It's a comedy that knows that no matter one's ethnicity, human foibles, follies and hopes are universal.

A movie-movie - big, lush and sexy. And formulaic, saddled with more plot than it needs and more "Spy Kids" references than it should have, but still . . .

Vilely violent, Saw 2 is the Phnom Penh of splatter movies.

The Weather Man belongs to a school of earnest, artsy Hollywood flicks that includes the Michael Douglas-goes-bonkers "Falling Down," and a lineage that goes back to revered 1970s pics like "Five Easy Pieces."

Paradise Now plays like Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," but with explosives.

A visually dazzling mood piece.

Doom is, to its detriment, a remarkably faithful re-creation of the massively popular video game. In other words, it's a dark, violent, nerve-wracking, trigger-giddy waste of time.

Nicely run through its paces by John Gatins, who also wrote the screenplay (it's his directing debut), Dreamer is, not surprisingly, about daring to dream the big dreams. It's about family, and faith, and facing hard times together.

A quiet, glistening love story - or not-quite-love story - adapted from Martin's novella of the same name, Shopgirl is such an atypical Hollywood affair that it's almost startling.

It's all very deep, but in a tricked-up, art-directed sort of way.

Steeped in attitude - a smart-alecky, insider sarcasm that can be pretty clever at times, but also pretty insufferable.

In her clear and compelling film, Sanders lets the innocents do the talking.

In the end, this earnest, inquisitive film leaves the viewer longing for some sanity, and some hope, in a world that appears to be seriously lacking in both.

Does what the best movies can do: take viewers to what might be unfamiliar places, into a culture with unique customs and traditions, and show, through drama and comedy, how the fundamental truths of the human experience need no translation.

Domino is less a movie than a hyperkinetic slide show - presented during a nuclear attack.

An unmitigated, inexplicable, unforgivable flop.

A strange mix of showbiz whodunit and soft-core eroticism, with a couple of fine actors - Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth - wandering around stunned and stoned-looking, as if someone slipped them a mickey.

What gives North Country urgency is that it's about how a man comes to understand that it's bad for him and for his community to deny his daughter privileges and prerogatives he'd grant his son.

It's a harrowing tale, but one that gets phonied up with unnecessary slo-mos, manipulative soundtrack cues, and unrestrained thespianism.

In refusing to pigeonhole its characters, Nine Lives is less like those L.A. road-rage melodramas "Short Cuts" and "Crash" than those all-of-us-are-interconnected dramas "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams."

Urgent and stunning movie.

A rollicking, mascara-smearing, intergenerational coed crowd-pleaser. Imagine "Sex and the City" negotiating "Terms of Endearment" with "The Golden Girls."

It says in the beginning of the film that Two for the Money is "inspired by a true story." Problem is, it's just not that inspired.

Insightful, funny-sad memoir of divorce, intellectual style and emotional rebirth.

The delightful G-rated film has a story line simple enough for pre-schoolers to follow and comic sensibility complex enough for adults to savor, with an emphasis on howlingly bad (by which I mean good) puns.

An inconsistent and endearing sports inspirational that aims to be "Chariots of Fire" for golf.

It's "The Deep" reimagined as an Abercrombie catalog.

Although Mal is ostensibly the movie's hero, and River its heroine, Whedon does a good job of giving all onboard their own story arc, their tragedies and triumphs. The cast, to a man (and woman), is solid, although it's the ballet-trained Glau, who gets to mope in high angst and go Zhang Ziyi-crazy in a couple of martial-arts scenes, who steals the show.