With its dopey fight scenes, grimy look and goopy gore, this movie is so far from ept that inept is the wrong word. It's anti-ept.

The NYU film grad steals liberally from Woody (especially "Annie Hall") - from camera placement to body language to plot twists to the whole Ingmar Bergman thing. That's not necessarily bad, if the project works. This one doesn't - it just annoys.

Transporter 3 is made for airplane viewing, and not just any airplane: an Eastern European one, on the flight from Hrubbishnik to Slutnya.

The movie boasts five Oscar winners. That figure exceeds by five the number of times I laughed at this cheap collection of icky jokes.

Smiling more than in all of his movies since "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" combined, Penn goes way deep and soulful in a highly ingratiating performance that's the one to beat for the Best Actor Oscar.

Sporadically entertaining, occasionally quite funny.

Edward's a remarkable young gentleman when you consider the hell he's been through: It turns out he's always 17, his fate to keep repeating high school, forever and ever. If that's my only option, kindly burn me at the stake.

A powerful account of how the American dream became a nightmare for one Laotian family.

Rappaport does a yeoman's job in this tonally confused oddity. The wonder is that Hal Haberman and Jeremy Passmore's Special is making it off the festival circuit and into theaters at all, however briefly.

One of those Deep Dark Secret movies, the dull indie Lake City combines a wholly uninteresting family mystery with a wholly unconvincing crime drama.

Nor does the movie try to use the game to make some larger point. Here's one: Even at its best and luckiest hour, Harvard can aspire only to equal Yale.

Baz Luhrmann's Australia has it all - unfortunately. With four major story lines and more endings than "The Return of the King," this ambitious 165-minute epic is the movie equivalent of an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Revenge is a dish best served with bullets, high explosives and giant rolling flameballs. In Quantum of Solace, James Bond orders the revenge buffet, deluxe.

Darkly hilarious, brilliantly acted.

The bickering and mishaps make for a semi-enjoyable if low-impact film that may appeal to the kind of nostalgics who buy Time-Life collections of '60s songmeisters.

An Irish indie that is well-observed and well-acted - but ultimately, not much more exciting than the love lives of its lead characters.

It would be easy to dismiss House of the Sleeping Beauties as a lewd male fantasy, but that would be ignoring the German film's deeper purpose as - in the words of the director, Vadim Glowna - a meditation on "transition, remembrance, mourning, guilt, loneliness, sex and death, eroticism and dying."

In the course of How About You, much champagne is consumed, pot is smoked, and a good time is had by all, the audience included. Redgrave even sings the title song.

Mostly We Are Wizards is a loving, if flawed, tribute to creativity and artistic freedom.

Four stars simply aren't enough for Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, which just may be the most entertaining movie I've ever labeled a masterpiece in these pages.

Role Models isn't a classic like "Superbad" or as hilarious as this summer's "Step Brothers," but it's excellent fun for males in the mental age bracket of 14 to 22, which is most males.

Combines a sketch-comedy premise with pacing like a philosophy seminar.

The bulk of the movie consists of scene after scene coyly setting up the same ironic juxtaposition, in the exact same way, about innocence vs. Nazism.

Tom Arnold plays the fatherly head of a child-prostitution ring and John Malkovich a sympathetic social worker - two clever casting twists that constitute the main interest in the grueling Gardens of the Night.

A by-the-numbers follow-up to the highly successful 2005 feature that was no great shakes to begin with.

LaBruce devotees will be tickled pink; others will be perplexed and/or disgusted.

Gini Reticker's embracing documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell shows how Taylor got his comeuppance from a coalition of tenacious Christian and Muslim women armed only with matching T-shirts.

There probably aren't enough futuristic Goth rock musicals, but Repo! The Genetic Opera is weak on a couple of things a musical needs: music and lyrics.