As Kym, Hathaway runs an astonishing gamut of emotions, from anger to fragility and from hurt to regret - without ever seeming actress-y, like Nicole Kidman. Start clearing that mantelpiece, Anne.

Hammer, whose blunt name belies the movie's many subtle touches, has his own distinct style. He also has an enormous trust in the audience to sort out this wounded family's miseries without the assistance of narration or even a musical score.

With its array of chases and shootouts and a sinister political plot, the movie at least holds your attention and keeps things brisk-ish. But every scene still bears the tags of the place from which it was stolen.

Aims straight for the tear ducts as well, but this weepie is a dry well.

Lee's framing device - which ends with a head-scratching fantasy - doesn't work. At. All.

CHOKE tries to be dirty but manages merely to be dingy.

Cheap, ignorant, tone-deaf and condescending, but what's strangest about it is that it actually thinks it's pro-soldier even as it portrays vets home on leave as foolish (Rachel McAdams), desperate (Tim Robbins) and dishonorable (Michael Pena) while playing all three situations for laughs.

If the script serves any purpose at all, it is to allow jocks to show off their buff bodies. They're hot, but not worth 12 bucks at the box office.

The entire script, which boils down to a hopelessly embarrassing lesson about "this beautiful place that can make people live again," seems to have been written within arm's reach of a bong.

Compelling.

Starts out as a thriller inspired by that city's 2005 Tube and bus bombings but gets bogged down in a family soap opera.

It's very sad to watch Keaton here. In the most excruciating scene, she gets drunk in a bar, staggers up to a microphone and starts to sing, or rather squawk. For those of us who still revere Annie Hall and her blissfully unaffected rendition of "Seems Like Old Times," this is sacrilege.

A documentary that uses against Atwater images of lynch mobs, decades-old racist comments of his onetime boss Strom Thurmond, and a clip of Bryant Gumbel calling him "the architect of the evil campaign."

It boggles the mind to think that Elite Squad won the top prize at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival in February.

The twists are executed superbly, right up to a climax that fits the David Mamet definition of what makes for a perfect ending: It is both surprising and inevitable.

Molly Shannon is dementedly charming as Eva.

Lakeview Terrace holds your interest, though the bad faith on all sides makes it something of an endurance test.

An intelligent look at family dynamics set in a boring Washington State suburb where Bible-thumping Mormons come knocking on your door.

Beautifully photographed by Dean Semler, Appaloosa is the best Western since "Open Range" and shows there's still life in this most unfashionable of genres.

In his directing debut Battle in Seattle, actor Stuart Towns end does an impressive job (on a shoestring budget) of re-creating the massive street protests that forced the cancellation of the World Trade Organization summit in 1999.

Everything is predictable three scenes in advance, and it's all stale, stuck, stolid.

Fanning gives a sensitive and fairly impressive performance. But like her over-the-top movie family, Hounddog is still trailer trash of the worst kind.

It examines other crises faced by JFK - Cuba, the Berlin Wall, civil war in Laos, the insurgency in Vietnam - and finds that in each case Kennedy chose talk over tanks. (Often, he went against advice of aides and generals.)

The film has enough funny lines and weird situations - some comedy business with a sex chair lovingly constructed by the Clooney character is the highlight - that it could age into a cult film like "The Big Lebowski."

A total disaster.

A slow-moving, ridiculous police thriller that would have been shipped straight to the remainder bin at Blockbuster if it starred anyone else.

According to Irene Salina's eye-opening documentary Flow, 500,000 to 7 million US residents are sickened by tap water each year.

The result is a hodgepodge of plots and styles, a fault compounded by stiff acting and, except for a few scenes, wooden direction.