An uneasy mix of frat-boy yocks and "Twilight Zone"-style science-fiction.

A deep waste is more like it.

"Queer as Folk's" Peter Paige makes a strong debut as a writer/director with this original black comedy.

Though the film contains many haunting images, the absence of a solid emotional foundation makes its increasingly preposterous story developments feel arbitrary and ultimately pointless.

Casually paced and filled with telling detail, Yamada's delicate drama with swordplay (there's not much, but what there is packs an emotional wallop) transcends its specific setting in its depiction of Katagiri's internal struggle.

Questions the efficacy and, above all, the humanity of what even steadfast Bush supporters like Tony Blair have condemned.

The result is a mixed bag of lozenges, some sweet, some tart and others that just melt away into nothing.

Despite the frequent and elaborate sex scenes, the film's overall tone is both melancholic and alienating, suffused with the sad certainty of Claudine's impending death in Venice.

The accolades are typically gushing - Bono likens Cohen to Byron and Shelley.

To call the film noisy and brainless isn't even a criticism - it's unadulterated auto-porn, as shallow and shiny as it wants to be.

A crass, tedious sequel.

Screenwriter David Auburn's awkward dialogue spells out the film's themes with painful literal-mindedness.

It's a one-gag film that rises or falls on how funny you find the sight of fat, grease-slicked Jack Black crammed into spandex pants and capering like an epileptic lamb.

First-time writer-director Robert Edwards is nothing if not ambitious, attempting to encapsulate the history of totalitarian oppression and misguided revolutionary zeal into a broad, blunt, black comedy.

It all adds up to an unfortunate misfire: a film at odds with both its source material and itself.

The story wears thin long before it's over, but Machado draws strong performances from his leads and makes excellent use of its rundown locations.

It's none too deep and a tad cartoonish, but also fast-paced, filled with quotable one-liners and often very funny.

There's nothing subtle about Pelegri and Harari's culture-clash romp, but it's sometimes frantically funny; that it's thoroughly forgettable is an issue only if you expect it to do more than poke easy fun at the thorny issues it raises.

It's also very cleverly edited - one scene will often branching off from another in much the same way a crossword puzzle works - and features a bang-up ending that will actually leave you cheering over a word game.

Welsh-born actor Roger Rees bares body and soul in director/cowriter Eric Werthman's handsomely photographed examination of the dynamic that unites a masochist and the sex worker who caters to his desires.

It's the one movie so far this summer that demands to be seen on the big screen.

Overall, the film falls into some comforting cocoon midway between affectionate spoof and adoring homage, much like Keillor's warmly nostalgic show.

The results isn't especially engaging, despite a quietly charismatic performance by Weiss, a relative newcomer who holds his own against far more experienced actors.

The film looks great, but there's nothing under the high-gloss veneer.

You'll feel lucky for such a comprehensive introduction to Turkish music.

Serrill wisely divides his film into chapters according to year, which helps structure the story's natural repetitiveness.

A window into bygone morals and mores.

Animal lovers and museum-goers alike are sure to enjoy this curiously delightful hour-long documentary.

There are no surprises for anyone who's seen the earlier version, and younger horror fans may find the modest body count and restrained gore unsatisfying.

Done in by its tone.

The larger message remains clear: Unified communities have more power than they realize, and the most vicious enemy of progress is learned helplessness.

Baer asks all the right questions.

What you're seeing isn't wire work or CGI -- it's stunt choreography, beautifully executed, flawlessly cut together and brainlessly thrilling.

The result is something close to a textbook example of how NOT to visualize spiritual principles of the "be here now" variety.

While we at home can't come close to experiencing the war in any real sense, we do come away from Scranton's film with a greater sense of the soldiers' everyday fear, helplessness and horror.

Billed as a dark comedy, brothers Jay and Mark Duplass' shaggy, ultra-low-budget tale of a tense New York-to-Atlanta road trip is more accurately a relationship-hell drama peppered with strangled laughs.

The action come fast and thick, and the sentimentality reaches near-operatic proportions.

First and foremost a celebration of Cuban dance and music.

That this deceptively quiet crime thriller about an ex con's troubled homecoming sat on the shelf for four years before finding commercial distribution speaks volumes about both the voracious appetite for sand/surf/summer-break cliches and Hollywood's willingness to pander to it.

But for all the sound, fury and spectacle, the film feels vaguely hollow and unsatisfying.

A bizarre hybrid between Euro erotic thriller and a parable of Jewish awakening.

It's easy to envision the big-budget remake, but hard to imagine a mainstream American production capturing the original's sour, sweaty immediacy.

Sardonic and steeped in the tumultuous history of the former Yugoslavia, this absurdist comedy of contemporary mores can be appreciated even without intimate knowledge of its specific cultural context.

Gore looks as energized and purposeful as Mother Earth looks sickly and mad as hell, which is no doubt why many commentators suggested it was less an environmental action statement than a test balloon for future political ambitions.

Unlike, say, David Cronenberg, who manages to establish a crucial, critical distance between his audience and his schizophrenic protagonist in his adaptation of Patrick McGrath's similarly themed "Spider," Carrere re-creates the insane mind through his camera, and diffuses his point about subjective experience by inadvertently raising questions about truth and the movies.

Naturally there's plenty of adolescent drama both on stage and off, and if the film ultimately feels a little thin, that's also to be expected.

Only McKellan seems to understand the profound silliness of the film in which he finds himself, and he camps it up accordingly.

It's very funny, and the little woodland critters that make up the cast are a kiddie-pleasing bunch.

Hippolyte subsequently reinvented himself first as a director of baroque erotic thrillers and then as music-video maestro to pop tarts like Britney Spears, but stalk-and-slash horror -- for all its porn-movie rhythms -- appears to have defeated him.

Were there more meat on the bones of this fable about hypocrisy and spiritual hollowness, Marsh's pacing might seem deliberate rather then merely slow.

The film's main attractions are the Charlottes, but the price of watching their eerie psychological pas de deux is to endure muddled metaphors and goofy gadgetry.

Canadian-born choreographer Alison Murray draws on her own experiences as a 15-year-old runaway living in squats and on the streets, in her feature-filmmaking debut, which is a clear-eyed look at the pleasures and price of abandoning conventional mores for experimental lifestyles.

Aside from its frank consideration of preteen sexuality, the most daring thing about Cuesta's extraordinary film is its willingness to put honest, intelligent dialogue in the mouths of kids.

Overall it's slick, brainless entertainment.

It's enjoyable and profoundly unlikely to make a lasting impression on anyone.

A big success in Europe, the film has already spawned two sequels, the first of which is due to be released in the fall.

Though the story is formulaic, the bleakly naturalistic performances give it an uncomfortable sting.

The result is fearlessly divisive and will no doubt play according to viewers' preexisting perceptions.

Zakarin's semiautobiographical screenplay hits all the sitcom beats.

Offers exactly what you've come to expect from the series: Bland but wholly innocuous family entertainment featuring a cute kid and an even cuter dog.

Though the raw material is juicy stuff, the details and the larger picture never come together and the cast is uneven.

Rescued from its inclination to smug, celebrity-testimonial-driven hagiography by Gehry's own considerable charm and infectious enthusiasm.

Film does show why so many young people raised in such communities find it so difficult to ever leave.

Klapisch's use of split screens, fragmented images and nouvelle vague-ish editing would be annoying if it weren't so in keeping with the youthful exuberance his characters haven't quite lost.

Nat comes off as flat-out crazy and more sad than amusing or heroic.

The end result is the very definition of a summer movie: breezy, undemanding and a carefully balanced blend of the familiar and the not-quite-what-you-expected.

This failure is especially surprising because Zwigoff not only reunited with "Ghost World's" writer, ingenious graphic artist Dan Clowes, but he aimed to satirize a rarefied sphere both know all too well: the art world.

Throughout the film, doors slam, windows shatter and poor, battered Betsy wakes up screaming with tiresome regularity; even Sutherland appears bored by it all.

The child actors are bland, the adult characters are forced to act like dunderheads to keep the paper-thin plot going, and the generic-sounding Jimmy Buffett songs are just a LITTLE out of sync with the film's target age group.

Driven by Edward Norton's and Evan Rachel Wood's riveting performances, writer-director David Jacobson's tense drama samples bits of cinematic Americana from sources as diverse as "Shane," "Badlands" and "Taxi Driver."

A sweat-slicked, near-abstract ballet of blood and sand.

Uneven tragicomedy.

The lesson -- that three into two won't go --has been learned by other improbably attractive couples in "bold" movies about youthful experimentation and its long-term consequences, but the word never seems to get around.

Mitevska telescopes centuries of conflict between nations into an intimate story of siblings whose hopes for the future are being slowly poisoned by the sins of the past.

Bendinger pulls out all the stops visually, using bold set design, frantic editing, extreme angles and computer image multiplying that turns what begins as a Busby Berkeley exercise in synchronized movement into a kaleidoscopic infinity of handsprings and back flips.

One of the most harrowing, viscerally upsetting films ever made.

Sentimental, manipulative, predictable and utterly charming.

Once you get past the lengthy, graphic geyser-of-liquid-excrement gag, it's not as irredeemably vulgar as it might have been.

If there's a gay cliche who doesn't flounce through this feel-good German comedy, he must have been out of town when the casting call went out, but its fundamental good nature is tough to resist.

Bill Murray plays the secondary role of a nameless American gag writer brimming with one-liners about the absurdity of Cuban life, Dustin Hoffman has a cameo as kvetching gangster Meyer Lansky.

Works better as a look at life among a family of Croatian immigrants in Vienna during the nightmare years of the Balkan conflicts than an exploration of the psychosexual tension between a prostitute and her son.

The message this oddball film propounds is pretty much standard stuff on the Oprah circuit.

It concludes Park's trilogy on a dual note of circular tragedy and fragile hope, while working equally well as an introduction to his universe of retribution and repentance or as a stand-alone thriller with a darkly feminist twist.

It's full of humor, pathos and a deep humanism that comes as a warm blast in this age of lifeless, cinematic junk.

It's simply one of the most beautiful films he's (Hou Hsiao Hsien) made to date.

Gets the details right while missing the big picture.

Douglas and Sutherland do crackling hostility with devilish glee, and the fireworks are nothing if not entertaining.

Runs out of story a good half hour before it runs out of spooky images, but it comes to a quietly chilling conclusion far more haunting than any bloody mayhem.

Cornish's raw, nuanced performance and Shortland's sympathetic but unsentimental portrayal of Heidi's fumbling steps toward maturity are underscored by Sydney-based band Decoder Ring's catchy, angst-ridden score.

Neither as dull nor as insufferably smug as it could easily have been.

But in the end it all comes to naught: Tantalyzing though the leads are, the paintings remain elusive.

Repulsion has often been compared to "Psycho," but Polanski's film, rather than presenting a portrait of a psychotic killer from outside, pulls the audience into the crazed individual's mind. (Review of Original Release)

But for those jonesing for a loosely connected string of comedy sketches, heavy on the scatological humor, this is the fix.

If you don't care about the characters, then everything's just a big, dumb joke.

Ejiofor's polished, energetic performance -- including several song-and-dance numbers -- enlivens what's basically comfort food in movie form, but sometimes comfort food is exactly what the doctor ordered.

Inspired by accounts of underage vigilante girls in Japan turning the tables on Internet predators, playwright Brian Nelson's schematic tale of the hunter captured by the game, a queasy blend of exploitation-movie nastiness and blunt moral lesson.

An oddly lifeless affair, though Gretchen Mol's sunny performance almost hauls it out of its doldrums.

The morbid theme notwithstanding, this is by no means a downbeat film, and it ends with the rather hopeful thought that for every disaster there's also a chance for survival.