Land of the Dead is huge. It's Romero doing what he does best: using zombies to create a lowbrow social parable. It shows up junk like "Resident Evil: Apocalypse" for the brainless pap it is. And it's got something that even the best previous "Dead" films have lacked: good acting.

It's a brave film, particularly on the part of Allen, and in many ways an accomplished film. But it's so bookish and clever that you can never fully embrace it, even when you wish you could.

The film that results from Jacquet's application is gorgeous and even inspiring, a tale of loyalty hard-tested and hard-earned, a sumptuous travelogue, and a reminder that some of the critters with whom we share the planet are, in ways, as complex in their feelings as any human being.

It doesn't take an awareness of the ethnic and cultural differences between the miniskirted siren and the shy Arab youth to see that she might be more than he can handle.

It's not without one or two missteps, but remains likely the most impressive juvenile acting you'll see this year.

In Duff's movies, the question is whether the movie will find enough interesting stuff to compensate for the blandness at the center. The Perfect Man does.

Fox uses her earth-tone-clad, Ivy-League-schooled characters the way Jane Austen used hers: taking their privileged, rigid social structures and building a stage to explore deeper human problems.

Refreshing and disorienting movie.

My Summer of Love, with its lush, sunlit landscapes, may occupy the opposite end of the visual spectrum, but it reinforces the sense that this director knows his way around the range of human emotion as well.

It's witty, gripping good fun.

If the two most gorgeous people in the world alternately bantering and making out isn't enough to compel the attention of the average American moviegoer, then we are truly doomed.

I was annoyed by Levasseur and Aja's desertion of their tense, simple plot in favor of tedious "plot twists" that could, frankly, use a rest. It's a waste of a good first half. (Grade: A- for first hour, C- thereafter.)

A story that would be charming if recited at the dinner table tries to carry a feature film, and it's not even close to the task. The result is screamingly bad.

It's one of the best and strangest films of Miyazaki's career.

A sort of anti-date movie, a smart but deeply cynical study in failure, with our sense of loss growing in direct proportion to the characters' romantic hopes.

It's a crowd-pleasing, artful and convincing movie that just misses being great but nevertheless gratifies.

Though the fiction doesn't quite equal the documentary in razzle-dazzle impact, it's a credible, handsome and engaging entertainment.

Even with Paul Green's invective echoing in the back of your mind, nothing's quite so heartwarming as the sight of a young person blossoming.

You should come out of a film like Apres Vous with your heart as light and fluffy as a souffle. But this farce, credited to four chefs, er, writers, is as heavy and leaden as meatloaf.

It's a definite crowd-pleaser and a perfectly fun night at the movies.

By and large it's formulaic and dull.

Despite the mysteries of the plot, a sitcom-style sense of expectation creeps into Saving Face, which sometimes feels comfortable but mostly serves to spotlight the shortcomings in a script that invents compelling characters but doesn't give them much out of the ordinary to do.

An unforgettable experience.

The darkest, most operatic, and technologically richest "Star Wars" movie to date, "Sith" is grim, stirring entertainment and a nearly complete vindication of everything its creator has been saying for six years about where the series was heading and what its final shape would be.

Gripping, outraging documentary.

It's been fascinating to watch the "intellectual" subgenre of the serial-killer movie -- the one where poetic evil geniuses elude the cops while leaving trails of art-directed crime scenes -- run out of ideas and start feeding on itself.

Isn't a particularly good movie if what interests you is the art of film -- cinematography, editing, screenwriting, staging, little things like that. But if you're chiefly interested in turning off the upstairs lights and relaxing with a few laughs, you could do a lot worse.

The movie never recovers from its cheesy center.

You nevertheless can't help but be swept up in the kids' enthusiasms and aspirations and gobs of energy.

Lively, cheeky, dense and, ultimately, too flip, clever and torturously twisted to be fully engrossing.

It is well-acted and written with a rigorous effort to skirt cliche, and it has the savor of real life throughout.

As fascinating as all the film history is, the movie's core is the dynamic between a famous but distant parent and his child.

Sadly, director Jaume Serra has taken the Gothic premise of a madman casting his living victims in wax and, no doubt at the behest of copycat-hungry producers, turned House of Wax into yet another teens-versus-hillbillies slasher flick

Scott's cast is like a grand orchestra with various performers filling the roles of instruments: Thewlis a wise, ironic oboe; Neeson a stout cello; Norton a slightly battered flute. As it happens, the piece they're playing is a piano concerto and the keyboard -- that is, Bloom -- isn't big enough to match.

Invigorating, blistering and chilling.

These three central performances, and a solid script by Anders Thomas Jensen and director Susanne Bier, ground a potentially overwrought story in genuine feeling.

The result is a hybrid of "Falling Down" and "Short Cuts" without the iconic central character of the former or the latter's clear-eyed humanism.

They have been true to a classic source, using Adams' language and finding just the right actors, sets and costumes to flesh out his vision. Only the most persnickety cultist won't appreciate the effort.

Hilariously, gut-bustingly, mind-blowingly, jaw-droppingly stupid.

Creates a thoroughly curious combination of tension and eroticism.

Gets its hooks into you in ways that are hard to explain or to ignore.

For his directorial debut, British actor Charles Dance tackles such familiar English themes as repressed desire and an arm's-length fascination with foreigners. Luckily for the slight story, he has recruited two of the most effortlessly brilliant grande dames of British film.

It's a thriller, and a large one, and it's got a couple of terrific performers in the center.

A Lot Like Love is, well, a lot like many other movies. It's also a lot like having your eyeballs seared by a propane flame -- in a bad way.

With this amoral business environment, it's not a question of if there will be another Enron, but when.

By the time of the fabled match -- which you could swear lasts a full 90 minutes -- it's all you can do to keep your skin from crawling off your body and slinking to the safety of another room. Do yourself a favor: Follow it.

Even with nothing at stake emotionally, though, he conjures some real scares, and the finale is as much a head-scratcher as a heart-stopper -- in a good way.

All in all, it's hard to dispute that House of D declares its own worth on arrival.

The only problem is that he's been such a shallow, ridiculous figure that exhuming any real sympathy for the guy is a Herculean task.

As satire, it doesn't add up -- but it's an admirable, if dull, experiment.

Solondz, for reasons best discussed with a therapist, can find no good in people -- or at least none that he expresses in his films.

Surprisingly entertaining.

This is Hollywood Hornby: not terrible, but not worth crossing a busy street for, and nowhere near as memorable as what the Sox did last year.

It's a visual feast that only a crack director could provide, and it's mounted within a story and setting that, played utterly straight, might still have made a good movie.

The young guns on board are Wong Kar Wai and Steven Soderbergh, and it's sad to report that they massively outshine the nonagenarian Antonioni.

The title is too cutesy and clever, but it's about the only unsubtle aspect of this poignant, humble drama that'll probably get lost amid the multiplex bombast, but shouldn't.

Some things in Sin City are almost too much to watch: the violence, the cruelty, the irredeemable evil. But it's irresistibly magnetic because it serves as a barely distorted mirror to our world.

The single most impressive thing about the film, in fact, is the taste that this shotgun technique gives of the mass simultaneity of the race.

This meandering tale of a pack of ticket inspectors working the Hungarian subway system delights in misleading viewers.

The verdict? Could have been worse. Yes, it's a slightly hollow endorsement, but Guess Who is probably worth your matinee/pub-theater dollar.

Daniel Day-Lewis may be one of our great actors, but he trips over a few Method-acting speed bumps in wife Rebecca Miller's third writer-director effort.

Israeli society is one that has ample experience processing grief, and Nina's Tragedies explores that challenge with humanity and humor.

Startling and amazing -- a cinematic hammer to the skull.

It's nonetheless a fascinating, thirst-inspiring, thought-provoking journey. Just one request for the lengthier version: fewer shots of dogs' swimsuit areas, please.

A mild disaster.

It's breezy enough, though, as a romantic comedy. And the stakes at risk in it are more grown-up and weighty than those in most Hollywood fare. Like Allen himself, you could do worse.

Full of small, weird moments.

Clever and charming.

In "Upside" Allen's marble face acts as the pressure-cooker lid on a hilarious hissy fit.

Social justice is never an excuse for bad art. In fact, one could argue that a really bad movie about a really important subject is twice the artistic crime -- because, however well-intentioned, it trivializes human suffering while squandering a teaching opportunity.

County Clare holds little of interest, with a generic story line and a cast that's mostly just going through the motions.

It's fun junk. And it doesn't satisfy. Dot the I is a weird, pretty film with a dumb script, a skilled cast and a good twist, plus one hot sex scene and one brilliant scene-chew by D'Arcy.

One of those American independent films with two chief points to recommend it: the earnest good will of its creators and its determination to be unlike any studio film.

In Be Cool, a wonderful cast essays a lively script and manages to make a decent film out of it.

But as the story takes some surprising turns, it works like a slow infection: Patient audience members may find themselves awakening to the story in much the same way the characters awaken to their own capacities for tenderness.

Gets behind the armor and the camouflage to give viewers a clear if brief view of the men and women who fight and die under the American flag every day in Iraq.

Though its characters aren't terribly complex, and its plot holds few surprises, the screenplay (in English, German, and Hebrew) amounts to a worthy treatise on the need to forgo revenge.

In exchange for a small piece of your life, you receive an infinity.

By the film's end, you feel like you've spent two hours rapidly changing channels between a WB sitcom, the gospel-choir segments of the "Ladykillers" remake, an episode of "Law & Order" and a Mexican soap opera.

Should satisfy its 8- to 12-year-old target demographic.

It all sort of plays out like "Law and Order: Spiritual Victims Unit," but the movie's stuffed (some might say overstuffed) with wonderfully staged moments and set pieces.

The story is as predictable as it is saccharine. Apart from the presence of local landmarks, there's no reason the Rose City should be proud of this effort.

Credit the great Bruno Ganz with creating a vivid Hitler: furious, unsteady, crushed and frankly cracking up.

This deadpan ode to living life to its fullest could be the ultimate crowd-pleaser at this year's PIFF.

A painlessly light introduction to Bollywood moviemaking, but it far too often feels like run-of-the-mill Hollywood fare.

For all its flaws, Hitch largely comes off as a light romp.

A deliriously entertaining field report from a historical moment when porn darned near became mainstream.

A movie of utter inconsequence -- a cinematic Listerine Strip that evaporates from the brain before you even get your popcorn tub to the trash.

Moves at a stately pace; it's a long film, to boot. But there's real drama and pathos in the story, in the blend of matter-of-factness and potential catastrophe, in the depiction of innocence imperiled.

Perhaps a better moniker would have been "One Flew Over My Left Foot."

Its smallness of scale, and undemonstrative nature, could make it a welcome change of pace from Hollywood bombast, especially for fans of the life aquatic.

Kind of a drag.

Intense, well-acted love story.

Hampered from the start by the numbingly formulaic additions by screenwriter James DeMonaco ("The Negotiator"). Toss in needlessly fussy visuals and a climax that is hilariously out of whack, and you've got an excellent excuse to stay home and watch the original.

As it goes on and on and on, Coach Carter becomes more patience-testing than soul-stirring, proving that you can overdose on good intentions as easily as you can on evil substances.

We end up with a piece of B-grade junk in which Elektra exchanges "banter" with the unexceptional Prout between fight scenes so badly shot that even Garner looks like a stunt double.

In the end, it's a perfectly decent, perfectly vaporous film, pretty but slight, predictable but never incompetent.

Boring and fundamentally silly.