What started out with the feel of a tight little kids' thriller turns into a Nickelodeon afternoon movie.

A tense, expertly acted Russian film clouded by its intentional ambiguity.

An ambitious and exciting piece of work, a movie about sex and movies made by a filmmaker who understands the power of each to set off fantasy, create addiction, incite danger and transform the spirit.

Good storytelling.

The least appealing of the trilogy.

A dull film with unsympathetic characters brought together by a gimmicky premise that's handled with no imagination and a pristine fraudulence of emotion. Aside from that, it's great.

This tale of tortured love between a Mormon missionary and a West Hollywood tomcat renders its gay and religious characters so stereotypical that neither lifestyle appears attractive.

A dreadful exercise, with a script full of contradictions and empty gestures and a leading lady who's such a novice it hurts to watch her.

A street-dance film that's lively and silly and about as "street" as a Britney Spears video.

[Duhmel] brings surprising nuance to an ostensibly shallow character, a guy who's not really bad, just caught up in his own celebrity.

Real acting replaces re-enacting, and amazing cinematography pits the limits of human will against the unruliness of nature.

In its own ridiculous way, The Butterfly Effect is an entertaining movie, despite mediocre acting, lackluster direction and a story that's sometimes frustrating. It has the integrity of camp, maintaining an odd earnestness in the face of its own absurdity.

It seems like a bizarre move for Disney, releasing a film that combines elements of "Blue's Clues" and "The Island of Dr. Moreau."

It's only January, but already we have a strong candidate for the most thunderingly stupid movie of the year.

This wise and warm man, who died in 2002, is captured in all his glory by the remarkable documentary.

Much of The Tracker, a blunt morality tale about Australian racism, is heavy going.

Its story is paint-by- numbers...But it's funny, and funny covers a lot of sins.

Gorgeous animated film.

probably less painful than actual childbirth, but it's still a very long 86 minutes.

Sometimes demure, sometimes funny and other times flat-out crazed, Wuornos was effusive and confrontational when Broomfield filmed her just before her 2002 execution in Florida.

What's immediately apparent -- and refreshing -- about Chasing Liberty is that it doesn't play cute with its premise.

It's back in a handsome new black-and-white print, and it's still powerful stuff -- you can see why Pauline Kael wrote that it was "probably the only film that has ever made middle-class audiences believe in the necessity of bombing innocent people."

Skids into absurdity, but it never quite gets boring. Movies like this rarely are.

Cause for celebration. It's not only a cracking good film, but it is the first by Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien to gain a national (though limited) release.

To mildly respect Japanese Story is easy. To enjoy it would require an act of will.

An ungainly masterpiece, but Chaplin's ungainliness is something one can grow fond of.

Lacks what could kindly be called coherence.

Running mainly on adrenaline and a gimmick, it's different from other holiday movies in that it's not ambitious, earnest or overblown, and it obviously wasn't made with one eye on the Oscars.