Director Cassavetes may want to cut back on the slow-motion stuff, but he's unquestionably a talent.

A sweet but overly sober look at a child's coming to spiritual grips with the death of his grandfather, Wide Awake occasionally packs an emotional punch. But a meandering script, written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, and the candy coating it's wrapped in, undermine its effectiveness.

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

It's full of visual flash, and can be enjoyed as a giddy ride, but you would waste your time trying to puzzle out the nuances of the story.

What could have been an insightful, irresistible movie is instead a simple, self-contained fable, pleasing to look at but meaningless

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

Metroland is a provocative rumination on how relationships are warped by two people's inability to be truthful with each other.

The welcome hints at emotional excess are compromised by the blunt force of the movie's political point-making.

Giving especially good performances are Aniston, Mahoney, McGlone and Burns. Not that this movie is bad; it's just not as great as "McMullen."

I can't help thinking, though, that maybe Thornton was too ambitious in trying to wear three hats.

The action moves along at a good clip, and Apted, who made "Gorillas in the Mist," "Nell," "Coal Miner's Daughter," and the "7-Up" series of documentaries, doesn't allow the plot to bog down in details. But the so-called moral dilemma that Myrick's work poses - kidnapping the homeless and torturing them to death in the name of medical science - is laughable.

Leaves the audience on such a devastatingly dramatic ledge.

The art direction is reliably vivid and hyperreal, but director Satoshi Kon and company can't articulate how mentally taxed Mima is without confusing us.

You're smarter than this, but occasionally it tricks you into thinking it might be up to something you haven't considered, like an above-average, extra-bloody episode of "Scooby Doo."

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.

You may find yourself weeping toward the end, and, later, you may also find yourself wondering why. The revelations are staggeringly obvious.

An unsteady stab at noir.

The cast's control and Dobkin's assured pacing keep most of the funny things funny and make most of the scary things scary - while maintaining the tricky balance between humor and fear.

Overstays its welcome until the jokes curdle and the satire becomes a blunt instrument, but not before Busch throws some priceless one-liners.

It's not as good as the original - which was fresher, funnier and scarier - but if it were, then by the criteria of the film's resident movie scholar, it wouldn't be a genuine sequel.

Woody Allen's questionable toe-tapping faux-documentary.

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

Caruso doesn't leave much of a mark in the movie. On the smaller screen he smoldered. He seems to need the cramped space to seem sexy. The big screen isn't claustrophobic enough to pinch and squeeze the talent out of him.

By aiming for something more ambitiously, ambiguously philosophical, [Sayles] forgot to include a heart and a soul.

I like that Sheridan's girlfriend works at Starbucks. Snipes plays the part with the kind of high energy that large doses of caffeine would explain.

Smart and unsentimental as it is, Shallow Grave is more than a little forbidding.

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

A proudly unsophisticated demonstration of racial progress.