Horror fans will still find it worthwhile. The ending is also a nice twist on the slasher genre.

Bar-Lev has created a film remarkable in its ability to capture both the worst and best of human nature.

If you care more about the quality of the movie than the food, language or location, there's no choice: Order Chinese.

Funny gem.

I have an idea for a Mars movie. When our first astronauts step onto the Red Planet, they discover that Martians not only exist but that they've hired Johnnie Cochran to represent them in a massive defamation suit against American filmmakers.

There are some light chuckles to be had, but considering its promising parentage, this is surprisingly soft stuff.

D'Onofrio is a natural for the role of a romantic who just may be a freak. A highly physical actor, he ranges between sweetly awkward and a candidate for the kind of mental hospital shown in "Session 9."

Typical of road comedies, it's a pastiche of sketches.

It's a movie that should have been called on account of boredom.

The bubble-boy niche is thankfully small. John Travolta began his career playing one in a TV movie, but this movie will undoubtedly finish off the genre for good.

Lightweight, inoffensive fare, as bland as a sleepwalker under a hypnotist's spell.

The cottage industry of the mockumentary has produced another pleasing trifle, the cute and smart Lisa Picard Is Famous.

It's reassuring to see love and sex in one's 70s depicted as fully replenishing. At the same time, it's sobering to think that it's no easier in the twilight of life to make rational decisions regarding the heart.

A journey that goes from prosaic to existential. Director Hans Petter Moland's raw drama of father-daughter reconciliation features an excellent cast.

Grand passion, secrecy, world politics and mortal danger provide a heady mix for this spectacularly beautiful movie. If only the accents were as reliable as the azure of the sea.

Dalton, using a Scottish brogue coarse enough to take his tongue with it, is hootably bad, and Kathy Bates, playing Ma James, is pure ham.

The movie is over in a breezy 112 minutes, but it may be another half-hour before your sides quit aching.

As for Scott, his rather wry interpretation is competent, but neither daring nor insightful enough to arouse any great passion.

The opera's story -- about a Chinese princess who rejects all her suitors -- is never even fully explained.

You may need fortification for this astonishingly bad movie.

May be free of gay stereotypes, but it's absolutely riddled with romantic cliches. It's hard to see the progress in that.

Pie 2's greatest asset is the rare, infectious amiability of its cast of characters and the actors playing them.

More than a bad movie, it's an anti-movie.

Heartfelt but often plodding and awkward, the movie feels like a somewhat subpar Sunday night TV movie.

A natural successor to "The Blair Witch Project" in terms of its small suggestions of horror past and future.

The suspense is as tingly as jalapenos on the tongue.

Delicious, intelligent thriller.

Possibly the sourest revenge movie ever, Audition starts off as a sweet, low-key romance, then abruptly turns into a grisly, sadistic thriller.

You'd think it would be boring to stare at Thomas's computer screen so intently for 97 minutes, but the movie is eerily riveting.

Banderas has some very effective moments, but in his emotional scenes, Cristofer has him screaming his lines into Jolie's face with such a spritzing fury, she might have filed a union grievance.

Ultimately, it's the casting and the story that are too good to be true. If a newspaper's classified ad section could document a success like this one, there would never be a slump.

The co-stars genuinely like each other, and their pleasure is infectious.

Prepubescent girls might get a few safe giggles while others around them are yawning.

Given the near total absence of intellectually ambitious American movies today, a critic's first impulse after seeing Francis Ford Coppola's reedited Apocalypse Now may be to treat it as the new, improved version he says it is and proclaim it a masterpiece - if not in 1979, then now. But it's not that simple: Apocalypse Now Redux is not a new movie, and neither is it necessarily improved.

As a story, Burton's Planet of the Apes is more of a comic-book creation than either of his "Batman" movies.

Kelly McGillis quite literally as you've never seen her -- as a manipulative, icy sex goddess in whose bedroom there are no limits.

Looks a lot like 1950s American gangster films -- particularly, John Huston's "The Asphalt Jungle" -- but it's decidedly French in its sexual candor and moral laissez-faire.

A perfect example of an "art" movie that is so lugubrious and soul-sucking that it's hell to sit through.

As escapist fantasies go, this easygoing romance is a modest winner.

Kurosawa may be considered the genius, but his movie would go nowhere without its extraordinary leading man.

This amped-up Japanese thriller is a fairly diverting tale of romantic and cultural alienation.

Shows that there's a limit to how much mileage one can get from offbeat, creepy and symbiotic.

The frantic proceedings are more likely to have you wishing this summer would just come to an end.

This is not challenging filmmaking by any means, more like a comfortable old slipper. But it's a perennial that's guaranteed to please.

Much of this is pretty funny, in its perverse, disorienting style, and there's an irrepressible sunniness to the relationship between Lola and Hlynur's mother.

Wretch of a B movie.

The result is a back-lot studio tour that's not exactly good-natured, but terrific fun and it gives the ensemble cast plenty of clowning opportunities.

The production is fantastically funny, high-energy camp, punctuated by Trask's infectious score and by Mitchell, dressing in a succession of wigs twice the size of his body.

Funny, insightful, unpredictable and blessed with pitch-perfect performances, Ghost World is one of the year's best movies.

Anything, Steven, anything would be better than making us watch the same movie again.

Alternates between being amusingly pretentious and studiously dull.

As a film, The Score may not add up to much, but take it apart and it's something to see.

None of the criminal skulduggery feels quite right, but the comic bits between Bobby (Favreau) and Ricky (Vaughn) are freewheeling fun.

Like all blond jokes, Legally Blonde is basically meanspirited, and that's when it's funniest.

That the actors can work under such scrutiny is amazing, and they are superb. The standout is Brad Renfro as Marty, the kid most under the thumb of the neighborhood bully.

This one uses sweeping compositions of nearly solitary figures as a reminder of what individuals stood to lose, and an auction scene is horrifying -- some livestock and a basket of everyday items are exchanged for a man's future.

You watch with amazement their physical movements, how closely their lips match their overly precise, prerecorded dialogue, yet they're not human enough to get us past the stunt factor and lost in the drama.

A delightful comedic twist on Martin Scorsese's "King of Comedy."

The action scenes, including one on that tourist sightseeing staple, the Bateau Mouche, were directed by Cory Yuen with some creative touches, including a hail of chopsticks during a fight in a restaurant kitchen.

Unlike most inner-city stories that come out of Hollywood, this feels like the real thing.

Here's the downside, and it's not just me: You need a scorecard to keep track of the sisters, their brother, two husbands, a boyfriend, two (or three?) extramarital lovers.

Sophisticated in that European way and predictable in that Hollywood way.

An enjoyable trip, as long as you don't mind traveling light.

As delicious as this premise is, Cats & Dogs is about as funny as a hairball left on your pillow.

The Worst Comedy of the Year race heats up today with the release of Keenen Ivory Wayans' Scary Movie 2. This one is so bad, even Adam Sandler will be impressed.

More amiably mindless summer distraction than just about anything Hollywood has to offer this season.

Treats the poets not as creative equals but as a groundbreaking genius and a jealous, vindictive hack. Wordsworth is Salieri to Coleridge's Mozart.

A farce nearly as cracked as his previous "The Dinner Game."

Pretty thin feature-film subject. But the silliness is so contagious that it doesn't matter.

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

Most of its features work fine, and it will dazzle you with its tricks and illusions. But it is not what it claims to be on the package.

There isn't much here besides two self-absorbed kids.

Gives a white-knuckled, you-are-there account of a politician's dilemma, one whose repercussions are still felt in Africa.

Despite the audience pandering -- not just in its violence, but in its wall-to-wall sexual vulgarity -- there are terrific elements in Baby Boy.

Dubbed for U.S. audiences, the film has suffered in translation.

Its simple, straightforward storytelling makes mincemeat of the idea that, gee, if these people just worked a little harder and got motivated, they, too, could get a piece of the American Dream.

Princess is far more contemplative than "Run Lola Run," far less energized, and the little tricks of fate that made his last film so unique seem like sophomoric affectations here.

Often tedious, sometimes fascinating anthology.

Unless you live and breathe exhaust fumes, there isn't much to sustain a viewer through a lame story and dialogue so pathetic.

Pure situation comedy, and it's still fresh enough to provoke laughs.

It's sort of like getting off the plane in a strange place without a guide. We can figure it out, but it takes some work, and the music is more of a distraction than an aid.

This is a sophisticated and unsettling documentary marred only by a voice-over taken from the writings of Jamaica Kincaid.

Baldly superficial, it probably should have been given a less demanding metaphor to live up to.

Goldblum, who has made psychological confusion his actor's stock-in-trade, gives Nolan's behavior just enough credibility to keep his quest alive for us, and Heche gives a delightfully unaffected performance as Lucy.

Perhaps simply discovering a film so dedicated to a different perspective is adventure enough.

Good music stands alone, and the documentary is jaunty fun.

For a film expressly about an underappreciated culture, there are some boulder-size cliches rolling down these hills.

Has all the appeal of a video game without the joystick. All you can do is watch. It's noisy and moves fast, but if you can't play, why pay?

If you're looking for either insight or even just an introduction into the mind of a great artist, "One Day" is worth the effort.

Noir has never been this bright.

In Wide Blue Road, his (Montand) character and the wages of desperation are much more complex. Here is the real lost Atlantis.

Parts of the movie play like French farce, but ultimately Hrebejk uses very simple cadences to unveil, movingly, the big picture.

Not all cartoon violence; there's cartoon nudity, too. Berry was paid a well-publicized $500,000 bonus to bare her breasts in the movie.

Takashi is a master of the jagged quick cut and the shocker finish, and his head-spinning story is pumped up with almost more bravado than a single screen can handle.

Despite a subpar script and performances, this minor indie entry does possess a rather touching belief in its own charm.

Half a barrel of laughs. The other half is made of slime.

A caustic, funny, low-budget treat, shot on digital video.

The idea that every animated feature from Disney is an instant classic officially springs a leak with the noisily disappointing Atlantis: The Lost Empire.