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.

The lead performers certainly are highly attractive, making this one of the more sensual werewolf pictures in quite a while -- and to their credit, they do manage to keep a straight face throughout. But ultimately, the anemic Blood and Chocolate could have benefited from a little less chocolate and a lot more blood.

A monumentally unfunny time-waster.

While the film bristles with cinematic verve, it also is as second-hand as an antique store.

A beautifully shot (by Oscar-winning cinematographer John Toll) but dramatically empty pursuit picture set in the untamed West.

The laugher about a meek middle manager who finds a life-changing fortune takes a while to hit its stride, but in its best stretches, it offers deliriously spirited farce.

While the 1986 edition was no classic, it's light years better than this update, which naturally opened without being screened for those ultimate villains, the critics.

Combining the influences of Italian neorealism with Dickensian melodrama, Andrei Kravchuk's simultaneously tough-minded and sentimental The Italian is as bracing as it is moving.

More interesting conceptually than dramatically, Eric Nicholas' thriller Alone With Her boasts a highly clever technological conceit, albeit one that was exploited many years ago to a lesser degree in "The Anderson Tapes."

A low-rent monster movie that could well have been released by American International in the early 1970s, Primeval boasts a level of cheesiness that should well merit it a regular rotation on late-night cable.

As the central character in this musical melodrama about step dancing in black fraternities, Short displays an uncanny dramatic sensibility to go with the eye-catching athleticism of his dance moves.

An incredibly powerful story of renewal, commitment and the resiliency of the human spirit, this is a movie that should attract a large theatrical audience, and no one will go home disappointed.

The dramatic story is related here in a somewhat diffuse and scattershot fashion that reduces some of its impact. But there is no denying its emotional resonance.

The movie is too parochial for a wide audience. The French judicial system is totally alien to Americans, for instance, plus the film is a talkathon.

The film is both too short and too long at two hours-plus. Not enough time is spent with the teens and far too much with their teacher.

This implausible plot full of holes does pave the way for a series of Cedric the Entertainer skits and physical gags. None of these is very funny. A few are painfully unfunny. In either case, the movie comes to a standstill. It's a pity no one thought to screen old Bob Hope movies to see how to integrate comedy into genre filmmaking.

The fairly routine plot is made somewhat more interesting by the infusion of issues regarding morality and faith, but ultimately Three, for all its philosophizing, is little more than a standard serial-killer movie with pretensions.

The performers are all good with Baquero poised and beautiful as Ofelia and Verdu vital and spirited as the rebellious Mercedes. Lopez gives an extraordinary performance as the bestial captain, an irredeemable villain to rank with Ralph Fiennes' Nazi in "Schindler's List."

Long regarded as unfilmable, Patrick Suskind's 1985 novel "Perfume" has finally reached the screen in a blockbuster production that succeeds reasonably well in achieving what many said was beyond the scope of cinema: conveying the world of scent and smell.