The dancing, while reasonably entertaining, isn't anything you haven't seen before on MTV or BET, although the soundtrack might be a worthwhile investment for hip-hop fans.

Worst of all, nothing happens that we don't see coming. Nothing. If, as Nathan seems to believe, surprise is a crucial element in any campaign, then The Last Samurai might win a battle or two for your attention but is doomed to lose the Oscar war.

It is a treat to see Sharif back on the screen and Boulanger is a pleasure to watch. They make Monsieur Ibrahim better than it is.

But there are so many beautiful, tender moments in In America -- that it's easy to forgive Sheridan's manipulative ploys.

The movie itself is a nominee for Best Animated Feature, and it's good enough to pull a surprise upset over the beloved Finding Nemo. It's a mad masterpiece.

Won't appeal to everyone, of course, particularly those who blush easily. And parents who take children to see it deserve to have their heads examined. But for those who don't mind a little bile in their eggnog, it's the perfect antidote to all that prefab Christmas cheer.

Won't surprise you, but it's more tolerable than the grating, garish, millinery-challenged Cat. Besides, a cadaverous Terence Stamp trumps a glossy Alec Baldwin as a bad guy any day.

Timeline gives Gigli serious competition for worst film of the year honors.

And although The Cooler doesn't do anything fresh with its Vegas milieu, the movie is refreshingly frank and astute when it comes to depicting sex.

The fragmented style is distracting and ultimately annoying, robbing the story of its suspense and drive while contributing nothing except self-conscious style.

Charmless and grating and immediately forgettable.

If you try hard enough, you might be able to forget that the story doesn't make a lot of sense or provide adequate thrills, although it tries to scare you a couple of times in the cheapest possible way.

It's crisp, efficient, well-made and strangely, vaguely dull.

What makes Master and Commander so bracing and transporting -- what makes the movie feel unlike any adventure film you've seen before -- is the precise detail and care with which Weir places us aboard the HMS Surprise.

Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck might want to talk to their agents about looking for better material.

Tupac Amaru Shakur is riveting in Tupac: Resurrection. The rapper is a compelling, charismatic hero: articulate, well-read, politically radical, and movie-star handsome to boot (he in fact starred in Poetic Justice and Juice). Make that, was riveting.

It is a stunning work that captures with elegance -- and touches of lyricism -- the challenge of finding the man through the artist.

There are precious few moments in Elf when Ferrell doesn't manage to at least get a smile out of you. Considering how cloying the movie might have turned out without him, that's a huge gift all its own.

The biggest surprise in the cheery, delightful Love Actually is its lively, edgy, slightly blue sense of humor.

It's a testament to the personalities of the actors, as well as the foundation laid by the original film, that we retain an emotional connection to the main players in Revolutions.

A fascinating look at events mostly unknown to outsiders.

Lives or dies by your ability to buy the sight of Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman snuggling in bed and enjoying hot, torrid sex. This may seem like a superficial approach to such a lofty, serious movie, but it is an insurmountable problem.

By retelling Glass' pathetic tale, Shattered Glass reminds you how our culture's emphasis on success and stardom in any field -- and the betrayal of ethics to attain them -- has a cumulative, corrosive effect on society, no matter how small the stage may be.

This is a disastrously clumsy, heavy-handed movie, one so desperate and exploitative that it resorts to putting a live grenade in the hands of a baby in order to get its message across.

Trailers make it seem as though Radio is all about football, but it's not, and once the film leaves the fall sport behind it wanders around in no particular direction until it reaches an abrupt, poorly executed ending.

Makes the Columbine shootings seem both abstract yet more painful and vivid. It also gets you excited all over again about the things movies can do.

The movie is all moist grime and seedy atmosphere, and it's certainly something to look at: It's beautifully lurid. But it's an empty, unengaging movie, and by the end, it has become ridiculous, too.

This new, presumably improved Chainsaw is just as humorless as the original, but it's also slicker, glossier and resoundingly artificial.

Grisham is an expert at hooking the audience, and he fills the edges with legal details that, realistic or not, are always fascinating. Runaway Jury is an adequate, unremarkable piece of work, but as they say in the book world, you won't be able to put it down.

Sweet and tart in just the right doses, but there's also something underwhelming about it.

Compare Sylvia to another, more powerful film about a tragic literary death: "Iris," about Iris Murdoch's descent into Alzheimer's, leaves you with an aching heart and reddened eyes. After the equally sorrowful Sylvia, we are entertained but unmoved.

The real Guerin deserves a more complete cinematic tribute.

No, this isn't the stuff of a kiddie classic like "Holes." But, to quote from another movie with a vocal four-legged protagonist, it'll do.

If it's not quite as funny as you want it to be, it's still more than enough to keep you entertained.

Self-indulgent, overwrought, shallow and ridiculous. It is also brilliant, a blast of cinematic lunacy and as much of a guilty pleasure as the schlocky movies Tarantino adores, which was probably the point. Sometimes, only a Big Mac will do.

May not be everyone's favored bloom in the garden, but it is still a fine work on film.

Deals with themes Eastwood has often explored before, but never so delicately or with as much sad wisdom: The way in which our past haunts our present, the lasting repercussions of violence and the cruel inexorability of fate.

A lot of ground for one film to cover, but this smart, absorbing movie, which has been sharply edited by Felipe Lacerda, never feels like it's spreading itself too thin.

The more preposterous Out of Time gets, the more enjoyable the movie becomes.

The movie is a polished (and irresistible) piece of crowd-pleasing formula and deserves to become a monster hit. But it is also a perfect showcase for the volcanic talents of the rotund comedian/musician/all-around wildman.

Despite its humble nature, the film is downright uplifting without being vulgar, flashy or embarrassing.

Never gives us a single reason to care about any of these people. It's a druggy, sordid spectacle.

It's a mean little movie, but it's also thin and repetitive, a premise in search of a story.

Doesn't break any new ground, but it doesn't leave you wishing you had stayed home, either. Considering the state of action movies today, that's something.

The whole movie is at once formulaic, clichéd and predictable, yet surprising, engaging and filled with subtle, unexpected details.

Sweet and moving, and occasionally irritating, but it's never embarrassing.

Slight but extremely effective, and its characters so engaging that even the sad finale, which is not entirely unexpected or original, manages to pack surprising power.

A pastiche so derivative and pointless, it leaves you wishing Allen had not bothered.

Despite the increasingly annoying presence of the mugging, fatuous Cuba Gooding Jr., The Fighting Temptations pulls off what feels like a major feat: Its musical sequences could make the most hardened atheist want to go to church.

Even without handicapping for the limitations of its gentle genre, the film has moments of whimsical humor and thoughtful plotting that soar tantalizingly close to something that could be enjoyed on its own merits.

A loud and relentlessly overstated B-movie, and yet not entirely stupid.

But Babys also resembles "Sunshine State" in another, more satisfying way: It leaves you longing to know what happens to these characters once the movie ends.

May not be a work of fiction but, despite its many minutes of real footage, it is far from being a documentary. Lack of truth in advertising notwithstanding, the story of this Colombian cowboy deserved to be told.

It is pretty convincing in its argument that China has every intention of destroying the culture of Tibetans.

A ferociously entertaining and mean little horror movie that achieves the kind of outrageous vibe best enjoyed in a crowded, noisy theater.

The best moments in Matchstick Men belong to Cage and Lohman, who, in "Paper Moon" fashion, prove that the family that cons together, laughs together.

If not exactly epic, the movie is certainly the biggest and most complex of Rodriguez's Mariachi trilogy, which began in "El Mariachi" and continued in "Desperado."

It's a sign of just how much Coppola respects her characters that she doesn't make us privy to that final line: It is only meant for them to share. But like the rest of the ethereal Lost in Translation, you don't need to have it spelled out in order to feel it.

Whether his character is happy, sad, angry or scared, Spade affects precisely the same knowing smirk and sarcastic delivery. This one-note style makes him a funny stand-up comedian. But in a role, it's usually pure amateur hour.

This is courtroom drama at is best, especially when you listen to the sublime soundtrack.

A stark regression from the intelligence of the Scream franchise, this teen horror sequel is about as satisfying as low-budget food that's been under the heat lamps too long.

Midlands finds some measure of success in its use of regular, real-looking people -- as opposed to the oddly glamorous characters who turn up in most romantic comedies -- but it's as though the writer used up all the personality traits before he got to Shirley.

Despite Fanda's shenanigans, and many are out-loud funny, Autumn Spring is not that uplifting though it isn't a downer, either. It's more an ode to friendship and marriage.

Strong acting from Khoury saves the weak storyline.

Even when sketched in broad terms, Rogowski's downward spiral makes for compelling viewing, and to her credit, director Stickler never romanticizes her subject.

The formulaic movie would be forgettable but inoffensive if it were anyone else posing for blue screen CGI effects.

Sometimes the film feels as if it's trying too hard to include every possible horror a teenager could sample.

A surprisingly ambitious entry into a genre that felt bankrupt and over more than a decade ago.

Dismal.

American Splendor reminds you that sometimes, simply getting out of bed each morning can be the most heroic of acts.

The biggest appeal of Passionada is Sofia Milos, a sexy actress who commands the screen in every scene she's in.

There's a fine little western lurking inside Open Range: Too bad it gets drowned out by director Kevin Costner's pretentiousness. Almost everything in the movie feels inflated, overblown, drawn out.

Shaolin Soccer applies everything you love about Hong Kong action flicks to the paint-by-numbers sports-movie formula.

Provides a few of the best thrills so far this summer.

This is an insignificant film with a passably entertaining premise that goes wildly to hell the instant it strays from its comic ideals with brief, unsatisfying detours into the realms of art and high-end lingerie.

A compendium of missed opportunities, uninspired action and clichés so tired, you wish the screenwriters had called 911, too.

Some older movies are so terrific, so capable of touching new generations that they cry out to be updated and remade. The mildly entertaining Freaky Friday isn't one of them.

If The Magdalene Sisters occasionally flirts with cartoonishness, the movie is tempered by Mullan's considerable filmmaking skills.

It's fitting. Valentin and Jane may be awakening from life's slumber, but mostly they're just putting us to sleep.

Leary's presence quickly grows tiresome, and The Secret Lives of Dentists would have been a better movie without him. But Scott and Davis keep you interested in the Hursts' dilemma

Best of all, though, is Seann William Scott as the profoundly annoying, profoundly vulgar Stifler.

Gigli's awfulness is of a rarer, more precious variety. It's the sort of bizarre, ill-conceived picture you can't believe exists, but are secretly glad it does.

When it was first shown at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival just days before Sept. 11, this movie seemed darkly, grimly comic. Today, though, it often just seems grim.

Repetitious, uneventful and, in the end, dull.

Easily the slightest and most frenetic entry in the trilogy. But it might also turn out to be the fan favorite, because the movie is nothing but eye candy and visual sensation.

Another joyless, brain-numbing adventure through lackluster Indiana Jones territory.

This crowd-pleaser is a genuinely inspirational film, gorgeously filmed and wonderfully acted, echoing an uplifting sentiment that bears repeating: ''You don't throw a whole life away just because it's banged up a little.''

The charms of Lucía, Lucía rely heavily on the charismatic Roth, who is funny and warm and a lot of fun to watch as she embraces her new life.

At the film's uplifting conclusion, when a stilled voice finally makes itself heard, you can unmistakably feel your heart lift, as if it had grown tiny wings. Camp reminds you that once you believed it would always soar, just like that.

An apocalyptic Bob Dylan song made cinematic, with all the vision and poetry dissipating in the transfer. It's as if the filmmakers listened to "Desolation Row" just one time too many.

The results, for the most part, aren't pretty. The newly expanded Balseros, which adds an hour of footage to the previous film, is an even more compelling, if grimmer, work than the original.

The result is an unwieldy but still compelling look at the plight of immigrants wrapped in a thriller about black-market organ transplants.

Mostly honest in its portrayal of teen sexuality -- it exists, whether we like it or not -- but also offers up the troubling notion of teen pregnancy as romantic and magical.

The vilest film of the season.

Despite its contemporary-sounding anti-French cracks, could easily have been made 20 years ago.

One shallow film, that quickly returns to where it started: Zero.

Simple and austere, The Cuckoo also draws from the mysticism of tales of gnomes and other creatures who inhabit remote Nordic lands. It is that blend of reality with allegory that delivers the film's beauty and charm.

Fails to capture the anguish and struggles of an ultra-Orthodox Jew adapting to a more secular world as did Amos Gitai's Kadosh, a film this one sometimes brings to mind.