As down-to-earth as a ghost story gets.

Catch a Fire paints the period with a double-sided brush that gives yesterday its due and puts today on notice.

The presence of some genuine feeling distinguishes Saw III from its predecessors. That said, it has plenty of the blood, torture and dismemberment that moviegoers demand from their Halloween weekend entertainment.

Though Babel lacks any tragic sense of inevitability, it almost compensates with a handful of vibrant performances and the palpable physical texture of the settings.

An achingly sincere but often staggeringly inept attempt to introduce Walsch's message to movie audiences.

Both the Chicks and this doc are left to deal with the aftermath as best they can. The film chooses to pad with an occasional over-reliance on cutesy filler -- a pregnant Emily having an ultra-sound, giving birth, recuperating at her beloved ranch away from it all.

A masterly piece of documentary chicanery that kills George W. Bush without once pandering to his legions of ill-wishers.

Here's one thing about Marie Antoinette: It sure is easy to watch. And here's another: It's even easier to forget.

Wears a deep and sophisticated shade of black and is also very, very sad.

Eastwood keeps retracing the same pattern, intercutting from the battlefield to the bond circuit, from the appalling chaos where no one feels heroic to the catered dinners where heroism is the dessert that sweetens the mood and opens the chequebooks. By now, though, the twinned structure seems fragmented, and neither half gets a chance to gather any emotional momentum or to further develop the theme.

Yet -- and this must be said in all fairness -- as things progress, the magic of the story asserts itself over the audience.

[Nolan is] back in the fine engineering business, crafting a story as intricately designed as a magician's lock, tightly packed with tumblers of deception and issuing a fun challenge to any volunteers in the audience: Just try to pick it.

Those ghosts might want to find a new vocation, because their work here is done.

As Dobbs's chain-smoking and hard-eyed enabler, a quietly spooky Christopher Walken manages to straddle the genres more effectively, gently toying with the stereotype of the rough-edged showbiz manager.

Another angry, searching document about pedophile priests, Deliver Us from Evil makes for unexpectedly gripping drama.

For all its treacly excesses of the post- "Full Monty" era, British comedy hasn't entirely lost its teeth yet.

Flashy, fun, shallow, easy-going and without a hope of brilliance.

Tideland is the easiest of Gilliam's films to follow, yet the most disturbing to watch.

A British flick based on the first novel in a popular teenage spy-thriller series by Anthony Horowitz, looks promising but, unfortunately, doesn't measure up.

To these disappointed eyes, Little Children seems a frustrating mess.

Rarely has a star's look-at-me turn so completely torpedoed a project. Whenever the picture threatens to gain some momentum, up pops Jack to stop it dead in its tracks. The loyal few may be laughing with him, but the rest of us are definitely laughing at him.

How bad does a film have to be to get the death doughnut? Disgracefully bad.

Mann (Comic Book Confidential) plays with archive, animation and music (hot soundtrack by the Sadies), illuminating another worthy counter-culture corner. Pure fun, fun, fun.

For all the carnality on offer here, Mitchell and his cast seem ambivalent about sex.

Succeeding where most docudramas fail, it turns a slice of recent history into a revealingly intelligent entertainment, without being didactic at one extreme or sentimental at the other.

With high seas and crashing waves created by Canadian special-effects company Fusion CIS, there's nothing wrong with the nail-biting side of the equation featuring a sequence of distinct maritime accidents; it's the rest of the plot that is taking on water.

The film wraps mindless cartoon violence and a few fart jokes around life lessons about friendship and responsibility. Kids should like it; parents won't mind it.

School for Scoundrels suffers from an old-fashioned identity crisis. The poor thing is awfully confused, and so are we. Is it a black comedy that isn't dark enough? Or a dumb comedy that isn't stupid enough, or a gross-out comedy that isn't yucky enough? Or is it really just a romance comedy that isn't sweet enough? Don't have a clue, but this much is certain: It's definitely a failed comedy that isn't funny enough.