Brilliant new documentary.

Just barely diverting, even at under 80 minutes -- a TV episode inflated past its natural length.

A torturous, mawkish, ill-conceived remake.

Director Mick Jackson (L.A. Story) delivers playful and charming teens-turned-30 moxie.

For all its brilliantly brazen sequences and energetic supporting players (as the young lovers' mothers, Brenda Blethyn and Lisa Banes are terrific), Pumpkin's abrupt shifts of mood and needlessly complicated ending(s) render its latter third a bit of a chore.

This limp gender-bender-baller from a first-time director and rookie screenwriter steals wholesale from that 1982's "Tootsie," forgetting only to retain a single laugh.

Almost two and a half hours long, and mostly consists of calm conversations. But don't be deterred, or you'll miss out on a study of character, class and changing times that puts Robert Altman's stodgy "Gosford Park" to shame.

Star Jeremy Renner seems shorter than Dahmer, but is otherwise a look-alike and gives a convincingly intense and weird performance. Bruce Davison (as Papa Dahmer) and the rest of the cast also do nice work.

Can barely move during its final half hour, which is a shame, because until then it's a frenetic, engaging ride -- a huge grin, not unlike the one Tom Cruise now hides behind his grownup's braces.

Very charming and funny movie.

It just doesn¹t get very good until halfway through, in large part because the usually excellent Walston is miscast.

Either a put-on or a straight shooter; that you can't tell the difference underscores its small but ultimately overwhelming flaws.

The over-the-top sincerity that is so rewarding in "Face/Off" (1998), Woo's best American film, feels too clichéd in this more conventional context.

Give Care and McFarlane points for trying to do something innovative with the same old thing. But realize that, as spruced up as the facade may be, this movie is indeed still the same old thing.

In tampering with history, these storytellers present to us a rare and wonderful case of enlightenment beyond the accepted truth.

Not only an exceptional thriller, but a transcendent summer movie: It assumes, for two hours, you've brain and heart enough to stick with a film that doesn't condescend, doesn't beat you up and doesn't dumb you to death.

While you think you're watching just another in a series of British gangster films, you may suddenly realize that you're watching what is, thus far, the year's best horror movie.

Warner Bros. is presumably aiming this movie not at children but at full-grown dopers with bad munchies glued to the Cartoon Network. Dude, pass the Scooby snacks.

If this it supposed to be comedy, why isn't it ever, for one second, funny?

Shot on High Definition video, this exceptionally well-made but exceedingly bleak peek at tinseltown would be unbearable were it not for the sympathetic performance of Danny Huston.

Their (Tunney and Nelson) interplay is what saves the movie, and possibly should have been expanded upon to the exclusion of the other plot points.

These wonderfully adept actresses take so much pleasure in playing long-faded Southern belles, in mixing the genteel and the bawdy as they conduct their extended therapy session, that it will be difficult for even the most hardened Yankee curmudgeon to resist them.

An authentic and thrilling glimpse into Inuit culture and tradition.

When Affleck keeps getting work, the terrorists HAVE won. With blank eyes and soft features, he has none of the gravitas of his predecessors, Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford, who saved the world with swagger. Affleck merely looks like a frat boy in over his head, which is perhaps the point.

Not only is Undercover Brother the funniest spy-thriller since "The Nude Bomb" (oh, behave), it feels like the proper sequel to "The Blues Brothers," crossing all kinds of lines between cartoonish buffoonery and genuine compassion for its characters.

Any story's a good story if it's told well, and this one is, with chuckles to spare.

Beautifully observed, miraculously unsentimental comedy-drama.

It's a feel-good movie for people tired of paying to feel bad. Bring it on.

It's refreshing and unusual to see clever strategy trumping ritual honor in a film of this genre, even if one of the tricks seems gratuitously brutal.

By the time Sprecher's skeins, set forth in 13 related episodes, come together, we've got as clear a view of the big picture as we got assembling the elements of "Nashville," "Lantana" or "Magnolia".

You probably saw this film the last time around, when it was called "Sleeping With the Enemy." This one merely adds a better car chase and more ass-kicking.

A key problem here is that the film is adapting a short story, and, as such, has to pad it out to feature length -- it still comes in at a scant 82 minutes, about 52 minutes too long.

What Nolan does accomplish here that we haven't seen from him before is staging a few horrifyingly effective suspense set pieces -- one of which, in particular, is likely to stay with you for a long time.

It's an exceptionally dreary and overwrought bit of work, every bit as imperious as Katzenberg's "The Prince of Egypt" from 1998.

Director Oliver Parker (An Ideal Husband) -- who also adapted the screenplay to include aspects from Wilde's unrevised four-act version of the play -- embraces the material with great gusto, delivering as charming and irresistible a film as one could demand.

A remarkable movie with an unsatisfying ending, which is just the point.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of About a Boy is how substantial it plays -- as a feel-good film with weight, a knowing comedy with dramatic depth.

There are a couple of technical rough spots, but this daring film challenges most widely held notions about religious conviction while providing a complex portrait of an identity crisis that's run amok and a good mind that's jumped the tracks.

Sometimes it bounces along, other times it feels forced. Kids and hardcore fans will love it regardless, and those who don't will nonetheless be talking about it for the next three years.

In the end, after the super-modified shovel racing, wild half-pipe action and integral employment of Black Sabbath's "Paranoid," there's a poignancy to the piece.

Boll uses a lot of quick cutting and blurry step-printing to goose things up, but dopey dialogue and sometimes inadequate performances kill the effect.

Even those looking to catch a few Diane Lane tit shots will be so exhausted by the endless nothingness between each one that it won't be worth it.

An ugly-duckling tale so hideously and clumsily told it feels accidental. Surely, no one PLANNED something this disastrously unfunny.

Wacky chaos ensues, as the film veers toward a subplot about industrial espionage, but director Clare Kilner's debut is never as daft as it should have been.

Surprisingly manages never to grow boring -- which proves that Rohmer still has a sense of his audience.

An inspiring effort, lavishly lensed and featuring a spicy (if occasionally synthy) score from A.R. Rahman. Best of all, it's also something of a musical, as the characters are not above breaking into song and dance to serve their emotions.

Thoroughly entertaining Home Movie carries on a grand tradition of American documentary -- seeking out the eccentrics and contrarians among us.

Jeffrey Greeley's loving photography of the wintry landscapes is beautiful, but lead actor Jacob Lee Hedman is nowhere near as charismatic as he needs to be for a film with this few characters.

If this all sounds masochistic, it most certainly is. But the filmmakers have rendered it with such grace and subtlety that the spectacle of three very intelligent people ruining each other's lives becomes irresistibly romantic.

As Rikki, Seda is a model of foul duplicity, and the movie itself is a relative rarity: an intelligent showcase of senseless machismo.

Solidly entertaining little film.

A small story, with fewer lofty ambitions than its lead character, the film runs out of steam at a certain point. Overall, its leisurely pace and lack of overt action will bore some filmgoers, while the movie's final section, during which Ganesh pursues his political aspirations, feels strangely hurried and less satisfying than the rest of the story.

While Imamura films generally have their droll moments, this is the most blatantly comic work he's done since the '80s -- richly entertaining and suggestive of any number of metaphorical readings.

What's particularly scary about Hollywood Ending, however, is that its flaws are exactly the sort of problems that often afflict aging directors, flaws that we've never seen in Allen before -- bad comic timing, slack pacing, an unsteady control of tone, a reliance on jokes that have long since become clichés.

The effects are smashing, yet there's a heart behind them.

Mandel Holland's direction is uninspired, and his scripting unsurprising, but the performances by Phifer and Black are ultimately winning.

Heavy with mood and Finn's fine music, Jeffs' debut feature merely moistens us when we should be soaked. Maybe next time she'll let it all come down.

When Circuit is on its game it's very telling and where it's at its best is detailing just how difficult it is for men so hedonistically self-involved to love one another.

As it stands, there's some fine sex onscreen, and some tense arguing, but not a whole lot more.

Say what you want about Hollywood losing its way in recent years, there's something beautiful about moviemakers who paint themselves into corners this tight.

We expect some depth and perspective from filmmakers, but even in talking about the movie Peralta sounds like an ex-high school quarterback who never got over the Big Game, or an old campus revolutionary who's never glimpsed the folly that went along with the fervor.

It's Tommy's job to clean the peep booths surrounding her, and after viewing this one, you'll feel like mopping up, too.

A happily self-aware body-count flick that's as brutally funny as it is plain-old brutal. A broad slash of scary, sci-fi fun, the project leapfrogs all the Scream and Last Summer junk to carve itself a new, high-tech niche.

As a gallery of the grotesque, however, the cinematic equivalent of a Joe Coleman painting or Adam Parfrey publication, The Salton Sea is a blast.

The acting tends toward the cartoonish (not in a good way), and the story is built on a series of illogical motivations.

There is nothing particularly interesting about either the people or the situations. Barrial might as well have filmed ANY body.

The week's most pleasant surprise.

Certainly a terrific sense of urgency underlies the story and Tom's desperation over Claire is palpable, but that may not be enough for viewers who actually like to understand how the riddle is unraveling.

With virtually no interesting elements for an audience to focus on, Chelsea Walls is a triple-espresso endurance challenge.

It's light fantasy, but lovely and astute.

Chuck Russell doesn't make masterpieces -- he makes good B movies ("The Mask," "The Blob"), and The Scorpion King more than ably meets those standards.

The movie climaxes with an entire audience farting -- a more concise review than this one.

Most obvious crime is first-degree dullness, giving us a thriller without thrills and a mystery devoid of urgent questions.

Here it is -- another double cross for which you will, and should, hand over your few grubby bucks.

Loses significant points for its lazy story and complacent delivery.

The film proves unrelentingly grim -- and equally engrossing.

While the humor is recognizably Plympton, he has actually bothered to construct a real story this time, and the joke sequences are shorter and better integrated. The visual style is also richer and "better drawn" than before.

What's in it for you? Mostly a bunch of astronauts and cosmonauts onboard the International Space Station, floating around filming each other.

The film is worth seeing for Sorvino alone. The actress hasn't been this good since Woody Allen's "Mighty Aphrodite," a role that couldn't be more dissimilar.

You'll laugh a lot, but not without a sense of animal desperation.

Seems to exist solely to prove there is something beneath the bottom of the barrel.

A grand, old-fashioned epic, this project is every bit as important as "Gladiator" or a new "Star Wars" episode.

The budget is low and the acting grade C at best, but director Lorena David stages one or two genuinely impressive stunts, and the script, by newbies Scott Duncan and Ned Kerwin, manages to skillfully maintain the plot's central mystery all the way to the end.

Stephen Earnhart's documentary lovingly covers the process -- veering between pathos, inspiration and mockery

If you can roll with these moments, the rest of the film pays off, but even with a relatively happy ending (one that, given the characters in question, may not last), it's a heck of a downer for date night.

Like so many other allegedly scary movies, it gets so tangled up in The Twist that it chokes the energy right out of the very audience it seeks to frighten.

It's vastly enjoyable in a low-down, scandal-mongering way.

The dumbest thing this side of a lobotomy.

This is mostly well-constructed fluff, which is all it seems intended to be.

While nostalgically recalling the past, this is a clear-eyed look at Jewish history that should prove compelling even to those who've never heard of the Yiddish theater.

Les Destinées has a leisurely, contemplative pace without ever growing boring. Still, at the end, we are left somehow empty. For all the time we spend with these people, we never really get inside of them.

Film falls into the same trap as the book: a moderately interesting setup ultimately undone by an ending that makes the audience feel like fools for investing any sympathy with the characters.

Feels like an in-joke, a party where everyone on the screen's having a better time than anyone in the theater, and they all couldn't care less. And that's just no fun at all.

Full of fresh and unexpected observations about the cross-culturally complex lives of second-generation Indians living in the U.S.

Merely labeling National Lampoon's Van Wilder "sophomoric" or "vulgar" doesn't do justice to the perpetrators' dedication.

Beautifully shot and finely acted movie.

Loquacious and dreary piece of business.

It's a paint-by-numbers job of the worst sort, stuffed with more tired old baseball baloney than Harry Caray and about as dramatic as shagging flies in St. Pete.