While his film is engaging enough when covering curiosities like a funeral directors' convention, the fact that it lacks an authorial voice of its own is a dealbreaker.

Famous fans (Rosanne Cash! Oprah!!!) attest to the book and film's greatness, but at best, this is a half-hour A&E Biography episode padded out to feature-length with forgetful trivia, frustratingly facile history lessons and far too much fawning.

That T.J. and his family willingly allow this headbanging psycho(analyst) to move into their cluttered, dankly lit abode-the emotional damage is palpable, yo!-is just one of the film's many eyebrow-raising contrivances.

Brings nothing new to the coming-of-age dance film. Worse, director Carmen Marron seems as bored with the movie's protagonist as we are.

A lot of history gets horned into this undeniably inspirational parable, though slick execution and simplistic storytelling make it a lesson suitable only for easily impressed elementary-school students.

By the time Nick decides to have an emotionally purgative yard sale-the primary holdover from the short story-all the adult ambiguities have been traded in for facile Indiewood profundities.

Fantastical is what we get: Cameraman is filled with Cardiff's achingly beautiful work.

Agent-turned-director Tony Krantz has a penchant for stylization that quickly slides into a velvet-painting cheesiness, which-along with the script's pseudoprofound Philosophy 101 maxims-renders the atmosphere less noirish than ridiculously cartoonish.

The movie skips along episodically; it's not quite as sharp as a war narrative needs to be, even if its nightmarish psychology feels spot-on.

Wiig comes out a winner, but nothing is worse than watching a perfect marriage of performer and material get so perversely undermined.

Once this cultural exploration devolves into just a forum for grating geek griping and Jar-Jar Binks hatred, however, you'll wish you could escape to a galaxy far, far away.

Though it holds your attention all the way through to an enigmatic, spiritually tinged climax, the movie leaves you wanting more than the Vega Vidals' secondhand artistry is able to provide.

You can easily see why Ichikawa's vision of the 20th-century Japanese-lit landmark is considered definitive; the way he elevates the story's soap-operatic elements to a level of extraordinary sublimity makes the melodramatic seem positively majestic.

The film ham-fistedly hammers home its message more than the usual collateral-damage drama.

Controversially, Escrivá started the Opus Dei, and There Be Dragons is best appreciated by those seeking more realism than the albino self-whipper of "The Da Vinci Code."

You can take the phoenix-rising actor out of straight-to-video trash, but-well, you know the rest of it.

Given how prominent the postcard sultriness of her backdrop is compared with the story's emotional ping-pong, all she ends up with is a kinder, chicer Adrian Lyne movie.

While Jumping the Broom showcases rarely depicted class issues within the black community, the film still relies on wince-inducing stereotypes to delineate them.

Two monologues-one in which the Hobo compares himself to a bear, the other a Travis Bickle–like screed delivered to a roomful of increasingly distressed babies-are damn near Shakespearean. It's a shame the performance is contained in a Z-movie patchwork that's a bit too knowingly repugnant.

Fulkerson's out to tweak the medical establishment, as well as offer dietary tips, and his film makes effective use of case studies and graphs to build a convincing, if inevitably simplified, argument for better living through fresh produce.

Michael Goldbach's pretentious take on identity development is woefully lacking in either subversive humor or genuine pathos; the overwrought end-of-the-world backdrop of a rampaging serial killer and a toxic industrial fire only poisons the concoction further.

Based on a banned short story from the 1920s, Caterpillar might be read as a reaction to hawkish nationalism, but it's more a cry for the unknown soldier in the kitchen and bedroom.

Gibson simply turns his signature righteous rage into a crushing inward sorrow-Sad Max?-and Foster boldly plays everything straight, rendering her actor's unnerving turn to mania (and a pitch-black third act) with zero tongue-in-cheek.

Except for two brief summits between Alba and Messina's pillowy lips, however, An Invisible Sign fails even to pander effectively.

This rom-com certainly has something old, something borrowed and something blue-the something new, however, is MIA.

The Fast and the Furious movies haven't exactly gotten better as they've gone along.

Thor accomplishes its essential goal and little else, which is to introduce the mighty warrior to the Marvel screen universe.

The culture wars may be simmering throughout writer-director Ben Hickernell's script-the Save the Whales and pro-choice bumper stickers on Will's VW invite a brutal barfly beatdown-but the real casualties are momentum and narrative cohesion.