The wrap-up's pretty charming, as are the performances, but the film's too heavy for its soufflé-ready ingredients.

Wacky, vividly conceived but mundanely executed cartoon fantasy.

A detective story without a solution and a coming-of-ager without discernable characters.

It's all well-acted and eerily compelling, but the shocker ending is patently implausible.

Given a decent script, they might make a fun summer movie. Given the script for Shanghai Noon, they've come up with a middling Old West oater that falls flat at least as often as it finds the funny bone.

Aviva Kempner's utterly conventional documentary plays like a lost chapter from Ken Burns' "Baseball."

For all its wit and sharp casting, State and Main is way too pleased with itself to be funny or endearing.

Pure, irrational, claustrophobic, gritty, unpretentious.

Strains our patience with overacting and photography so sumptuous you can't help but ponder why so much bloodshed and mayhem is being so expertly prettified.

Arresting, visually accomplished documentary.

As fascinating as the case is as history, however, Scottsboro: An American Tragedy is a TV show, not a movie.

Plays like "The Honeymooners" might have if Ralph Kramden were from Pakistan, but with less laughs and more ignorant spite.

Shower isn't a bad movie -- just a baneful sign of things to come.

The cast is largely nonprofessional, and the story has the simplicity of myth.

Mild as satire and completely unconvincing as tragicomedy.

This is, recognizably, an indie film, in the best sense of the term.

Far from creating a pungent portrait of a society gone mad with blood and greed, Schroeder's movie strives for political points while it's whiffing on simplicities like character, motivation, and believability.

The real reason to see it is Brian Cox, best known for being filmdom's other Hannibal Lecter (he played the role in Michael Mann's "Manhunter").

All of the filmmaker's fine work and good intentions cannot make this repetitive and finally tiresome saga fly.

If you're looking for refuge from summer movie bombast, it's frequently intoxicating.

Until he (Smith) learns the difference between what has meaning and what's meandering, what feels real and what feels contrived, he'd be better off sticking to the funny stuff.

It's amiable enough, but the only real opportunity here is to see Walken step out of the shadows.

As a portrait of a man barely qualifying for a cinematic portrait, Benjamin Smoke is a trifle, but when Sillen and Cohen turn their cameras on the weedy, workaday, hellhole America that Benjamin calls home, the movie comes alive.

It's Norton's movie, really, and he shines both as cocky Jack and as cerebral-palsied Brian.

Never the heart-wrenching emotional experience it seems intended to be.

Eventually succumbs to fatal overlength.

A cute, clichéd, coming-of-age comedy.

A modest project with an agreeably modest point of view, but it cries out for a sharp, believable naturalism Kusama simply doesn't supply.

Like "Pollock," Nora is a convincing portrait of the intersection between creative genius and crazy, all-consuming love.

Only Elaine May shines, in a weird and wonderful turn. Her loopy character has such a struck-by-lightning demeanor that she's always delightfully off in her own comic orbit even in the tritest of scenes.

Badly photographed, clumsily edited, and lacking any discernable cinematic style.

Demonstrates that even if you live in a country intimately familiar with fascist occupation, you might still not have the least clue how to communicate that experience on film.

Just try not to smile while watching Jump Tomorrow.

This bed-swapping crime story is ultimately too protracted, but Piñeyro's direction is richly atmospheric, full of noir shadows and strong period detail.

This fictionalized, frequently stomach-churning biography of Australian criminal Mark Chopper Read features the most bloody ear-severing scene since "Reservoir Dogs."

Born Romantic feels less like it was born than assembled, in a kooky Britcom factory. It's no "Four Weddings and a Funeral," but it's certainly a happier conception than last month's "Maybe Baby."

For some viewers, this will seem a trial of predictability and unrelenting sweetness; for others, it's more than enough.

Likable, but frustratingly lazy, Ghost Dog has coolness running all through it, but little substance.

Come Undone is the quintessential gay date at the art house.

Ultimately too slight and opaque to inspire much ardor.

Billed cleverly as a comedy from the heart that goes for the throat. If only Brooks had had the guts to avoid the schmaltz.

Provocative but lame-brained polygamy comedy.

Just another basketcase with a blade.

It's the kind of flourish that makes you smile -- that makes you believe in the power of movies.

What's right as rain with Diary is the casting.

Simply a pleasant diversion rather the paean to crazy-in-love classics it would so like to be.

Ultimately, Grateful Dawg will only be of real interest to musicology students and diehard Deadheads.

Almost nothing happens for most of the movie.

A punishing tragedy that could best be described as the anti-"Shine."

An absurdist semi-romance between two traumatized somnambulists.

All that this really amounts to is a lot of hot-headed, hairy men threatening each other -- whenever they're not dancing on table tops, that is.

Gay jungle sex (gasp!), gone-native intellectuals, tribal rituals (gulp!), cannibalism (none of which the film shows, by the way) -- it sounds like a "Weekly World News" front page, not the thematic fodder of a highbrow non-fiction film.

For the most part, it's when the women do the singing -- that Songcatcher really comes alive.

Whatever extraordinary ingredients are necessary to fashion a 1776 home run, this movie doesn't have them.

The voyage is never less than interesting, even when you have no idea where it could possibly go.

Despite the film's impressively epic look and an interesting cast of young and old actors, it ringingly sounds the same dour note over and over again.

Just keeps grinding along, pushing its way through a barrage of boom-boom and a sea of tight-lipped clichés.

Covers some bases, but it feels like the Cliffs Notes version of a grander epic.

Too much of a study in formalism to register deeply on an emotional level.

Packed with melodrama, and often it works in the passionate, easy-to-watch manner of an old-fashioned "woman's film."

It plays out like an endless series of scenes we've seen before.

Apart from the historical eminence of the poetry itself, Pandaemonium is about nothing much at all.

Messy, frantic, and repetitive, Everybody Famous! takes on both vapid pop culture and the mindless hoi polloi that consumes it.

Sentenced its audience to a maudlin death.

Turturro's movie is all surface, all artifice, and little substance. Actors love artifice; the rest of us wait for it to clear so we can find something meatier.

Makes for compulsive viewing even though its noirish plot doesn't make a lick of sense.

But jaw-dropping trailer aside, there isn't much movie here.

The movie is a shambles, a rambling, disjointed love tragedy with a story that amounts to little more than a mess of fade-outs, sloppy montages, and dramatic sketches.

It's a polished, beautifully made movie with a rotten heart.

That's just not enough to recommend it, though it does have one moment of real justice: The person sentenced to jail has truly bad hair.

Hardly a ripping, inspired children's film.

At once arch, derivative, and, in the end, bizarrely lyrical.

Strictly where the boys are: posing, posturing, and talking engine envy.

Has one of the most stupendously tasteless premises in cinema history, and much of the time when this movie tries to beckon a smile, the effect is closer to astonished nausea.

Feels repetitive and impacted.

It's a wonderful reminder of the importance of music in the movies.

Opting for this refried mash over Lee's rentable beauty is like choosing canned beans over an Asian feast.

It's not a movie you could call dispassionate, however aimless and unfocused. It's a Molotov cocktail tossed in several directions at once.

The flat, gross-out live-action bits, directed by (surprise!) Peter and Bobby Farrelly, don't jive with the zippy, Tex Avery-style animated segments, directed by former storyboard artists Piet Kroon and Tom Sito.

Might be structured like a soggy house of cards, but it's shot beautifully and acted expertly.

As amusing and sharply performed as it is, Lisa Picard quickly grows thin and dull. Perhaps it would have been better as a real documentary, with Kirk and DeWolf simply playing their pathetic selves.

Bossa Nova has no beat.

A seven-course melodrama.

Every frame of Scott's film is gorgeously lurid and baroque, but it just hangs there like bad art, even during the gore-spilling, Grand Guignol climax.

While An Everlasting Piece is rife with engaging family moments and an undeniable charm, it never allows its characters to find the very thing they're seeking: peace.

Beautifully performed and filmed, but tiresomely schematic episodes like this one cause us to experience major sensory deprivation.

Despite good performances and moments of spectacle, it seems to go on longer than the Cultural Revolution.

The overlapping dialogue and the comedy of famous people playing self-variations is pure Altman (Leigh, not surprisingly, has worked in three Altman films).

Sunk by its own melodramatic falseness, and it stands as a well-meaning yet lacking tribute to a courageous man.

The script is pure Disney formula. Dinosaur offers next to nothing in the way of variation.

Few other 1999 films are as filthy with tantalizing elements as Agnieszka Holland's The Third Miracle, and of those that come close, none other is as pointless, confused, or unsatisfying.

The first 15 minutes of Nowhere to Hide rock, and after that it's got nowhere to hide from its own excesses.

A botched effort. Not necessarily bad, but hardly compelling either.

Its characters and plot are almost wholly negligible. It's just a party.

If Parker had aimed more at capturing the author's unique voice, and worried less about getting the details right, his movie might have been extraordinary as well.

The movie's most glaring flaw is that the brothers and their screenwriters, Terry Hayes and Rafael Yglesias, don't manage to preserve the secret of the Ripper's identity for nearly as long as they intend to.

Writer-director Harmony Korine seems more interested in churning your stomach than in warming your heart.

By the time Rock Star reaches its cop-out, "All About Eve"-ish ending, the only thrashing that should be going on is of the filmmakers, for bungling such a promising premise.