Presented without preachiness or affectation, Kandahar is a short, matter-of-fact visit to hell.

Stuns with writing, acting, direction.

A daring, free-spirited and ultimately moving performance by Benjamin Bratt lies at the beating heart of Pinero.

Splendid.

Proves that it's possible to make a movie so tasteless and so crude that audiences don't laugh. This is worthwhile information. It means there's a limit.

Might have been about the rise and fall of a family of gifted children. That would have been the typical way to approach the story. Instead, it's something rare -- a movie about people who have already fallen, whose best days are behind them.

The film's aim -- to dazzle and inspire -- is sapped by Cruise's vein-popping, running-the-marathon performance.

A powerful allegory.

A picture so infectious it almost seems original.

A sympathetic look at what it's like to be a Brazilian transsexual prostitute working in Milan.

Can and should be appreciated as a work of delicate and unmistakable beauty.

A disappointment, a precious and grotesque exercise reminiscent of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's "Delicatessen," only less amusing.

The film is like watching a very bad play as presented by a very bad director.

A solid network effort about heroism in a most immoral world.

The actors do their best, particularly the impeccable Mirren, but Schepisi draws a shroud of chaste dullness over their scenes and lays on an energy- sapping score.

Stettner approaches this material with a playwright's incisiveness and structural sense. His dialogue is cutting, often surprising.

The film is exciting in two big ways: its simplicity of story (Tanovic does not get bogged down trying to give us an epic history) and the breadth of Tanovic's vision.

There's no joy and little playfulness about this caper comedy, which, despite a lighthearted script, has a sober undertone to it, almost a melancholia.

Great pleasures.

Really is just an excuse to string together some silly fake-movie clips.

Plays like the cinematic equivalent of a paperback bodice- ripper with embossed type.

Behind Enemy Lines has a wretched script and a director (first-timer John Moore) who either has no taste or doesn't know what he's doing.

Maybe there's a metaphor here, but figuring it out wouldn't make Trouble Every Day any better.

Brothers Oxide and Danny Pang co-directed. What they lack in discipline they make up in razzle-dazzle, even if it sometimes is pointless.

A lot of actors are labeled "brave" for taking on difficult scripts like this, but Spacek is the real thing: an artist first, without vanity, and a movie star almost by default.

Few who see it will be sorry. Sometimes being humane means not being squeamish.

Martin Lawrence finally gets to show what he can do as a screen comedian.

Burns has a hard time finding a central idea, some overall point that isn't borrowed or trite. Or both.

The film doesn't explore the nature of ghosts, as it promises to initially, but it's fun to watch Del Toro confront death and fear with such energy and humor.

Enormously satisfying and fun to watch.

A purposely inane mishmash of maudlin love story, gastrointestinal gags and shredding snowboard scenes, Out Cold has a couple of laughs but mostly wipes out.

A lively, ultimately sad portrait.

It's hard to give two hoots about any of these characters.

Spins an unconvincing, miscast noir tale.

Absolutely the best single moment, beautifully presented, comes when the orphaned Harry looks in a mirror and sees his parents there. It is brilliant in its simplicity and very moving.

The picture itself seems stoned. Line readings and whole scenes are abandoned midstream, as if Pooh lacked the attention span to see his ideas through.

Well-intentioned but predictable romance.

Even a mediocre David Mamet movie is still a David Mamet movie. That means there are lines to savor, partly because the lines are so good, partly because they are so Mamet.

The belly laughs finally start to come --legitimately.

Hawke is the movie's revelation.

A thriller that presses all the buttons: parental love, childhood terror, fear of Vince Vaughn.

A tale of yuppie conformity and domestic angst that quickly turns into a horror film.

Funny and sweet enough to delight kids and inventive enough to satisfy adults.

A charmer, a movie whose embrace of cinema is so passionate it could be mistaken for an embrace of life.

It's called One, and the hemorrhaging begins with the so-called story, which doesn't quite add up to one.

The Coens' plotting, with its suspense and reversals, is a source of amazement and delight.

An audacious film, set in contemporary Marseille.

If one ignores reason, High Heels hums along well enough as a crime caper.

The movie has some clumsy dialogue and awkward turns, but the picture is brisk and likable.

This is a tour-de-force performance, delivered by an actor at the top of his game, and it's a shame that K-Pax, instead of engaging our imaginations as it promises to, devolves into such a conventional, paint-by- numbers disappointment.

Kline, in particular, has the spark and know-how to overcome some awfully belabored writing and situations.

Oddly comforting in its inconsistent acting and bad monster makeup.

The best teenage werewolf movie ever made.

If this movie ever figured out what it wanted to be when it grows up, it would be a terrific one.

Doesn't work at all. Even the structure is off.

It's that dilemma -- a commitment to Orthodox life, the refusal to deny one's sexuality and the fear of expulsion once that sexuality is revealed -- that director Sandi Simcha DuBowski illustrates so powerfully.

About American anti-Semitism, but it's not a typical genteel "cause" movie.

They try to make Beverly adorable, and the movie comes off strained and dishonest as a result.

Jay and Claire are exquisitely played by Mark Rylance and Kerry Fox.

Not as simple as it looks, though its appeal is simple: Robert Redford goes to prison, and James Gandolfini ("The Sopranos") is the warden. That's a movie worth seeing right there.

Mystery skillfully evokes Victorian London's dark depths.

A sexy, mildly entertaining import.

Leaves an impression, while its specifics fade almost immediately.

A great experience, precisely because it's so intimate and unguarded.

A coming-of-age story that gets it all wrong.

Where it really counts, though, it's the same good old comic action fantasy.

Nobody would claim it adds up to much of a comedy. It's strictly for someone looking for a goof-off.

Taken as a whole, Bandits is a success, a two-hour entertainment that floats along, stumbling into various genres, discovering its moments.

Exhilarating not only for its dreamlike images and fierce, frequently reckless imagination but also for the fact that it got made (and released) at all.

An indelible statement on loneliness and spiritual thirst.

This is a different kind of girls' movie, and certainly not a pretty one, especially its horrific head-scratcher of an ending.

For music fans, there's great pleasure in hearing new audio tracks to "Sitting Here in Limbo," "Friend of the Devil" and more songs -- each one complete and unedited.

Turns out to be the most unnerving film of the year. Easy.

A melodramatic yarn that transcends some of its technical and storytelling flaws through the cheery energy and sincerity of its cast.

Serendipity is a throwback to a more innocent era in American life, 25 days ago.

It is so propulsive so much of the time, it almost looks as if it's going to go the distance. If Washington & Co. don't quite manage to bring it home, the getting there sure is something.

A movie like this depends on clever bits and incidents, but there's little invention here to disguise the film's formulaic nature.

Faye's presence provides an unexpected context for the photographer's circle, where the gay and straight worlds overlap, and adds a delightful dimension to Chop Suey.

Delicious but complex.

Benefits enormously from Aiello's down-to-earth magnificence.

Unabashedly sentimental, it's meant to touch our hearts in profound and important ways, but misses the mark by drawing too deeply from a pool of schmaltz.

It's probably pointless to complain when a movie sets out to be stupid and actually is. (And the people who came up with a couple of these ideas think male models are dumb.)

Don't even try to make any sense of this --none of it elicits a moment of genuine concern.

Downbeat, ultimately tragic, but there's a wondrous, sad beauty here.

The animation is rich and densely detailed, the characters well defined.

A remarkable documentary about an almost unfathomable ordeal.

It doesn't help that Glitter is such a derivative mishmash of cinematic and real-life situations that it's nearly impossible to count all the ways.

The result is a winning comedy.

This is trash on a big budget, but trash nonetheless.

Hardball works where it counts, on the emotional level.

A complicated and stylish Korean thriller that will make viewers' skin crawl.

The best scenes are the ones that Fox shares with Tamala Jones, Wendy Raquel Robinson and the full-figured Monique as her sassy girlfriends. There's a ripe, crackling spontaneity when these women get together.

The writing, by Rapp and Catherine Dussart, is exquisite, and the performers, including Francois Truffaut's old colleague Jean-Pierre Leaud as a magistrate, are all first-rate.

The movie lacks the one thing that the classic "Three Musketeers" story can't do without: panache.

A provocative, upsetting film.

A truly awful mix of bad direction, nonsensical story line and dialogue that appears to have been made up on the spot.

A marvelous film.

An irresistible movie about a guy who goes on a journey, the kind an audience can't wait to take with him.