As for this film's esteemed director, I don't remember getting such sheer pleasure out of an Altman movie since . . . hmm, lemme look at the filmo . . . hmm—"The Player"? Not so much . . . "O.C. and Stiggs"? I wish . . . Um, "Popeye"? More likely, but . . . Ah-"A Wedding." Yeah, that’s it, "A Wedding." Whoa. That was, like, almost 30 years ago.

But after surveying pop and rock hybrids, Akin and Hacke go deeper. You will be very happy indeed to make the acquaintance of such Turkish music luminaries as Orhan Gencebay and Sezen Aksu, whose stories and personalities are as fascinating as their music.

Peyton Reed's The Break-Up proves there is nothing particularly funny or charming about two people splitting up, even if the couple is played by Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston.

If you've been disappointed by the recent rash of mediocre blockbusters, District B13 may provide some of the mindless fun you're looking for.

Comic-book enthusiasts can breathe a sigh of relief: Brett Ratner hasn't completely ruined the X-Men series a.k.a. "The Franchise that Bryan Singer Built."

As long as Guggenheim keeps his cameras trained on Gore's presentation, An Inconvenient Truth is an engaging film. Less successful are the scenes where Gore is seen off-stage, traveling around the world and visiting his childhood home.

At root, novelist Dan Brown’s story is an entertaining one--whether you believe any of these ideas are real or not. And in the end, it’s that standard movie trope (good guys must solve dire puzzle while bad guys give chase) that makes The Da Vinci Code an okay film.

Compelling and exasperating in pretty much equal doses.

Isn't quite self-aware enough to be really funny, and certainly isn't serious or genuinely exciting enough to be thrilling because of it's action.

One of Cruise's most deeply cherished ambitions is to be a great actor, and this movie goes to great lengths to let him do that--sort of. You'll understand what I mean during the sequence in which there is more than one Philip Seymour Hoffman on the screen.

The movie belongs to Wood, who creates a unique portrait of a girl hesitating at the threshold of womanhood; she's smarter, more attuned, and more spiritually ambitious than those around her, but also too decent and loyal to break from the world she knows-and too unformed to have a grasp of what she wants outside of that world. It's fantastic work.

The Proposition can be appreciated as a strong technical exercise, but it fails to resonate on any deeper level.

The climactic spelling bee sequence is as tautly written and edited as any gridiron drama, and Palmer's performance here is truly gripping.

Those last thirty minutes are worth the price of admission.

Composed of relatively few events and scenes, it's often excruciatingly tense and never less than heartbreakingly human. And as much as I admire "Munich," Shadows leaves Spielberg's film in the dust in the moral-ambiguity department. Never before seen in the States, it's already on my year's ten-best list. (April 2006 Premiere)

Never anything less than wholly engrossing. There's a lot of humor to be found here (primarily of the dark comedy variety) and the cumulative impact of Lazarescu's journey through the Bucharest medical system is quite powerful.

The movie tires itself out setting up the complex plot.

Ultimately all of the ado about men in shades and dark suits running around shooting and shouting at each other comes to a satisfying, if predictable, conclusion.

Director Shortland frames the story against the apt grey, off-season ski town, but her attempt to match it with deliberate pacing just makes the film feel chilly and too long, just like Heidi's depressing routine.

Even if its premise weren't so achingly familiar, the film's bland humor and oddly conservative depiction of its central character, a flamboyant drag queen named Lola, would still make it seem like a museum piece.

The result is a film that's almost unremittingly bleak, but also consistently compelling.

Weinstein Co. honchos Bob and Harvey are chasing some of the old "Pulp Fiction" magic--and failing not only miserably, but kind of disgustingly.

With the almost half-decade spaces between Holofcener's three features, one might (rather unreasonably, I admit) expect her to have sought to break wholly new ground in the interim. So she hasn't; nevertheless, Friends is well-crafted, intelligent, genuinely adult fare.

For all its intelligence, Free Zone has disappointingly little to say.

Jarecki seems all too eager to buy into Toback's depiction of himself as the ultimate Hollywood outsider. Try telling that to the independent filmmakers who aren't on a first-name basis with Warren Beatty.

The sweet, furry animals are witty and often funny, and while the physical comedy is simple, the main characters ultimately aren't.

It takes a good fifteen minutes to fully adjust to the screenplay's rhythms, but once you do, the dialogue is a lot of fun to listen to.

Obviously, if you don't like the Beasties or live music, arena-style, it's unlikely that you'll like their movie. But if you've ever even privately caught yourself nodding your head to "Brass Monkey," or you have a soft spot for the big-venue concert experience, Awesome rocks.