Along the way, we end up losing patience with our couple-to-be because they seem too smart to endure the indignities ceaselessly heaped on them.

Plenty of the tasteless gags don't fly, and for every celebrity cameo that works (a hilariously heavenly Reese Witherspoon), there are two or three that crash and burn.

Hicks is far less interested in resolving dramatic conflicts than in framing shots.

"Run mad whenever you choose, but do not faint," Austen wrote in her early journals. Despite its brazen politics, Mansfield Park never goes giddily amok as promised.

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

It's yet another serial killer movie, a plot element that by this point in time, far from being disturbing or fascinating, is just plain dull.

There's a sense of life to Committed that's unpredictable and sweet, but too much of it is cluttered with lazy shortcuts.

From the beginning of his career a fervent, epic documentarian, Herzog is a personal filmmaker as well, and My Best Fiend is certainly his most intimate and introspective film.

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.

This might be as perfect a new-millennium Halloween creepshow as we can expect.

The result is a feast for the eyes but frequently a famine for the frontal lobes, a movie of towering imagination and middling rewards.

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

An enjoyable female buddy caper -- more "Outrageous Fortune" than "Thelma and Louise."

Too much of a locker-room melodrama to make for great tragedy.

The film has an unabashed romantic tone that's matched by Wenders' usual flair for visual drama.

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

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

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

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

The material it does pull off is daring and sharp.

Arresting, visually accomplished documentary.

Repetitive, aimless, and as frustrating as you'd imagine any two-hour music video to be.

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

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.

Almost nothing happens for most of the movie.

A tepid and surprisingly dull farce stamped from the "About Mary" mold.

Glossy, gruesome police drama.

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