"I am surrounded by oceans of boredom," the campy Abraham complains at one point. It's a sentiment audiences are bound to share.

France's François Ozon's 5 x 2, which resembles Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage" told in reverse, could be played for laughs, or suspense -- who killed this marriage? -- or with the rueful irony of Stephen Sondheim's backward musical "Merrily We Roll Along."

The three are appealing characters, and you can't help but root for them in their quest, which gives a whole new meaning to the term "family values."

The writing, acting and direction are so amateurish that the only thing you'll care about is escaping the theater.

Ron Howard's bio-pic is an Oscar-baiting fairy tale that manipulates the audience at every turn of the clich.

The story meanders from competition to competition (up the ramps, down the ramps) and seems like it could end at any point. The characters are similarly underdeveloped.

A rousing, garage-band-style documentary.

Après Vous arranges for a normal guy to get stuck with a blithering wreck. But whenever things threaten to get really silly, it pulls back.

A beautiful but empty-headed documentary.

Never-quite-believable crime drama.

A fluffy and fun coming-of-age-in-Rome comedy, with a sparkling turn by its 16-year-old star, Alice Teghil.

Though the story may be cut from the same cloth as the female-empowering "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood," it's never as cute, cloying or overbearing as that movie eventually became.

Like mother, like daughter best sums up Or (My Treasure), a raw drama.

Magnificent shots of waterfalls and other natural phenomena abound, but it's far too late in the history of nature photography to expect anyone to gawk at them.

Isn't always easy to watch, but Bojanov's film is so compelling you just can't turn away.

"The Waterboy" was funny because Sandler doesn't look like a football player. When he swaggers around The Longest Yard starting fights and taking beatings without flinching, he only reminds us how little Steve McQueen and how much Woody Allen there is in him.

More than a few will agree with the penguins, who netted the film a PG rating with the utterance, "Well, this sucks."

A mild, slow-moving drama that belatedly tries to argue that graffiti writers are political artists, not an urban blight.

It doesn't measure up to Schlondorff's 1979 Oscar winner, "The Tin Drum," but it's compelling nevertheless.

If there is a poetry to losing, then this film has as much as the collected works of John Milton.

It could turn someone who never heard of the Flaming Lips into a devoted fan.

Tender and often extremely funny.

Eleonore Faucher, first-time director (and co-writer) of the French charmer Sequins, is well aware of Neymark's allure and sees to it that the young woman is seldom out of the frame.

A relentlessly dull film that's shot on eyeball-gougingly ugly digital video.

Maybe nothing here is supposed to be as scary as in the 1973 movie because this is merely the opening act. That's the problem with prequels, isn't it? It's like being asked to pay full price just to watch batting practice.

If it weren't for "Sideways," Second Best probably wouldn't have been released at all, but the earlier film made you root for a hapless schmo. This one doesn't, mainly because its protagonist is so obnoxious.

It remains for a tougher documentary to more forcefully trace exactly who benefits from this shameful practice -- multinational corporations and consumers who don't ask enough questions.

Arguably the darkest episode in the entire series (and the first to carry a PG-13 rating) the visually stunning "Sith" is also the fastest-paced and most accessible.