Frantic and out of control - and great fun to watch.

An amateurish, pointless exercise in filmmaking.

Well worth seeing for the terrific performances.

It's hoary and clunky even by the low standards of contemporary thrillers.

There are times when the urban dialect is so thick, you wish the film came with subtitles.

This oddly cheerful, decreasingly dark comedy actually works and can boast some of the most enjoyable performances of the year.

A lovely, intelligent film from Spain about recognizable human beings with real-life problems.

A crass, mechanical attempt at a thriller that should have gone straight to video.

Features less than 10 minutes of music in its mercifully brief 83-minute running time.

Initially amusing but finally sour sex comedy.

Well worth seeing for Walters, whose comic and dramatic gifts are showcased to very entertaining effect.

The late Akira Kurosawa's shamelessly sentimental last film is a fond and fitting farewell.

Shapeless, tedious, hopelessly bad sequel.

Androgynous Clea DuVall's performance shines through a foggily told, vaguely acted coming-of-age tale.

Fascinating, beautifully photographed portrait of a vanished community.

A 21st-century equivalent of the early James Bond flicks.

Essentially a feature-length commercial for both the growing sport of competitive cheerleading and ESPN2 .

Tepid tale of star-crossed lovers in 1910 Wales.

Mostly an unfunny, rather dull affair.

Much less a satisfying movie than an intermittently funny 90-minute acting audition.

Fans will love this quick flick by director Todd Phillips, but it better serves as an introduction for the uninitiated.

Has an unusual intimacy and lack of condescension.

Difficult but rewarding.

Fails to deliver the dramatic punch.

Generally rises above the easy clichés you find in most such movies.

Sometimes hilarious but mostly sitcom-esque geezer comedy.

A vast improvement over Schenkman's previous effort, "The Pompatus of Love."

Its intriguing subject matter is diluted by too many bland performances.

Heavy-handed, predictable and almost completely unbelievable.

Bittersweet and often funny but overlong.

Unashamedly vulgar and exuberantly politically incorrect.

Vincent D'Onofrio does capture Hoffman's charisma and nuttiness - and he's the only reason to resist the temptation to skip this exasperating movie.

Generic variation on the overworked serial-killer genre.

Heck, it's great to have the big guy back.

Mostly ludicrous, but occasionally effective.

Disappointing and surprisingly crude.

Formulaic but surprisingly charming.

Walken gives a beautifully understated performance.

Sophisticated entertainment of the less-is-more school.

There are some decent actors and great costumes in this overly solemn compendium of rock clichés.

Ultra-glossy weepie turns out to be something of a guilty pleasure.

Entertaining, extravagantly emotional.

An ideal antidote to the big-budget bores that studios put out in late summer, The Tao of Steve is a charming, funny and refreshingly smart Gen-X romantic comedy in the tradition of "When Harry Met Sally" - with the bonus of an engagingly laid-back Southwestern flavor.

A real high in a season filled with unfunny comedies.

Sounds bleak, but turns out to be an absorbing and lively film.

Charles Busch's spoof of beach-party movies and psychological thrillers, an off-Broadway hit 13 years ago, stubbornly refuses to entertain in this unrelentingly dull film version.

Expertly directed, acted and written crowd-pleaser.

There's no limit to Coyote Ugly's crass shamelessness.

Boasts special effects that are really spectacular - too bad it lacks flesh-and-blood characters.

This inferior sequel is doomed by a lousy - and extremely vulgar - script.

Leconte turns up the erotic heat in the most gorgeously photographed black-and-white film since Wim Wenders' sublime "Wings of Desire."

Its superb performances, music, photography, dialogue, its rhythms of tone and theme all complement each perfectly.

Ranges from exquisitely sensitive to crass, but overall, it's an interesting effort.

Poetic but tedious and all but plotless.

Skin-crawlingly awful.

Under the direction of Allan Moyle ("Pump up the Volume"), Nairn, McCarthy and Balaban give confident, believable performances but overacting plagues the rest of the cast.

It's highly entertaining, even if it's almost entirely one-sided.

It's fascinating and moving all the same, both in its depiction of Iranian daily life and in its powerful portrait of female oppression.

The film is only 91 minutes long, but it seemed to stretch out for days.

Best watched while doing a crossword or reading the paper.

If you're able to check your brain at the popcorn stand, you'll stand a much better chance of enjoying this crowd pleaser.

Francois Ozon, perhaps France's hottest director of the moment, is often better creating stylish visuals than dramatically credible situations, but Criminal Lovers is never boring.

Even duller than the original, but will fulfill its function as a feature-length commercial for Pokemon merchandise.

Rather morbid.

A laughably bad B-thriller.

In spite of (its) flaws, Fear of Fiction is an intense film with many touching and funny moments.

There's enough wit, intelligence and theatrical intensity at work in Larry Kramer to overcome an occasional tendency toward politically correct smugness.

Fake-sounding dialogue, some over-deliberate performances and five amazingly trite linked stories.

A real crock.

Spectacular special effects and sets.

The static, claustrophobic movie is very much a filmed play.

Almost too creepy to be poignant, and generally funny only in an uncomfortable, squirm-in-your seat way.

It's Willis who delivers the goods in scene after scene, triumphing over a thin script, often bland direction.

Infuriating grab-bag of a movie.

Those with the stomach to sit through Decline will be rewarded with a lively, masterful documentary.

Comes as close to perfect as any movie I've seen lately.

There is probably an amusing movie to be made about camps that try to "rehabilitate" homosexuals - but this thuddingly stupid satire isn't it.

The gleeful teen-horror spoof that proves that the Farrelly brothers have no monopoly on outrageous, politically incorrect comedy.

This is one perfectly terrifying movie, an instant classic.

Works because they really are the focus - and they're excellently voiced .

It's so painful to sit through you eventually stop feeling sorry for the floundering cast.

While the film contains some terrific, realistically bloody battle scenes, it has a distinctly Germanic feel, both in its epic heaviness and in the peculiar way it revises the history of the American Revolution.

The film's earthy frankness is refreshing.

Doesn't quite reach the heights - though it does plumb the depths - of its hugely popular predecessor. But it will have an enormous, appreciative audience doubled over with belly-busting laughs.

Like many first films, Boricua's Bond is wildly uneven.

It is not only an amazing technical accomplishment, it's also the wittiest and best-voiced animated movie to come along in years.

In the end, it is inadequate, juiceless storytelling that deprives Titan A.E. of any dramatic force.

Shaft is what summer action flicks should be... thanks to superior writing, acting and direction.

Transcends ironic grunge-glamour and achieves a beguiling combination of dark comedy and genuine sweetness.

If you go with the flow, there's seductive imagery and a terrific performance by John Malkovich as a decadent baron.

It's a film noir spoof, replete with hard-boiled narration, lounge-music soundtrack and dramatic black-and-white photography.

Maddeningly pretentious and often slow to the point of tedium, Humanite is also hauntingly original and truly strange.

Butterfly doesn't require much knowledge of history to appreciate, but it really isn't suitable for very young audiences either.

Calling Boys and Girls the year's worst movie makes it sound more entertaining than it actually is.

Contains too many weak performances and predictable lines to succeed, but it's probably the best rave movie so far.

A self-indulgent chronicle of Chris Roe's whiny power struggle with his father over where to eat dinner in various exotic locales.

It is often as powerful as it is elegantly shot. Unfortunately, Szabo tends to tell this rather predictable tale in an obvious yet uneven way.

Branagh's attempt to meld Shakespeare's densely verbal early comedy with Broadway show tunes fails, thanks to stunt casting, poor singing and dancing, and the incompatibility of the two art forms.