A fascinating film that also benefits greatly from the stunning scenery of the Tibetan plateau and from a quicksand scene that will leave you gasping.

In different hands and different lands, the same story could easily have been a pretentious bit of "Red Shoe Diaries" piffle. But exceptional performances and the oh-so-Frenchness of the complications instead produce an erotic tale that plays like the best gossipy story you ever heard about people you thought you knew.

Bello is phenomenally good as the embittered Marcia, while Stuart and Christensen do their best with their less complex roles, but they're all undermined by Alfieri's shrill, mannered dialogue and cliched backstories that wouldn't be out of place in a dysfunction-family-of-the-week movie.

Though the performances are surprisingly good - the characters are drawn with a broad brush, but the actors, almost all professional comics, hit all the right notes - the material just isn't funny enough to justify the film's length.

More gripping than anything on Court TV and unexpectedly uplifting.

Smilovic's rapid-fire, Tarantino-esque dialogue is consistently razor-sharp, and the elaborate set design - which leans heavily towards shiny, riotously patterned wallpaper - is an eyeball-jangling blast.

This formulaic mess of sports-movie cliches and self-esteem claptrap contains a couple of funny bits, but you have to slog through a lot of done-to-death bodily function jokes to get to them.

Even Mo'Nique's outsize presence isn't enough to make ancient gags about stuck-up popular girls or about voluptuous vultures clearing a whole buffet table in one fell swoop funny.

Though screenwriter Dianne Houston spent time observing the real-life Dulaine, her screenplay is a showcase for triumph-of-the-underdog sports-movie cliches and coming-of-age-through-adversity moral lessons.

For a film that feels so breezy on the surface, it's a surprisingly complex character study.

As to what happens between shows, well, apparently not a whole hell of a lot. If there are groupies, demolished hotel rooms, midnight payoffs to the vice squad or drug- and alcohol-fueled misbehavior, there's no evidence of it here.

Sharply acted and cheerfully coarse.

Dellal and their cast consistently hit the right notes, and the result is an uplifting tale that you don't have to be embarrassed to enjoy.

Litvak's broad comedy has novelty on its side, and though the script never rises above sitcom-style one-liners and sight gags, strong performances invest both the jokes and the syrupy moments of forgiveness and reconciliation with no small measure of, yes, heart.

Looks great but has a shambolic, off-kilter feel that might not be entirely intentional, and is alternately tedious and shocking.

Unfortunately, the characters feel more like symbols than people, despite strong performances, including what might be Portman's finest work to date.

Zieger's thoroughly researched film is a vital reminder that beginning in the mid-'60s, a few conscience-stricken military individuals -- including dermatologist Dr. Howard Levy, sickened by cynical attempts to win Vietnamese "hearts and minds" through medical treatment, and Navy nurse Susan Schnall, who wore her uniform to a civilian antiwar demonstration -- actively and openly voiced peace sentiments.

Toback quickly reveals himself as an insufferable, opinionated blowhard who pontificates shamelessly about the art of the cinema while indulging his own obsessions on film.

While Burnam and Garrison imbue their characters with authentic-feeling frustration and anger, they never succeed in making them especially interesting; it's hard to care in any serious way what becomes of either.

Zahedi has been compared to Woody Allen, and he shares Allen's neurotic sense of entitlement and navel-gazing fascination with his own sexual peccadilloes. Whether you find either man funny or infuriating depends in large part on whether you identify more with their narcissistic quests for self-knowledge or the collateral damage left in their wakes.

For all the sex and slicing, the most shocking thing about it is how dreary it is.

The story is familiar, but terrific performances and a vivid sense of place elevate it above the average teen-oriented picture.

The series' breakout star remains Scrat (Chris Wedge), a scrawny, speechless rat-squirrel thing trapped in a Sisyphean quest for acorns, and while kids' movies generally could do with fewer scatological gags (the target audience for poo and pee humor needs no encouragement), writers Peter Gaulke and Jim Hecht managed to come up with a (relatively) sophisticated one.

If your idea of fun involves zombies, monstrous physical transformations and alien slugs bent on world domination, look no further than James Gunn's gleeful homage to all things gross and horrible actually makes good on the "horror comedy" label by being both flat-out creepy and darkly funny.

First-time writer-director Rian Johnson's gimmick is that his SoCal teens talk like film-noir yeggs and dames, slinging hard-boiled shade and spitting out terse, rat-a-tat dialogue peppered with slang that was yesterday's news 40 years before they were born. But the result is, against all odds, marvelously entertaining.

Needless to say, anyone who's not entirely down with the beastly noise of the Beastie Boys will hate every second of it. This one's strictly for -- and, for the most part, by -- the fans.

It hits more often than it misses, and the best parts are always the simplest, in which the stars wing it with nothing to go on but their natural chemistry.

The casual listener is easily put off, but by the end of the film, even a newcomer can see the magic that made fans of Kurt Cobain and Sonic Youth and led the estimable Yo La Tengo, Pearl Jam and Wilco to cover Johnston's remarkable body of work.

Expanded by writer-director Randall Miller from a nostalgic half-hour short he made while a student at AFI, this well-intentioned film about loss, grief and new beginnings gets bogged down in syrupy cliches and blunt self-help dialogue.

If it were possible for an entire state to sue for defamation of character, Iowa might have a strong case against writer, director and star Matt Farnsworth.

Mohammad Rasoulof's heartfelt and darkly comic second feature proves beyond any doubt that Iranian film is still alive and well, despite waning Western interest in one of the world's richest contemporary cinemas.

It's an impressionistic experience rather than a linear one, and the process of surrendering to the images and rhythms of lives lived in simultaneous harmony with the physical and the spiritual is greatly helped by the chants that dominate much of the soundtrack.

A gorgeous feature that's both passing strange and undeniably beautiful.

Yuen would have been better off exposing more of that reality and celebrating less of the joyful silliness of the model works, let alone staging pointless hip-hop-inflected dance numbers set to Yang Ban Xi musical themes.

Well acted and hugely entertaining, the film strikes a near-flawless balance between sly pop-culture allusions and the details of how business gets done under pressure.

Horror buffs looking for a novel twist on genre formulas should look elsewhere, but this body-count potboiler about a sinister video game and the poor dopes who make the mistake of playing it is the movie equivalent of junk food: It's not good, but it's predictable and even satisfying, in a low-expectations way.

So laugh all you want at the proud haircutters of Beauty Without Borders - but don't underestimate what a basic cut and color can mean for a country's future.

Affleck's gloomy, one-note performance exacerbates the problem, but the stellar supporting cast helps compensate.

It's hard to say which sight is more depressing: That of Chinese girls mortgaging their futures in the hopes of helping their families, or drunken American girls, surrounded by privilege and opportunity most of the world can barely imagine, arguing that it's fun to degrade themselves for cheap baubles.

Throughout this raw, often brilliant drama, the Dardennes refuse to judge these deeply flawed characters. They instead maintain a moral objectivity that ultimately leaves room for the possibility of redemption, no matter how dire the sins committed.

Catania and Ignacio's film works best on the level of straightforward biography told through the reminiscences of friends, family, members of Busch's Lost-in-Limbo theatrical troupe and, best of all, Busch himself.

Newcomer Gregory never captures the mercurial charisma for which Jones was famous (and which Jagger notoriously channeled in his movie debut, "Performance"), without which his story is just another cautionary tale about fast times, intemperate passions and bad dope.

Folks watching any movie that opens with a shot of a butt crack (with the possible exception of "Lost in Translation") can't claim they weren't warned.

Despite the low budget, the film is handsomely designed and well acted.

It's by no stretch of the imagination a good film, but it delivers what it promises: naked girls whaling on each other, flesh-ripping zombies and genre stalwart Todd growling and glowering satanically from beneath a mane of dreadlocks - the He-Who-Kills teeth are a nice touch.

The overall effect of watching his film is a bit like a nerve-racking game of Russian roulette: You just know a gun is going to go off, but you don't know which of this multitude of characters it's going to hit.

The film is dreary and attenuated, the tedium broken only by the occasional golden moment when one of the stellar supporting players - Ron Silver as the principled presiding judge who alternately tolerates and quashes Jackie's antics, Peter Dinklage as the lead defense attorney or Annabella Sciorra as Jackie's ex - manages to cut through the clutter.

It will certainly appeal to its target audience, and Bynes is charming enough to carry the whole film on her shoulders, which is a good thing considering that she's in just about every scene and leading man Tatum is a stiff.

Brutally gorgeous and seething with incendiary images.

Eckhart is dazzling as a born phony.

Raised in Mumbai, classically trained actor-turned-writer-director Khanna addresses the volatile issue of women's rights within Islamic households, and if his sensationalistic debut feature makes its point with a heavy hand, it's also starkly effective.

Harrowing, psychologically astute drama.

It's swiftly paced and never dull, but the heavy-handed symbolism comes fast and thick.

Beautifully shot in rich colors by Franz Lustig, it's possibly Wenders' most accessible film to date, and among his most emotionally satisfying.

Basilio narrates his tale with such wit and wisdom that one comes away from the film wondering how much youthful potential is slowly being choked to death deep within the bowels of the earth.

You just know that any film that opens with Nietzsche's aphorism about hope being an evil that only prolongs the torments of man isn't going to a comedy.

The film's tone - a mix of childlike directness, twee whimsy and arty sentimentality - is a matter of taste.

Stovall's film could have been a little shorter and a lot tighter.

While touching on subjects as serious and diverse as capital punishment, the devaluation of women in Iran and the true Islamic concept of forgiveness, this powerful melodrama from the Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi is anything but a message movie.

That there's precious little chemistry between buffed-and-tanned stars Parker and McConaughey is only the first of this slight, overly busy film's problems.

French up-and-comer Alexandre Aja's full-bore do-over is a shockingly successful update of a seminal 1970s shocker.

Crafting this crude, noisy remake of Disney's first live-action comedy required the labor of no fewer than five screenwriters.

Occasionally overrated as a writer but consistently underrated as a director, Towne does a marvelous job resurrecting all the seedy jumble of the long-gone Bunker Hill neighborhood.

Slow but charming film.

Given Argento's willingness to attempt the controversial book at all, she pulls a surprising number of punches. What at first appears to go too far in reality doesn't go far enough: Argento doesn't even broach the subject of child prostitution.

This didactic drama is set safely in the past and says nothing about the culture of conformity at all costs that hasn't been said before.

Though Keaton is convincing as a smarmy narcissist who secretly thinks he deserves to fail because writing plays isn't REAL work, he's also thoroughly unlikable -- a problematic trait in a protagonist.

Shakespeare himself couldn't have written better or more complex characters, and far from strange, by the end of this extraordinary film you couldn't imagine Shakespeare performed anywhere else.

Though impressively ambitious and making the most of a small budget and talented cast, director Ari Taub's feature concentrates so intently on the day-to-day minutiae of infantry life on World War II's European front that the bigger picture gets lost.

A throwback to an age when action movies had room between shoot-outs and car chases for dialogue - real dialogue, not rim-shot-ready one-liners - and character development.

Aside from an inspired bit involving a pair of sycophantic starfish, it's amazing how unimaginative a movie about a mermaid can be, and it's sad how thoroughly its girl-power stylings devolve into a muddle of mixed messages.

The film's highlights are far and away the musical performances.

An all-but-incoherent mess whose main components are palpably fake-looking CGI effects, video-game-style action sequences and Milla Jovovich's admirably taut abdomen, Kurt Wimmer's film epitomizes just about everything wrong with post-MATRIX, comic book-/video-game-inspired, Hong Kong-action-style sci-fi thrillers.

Forget haunted houses and the mountains of the moon: There's no better environment to show off the wonder of the immersive IMAX 3-D experience than the deep blue sea.

A down–under fable with a sweet country-music twang.

The bad news is that Seitz's protagonists are almost all insufferable: Smug, self-important, opinionated and relentlessly convinced that they're far more sensitive, intelligent and interesting than they are.

The film's heart is Magdiel and the modest dreams that get him through the day but may also be the death of him.

What's suspenseful - and so troubling - is seeing exactly how far the "progressives" of GCS are willing to go to put a decidedly unpopular candidate back into office, regardless of what it will mean for the future of the country and for Bolivian democracy itself.

Stanzler's ideas about the psychic legacy of 9/11 are so confused -- that by the time he unveils the final plot twist, his film has lost every shred of credibility.

Powerful crime drama does more than just expose the criminal underbelly of South African township life.

The original English scripts certainly were peppered with sly, topical asides aimed squarely at adults. Paul Bassett Davies' updated screenplay attempts to follow suit, but what passes for topical these days is pretty much limited to industry inside jokes and constant allusions other movies. Thankfully, the animation itself is thoroughly inspired.

Too long and its tone is disconcertingly uneven, but Perry never betrays or condescends to his characters.

It's way too violent and perversely excessive for many tastes, but there's more to its outrages than meets the eye, and that second look is well worth taking.

Desperate-to-shock slice of sleaze life.

The film's title refers both to tiny, fish-shaped vials of liquid heroin and the small fry flitting around the edges of the urban drug scene.

Cushioned by money - which frees him from needing to work and allows him to fly around the world looking for his past - Bruce is attractive and well-spoken but not especially interesting, which leaves a yawning void at the story's center.

Rae's 80-minute film isn't able to answer every question or flesh out important details of these events, and she spends more time on Trudell's artistic endeavors than on his direct political action.

Besides its exhilarating style, the well-acted film works as an effective translation of the classic Greek myth into a Brazilian romance. (Review of Original Release)

Kor's intentions are beyond reproach, but her campaign raises discomfiting questions.

It's a fascinating film, simultaneously enthralling, infuriating and guaranteed to make viewers ask how such a perversion of the political process could be taking place in America.

The choice is yours: Shell out 10 bucks for this dire spoof of recent romantic comedies a la "Scary Movie" and "Not Another Teen Movie", or toss your 12-year-old nephew a quarter and get him to act out scenes from his favorite movies for 80 minutes: The entertainment value will be about the same.

Eight magnificent sled dogs must fend for themselves amid Antarctica's frozen wastes in this top-notch survival adventure that will reduce the coldest heart to a puddle of warm slush.

Hugely ambitious and driven by Julianne Moore, Samuel L. Jackson and Edie Falco's fine, intense performances, Richard Price's adaptation of his own sprawling novel about a racially charged kidnapping that turns a volatile New Jersey town into a powder keg tries to tell too many stories in too little time.

Simultaneously shocking and deeply religious, Carlos Reygadas' follow-up to his acclaimed 2002 debut, "Japon," tells the story of one man's battle for spiritual redemption through a series of explicit images rarely seen by even the most jaded art-house audiences.

Although this first chapter in a three-part tale is inevitably overburdened with back story, it ends on one hell of a cliff-hanger.

As a film, it is earnest, cliched, often awkward and unlikely to inspire anyone who isn't already thoroughly sold on its message of salvation through community activism.

The film is a shattering experience fueled by Jentsch's electrifying performance.

Rapp's theatrical past is evident throughout: His strongest scenes tend to be those purely character-driven moments when his sharp dialogue takes precedence over any cinematic action. Harris gives another strong performance and Ferrell is great in a comic but low-key role, but this is Deschanel's movie.