These self-involved studs manage to make ready, anonymous sex look rather dull.

The casting clicks; the visuals have leaped right out of Dave Gibbons' original panels; the action is brutal, stylish and well-staged, and -- with most of the major characters, themes and symbolism are retained in an abbreviated form -- the 2 1/2-hour film makes an enjoyably esoteric Cliff's Notes version of the book.

It's no earthshaker, but the indie film is refreshingly different from the current movie norm, it's won more than 15 awards on the festival circuit, and war-movie aficionados will find it well worth the journey.

A movie you've seen many times before, but the setting is different, its characters are well drawn and it delivers its uplifting message with succinctness, sincerity and skill.

An excellent documentary equal parts extreme sports and social anthropology.

The film is genuinely good-natured and kids -- particularly the ones who actually do this sort of stuff to worms -- will enjoy it and may even take the movie's loose morals to heart.

For all its other virtues, the supporting casting is lackluster, the script never quite kicks into place as a sports movie and Clooney the director seems to lack the touch that might have set the proceedings on fire as a zany ensemble comedy.

The most totally appealing and seemingly heartfelt performance of (DeVito's) career.

If you can forgive some plot artifice and gloss, there's a seductively intuitive and resonant theme resting at the core of Jeremy Podeswa's haunting new film.

It's naturalistic, briskly paced and never overreverential. It's not a bit stagy, yet it manages to be dazzling theater.

The film's deliberately overblown cartoonishness and its gleefully pandering adolescent cruelty never blend into the enjoyable style of, say, a good spaghetti western (Rodriguez's acknowledged model), or even a bad Quentin Tarantino movie.

The messy emotions and illogic of human nature defines this drama.

The movie works like a clock. A few minor quibbles aside (the casting of Hitler, for instance), Valkyrie is a highly intelligent and deeply engrossing historical drama and, frame for frame, the year's most suspenseful nail-biter.

Driving Lessons was written by director Jeremy Brock as a vehicle for Grint and Walters, who appeared together in the Harry Potter movies. They make a terrific screen couple. Walters is alternately zany and poignant, with Grint the perfect foil, a bemused, confused innocent who only wants to do good.

It pales in comparison to its two classic predecessors, and also just generally feels like one too many trips to the well.

It rolls in waves over the sedentary crowd until there's not a single soul left who's not keeping the beat.

What Jeffs -- and Paltrow -- do capture is the shroud of tragedy that hovered over Plath.

It's pure romantic fantasy, almost too cute and naively innocent for its own good. Jeff Balsmeyer, a former storyboard artist making his directorial debut, stumbles through the clumsy establishing scenes, but his playful direction smoothes out as the characters settle in.

Mostly it's tedious as we watch the photogenic but emotionally blank Chatagny bounce between anonymous sexual encounters.

With The Brave One, Jodie Foster and director Neil Jordan shift the genre to the murky left, where right and wrong are not so black and white. In doing so, they have taken away the very thing that makes a vigilante movie work.

John Jarratt is perfectly creepy as the outback loner gone psychotic survivalist who gets his kicks from the systematic degradation and torture of hapless victims. And make no mistake, the ordeal is excruciating.

Contrary to its title, Virtual JFK is less a counter-history of the Vietnam years than a tribute to John F. Kennedy's stubborn resistance to a military that pressured him to go to war on six occasions during his short presidency.

It's nicely crafted, respectably acted and often quite compelling in a low-key way, but it doesn't have the kind of flair, impact or resonance we've come to expect from the director.

"Clouds" fills its exteriors with the glory of the Utah mountains and its interiors with the work of the late Hopi artist, Dan Lomahaftewa -- a pleasing combination that gives the film its own special visual style and magic.

It's an unpleasant experience, and a long one, that gets more morose and melodramatic as it goes along.

The film ultimately has no contrast and we can't figure out whom to like or dislike.

Good-natured and fun, the Austin Powers silliness of the era shines through, and Coppola family art director Dean Tavoularis ("Apocalypse Now," "The Godfather" trilogy) makes the film -- and its kitschy film-within-the-film -- look consistently terrific.

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