As much a call to action as a documentary, it's a compelling and sobering lesson in the devastating effect of human industry on the planet. But a lesson nonetheless.

It's a moderately compelling sci-fi action movie with a handful of scary scenes -- though nothing at all special, and only a shadow of the original or even its 1978 remake.

Before the film flails, like a balloon losing air into a terrible finale, it has the audacity to lay siege to just about every xenophobic bias possible. No one -- or country -- is safe in this comedy and for that alone it's admirable.

An odd charmer with a whisper of autobiography (Blitz makes his film's protagonist a stutterer, just as the director was in school) and it's made even better by young lead actor Reece Thompson.

The best scenes belong to Tucker and director Brett Ratner keys in to his timing, whether it's a Chinese twist on "Who's on First" or a seduction scene in which Tucker blurts out every impulse.

Ponderously plotted, poorly cast, visually undistinguished and devoid of any real verve or charm.

This belabored summertime sequel is moderately less vulgar, certainly less expensive and, if possible, even less funny than its forerunning bomb, "Daddy Day Care."

As sketch comedy, The Ten often is imaginative and sometimes hilarious...Still, like precursors from "The Groove Tube" to "Jackass," it doesn't make for much of a movie.

It's an enjoyable period romance. Yet, ultimately, the unique magic of Austen so beautifully caught in 1996's "Emma" is missing.

The movie is so surreal it's just not very involving. As an action extravaganza, it's busy but dull.

A special film, one that refuses to package a person's life into a comfortably familiar genre.

Hot Rod is a cousin to the comedies of Will Ferrell (for whom it was developed) with a younger skew, a kooky '80s nostalgia (complete with a pitch-perfect synthesizer score by Trevor Rabin) and a low-key amiability that keeps you rooting for Rod and company to triumph.

The meshing of Moliere and Tartuffe into one character creates so many complications and loose ends that it is a fool's errand to try to make sense of the story.

The film concludes that there's still simply no way out of the forest.

By far the best thing about it is Zeta-Jones.

As much as I enjoyed the movie -- and I laughed all the way through it -- the truth is that the big screen adds nothing special to the "Simpsons" experience.

Positioned to be the environmental documentary of the year.

The first half of the movie is repetitive, and threatens to become more about Steidle than the conflict. The second half picks up considerably as we see him actively trying to alert the U.S. government to the atrocities.

With Biggerstaff's breathless narration explaining every detail of the action, Cashback seems aimed at an audience that would rather be told a story than shown a movie.

The biggest tragedy about Milos Forman's foray into the life and times of Spanish artist Francisco De Goya is the waste of so much great raw material.

Broad and funny, its sensibility is very campy and it's out to be loved by everyone.

It's kind of like "Tootsie," only without the drag. Or the class. Or the laughs.

A bare outline of the plot reads like a space-adventure thriller with end-of-the-world stakes and a hint of celestial spirituality, and the haunted spaceship twist in the third act is pure B-movie madness.

Buscemi gets a fine performance from Miller and plays his part with a murky mix of self-pity, opportunism and arrogance. A few scenes crackle with their intensity. The rest of it wallows in glib acrimony and cynicism.

Patrice Leconte's new film, My Best Friend, is probably his lightest and sweetest to date. Fans of his serious historical dramas ("Ridicule") or raucous farces ("Les Bronzes") may be disappointed, but others should find it a reasonably enjoyable feel-good comedy.

Hughes' push for Greene to succeed confronts the nettlesome issues of racial identity that most films vigorously avoid. The worthiness of Talk to Me will be proved if it gets us talking to each other.

Yet, as good as it is in so many ways, there's no getting around the fact that this briefest Harry and first directed by an unknown filmmaker (David Yates) is the least substantial of the bunch.

Director George Ratliff plays pitch-perfect on the tautly wound strings of our innermost fears that nothing -- not love, wealth or intelligence -- can protect us from the monsters we harbor.

Director Cherie Nowlan creates vivid personalities for the entire family and exposes the raw nerves of the biting humor.

It's a well-acted but rote and strictly by the book "war movie."

It's all about the sheer visceral rush of mega action.

Bland and boring.

With less lampooning and satirical asides, Sicko may be less "entertaining" than Moore's previous films, but it's also more affecting and effective.

Long for an animated feature and too demanding for very young children, but it's also filled with delights.

Evening is so distanced from the emotions of the story that it never breathes on its own.

The film ultimately swindles its own story.

Director Len Wiseman, confidently stepping up from the smallish budget "Underworld" films to mega-budget Hollywood mainstream.

Cusack, who is beginning to look disturbingly like Dustin Hoffman, is not only the film's center, but its orbit as well.

You'd hope God would think bigger for His divine intervention in American politics.

Visceral, alive and very scary.

There's not a lot of story here and the dialogue lacks the snap one usually gets in New York stories of affluent young adults, but the characters have an authenticity.

These are mortal souls and unglamorous bodies and Ferran explores their affair in its earthy, physical and fleshy reality.

A deviously delightful entertainment.

Diverting, at times even visually impressive, but has neither the spirit or style of "Spider-Man" nor the ambition of "X-Men."

The teen parties and sidekick silliness are time filler, and not very good filler either -- why even Bruce Willis shows up in a scene that has nothing to do with the story.

Despite Clement's best efforts to make Jarrod a deadpan oddball nerd, it becomes apparent early on that excessive teenage eccentricity and terminal self-delusion isn't quite as cute in the adult male and absent father.

The echoes of Douglas Sirk melodramas and Lassie movies just add to the fun.

Although the film is entertaining, its cleverness is not enough to cover its shortcomings.

All told, this thing has to be one of the dullest caper movies ever made.

The film's greatest triumph, at least on a technical level, is the amazing texture of the water, which has never looked so dramatic or convincing in an animated film.

Olivier Dahan's sprawling portrait of the life of Edith Piaf is the kind of grand, passionate historical drama that no one seems to be able to pull off any more.

A familiar but rewarding little parable.

All told, Knocked Up works more in spite of its low humor than because of it.

You may enjoy this complex, psychologically daring and visually stylish noir, which has been put together by director Bruce Evans ("Kuffs") with few dull moments and virtually none of the black humor you might expect from the premise.

Romance has little to do with the bizarre tale, part true crime and part lonely-hearts drama, of Burt Pugach and Linda Riss. While the now elderly pair may have found some happiness, that absence is heartbreaking.

The story is pure gobbledygook.

A top-flight example of cinematic storytelling, thanks in large part to the unusual narration, spoken in English by David Gulpilil.

As near as I can tell, it's the smallest-scale, lowest-budget, most experimental film Friedkin has ever made, as well as the most thoroughly unpleasant and off-putting -- though it builds a grisly, masochistic fascination as it powers along.

It's an even more tedious storytelling mess, with a plot so muddled it's impossible to accurately describe, generating zero interest in its characters and grinding on for nearly three endless hours.

Under the lingerie model façade beats the heart of a celestial Dr. Phil.

The familiar majesty of the Statue of Liberty and the New York skyline is replaced with anticipation and imagination. The sense of hope and wonder is the greater for it, and the sense of promise glows from the screen.

Despite the jumble, Kon's eye-popping, surreal mastery of the Japanese dream is awakening.

A quietly, somberly effective American indie drama.

The result is a cathartic hoot, relishing its own carefully doled out carnage.

A fairly underwhelming experience for man or child -- not so much bad as just more of the same, with little of the original's novelty or freshness.

Too hip to play it straight and too cool to resort to an actual story, Hartley turns the whole rambling spy game into a puzzle box where every certainty is thrown into doubt, every character has a hidden motive, and every clue is contradicted.

A miracle of a movie that is both fairy tale and slice of life.

The resulting hodgepodge has the feel of filmmaking by committee, the look of last-minute reshoots and the whiff of desperation. Not even Braff's cartoonish smirk is distracting enough to hide that.

The mayhem is presented sparingly enough to be suspenseful, some of the sequences are genuinely terrifying and, compared with Hollywood's last zombie movie, the Robert Rodriguez half of "Grindhouse," it's a masterpiece.

In the acting contest that ensues, each star comes off reasonably well, though, surprisingly, Lohan (who had well-publicized emotional problems on the set) wins out over Huffman's comic drunk and Fonda's leathery evocation of her father, Henry, in "On Golden Pond."

While their stories are well worth telling, first-time director Ruskin fails to shape his material into the dynamic film it might have been.

It's the first Hanson movie in a decade that doesn't quite click into place.

There's nothing messy or unkempt about the beautifully, quietly heartbreaking story of unconditional love and emotional sacrifice.

The experience is fun enough that it's sure to be the summer's first blockbuster.

Ultimately less psychological thriller than polemic about the effects of living in an atmosphere of paranoia fed by daily threat-level assessments and round-the-clock TV news-channel coverage of fear-mongering speeches.

Even if you don't like the stories, the filmmakers seem incapable of finding a corner of Paris that is not photogenic.

Sweet and sour and sexy.

Jindabyne is uniquely Australian, dealing with Australian issues, and it boasts a wickedly wry conclusion that -- for everything that has come before -- is karmically just.

A sloppy, indifferent action movie with a sadistic edge and a sour hypocrisy.

As a thriller, Next goes a certain distance on Cage's sad-sack charm and sense of humor, but it does nothing with its intriguing premise, and it's mostly just one more tedious and progressively dumb collection of Hollywood action clichés.

Ultimately, the movie is about finding contentment during tough times.

It is a pretentious and incoherent blend of ghost story and frontier adventure that becomes more preposterous and idiotic with each passing scene.

The surprise of this locally produced, stylized documentary is that it could leave you wishing it had told a little bit more.

Cements director's place as mob-movie master.

Hot Fuzz is something all too rare in movie comedies: a story rather than a string of disjointed skits, with hearty characters behind its caricatures.

It is a fairly routine exercise in New Millennium movie mayhem.

It's occasionally quite witty, it's able to tell us a great deal about its characters and their back stories in an economic fashion and its plot swings are surprising and compelling.

Most of this is harmless enough, but Kasdan's Hollywood logic is simply too implausible.

Far from his best work ("Le Placard," "Le Jaguar"), but even off-form Veber has its moments of inspiration and the movie is definitely worth seeing.

It's a taut, unexpected study that asks many questions about retribution and redemption.

At best, it's an inspired piece of free-association pop art held together by sheer momentum, at worst a noisy mess of juvenile nonsense passing itself off as a movie.

It's a tedious experience in almost every way: The acting is numbingly one-note, the CGI work is unconvincing and often downright shoddy, and the action is poorly staged and framed so close you can never tell for sure who is lopping off whose head.

Cliched, mostly routine and never especially satisfying.

The script is undone by confusing romantic developments, a convoluted murder mystery and a facile and maudlin resolution.

It's more clever than smart, but Paul Fox directs with the same easygoing attitude of its slacker hero and finds some modest truths (also lower case) behind the props.

The curious character study is a comedy in a minor key, but for all White's fascination with Peggy, he brings little conviction to the healing message under all this creepiness and social awkwardness, beyond what Shannon brings to the role.

The battery of startling shock cuts can get repetitive and the plot has a few potholes, but the palpable atmosphere of vulnerability keeps the drama knotted in tension and the audience rooted to the teens in peril.

The mock trailers are for impossibly schlocky Z-movies with titles like "Machete," "Don't Scream," "Thanksgiving" and "Werewolf Women of the S.S." They're by far the funniest part of the program, possibly because they're mercifully brief.