What joy it is to watch the man (Douglas) slime himself on camera.

Scott removed the adventure aspect, and some of the movie's passion was lost, too, like a dolphin caught in a tuna net. Perhaps it's for that reason that a movie that starts out with the potential to be great somehow falls short, and what seems as if it's going to be a revelation ends up, instead, simply a worthwhile, reasonably interesting variation on an old theme.

The film's grungy, ultra-low-budget look, thanks to the Safdie's handheld camera, is just right for catching the crummy, hardscrabble, rat-infested milieu.

A squishy-soft romance set to bouncing Italian pop. It's like a long swallow from a bottle of a very sweet wine. Goes down easy, warms the gut, leaves a film of sugar on the teeth.

It's one thing for a romantic comedy to be predictable - they all end at the same destination, after all. But it's quite another thing to be predictable at every twist and turn of the story.

A documentary that is often told in adages, riddles and poetry.

As Kaiulani's story, it falls flat, having collapsed under the weight of the genre's mushier conventions. There are too many swooping violins, too many trite generalizations, too few moments that throw a light on history and turn it into art.

Along the way, Looking for Eric emerges as a portrait of a world and a way of life. You will probably not want to live in Manchester after seeing this film, but you'll like and respect the people.

A better-than-average follow-up, but Tony doesn't suit up enough.

To cover the Abramoff scandal is to follow tangent after tangent, until it seems as if prison was in the lobbyist's plans from the beginning.

Still, the goodwill lingers, even though Mother and Child falls down, dies and is beginning to look a little green and stiff about 15 minutes before the finish line.

At first, The Oath looks as though it will be a study of the soul-corroding effects of twisted ideology, but it emerges as the reverse.

A very funny French comedy of a variety that usually doesn't make its way here.

The similarity between the children is the most striking part of the movie.

So any "Nightmare" movie has a built-in handicap going in, but the better ones find ways to compensate, by casting appealing young actors (they're always young), by having imaginative dream sequences and - most important of all - by keeping the dreams short. By that standard, this new "Nightmare" is a fairly decent effort.

It's a strange thing, this type of whimsy. Kari offers us ideas in place of characters, and yet he expects us to see through these ideas to the real-life conditions they represent - and then to respond to them in kind.

Harry Brown has more to say, about aging, about old-school courtesy in collision with blind stupid violence, and about how sometimes pensioners on a fixed income get stuck in neighborhoods that turn dangerous.

Though I wish Please Give were a little better, there aren't enough American movies like it.

This is smart, inspired, no-fuss entertainment.

I laughed hysterically, but in the interest of balanced reporting, I should add that the guy parked next to me at the screening - a boyfriend who was there under duress - emitted a series of low guttural noises suggesting profound psychological anguish.

The Losers is boring. It's predictable. It's so, so active, and yet so, so dead.

Anyone can make a bad movie. But it takes a unique set of circumstances to make a movie so horrible that people are celebrating its badness two decades later.

What we have in this film is a whole lot of nothing, and the little that's there is irritating.

You can get away with almost anything in a farce except failing to be funny, and that's what kills Death at a Funeral.

It brings together several popular strains of contemporary moviemaking and combines them into one big, shameless, audacious, compulsively watchable, irresistibly likable piece of pure entertainment.

The beauty of The Joneses is that the salesmen are as much the victims as the people they're deceiving.

It's all talking heads, clanging music, substandard graphics, long scans of Web-page headlines and Bowdon's heavily cadenced voiceovers.

From the start, we can see where this is headed: a big fat power struggle, with Omar at the eye of the storm. But the storm is more of a drizzle than an apocalyptic downpour, just one snippy conversation after another in languorous settings.