allows for an affectionate and fleet-footed satire of the classic elements of the Bond franchise.

Maybe it's the sight of Leguizamo running around dressed only in boots and a well-placed sock that does her in, or maybe it's just that she's seen this movie too many times before. She isn't the only one.

Smart, lively and altogether warmhearted dramatic comedy.

In its milieu and parallel story lines, the film suggests a bantam "Short Cuts," but for better and for worse, this is Altman without the razored edge. Cholodenko elicits appealing performances from her ensemble, but she never pushes their characters anywhere there isn't an easy out.

This is an intelligent epic told without special pleading, a film able to cut deep enough to reveal a keen specificity of experience.

A movie that desperately wants her (Latifah's) hip, her edge and mostly her blackness but doesn't know what to do with the human being who comes with the package.

For all of Troche's skill and talent, The Safety of Objects (a splendid title) nevertheless tries to cover too much territory. In movies, as elsewhere, a little less sometimes can add up to a lot more.

Noé;, with his Nietzsche-for-knuckleheads nihilism and extreme-cinema ambitions, clearly fancies himself a visionary, but mounting a camera on a roller coaster or putting a story into rewind doesn't make a film formally adventurous or interesting. Conceiving of a gay club as an antechamber to the inferno and sexualizing a woman's rape, however, do make it titillating.

May make you weep, but not in the way anyone intended. Handsomely made, well-meaning but finally frustrating and unsatisfying, this perplexing film is an example of a previously unseen hybrid, the socially conscious, humanitarian action movie. It doesn't appear to be a genre with much of a future.

One of the best films to open so far this year, but greeting each new work from a favored director as if it were equally brilliant can't be good for anyone, the director included.

With so little trust and even less dialogue to back him up, it's no wonder Li rarely takes his left hand out of his pants pocket. His fists aren't furious; they're on strike.

Although the term cinéma vérité is overused as a descriptor for documentaries, it applies here. The makers of Horns and Halos eschew the Michael Moore "poke 'em with a stick, let's watch 'em squirm" approach and wisely let the cameras roll, interspersing news footage with their own interviews.

It isn't that nothing happens in Poolhall Junkies, it's that nothing interesting does.

Instead of a genre movie-industry calling card, Roy has made a venturesome and effective film.

This premise is ripe with possibilities, but in an apparent -- and definitely misguided -- attempt to make his movie more commercial, Wilkinson has made the younger brother a murderer on the run.

There are no big surprises in Caetano's film, which plays out exactly as ordained, only a sense of life at its most precarious and real.

The gritty, low-budget realism approach of the Dogme manifesto gives immediacy and edge to the raw emotions Bier and her cast uncover. Best of all, Bier never forgets that a little humor can relieve an awful lot of pain.

Kept in check by his character's neuroses, Pearce holds our attention throughout, but it isn't until near the end that he manages to break free of his character's and his director's inhibitions.

Sensitively directed by Ron Shelton and helped by what just might be the best performance of Kurt Russell's career, Dark Blue is as interesting and successful as it can be within its limits, but those limits make this a more generic film than its makers intended.

Charming, disarming and in some ways humbling film.

Maxwell has populated his film with paragons rather than people. Worse, they talk and talk and talk; this film is in danger of talking itself to death before the Union and the Confederacy are able to decimate each other.

The disconnect between what men say and what they do makes Old School funnier than most of its gags and it also invests the movie with curious pathos.

Frankly, the film's real surprise is that it doesn't collapse under the weight of its sanctimonious posturing and howling pretension. The film is crammed with high-cultural references and people playing "smart," but none of it adds up.

Chillingly, Portillo reveals that 50 women were killed in the 18 months it took her to make her film.

It leaves you stirred and uplifted not only by its music but also by the determination and courage of the people who sang and danced it on the way to a freer life.

What makes the story worthwhile is the candor and personality of the band members.

It is a slack and preachy business that never comes to grips with its underlying theme of homophobia.

Im recounts the painter's life in bold strokes rather than with the literalist's painstaking detail, and in the process tells us more about the mysteries of genius than a bushel full of quotidian fact.

A work of such charm and imagination it should enchant, as the old circus phrase goes, "children of all ages."

About as non-narrative a film as you're likely to see in commercial theaters. This makes it a curiosity and, less charitably, something of a gimmick, but mostly it makes it a challenge.

An impressively assured and confident first film and has been made with such attention to detail and mood that it's possible to regret not paying closer attention to its cleverly deceptive first part. It is ultimately unsettling in the utmost, its creepiness leavened by only the slightest touch of pitch-dark humor.

It's a sad love story that's insightful at its core and indulgent around the edges, a film whose instincts are impeccable when focusing on that romance but less than compelling when it wanders elsewhere.

Unfortunately, Garner doesn't have as much screen time as her prominence in the advertising would indicate: Daredevil has a hard time staying alive when she's not on the scene.

The film has been hailed as something of a literary thriller; it's not. The stultifying pace and Moskowitz's filmmaking laziness are forgivable, but it's exasperating and indicative of our low expectations for the documentary form that a film that taps the likes of Leslie Fiedler could be so devoid of ideas. Reading is fundamental; so is thinking.

Flows smoothly, looks great and probably cost lots less than it looks. One can't help resist saying it delivers the goods.

A concept, no matter how promising, is not a movie, and this picture has the bad luck to illustrate the difference.

Loving Jackie Chan has always been easy, which is why it would be nice if he could find better material in which to bask in his long-sought American stardom or, alternately, ease into bad movies as effortlessly as his co-star.

A stylized work of unflinching control and discipline, reflecting an artistic maturity unusual in a first film.

There's more than a little Oedipal melodrama tossed into the mix. But the movie rarely gets as sappy or as contrived as one keeps expecting.

Records an accident while it's happening, revealing a situation that makes you laugh again and again while weeping, metaphorically at least, for the sheer frustration of it all.

The Guru turns out to be just a flirtation with the musical rather than a full-on embrace. That's a shame because the musical interludes are where the film wears its heart and finds its soul.

The horror sequel is less philosophical than the original, but it's just as intelligent.

No matter how seriously everyone works to make the CIA impossibly sexy, the illusion that these pencil pushers are incarnations of Bond, James Bond, is difficult to sustain.

Crewson is a game, experienced actress but hasn't sufficient star charisma to lift Suddenly Naked out of the doldrums.

Mixes satire and suspense in unexpected ways in a film that is as darkly amusing as it is bitterly critical of bourgeois society's indifference to suffering.

Darkness Falls -- with a thud. But it does not go gently into the night, for director Jonathan Liebesman and his large crew cram as much style and energy as they can into a hokey and morbid supernatural thriller plot. It's a downer to see so much effort expended on such junk.

A riveting encounter with the woman who was Hitler's secretary...In a daring and successful stylistic choice, directors Heller and Schmiderer include almost nothing in the film but Junge.

A handsome period production of fluidity and subtlety, intimate and large-scale.

Guaranteed to infuriate anyone with strongly partisan opinions about the region. The film offers up simultaneous critiques of Palestinian and Israeli extremism, but the most radical thing about it is that it's often disquietingly funny.

Despite strong portrayals by Guttenberg and his co-star, Lombardo Boyar, and sequences that attempt to open the play up, it remains too much a filmed play, and worse, one that has not been effectively paced. As a result, it doesn't come alive until it's drawing to a close that's unexpectedly touching, if more than a little sentimental, but too late to redeem the preceding tedium.

The three leads go through the motions with goofy geniality, and director Chris Koch has enlisted some consummate character actors -- to help hold up the sagging jokes and story line.

A funny, raucous action comedy, effectively teams Martin Lawrence and Steve Zahn in a film that's both laugh out loud funny and surprisingly subtle.

88 minutes of desperate gyrations intended to simulate humor.

A potent and unexpected mixture of authenticity and flash -- even if this is what happened on the ground, making it worth our time on screen is just beyond the contortionist abilities of even this most acrobatic of films.

Through everyday actions and gestures -- in Hussein's awkward exchanges with other people, in his tender fumbling of his fiancée's purse -- Panahi shows a man for whom life has become increasingly arduous, alien. The filmmaker captures, in other words, what Bresson called "the force in the air before the storm."

The route to the film's dramatic and poignant climax is so hard to follow that the pleasure, the potential for which is considerable, has been substantially diminished.

There are all sorts of ways to look at The Son -- as a philosophical thriller, as a statement of faith, as a call to political arms or just as a terrific entertainment.

A dazzling epic of love, guns, gangsters and cigarettes.

Ashton Kutcher and Brittany Murphy are attractive and skilled performers as the film's newlyweds, but the movie is so mechanical it's like watching Barbie and Ken dolls going through the motions.

Has the virtue of sincerity but not that of restraint. Unlike Terrence Malick, whose shadow looms over the film's visual style, the Smiths over-explain, not grasping that all those barren fields and blood-red clouds are doing plenty of work for them.

George Clooney's first effort behind the camera was doubtless more stimulating to direct than it will be for audiences to watch.

"Dark and demanding" doesn't begin to describe this devastating film -- It is not too much to say that without its splendid use of music Love Liza might not be bearable.

The day-to-day realities, especially economic, of Sonny and Jewel's lives could have been more fully detailed to good effect, and Cage might have also have risked setting off the tenderness of his storytelling with an edgier style. Even so, few films take the viewer by surprise with such emotional impact as Sonny.

McGrath, who adapted the novel, manages to catch the flavor of it without its tang.

Just because people are objecting to Max for all the wrong reasons doesn't make it a good film, and it's not. It's a bizarre curiosity memorable mainly for the way it fritters away its potentially interesting subject matter via a banal script, unimpressive acting and indifferent direction.

A splendid film. It uses all the resources of cinema -- masterful writing, superb acting, directorial intelligence, an enveloping score, top-of-the-line production design, costumes, cinematography and editing -- to make a film whose cumulative emotional power takes viewers by surprise, capturing us unawares in its ability to move us as deeply as it does.

Never before has a fiction film so clearly and to such devastating effect laid out the calculation of the Nazi machinery of death and its irrationality.

It's Zeta-Jones who keeps you watching from start to finish -- You'd have to go back to Joan Crawford in her hungry prime, in films like "Rain" and "The Women," to find another female film star who grabs hold of the screen with such ferocity.

The only way his (Benigni's) show-off performance could have a prayer of working would be if the film were released as a silent.

For all his genre-hopping and shape-shifting Spielberg seems to have become too big to tell small stories, which is one reason why the film sputters on one too many false endings.

A witty and delightful Christmas present for the entire family.

A venturesome, beautifully realized psychological mood piece that reveals its first-time feature director's understanding of the expressive power of the camera.

Ready for a singing and dancing "Reservoir Dogs"?

It is a lovely, amusing diversion from the start, but the depth of its poignancy by the time it's over comes as a surprise.

Ramsay reaches out boldly with a film that is as unsettling as it is minimalist.

In an instance of director, stars and material melding flawlessly, Spider is a brilliantly realized depiction of a mentally ill individual.

To transcend cliché, movies like Narc need the passion of a heretic who can take stock characters with their stock predicaments and turn them inside out, the way Curtis Hanson and Quentin Tarantino do. Blood, guts and flash aren't enough.

Scorsese and his team have created a heavy-footed golem of a motion picture, hard to ignore as it throws its weight around but fatally lacking in anything resembling soul.

Rarest and most impressive of all, Antwone Fisher is a serious drama set in the African American community, one that showcases powerful, confrontational scenes between black actors.

There are two films at war in director Spike Lee's newest feature 25th Hour, one uninteresting, the other an epic of near-tragic miscalculation.