The story is a pleasant one despite its pointed righteousness.

Though Lee's movie is dripping with action and beautiful details, it's aimless and, eventually, tedious.

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.

A laughable disaster: an agonizingly long, perversely dull, childishly conceived fantasia on marital sexual angst that could only have been made by someone (like Kubrick).

All in all, she comes off as quite a complex creature.

For all its originality, O Brother doesn't seem to have a point, or enough spark to distract us from the lack thereof.

The politicizing is intense, but the actual game footage is even more engrossing; Carlson uses both digital video and 16mm film to put us squarely in the midst of the gridiron brouhaha.

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.

A new version of the greatest psychological mystery of all: love.

A brooding, stunningly realistic portrait of familial self-destruction that raises far more questions than it can possibly answer.

The results are far more real than MTV's The Real World.

Just try not to smile while watching Jump Tomorrow.

Startlingly vigorous and entertaining piece of work.

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

Has storytelling rambles and lapses that no amount of electrifying jump-cuts and original image-making can compensate for.

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.

A remarkable debut, and its first half is a genuine jolt.

A smart, sometimes pissingly funny romantic comedy that is also oddly unmoving and predictable in spots.

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

In spirit, 101 Reykjavík is so Almodóvar that it could melt the polar icecap.

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

Combining a seething physicality with enough weary nobility and tightly checked rage for a dozen wronged heroes, (Crowe) provides the movie's vital center of gravity without looming over his co-stars.

Assiduous, temperate, and a lot more honest about government and politicians than any other Hollywood film of the last few decades, Thirteen Days is nevertheless too little, too late.

Elevates the horror genre with a refreshing intelligence and humor -- too bad it's not half as good at generating scares.

Ultimately too slight and opaque to inspire much ardor.

As talented as Polley proved herself in "The Sweet Hereafter" and "Go," this is her best work yet.

For a modest film, however, Too Much Sleep is a modest surprise.

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

Despite terrific comic acting...and an atomic first hour, Fight Club makes a few wrong turns and ends up lost itself.

As an audience member, you end up feeling like a sucker for even having tolerated that sickly sweet notion about a father, a son, and their silly radio.

Plays like a Chinese "Cinema Paradiso," full of feeling without succumbing to sentimentality.

Provocative but lame-brained polygamy comedy.

Worth navigating for its refusal to play to the crowd. There's certainly nothing safe or sweet about Weaver's performance.

Just another basketcase with a blade.

A fast, funny film that goes down like a cyanide-spiked piña colada.

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.

A genre-busting film that deserves to be seen.

Rereading Greene's book, one is struck anew by the absolute perfection of the film's casting.

Actually, it's a childhood "A Clockwork Orange," a reverent realization of the late Stanley Kubrick's final obsession.

The most poignant (if hard-hitting) depiction of childhood to show up this year.

Easily the best millennial movie, Don McKellar's Last Night is also the only one to use the idea of apocalyptic end-time as a vehicle to explore the absurdity of human desire.

A film that's bound to be loathed for its irrationalities and narrative drunkenness, just as it will be beloved for its original risks and manic visual energy.

But for all its pretensions toward exemplifying a brave new way of making movies, Time Code offers less and less worth discovering as it slouches toward its tritely "fatal" climax.

Burton's films are endearing and impassioned despite the fact that they generally fail to tell a whole story, create a single rounded character, or inspire even mild laughs or chills.

A jauntily entertaining ride.

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

Rarely falters but neither does it ever take flight.

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

Almost nothing happens for most of the movie.

The biggest piece of supernatural hooey since estranged wife Demi Moore's "The Seventh Sign."

Mature and adroitly performed but ultimately underachieving.

The film's details are spot-on, its tone ludicrously ironic, and its casting deft.

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

An absurdist semi-romance between two traumatized somnambulists.

It's so easy to be mesmerized by Chocolat's brilliant indulgences that one abandons reason altogether.

Even if the great debate that pits artistic integrity against corporate compromise doesn't thrill you, see Cradle Will Rock anyway. It's marvelous, provocative entertainment; art for art's sake.

The best kind of summer blockbuster -- the kind that makes you immediately crave a sequel.

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.

Easily the year's most trying, tormented, and thrilling movie ordeal.

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.

Too poignant and funny to be dismissed.

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

Optimistically explores how vastly different people can come together, and how any journey is more about what happens along the way than simply getting from one place to another.

This one's still worth checking out -- especially for the naturalistic performances by the feisty Touly and the rest of the young cast.

A classic Sundance résumé movie -- texturally interesting, bubbling with ideas, and as structurally predictable as a cardboard box.

There's lots of sweet music to savor in this snide industry satire.

Zahn's dazed and confused, droopy-mustached dude steals every scene he's in...a movie that will make you smile and put a lump in your throat.

One of those special movies whose freshness and vitality are so bounteously infectious, your humble reviewer wishes everyone had the pleasure of discovering it brand-new and undescribed.

Plays like mediocre outtakes from better bell-bottomed fare (Richard Linklater's authentic, seriocomic "Dazed and Confused"; Fox's "That '70s Show") without making any kind of impression of its own.

After an uproarious first half, Saving Grace arrives at its conclusion somewhat hastily and conveniently.

Moviegoers of any (or no) religious persuasion can share in the simple satisfaction of his tense, well-spun murder mystery.

A satisfying, sentimental trip.

The real revelation, however, is Keanu Reeves. His character is something of a caricature — a violent, white-trash wife-beater — but Reeves' portrayal is joltingly authentic.

The frequent song interludes will distract the kids (but send the adults into comas), and the anti-Disney satire rages as never before.

American History X is a crash course on how to make a message movie that resonates with crackling power.

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.

The execution is crisp and the fundamentals are solid. Like its protagonist, Finding Forrester got game.

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

A meticulously mounted film that retains the author's ambiguous characterizations yet is still emotionally accessible.

Despite impeccable performances, this is bloodless, ho-hum stuff.

Even if the antic futility of attempting to get an entire shtetl to pull together in the face of genocide is your idea of a day at the races, don't laugh too hard -- the out-of-nowhere ending will make you choke on every chuckle.

Seems truncated, incomplete -- mostly because the patented Shyamalan twist is revealed in the dénouement, not the climax.

Juggles a few too many subplots, cramming in more issues than your average nightly newscast. But more often than not, this is a film to savor.

Basically one elaborate joke about male modeling and all the vanity, emasculation, and fatuousness that attend it. Fortunately, it's a good joke.

A teenage movie that trusts its audience -- it sounds crazy, but it's actually quite beautiful.

A hilarious and utterly faboo documentary...you'll be begging for more.

A bright, lively picture.

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.

This jailhouse jam is quite a haul.

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.