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.