The result? A briskly self-aware, thoroughly stage-struck portrait of a theatrical portrait.

All of this is at once predictable and implausible -- a two-hander of a story so overplotted and overpopulated that by the time it's winding up, the question isn't so much Is Anybody There? as it is, "Why on earth are so many bodies here?"

The filmmakers have mostly cast from Dominican playing fields rather than from acting studios -- Algenis Perez Soto, the accomplished first-time performer who plays Miguel Sugar Santos, was himself a teen ballplayer -- so game and practice sequences have an easy authenticity from the start.

After a while, you can see the setups happening -- and once you do, the careening gets predictable. Which gets old, really fast.

Laughs? Schmaltz? Life lessons? They're all there in Sean McGinly's pleasantly lackadaisical script, but not in such abundance that they seem reason enough to see the film.

Allowed remarkable access, presumably because of the familial connections, Rademacher comes up with compellingly unfamiliar documentary footage.

The director recycles some of the better effects from his gladiator epic "300"...and he's being so faithful to the work of comics artist Dave Gibbons that he might as well have used the graphic novel's illustrations as a storyboard.

The title is shorter, but that's the only thing remotely diminished about 12, Nikita Mikhalkov's exuberantly Russian reworking of Reginald Rose's 1950s jury-room play, "12 Angry Men."

Hard to say what's dumber, the premise or the characters in William Olsson's trashily preposterous An American Affair.

Selick puts his real faith not in the gimmickry that Coraline's audiences will think they've shown up for, but in the stronger virtues that they'd likely view as old-fashioned: character, and story, and handmade figures, handmade milkshakes, handmade blades of grass, each one moving utterly persuasively as he and his animators tweak it, frame by frame.

You'd think the weakest link in Fanboys would be that it's all in-jokes, but they're actually not so "in" that a casual fan won't get them.

Tykwer being something of an architecture freak, controlling Third World debt also requires a trip to the rooftops of Istanbul, to Zaha Hadid's BMW factory, and to Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin. All great fun in a story that's more kinetic than compelling.

There's no chemistry between Zellweger and Connick, and there's not a moment in which anything anyone does feels remotely plausible.

The title is drawn from a verse Hannah wrote just before she was captured -- and that impulse is enough to sustain audience interest.

It's all handsomely produced, but none of the characters (save perhaps Bettany's fire-juggler) has a distinctive enough personality to make much of an impression.

It's an inspiring story, if one that doesn't need quite as much poetic inspiration as Ed Zwick's movie insists on giving it, with dialogue that's too often ornate and parable-inflected.

Good demonstrates the surprising power of character flaws in drama. How else to explain that the portrayal of a good man who does nothing in Good should prove more dramatically compelling than the stories in "Valkyrie" and "Defiance" of good men who did good?

Director Sam Mendes makes '50s suburbia a persuasively suffocating place — he did the same for '90s suburbia in "American Beauty," remember.

As action movies go, Valkyrie is pretty short on action.

A little slow for the very youngest kids -- though the messages it imparts are certainly ones you'll want them to hear.

Dunno about the Earth, but time certainly stands still for a goodly portion of Scott Derrickson's expensively produced but utterly boneheaded remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Doubt cast a long moral shadow on Broadway but seems blunter on screen, largely because Shanley's fussy directorial notions ... are less nuanced than the religious and moral arguments he's given his principal characters.

A case is being made here that it wasn't really Frost who did Nixon in: It was Nixon's old nemesis, the TV camera.

Alas, there's scarcely a moment of ingenuity or surprise in this tale of the supremely smug, unmarried-but-made-for-each-other Brad and Kate.

What sets this film entertainingly apart from most civil-rights sagas, though, are a slew of relaxed, offhandedly persuasive performances, along with the flamboyance of hippie-era San Francisco.

A bit abrupt about its mood-changing revelations and a bit sketchy about its put-out-to-pasture characters. But it's a warmly engaging romp nonetheless.

Romantic, action-packed and always held together by an intriguing social conscience, Slumdog Millionaire is a rapturous crowd pleaser.

The faux-naive point of view probably worked better in the novel; the literalness of film renders certain of the story's conceits overly precious.

Without their guns, the men prove surprisingly helpless. And when a representative of a larger pan-African community tells them that if they want the women to stop treating them like children, they must behave responsibly, you sense a corner has been turned.

Now, it's not fair to ask that a romantic comedy be entirely realistic, but some level of plausibility would make the jokes go down easier, as would a touch of delicacy in the writing.

Synecdoche, New York is one heck of a head-trip.

A surprisingly unsurprising film.

The film is more appealing for its scenery, which is as breathtakingly blue as you'd expect, than for its drama.

It would be churlish to parse the logic of the underlying situation too closely when all the filmmakers are really after is a heartwarming little object lesson in tolerance.

So relentlessly upbeat that it won't take long before you're wondering just how the director plans to wipe the smile off her face.

Though these two really grow on you, what's almost more remarkable than Nick, Norah or their playlist (which may not be infinite, but really does include some great music) is the quirky, melting-pot world director Peter Sollett creates around them.

Moore is always watchable, Ruffalo and Bernal get a nice rivalry going without ever establishing eye contact (as it were), and Danny Glover has some nice moments in an underdeveloped part as an older man who finds, to his benefit, that love is blind.

Idiotic, if reasonably kinetic, Eagle Eye -- in which Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan spend the better part of two hours urgently answering phone calls and dodging hurtling machinery -- is every bit as over-edited as it is under-thunk.

Even in a film that clocks in at a quasi-epic 2 hours and 40 minutes, that's just too much narrative. And matters aren't helped by the fact that Lee, who has never staged battle sequences before, hasn't quite got the rhythms or camera angles right.

There's something centrally pat and predictable about the coincidence-laden story, and by the time they get to Vegas, The Lucky Ones has been all but done in by a surfeit of serendipity.

Director Saul Dibb, presumably knowing that this is pretty standard stuff for a costume epic, occupies us not just with the usual visuals -- of his star drifting through exquisitely furnished estates, draped in rich silks and brocades -- but also with some intriguingly offbeat sights.

Slack, morally ambiguous, decidedly sub-Dexter serial-killer-cop story that's been cooked up for them (De Niro/Pacino).

The performances are nicely calibrated, even when the director isn't meshing them into a persuasive whole. Summer Bishil makes Jasira an appealing naif -- smart, precocious and curious, if too easily led by hormones.

Claude Miller's ravishingly shot drama A Secret gives up its titular mystery early, so it may seem odd to speak of the suspense it generates.

Kaplan keeps the story breezy and brisk, and provides his down-to-earthily modern fairy tale with an appropriately other-worldly visual style.

Probably the most artful of the Apatow Factory comedies so far, but that's not to suggest it doesn't take being sweetly dumb just as seriously as the rest.

The students all say and do more than they should in the filmmaker's presence, which certainly makes them watchable -- sort of a slow-motion train wreck.

Spectacularly self-absorbed protagonists step on each other, jockeying first for position, and ultimately for survival.

This is a world of dinner jackets and evening gowns, casual jaunts to Venice and Morocco; it's about elegance, style, money and perhaps too heady a mix of drink, religion and intrigue.

Jack, as played by Andrew Garfield, comes across as agonized, desperately anxious to get things right -- something you might also say about the filmmakers, who have turned Boy A's very particular story into a scary, universal and wrenching social statement.

The real relationship here is between a Batman in existential crisis and a Joker who'd love to leap with him into the abyss -- tight-a--ed yin and anarchist yang in a fantasy franchise that Nolan has made as riveting for its psychological heft as for the adrenaline rushes it inspires at regular intervals.

This plot is not being taken terribly seriously. It's mostly a pretext for songs that are mostly a pretext for acting silly.

By the end of the film's scant 72 minutes, the conceit is on the verge of wearing out its welcome, but by then, it's created so much stomach-churning, quease-inducing, uproariously embarrassing humiliation for Trevor that it's become all but irresistible.

For Soldini, even bleakness has a poetic side, and his imagery is occasionally breathtaking here -- never more so than in the film's final tableau, which elegantly connects a Renaissance fresco Elsa had been working on before the couple's fall from grace with a strikingly similar real-life image suggesting the possibility of a renaissance in their marriage.

The story's not really about youthful indiscretions. It's more a tale of a young man struggling toward maturity, even as an older man struggles to abandon it. With that story, and that offbeat friendship at its center, The Wackness will likely strike plenty of chords with plenty of audiences.

The first hour of Wall-E is a crazily inventive, deliriously engaging and almost wordless silent comedy of the sort that Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton used to make.

By movie's end, director Marcos Carnevale has made it possible for you to see Elsa through Fred's eyes. Love has bloomed late -- but with sweet exuberance -- in this romantic charmer.

None of them -- not one, not for a moment -- is remotely funny.

If what audiences are looking for is a thrill ride, or even a pervasive eeriness, The Happening's just not happening.

Though the film's simple story is squarely aimed at tots, DreamWorks' digitizers have referenced Eastern visual styles -- everything from delicate Chinese screens to flashy Japanese anime -- to enliven the look of the film.

What's more annoying than the crassness, really, is the directorial sloppiness that results in a virtually mirthless first half-hour and a slow build to chuckles thereafter.

If this fabulously decked-out foursome is self-absorbed enough to be inadvertently cruel on occasion, they also suffer lots of guilt -- though their angst is rendered somewhat less angsty for viewers by the zingers, the designers, and the cheerfully objectified men on display.

What possessed Liv Tyler to take a role in this sadistic, unmotivated home-invasion flick.

Stuart Gordon's inventions -- vivid, gruesome and occasionally quite funny -- offer a just-deserts ending and make both characters surprisingly active participants in their fates.

Daniel Craig brings us a new James Bond in Casino Royale. He's not only rugged, fearless and — when the chips are down, as they often are in this poker-faced thriller — a lethal weapon. He's also vulnerable.

A fine family drama...Though the film is marked by overtones of "Beloved," the Jonathan Demme film of Toni Morrison's book, it's worth seeing on its own merits.

The way the movie handles cycling, which isn't one of cinema's more heavily covered sports, introduces another entire dimension and transforms Breaking Away from a nice character piece to a literally breathtaking story.

Brian's Song is a classic in a genre that is -- perhaps for good reasons yet unnamed -- films that make grown men blubber and sometimes women look on with stern wonderment. [07 Mar 1998]

Sprawling, and hugely ambitious, and containing a glorious Wellesian Falstaff who is as majestic in folly as he is in girth.

As with a great silent film, one gets the picture just by watching the pictures, and the film is as good with the sound off as it is with it on.

In this movie, real history, in the form of the people who actually knew George Gershwin and performed his music, makes a bigger and truer impression than the Hollywood fabrications.