What keeps the film so fascinating is how even its protagonists are greatly flawed. While certainly upsetting, Aftermath takes a look at the dangers inherent in an abundance of truth.

Early scenes set up the tragedy, but the majority of Oliver Hirschbiegel's movie is set in a TV studio where the two eventually face each other, and the tension, unfortunately, quickly becomes stagey.

CSA is a sophomoric film essay that would have barely rated a passing grade from a tougher teacher.

The performances are expert, but can't make up for a flat script and direction. Unless you, like Claire, are a glutton for punishment, we suggest you choose nothing over something.

Despite choreography by the late Gene Kelly and six original tunes by Randy Newman, the song-and-dance numbers here are merely congenial and definitely not rousing. [26 Mar 1997, p.42]

Jamie Bell gives a watchable performance in this self-conscious, coming-of-age drama, though the film's overall effect is best described as David Lynch lite.

Guaranteed to charm anyone who’s out of school and already bored.

Melodrama, romance and action are cheerfully jumbled together, so as long as you're ready to embrace the excess of swoony sentimentality, you'll get more than your money's worth.

The philosophy is even less plausible. But the action -- oh, the action! There's nothing else out there like it.

There's not much to the movie, in which we watch the participants crack jokes and complain about their in-laws over corned beef. But when the diners include Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner, director Arthur Hiller ("Love Story"), "Animal House" producer Matty Simmons, and anachronistic announcer Gary Owens, it's worth pulling up a chair.

Despite the spectacularly cool opening credits and some first-rate animation, the story starts to flag about halfway through.

True chemistry is hard to find. And by some stroke of movie magic - or sheer skill - Wahlberg and the bear make a pretty great team.

Actors are left with too much time to play emotional symphonies, while inevitably having to hit too many required notes.

The performances by Smith, Brewster and veteran David Morse, as a morbidly depressed widower, elevate Nearing Grace to something near grace.

Anybody who missed 2006's excellent indie "The Puffy Chair" has another chance to discover the off-kilter world of the Duplass brothers.

Though "Woman" never rises above its status as a traditional genre thriller, that's perfectly fine. It was made with intelligence and commitment, and it achieves its goal: to keep us looking over our shoulders long after we've left.

Santa Claus and the Snowman stage a scaled-down "Star Wars"-type battle for the rights to Santa's sleigh on Christmas Eve in the pleasantly goofy, irreverent Santa vs. the Snowman.

Nolte, at least, delivers his lines with laser accuracy, and gives The Golden Bowl the life that so much cogitation could have drained from it.

The action is tightly focused and well-paced.

As an answer to the spreading cultural virus of evangelical conformity, Brian Dannelly's teen farce Saved! is about three teeth short of a full bite. But it leaves an indelible impression.

Offers only the smallest glimmer of hope that the two sides can work things out through ingenuity and compromise.

A heartfelt, bittersweet and often amusing portrait of early middle-age.

Meryl Streep narrates this global update on child-labor abuses with all the enthusiasm and alarm of someone reading "The Pet Goat" to a classroom of second-graders.

Hasn't a single original idea in its bird brain. But it clowns around just enough while sitting in the dunce chair that after a while it's mildly amusing.

One of the reasons why the film works so well is because it imagines a path anyone who’s thought about escaping their lives — and hasn’t — could take.

The cast all do well with banal material that’s beneath them, especially Emily Watson.

The movie still isn't great, but it's an important remonstration to that oldest of all studio-system curses: the producer who thinks he's more creative than the director.

Blunt has never been more relaxed, and she and Segel have a believably warm chemistry. It's also nice to find a romantic comedy with so much respect for both its leads.

It’s playful, stable and sexy, thanks to a cast that knows how to find the sweet spots.

Low-budget, grubby and gleeful, but with a nice sense of style and apparently an endless supply of dry ice. Points deducted, though, for a too-easy alien-corpse joke.

These are the best moments, when Stewart and a wisely understated Gugino are free to enact their own wistful, beautifully intuitive pas de deux.

Herzog, who deadpans his way through the high jinks, is the best thing about the movie, but even he gets wearisome before Nessie has sunk the boat.

Marshall shows off the breathtaking landscape, but with interiors, he populates the ale houses and encampments with cliches - like dueling female warriors, one a mute and the other a white-haired vixen.

Emma Stone, for example, is no one's idea of an ugly duckling. And though she offers a sincere effort, she never quite settles into the role of Skeeter.

This doc, made by Kunstler's daughters Emily and Sarah, doesn't pretend to be unbiased, but it nonetheless has an unblinking view of its subject. They must have learned a thing or two from dad.

A must-see both for girls and the grownups who love them.

Hunt and, especially, Harper do excellent work rounding out sketchily-written roles. But Pardue, who offers little beyond movie-star looks, is either miscast or genuinely unable to grasp his character's intense longing and insecurity.

If you go searching for an original idea in this tiresome thriller about a soul-sucking demon doll, you won’t find one.

A two-hour, one-joke comedy that never gets old, Stuck on You is the most mature, consistently funny and satisfyingly sweet movie in the rollicking careers of brother filmmakers Bobby and Peter Farrelly.

Director Michel Leclerc's comedy plays like one of those foreign-movie spoofs Jerry and the gang would go to see on a "Seinfeld" episode. Only here, there's no "young girl's journey from Milan to Minsk" - just from madcap to moronic.

Dynamite perfectly describes this riveting documentary.

A tale of love, desperation and conspiratorial madness, comes off on the big screen as a wacky psychological snow job.

Though we had just heard the name Lee Harvey Oswald, I believed he had done it alone. I still do, even more so after watching Robert Stone's meticulously researched, seemingly unbiased summary of the killing and the major conspiracy theories.

A streak of "Cinema Paradiso" runs through this Italian dramedy - and while it lacks that film's overflowing emotion, it's filled with its own artfulness and warmth.

With its scenes of full-frontal nudity and its references to the Tiananmen Square protests, Lan Yu may be a breakthrough film for China, but it's well-trod territory for American viewers.

Among the funniest and most satisfying films I've seen in years.

"Sixth Sense" fans will be intrigued at first, then disappointed.

Vardalos is a breath of fresh air. After all the little nipped and tucked bunnies we've been seeing onscreen for so long, we forget what real women look like.

Only two hours long but it may take your mind another day to get through it. Egoyan has stuffed a lot into this personal and strenuously opaque film, which perhaps explains why its over-plotted, elliptical structure seems so onerous.

Deeply disturbing, but dramatically realized, and the movie marks Burke as a young talent to watch.

Strong, subtle performances elevate A Silent Love, a slow-moving drama about an unlikely love triangle from first-time director Federico Hidalgo.

Yen, who also choreographed the fights, is a natural hero, and the large canvas and pseudo-superhero tactics work for a bit, but then the action gets sidetracked in place of myth-building.

If there's anything more tiresome in film today than hip irony, it is forced irony, and here comes a boatload with Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.

The way he presents his romantic history is both clever and entertaining, but after a while the story becomes tediously familiar.

The nasty, violent material has two small beacons of hope - Nielsen as a fair-weather stripper in the manner of old film-noir dames, and Quaid as a scurvy ­mobster who hates being cheated. With his puffy, reddened face, Quaid looks like a bad Santa.

Marie is middle-aged and at a crossroads in All the Light in the Sky, a movie that feels the same way — listless and searching and on its way toward something good.

When a movie is this strange, it's gotta count for something.

An intelligent, old-fashioned nail-biter.

Though much of the film is overcooked and overwrought, it’s well-played, and writer-director Kieran Darcy-Smith keeps us guessing, and watching.

It's a shame, of course, that Madden brought the best to such an exotic Top locale without making the most of the opportunity.

Ultimately about the indomitability of faith, and the Christian symbolism is laid on thick. But the story, adapted from a famous behind-the-Iron-Curtain novel, sheds light on a subject few people have known about.

The era deserves far better than hipster nostalgia.

A brazenly mindless thriller about the infinite capacities of the human brain. That said, sometimes we just want to shut down and give in to bombastic summer entertainment. In that regard, as usual, Besson delivers.

Though there is enough haute couture on display for a season of "Sex and the City" envy, it has definite off-the-rack appeal to regular moviegoers. In fact, it may be the one film this year where you'll see Manolo Blahniks and Doc Martens on women sitting in the same row.

Writer Sarah Koskoff's nuanced script and director Todd Louiso's ("Love, Liza") delicate tone follow indie terrain, but go the right way.

The American, a movie as coiled as a snake and as still as a sleepy villa, is the rare grownup thriller that knows the link between peace and danger and the tension that comes from both.

African Cats, while often adorable and at times gripping, is more of a TV-ready experience.

The humor is simple but far from dumb. The dueling "walk-off" between rival male mannequins is inspired, as are the sly juxtapositions of the male model's faux physicality with such real-world demands as coal mining.

We never do find out what really went on behind the scenes of “Community.” But the delightful success of a charismatic loner like Crittenden could be considered one of Harmon’s greatest accomplishments.

Despite several attempts, we're still waiting for the drama that convincingly captures the experienc of soldiers who've fought in Iraq. Stop-Loss" isn't that film, but at the very least its efforts are honorable.

This is what happens when the Norwegians try to make their own "Blair Witch Project": We get three-headed trolls that hate Vitamin D and references to "Deliverance."

An impressive portrait of the migraine of teenage girlhood, and also works on the more modest level of teen romance.

Some segments are anti-American, but to concentrate on that is to miss the variety, depth of opinion, and fierceness of the emotions that drive each director.

Brisk pacing and a remarkable cast achieve the sleight-of-hand effect of making you forgive some implausible twists and a sanitized ending.

It's like racing through a detective novel, only to find the last page has been torn out.

Even with its first-rate cast, current political relevance and tangled mysteries, The Good Shepherd remains as remote as Wilson himself. But frankly, if the lives of CIA spies are really this dreary, they may as well keep their secrets to themselves.

Some of the talk gets a little bombastic, but it's hard to deny the thrill involved.

It's a tribute to Adrien Brody that Wrecked works as a modestly compelling thriller, since there's almost nothing to see but Brody himself.

The genuinely sweet nature of this sometimes clunky movie is mixed with a little sass, and wins you over.

Steven Meyer's deeply affecting documentary, narrated by Laurie Anderson, takes us back to a camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, Majdanek, in order to honor those who left everything behind.

A work of words as lovely as “The Prophet” deserves a better artistic interpretation than this animated venture, which consists mostly of pedestrian, ’70s-quality visuals.

Margaret - titled after a poem - reflects its adolescent subject with striking accuracy. It can be frustrating and self-important, clumsy and naive. But it's also passionate, curious and filled with insight, so unafraid in its ambitions that even the flaws are interesting. Every bold vision requires respect; a few deserve celebration. This is one of them, imperfections and all.

When people complain about movies glutting the market, this moronic “Black Swan”-meets-“Phone Booth” thriller is what they mean.

Michael Starrbury’s astute script draws us in slowly, depicting the realities of Mister and Pete’s lives in progressive reveals.

Its story, characters, dialogue, humor and voice performances are first-rate.

Kids who get a kick out of the macabre will enjoy this exquisitely crafted but tedious film.

Michael Cuesta's perfectly-pitched indie captures the pain of arrested development with so much empathy and insight, you can't help but root for the unmoored, overgrown adolescent at its center.

It takes nearly an hour before Stephen J. Anderson's 3-D, animated comedy Meet the Robinsons begins to make sense, and when it does, the film literally takes off. But unless you're familiar with the children's book by William Joyce from which it's adapted, that first hour is a cluttered, noisy, nearly unendurable mess.

A taut drama that manages to be thoughtful without forgetting it's a creep-out.

Israeli director Savi Gabizon has created a nuanced coming-of-age portrait that ought to strike a chord with ­audiences ­everywhere.

Though this well-observed, wry drama is determined to be quirky, its most endearing quality, like that of its heroines, is a willingness to wallow in foul moods and come out the other side.

Private, Italian director Saverio Costanzo's stunning human drama, would seem like something out of Kafka if it weren't based on real events and a relatively common fact of contemporary Palestinian life.

Good intentions and some nicely playful moments go a long way toward balancing out Paul Morrison's uneven story of British immigrants in the early 1960s.

Amusing and slightly alarming documentary.

It's a sensation - both a milestone in computer-animation and a likely Christmas classic.

From the beginning, Edmond is too self-absorbed for us to care much about his fate, but like the proverbial train wreck, you can't tear your eyes - or your ears - away from the spectacle.

Occasionally stumbles into charm but more often is just wayward and hazy. It makes you hungry for a real movie from writer-director Jonathan Levine.

This fawning appreciation wears thin, despite the good-natured clowning of Alabama dentist/would-be actor George Hardy, who's like a poor man's Bruce Campbell (our apologies to Bruce Campbell).