If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. That about sums up the amazing story of Edith Hahn Beer, an Austrian Jew who survived the Holocaust by passing herself off as Aryan.

Wait for the video, then fast-forward through every scene except the ones featuring Maria Mironova as a cheating wife.

Dull and creaky soap opera.

A leisurely, scene-setting start, peppered with authentic banter and winning localized humor, fleshes out the characters in Manito so well you feel as if you live alongside them.

An alarmingly unfunny French comedy where the two main characters are constantly yakking on a cell phone at an airport.

A toothless, dated Seventh Avenue satire with shaky script, direction and acting - is the movie equivalent of something you'd find on the deep-markdown rack at Daffy's.

Wildly uneven romantic drama.

Its "I see dead people" premise is shopworn, but Hong Kong brothers Oxide and Danny Pang manage to deliver real skin-prickling jolts with their minimalist horror film.

A lark for anyone who's willing to check their brains at the concession stand for 100 minutes.

An excellent way to teach children that movies don't begin and end with Hollywood blockbusters.

Filmmakers Sam Green and Bill Siegel tend to shy from tough questions, allowing their subjects to wax nostalgic about bomb-throwing as yet another youthful folly of the '70s. That's tougher to swallow than some boomers' claims they didn't inhale.

Plays like a bad daytime soap opera. The acting is amateurish. Ditto the uninspired script (continuity? what's that?) and direction.

The leaden pacing, somnambulant performances and incessant symbolism in nearly every shot will soon have you thinking that The Three Marias is three too many.

Low-end schlock that will likely land with a dull thud in the video remainder bin before the frost is on the pumpkin.

An unforgettable and complex portrait of a nuclear family in meltdown.

Watching The Italian Job in a theater makes you long for a fast-forward button - to skip past 90 eyeball-glazing minutes of generic caper plotting and cut to the chase, as it were.

Summer hasn't even started, but you won't likely find a better catch this season than Finding Nemo, a dazzling, computer-animated fish tale with a funny, touching script and wonderful voice performances that make it an unqualified treat for all ages.

The result is as enlightening for viewers as the journey was for Harris.

What's cutting- edge comedy for one generation can become generic filler for the next - that's the lesson to be learned from The In-Laws, a strenuous attempt to recycle a vastly funnier minor classic.

The actors don't seem to have been directed at all, and the movie is very sluggishly paced.

Has a sexy cast and is gorgeous to watch -- but it takes more than that to make a movie worth seeking out.

It's hard to go wrong with documentary subjects as articulate and intriguing as childhood friends John Flansburgh and John Linnell.

One of Miike's most violent and sadistic movies, filled with squirting blood, throat-slashing, limb-hacking and other forms of mutilation too gruesome to describe here.

An exploration of the way the sins of the father trickle down to his offspring, is dense with quirky characters and subplots all woven into a rather heavy-handed meditation on the evils of globalization.

Not for all tastes, but it demonstrates Loach's skill as a poet of gritty semi-documentary filmmaking.

It would be easy to mock or patronize them. Cinemania does neither. They seem quite satisfied with their lives, which is more than can be said for a lot of people with more conventional lifestyles.

Crudely animated, badly dubbed, incomprehensible, boring -- and headache-inducing -- attempt to wring a few more yen and dollars out of a thoroughly spent franchise.

It's a touching story that deserves to be told. Unfortunately, Slesin's presentation is conventional and uninspired (lots of boring talking heads). These heroes deserve better.