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.