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.

If the second film never reaches the highs of the first -- we have met the players before and there are no new worlds of wonder -- it nonetheless invests moviegoing with a sense of adventure.

Anthony LaPaglia and Sigourney Weaver are superb in this moving adaptation of the post-Sept. 11 play.

Its heart is so much in the right place it is difficult to get really peeved at it.

As saccharine as it is disposable.

Familiarity and continuity are what the success of this series has always been about. We've been here before, and we like the neighborhood.

A sharp brainteaser of a film, a compelling mind game you compulsively play along with.

Every holiday season needs a pleasant surprise, and this year it's Drumline. This entertaining and enthusiastically told tale shrewdly energizes its way-familiar plot line by setting it amid one of the greatest and least-known spectacles in American sports.

As for Schneider, he may be obnoxious and unhandsome, but he is, more important, talented and fearless, the driving force of this brash, not-so-predictable comedy.

A comedy poised on the knife's edge of tragedy, the film is a gutsy, truthful, deeply rooted vision of contemporary American life, scaled to the size of an ordinary man. It's a humanist triumph strip-mined of bathos and confirmation that, after directing just three features, Payne has become the most gifted comic social satirist to hit our movies since Preston Sturges.

Even when they don't always add up, these are movies in which De Niro can shrug off the burden of being Robert De Niro. Where the star who was Travis Bickle can again freely assume the part of the great character actor -- if only this time to ask, "You laughin' at me?"

In regard to Franc. Reyes' engrossing and utterly uncompromising Empire let it be said right at the top that the protean John Leguizamo, last seen as Toulouse-Lautrec in "Moulin Rouge," gives one of the best performances of the year in a lead role in an American movie.

Gaunt, silver-haired and leonine, Harris brings a tragic dimension and savage full-bodied wit and cunning to the aging Sandeman.

An accidental entertainment, Equilibrium is a science-fiction pastiche so lacking in originality that if you stripped away its inspirations there would be precious little left.

It's typical of the nerve, the bravado, the sheer giddy playfulness and sense of fun that characterize what has to be the boldest and most imaginative studio film of the year.

It is solidly crafted enough from inherently powerful true-life material, however, that WWII buffs and religiously inclined audiences won't be disappointed.

An old-fashioned weepie tucked inside a fiercely indicting political thriller.

An astonishing technological feat, but what is even more remarkable is that the technology does not overwhelm the artistry.

They never generates any real fear until its last minutes, by which time it is too late to redeem the dull events that preceded them.

Dude, one last thing: If you see my moms and pops, definitely don't tell them about this.

Ends up more challenging and intriguing than personally involving, and while these are far from small things, it is only human to hope for more.

On the whole, this lively, bittersweet Columbia release works well and is sure to connect strongly with fans of Sandler at his most free-wheeling and uninhibited. Scrub off the latrine humor, and underneath there's a heart-tugging sentimental tale of uplift and redemption.

Die Another Day is only intermittently entertaining but it's hard not to be a sucker for its charms, or perhaps it's just impossible not to feel nostalgia for movies you grew up with.

Miller's strength in her stories and in the film is in her ability to push past ideology and get right down to the nitty-gritty of desire.

It's well crafted by director Michael Hoffman, not painful to sit through, and even contains some 21st century plot twists -- But unless you have a predisposition toward this kind of thing, none of that is going to matter much.

Star Michael Caine, who gives one of the great, inescapably moving performances in a career filled with them, based his character on personal impressions of the late author. And Greene's lifelong concern with moral ambiguity gives this film a texture and complexity that movies don't usually achieve.

As audacious as it is compelling and as dark as it is erotic. Its sexuality is explicit, alternately teasing and brutal, and one that is ultimately a cautionary tale.