It's a bento box of shifts, feints, hints and small, sharp insights, built around a surprisingly deep core of feeling. And it confirms Coppola as an artist to watch and relish.

Its sense of play, its sleek design and Yuen's spectacular action sequences will make it, I suspect, attractive to palates not accustomed to the spicier or cruder forms of this genre.

So what is the picture saying? With its uneven tone, flat direction (on bad-looking digital video) and varied performances, very little.

Compelling and superbly acted.

Is it a silly movie? At times, yes. Is it creaky and blatant and obvious? Quite often, absolutely. But should you miss it in this splendidly colorful restoration? Not on your life.

Short on both life and laughs.

Engrossing and unusual.

Not that Chan isn't lovable; he is. But he's making it harder to feel warm and fuzzy about him with films like The Medallion. It's OK to age, but Chan needs to broaden his horizons. He is a trained singer. Where's that musical he's always dreamed of making?

Like most Meg Ryan comedies, Uptown Girls has a heroine who's adorable only because it says so in the script.

Thoroughly unique work of art.

There are movies that are made for the big screen, and movies that are made for the small screen; Passionada is the latter type.

When the picture's good, it's really something; when it's bad, you grit your teeth and pray it will end.

If you've recently watched that great skateboarding documentary "Dogtown and Z-Boys," Grind will play like a soft-pedaled Afterschool Special.

Watching the teachers whip these kids into Wilder recitations is especially intriguing, particularly when their personalities come out during the sometimes-arduous process.

Scattered and silly. If it evokes any strong feelings from you, it will probably be hunger -- the food all looks so good.

Lohan has a fresh presence; in a world of pale blond princesses it's a relief to see a freckled redhead who looks like she eats occasionally. A pleasure, too, to watch a young actress accomplished enough to play not only a punky high schooler, but a punky high schooler with a middle-aged woman trapped insider her.

A picture so powerfully harrowing, its slight shortcomings are forgettable compared to the entire film's cumulative effect. It's that searing.

The film isn't so much a demanding character study as it is a lot of pretty parts pushed together.

Campbell Scott and Hope Davis, both of whom work with such subtlety and depth, rescue the film from Rudolph's seemingly native inability to keep it steadily on course.

Junk this is and ever was, but this is well-acted junk.

Has a curious train-wreck quality to it that keeps you watching and thinking. (Even if you are thinking things like, Why were these lines ever written? When you hear the "turkey" line, your jaw will drop.)

The pleasures of Buffalo Soldiers mainly come early on, before the film becomes a sloppy mixture of tones and story lines. Afterward, you're left mainly puzzled and looking for a way to wash a bitter aftertaste out of your mouth.

The lack of sentimentality and rhetoric is refreshing. It's a grown-up movie about some harsh facts of life.

Quite simply, the "Tomb Raider" series has been flat-out boring, even with the talented and fun Jolie -- who needs to take off those harnesses and get back to real movies. She deserves better.

This is grand, inspiring entertainment of a sort that Hollywood aspires to and rarely achieves.

Though filled with charm and led by three likable characters, the picture spreads its plot points and whimsy so thinly that we can never just relax.

So strained in its "charm" and "pluck" that you grow weary by minute 15, hoping that the teens whose lives it depicts will stop being so darn peppy or sweetly confused or irritatingly dramatic.

This one's painful.