Cross "Get Shorty" with "State and Main" - Hollywood hustlers, colorful crooks, crafty poseurs, and a production crew on location - and you have the stuff of The Last Shot. One other thing: eliminate anything funny.

Raunchily entertaining farce.

Not a great movie, but it's affectionate. It reveals the cuddly side of Mac.

A slick comedy that's more fun than it has any right to be.

The film's save-the-world scenario may be the stuff of crusty cliff-hangers, its imagery may be borrowed, and its jaunty dialogue anything but deep, but there's something exhilarating going on here. It's darn sublime.

Catastrophically overdone.

The story is as basic as a peasant meal - and just as hearty.

Essentially a series of walking character sketches. The storytelling is slack and lackluster, the cliches rampant.

The imagery is uniquely that of Oshii, who deserves a place in the pantheon of visual artists.

Those who want something more substantial from a movie than a vid-game script with centerfold appeal will not find it in this noisy, bone-crushing survivalist flick inspired by the Game Cube diversion.

Apart from Luna's exquisitely subtle performance, Criminal's strongest suit is the so-artless-it's-artful cinematography by Chris Menges, which gives the impression of being shot by a fly on the wall. Similarly, Alex Wurman's jazz-infused score contributes to the improvisational atmosphere.

An unfortunate collision of earnest coming-of-age cliches and off-key acting, Evergreen almost, and certainly unintentionally, presents itself as parody.

A dementedly artificial and artsy film, a headache-inducing jumble of fractured narrative, flashbacks within flashbacks, and shifting perspectives.

If the shrill Italian melodrama Remember Me, My Love were a television soap opera, it would be called The Not-So-Young and the Restless.

A triumph for its director and its star.

Quite possibly the biggest ego trip ever to play Cannes, or anywhere else, at any time.

Its stars - especially the photogenic Leung and Cheung, fresh from Wong Kar Wai's jazzy romance In the Mood for Love - are wonderfully charismatic. And wonderfully athletic.

From its jungle forays to its waterfall tumbles to its deadly spider bites - is entirely, utterly unoriginal.

Fails to provide one essential ingredient: suspense.

It's a gently provocative film diary about tobacco and its mixed legacy.

This so-called comedy is a frayed string of anxious jokes about whether male bonding is manly or sissy.

Fry's film has the frantic energy and kaleidoscopic style of Waugh's feverish prose.

Offers a fascinating chronicle of the birth, glory days and waning years of a motorcycle-jacketed, bowl-haircutted quartet of middle-class geeks who unwittingly spawned the punk movement.

It is at once inspiring and troubling.

Has a jumpy, reality-TV kind of feel that adds to the story's sense of unsettling authenticity.

Delightfully creepy suspenser.

Anderson gets style points for the pyramid, though. The building - a combination of Aztec, Egyptian and Cambodian elements loaded with sophisticated gadgetry - totally rocks.

All four performances are strong and nuanced, which makes the film oddly compelling. At the same time, all four characters are hard to like, difficult to care about. They're like car-crash victims in a demolition derby of narcissism and lies.

Whenever Andrews - that incarnation of the sensible and the sensitive - glides on screen, PD2 sparkles.

Foxx makes what he does look effortless. He's the reason to see Collateral, as he walks into the frame and walks off with the picture.

Looking for plausibility in a farce is like looking for a million dollars in a box of breakfast cereal, but elements of real life can make a comedy resonate instead of thud. Little Black Book does the latter.

Without doubt one of the scariest, creepiest, gut-churningly unsettling pictures to come along in ages.

Sure, there are holes in The Manchurian Candidate, and tenuous coincidences and too-convenient plot devices. But Washington, Schreiber, Streep and company - and Demme - have managed to make all the malevolent machinations seem relevant again.

It's clean and cheerful entertainment, blithely piggybacking on a beloved classic. No wonder Anderson washed his hands of this project - the filmmakers tampered with and trampled on his magic formula.

A third-generation performer, this daughter of actor-director Ron Howard makes a stunning feature debut.

Both a concert film and a more intimate thing: a fascinating, fly-on-the-wall (or fly-in-the-dining-car) glimpse of some clearly blotto rock legends talking, singing, hanging out. The fact that a good number of them are now dead makes it doubly memorable.

The twist of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, a laugh-out-loud if not-exactly-good stoner comedy, is that its heroes, an entry-level investment banker and a brainiac pre-med student, are not dimwits.

Light and droll, but with an undercurrent of moody suspense.

The best performances are those of Portman and the resourceful Peter Sarsgaard (Shattered Glass) as Mark.

Like most Lee films, She Hate Me is gasp-worthy, with something to offend everyone. I will not say that I liked it. I will say that like "Bamboozled," it exasperates and resonates.

A boisterous and improbably entertaining action comedy.

Supremacy has thrills, but without Potente's presence, it loses its soul.

Catwoman, which talks about the "duality" inside all women (wild vs. docile, rapacious vs. cuddly), does have its guilty pleasures. Most of these come courtesy of ice queen Stone.

The beautiful Wright Penn has a harder time anchoring the free-spirited Clare in territory that feels honest and true - there's a stagey quality to the actress' performance that goes beyond the stagey quality of her character.

A thinker and an educator, Zinn has led a life of commitment and compassion, and the film offers a loving tribute.

A mostly charmless affair.

For its first two acts this flashy vehicle is an anodized titanium streamline baby. Then comes a robot rumble that brings the action to a crashing halt.

Moreno, with her wide, watchful eyes, owns the camera - and the film. Her performance is perfectly natural and profoundly moving. Maria Full of Grace is a remarkable picture, full of suspense and discovery.

Sadly, the combination of gauzy photography and cheesy music gives the film the aura of a fragrance commercial.

A handsome-looking movie that's full of the muted greens, browns and grays of the tony Hamptons, director Williams' tale never quite finds its footing.

An engagingly knuckleheaded comic vehicle for former Saturday Night Live trouper Will Ferrell.

That a detente between the cliques is unthinkable, that they could never eat at the same table, is one of many assumptions that makes Sleepover such a downer.

For those dazed and dazzled by surf anarchists Noll and Clark, Hamilton comes off as the sport's technocrat, but he boldly goes where no surfer has gone before.

This glum and grandiose new King Arthur has little to do with the Camelot monarch we've come to know through books and film.

This intelligent, postmodern biography from director Irwin Winkler and screenwriter Jay Cocks uses Porter's songs, by turns haunting and hilarious, to decode and reconstruct a life hinted at in the familiar words and music.

It's great to see an American filmmaker - and a successful one at that - willing to simply train his cameras on the actors and let them, and their characters, come to life.

Classy but ultimately unsatisfying film.

A pumped-up, plotless montage of extraordinary landscapes, colorful wildlife, and interesting people performing feats of derring-do.

This soulful tale of a teenage underachiever who exhibits flashes of genius is a surprise on the order of wandering the movie desert and finding the Garden of Eden.

I also like that when Our Hero starts swinging from skyscrapers, he's not just emulating Tarzan, but is working out the Newtonian physics of action and reaction.

Dramatically speaking, the movie version of The Notebook has a first act and a last act but lacks a transition. If it were a sandwich, it would be two slices of bread without filling.

The first family of black comedy goes at this bawdy burlesque with a broad brush. They get their laughs, but not without a lot of unsightly spillage.

As a character assassin, Moore fails, because you can't kill anyone with contempt and sarcasm. And as an independent counsel prosecuting Bush for bamboozling America, Moore likewise misses his mark because many of the exhibits he offers as evidence are emotional rather than factual.

Anyone with a sizable role in Dodgeball gets mired in the script's dissipated tone. Two of the climactic jokes involve "Happy Days" references. How tenuous is that?

It's a hokey piece of melodrama in a movie that cheats its characters - and its audience - out of some emotional truth.

As a piece of filmmaking, What the Bleep isn't exactly transcendent stuff. But as an entryway into new ways of thinking about the self, the universe, and the vast infinite whatnot of whatever (you know what we mean, oh wise one), this little movie is big.

Facing Windows is rich stuff. Maybe too rich. But thanks to fine performances and a grounded script, the pieces of this intriguing little puzzle all manage to fit.

Not even Chan's imaginative fight choreography redeems this folly.

An overblown hodgepodge of volcano-baked desertscapes, Egyptoid-gone-baroque architecture, and gladiator-geared storm troopers with goofy headpieces, The Chronicles of Riddick bears no resemblance to the movie that spawned its namesake.

Only Close, in a majestically, maniacally brittle demonstration of Stepford overdrive, has the courage to show how nutty the pursuit of domestic perfection is. In this mess of a film, she is perfection.

However terrific Murray is, if Antonio Banderas, mellifluous voice of Puss-in-Boots in "Shrek 2," went paw to claw with Garfield, Puss would definitely triumph.

So deadpan a film is Napoleon Dynamite, the story and the name of a gangly high school misfit in Preston, Idaho, that I can't say whether it was intended as a character study or a comedy.

In the end, Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban offers what neither of its predecessors, for all their wand-waving and witch-brooms, had: real magic.

While it's too slight a movie for overpraise, there are such a serenity of vision and clarity of purpose to these characters that we easily are caught up in the boys' struggle to reunite mother and child.

One of the film's cleverest devices is a "Personality Diagnostic Checklist" that equates corporate "serial behaviors" - exploitation, deception, greed, lack of empathy and guilt - with the antisocial makeup of a certifiable psychopath.

Never mind the cool, convincing effects (and they are cool), The Day After Tomorrow teems with illogical action, improbable coincidences. It's pure escapist fare, a popcorn gobbler.

A raunchy spoof of the disaster-movie lampoon Airplane! - does everything to get the laugh. And in the way that a broken watch is right twice a day, a shotgun comedy like this one occasionally hits its target.

Sobering and wildly entertaining.

Despite a strong cast and a willingness to lampoon the fundamentals of fundamentalism, Saved! isn't as funny, or as wicked, as it should be.

What Raising Helen doesn't offer is a competent (never mind compelling) performance from Hudson, who is as cute as lace pants and has approximately as much acting skill.

It's strong stuff.

There's nothing original, nor compelling, about Twist.

Shrek 2 is a dream, a sequel as exhilarating and riotously funny as 2001's top-grossing original.

The cast, headed by the divine Jamie Foxx, is better than the material. Director Daniel Taplitz is better than the material.

When the film focuses on the Trojans, it's splendid. But when Troy attempts to sort out the competing agendas of the Greeks, it drags.

Searing and hypnotic docudrama.

Very slight and, in the early going, slightly annoying, Coffee and Cigarettes is a long-borning Jarmusch project.

While the movie is content to be merely atmospheric, the performances convince you that here are two misfits who might be a perfect fit.

Béart, too beautiful for words, brings a complex swirl of emotions, elegantly restrained and marked with pain, to this finely wrought work.

Heartfelt and artfully shot, the movie - with little Rodrigo Noya, wearing big eyeglasses, in the title role - is too sweet for its own good, even as some of its characters do things that aren't terribly sweet at all.

Plays like "Sixteen Candles" meets "Beetlejuice." Yet for all the film's frantic pace, this plot plods, even for 'tweens at whom this suburban-girls-take-Manhattan fantasy is obviously targeted.

Instead of paying homage to these creepy creatures of bygone Hollywood, Sommers seems to be unwittingly lampooning them. The first few minutes of Van Helsing, shot in black and white, look like outtakes from Mel Brooks' gagfest "Young Frankenstein."

Half a century after its release, Godzilla couldn't be more current.

A movie every American should see, although parts of it are close to unwatchable - notably an operating room sequence in which a pair of surgeons performs a gastric bypass, or "obesity surgery," as they like to call it, on a dangerously overweight patient.

Envy makes a pretty entertaining three-minute trailer. If only they'd left it at that.

Unravels in a series of spooky dream sequences, dopey detective work, and a couple of richly hambone-ian De Niro soliloquies.

Laughably predictable and lamentably unfunny, Laws of Attraction practically creaks from the effort exerted by its cast, straining to bring snap and panache to a hackneyed exercise. Sno Ball, anyone?

Alternately intriguing then not, and, like its subject, features a lot of lip gloss and girl-on-girl zingers. And like most contemporary movies, Mean Girls has no ending.