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.

Chomsky deserves a more thoughtful documentary than Power and Terror, and in fact he got it in 1993's "Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media" --The film's main flaw is the absence of other voices -- From a cinematic point of view, two sides of an issue are always better than one.

Like taking a drug everyone says is dynamite and impatiently wondering why the heck it's not kicking in. The kick in fact turns out to be real, and as powerful as advertised, but it doesn't necessarily hit you in any way you anticipated.

Fast and raunchy, Friday After Next surely stands apart from other holiday-themed movies for its gleeful low-down humor and a raft of uninhibited characters involved in one outrageous predicament after another.

Has inherent sentimental appeal, but Lee balances it with considerable humor and an unblinking eye toward the realities of a primitive way of life.

A blast into the past, but as with many nostalgic trips it's also shrouded in mist. The awkward, almost embarrassed way in which director Paul Justman, as well as writers Walter Dallas and Ntozake Shange, deal with race is unfortunate, as is the tendency toward overstatement.

Burger knows how to shoot and this is one feature where the dingy digital imagery arguably makes sense, but it's too bad he didn't work harder at finding something more original with which to test his talent than the JFK assassination and the gimmick of the phony nonfiction film.

Absent one original moment and bathed in de rigueur steel blue punctuated by sporadic bursts of flaming orange, the movie is notable only for its creative approach to Seagal's bulky gracelessness: Not since "Apocalypse Now" has a film gone to such lengths to hide what its star looks like.