Crammed with outrageous turns of fortune and quicksilver shifts in tone, Almodovar's film is held together by performances so subtle and complex it's hard to single out only one as exceptional. But Cruz is astonishing.

An impressive parade of scientists, meteorologists and grassroots activists assert that humanity is capable of adapting to a changing climate, building sustainable communities without sacrificing modern-day comforts and even reversing some of the damage already done.

It's all pretty rough going, but even with its microbudget there's enough blood, booty and bling to satisfy fans of the genre. It's also never dull, thanks to Silvera's restless pacing and a great reggae soundtrack.

As lightheartedly as the film plays, Morrison manages to say quite a few serious things about immigration and otherness.

Christensen simultaneously avoids all the cliches that might have been heaped upon her beautifully rendered characters and roots their travails in everything that makes for a good soap: tragedy, tears, sexual tension, misplaced letters and a slightly sardonic voice-over that teases the plot lines like the old-fashioned, "tune in tomorrow" narrator of yesteryear.

The only famous person in the film, actor Peter Coyote, is an eloquent spokesman, but he was only a visitor to Black Bear; the stars are the full-timers, and their willingness to share their rich and sometimes painful memories is captivating.

It's an entertaining diversion whose clever structure gives pulp-crime cliches a welcome twist.

Luke gives a powerful performance -- with his looks and talent, he should be a much bigger star -- but Robbins is the one you'll remember. Fixed with the faraway look of a doomed man who knows the center cannot hold, he gazes fearfully toward a future he knows is coming and can do nothing to stop.

An improvement over the tedious "Saw II" (2005), this second sequel to the surprise 2004 hit still features the series' trademark gruesome "games" but shifts the focus to the relationships among the characters.

The flashy spectacle of intersecting narratives and its crosscutting and fractured chronology nearly overwhelms the film's simple message, in this case that despite divisions of language, race and geography, we're all connected.

What is interesting is Ceylan's depiction of life among the Turkish upper-middle classes, a world rarely seen in international art-house cinema outside his own films.

While it's unlikely that her film will sway former fans who swore off the band for political reasons, that seems beside the point.

Given the controversy, which strongly suggested that the filmmakers had it in for President Bush, the film's biggest shocker may be how kind Range and coscreenwriter Simon Finch are to him.

Cocaine cash financed Miami's renaissance, but the film never downplays the human cost at which that urban renewal was purchased.

Monica Cervera's fearless performance as the homely Marieta, whose movie-made dreams of glamour will never come true, is mesmerizing.

The result is a rather conventional, Biography Channel-style portrait of a man who helped change the face of theater in the last quarter of the 20th century.

The film avoids theorizing about why the bridge should exert such a hold over the imaginations of suicides all over the world, but Steel's dramatic cinematography, particularly the distorted telephoto shots that make the bridge loom even larger than it already does in life, provide one answer.

Werner Herzog's self-proclaimed "science-fiction fantasy" is a meticulously constructed fiction made from a combination of real-life footage repurposed in ways a conventional documentarian couldn't imagine.

Fisher's dialogue draws heavily on the original film's intertitles and script directions and the addition of sound is a plus for moviegoers uncomfortable with the artificial embarrassment of silence.

The freedom to answer Hamlet's nagging question over whether to be or not for oneself is explored in this thoughtful and thought provoking documentary about the Swiss organization EXIT AMD.

Ultimately, Coppola's pastel-colored take on Marie's life is beguiling and annoying in equal measure.

The movie winds up becoming "The Annette Bening Show," and she's quite good: Bening makes the most of a string of mad scenes for which any actress would kill, and the real pain she brings to the part grounds the film in something real.

This is a powerful, important and, in the end, profoundly poignant movie dedicated to the lives of men and women who fight wars and shoulder the burden of becoming "heroes" to help the rest of us make sense of what remains incomprehensible.

Mayer knows how to tug at the heartstrings, and his admirably restrained cast keeps the family drama from becoming too sugary.

The film's prestige is a doozy, both dazzling and preposterous, but if you're watching closely -- as Cutter advises in the film's first few minutes -- it's flawlessly set up.

There are no laughs to be had here, though, unless you count nervous titters and frat-boy sniggers at the very thought of, you know.

Features a nutty mix of broad comedy, romance and maudlin melodrama.

Nelson's film eschews sensationalism, and knowing how the story ends in no way diminishes its visceral impact.

Bogumil Godfrejow's raw cinematography and Huller's poignant, close-to-the-bone performance transform what might have been a morbid curiosity into an entirely enthralling, quietly terrifying experience.

Mark Orton's overused fiddly score is nice enough, but can't disguise the essential emptiness of overlong scenes.

What's best about Block's documentary is how well he captures his own shifting perceptions.

Animator Bill Plympton's seventh feature is a must-see for fans of his often witty, always scabrous, hand-drawn work.

The film pulls off a couple of "gotchas!", but the subtle creepiness of its predecessors is gone, replaced by a sense of numbing predictability.

Wobbles unsteadily between broad humor and paranoid thrills. The result is a bland muddle.

Lunkheaded but entertaining action flick.

The most infuriating revelation in Amy Berg's powerful documentary is the lengths to which current Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahoney and other church officials went to protect Father O'Grady and themselves, even though it meant knowingly delivering countless other children into a child molester's hands.

Linney's character is written as a one-dimensional monster whose selfish cruelty is beyond redemption and, ultimately, belief.

Overall, McGrath's film has superior star power (including Gwyneth Paltrow in a one-scene role as a Peggy Lee-like chanteuse), is franker about the sexual nature of Capote's fascination with the murderous Smith and his sad, strangled dreams, and spends more time establishing Capote's glittering New York life before setting him adrift in the heartland.

This intimate coming-of-age story benefits from excellent performances, notably Gregory Smith's.

By turns fascinating and intolerable.

Anyone who understands the meaning of the title or catches all the frog references scattered through writer-director Martin Curland's feature debut will have a head start understanding this confused and confusing comedy.

Sax keeps things moving, but the best thing about the film is the British cast.

Produced by the son of Trinity Broadcasting Network founder Paul Crouch, this historical epic offers a solid two hours of spectacle and intrigue drawn from The Book of Esther by way of Tommy Tenney and Mark Andrew Olsen's novel "Hadassah."

As the film makes pointedly clear, ALS is what is considered an "orphan disease," meaning drug companies aren't willing to devote their resources to finding a cure because they feel too small a percentage of the population suffer from it to make an effective drug profitable.

Tedious and obscure where it was apparently meant to be atmospheric and tantalizing.

Once again, Field has crafted and grown-up movie that grabs you by the throat, drags you in and doesn't let you go until the very bitter end.

A thrilling return to form.

The less said about Simpson the better; whatever her talents, she can't sell a simple reaction shot, and, perhaps sensing this, Coolidge's camera tends to drift south of her face.

Who will survive and what will be left of them? If you don't have a pretty good idea, this is not the movie for you. If you do, rest assured you've seen it all before.

If you've never given much thought to the lives affected each time you choose one brand of coffee over another, allow this handsomely mounted documentary from British filmmakers Marc and Nick Francis to serve as a bracing, double-shot of reality.

Director Stephen Purvis and writer Chris Haddock never rise above the material's inherent pulpiness, but they keep the twists coming until the very end.

A nonstop cavalcade of Roth-style animation starring Rat Fink, vintage footage, artfully animated black-and-white film, and fanciful "interviews" with beautifully preserved cars of the era.

It's a sorry state of affairs when a goldfish and a frog (Ginger's prize specimen, unsubtly named Casanova) have more chemistry than a romantic comedy's human leads.

A darkly comic trifle that follows in the footsteps of such films as Catherine Breillat's "Romance" (2000), "The Brown Bunny" (2003) and Michael Winterbottom's "9 Songs" (2004) by incorporating hard-core sex into a nonpornographic narrative.

Mock's film leaves us with a sense of gratitude and relief that so thoughtful an artist as Kushner continues to work among us, capturing and reacting to the world as he buzzes through it.

Despite the absence of dialogue -- the mice squeak and the oak creatures caw like ravens -- Cegavske imbues her scrappy little creatures with disturbingly complex personalities. And if the tale's moral is less than clear, its haunting images speak directly to some dark, preverbal corner of the heart.

Mirren, who's played her share of queens in the past, is hypnotic.

A predictable amalgam of every military-academy movie you can think of.

Though silly and predictable, this animated comedy has stunning visuals, a catchy soundtrack and charming characters that are family-friendly crowd-pleasers.

For all its crudeness, Phillips' tale of men behaving badly is remarkably toothless.

Singaporean writer-director Eric Khoo's third feature is a beautiful, contemplative study of love -- unrequited, unfulfilled and reborn.

Scenemaker Dito Montiel's rough, grating memoir of growing up in a poor, violent section of Astoria, Queens, in the mid-1980s features a few too many arty flourishes, but also packs a raw power that's hard to shake.

Don't be put off: Hernandez's exquisite romance works on an emotional, as well as intellectual, level.

The film doesn't dwell on bad feelings, and anyone looking for lurid details won't find them. But fans will love the live footage of this still-powerful band ripping through a virtual greatest-hits set.

The supporting cast is uniformly strong, with Simon McBurney standing out as an oily representative of the British foreign service.

We never see enough of the small compromises Willie Stark makes on the way up to fully grasp the tragedy of his fall. Some will undoubtedly find Penn's hamboned, spittle-lashing performance a bit much, but it's a pretty close to Warren's original conception.

While the aerial dogfights are handsome and apparently historically accurate, right down to the tracer bullets that leave graceful, crisscrossing trails in the clouds, they have a video-game feel.

Ask yourself this: Did the title make you laugh? If so, you're probably the target audience.

The final scenes pack a surprising melodramatic punch.

John Gulager's directing debut is horror at its most reductive and least resonant.

The fact that Pastor Fischer would probably consider the film an accurate portrayal of her mission may be the most terrifying thing of all.

Twenty-five years on, hardcore continues to be the soundtrack of choice for extreme, white-supremacist groups hoping to tap into teenage rage. With no one on hand to counter the argument, this may go down as hardcore's lasting legacy.

Bernal continues to demonstrate an impressive range; the character requires the normally laid-back actor to be a wild ball of energy, and he's more than up to the challenge. His performance is hilarious, heartfelt and more than a little creepy, which could also be said about the movie itself.

Gorgeous and menacing at the same time.

Sweet, goofy story.

At well over two hours it's merely exhausting, and the constant evocation of the fearsome power of "The Lodge," which proves Pat's salvation (Nwamu is himself a Freemason), is as silly-spooky as the White and Black Lodge hokum of "Twin Peaks."

The result is hypnotic.

Togman, an associate professor in political science at Seton Hall University, paints a clear-eyed and unsentimental picture of Sheree's efforts, and there are no happy endings for her or for Mary, who's quietly battling breast cancer as she helps Sheree line up paperwork and negotiate with creditors. The film leaves them both where they started: struggling.

Without relying on dialogue, and once again making good but sparing use of Yo La Tengo's toasty guitar soundtrack, Reichardt proves herself a filmmaker with a masterful sense of the expressive purity of the passing moment.

Banned for many years in director/cowriter Alfonso Cuaron's native Mexico, his debut feature is a bawdy comedy that pivots on the comeuppance of a serial philanderer.

A ludicrous mishmash undermined by ghastly performances and a hopelessly convoluted screenplay.

An anemic adventure that epitomizes generic feature animation.

The film is relentlessly formulaic -- it's like a super-sized Afterschool Special with PG-13-rated bad language -- and is weighed down by Trevor Rabin's bombastic score, which telegraphs the appropriate emotional response to every feel-good moment.

Veterans Danner and Wilkinson effortlessly make Anna and Stephen more interesting than all the youngsters combined.

The real surprise here is Lewis, who seems to have finally hit on a role that balances her usual flakiness with smarts and an offbeat poignancy, and she delivers the strongest work of her adult career.

It's ripe for an American remake, given the popularity of reality TV shows like "My Super Sweet 16" and "Bridezillas," but it's hard to imagine a better cast than this ensemble.

There's less than meets the eye to writer-director Flowers' time-hopping narrative, and what could have been a routine but entertaining crime story gets hopelessly muddled in its telling, despite the efforts of a generally strong cast.

Ending the film with a perfunctory run-through of Lennon's murder on the doorstep of his Manhattan apartment building, however, foregrounds an unfortunate irony: Had the INS succeeded in forcing Lennon out of the U.S., he might be alive today.

Falk is as good as ever and the rest give it their all; you couldn't ask for a better cast, just better material.

Director and cowriter Niall Johnson's black comedy falters at the end, but until then it manages to wring gentle humor from murder most well bred.

Buono is truly charming, and the film delivers a handful of genuine laughs -- low laughs, but laughs nonetheless; if only they weren't so few and far between.

The film ends before Franken can actually take the step from commentator to participant, which adds to its overall unfinished and unfocused air.

The title refers to the giant promotional sign for the Hollywoodland real-estate development that once loomed on the side of Mt. Cahuenga. Shorn of its last four letters 10 years before Reeves' death, it survives as the iconic Hollywood sign.

It's little more than a disjointed succession of kick-ass action scenes.

It's carefully researched, and it's crucial to fully understanding the Iraqi/American enterprise.

It fails utterly as a horror picture, although it delivers plenty of PG-13-rated flesh and unintentional laughs.

Who knew the rock 'n' roll life could be so mild?

Maggie Gyllenhaal cements her reputation as a gifted, if somewhat aloof, actress in Laurie Collyer's sad character piece.