The script's flaws are most keenly felt in the Jodie Foster storyline, to the point where her character seems more like a bumbling screw-up than a supposedly sought-after facilitator. Whenever Lee turns the camera back to Denzel and Clive though, the movie works.

With a cast of well-chosen actors, a good script, and an eye for making ordinary suburban scenes visually heartbreaking, director Steve Buscemi's small story of failure, depression-and ultimately, love-in one Indiana town rings painfully true-to-life.

For all its seeming simplicity, this is an emotionally and intellectually complex film that holds the viewer in a grip as tight as any classic thriller you can name.

A clichéd rock-star film.

A compelling, rousing and at times strangely moving entertainment.

This is the kind of comedy that gives you two meaty underhanded jokes for every big obvious guffaw. It doesn't add up to much more than that, but there's no earthly reason why it ought to.

Though McConaughey has proven himself game for romantic comedy contrivance in the past, his charisma is all wrong for the immature Tripp.

Though this new Hills is both scarier and smarter than 95 percent of the other horror product out there, it's also indicative of everything that's wrong with horror movies today.

Feels like little more than a stale rehash with a promising cast whose talents haven't been tapped.

Farrell and Hayek are two beautiful people with absolutely no chemistry. Even when they're lying in bed together, they're so far apart that they might as well be in different movies.

Some viewers will wonder what exactly it is they are supposed to be laughing at, but those that do find themselves on the movie's wavelength will enjoy its observational approach to comedy.

All this stuff is enacted by a better-than-reliable cast (Griffin Dunne, Robert Downey Jr., Catherine O'Hara, Roger Rees, and more), so Game 6 is never a bore. But it's not much more besides never a bore.

Amid every action cliche in the book, outmoded stereotypes, and a plot derivative of every futuristic drama made in the last fifteen years, Ultraviolet comes off as nothing more than a pale copy of better, more inventive films.

Joyeux Noel is no gritty war film; this is more of a Christmas miracle movie, full of melodrama. Carion juggles a large, multicultural cast, and few of the characters stand out; most are there to represent the types who pop up in your standard war-movie battalions.

This unlikely pairing of relentless U.S. pollsters and a Bolivian election is a fascinating glimpse of the Americanized marketing of international politics (and vice versa).

Hood's film, with its bold, beautiful cinematography and hard-thumping kwaito music, brings us into a different world, and then helps us to understand it.

Ultimately, it is a serviceable, well-made thriller that earns its R rating.

The dogs are such charismatic performers it's almost a shame that there have to be humans in this story at all. Still, the Antarctica sequences alone make Eight Below one of the better family films out there right now.

Surrounding Council and Moore in this cacophonous, bleak New Jersey are a set of cops, neighbors, and relatives played by actors that the unimaginative Roth yanked directly from various TV gritty crime shows; it's like he thought HBO was his personal casting agent.

Clichés are often a big part of what makes suspense films enjoyable. But Firewall goes out of its way to promise something more than business as usual, and then makes no attempt whatsoever to deliver.

This one will make you laugh early and often, and send you out of the theater in a cheerful mood.

With its varied close-ups and wide shots of the performers and a series of interviews with several of the musicians as they prepare to perform, Heart of Gold is a traditional concert film. But a traditional concert film starring Neil Young brings a layer of emotion to the medium that's rarely seen.

Ironically, for all of Stranger's faults, director Simon West has probably made a perfect date movie: just suspenseful enough to keep you arm-in-arm with your beau or belle; but silly enough that you'll both laugh about it afterwards.

All told, however, this bland little movie fits right into it's late January slot. It's a little bawdy - the fat-lady thong bit was funnier in "Shallow Hall" - and it passes the time.

Anybody can make a movie that's anti-slavery. But to make a movie that's explicitly anti-democracy-that's something.

The movie biz inside jokes eventually yield to fairly merciless plumbings about the construction of the self, resulting in a kind of philosophical discomfort that's much different from the run-of-the-mill humiliations this sort of thing usually trucks in.

At heart, a light, watchable film.

While basketball fans might have trouble recognizing the sport as it's played here, the games certainly aren't dull. Unfortunately, most of the off-court sequences are.