Although the drama suffers from the episodic story structure, Zathura feels less like "Jumanji" and more like a really great episode of Steven Spielberg's "Amazing Stories" TV series.

The problem here is we never get much more than the pretty, the quaint and the comfortingly familiar. There's a place for such stuff in the world, yes, but that doesn't make it art.

Sometimes a movie can defy rational logic, yet still make sense emotionally in a way that pulls you through. Bee Season is one.

Watts is a champ for seeing this through now that she's actually famous.

You see, in "Jesus Is Magic," Sarah Silverman plays "Sarah," a self-absorbed Jewish American Princess who also happens to be casually, cluelessly racist.

Marcus, like the real-life Jackson, survives being shot nine times. But this film is dead on arrival.

When the picture hits high gear, your qualms vanish one by one, and the script, credited to four writers, grows into its own.

The result is typical Mendes: accomplished, calculated and uncommitted. Maybe it's because his talent comes to him too easily, but I've yet to sense his heart and soul in a film.

This may be the best work we've seen from either actor, which is saying something.

It's often a vivid film and paints its small niche well, but only in the final passages, when AIDS changes everything, does it feel full-blooded.

It's not a question of agreeing or disagreeing with this film's point of view to say that it isn't as often convincing as it is convinced.

Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones are back, as is director Martin Campbell, but the result has the all-too-common feel of an expired equine redundantly abused.

Unfortunately, this rich story about actual adults takes up maybe a third of Prime. The rest of the time, we're hanging with David and Rafi as they act out relationship cliches.

It all adds up to a sequel that is, against all odds, not a total waste of your serial-killer dollar.

A sour, deflating and ultimately unlikable black comedy about how awful life can be.

So rich, moving and surprising that a familiar story starts to feel new again. The details, the personalities and the final twist grab you until you're left truly shaken and inspired.

It's refreshing that something once considered terribly new and modern can still feel contemporary three decades later.

There's a sense of diminishing returns here -- "Extremes" leads with its strongest short and ends with its most esoteric. But all three offer provocative, distinct and gorgeous twists on horror and splatter conventions.

Beyond a couple of cool guns and one long, gory, clever first-person shot, Doom is something the video games have never been: dull.

It's a movie, finally, that feels longer than its exquisitely brief source material, which is a crime of sorts.

This is one of Downey's most enjoyable performances, and one of Kilmer's funniest. It's a relationship comedy wrapped in sharp talk and gunplay, a triumphant comeback for Black, and one of the year's best movies.

Powerfully explores the struggles faced by those whom DNA testing has exonerated after years behind bars.

If it's meant as a retort to anti-Semitic doctrine, it's far too episodic, anecdotal and lacking in specifics.

In addition to providing a fascinating, agenda-free look at an unseen way of life, the film presents a lesson that should be welcome among people of any faith or none at all.

In small doses, this looks kind of cool. For two hours, it's excruciating.

There are wonders here, but there are as many things that just plain make you wonder. By the end you're too addled to be truly moved.

There are moments here so out of whack that you almost wonder if David Lynch isn't snickering somewhere at having fooled everyone into thinking someone else made the film.

Caro stumbles in a couple ways. By flashing forward throughout the film to scenes of the climactic courtroom showdown, she blunts the story's dramatic impact.

The snaky cinematography pulls you through even when the writing doesn't, and the best performances keep you hoping that you'll feel the next one or the one after that just as powerfully.

An unusual and absorbing, if somewhat preachy film.

While it's focused on the people -- on men who never had mentors struggling to mentor themselves and each other -- the movie works as a smart B film.

For every gag that flies there are at least one-and-a-half that don't.

Isn't easy to watch, but it's beautifully written and acted, with a sharp eye for the small embarrassments of divorce.

It has the feel of something slaved over lovingly in merry isolation, and it is virtually the only thing I've seen this year that conveys in the viewing the obvious enjoyment its makers had in whipping it up.

Made with a slapdash non-style that doesn't seem quite lame enough to have been intentional, this aptly titled low-budget horror comedy serves up tame amounts of both guts and gut-busters.

The film is sugary, simplistic and riddled with cliches -- yet it still manages to absorb you in its story and even carry you with some of its emotions.

If you think the "Star Wars" prequels are a disease, then Serenity is the cure.

This is an awesome performance in an outstanding film, a film worthy, if you can imagine, of the book at its heart.

An utterly convincing portrait of the sort of person willing to strap ordnance to himself and decimate scores of strangers in pursuit of his religious and political ideals.

A thriller that goes from pretty good to absolutely ludicrous in the time it takes one actor to recite about four sentences of dialogue.

This movie is a powerfully silly brain vacation. It's a by-the-numbers underdogs vs. bullies comedy.

When you have to ask yourself whether this parable is intended as comedic satire or stone-cold-serious moralizing, that's a big sign that you're watching a misfire.

It's Cronenberg's most mainstream work, and yet it has all the power of his creepiest nightmares.

And that ultimately may be the problem with the Polanski version: by bringing Oliver forward, you push the drama backward.

Tasteful, thoughtful fare that entertains without ever speaking down to the audience.

The leads are just too good to commit fully to something this baldly formulaic. It's sad.

Taken as a whole -- and it kills me to write this -- it just doesn't add up to much.

There's a daring to Everything Is Illuminated that commends it somewhat more than its achievement deserves.

Such a treat for the eyes, ears and funny bone that you feel cheated that it clocks in at less than an hour-and-a-quarter.

As it stands, the film is perhaps a tad low-key to catch the eye, but it's carefully enough made and, especially, acted, to keep a hold on the brain and heart long after it's over.

Three impeccably cast actors are fully engaged in something like a psychological thriller that has much of the crushing weight and lingering pain of grown-up life on this Earth.

Creaks and groans with pat emotionalism and rickety storytelling.

I'm all for hearty theological debate. But this is intellectual suicide. Even worse, it's boring intellectual suicide.

It's a handsome and spry movie, and it might even have managed to be a good one if there were even the least chance of believing that Wood, who can't weigh 145 pounds dripping wet, had the slightest chance of hurting anyone with one of his wee fists.

The juxtapositions can be beautiful: haunting music played over a water-streaked windshield, a deaf student awakening to the "feeling" of sound, Glennie staring ferociously at a gong as she extracts its vibrations.

Once in a great while -- usually late August -- a movie comes along that's so lame, it doesn't deserve a bad review. It deserves a war-crimes tribunal. Ladies and gentlemen, Underclassman is that special film.

Reigns as the most assured, provocative film so far this year.

The result is minor Gilliam: still more engaging than most moviemaking, but nonetheless a letdown after such a long wait.

The Baxter is so ineptly conceived, staged, written and played that you suspect it's part of a psychology experiment to see if people will laugh at anything.

With solid performances, competent direction and artfully drab cinematography, the film would be indistinguishable from a Hollywood thriller if not for the Flemish dialogue. It's no surprise to learn that an American remake is in the works.

It's not great moviemaking -- it isn't as accomplished or funny as the best of the Farrelly brothers' films, say -- but it's got real appeal.

Despite some fast-paced direction by Wes Craven, Red Eye finally gets so silly, it's practically popping its wing-rivets.

Competently done and harmless enough to entertain the tots. It's just that the movie's kind of . . . sparse.

De la Iglesia is a mercilessly agile talent.

An engaging if overlong documentary.

Stirring and haunting.

After getting off to a decent, somewhat muted start, Skeleton Key just gets sillier and sillier and sillier until it's yet another one of those stupid, noisy thrillers where everyone's running around in a house, yelling and falling down, and you're mostly wondering why nobody bothered to call the cops.

The film is much better as a ticking-clock action picture than as a story of human emotions, be they romantic, altruistic or base. So it's too bad that we have to wait so long for the actual raid to begin. When it does, it's a cracker.

There is such a thoroughgoing nastiness to the plot and dialogue that the film almost achieves a level of buoyancy.

Beautifully shot and cut, written with a visceral aversion to cliche, deftly skirting sentimentality, sensationalism and simplicity, it continually surprises, engages and satisfies. For a small, unheralded film, it's a knockout.

Director Jay Chandrasekhar ("Super Troopers") will never be mistaken for an artist. But he's competent with crude humor and manages to balance affectionate parody and rote imitation.

An engaging exercise in mature poignancy, existential consciousness and deadpan drollery, Broken Flowers is a return by Jarmusch to the road movie structure of such films as "Stranger Than Paradise," "Night on Earth" and "Dead Man."

One of those undeniably beautiful things. The film is, in fact, an encyclopedia of beauty -- the beauty of desire, the beauty of nostalgia, the beauty of music and clothing and smoke and pain, and, chiefly, the beauty of women.

Wants to be a sex farce, a sports film and a serious meditation on Catholicism. To its credit, it succeeds as all three.

A frustrating combination of inspiration and routine, acuity and dullness, originality and fashion. Part web-of-life indie film, part troubled teen drama, part suburban satire, part comic book fantasy, it vacillates between the engaging and the silly, buoyed by energetic performances but pulled underwater by self-satisfied writing and direction.

Wonderful performances and the director's continual inventiveness make Junebug a particularly promising first feature.

Here's a hint to tracking down an intelligent, discriminating significant other: stand outside the entrance to a theater showing Must Love Dogs. Once the film begins, look for the first person to walk out.

So funny and sweet and observant - and so much warmer than other family films that feign hipness through product placement and pop culture references - you won't mind that the steps feel familiar.

While you're in the theater, it's actually -- heaven help me -- pretty fun to watch.

In the wake of everything we've seen on TV and in movies in recent decades, it's amazing that something as harmless as language can still stupefy us. As The Aristocrats demonstrates, there is real humor in the confrontation of taboos.

A haunting, melancholy fable, Tony Takitani is the kind of film that could seem tedious from a mere description. Approached with the right mind-set, however, it's a hypnotic mood piece on love and loss, one that knows -- at 75 minutes -- not to overstay its welcome.

The writing, acting and filmmaking make Hustle & Flow nothing short of amazing.

The final third...is so overblown and anticlimactic that it finally gets you thinking about empty profundity and loose ends.

It's the screenwriting equivalent of those fat substitutes used by snack food manufacturers: the finished product looks all right but the taste is off, and the aftereffects are embarrassing and uncomfortable.

A stultifying bore.

If you can look beyond the simple-minded Socratic political discourse, The Edukators reveals itself as warm, humane and sad, a movie that genuinely wants you to think about how idealism eventually collides with human frailty, and about what upstarts and sell-outs might teach one another.

It's an experimental film about a sensational event, placing tragedy in the context of the dulling normality of human life and resisting easy interpretation, just as did the inexplicable death of Kurt Cobain.

Exploring the possibilities of low-budget digital filmmaking is a worthy endeavor, but November is a little too in love with the grittiness of it all.

It's not orthodox Dahl but it's pure Burton, and, as it's been such a very long time since moviegoers have been afforded that particular treat, it's entirely welcome.

Surprisingly flabby, with lazy writing and some final-act lurches into unironic rom-com that seem at odds with the bizarro premise.

It's fine ensemble work, but you nevertheless grow itchy wishing Roos had focused it a little better.

It's a waste of classic material. Rent "The Incredibles" and see what should have been.

One of those hard-to-pin-down movies where you're not quite sure which sort of story the filmmakers wanted to tell.

It's as full and rich a portrait of the lives of athletes as we've seen since "Hoop Dreams."

A joy to watch.

Even as the film sometimes veers into unproductive sidebars, there's a masterful tension to it, Alcazar is wonderful, and the final shot is a stunner.

It's just another bland, junior-high-basketball riff on "The Bad News Bears" formula, one that takes every single dramatic cue from the underdog sports-movie playbook.

Unpretentiously fantastic.