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.

Shot by Ashley Rowe to look like a cross between a Vermeer retrospective and a music video, Copying Beethoven is silly and misguided, if reasonably entertaining for its charming lack of self-awareness, its weakness for lines like "Loneliness is my religion!" and its transcendently beautiful music.

If Biraben had devoted more energy to the human contours of his story, its metaphorical implications would have sorted themselves out. Instead, he herds his characters toward a foregone conclusion, reducing both their scope and his story's power.

Often surprising and thought-provoking (the urge to euphemize is characterized as a drift away from reality), "****" is as funny and cathartic as the word it celebrates, and nearly as perversely shock-happy.

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.