Spanning two decades in a little under two hours, Higher Ground is a well-acted if slow-moving drama that will reward adventurous audiences with fine performances and a thoughtful approach.

Graham Greene's guilt-and-gangsters tale "Brighton Rock" gets an even more melodramatic telling than in the 1947 film version courtesy of first-time director Rowan Joffe, whose histrionic adaptation screams "student film" with practically every frame.

There are superb performances by Iranian-Canadian Nikohl Boosheri as Atafeh, the more rebellious of the two women, and French-born Sarah Kazemy as the less-privileged Shireen.

Harks back to a 1960s idea of what a horror film should be.

So this bourgeois-bohemian movie is, in a way, as serene in its obliviousness to the exterior world as its man-child subject. It's not essential, but it is endearing.

Luc Besson keeps ralphing up scripts about beautiful lady killers, but that doesn't mean you have to keep seeing them. Case in point: Colombiana...[a] dull cable-TV-quality item.

A dumbass "Kick-Ass," the superhero comedy Griff the Invisible sits on the screen like a steaming lump of Kryptonite.

Mozart's Sister had a much smaller budget than "Amadeus," but Féret makes good use of his resources, even getting to film in the splendid halls of Versailles. The cast is excellent, be they relatives of the director or not. And the music, though not by a Mozart, is beautiful.

Gentle, tender and very French, The Hedgehog is cinematic poetry -- too bad about that prosaic plotting.

In the end, there's just a roomful of decent character actors in search of a point. For them, the titular Flypaper may have simply been a paycheck.

Should appeal more to those who like to watch stuff blow up than understand exactly why the carnage is transpiring.

The overlong Amigo has its heart in the right place, but its approach to complex issues is too simplistic to win over unconverted minds.

The Last Circus features garish costumes, grotesque ultraviolence and plenty of other assorted weirdness. Although not everybody's glass of sangria, it has the making of a cult hit.

Feeble comic one-liners and slow pacing combine for a routine fangfest in this remake of the 1985 film.

It has a certain commitment to its cause, and by that I mean it supplies the necessary flayings, slayings, beheadings and, um, a be-nose-ing, all of it dancing to the tune of those amusingly stilted He-Man declaratives - King James Bible cadences applied to comic-book visions. It knows it's a B movie, and gets on with it.

I might be able to get past that if Hathaway and Sturgess had any chemistry. There are no sparks whatsoever, and that's always a deal-breaker for me in romantic films.

A daunting work that will please movie lovers willing to invest their time and intellect. Now I look forward to Fiennes' next project, a feature about Grace Jones.

Rambling, mildly engaging micro-budgeted indie.

Little more than a rehash of old news.

It isn't every day that one witnesses, via a camera mounted with the driver, some of the final images in a man's life before he crashes into a wall at enormous speed. Whether you'll feel good about yourself after watching is up to you.

Fine for fans? Sure. This stuff is crack for fans. Crack is really bad!

Final Destination 5, which, despite its lowbrow story, turns out to be one of the fastest-moving films of the year, is a suspenseful and macabre exercise in dread for the absurdly cosseted.

Gut-bustingly funny -- perhaps this waning summer season's ultimate guilty pleasure.

Director Tate Taylor is a childhood friend of Stockett and hasn't done much else, which may be why The Help feels clumsy but well-intentioned.

It's basically left to the viewer to figure out the historical significance of this drug-fueled odyssey.

Tenderness and good intentions don't necessarily add up to a movie.

You'd be better off renting "Eddie and the Cruisers" (1983) than slogging through this latest, far more dire recycling of the same rock clichés.

A pointless drama that trafficks in cliché.