There are flashes here of a more involving movie, but, as if living up to the cliches associated with her name, filmmaker Lee is content to sit quietly and let others talk.

Indeed, the film is altogether too much like Sayuri: trying to overwhelm with surface beauty and unspoken emotion, it never hits deeper than the skin.

Beautiful, poetic, mournful, at once rich and spare, Brokeback Mountain takes a daring conceit and creates of it an overwhelming work of art that should speak to anyone capable of love.

A rather schizophrenic comedy that gives respected performers Dame Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins a chance to show they don't take themselves too seriously.

Though it's handsomely made and peppered with seamlessly achieved visual glories, Narnia is ineptly acted, crudely staged and burdened with a score that only a masochist could love.

This gritty take on Grimm's suffers from mannered supporting performances and an inconsistent level of realism.

All the hammy acting and meandering storytelling in the world can't drown the essential appeal of the story.

A perfect example of an ordinary movie made unique by the powerhouse performance of its lead.

Vastly entertaining, slightly overlong.

It does a splendid job not only of introducing newcomers to a vital artist they might have missed, but of reminding rabid fans of Earle's stripe why they were infected to begin with.

The Boys of Baraka leaves you outraged in the way only the best documentaries can.

This isn't a crime comedy, exactly. It's a slightly absurd, minimalist noir, in the ZIP code of "Blood Simple" and "Fargo."

Rent isn't nearly as transporting a film as the Oscar-winning adaptation of "Chicago," but its energies and passions compensate for a lot of its deficiencies.

Unfortunately, the dialogue undermines the movie's promise.

A gripping movie about espionage, loyalty and betrayal.

A mature, tense, frightening and altogether masterful film.

It's frustrating that a movie about a man so deathly serious about music has largely boiled his life down to addiction and adultery.

The question that lies at the heart of the documentary Aristide and the Endless Revolution is whether his exile was his own idea or whether he was pressured, even kidnapped, by the United States.

[Murphy] makes a thrillingly flesh-and-blood creature of Kitten, with her yearning, her droll, self-deprecating wit, her breathless romanticism and her puckish vibrancy. It's easily the most fun bit of screen acting this year, and as rich and nuanced as the lead in any drama.

For starters, everything's grimy and humorless in a way that infects even Aniston.

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.