The film does a fairly remarkable job of capturing the attitude of the festival, covering its evolution from quaint little Woodstock knockoff into something much larger that is both hallucinatory and hypnotic. It's Mardi Gras meets Burning Man with an excellent, revolving house band.

Filled with tension, deception and bravura acting, Breach is a crackling tale of real-life espionage that doubles as a compelling psychological drama.

A wonderfully heart-wrenching love story for tweens, teens, and even adults who fondly remember when a friendship could be ignited by a gesture as simple as offering a stick of Juicy Fruit.

It's entertaining to watch ol' hothead do his thing with his fiery chain and his "penance stare," but for a comic book with a rebel spirit, the adaptation feels obediently conventional.

Although Alvart lays on the biblical allegory too heavily at times, the film's pace is brisk enough to maintain our full attention. Antibodies is not so much an art house movie as a well-made, commercial thriller that happens to be in German.

Avenue Montaigne may not be a centimeter deeper than it needs to be, but you also won't be feeling that your pocket was picked when it's over.

Close to Home is a slender slice -- a sliver is more like it -- of a very rich cake.

It is terrible in every aspect -- wretchedly written, directed with a ham fist (by Matthew Levin) and over-acted.

While excellent films like Danis Tanovic's Oscar-winning "No Man's Land" and Vinko Bresan's "Witnesses" have dealt with the war itself, few have dealt with the aftermath, and none with the aching power and empathy of Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams.

Something about Eklavya: The Royal Guard suggests a lost film by David Lean. With some muted echoes of "Hamlet." And a whiff of "Rigoletto."

More surprising is Perry's inability to write back-and-forth dialogue with any real wit or verve. He is at his best when writing speeches, and some of the film's best moments come when Union is given snappy monologues on the state of contemporary relationships and African American maleness.

Bamako is an attack on globalization that is endlessly cogent, confrontational -- and, best of all, as captivating as it is illuminating.

Bad as Harris' Hannibal Rising screenplay (his first) is, at least it's an improvement on his dreadful book, streamlining its convoluted action and discarding large chunks of unspeakable dialogue.

Murphy and his brother Charlie, who collaborated on the screenplay, seem to have drawn the wrong lesson from the latter's stint on "Chappelle's Show." Where Dave Chappelle used stereotypes to confront prejudice, the Murphys (and their co-screenwriters Jay Scherick and David Ronn) merely squeeze a few grudging drops from caricatures that were wrung dry in the age of vaudeville.

Consistently imaginative, revealing and funny.

A project such as Operation Homecoming should shed light on their experiences, but Robbins' film just falls short. [06 Apr 2007, p.E17]

Not so much phoned in as it is auto-dialed with a text-to-speech prerecorded message in one of those creepy robotic voices.

The Messengers is at once ruthlessly efficient and shamelessly distended.

The romance makes an awkward, contrived fit with the nominally serious political stuff, and even those momentous events come off as generic and unconvincing.

Fired! is missing the one thing it could have used most: a career objective.

Bisexuality certainly increases the geometric possibilities of the romantic comedy, completing its triangles and allowing for quadrangles and other, more amorphous layers of amorous involvement.

Walker-Pearlman's strengths lie in these characterizations and his ability to draw subtle performances from his actors. However, the powerfully understated moments are undercut by the film's unwieldy structure. Any emotional momentum that builds is lost with the interminable flashbacks.

East of Havana is a rare glimpse of everyday life in Cuba, where big questions and obstacles confront the rappers at seemingly every turn. Some of their lyrical criticism of the government is downright brave. The artists don't live in utter squalor, but are certainly impoverished by American standards.

Equally as perplexing as its lack of perspective is the film's overall shortage of information.

Like "Street Fight," Marshall Curry's account of the 2002 Newark, N.J., mayoral race, "Mr. Smith" captures ground-level political machinations in an utterly fascinating way. The question raised by the title makes for an interesting, if possibly disheartening, debate.

Though the second half contains the fireworks, it's the film's first hour that is ultimately most memorable. Mantel and Skrovan do a commendable job in covering a lot of territory, mixing pertinent and entertaining archival footage with interviews.

It's a relentlessly silly horror/fantasy/romance that is merely the latest twist on a tired premise.

An oddly appealing, if innocuous, movie of considerable charm.