The Hitcher's main problem is that many of the title character's dirty deeds are done off-camera. Instead of seeing Ryder trap his victims before he kills them, the audience is treated to plenty of butchered corpses that seem to magically appear after Ryder leaves a room.

The depiction of everyday life at the orphanage is far more compelling than Vanya's personal quest. It's unfortunate that once the Italian hits the road, The Italian loses its way.

Mafioso isn't a straight black satire of Sicilian culture so much as a suspenseful near-tragedy leavened by the zesty, irreverent wit that helped define the golden age of Italian comedies.

Through a haze of opium smoke and Molotov cocktails igniting, Regular Lovers plays out like the heavier politicized and unsentimentalized counterpoint to Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Dreamers."

At its best though, the film offers a pointed critique of a youth culture that views someone like Jesse James Hollywood as a person to emulate.

Director Sylvain White, whose last film was the equally unnecessary "I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer," manages to take the joy out of a dance movie by jerking the camera around and speeding up the dance moves so much.

If nothing else, this doc, which one the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at last year's Sundance Film Festival, will leave you feeling that the American dream is still alive and well.

This intense film, a mix of horror, fantasy, and history that convinces on all those levels and mixes them up with dizzying brio, is a searing cinematic experience, a beautiful, terrifying vision from writer-director Guillermo del Toro.

Perfume is sure to annoy as many moviegoers as it entertains, but at least even the naysayers would find it difficult to argue that film is nothing if not a departure from the ordinary.

Dark little indie thriller.

Ultimately, Besson has made an interesting, if shaky in places, homage to childhood.

If the resultant wreckage is a little underwhelming, and the film's coda useless and trite, the getting there is pretty absorbing.

It's the rare sci-fi film that transcends its genre with its ideas, able to sweep one up in its not-too-distant future and yet remain remarkably prescient about the present day.

After a slow start, this feel-good family film is a nice postcard from the Big Apple that may benefit New York and the Museum of Natural History as much as it does 20th Century Fox.

We can only speculate why McConaughey chose to play the role this way, but in all honesty, it's a good thing he did. His loony performance is the only surprising thing about this otherwise paint-by-numbers inspirational drama.

Action fans might find the film's first half somewhat of a slog to sit through because of its carefully honed exposition, while those used to Zhang's dialogue-heavy dramas are sure to be surprised by the film's brutal second half where blood spurts more than the words.

Letters from Iwo Jima isn't just the film that Eastwood wanted to make, but one that the film's producer Steven Spielberg had tried to make twice with "Empire of the Sun" and "Saving Private Ryan."

If The Painted Veil ultimately lacks some of the novelty and ambition of the year's best pictures, it still ranks as one of 2006's quiet gems.

After the widely reviled "Rocky V," it was just as unlikely for there to be a satisfying conclusion to the Rocky saga, but Rocky Balboa fits the bill.

Marker's even-handedness and playful spirit tries to show that innocent art and activist politics are two sides of the same culture, even if deviant government duplicity threatens the balance between them.

The reason to see Dreamgirls is what hasn't been advertised - a film that in spite of its shiny veneer actually hits all the high notes through its underlying rawness.

I hold Soderbergh in high esteem, but as handsome a technical achievement as it is, The Good German plays to me as a failed experiment.

You're most likely find that Eragon is less a gem and more cubic zirconia -- nice to look at but not as preeeecioussss as its recent fantasy bretheren.

It's not often that Hollywood is willing, or even able, to accurately dramatize what it's really like to be poor in America -- to evoke not only the circumstances, but also the sense humiliation and failure. That a European director like Gabriele Muccino, helming his first English-language film, is able to capture the essence of that experience is a testament to his skill as a filmmaker.

By straining to make a respectful war film for everyone, Winkler and Friedman have wound up with a toothless picture that won't satisfy anyone.

The Holiday is the type of welcome diversion that only Meyers still seems to specialize -- a romantic comedy where Barbara Stanwyck and Rosalind Russell would have been just as natural as Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet and where the one liners fly like confetti.

Not that Diamond skimps on the social commentary; far from it. But it makes its points without too much breast-beating, caching its polemic within a tough-minded entertainment.

Inland Empire is interchangably terrifying, maddening, shockingly hilarious and perversely exciting, and that's just to those who end up disliking it.