The script and direction by Irish filmmaker Mary McGuckian is just deadly.

Ozon's greatest special effect is holding the camera in tight on the faces of Bruni-Tedeschi (one of the most expressive faces in French cinema) and Freiss.

Steel and Morris are simply a couple of ordinary citizens who stand up for their ideals and their rights in the face of intimidation. Which is what makes this underdog story matter.

It's an eye-filling, sumptuously detailed historical epic that grandly re-creates the bloody gladiatorial spectacles and smoke-filled, spit-flying, claustrophobically crowded arenas of its bygone era.

An excellent documentary equal parts extreme sports and social anthropology.

It's a big enough film to hold all the contradictions. Green has an ego and a gift for stealing the spotlight with a wink and a grin. Yet his respect for the kids is genuine.

The jokes run dry, the situation is redundant, the cast becomes tiresome and the running time is interminable.

Stunningly beautiful film.

It may set itself up as a girlie film with "Ya-Ya" mystics (complete with candles and chanting), but sheds that motif for a much more grounded (and satisfying) film.

Yedaya is respectful and sensitive of everyone in Or's life and creates a beautiful, complex and rich relationship between mother and daughter, loving and protective of each other, but not of themselves.

Sandler's frequent director, Peter Segal, also rises to the occasion, giving the proceedings some of the rough-hewn, hard-edged look of the original, and brings it to a funny, satisfying climax that -- happily -- doesn't cop out.

It could be more involving, but it's funny enough that you won't care.

The film half-heartedly paints their actions as rebel-chic heroism even when it has all the integrity of tomcats spraying outside their yards, and it ends up just as confused as the characters.

The dark, rotting interiors and sunless winter skies create a festering atmosphere of unexpiated guilt as Kremer ponders the question of how a decent man is to navigate the rivers of hell.

Ripe with offbeat Americana, Beesley's rockumentary is also a portrait of growing up in a white-trash Okie ghetto.

A convincing and compelling community of characters with a sure comic sense and an at times screwball sensibility.

But if her wisp of a story rushes the simple connection between the women, the actresses fill in the details with an easy, unforced intimacy.

Fascinating as these spiders and frogs must be to one another, a human being need not be put into such close proximity to their private dances.

Ingeniously engineered, self-consciously clever and directed with snazzy style, it's played as a violent black comedy with often-gruesome punch lines.

The movie grabs us from its heart-pounding opening sequence and pulls us inexorably along its trajectory with the grip of the last gruesome act of a Greek tragedy. Its fascination is not what happens but HOW it happens.

Blunt, somewhat artless, but very effective.

The psychobabble silliness passed off as investigative insight here is laughable at best.

It never quite takes off.

It's incorrigibly unfunny.

The simple, unpretentious storytelling of Unleashed is a rarity in the glut of underwritten and overproduced action films that dominate American screens today.

It's not the dance but the kids' passion, and the boisterous support of their friends and family in the audience, that makes the contest so entertaining.

Craig's got the stuff but the ending of this cake is soggy for its protagonist and audience.

Desplechin fearlessly dives into raw, bitter revelations and surfaces with hope as our heroes try again to get it right.

Haskell comes off as a jerk -- but Mark somehow looks even worse: not just insincere but weak, vain and vindictive.

Overlong, unscary, poorly paced and banally written.

Its concept is gutsy, its script is literate and intelligent, its visuals and cinematic craftsmanship are mouth-dropping, and its vision of the insanity of various religions vying to dominate the real estate of the Holy Land comes through with great power.

Had Araki chosen to illuminate, rather than exploit, the traumatic aftermath of child molestation, his wallow in the horrors of Mysterious Skin might have had a purpose. As it stands, his film is just another trashy look at America as the land of imbecilic perverts.

It's a quiet anti-war film full of lovely, heartbreakingly assured performances and real situations and responses.

Crash can't rise from the ashes of its pessimism.

The movie is a fascinating, if often confusing, mix of dramatized scenes from the novel, re-created and actual interviews with Desclos.

It's a pleasure to see and hear so much wit in a big-budget comedy, and the fine British cast of supporting actors makes every bon mot a tasty verbal morsel.

Has to be one of the most absurd of all big-budget action movies, and that's saying something. It's just a blink away from over-the-top self-parody, and I'm pretty sure it's not trying to be.

Original, imaginative and stylish.

The result is a painful and poignant film at once empathetic and critical, more soberly unnerving than exciting, but never less than compelling.

Andrew Bujalski's refreshingly modest look at life in the directionless netherworld between college and career is the rare film that finds its story in the minor contradictions and simple conflicts of ordinary people doing, well, not exactly nothing, but nothing important.

The film's wealth in themes provokes unsettling thought, even as it feels meager in thesis.

This is the most impressive directing debut by a "name" British actor in a long, long time.

Well-cast and sporadically gripping.

Very much a '70s-style paranoid thriller, with a mood, tone and cascade of plot twists that are highly reminiscent of his 1975 classic, "Three Days of the Condor."

It is charming and at times disarmingly surprising.

Based on a best-selling book by Fortune magazine writers Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, the film approaches Enron through the Horatio Alger saga of its founder, Kenneth Lay, the son of a dirt-poor Missouri Baptist minister.

While Madison is earnest and inoffensive, it offers no surprises, few fascinating characters and a hackneyed script.

All the furiousness doesn't really add up to anything, but there is grungy fun to be had in gizmo-laden art direction and the increasingly bizarre battle of wits of the weirdly warped South Korean sci-fi black comedy.

As far as these things go, the film's violence is not outrageously excessive.

As a director, Duchovny is in big trouble every frame of the way. His characters ring false, his scenes seem improperly motivated in a glaring way, and his distasteful obsession with imagery of unflushed cigarette butts bobbing in a toilet is beyond inexplicable.

Deepened by the socioeconomic undercurrent that suggests the lengths to which workers are forced to prostitute themselves to survive corporate downsizing.

Even if you know or care little about the sport, it's a fascinating saga.

Hartley's soft spot for offbeat romances is trumped by irony and sloganeering dialogue.

Aviva emerges undamaged for all of her trauma. That may be the most compassionate, human act Solondz has offered in his career up to now.

The casting is so strong and the overall filmmaking flair of the movie is so captivating that it basically works.

Passably entertaining.

In a farce like this, where the story is merely a string of martial-arts movie cliches lined up to be parodied, that has its own rewards.

Plays like a feature-length sitcom with gay double entendres.

It's so affected and arch it flops into self parody.

It's not sleepy, it's comatose, and writer/director Josh Sternfeld never wakes it up with anything as crass as a plot.

Eloquent and informative.

Sadly, it's still a plodding affair that's low on plausible character motivation and compelling action scenes, and it's still not much of a showcase for its star, Charlton Heston.

The attainment it achieves is in the depths of pointless, mean-spirited exploitation.

Despite the scenic appeal of Mexico's Baja Peninsula, the film may prove too nerve-racking for casual viewers. It is a racing movie for the inside track.

While Look at Me at times falls into familiar plotting, it never offers false hope or false characters.

The script is full of brassy lines.

Surprise! After a clumsy opening, Guess Who goes down very smoothly. Its cast is appealing, its script is often clever and imaginative.

A difficult movie. Its obvious, heavy symbolism, glaring soundtrack and top-heavy themes threaten to make it implode, but it's saved by its performances.

The film dwells more on the sensationalistic aspects than the sport itself but it's impossible to deny the tawdry entertainment value in this compelling film tabloid.

It's just the kind of film that you'd expect a jury led by Quentin Tarantino to choose, a bloody and brutal revenge film immersed in madness and directed with operatic intensity.

The writing here is truly dismal.

There's no question where filmmaker Jonathan Nossiter's sympathy lies, but he makes his case leisurely, without hysteria and with much playful screen time devoted to the various interviewees' pet dogs.

A sweet if bland film.

The film is a dud in the tradition of such weak horror sequels as "Exorcist II" and "Dracula's Dog."

tTere are two things going for Melinda and Melinda: Woody's not in it and Radha Mitchell is.

It's part Jules Verne arms-race nightmare, part James Bond gadget war and part boy's own adventure.

There's a gripping thriller between the gaps in logic. Director Florent Siri has a tough style and an unforgiving attitude, but it drowns in the queasy blood lust.

There are a lot of terrific creative energies at play in Robots and they overcome an overreliance on amusement park sensibilities in the animated adventure.

The film never earns the irony of the title or offers anything profound in its observations of fractured family dynamics in an atmosphere of lingering resentment, but Allen and Costner enrich and elevate the film and give the growth of their characters a hard-earned gravitas.

The film is thriller, comedy and rite-of-passage story, but Boyle never loses sight of what's at its core.

Ends badly, with a clumsy, nihilistic coda that leaves one uncertain how to feel about the story, confused as to what point has been made and not at all convinced that the new South Africa will be that much different from the old one.

It's well-written, well-cast and skillfully directed in every scene, and, at the same time, it doesn't come together with enough impact to be hugely memorable.

John Travolta is nothing if not cool as Chili Palmer.

Maybury's attempt at a more mainstream movie is really just a simple love story cloaked in a lot of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo.

Ultimately this soppy Pacifier sucks.

The film tugs at us. And we forgive it its faults because it never loses sight of what it's supposed to be even though the story has a manipulative edge and maneuvers our feelings.

The ironies and contradictions that give the first half a dark humor give way to gravity and respect as soldiers are killed (off camera).

Genuinely funny and sweet, the film's "everybody wins" philosophy resonates beyond the feel-good surfaces.

Despite its flaws, Walk on Water is a sometimes engaging story of emotional opposites who become mystifyingly attracted to each other.

Giordana's redemptive vision provides a sense of discovery and a well of hope in the most devastating of troubles, and beautiful surprises in love, friendship and family.

The movie has a soul, and its good-natured charm may well win over the most cynical heart.

It's a methodical, friendly fairy tale in which everyone is good and the outcome is a given.

It's inconsistent and it fudges the script's murkier details, but Lawrence keeps the story on track and doesn't cheat the world of Constantine."

A harried, screechy film that goes nowhere at a breakneck pace, full of sound and furious slapstick overkill but devoid of wit.

Uncompromising, unpleasant and emotionally brutal, this twisted love story of emotional bondage is oddly compelling.

It's a bracing reminder that before Hitler took power, it was handed to him. The lesson resonates long after the credits roll.

It's the warmest, most generous portrait of American hospitality you've seen from a European movie in some time.

A well-made but harrowing and extremely downbeat coming-of-age drama.