Classy and professional throughout, the technical work gracefully holds all the threads together.

The movie does achieve something nearly impossible: Someone who doesn't even like the sport may care about Billy Beane and the 2002 Oakland Athletics.

Unfortunately, the R rating will prohibit the target audience -- namely teenage boys who find penis jokes endlessly hilarious - from seeing this relentlessly unfunny and vulgar effort until it shows up on video and cable.

Directed with feeling for its richly layered protagonists, the film is elevated by its emotional complexity but simultaneously dragged down by the relative shortage of propulsive, hardcore action.

This is awareness-raising documentary cinema at its most urgent and necessary.

Liz Garbus' documentary tells the compelling and powerful story of the late chess prodigy.

Informative and, especially in its last hour, surprisingly dramatic.

Director David Weissman brings a rewardingly fresh and personal perspective to the subject.

Sumptuously clothed in vintage fashion, pop idols Wu and Hsu may bring in a younger crowd otherwise indifferent to the dated subject, but their performances are unimpressive.

This is a film that should be seen by anyone who wants to learn where we've come from as a nation.

The pressure cooker plot calls for intense performances all around but first among equals are Winslet and Ehle.

The PG-13 film is heavy on scenes of cloudy blood in the water but almost entirely lacking shock shots of flesh torn asunder. (And while marketing relies heavily on bikinis, the movie's light on that kind of flesh as well.)

As a thriller, The Debt performs many if not all the right moves. Where the John Madden-directed film gets into trouble is in wanting to deal with the Holocaust without being entirely a period film.

Love Crime has Hitchcockian pretentious, with perhaps a touch of film noir, but the "love" component is perfunctorily done and the "crime" pay-off is unconvincing (despite the twist in the tail). The Master would not have allowed the suspense to dissipate so wantonly.

Not only is this film's form clichéd, so is its content.

This Mexican action flick from director-writer Beto Gómez has all the makings of a great comedy only no one told the filmmakers.

In Bodyguard, Khan seems to have a tongue-in-cheek awareness of his major strengths - able comic timing and a cartoonishly muscular physique - and in case that's not obvious enough, he flexes his biceps to the beat in the film's opening song and literally winks at the camera.

Proves too anticlimactic for the audience to maintain interest.

Although it lacks the historical aura of classic Chinese wuxia backdrops, James Chiu's post-"Avatar" production design is memorably imaginative.

A so-called black comedy that is more sort of dull, spotty and yucky.

It's a long movie that feels short: It grabs you in early scenes, intense though low-key before all hell breaks loose, then keeps you riveted to its mostly male characters.

Duvall can play an avuncular cowboy sage in his sleep, but there's truly no one on Earth you'd rather see dishing out homespun aphorisms, so it's pointless to resist the pleasure of watching him do what he can do better than anyone else. Baker and Melissa Leo, as the waitress' mom, are not asked to exhibit a fraction of their talent, but they further class the joint up.

The movie is too much an act of hero-worship for there to be any critical distance.

Fails both as historical re-enactment and as action-flick thrill ride.

Will undoubtedly mean a great deal to Romanians who struggled during this dark period, but not much to anyone else.

With neither great insight nor any sign of wit, the film is not likely to capture interest outside France.

In a sense, this is not a financial thriller so much as a financial mystery. Which gets a bit lost in the movie's stylized presentation.

Earns its R but may leave audiences wanting more.