An exercise in drudgery... The whole thing is so patently uninteresting it's hard to see it as anything but a Douglas family vanity project.

The only pro involved in this amateurish labor of love is veteran character actor Arthur Nascarella, cast as Jack's florist father.

Prywes has produced a technically accomplished nostalgia piece on a shoestring budget, but the plotting is too sitcom-lite to support its aspirations to magic realism.

Nasty but compulsively watchable.

Excellent performances redeem Jordan Melamed's gritty teenage version of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

A Southeast Asian thriller that positively reeks of atmosphere - but is woefully lacking in narrative credibility or character development.

Konchalovsky, best known here for "Runaway Train" (1985), takes on a difficult subject with a light mix of dark humor and pathos.

Eventually turns somber, with stark depiction of mass graves and suffering refugees. The final scene will break your heart.

The central narrative is ultimately too one-dimensional to sustain interest.

It actually works as a sometimes funny, occasionally scandalous, but mostly involving narrative.

The decade under discussion in this enjoyable documentary is the 1970s, a period that changed Hollywood forever.

Every once in a while the old-fashioned costume drama comes alive, only to sink again into run-of-the-mill special effects and long periods of talkative tedium.

Has laugh-out-loud moments of inspired idiocy. The problem is that this one-joke skit (done first and better by Britain's Ali G) has been given the Hamburger Helper treatment and stretched to feature length.

A mild cross between "The Big Chill" and "Sex and the City," this English-language German oddity is a romantic comedy passing through on its way to video.

Lilya is portrayed by Oksana Akinshina, who gives a dynamic, heartbreaking performance... She was wonderful in ["Brothers"], but is even more astonishing in Lilya 4-Ever.

Suffers even more than the Harry Potter films from a compulsion to be faithful to the source material, including cramming in a head-spinning assortment of characters and subplots.

A thrillingly vicarious experience that answers a primal urge to join our feathered friends as they soar and glide in the blue beyond.

Relentlessly stupid.

This pursuit farce is harmless (if stale) entertainment, but the sledge-hammer attempt to appeal to the country's fastest-growing movie-going demographic makes for a clunky narrative and one-note characters.

You are left with two emotions - despair and hope - after watching producer-director Jennifer Dworkin's disquieting documentary.

The non-linear plot makes for confusion and, except for the inspired final shootout, the action sequences are mediocre.

Ali Zaoua doesn't have the fireworks that made "City of God," the story of Brazilian youth gangs, a crossover hit. But in its own, low-key way, Ali Zaoua is just as stirring.

A hilarious, pitch-perfect comedy.

A skin-deep examination of a shallow lifestyle that draws a conclusion so logical it's almost superfluous.

An earnest, if dreary little Canadian domestic drama.

A ragged piece of filmmaking, but the odds are you'll have as good a time watching it as Nicholson and Sandler seemed to have making it.

It's awkward, listless and fails to reach any sort of climax.

Bracing and stylish thriller.

An enthralling 3-D IMAX documentary.

Kicks off as a cheap piece of retro schlock and quickly devolves into a putrid bloodbath with a thin narrative made utterly indecipherable by the first-time director's clueless approach to filmmaking.

For a movie that's trumpeted as providing a probing look beyond the comic's onstage patter, there's an awful lot of onstage patter -- and what nasty, hateful stuff it is.

First-time director Ed Solomon has corralled a stellar cast for his indie drama Levity -- and then put them through paces as plodding as a draft horse's.

Hokey, overstuffed plot and a messily hand-stitched, often illogical script.

Brilliantly idiosyncratic.

Harmless, fish-out-of-water fluff.

A tabloidy, nail-biting thriller.

Violent and unoriginal actioner.

So smooth and satisfying it makes the similar "Ocean's Eleven" look like a game of three-card monte.

The screenplay also fails to put the unconventional relationship into context. It never lets on that Andrea helped Duras produce some of her best work, including the autobiographical "The Lovers."

The newly found footage of Fellini and actor Marcello Mastroianni on the set of "La Dolce Vita" made me want to run out and see that wonderful film yet again.

No one's going to confuse The Core with art -- or even a good film -- but it's 25 minutes longer than "The Hours" and I had at least 25 times as much fun.

A love letter to a New York neighborhood that is rapidly disappearing -- a tight-knit Dominican community.

Overly long and uncomfortably intrusive, but never less than compelling.

The most interesting parts of the movie are the long, sexy and well-staged dance sequences, some of them involving a very nimble Duvall.

Chases its tail for so long, it morphs from a whodunit into a who-cares.

The sloppily shot, crudely edited Head of State fails as satire, for starters, because of its utter disconnect from any kind of reality.

A stunning study of ennui.

Beautifully photographed and fitfully amusing, Gaudi Afternoon would be an impressive film from a first-timer, but Seidelman is experienced enough to know she should have told the actors not to camp things up so excessively.

Co-star Christina Applegate, who's much more at home in this down and dirty milieu, wipes the floor (in one scene, literally, in a ludicrous cat fight) with the erstwhile Oscar winner.

Dreamcatcher is a lark probably best enjoyed by 12-year-olds -- or anyone still able to get in touch with their inner 12-year-old.

The story won't win any prizes for coherence, but that doesn't much matter. As in most Hong Kong thrillers, it's the visuals - love those boldly choreographed shootouts! -- and moments of absurdity that count.

Fairly cringe-inducing, full of witless double-entendres and the requisite "gags" involving bodily fluids.

When the world gets too big and scary, the Hundred Acre Wood remains a clearly delineated comfort zone.

Carion, in his feature debut, means well, and his characters are lovable. But the plot is so predictable and sentimental that viewers are likely to lose interest before Sandrine and her goats walk off into the sunset.

The trouble with authenticity in a punk rock film is that it comes off as amateurish, and while "Dolls" has a feverish energy -- and some good songs -- it suffers from crude performances and a trite rise-and-fall plot.

Doesn't have the crossover appeal of the Mexican sexcapade "Y Tu Mama Tambien," but it does herald the arrival of an audacious young filmmaker. We can't wait to see what he does next.

Morgan never reaches the heights the film probably would have hit if had been directed by Tim Burton, whose style is frequently evoked -- especially Shirley Walker's playful score, which seems channeled directly from Burton's frequent collaborator Danny Elfman.

The plot has all the ingredients of a soap opera, but Bani-Etemad, who has been making movies since the '80s, is able to make it much more.

Spun is quickly exposed as being all flash, no substance.

The only prize this shamelessly derivative schlock is likely to be in the running for is the year's dullest thriller.

Awesome filmmaking. But it doesn't make for easy film-watching.

The cheap-looking special effects, embarrassingly clunky attempts at humor and one-dimensional characters are bad enough, but the PG-rated movie's most offensive crime is its uncomfortably lewd interactions between adults and kids.

An energetic, feel-good blend of comedy, romance and benign drama -- with a side dish of social commentary -- that works despite its strict adherence to the culture clash/generation gap formula.

The plot is neither here nor there, but you have to see this for the luscious cinematography by Chi Xiaoning, who loves shades of blue and amber.

Although deft editing provides neat segues, "Safety" suffers from a case of too many dramas, too little time. Characters are given no chance to develop and, too often, their behavior turns on a dime, hurtling off into a parallel universe of extreme acts.

Tried to turn this into a replay of its 2000 military-rescue hitBlack Hawk Down -- though, in the end, it's almost totally lacking in the serious hardware and viscerally paced action that propelled Ridley Scott's movie to the top of the box office.

The narrative is fractured, David Lynch-style. Everything eventually makes sense -- sort of.

Schmaltzy and endless.

Bale, one of the most intriguing actors of his generation, plays a young man rebelling against his liberal upbringing with a mix of bemusement and lost-puppy anguish, making this film as much about mothers and sons as struggling couples.

The best scene centers on neither Latifah nor Martin. Rather, it's the venerable Plowright delivering an a capella rendition of the slave spiritual "Is Massa Gonna Sell Me Tomorrow?"

Truthfully, it's all incredibly boring. Noé tosses in some dime-store existentialism ("Time destroys everything"), but this is a movie with not a whole lot on its mind except rank exploitation.

Breezy, entertaining and enlightening.

The promising tension between Gypsy and the arrogant Lucian never amounts to much, and the climax is comically melodramatic.

Wolman gets his point across, but he does so in such a predictable, contrived and sappy manner that viewers aren't likely to care. And the final plot twist is a cop-out.

For all his skill with a cue, the charisma-challenged Callahan is no Nia Vardalos in the acting department -- let alone a Paul Newman or Tom Cruise.

Would be a perfectly decent B-action movie if it weren't shipwrecked in the last act by laughably ridiculous plotting and a lazily executed climax.

Alternately fascinating and frustrating.

The gritty photography is a perfect match for the film's harsh realities, the script is taut (not a word or motion is wasted) and the acting is raw and realistic.

It takes a while to get used to the fractured narrative, but once done it is easy to put your mind on autopilot and go with the offbeat characters and events.

Less Spartan than some films shot under the Dogma "vow of chastity" (there's actually a little music), but it's raw enough to complement the very real emotions on display.

With so many worthy movies being made in Europe, it's a crime that something as mediocre as Erotic Tales gets a release here.

Ron Shelton effectively ratchets up the tension without resorting to the stylistic flourishes of a more recent flick about dirty cops, "Narc."

The two young actors are very engaging, but the chemistry between Pearce and Bonham Carter is less than zero and there's altogether too much heavy-handed, watery symbolism for comfort.

Ultimately, the immensely personable and talented lead actors manage to push aside the disquieting notion that this group of men are so emotionally stunted that they're happy to abandon their wives and children for the sake of a party.

So nasty, hysterical and long-winded -- and unintentionally makes capital punishment foes look so twisted -- you wish someone had administered a lethal injection to this dreck in its planning stages.

The film's staggering incompetence can be measured by the way it makes some of the most fascinating and heart-rending episodes in American history tedious.

Little is made of the cultural fusion aspect of their story, and ultimately the struggle-for-success tale is as homogenized as the music.

Needs less talk, more music.

Aside from one tasteful nude scene, this well-meaning if bland romantic drama plays and looks a lot like a "special" episode of "Dawson's Creek."

It's the little things that resonate in this tender and sincere tale of first love.

This blithe inattention to authenticity is perversely endearing, and the whole (overlong) shebang is so jolly and well-intentioned, that it's kind of fun. It's just not very good film-making.

A gorgeously shot endurance test that is impossible to get through on anything less than a full night's sleep and a double shot of espresso.

Beautiful to look at, with scrumptious period detail and a knowing performance by Choi Min-sik as the portly, goatéed painter. At the same time, Chihwaseon is slow and stilted.

This is a by-the-numbers rehash that will leave anyone much over 5 enormously grateful that, if you duck out before the lengthy end credits, it lasts just over an hour.

Mind-numbing, would-be comic-book franchise, which often seems as blind as its hero -- not to mention deaf and dumb.

It's a sugar cube laced with arsenic, a nasty little film whose mean-spiritedness is surpassed only by its mediocrity.

A remarkable accomplishment, an absorbing documentary about the joy of reading that's also a positively gripping literary mystery.

With so many worthwhile movies out there just waiting for a release, it's a shame that this tired drama is getting a run.