It's an elegant nail-biter.

Unlike the worthless torture porn that is destroying the genre, Stuck is a horror movie with a reason for being.

What Spottiswoode lacks in subtlety and restraint, he balances with a heartfelt passion for the material.

Its comedy too often blunders into meaningless slapstick, with bombs and bloodshed replacing pratfalls and pies in the face.

It's crammed full of the dash, filmmaking flair, swashbuckling magic, impossible stunts and tongue-in-cheek humor that made the series such a phenomenon of its time, and -- for those versed in its traditions -- almost every frame is enjoyable on some level.

In this sequel, magic still reigns but suspending disbelief doesn't come as easily.

This one is a kiddie show all the way, with characters as broad and one-dimensional as a billboard, a vision of good and evil as simple as a bumper sticker and a tiresome chimpanzee mugging through every other scene like something from a bad Tarzan movie.

A deliciously vivid adventure fantasy.

The real joy here is the performance of Jean Dujardin, who, besides being very funny as the Gallic Maxwell Smart, is also enormously charismatic and is made to look uncannily (and I do mean uncannily) like the young Sean Connery of "Dr. No" and "Goldfinger."

Filmmaker Pray, who is building an impressive body of documentaries on American subcultures, including the Seattle grunge scene in "Hype," graffiti artists in "Infamy" and truckers in "Big Rig," does an admirable job of allowing his subjects to represent themselves.

A first- or second-date flick, after which there can be some Cheesecake Factory and maybe a peck on the cheek, no harm done. What Happens in Vegas is pleasant enough for all of that (and it sidesteps all that "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" raunch).

Sivan makes it all quite beautiful with verdant imagery and tastefully melodramatic direction, but at the cost of emotional and social ambiguities, not to mention living, breathing characters.

Dillane gives such a layered, detailed, utterly convincing performance as a man struggling with an inescapable and suffocating burden of guilt that he quickly makes us forget that he's too old for the part.

Is it possible to have yet another expensive excursion into this genre that seems in any way fresh, original and alive? The answer, surprisingly, is yes.

Dempsey also needs some fashion advice. As always, he sports his trademark five o'clock shadow in every scene (which in itself is excessive). But with Dempsey at age 42, it's beginning to make his face look more sinister than sexy, less Dr. McDreamy, more Richard Nixon.

Korine's latest film, Mister Lonely, is no different, but this film has a sweetness that has rarely, if ever, been present in his previous work.

Mamet is more respectful than exciting as an action director, but his fascination with how things work, be it the mechanics of designing and promoting a big pay-per-view event or battling a world-class Jiu-jitsu master, makes it all quite mesmerizing.

Perhaps the most ingeniously imaginative element in Son of Rambow, a film exploding with imagination (some of it scrawled directly over the film in animated expressions of Will's private world), is its very conceit.

Writer/director Michael McCullers sprinkles the film with sight gags and comic characters (the lisping birth coach becomes funny out of sheer doggedness), but his pacing is poor and doesn't know how to showcase the small-screen chemistry of Fey and Poehler on the big screen.

The film's first-time director, the TV-commercial-trained Marcel Langenegger, is out to emulate Hitchcock with dashes of "Vertigo," "Strangers on a Train" and more. But his homage is uninspired and disconnected, and his film is a bore.

The movie is sporadically funny in an anarchistic way. But Cho and Penn don't have the needed personality or comic identity to sustain a franchise and their non-drug humor is so crude and scatological that -- to say the least -- it leaves a very bad taste in the mouth.

The film -- Lelouch's 49th in 41 years -- stars Fanny Ardant as a glamorous, beautiful and phenomenally popular Parisian novelist who we first see in a flash-forward as she's being hauled into the Sureté, interrogated and formally charged with murder.

Morris challenges us to understand what the pictures show and what they don't show, and to see them in context. And he confronts us with the most important question surrounding them: Do they reveal a crime, an aberration in the system or standard operating procedure?

While Hunt's directing debut is promising, if understated, it's her performance as schoolteacher April Epner that impresses the audience.

Preposterous, empty-headed and tedious.

The directors have told the press that one of their goals was "to make horseracing -- a great sport that has gotten progressively less attention over the past 30 years -- cool again." The movie actually does this. It sure inspired me to make plans for Emerald Downs.

The result is joyous and exhilarating.

For about an hour, the movie is essentially Budweiser ad humor writ long ("Dude!") but about halfway through -- after enough members of the "Knocked Up"/"SuperBad" dude squad have all made their requisite cameos -- the movie shows it has a little heart.