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.