If Stealth were a recruitment film for aircraft-carrier duty, one would be tempted to say, "Mission accomplished." As a feature film, it's a washout.

Though a fine specimen of cultural anthropology, The Aristocrats is too shapeless to be satisfying as a film.

Tony Takitani, fablelike and beautiful, requires a certain amount of patience, but its small, peculiar charms work their way into your soul.

A funny, sad and absolutely lovely film.

A weird fusion of blaxploitation and American indie, built on a template of old-style, follow-your-dream Hollywood drama. But it works - sometimes magnificently.

The Island could be read as a metaphor for societal ills (commercialization, conformity, pharmaceutical overkill) if it weren't so shamelessly dumb. And dumb it is.

Thornton swills the Matthau role with the unslakable thirst of W.C. Fields and idiosyncratic sexuality of Johnny Depp. So this is what Bad Santa does during the off-season.

Completely unhinged, a garish and gonzo walk on the wild side.

It's the emotional equivalent of a big shrug.

It's an action movie that's also an intellectual-action flick.

While Last Days succeeds as a nature documentary, Van Sant fails to penetrate human nature. The result is a portrait without a face.

Ambiguous in a satisfying, puzzling sort of way, November offers a triptych of scenarios revolving around a grim moment.

It succeeds as a vivid video album of the metropolis at the millennium, a lilting musical album of the varied carols Americans play and an all-too-rare depiction of what the pursuit of happiness actually looks like.

A mischievously inventive, surreal entertainment, one that celebrates not only Whipple Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight and Nutty Crunch Surprise but Busby Berkeley, Stanley Kubrick, the Beatles, and the outer-space acting choices of one Johnny Depp - not to mention those bushy-tailed rodents in all their bustling splendor.

Hopelessly raunchy, helplessly romantic, and wickedly, wickedly funny.

Bills itself as a comedy but unfolds as the drollest of dramas, an extended-family album for the age of abortion, adoption and donor sperm. It's a cheeky story about turning the other cheek.

What begins as Lafcadia's journey into the heart of darkness ends as his pilgrimage into the light. Stunning.

While his movie lacks the psychological resonance of "Rosemary's Baby" or "The Sixth Sense," it easily equals their creep-out quotient.

There's nothing remotely fantastic about this Fantastic Four.

Loses itself in melodrama, caricature and narrative missteps.

Saraband, flat and static both visually and thematically, doesn't begin to approximate the austere beauty of the director's art-house classics.

A taut, tricky thriller.

Beautifully shot, in long, fluid takes, The Beat That My Heart Skipped is that rare thing: a remake that improves on its source.

For the first 100 minutes of his 117-minute film Spielberg holds the audience in a grip of fear. When Ray and Rachel take refuge in the storm cellar of a survivalist (a miscast Tim Robbins), the director's grip relaxes only a bit, but the film never recovers from this excursion into the Gothic.

One thing Kidman is not is a clown. She thinks fizzy and dizzy and klutzy are funny. She is mistaken. To be a clown requires a kind of witchcraft.

Oddly enough, though Land of the Dead is more clever and grand than Romero's early classics, it is not as haunting.

Rize shows how clowning led to krumping, and argues that its practitioners' fierce dedication to dance has saved countless kids from drugs, crime and gangs.

Potter explores midlife ennui, (middle-)East-West tension, theology, biology and the irrational nature of romance in this ambitious, if ultimately sketchy, drama.

This remake is about half of a very likable film. But in movies (as in auto races) it isn't how you start, it's how you finish. And Herbie should have kept something in the tank for the late going.

Once upon a time there were made-for-television movies. Now there are made-for-television movies for movie theaters. The Perfect Man, another anemic Hilary Duff vehicle, is a case in point.

Heights manages to make the lives of all these beautiful people seem quite tedious. Despite their accomplishments, the only thing they seem suited for is hailing cabs.

Although Me and You and Everyone We Know requires patience on the part of the viewer - to get past the faux naivete of its grown-up characters, to get past its deadpan arty tone - Miranda July's feature debut is worth the time.

An exquisite exploration into the realms of seduction, obsession, deception and disillusionment.

Burton gives us SuperDude; Nolan gives us Sir Subdued.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith kicks off with panache and star power - and quickly wears out its welcome.

This one is so bad that even Ed Norton couldn't get this mess to move through the sewer.

A case of a yummy yarn spoiled by cheesy visuals.

It is almost inevitable that Miyazaki, often compared to C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling, should have found in Diana Wynne Jones a kindred spirit.

Cool, clinical and not altogether convincing.

Cinderella Man is not a movie about boxing, but about this boxer who personified the heart and hope of 1935.

The film doesn't hold together in any compelling way.

Thoroughly engaging.

Salvadori's choppy film never establishes a comic rhythm.

Paolo Virzi's film looks at school as the microcosm of society and at fathers too self-absorbed to be there for their daughters. He combines the themes played in "Mean Girls" and "Look at Me" and makes them vibrant.

Sisterhood is Stand by Me for girls, as sullen, plucky, melodramatic, exuberant, athletic, graceless, crafty, artistic, arrogant, modest, helpless and resourceful as its teenage heroines.

What makes the new movie almost bearable is the byplay between Sandler and Chris Rock.

This slight and amusing 'toon is mostly a trip designed for the kiddie crowd to take in.

A first film with a deft comedic touch and a trio of charming stars, Saving Face isn't deep - but it doesn't profess to be.

For the casual viewer who feels like maybe all the Sith hoopla is worth checking out, well, it's like tuning in to the season finale of "24" without having watched a minute of its lead-up episodes.

A stale and stupid thriller.

For soccer aficionados, Kicking & Screaming boasts some fairly cool play, courtesy of Alessandro Ruggiero and Francesco Liotti, two kids who play "the Italians."

Monster-in-Law, where Bridezilla meets Godzilla, is a comedy so anemic, so toxic, that even Dracula wouldn't bite.

Freeman and Hoskins lend the film a level of artistry it doesn't really deserve. Unleashed has a vivid concept, but savagery and sentimentality make strange costars.

A crowd-pleaser of immense proportions.

Ma Mere, with its sun-drenched sense of dread and band of reckless, unlikable characters, isn't very good, but that doesn't stop the actors -- especially the intrepid Huppert -- from going all the way.

Things get a little tricky by the end, but it's the sort of trickery that's immensely satisfying.

Kings and Queen, full of passion and humor, madness and grief, is close to a masterpiece. It's like life: messy, impossible, elating, unavoidable.

A sturdy and cohesive representative of what tends to be a flimsy and tawdry B-movie genre. It even has a moral: People who live in wax houses shouldn't start fires.

It's hard to say with assurance whether the flaw is in Bloom's performance or in Monahan's politically correct conception of Balian, precociously secular for a Crusader.

A deft, affecting drama about childhood sexual abuse and its lifelong scars.

A comedy about friendship, faith and the acting life, Le Grand Role is unabashedly corny and tear-jerking - and still quite likable.

Brothers is about how people change, how they can rise to an occasion, or sink to one. It's a tale of love and allegiance, of truth and the cruelties that men can bring to bear on one another.

Crash fools around with chronology in a Tarantinoesque way that brings its story full circle. You could argue that as events, and people, merge, Haggis' spiky screenplay (cowritten with Bobby Moresco) gets to be, quite simply, too much.

The real reason to see this slight but interesting documentary is to watch and listen to the radiant Aury.

Lost in a time warp of its own doing (or non-doing), Hitchhiker's Guide just doesn't seem terribly original.

Appalling sequel.

There is a funny movie to be made from the outrageous egos and excesses of rap music. Death of a Dynasty is not that movie.

A film that leaves cinephiles breathless and the mainstream movie maniacs scratching their heads.

A wistful little thing about regret, jealousy and love.

The film feels long, the editing is choppy, and the plot strands are at once convoluted and cliched.

Though I liked Love's unhurried pace and oddball digressions, its obligatory romantic-comedy resolution seemed too schematic for what had preceded it.

With no-nonsense narration by Peter Coyote and a soundtrack that's at once apt, ironic and really, really good, The Smartest Guys in the Room is anything but a dry dissection of a major Wall Street debacle.

With his beard and '70s clothes, Reynolds looks like Val Kilmer playing Jim Morrison. Before things go precipitously south, he gives an endearing performance that proves he's ready for far more substantial roles than Van Wilder.

A heartfelt, '70s-era coming-of-age story with a prologue and epilogue set in the present day, marks the filmmaking debut of actor David Duchovny, who also wrote the symbol-studded screenplay.

On the evidence of Palindromes, the most misanthropic, depressing, hopeless film in memory, I'd hazard that for Solondz, childhood is a problem without a solution.

The left hand doesn't know who the right hand is shooting in State Property 2, Damon Dash's prodigiously muddled thug-life sequel.

Spectacularly silly and perversely entertaining.

Fever Pitch works. At times, it works brilliantly.

The upside: Chow has energy and invention to burn. The downside: He doesn't know when he blisters his audience.

Where My Wife was offbeat and original, Happily Ever After gets bogged down in midlife-crisis cliches.

To say that Sin City is a guy movie - and an often brutally misogynist one, at that - would be an understatement.

Brilliant, blistering account of the many ways fame deforms a star, his family and his fans.

lLght and likable - a low-budget "Steel Magnolias" without pretense.

A comedy as likable as its stars.

A gut-punch of a movie, a potent, mesmerizing drama.

Engagingly odd and full of sad, funny moments.

Deliriously funny if instantly forgettable.

An unsteady empowerment film for 'tweenage girls and their moms, Ice Princess boasts more spark than sparkle.

An unusually atmospheric outing. Splatter fans may be disappointed, because Nakata isn't interested in a body count.

The dialogue rings tinny in the ear, as if enunciated in the phony arc of a stage light.

Hostage may well be the first action flick cited both for child abuse and audience abuse. In a singularly sadistic and degrading way it has something to offend everyone.

Cluttered as it is colorful, Robots is a visual delight.

Binder has written himself a scene-stealing supporting role as Shep, sleazeball producer.

Leaves you feeling rich - and richly satisfied.

Castellitto directed and stars in this unbearable film, a case study of a surgeon with a raging madonna-whore complex.

Directed with an easygoing grace by Campbell Scott, has the feel of a coming-of-age novel.

How to count the ways that Be Cool isn't? For one thing, it looks terrible: grainy, ill-lit, edited with blunt, rusty shears.

The Jacket is both a genre movie and a symptom, a gothic treatment of Gulf War syndrome.