Filmmaker Kormákur orchestrates all this with broad strokes and winking intrigue, although the line between hambone melodrama and irony-tinged satire gets walked across a few too many times.

It's a beautiful, grim tale.

A love song to the new Europe (Klapisch's original title: Euro Pudding) and a snapshot of a polyglot gang on the cusp of kind-of-reckless youth and responsibility-burdened adulthood.

All of the elements that made The Matrix a mass-cult phenom -- breathtaking physical gymnastics wedded to the brain-cramping mental and spiritual kind -- resurface in Reloaded.

Most parents will find the movie has the familiar feeling of one of those kid birthday parties where the little ones are on chocolate highs and the adults run out of scheduled activities after 20 minutes.

Made in a forthright, unfancy style and utilizing a cast of born naturals, Washington Heights deftly draws parallels between father and son's complicated relationship and the tensions that pulse through this predominantly Dominican American community.

A postfeminist valentine to the Paleolithic days of Woman Power when dinosaurs walked Manhattan in heels with matching handbags.

Riddled with romantic and political cliches but is often redeemed by the charismatic performances of Braun and Sullivan.

In the end, what the movie is about: time and life, and what we do with them, and what we regret that we didn't do.

A story of obsession and honor, deception and self-deception set against a sharply etched landscape of political upheaval and intrigue. Malkovich orchestrates all this with assuredness, and Bardem, looking weary and worn, inhabits his character with a realness, a truth, that's downright spooky. And beautiful.

An unflashy but fascinating meditation on addiction and greed. The junkie was clearly Mahowny, but the greed, in a way, was everybody else's: the bankers', their flush clientele's, and the casinos', all busy feeding his habit.

As it is, most of X2's action is restricted to the Northeast Corridor, with a climactic face-off in the western Rockies, where, in typical blockbuster fashion, everything goes kablooey and ka-bam.

Lizzie McGuire is an old-fashioned, harmless dolce, made all the more charming by Duff's winning appeal.

Not an easy movie to watch.

I love this movie, and I love the pride, spirit and sportsmanship of the kids who represent the best of American pluck and luck.

Cusack is especially good in a role that's got more (and less) going on under the surface, while Peet offers up another coltish, trash-mouthed vamp.

Best of all is Hoffman, who hasn't had this much obvious fun since he played Hollywood producer Stanley Motss in "Wag the Dog."

An exotic throwback to the kind of movies that John Huston used to make, where on-the-lam expatriates, tubby guys with tinny accents, and sinister locals convene in a ramshackle but seductive foreign burg -- and corruption, conflict and come-ons from a sultry female or two ensue.

The biggest surprise of his film is that what begins in sentimental cliche concludes with melancholy insight.

The film is an accelerated version of MTV's perennial reality series, "The Real World," only with more drinking and more sex. The results, however, are the same.

Think Jerry Lewis doing Eminem, or maybe it's Eminem doing Jerry Lewis (or maybe it's Pauly Shore doing Vanilla Ice), and you've got B-Rad.

Terrific filmmaking, but it's hard to leave Moodysson's picture without feeling much of anything except hopelessness. Utterly.

The results are exhilarating, thrilling, and extend the wingspan.

The worst sin is the way the film borrows and corrupts the gravity-defying action style of Yun-Fat's international hit, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

A girls-just-wanna-have-fun farce.

Funnier than his criticism of egos on the rampage is Guest's rare talent for double-edged satire that tweaks one convention by means of another.

Each actor is unusually watchful and wily, and their actorly competition underscores the one-upmanship of their characters.

"Rebel Without a Cause" with a debate club, Better Luck Tomorrow is a sharp, smart slice of suburban angst among the high school overachiever set.

His routine about the differences between cat lovers and dog lovers demonstrates how perceptive and just flat-out funny he can be when he's not trying so hard to shock us.

A meditation on guilt, remorse and redemption -- is unrelentingly heavy.

A dour-faced but sublime comedy about the kindness of strangers -- and about the strangeness of people who find themselves in oddball moments of grace.

Designed as the ideal confection to attract a young girl or teen, What a Girl Wants will more likely hook their mothers.

A high-concept hostage drama of absolutely no value to anyone -- except maybe Bell Atlantic, whose titular street-corner pay phone is on screen for almost every agonizing frame.

Yes, there's a hastily added new ending - an ending that doesn't make sense when you think about it. Not that it's worth the effort

Cinema as jazz. More precisely, jazz traded by the likes of Charlie Parker, Billie Holliday, Chet Baker -- blurry, opiated, jagged with melancholy and stone cold beautiful.

This portrait of the fabulist whose images are as haunting as those of Giorgio de Chirico is a disappointment, not to mention a squandered opportunity.

The Core is unabashed Hollywood spectacle, but with a cast of up-from-indie actors that makes the cataclysmic kitsch all the more fun to behold.

Stevie is compelling, real-life drama: bleak and disturbing, but illuminating all the same.

A wonderfully crafted, smartly acted study of a complex old coot.

Basically, it's a muddle.

Mike Myers, responsible for the picture's one, or possibly two, laughs.

A crazed symphony of the supernatural. The elements don't hang together, but Kasdan delivers real scares, and real hoots, in the midst of the mayhem and madness.

While it won't do much for those into cutting-edge computer animation, it won't disappoint parents looking for wholesome high-quality entertainment for preschoolers.

The scenery is majestic, the goats adorable, the characters alternately gruff and tender. Like the best storytellers, Carion delays vital information about his characters that makes their dynamic increasingly interesting.

Rourke and Roberts! Dueling kings of B-movie excess and cable-TV schlock, together again on the big screen! Talk about chemistry!

Isn't exactly fraught with psychological depth and nuance, but as a stalker-stalkee suspenser, the pic has some nice things going for it.

Written and directed on autopilot, containing every cliche endemic to these movies: clueless parents, bratty brother, nasty rich kids, pool fight, food fight, girls who can't drive.

Pure, undiluted joy.

Eloquently adapted from the collection of A.M. Homes stories of the same title, Troche's film derives its voltage from the way it burrows to find that the connections within -- and among -- families are very much alive.

It's simplistic and reactionary and designed to get hearts pumping but not minds thinking.

Enchanted and thrilling film.

Cholodenko takes us inside a bohemian hive where everyone buzzes around the Queen Bee. McDormand is superb. Likewise Bale and Nivola.

A high-performance low comedy, House succeeds because Martin's Peter Sanderson and Latifah's Charlene Morton each plays Henry Higgins to the other's Eliza Doolittle.

Maybe, you think, there is something daring and brilliant going on here: an excursion into the darkest territories of the human soul. But no. In the end -- or the beginning -- there is no point to all this. Or at least not a point worth making, and making us watch.

A little like a British Eric Rohmer film -- a lot of talk, and a lot of talk about love and relationships -- Lawless Heart has wit and a winning charm.

Bier knows what she's doing, and the performances are expert and affecting. But this meditation on love -- and love's bad timing -- is also improbably accommodating to its characters' respective longings.

The movie heads in a disastrous direction: namely, a police academy ceremony... This lets-wrap-this-thing-up moment sucks the life and the honesty out of an otherwise compelling portrait of tainted lawmen, tainted law.

Old School has all the ingredients of an uproarious campus comedy, but it lacks a boisterous short-order cook who could whip up a food fight or three.

Plot contrivances, including an ominous cowboy-hatted figure who stalks Bitsey and her tagalong intern (Gabriel Mann), undermine the story's serious political themes.

It may not be the worst war epic ever made - that probably would be "Battlefield Earth" -- but it's darn close to being an unqualified disaster of that magnitude.

It's quite a celebration.

Smartly acted, achingly simple love story.

If it were a landscape painting, Gerry would deserve a place in the National Gallery. But as a movie...deserves its own wing in The Old Curiosity Shop.

Brought to the screen with a mix of jaunty humor and jagged violence that should have worked more effectively than it does.

An interesting choice for a Valentine's Day outing, He Loves Me is a weird, bubbly cocktail -- effervescent charm and troubling pathology, shaken together.

The film's recurring image is that of a butterfly fluttering around a flower, a lovely symbol of the reader drawn to a novel's nectar.

There are three action sequences here so delightful, so hilariously deploying an old tool for a new use, that they prompt smiles long after I saw the film.

Lightweight, likable buppie romantic comedy.

There is no shape or pacing to Daniel Petrie's movie. It's like a bottle of soda left uncapped. So thus a story that promised effervescence ends up being flat.

Wildly sad, funny and terrific documentary.

This startlingly lame tale about a young upstart challenging a veteran leader of the pack doesn't update the genre, it simply recasts it.

Probably better than anyone else working today, Donaldson knows how to knit a thriller. Each time you think this taut yarn is about to unravel, that's when he pulls the wool over your eyes.

Riveting and heartstoppingly fine documentary.

Stephen King without the snap, David Lynch without the kink, teen horror without the teen hormones, Darkness Falls falls apart in a crescendo of creepy-crawly hoo-ha. It's more like Darkness Kerplunks.

Never going to be remembered as a tying-the-knot screwball classic (it probably won't be remembered past March), but one could do worse.

This salt-and-pepper buddy movie set in the scenic environs of downtown Brooklyn and the Australian bush is a crowd-pleaser -- for the elementary-school set.

An epic docudrama - electric and raw.

A slo-mo gem of gangster cool, of vintage Hollywood noir reimagined by a French new waver in love with American cars, American jazz, and the kind of trench-coated tough-guys embodied by Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum.

This mostly vulgar, but never explicit, comedy resolves itself surprisingly, revealing depth just when you think it's going to continue its skip across the shallows. In other words, Just Married might not be good, but it's just good enough.

All about the wacky borderlands where reality and invention intersect. But there are no safe demarcations -- no demilitarized zone, no Berlin Wall -- to cue us to which side we're operating in, or that Barris is operating in.

Because the movie is about addictive behavior dulling the pain of grief rather than in the larger drama of dealing with grief, the movie reduces the scope of Hoffman's performance.

Throw bouquets at Marshall, who instead of dissecting it to death, neatly resurrects the Hollywood musical.

To the extent that movies bear the residue of their filmmakers' autobiographies, I found The Pianist particularly compelling.

This film is a philosophical musing -- a humanitarian speculation, not a drama about real people, historical figures or not, who seem fully formed.

Though Daldry elicits brilliant performances, particularly from Meryl Streep and Claire Danes, on balance The Hours is more pretentious than penetrating about existential despair.

In the end (and it's a happy end, to be sure), Catch Me if You Can is as crisp and trim as a new suit. Well, a new old suit - say, circa the 1960s.

A clever feature-length cartoon just as entertaining as the hit Nickelodeon series on which it is based.

A gossamer tale about a heavy subject -- a passive creature who slowly emerges as the active author of her own life.

Two Weeks Notice is a lot like Trump's tonsorial tower: improbable and overteased.

Patric and Liotta get the chance to do some heavy riffing on themes of honor, sacrifice, selling out and self-destructing, and the bleak, smeared world of drugs and violence is brought to the fore with feverish style.

An elaborately worked-over opus that's as tarted-up and artificial as Scorsese's '70s classic Mean Streets was gritty and real, Gangs of New York feels like a movie musical without the songs.

Spider is a difficult film, but an inspired one, the movie equivalent of eating a meal of artfully prepared eel or sea urchin. It's for those with adventurous tastes and no fear of squishy textures.

A deceptively simple movie with a deeply felt message.

It could have been more taut, could have been harder, but 25th Hour still resonates with power and poetry.

Jackson's superior sequel to last year's first installment in his Rings cycle - resurrects the beloved Gandalf (majestic Ian McKellen) and rejuvenates the audience, too.

Not only is there no magnetism between Fiennes and Lopez, he's a lead balloon and she's helium-filled. Happily, their odd chemistry doesn't sink this fairy tale.

This unabashedly stupid comedy is, well, unabashedly stupid.

Doesn't overdo it on the 1950s period charm -- lots of tweed, old cars and bikes, great woolly sweaters and painted rowhouses -- and the performances never get out of hand, even when the plot does.