It's an interesting experiment that doesn't quite work.

This isn't the Bollywood blast of color and song or the brassy razzle-dazzle of "Chicago," but a quieter, sweeter approach that works against the chaotic comedy while humanizing the characters.

A proud and optimistic testament to the youthful spirit of seniors who refuse to let such a trifle as their failed lives get in the way of a bit of fun.

If there is a delicate story of forgiveness, friendship and family buried somewhere in Erica Beeney's script, Potelle and Rankin haven't managed to find it under the throes of empty rebellion and painless triumph.

This limited point of view, while effective in chronicling Gator's rise, is dreadfully inefficient in contextualizing his fall.

So full of limp slapstick silliness and stock characters that it's hard to stay awake through it.

Despite the raw gut-punch of its direction, its power lies in compassion, not sensationalism.

Doesn't have any of the creepy suspense that graced the first "Friday" movies, and very little of the Daliesque dream imagery of the early "Nightmares." It's just a slam-bang succession of gross-out mutilations, played for giggles.

See "Freaky Friday" for convincing cross-generational female bonding. Despite it's elegant style and uptown milieu, this film is a cheap imitation.

In the world of comic-book movies, American Splendor is the real deal, the warts-and-all adventures of the most unlikely hero on the comic stands.

Ireland says he was after the kind of "elegant simplicity" of the great Hollywood romantic dramas of the '50s, and, for the most part, this is exactly what he pulls off.

It's a gorgeously atmospheric, perfectly cast, beautifully crafted oater of the old school, made with heaps of integrity, no gimmicks and few concessions to the box office. Its only real flaw is that it strains a bit too hard to be a "classic" western.

Director Casey La Scala directs with enough energy to carry the odyssey over the next ramp, but for all the eagerness of the performances, the conviction is strictly prepackaged.

An almost too-sophisticated comedy, pitting the New World mentality and brash pugnaciousness of America against the staid arrogance of custom that defines the French bourgeoisie.

It's just one more competent but routine, midlevel ($70 million) late-summer action movie filled with the usual explosions, shootouts and male bonding.

A family-friendly remake funnier, fresher and more affecting than the flavorless original.

It is passionate and angry and rousing where you might expect it to become numbing and depressing.

It's too insubstantial to support its two-hour-plus running time, and too arbitrary to work as a story, so you walk out wondering not happened, but whether anything actually did.

Think of easy jazz or soft soul, with Rudolph's cinematic improvisations soaring and circling the melody while adding quirky variations.

It's often helplessly hilarious in its adolescent gross-out way, yet the cast periodically invests the film with sweetness.

There is no histrionic excess or crackpot camp, only hoary sentiment, the puppy-dog cuteness of the mentally handicapped, and the proposition that the "cure" for lesbianism is one good man brave enough to get in touch with his inner cow.

In some ways it suffers from the same unredemptive afflictions as Elwood and his gang: It's a bit flaccid and flabby and lumbers gracelessly along without self awareness or humanity.

Tinged with sadness, and despite overstaying its welcome a wee bit, remains an anthem of insurrection, melding its political and humanistic truths into an almost dreamily subversive film tinged with humor and some small hope.

The nuttiest big-screen video game you'll ever have the pleasure of seeing somebody else play.

The movie is all action. But there's no pacing, no suspense and no vulnerability for the protagonist so it all soon gets numbingly tiresome.

It's not the most viscerally exhilarating racing saga or squishy animal movie ever made, but it's a terrific period piece. It's also a well-acted, engrossing and satisfying character drama that stands out like a diamond in this summer of sequels and comic-book violence.

Starts slowly, takes a turn for the better for a couple of reels and then, not having much to say or anywhere to go, flatlines into something akin to "American Idol."

A strange and convoluted film that is as rewarding as a Dylan song, and just as perplexing.

The poetic justice strains the verisimilitude of a film otherwise grounded in a tough reality, but there is a guilty satisfaction to it all.

A lively and lightweight comedy, the film finally connects with the real-life rush of playing music for a live audience.

Kilner and crew cough up a mish-mash of contrasting tones and tempos and wind up a rather odd, misshapen curiosity that wavers into too many styles to avoid a slow death by overkill.

Watching a Bruckheimer with natural comics like Smith and Lawrence makes it all go down easily. If you like this type of movie, that is.

An absorbing slice of a lost world that's actually very reminiscent of Kurosawa's underappreciated 1957 film, "The Lower Depths."

Overall, the film contains personal and political stories, as well as the macrocosm and the microcosm of chaos, rage, sadness and confusion.

Most Bond parodies tend to flatten because they fail to evoke the production design overkill and slick cinematic style of its target. Johnny English is no different. Director Peter Howitt delivers action like a journeyman, but Atkinson saves him time and again.

No more or less than it appears to be: a paean to the benevolent fate we'd like to believe watches over us.

A comedy of miscommunication that blends the humanism of Jean Renoir, the magic of Jean Cocteau and the absurdism of Eugene Ionesco.

The boys and girls are so busy acting out their romantic fantasies or soulfully pining over impossible loves that, however photogenic they may be, they never seem to actually live their lives.

One more bloated effects-o-rama lumbering through a formula plot (super-villain out to rule the world) without much zest, imagination or awareness of its own absurdity.

There's no particular tragedy or triumph, merely another step in the lives of two fallible people finding a little comfort while stumbling toward happiness.

A love letter to the state of Montana and a landscape that is biblical in its desolation and splendor.

Verbinski puts a Jackie Chan flourish of high energy and gymnastic action on the swashbuckling stunts and swordplay and keeps this lark sailing along.

Contains much abuse and brutality, an annoying celebratory air of pimp-chic and enough explicit gay sex scenes to qualify as (very tepid) soft-core porn.

The ploddingly literal screenplay by John Logan doesn't help matters.

Occasionally falters in its symbolism and storytelling, but still unnerves because we're never quite sure of our bearings, or whose "reality" we're watching.

airily works not only because of Witherspoon and a game supporting cast...but because, with its bark-and-bite agenda wrapped in a blanket of laughs, has the sense to remember that, first and foremost, it's entertainment.

In a summer of comic book super-operas dense with psychological torment and sprawling well over two hours, the unpretentious efficiency of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is refreshing.

The most sensuous and intimate work of cinema of the past few years, a film that luxuriates in the immediacy of the moment. There is no guilt to the act, only exhilaration, joy and freedom. At least for the moment.

Boyle gives us some truly harrowing sequences and a succession of images that stick in the mind like a bad dream.

It's flashy, it's often funny ...,and it resembles a movie so much that soon it demands something resembling motivation, character, a plot, anything to explain the seemingly arbitrary connections between the stunts and the skits.

This is still Reiner's worst movie since 1994's "North." Wilson is lackluster, the film's depiction of the collaborative process is (unlike "Adaptation") tortuously false, and it's so disrespectful to the realities of writing and publishing that it has no satiric bite.

After a rough orientation, it kicks in to be a visually enthralling, viscerally rousing, politically fascinating epic of the old school that evokes the pleasures of the great spectaculars of the Hollywood past.

As this all plays out -- and basically segues into "King Kong" -- the movie wins its biggest gamble: its entirely computer-generated monster works.

It's so sloppy that the flashback montage includes clips from scenes that were cut from the film!

Even a one-two punch from Australian stars Guy Pearce and Rachel Griffiths, who are wryly good in this crime caper, can't keep it from sinking into a cavern of cliches.

This collision of popular Emmy-winning TV shows is strangely uninspired and, well, a bit dull.

Ford tries very hard to be eccentrically funny -- to the point of forced, slapsticky mugging -- but he looks terrible, his timing is way off and his character is so uptight, abrasive and unappealing that he makes miserable company.

It's light and airy and, unlike the land-locked planes, runs the risk of nearly floating away into innocuous obscurity.

Commentary from shockingly outspoken Watts residents on topics ranging from revolution to infidelity are a vital part of the documentary.

The Pangs are at their best playing in the style sandbox, creating shivery imagery and eerie moods while exploring nothing deeper than irony and unease, as their climax so effectively demonstrates.

Unlike original director Rob Cohen, Singleton has no gift for giddy action and his movie is a crashing bore.

The real find in this lovely family film is Castle-Hughes, who makes Pai's confusion, emotional fragility and devotion palpable.

A perceptive, fascinating and relatively evenhanded look at the most radical arm of the American student rebellion of the Vietnam era.

What's most devastating in Capturing the Friedmans is how Jarecki puts the sureness of justice into doubt as he shows Truth (with a capital T) at the mercy of perspective and perception, context and emotion.

Together is a likely candidate to become that one foreign-language film that jumps out of the art houses each year to become a mainstream phenomenon.

Charlize Theron, playing the one woman member of the team, handily steals the movie from the guys with her no-nonsense display of verve and vulnerability.

Dazzles us with computer-generated animation that has never looked quite so boldly exotic or shimmeringly beautiful.

Douglas brings a hilarious kind of Gordon Gekko assurance to his character, and Brooks' long-suffering, naggy persona -- which hasn't had a showcase this strong since "Lost in America" -- sparks off it like Hope with Crosby.

The movie is mainly an excuse to display special-effects gags in the form of the various miracles manifested -- some of which are highly imaginative, some of which aren't.

Director Emanuele Crialese captures a stifling, dead-end rural culture awash in nature's beauty but seething with pent-up sexual frustration.

Forget "The Revenge of the Nerds." This is the real thing.

For the most part the eruption of repressed anger is blindly destructive. There's little healing to be found in the bitter melodrama, but there is a small sense of triumph as the children face up and move on.

A hard film to shake and makes us think and think again.

This community finds its balance with an easy effortlessness.

Moves like a bullet and, even if they're overblown, the action sequences are still mostly exhilarating and hypnotic. Moreover, the film's human dimension and character development is richer and more rewarding than the genre requires, and its philosophical underpinning more intellectually audacious and seductive: The film is more of a mind-trip than I expected.

It's a formula job all the way, filled with pratfalls, flying food, much male incompetence in the face of child-rearing realities, and a cast of violence-prone children on sugar highs who somehow turn into angels by the film's last sappy moments.

The script consists largely of goofy little scenes in which various groupings of the four characters banter in that nervous, Woody Allen-ish, never particularly funny or endearing or believable dialogue style of the '90s dating movie.

Zellweger is a gifted comedienne and her wonky persona sparks here and there, but the humor is so broad that the film is a poor stage for her subtle comedic skills, and she's not photographed well: her face has to be lit just so or it tends to looks strangely distorted. McGregor is terrible casting.

This moody, progressively enthralling little French psychodrama is very much it's own thing: a boldly conceived, impeccably crafted and wonderfully enigmatic two-character study that turns out to be a most powerful showcase for its two stars.

It's in English, but the actors speak it with tortuous accents that are a constant struggle to understand and make them seem like foreigners in their own land. Spanish with English subtitles would have served this story much, much better.

After its irresistible first act, Owning Mahowny loses its energy and focus very fast.

A witty new indie with a good cast and high production values that has fun with the absurdity of the frenzied bidding wars that can break out over a "spec" script by an unknown or first-time screenwriter.

It also boosts the punch of the movie that so many of its action scenes evoke the Iraqi War news footage of the past month, and the "X-Men" premise -- people persecuted because their difference makes them seem threatening -- carries even more relevancy and weight than it did three years ago.

So fluffy and sitcom shallow that it makes "Gidget Goes to Rome" and its other many predecessors in the young-American-girl-goes-to-Italy-and-falls-in-love genre look like high art.

Bruckner's restrained performance reveals a girl drowning in her own lack of self-esteem. When she finally comes up for air, she shatters the surface with a force that, in the hands of a less thoughtful director, could send her spinning down the melodramatic road to ruin.

Not only is it an enormously entertaining study of a curiously American institution, it also manages to be a nail-biting competition film, an engrossing group character study and a wonderfully graceful comedy of manners.

When its big plot switcheroo comes, it proves to be not such a great idea after all: It actually weakens, rather than strengthens, the premise, and dissipates, rather than intensifies, the drama.

Delivers a clever confidence game, if not much else.

This is one family reunion where you need someone to act up or pick a fight, anything to bring a little life to the party.

The texture of Manic feels honest and the chemistry of the kids is well observed, but even the modest breakthroughs are dramatic conventions that favor the symbolic over the genuine.

After all of these years playing smug street thugs, cocky idiots and patsies, can you blame Dillon for giving himself an elegant girl (Natascha McElhone), a devoted guardian angel, and a little redemption?

An often trying and not wholly successful but highly ambitious and ultimately rewarding mental-institution movie that strongly echoes the 1966 classic of the genre, "King of Hearts."

Too bad the film, which Kennedy spun from a stand-up skit, remains as blissfully unaware of its possibilities as B-Rad is of his absurdity.

It's almost too devastating for words, yet never less than compelling and heartbreakingly affecting.

Fails to be anything special. It makes passable preteen entertainment but comes off as clunky and heavy-handed in most of the places it should be graceful and enchanting.

Makes a case that despite human inability to empathize with the emotional lives of other animals and creatures and to believe they are here only to serve our needs and convenience, birds are as capable of courage, violence, affection and commitment to family as we are.

Most surprising (and disappointing) is the film's lack of humor. Scott, who has a huge following and has developed a lively comic persona, never seems in on the joke.

Most of Chasing Papi is a loud, frantic mess, a movie that wants to be a screwball farce but is simply farcical and screwy.