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.