A sweaty-browed exercise in precision filmmaking, but one that doesn't cheat you with wisps of tension and the pretense of attitude.

In Criminal Lovers, the "Bonnie and Clyde" model of killing-as-erotica gets a shrewd, funny, decidedly French workout.

Of course, there's little else of interest about Pokemon beyond the consumption factor. Buy more.

It's the hypnotic long-form music video Smoke never got to make.

Particularly anticlimactic - the film itself seems sprung from molting yuppie catalogs.

A mixed bag with the promise of a better sequel.

Through it all, Ozon supplies a sense of pathos that makes fun of its own soullessness, transforming a self-serious suicide note into an existential love letter.

Comes on like an "After School Special'' psychodrama that's been taken off its medication.

Wields its Middle America values and moralistic flogging of idiosyncratic lifestyle choices like a flipped bird.

Priceless.

A warm-hearted valentine to old traditions in China that are being obliterated by modern - and admittedly more efficient - technology.

It's the year's funniest, most absurd sight gag.

Deadly funny.

An enthralling special-effects tour de force with a lover's nook.

Too dumb to realize that the senselessness is viral.

Highfalutin swill determined to pass itself off as a jazzy caper.

The Patriot makes the Revolutionary War look like super-produced studio footage of the L.A. riots.

You can see Bobby and Peter Farrelly bent over blowing violently into the sails of this toy boat, trying to get it to move.

Imbued with infectious pluck. It's also a lucid, competent, titanically entertaining movie loaded with workable gags.

The glory of the picture is the eye-popping, surreal backgrounds that blast the conventional characters off the screen.

The movie's primary narrative weakness is that its racism plot points seem ripped from the headlines of a "Geraldo" newsletter and stretched into a string of terribly executed car chases.

A dashing fusion of the literary and the cinematic.

Ruiz has made the most ambitious adaptation of a Proust work yet.

It's the year's best movie sex.

Staggering, gorgeously ambiguous.

There are episodes of "Rugrats" with stronger sexual suspense.

This is not the addictive, hot-wired movie you want.

Szabo doesn't bring the film to its senses until just past the halfway point.

The writer-director has come up with a sumptuous, happy piece of fluff.

Most of American Pimp feels like you've been slipped a Mickey.

A film where suspense and exhilaration are incompatible, and a receding plot line is merely the platform for cars to fly through panes of glass.

An undernourished exercise in pop critique.

A high-spirited, big-bottomed Polaroid of the comedian in a fat suit.

Funny enough that it could make buddy pictures respectable again.

Fans likely to rave about Living.

Moore can't help but be rotten. She has no grace and little nuance, which is why she's always best as a hard-ass in movies.

With a few quiet, moving scenes and a lovely ending, the film betrays an artist's touch, no matter how hard Kitano tries to make it look easy.

It's downright boring.

Woo delivers a vintage breakneck, break-arm, break-face 20-minute finale.

Parents should note the PG rating. There's little bloodshed, but several fight scenes, lots of loud roaring and some overwhelming special effects sequences could vex younger viewers.

Stooge-filled farce offers low laughs but lacks a point.

Slightly more mature and better assembled, Road Trip goes one better on "American Pie" by teasing out the idiosyncrasies in four guys existing in a personality grab bag.

It's a movie so foul even the folks at the NAACP Image Awards would have to look the other way.

What makes Shadow Boxers special is how Bankowsky restores the woman's touch that always seems intentionally excised from coverage of the sport without comprising their participation in the sport.

Aiming to keep it real, the cast of the new dance casserole Center Stage sweats spunk.

If filmmaking has ever been less thrilling and more disengaging, I'd like to see it.

Hamlet finds in Hawke's greatish performance a Great Dane for this, or any other, modern moment.

Things stay standard-issue French self-analytical from here.

Frill-less almost to the point of minimalist, teary without being lachrymose, hers is a performance you'd think was great were the movie in a language you didn't understand.

Earnest and kid-friendly -- also simplistic and dramatically creaky.

As formulaic, but occasionally outré multiplex-bound behemoths go, Gladiator is a foaming beast.

This overall good feeling helps smooth over the sometimes shocking lapses in logic.

It is a traffic jam of broken hearts, fluxing racial identities and deplorable outfits that has everything but a salsa overhaul of "I Will Survive."

Works as a quixotic study of emotional quirks.

There's a novel, engaging story trying to transmit through the storm of special effects and convoluted plot twists that mar the movie.

Like sitting on the beach under a cozy, warm afternoon sun. The view is beautiful, but not much is happening and soon you drift peacefully to sleep.

Demonstrates that sadomasochistic streak in von Trier that equates the raw with the experimental.

A depressing show of how truly, madly, deeply outmoded Hollywood can be.

Just fascinating in an empty, trendy sort of way

A particularly egregious array of Kodak moments.

One of those truly biodegradable experiences.

Certainly it isn't about to give "Das Boot" a run for its money - but nevertheless it is irresistible entertainment.

Ethereal.

Prince-Bythewood's movie is an occasionally clunky, mostly engaging coming out party for herself.

Funny and untouched by cynical, ironic bids to be taken seriously.

Revelatory.

Most of American Psycho just sits there, looking at trouble, rather than looking for it - complacent, overjoyed in fact to exist at all.

Needs a gritty intervention.

If you haven't taken your mother to a movie in a while, this is the ticket, with its PG-13 rating, lack of violence and like that.

May be the funniest movie about parental and spousal abuse ever made.

A grand, old-fashioned movie of spies and Communist repression.

If Restaurant feels like a high-caliber TV drama, it's one that tries to pack an entire season (plus pilot, plus backstory) into one episode.

If nothing else, The Filth and the Fury is a searing, forceful, entertainingly biased reminder only that the English group mattered - as musicians and as anti-social curs.

Tucci and Holm brilliant as magazine writer and artist.

A wildly dull, predictable script whose holes seem to be courtesy of random sniper fire.

Crammed with such earnest belief in the power of love - even if it happens in the Chicago Zoo - it almost doesn't matter that O'Connor and Loggia have better chemistry than Duchovny and Driver.

It's a truly strange coupling of mooning romanticism and rank stupidity that fairly screams, "Teenage America, we love your money!"

Ideological disaster!

A movie that features rich Mexican American characters and an uncompromising story line is always timely.

A lazy, torpid piece of animated tourism.

Brainless thriller.

Elegant.

Like laughing into a mirror for 113 minutes.

Any movie that opens with a Goo Goo Dolls song and ends with a line like "I'm going to live -- just not as long as you" is bound to leave somebody reaching for a Kleenex.

As involved as Crudup and Connelly beseech you to be with this story, their very youthfulness, their nagging lack of adulthood, keeps the film from being anything more credible than a tight grad-school tryst.

Whatever It Takes is DOA -- dated on arrival.

A tedious, soapy romp about overlapping lives and destiny.

Between fights, the film can't even rely on the luxury of Lindo, Isaiah Washington, Russell Wong, Rottweiler rapper DMX or the scary Henry O as Han's father to make it watchable - the dialogue is wreaking more havoc than Li.

Loose and funny with verve.

Trouble is, it's too close-up.

Stupid.

It's an experience as frustrating as watching Jeff Gordon drive a stock car through a bowl of oatmeal.

Right up to its deliberate thud of a closer, Polanski had me.

Ludicrously written and appallingly directed by ex-film critic Rod Lurie, seems to pride itself on the fact that it never (ever) leaves the greasy-spoon milieu in which the president and his staff are trapped by heavy snowfall.

In another universe - though it is difficult to imagine which one - Garry Shandling might be sexy.

It's too cryptic and unfulfilled to serve as a tool for anything beyond its own obfuscation.

There are enough mullets to win this movie a Stanley Cup.

The best-looking bad movie in years.