By the time the closing credits roll, you'll be ready to run out and hug a tree.

There's no real payoff - artistically or emotionally - in Gregory Harrison's gimmicky and tedious psychological thriller November, shot on ugly digital video.

The star of the movie is Caeli Veronica Smith, 12, an accomplished violinist who frequently performs in the park. Seeing her play in person would be worth the bus trip to Philly.

The subject is touchy, but Gund handles it with taste and compassion.

Like Roald Dahl's book, Tim Burton's splendidly imaginative and visually stunning - and often very dark and creepy - new version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is squarely aimed more at children than their parents.

The flick brings two hours of great big sloppy buck-wild laughs by morphing into a cross between "Meet the Parents" and "Some Like It Hot."

Way too long, too convoluted and too peppered with title cards...Even so, it's hard to dislike Don Roos' "Magnolia"-inspired triptych of interconnected comic tales about lies, sex and video.

Clever, racially and sexually provocative variation on "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

The Warrior may be mighty of sword but he is exceedingly limp of writing. We never learn why he went bad in the first place, or what causes his sudden conversion. If the audience is expected to do most of the work, we should be paid $10.50 each.

A gritty, well-acted, documentary-style drama.

Offers interesting views of ordinary life in Baghdad that Americans won't find on TV news. But the impact is lessened by the director's failure to let those who think the war is justified have their say.

By the time White gets around to condescending remarks... the film has become a sort of BBC "Hee Haw," meant to reassure Brits and New Yorkers that the South is indeed a land of pistol-toting, Jesus-praising gap-toothed freaks.

If you can check your brain at the popcorn stand and keep your expectations low, Dark Water is an OK genre exercise that maintains a consistently creepy tone.

A perfect storm of wooden acting, hackneyed direction, inane scripting and laughably cartoonish special effects produces a shapeless mess more wearyingly stupid than arch-villian Dr. Doom is evil.

The movie grows steadily more arresting as it goes on and saves its best parts for last.

Fast-moving, psychologically savvy.

Saraband -- the term means an erotic dance for two -- is like watching four people take turns trying to swim with one of the others clinging to an ankle. It's grim and gripping.

Scathing indictment of the tabloid media! Film at 11! That's how Crónicas sees itself, but all I could see was a scathing indictment of writer-director Sebastian Cordero's ability to put together a credible story.

You can't help wondering how prisoners who practiced Vipassana fared as free men.

HUGELY tedious and mostly incomprehensible.

As we learn, delightfully so, in Jeffrey Fox Jacobs' documentary A Sidewalk Astronomer, the Peking-born Dobson promotes the building and use of small, inexpensive telescopes to study the wonders of the sky.

Starts off bad, then tapers off.

Even when deadly silent, though, as he is through most of the film, Duris is brutally eloquent.

A campy, low-budget Romero homage that's badly in need of editing.

Jia's message is that globalization has failed to help the Chinese masses. We hear you, dude, but did you really need 143 minutes to get your point across?

Puts a face on the clerical sex scandals rocking the Roman Catholic Church.

Now that this technically impressive - but seriously flawed and self-referential - remake is finally in theaters to swell the July 4 weekend box office, conversation will doubtless shift to the lamest ending yet to a Steven Spielberg movie.

If you enjoy intelligent, challenging filmmaking, Tropical Malady is for you.