Succeeds only in fits and starts.

It's meant to be funny, but I couldn't help thinking they were figuring out where to plant the pipe bombs.

Odd, beautiful and ambitious film.

There is life to The Proposition, though, and brutal, pitiless life it is. If it breathed more (and if Huston had spoken less), it might have been remarkable. As it is, it's monotonous, grim and uneven.

Other than flubbing the dismount, Stick It is smarter and funnier than it has any right to be.

I am here to tell you that Greengrass has fashioned one of the most powerful films I have ever seen, and that watching it makes you value your loved ones and your privileges more, perhaps, than you ever have. He has made a film that makes you feel, makes you think and makes you want to connect. And that, finally, might be the greatest thing that art can do.

It's unfortunate that the lack of originality in plot and character keeps Akeelah and the Bee stuck firmly in "After-School Special" territory.

With the exception of one long improv riff on a campground basketball court, Williams nicely underplays his role. Unfortunately, Sonnenfeld also underplays his. We should expect more of him.

Park is a visual virtuoso, with imaginative transitions and clever use of special effects wrapped around a sly, effective performance from Lee at the center of it all.

The protagonists have subsumed their identities to the collective, and they rise and fall in their hearts as the collective prospers or suffers. Their effort is absurd, but their intent is pure. Watching it evokes a combination of pity for their naive idealism and awe at Melville's uncanny brilliance.

Putting it another way: When spoofs of bad singing and songwriting are the sharpest arrows in your quiver, and your politics are diluted until they hit about as hard as someone sticking their tongue out, your satire has a problem.

We have reached a point in history when an ordinary TV show is often as good as or even better than an ordinary movie. And movies don't come much more ordinary than The Sentinel.

As to claims that the book provides a path to enlightenment, I'm an agnostic. But I can swear on a stack of ancient scrolls that the movie plays like 90-odd minutes of purgatory from which you feel you may never escape.

Chiwetel Ejiofor's performance alone makes it worth giving your "Full Monty" DVD a rest and heading out to Kinky Boots.

Despite the hot-button pedophilic story hook (I'm surprised Jeff and Hayley didn't meet on MySpace.com), Hard Candy ultimately beats with the heart of a stagier, more complicated psychological revenge picture along the lines of Roman Polanski's "Death and the Maiden."

A feature film has to be more than just an interesting theme; it needs something that constitutes drama -- conflict, journey, adventure, what have you. The Notorious Bettie Page is a perfect example of a film that has a subject but no story.

If Look Both Ways has a familiar form, this sort of emphasis on humanity, with which the film refreshingly pulses, is rare.

In all that empty space, the film gets a bit lost.

One of the great things about international cinema is the way it can remind us of our common humanity. For instance, it's good to know that beautiful, rich people are selfish and miserable the world over. That's one of the few positives a viewer can take away from a film such as La Mujer de Mi Hermano.

Never actively unfunny. The cast is far too smart for that. But it never quite pops like it would if it were whittled down to something just a little longer than an "SNL Digital Short."

They almost got it really right with Lucky Number Slevin, but they also almost got it horribly wrong.

Surprisingly charming and well-acted.

It's a movie of charm and insight, well-acted and carefully observed, but it's also one that lacks any real heights to offset the generic competence that characterizes it. There's no real drama to follow, no surprises of sufficient magnitude to enliven the experience.

Mullan makes the journey more than worthwhile, but don't go in expecting profundity.

Free Zone is similar to the car-based films of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami but with a more improvised, less-finished feel.

A few bodies pile up. Surprisingly little sex is had. And given that Catherine's true nature was revealed at the end of the first "Basic," the mystery seems superfluous.

Ultimately, ATL is the same old teenager angst in a mildly novel package.

Brick is kinda brilliant and kinda demented, and you love it for the former far more than you hold the latter against it.