Offers interesting views of ordinary life in Baghdad that Americans won't find on TV news. But the impact is lessened by the director's failure to let those who think the war is justified have their say.

By the time White gets around to condescending remarks... the film has become a sort of BBC "Hee Haw," meant to reassure Brits and New Yorkers that the South is indeed a land of pistol-toting, Jesus-praising gap-toothed freaks.

If you can check your brain at the popcorn stand and keep your expectations low, Dark Water is an OK genre exercise that maintains a consistently creepy tone.

A perfect storm of wooden acting, hackneyed direction, inane scripting and laughably cartoonish special effects produces a shapeless mess more wearyingly stupid than arch-villian Dr. Doom is evil.

The movie grows steadily more arresting as it goes on and saves its best parts for last.

Fast-moving, psychologically savvy.

Saraband -- the term means an erotic dance for two -- is like watching four people take turns trying to swim with one of the others clinging to an ankle. It's grim and gripping.

Scathing indictment of the tabloid media! Film at 11! That's how Crónicas sees itself, but all I could see was a scathing indictment of writer-director Sebastian Cordero's ability to put together a credible story.

You can't help wondering how prisoners who practiced Vipassana fared as free men.

HUGELY tedious and mostly incomprehensible.

As we learn, delightfully so, in Jeffrey Fox Jacobs' documentary A Sidewalk Astronomer, the Peking-born Dobson promotes the building and use of small, inexpensive telescopes to study the wonders of the sky.

Starts off bad, then tapers off.

Even when deadly silent, though, as he is through most of the film, Duris is brutally eloquent.

A campy, low-budget Romero homage that's badly in need of editing.

Jia's message is that globalization has failed to help the Chinese masses. We hear you, dude, but did you really need 143 minutes to get your point across?

Puts a face on the clerical sex scandals rocking the Roman Catholic Church.

Now that this technically impressive - but seriously flawed and self-referential - remake is finally in theaters to swell the July 4 weekend box office, conversation will doubtless shift to the lamest ending yet to a Steven Spielberg movie.

If you enjoy intelligent, challenging filmmaking, Tropical Malady is for you.

Unintentionally funny is still funny, and the documentary A Decent Factory, had me giggling.

The street action is a grabber, but the story itself isn't.

Un-magical, unfunny and un-romantic alleged comedy.

Brains! Brains! Why can't they make a zombie movie with brains? This is one. Romero has given us, as well as the zombies, a lot to chew on.

If the director had more gospel and less blues in him, it might have brought him closer to really understanding these talents. Still, I can't wait for "Rize 2: Electric Boogaloo."

The more serious Potter gets (there are several earnest soliloquies about dirt), the harder it is not to laugh.

Jeff Goldblum is a hoot as Hatosy's pot-smoking shrink, who also happens to be his mom's boyfriend, but Dallas 362 is basically a road movie that doesn't really go anywhere.

A remarkable, eye-popping nature documentary.

Strings together 60 amateurish short films to tell us drugs are cool, man.

Lebanon-born director Ziad Doueiri, a camera operator on Quentin Tarantino's films, has a dreamy, fluid style he decorates with light electronic sounds -- from bands like Air -- that give this film more than a touch of youthful poetry.

Highly entertaining.

Though Lohan doesn't embarrass herself in a film in which she appears in virtually every frame, this tepid tribute to girl power hardly represents a step forward from Lohan's breakthrough roles in "Mean Girls" and the remake of Disney's "Freaky Friday.

Weisberg is nonjudgmental, allowing his subjects to deliver the message that, for far too many people, the American dream is more of a nightmare.

A flat, would-be thriller pausing briefly on its journey to video stores.

Most of this movie is beyond lame. It almost makes "A Cinderella Story" -- the ever-mugging Duff's surprise hit of last summer -- look like a real movie by comparison.

Nicely acted and stylishly photographed.

Working in Terribly Serious mode, rookie director Chris Terrio proves as pompous as filmmakers three times his age.

Me and You takes a couple of neat swipes at the pretentiousness of the art scene, but as a commentary on the difficulty of connecting in contemporary society, it's too precious by half.

Far from earthshaking, but it's fun while it lasts.

Limps to a fairly lame conclusion, but until then its remarkable candor is like spending a memorably hilarious, harrowing and unforgettable weekend with your wacky in-laws.

The one highlight is Julia Nickson, who breathes life into the role of Ethan's evil stepmom.

A witty and wise midlife comedy, not only represents Peter Riegert's debut as a feature director but gives this gifted veteran performer his juiciest big-screen role in quite some time.

A great movie, period. It's great because it's so real.

Scenes of the probe are less successful. They feel contrived, and actress Lee Yeong-ae is not especially effective as Major Jang.

Call it a spiritual Woodstock.

An action comedy for suburban women that's as toothless as a newborn, and nearly as stupid. It tries so hard to be cute that it practically drools on your shoulder.

A bland, dull and only occasionally funny waste of time that will very soon be gathering dust in the remainder bins.

A chainsaw-cut above recent entries in the genre: a pure, unapologetic, unironic homage to the likes of "Friday the 13th" that respectfully salutes all the old shtick.

You can't get this kind of full-on sensory-jolt anywhere else, not legally anyway. "Sharkboy" will be equally beloved in elementary schools and in college dorms.

The story, which also involves an asthmatic dog and a scarecrow, is more accessible than "Spirited Away" but less transporting than that Oscar-winning masterpiece.

Tries to be a gay version of "Sex and the City," which was pretty gay to begin with.

Viewers are either going to walk out after 10 minutes or, like this tolerant critic, get caught up in the sordid lives of the three misfits and stick around for the ambiguous ending.

"I am surrounded by oceans of boredom," the campy Abraham complains at one point. It's a sentiment audiences are bound to share.

France's François Ozon's 5 x 2, which resembles Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage" told in reverse, could be played for laughs, or suspense -- who killed this marriage? -- or with the rueful irony of Stephen Sondheim's backward musical "Merrily We Roll Along."

The three are appealing characters, and you can't help but root for them in their quest, which gives a whole new meaning to the term "family values."

The writing, acting and direction are so amateurish that the only thing you'll care about is escaping the theater.

Ron Howard's bio-pic is an Oscar-baiting fairy tale that manipulates the audience at every turn of the clich.

The story meanders from competition to competition (up the ramps, down the ramps) and seems like it could end at any point. The characters are similarly underdeveloped.

A rousing, garage-band-style documentary.

Après Vous arranges for a normal guy to get stuck with a blithering wreck. But whenever things threaten to get really silly, it pulls back.

A beautiful but empty-headed documentary.

Never-quite-believable crime drama.

A fluffy and fun coming-of-age-in-Rome comedy, with a sparkling turn by its 16-year-old star, Alice Teghil.

Though the story may be cut from the same cloth as the female-empowering "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood," it's never as cute, cloying or overbearing as that movie eventually became.

Like mother, like daughter best sums up Or (My Treasure), a raw drama.

Magnificent shots of waterfalls and other natural phenomena abound, but it's far too late in the history of nature photography to expect anyone to gawk at them.

Isn't always easy to watch, but Bojanov's film is so compelling you just can't turn away.

"The Waterboy" was funny because Sandler doesn't look like a football player. When he swaggers around The Longest Yard starting fights and taking beatings without flinching, he only reminds us how little Steve McQueen and how much Woody Allen there is in him.

More than a few will agree with the penguins, who netted the film a PG rating with the utterance, "Well, this sucks."

A mild, slow-moving drama that belatedly tries to argue that graffiti writers are political artists, not an urban blight.

It doesn't measure up to Schlondorff's 1979 Oscar winner, "The Tin Drum," but it's compelling nevertheless.

If there is a poetry to losing, then this film has as much as the collected works of John Milton.

It could turn someone who never heard of the Flaming Lips into a devoted fan.

Tender and often extremely funny.

Eleonore Faucher, first-time director (and co-writer) of the French charmer Sequins, is well aware of Neymark's allure and sees to it that the young woman is seldom out of the frame.

A relentlessly dull film that's shot on eyeball-gougingly ugly digital video.

Maybe nothing here is supposed to be as scary as in the 1973 movie because this is merely the opening act. That's the problem with prequels, isn't it? It's like being asked to pay full price just to watch batting practice.

If it weren't for "Sideways," Second Best probably wouldn't have been released at all, but the earlier film made you root for a hapless schmo. This one doesn't, mainly because its protagonist is so obnoxious.

It remains for a tougher documentary to more forcefully trace exactly who benefits from this shameful practice -- multinational corporations and consumers who don't ask enough questions.

Arguably the darkest episode in the entire series (and the first to carry a PG-13 rating) the visually stunning "Sith" is also the fastest-paced and most accessible.

Fails to elicit any substantive information from his (Tommy Davis) subjects. And he fails to put their plight into perspective.

The filmmakers follow this compassionate and articulate man as he returns to Rwanda a decade later to revisit his demons.

So bad it's awful.

R0bert Duvall as a pee wee soccer coach? Great idea, but Kicking and Screaming should have had him roar, "I love the smell of juice boxes in the morning."

Fonda is a hoot and a half.

A preposterous mix of sentiment and brutality that casts martial-arts star Jet Li as a music-loving killing machine, turns out to be his most entertaining movie in quite some time.

A crowd-pleaser of the first order.

Huppert is wonderful, as usual, and she's to be congratulated for taking this daring role. But, alas, even she can't save Ma Mere.

This is a smart, vivid, thrillingly real gangster picture that nevertheless resembles many others.

A long, messy cinematic novel full of hate, love, murder, ghosts, madness, poetry and Catherine Deneuve.

An Iranian comedian named Omad Djalili plays Picasso, that sexually combustible Spanish bull, with all the earth-shaking allure of, say, Andy Richter.

Breezy and informative. It offers a view of the talented, opinionated man that only his son could pull off.

Treats us to some feverish decapitating, juicy stabbing and non-anesthetized fingertip removal.

A rousing, politically correct, Muslim-sympathetic, $140 million take on the Crusades.

Tommy Riley is a ten-cent "Baby."

One of that film's funniest performers, John Michael Higgins, is on hand as a maniacal European celebrity handler who keeps swearing, "I am no homoist."

Not for the squeamish, but it is a beautifully crafted and thoughtful film that genuinely provokes.

A wry, "Rashomon"-like tale.

A shaky effort to make a point about art triumphing over all.

Director Susanne Bier is helped by a well-chosen cast, especially the glowing Nielsen, a Danish-born actress best known for American films like "Gladiator."