A repellent movie filled with gratuitous violence, Election is bound to find an appreciative audience among those who like their cinematic criminals noisy, stupid and deadly.

Lacks any of the socio-economic or political concerns of "The Big Chill." Indeed its shallowness is reflected in one character's abiding concern with his receding hairline.

While the three actresses have an appealing grittiness, they aren't always up to the demands of the roles.

For all its flaws, is an often spooky and imaginative ghost story that contains a genuine creepiness.

The film, which thankfully doesn't wear out its welcome with a scant running time of 64 minutes, is fairly prosaic stylistically. But the admittedly rough-hewn footage of the games is thrilling, and the pride and self-respect instilled in the players by their success is still evident today.

Whether meaning to or not, Devor and his accomplished crew expand our concept of the documentary film, which relegates this documentary to art houses, not porn theaters.

It's not all violence and brutality. To allows his morbid sense of humor to shine through. There are moments of absurd hilarity that don't necessarily lighten the mood so much as bring it down to earth. The performances are strong all around.

All the action is staged with energy, but it gets relentless without anything really funny going on.

While the sadism doesn't stoop -- rise? -- to the level of the "Saw" horror-thrillers, Vacancy does have a name cast.

The movie entertains, but it's a shallow entertainment where you have no rooting interest in the outcome.

Probably needed more originality than is on display. With an age-old cinema theme of a young man's maturation, it also needs to land female ticket-buyers but seems a lot like something women could find at home on the WE channel.

Francis Veber's latest offering, remains faithful to the formula -- broad farce leavened with witty dialogue -- that has made him France's most bankable comedy writer-director and a surefire hit with international audiences.

A frequently charming, if ultimately slight, coming-of-age tale.

A muted psychological mystery where filmmaker Hilary Brougher's interest in "solving" a possible crime is superseded by her investigation into matters involving denial, free will and the physical and emotional burdens of pregnancy.

An artful experiment that's imposingly cryptic but comes from a respected filmmaker, it should appeal to its art house niche.

You might call the film "Rear Window Times 100."

No doubt about it, the show's certifiably bizarro, stream-of-consciousness sensibility has made the transition notably intact, which should please its young male fan base.

Nicely balances action and adventure with American Indian wisdom and a modest romance to provide a graphic-comic-book movie experience for males in urban markets.

The star wattage quickly dims in this slick-looking but ringingly hollow affair that starts off generically at best before collapsing into a convoluted heap of shrill screen cliches.

Redline is the cinematic equivalent of a sports car ad in Maxim magazine.

A static and awkward effort that never quite comes to life.

While the duo's crimes were indeed sensational, writer-director Todd Robinson's starry take on the material fails to provide much in the way of a new perspective.

Overall, Year of the Dog evinces an appealing sentimentality without being maudlin or only puppy-dog cute.

The sort of cheesy thriller that would prove mildly diverting on late-night cable, Slow Burn at least features a terrific cast to enliven its familiar elements.

This is a minor film from a master, which is disappointing, but nevertheless it has its charms, most notably in the acting by a cast of stage and screen veterans.

For connoisseurs of stories of show business near-disasters, "Bells" is compelling viewing.

There's plenty to ensure fresh jolts for viewers who know Hitch's tricks inside out, to say nothing of young moviegoers who don't know Grace Kelly from Thelma Ritter.

If you were keeping score, it would be Quentin Tarantino 1, Robert Rodriguez 0.

Entertaining and piquant. The film does possess some of the bittersweet qualities that usually mark Hallstrom's films, but it's generally a tougher, more incisive work that ranks as one of his best.

Overlong and overstuffed with characters and situations, Ping Pong doesn't really succeed on a dramatic level. But there is no denying its skill in rendering its chosen milieu with an intense visual immediacy.

Whether outsiders will find much to appreciate in The TV Set is another question because the film fails to provide the thematic resonance of similarly themed predecessors like the brilliant "Network."

One either likes this sort of thing or not. Even fans might not buy the ending in which more people get wiped out than in Hurricane Katrina.

Tpicture delivers the requisite number of pratfalls, and the genial Ice Cube makes for a credibly hapless everyman, but the comedy still feels a little too safely soft around the edges.

No best in show but a decent family comedy.

It succeeds on almost all fronts. The epic film is a high-octane adventure rooted in fact with a raft of arresting characters, big action sequences and twists and turns galore.

The blissfully silly Blades of Glory is one of those rare comedies that puts a goofy smile on your face with the premise alone -- and keeps it planted there right until its wacky finale.

The most un-Disneylike cartoon yet from Disney animation. The thing is a hellzapoppin' of eccentric characters, zany situations and wacky gizmos, but little effort has gone into making any of this connect with an audience.

Once again Bier demonstrates just how misleading appearances can be, as she artfully removes the veneers concealing the dark truths locked away by her intriguing characters.

Loaded with obtuse symbolism, the film is not only hard to understand, it isn't much fun trying to figure it out.

Although more than a little familiar in its road movie-style romantic banter and bickering, the film is easy to take for a number of reasons, including the witty and frequently caustic dialogue. Modest in its aspirations, "Race You" succeeds by not trying to do too much.

Brilliantly sung by an extremely talented lyric theater company in Cape Town called Dimpho Di Kopane. Whether this all works will be a matter of opinion -- mine is that it does not -- but the experiment is fascinating.

If the movie only lavished as much thought and care on its characters as it does on each intricate set piece, Shooter might have been a classic.

The Hills Have Eyes 2 proves that even grisly, gory violence can be awfully boring.

A reasonably engaging movie filled with fun visual effects and an appealing tone reminiscent of a certain Spielberg movie about an out-of-his-element extraterrestrial.

Terrence Howard delivers another solid lead performance and competition swimming is a new arena for such films. Nonetheless, Pride is just plain trite.

It doesn't exploit our emotions about Sept. 11; it simply tells a story that exists because of what happened that day -- one that should resonate with a wide, appreciative audience.

A tad too conservative and calculated. CGI delivers best on moody sets and a noirish atmosphere achieved by lighting, backgrounds and visual effects. But the characters look like plastic dolls, and the story is recycled sci-fi.

At best a kitschy "Catch Me If You Can" and at worst a tedious comedy that grows more tiresome by every self-consciously irreverent minute.

The actors, all strong, give the lyrical but never artificial dialogue the ring of life. Pearce is riveting as a go-getter who finds himself trapped between a murky past and a future defined by ambition.

A movingly rendered, stirringly photographed first feature by Ham Tran.

Women's roles and the eternal fight to expand their rights in Iranian society get a light, hugely entertaining treatment in Jafar Panahi's Offsides.

A muddled and routine murder mystery tricked up with a science fiction gimmick that wouldn't pass muster for a "Twilight Zone" episode. The writing is poor, but the direction is even poorer. This is a film to delete from one's memory bank.

The problem is that if Callahan spent even a week writing this script, he wasted four good days. The dialogue, characters and situations are distressingly bad.

Most of this is fairly predictable spoofing, and Englund is wasted as a psycho-hunting shrink clearly modeled after Donald Pleasence's character in "Halloween." But there are moments when the proceedings are unsettling and original.

Boasts nothing new under the sun, but it does provide a few decent scares.

In I Think I Love My Wife, Chris Rock does something entirely unexpected. He isn't funny.

The usually likable Bullock, obstructed by glaring continuity problems and often baffling character motivation, comes across as unsympathetically dazed and confused here, giving the viewer little reason to care about this desperate housewife's puzzling predicament.

The claustrophobic and poorly executed Caffeine is either a play in search of a movie or a movie in search of a play but, either way, it's searching for the wrong thing. What it desperately needs are laughs.

Atmospheric but pedestrian, it is a retelling of the classic tragedy of all civil wars, from the U.S. to Vietnam to England, where brother is pitched against brother.

Although the story takes place during a tumultuous period, historical events never obscure the gaming genius' story. Rather it's a scrupulous examination of a somewhat naive intellectual.

In epic battle scenes where he combines breathtaking and fluid choreography, gorgeous 3-D drawings and hundreds of visual effects, director Zack Snyder puts onscreen the seemingly impossible heroism and gore of which Homer sang in "The Iliad."

Bong has pulled together a multilayered horror-drama that works more often than not. The film gets back on track after a clumsy middle section that's too long and finishes strong, and Bong fans, horror fans and Asiaphiles are likely to be thoroughly satisfied.

It's very much in "A League of Their Own" league, but what the inspirational sports drama Believe in Me might lack in freshness, it nicely compensates for in heartfelt, winning conviction and spirited performances.

The greatest failure of the film, written by David Wolstencroft, is its inability to enter into the lives of the Rwandans, Tutsi and Hutu alike. The movie never moves beyond the tragic facts to show us the human face of either victims or perpetrators. All we get are white people shaking their heads and cursing Western governments.

It is hard to imagine a better cast or production values so the film should find audiences among sophisticated urban adults.

"Gift" comes across as a television-ready effort that would work perfectly for Hallmark.

Alternately provocative and highly silly, the film overcomes its more ludicrous aspects through its glossy visual style, its frequent doses of humor and the obvious associations it evokes to its creator's real-life experiences.

A charming piece of Japanese anime that could well serve as the basis for a stateside live-action remake, “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time” boasts an entertaining storyline to match its well-drawn visuals.

Firing on all cylinders as a creepy thriller, police procedural and "All the President's Men"-style investigative newsroom drama, the smart, extremely vivid production oozes period authenticity.

With its clever premise and quartet of appealing comedic star turns, Wild Hogs is a step above the typical comedies rolling off the assembly lines of the major studios.

The blues music in "Moan" is superfine, but my oh my, what to make of the ripe Southern cliches and this absurd story. The film is so jaw-dropping awful that it just might become a boxoffice hit.

Filmmakers have long recognized that high school makes a terrific arena for social satire and comedy in films ranging from "Heathers" to "Mean Girls" and "Election." There is a glimmer of such a comedy in Full of It, but this is quickly swamped in overextended gags and broad caricatures.

Tigers shares a penchant for rigorous self-analysis with such relatively recent films as "Chumscrubber," "Mysterious Skin" and "Tarnation."

The Astronaut Farmer, is goofy, wholesome and, well, sweet. Despite some droll humor and on-target political jabs delivered deadpan by a uniformly strong cast, "Astronaut" often is too corny for its own good; it could have used more of those zingy lines.

While several members of the cast valiantly fill the void where they can, these fish out of water could have made a greater high-definition splash if they had been thrown an occasional line or two rather than counting on inspiration to wash over them.

While Kramer's well-conceived screenplay features much amusing dialogue, there's a forced quality to the proceedings that makes the comic premise seem more artificial than it needs to be.

The film successfully replicates the mellow charm of Brit hits "About A Boy" and "Love Actually."

A performance film, but sadly the majority of the performers are not the acts that have played at the long-running pop festival over 35 years, but the exhibitionists who make up the crowd.

This silly film does nothing to enhance Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang's reputation. The acting is below par, the mise-en-scene is clumsy and the structure is lazy.

In this film, everything comes down to the acting. Chris Cooper, one of our finest screen actors, gets inside the mysterious traitor. Ryan Phillippe has just the right gung-ho determination tempered with a touch of naivete as O'Neill. Meanwhile, Laura Linney nails the role of a career agent.

The fantasy-adventure incorporates the novel's magical and emotional elements without overplaying either -- a balance that hasn't always proven easy to maintain in the world of kid-lit adaptation.

All of [Cages's] natural charisma is unable to compensate for the plodding narrative and thin characterizations.

Films about serial killers have become so ubiquitous that they now form a subgenre of the crime movie. Even so, Antibodies, has a bracingly original take on the matter.

Bookending the film is the relationship between Jessica and the grandmother who raised her. This role is delightfully played by Suzanne Flon, who recently died at age 87. The film is dedicated to the veteran actress.

In her brave first feature, Bosnian writer-director Jasmila Zbanic tackles the theme of war's aftermath.

Daddy's Little Girls may be heavy-handed and drearily predictable, but it also should connect with its core audience as solidly as Perry's previous efforts did, even if the drama is frequently just as over the top as its predecessors.

An agreeably loopy romantic comedy that bounces along effortlessly on the genuine chemistry of leads Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore.

It's all quite a mess, with awkward performances, worse dialogue and a painfully protracted running time conspiring against any chance of enjoyment, even in a so-bad-it's-good guilty pleasure way.

Racially insensitive, politically incorrect and beyond crude.

Anurag Kashyap's Black Friday is a superb and devastating piece of cinema that with justification can be compared favorably to Gillo Pontocorvo's classic "The Battle of Algiers" in its dispassionate yet sweeping journalistic inquiry into cataclysmic social and political events.

Amongst the cardboard-cutout supporting characters, Lauren Graham brings a welcome deadpan sensibility to the overeager proceedings.

A tepid ghost story filled with all the usual things that go bump in the night minus the somewhat crucial element of suspense, this bland effort from Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert's Ghost House Pictures is surprisingly devoid of the creepy, claustrophobic atmospherics that haunt the brothers' Asian work.

Part war drama, part political thriller, part romance -- and wholly uninvolving.

While unlikely to set the documentary market afire, is entertaining enough.

Brainy and balmy.

Heavy-handedness prevails, with the schmaltzy original score as unconvincing as the script. An over-reliance on song, from pop to Puccini to Ellington to hip-hop, doesn't compensate for what's lacking in the storytelling.

Editors Alexis Provost and Beth Gallagher cut back and forth between the talking heads so deftly that you have the illusion that Nader is answering his critics in real time in a very lively debate.

The filmmaker clearly has a gift for incisive characterizations and dialogue, but the overall impact of the vignettes is muted by an overall artificiality.