Packs five films' worth of drama, crises and revelations into one, and often lapses into sitcom triteness.

The images of gods and ordinary Tibetans that Bush captures are more eloquent that his turgid narration, and overall the film works better as a travelogue than an introduction to Tibetan Buddhist beliefs or history.

The Country Music Channel's first foray into feature filmmaking is sickly sweet and thoroughly predictable, and woefully underuses veterans Harper and Reynolds, but it features some stirring performances, including BeBe Winans and Willie Nelson dueting on "The Uncloudy Day."

Throughout, Holstein makes no bones about the fact that Father Mychal was hardly perfect -- he was a recovering alcoholic who found salvation in Alcoholics Anonymous -- nor does he attempt to disguise Father Mychal's homosexuality, something he never made public but which no doubt grounded his gutsy work with gay Catholics and people with AIDS.

The whole thing whizzes by in such a panicked rush that there's no time for anything so immaterial as character, but what little we do learn about Chev works against the film.

Astonishingly inept drama.

There may be a way to remake 1973's cult thriller The Wicker Man, in which a deeply Christian cop has his religious convictions shaken to the core as he investigates the disappearance of a child from within a cheerfully pagan community, but Neil LaBute didn't find it.

The young actors are charming, O'Toole commands every scene he's in, the scenery is lush, and the animals are gorgeous.

Never adds up to much of anything.

A marvelous, deceptively simple accomplishment shot on grainy 16mm film and featuring a cast of mostly nonprofessional actors delivering loosely written dialogue.

Zhang's film is sweet and sentimental nearly to a fault; luckily, he's such a master, you'll hardly notice how shamelessly you're being manipulated.

Ultimately, Dick subordinates scholarship to passion, which may be exactly what it takes to convince mainstream moviegoers that they should care about a system that shortchanges THEM when they go to the movies.

Both a biographical portrait and an exploration of the tradition of Jewish liturgical music in America.

There have been a number of worth documentaries about gender-benders who cross every conceivable line, but Tomer Heymann's film about a group of Filipino cross-dressers living in Israel is a drag doc with a difference.

Leaves you wanting much more.

Funnier than you might imagine.

Barber's screenplay is mired in cliches that got old in 1935.

While changes have been made to the book in the interest of compressing the story and emphasizing certain life lessons, the 33-year-old premise is still perfectly in sync with the sensibilities of preteen boys everywhere.

The film's depiction of life among the salt of the earth is blandly cartoonish; and the "Super Sounds of the '70s" soundtrack meticulously matches songs to action, as though the filmmakers didn't trust viewers to figure out what these one-note characters were feeling.

An unconvincing and uninvolving psychological thriller.

For all its contrivances, the film is cheerfully rude and surprisingly generous to the mothers, most of whom find sizzling new romances at an age when their American counterparts are reduced to sexless dithering or played as humiliating punch lines to jokes about horny old hags.

Only Lynch's over-the-top network executive stands out in this otherwise bland film that tries for satire but neglects to be funny.

The film's opening dedication to Pasolini acknowledges Arslan's debt to Neorealism, but the gritty, documentary style is offset by a charming bit of chalkboard animation that helps lighten the mood considerably.

Scruffy, loosely structured and piercingly perceptive about the ways in which technology that supposedly brings people together actually keeps them apart.

Film works best as a soberly witty commentary on the workplace and makes an interesting companion piece to "Mondays in the Sun."

The whole enterprise has the sweaty sheen that comes from trying too hard to be cool.

If all this were anarchically funny, its shambling idiocy could be forgiven.

This handsome, elegant and restrained fable about love, artifice and power in fin de siecle Vienna is lavishly imagined and yet oddly airless.

The Duffs are certainly cute together, but not even their natural chemistry can enliven all the preachy bits about hard work and the meaning of happiness.

It is fragmented and episodic, and many of Bukowski's best bits are oddly truncated.

The cast, however, is great -- Crudup and Duchovny in particular share a fun chemistry that's just toilet-obsessed enough to be absolutely believable.

The narrative is cluttered with backstory, and the endless digressions overwhelm the efforts of a generally strong cast.

The fine acting and sexy chemistry between Bonham Carter and Eckhart make it work.

To say Wes Craven's rewrite of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 2001 "Pulse" isn't as bad as it could have been sounds like faint praise, but Kurosawa's "Pulse" is one of the true masterpieces of recent Asian horror, and the track record for Hollywood horror redos isn't great.

This teen drama may be filled with some great-looking dancing, but its hackneyed, predictable script is a giant step in the wrong direction.

One of the most dismal excuses for family entertainment ever perpetrated by a major studio, this crude, lazy variation on Disney's "Sky High" (2005) revolves around the education of four "special" youngsters at the hands of a washed-up superhero.

Superb drama from New York-based filmmakers Ryan Flek and Anna Boden.

An odd blend of recycled American exploitation movie tropes and snarky Euro-art film attitude.

First-time writer-director Matthew Porterfield's small-scale, 16mm slice-of-life drama has the hazy, sticky rhythms of a hot summer day and the minimal narrative of a classic European art film.

After a positively thrilling first half, Brazilian director Andrucha Waddington's follow-up to his acclaimed 2000 debut "Me You Them" badly stumbles over an unfortunate casting strategy.

The film's strident tone also serves to undermine its generally above-average performances.

Stone, the master of the epic conspiracy and the operatic spectacle of diametrically opposed forces at war for men's souls, is so entangled in the trees that he's lost sight of the forest -- who could have imagined?

Svankmajer has crafted his finest live-action feature to date.

Charming, if slight, Venus-and-Mars romantic comedy.

Though the film's downbeat ending was softened for U.S. release, it's still a long way from happy.

Moooove along, there's nothing to see here!

Where the hero of Maupin's novel learns some valuable lessons about love and faith, the film strikes a darker, even angry tone that's far more understandable and, in the end, far more convincing.

Those who appreciate Ferrell's sense of humor will be utterly entertained by his efforts to kick it into high gear.

Poitras boldly dispenses with the traditional documentary voice-over, but her film is filled with telling moments that are far more eloquent than any scripted narration.

One of the most perceptive movies about the gentrification of Los Angeles.

Sweet-natured, episodic comedy-drama.

In the final analysis it all feels very much like a successful acting exercise that while psychologically acute, doesn't really bring much more to the table than what we've already gleaned from a few episodes of "Oz."

The story delivers enough twists and turns to be engaging without feeling like work, and the overall vibe is dangerous and flirty rather than brutal or excessively graphic.

Though Verow attended the American Film Institute and has made more than a dozen shorts and features since 1994, his low-budget gay-themed films are characterized by phenomenal indifference to framing, sound quality and performance. If his relentless amateurishness is deliberate, it's self-defeating; if not, it's inexplicable: Most people who do anything for more than a decade get better at it.

A combination of muddy sound mix and players with heavy accents (particularly Chinese superstar Gong, who seems to have learned her lines phonetically) renders large swaths of dialogue incomprehensible, but the details of what's being said and done don't really matter.

For the first time, Allen's trademark shtick sounds less like the anxious kvetching of an endearingly neurotic New Yorker and more like the ramblings of a tired, elderly man fumbling for the right words.

Surprisingly entertaining, if less than original.

The screenplay is blessedly free of mediocre songs and light on flashy pop-culture in-jokes.

Shot in neorealist black-and-white, it opens like a gritty slice of social drama, then takes a sharp turn into bleak, existential horror.

Law-abiding Americans who hand off a solid chunk of their salaries to the IRS might be interested in what filmmaker Aaron Russo has to say on the subject of income tax.

There's a fine line between subversively transgressive and just plain gross, and this coming-of-age-movies parody from Todd Stephens, who wrote and directed the charming and underrated "Gypsy 83," crashes right over it.

Despite some excitingly shot concert footage, one scene begins to feel very much like the next, and it's all rather predictable.

Shopsin is a small piece of New York history, and Mahurin's film is the portrait he deserves: small, noisy and oddly engaging beneath the bluster.

What makes husband-and-wife directing team Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris' hilarious debut such a great family film isn't that it's suitable for the whole family (it's not), but that it speaks a simple truth about what it means to be part of one.

Sebastien Pentecouteau's startlingly beautiful cinematography lends the film a dreamlike quality and perfectly suits Kounen's mystical subject matter.

They're frank, funny, resilient and altogether captivating.

Despite the edifying square-up -- moral lessons about family, the legacy of violence and the tenacious power of love -- the appeal is freak-show all the way.

If not precisely poetic in its elaborate offensiveness, it's certainly imaginative. Unfortunately, that's not the same as interesting or engaging, unless you're a dyed-in-the-wool fan.

The result is a soggy swamp of nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyahing, its only grace notes are Giamatti's fine, nuanced performance as Heep and Christopher Doyle's handsome cinematography.

Surprisingly enough, puberty-stricken J.D. and Chowder actually sound like real teenagers, but the cartoony look will probably alienate real-life kids that age, and the man-eating house might be downright terrifying to younger kids.

Most of the gags recycle the same tired old romantic comedy schtick, with special effects.

Features more than enough thrilling wirework, slow and agonizing deaths, and blood-spattered faces to please even the most discriminating fans of the genre.

Although the film contains a subtle antiwar message, it's not necessary to look for any rhyme or reason in the script; just enjoy all the derring-do.

Apocalyptic carnal horror with a strong Alejandro Jodorworsky vibe.

It took a century of innovation in the field of cinematic special effects, but finally the head of Marlon Wayans could be successfully grafted onto the body of a baby.

Owen Wilson single-handedly hauls this amiable, middle-of-the-road comedy out of sheer mediocrity.

While incontrovertibly light compared to contemporary master of melodrama Andre Techine's best work, this 2005 romance is best enjoyed as the welcome reunion of two of French cinema's most beloved stars.

Leguizamo deserves real kudos for making what he does of T.C., who is the film's walking lesson in how to undermine elitist clichés about working-class Long Island.

Pitch-black and bound to offend anyone who's not on its wavelength, Nick Guthe's entertainingly slick debut is a mordantly funny slice of lust, crime and sleaze life set in the world of L.A.'s industry elite: Call it 9021-noir.

Falls disappointing short of its ambition to be both sympathetically straightforward and funny.

The film rests entirely on Poupaud's shoulders, and he rises to the demands of a complex, deeply unsympathetic role.

Written in the aftermath of a bitter divorce, Mamet's paranoid rant -- an explosion of middle-aged, white-collar, white-men's rage at losing ground to everyone, from women, hustlers, African Americans and homosexuals to the younger generation nipping at their heels -- is as bilious as ever, but time has overtaken and defanged it.

Patrice Chereau's portrait of a marriage en crise is an excoriating look at the deep unhappiness that can fester within the most respectable-seeming of households.

The overriding themes of the film are never broadly stated but are subtly revealed, and the horror and reality of war are quietly played out on both the human and panoramic levels with disturbing effect.

You can't beat on Dead Man's on value-for-money terms, but it's like an all-you-can-eat buffet -- everything's tasty, the surfeit is sickening.

But transforming full, live-action performances into quavering cartoons isn't inherently lyrical, and here it produces the jittery sense of a world dissolving into flat forms and buzzing prattle.

We're more likely to snicker at this marauding monster than scream.

Director Laurent Cantet's fourth feature abandons the contentious French workplaces of "Human Resources" and "Time Out" for sunnier climes, but this Haitian idyll is an equally excoriating look at labor and exploitation.

Taking its title from a key track by the NYC noise band Sonic Youth, S.A. Crary's documentary about No Wave music and its paradoxical influence is both a history of music that sought to defy history and a sharp look at the crisis of innovation in an age of commodified nostalgia.

Crowder and Dower's film is a refreshing reminder that without Ross and the Erteguns, pundits would have had to coin an entirely different term to describe "soccer moms," since without the Cosmos' brief and shining moment in the sun, suburban soccer leagues would be as rare as collegiate boccie tournaments.

Briskly directed by "Sex and the City" veteran David Frankel, the movie is far better than the source.

Attempts at balance through interviews with unidentified U.S. soldiers is halfhearted at best. In the end, Berends sacrifices coherence for the sake of a story he's determined to tell, rather than focusing on the one that's practically telling itself.

Miike's goofy, gallant, action-packed fantasy deserves to become a classic family film.

Don't hate him because he's beautiful, decent, awesomely powerful, modest and just plain good. That's the big blue Boy Scout package - take it or leave it.

Kang's marvelously assured feature debut is a subtle adaptation of Ed Lin's acclaimed novel "Waylaid."

Winner of the John Cassavetes Award for Best Feature Under $500K at the 2006 Independent Spirit Awards, Henry's film is beautifully shot and extraordinarily well acted by Williams.

When it comes right down to it, there are two kinds of people in this world: Those who despised Comedy Central's notorious series Strangers with Candy as the rudest, crudest and most offensive show ever to appear on television, and those who loved it for those very reasons.

Impassioned, unwieldy and padded with celebrity interviews.