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.