An amateur in the best sense of the word, Dobson is an engaging ambassador for a life of the mind lived firmly in the real world.

Even by the debased standards of preachy sports movies aimed at kids, this is pabulum.

It lacks "Fingers" searing, explosive vitality.

There's nothing under the goofball gags and gushing gore, and its welcome is worn out well before it's over.

Maverick Chinese director Jia Zhangke examines the rapidly changing face of China as its economy edges further toward a modified form of market capitalism with yet another complex, multicharacter masterpiece.

Like so many true stories, Comes' lacks the clarity and comforting resolution of fiction

It unfolds in the angst-haunted shadow of the 9'11 terror attacks and teeters on a thin edge of sheer panic.

"All of us are by nature wild beasts. We must be like animal trainers and teach ourselves tricks alien to our bestiality." Cutting-edge Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul uses this quote from the novelist Ton Nakajima to introduce his entrancing third feature.

This film exposes a more insidious kind of exploitation, one far more difficult to detect.

Dawson actually delivers the film's most persuasive performance.

Falls victim to an overly tricky rethinking of the way familiar TV shows are transformed into movies.

Romero isn't a subtle filmmaker -- the sociopolitical underpinnings of his DEAD films have always been brutally clear -- but LAND is alive with subtle touches.

Like its title, the film is ultimately an affirmation in the face of catastrophic negation, a bit obvious at times but nonetheless welcome.

The penguins' matter-of-fact victory over some of the Earth's most punishing conditions is astonishing enough without the epic airs.

Like so much dope humor, Soling's logic is fuzzy, and you'd have to be pretty high to find any of it funny.

The story's message is less than profound, but it's vividly delivered.

Avrich's colorful account of Wasserman's career starts out looking like a puff piece, but quickly reveals a refreshing willingness to delve into the dirty side of a glamorous business.

Only those who really love the Bug will be willing to put up with the loose plot and over-the-top action scenes.

Shot largely in Toronto and cast with the best of the B-list, this film has the low-rent gloss of a made-for-cable thriller.

MacKinnon's film draws on his past as a youth worker and features a standout performance from first-time performer Harry Eden.

This cream puff of a romantic comedy is sweet enough, but lack of substance makes it deeply unsatisfying.

Bleak political parable.

Terrio keeps the multiple stories flowing smoothly, and the setting goes a long way to justify the web of fortuitous interconnections -- New York is the ultimate two-degrees-of-separation town.

The result is discomfiting, funny and oddly touching.

A bittersweet rite-of-passage story driven by the subtle performances of newcomers Nathalie Press and Emily Blunt.

This curious blend of fact and fiction is ultimately worth the trip -- just don't forget to pack the Advil.

Lee obviously wants to portray Ethan as something other than the dutiful No. 1 son, but Ethan isn't entirely convincing as a doped-up street hustler.

The result is handsome and logical, but missing the spark that would make it thrilling.

A blockbuster hit in Korea, Park's feature debut is a beguiling mix of the generic and the unfamiliar, and it ends on a shot that's nothing short of heartbreaking.

Mesmerizing.

By the time the film winds itself up, the sophisticated fizz of its first 45 minutes has been smothered by explosive bombast.

When a performer as sharp as Cedric the Entertainer is reduced to funny fat-guy shtick, you know you're in the presence of grinding mediocrity.

The first two thirds of the screenplay by Aja and cowriter Gregory Levasseur is a relentless exercise in bare-bones nastiness.

The concept is cute and the movie starts out well, but it devolves into a muddled, overstuffed mess that wears out its welcome around the time the novelty of 3-D effects wears off.

You'll gladly surrender to the whole gorgeous muddle.

Andreas' cast and crew, however, have done an admirable job of backing up that hilarious title with an intelligent little film that knows its limitations and makes the most of a shoestring budget.

Stony and statuesque, Michelini is an excellent casting choice: Her impassive face and dispassionate voice serve as a carefully constructed protective mask that hides her pain, and which she rarely lets slip.

Though handsomely mounted, this parable of intersecting destinies and implacable tragedy is as lifeless as a wax tableau.

A wickedly entertaining bit of domestic tragedy.

The film is an original work by a filmmaker who throughout his career has absorbed the best of what Ozu had to teach, and as such it stands as beautiful tribute from one master to another.

While sumptuously beautiful, the film is often stilted and undermined by some painfully amateurish performances that no good intentions can smooth over.

Viewers who remember Max Baer may, however, take issue with the way the film treats this charismatic fighter. In 1933, Baer became an important symbol of Jewish strength when he faced off against Hitler's favored fighter, Max Schmeling, and while reducing Baer to a bloodthirsty villain makes it easier to root for Braddock, it's an unfair bit of character assassination.

The skating photography is excellent and, like the documentary's soundtrack, songs from the Stooges, Blue Oyster Cult and the Weirdos set the proper mood. But this dramatization does nothing Peralta's documentary didn't do better.

And while Ivy League-educated psychologist Green considers himself a natural teacher, his teaching technique involves pitting students against each other and haranguing them with rants that run from gentle, good-natured ribbing to flat-out verbal abuse, delivered at an ego-crushing volume.

Like most contemporary romantic comedies, the film's plot works only if you accept that everyone behaves like a complete and utter idiot at all times.

This stunningly photographed documentary captures extraordinary images of ocean-based life.

A riot of artfully grungy hotel rooms, sleazy costumes and sordid behavior, Allan Mindel's directing debut gives off the smug air of hipsters at play, making it hard to care what happens to any of its lost souls and inept opportunists.

Despite outward appearances, Paolo Virzi's utterly charming fable is actually a razor-sharp political satire.

Readers hate to see their favorites messed with by filmmakers, and though devotees will notice changes from Brashares' novel -- some slight and some more substantial -- the film remains true to the book's spirit, and the deviations shouldn't alienate them.

Israeli director Keren Yedaya's remarkable debut feature, which won the 2004 Cannes Film Festival Camera d'Or, is a powerful study of a teenager's willingness to do anything to save her mother, a Tel Aviv prostitute who may be well beyond salvation.

An intoxicating dream of a film that speaks to the daydreamer in all of us.

Bojanov's sad subjects could as easily be in Detroit or Glasgow or Marseilles. What keeps his film from being a relentless wallow in wasted lives is its surprising conclusion.

This Canadian production -- while somewhat impressive for its low-budget roots and loose but inspired plot twists -- is a tedious exercise in shoddy horror that's just as forgettable as 99 percent of its straight-to-DVD kin.

Witless farce.

Sandler's performance is aimed squarely at the fans who love his smarty-pants man-boy shtick and Rock gets off some funny lines, but overall this is one dreary, formulaic slog through sports-movie cliches.

Slickly animated and cleverly written.

In the end it's all seductive surface and no substance, but Lough has a bold eye and a vivid sense of uniquely urban beauty.

A grim meditation on faith and betrayal that focuses on a relatively obscure corner of Holocaust history: the fate of the Catholic clergy under the Third Reich.

Christopher Browne's fun, surprisingly exciting film probably won't convert anyone convinced that bowling is something you do while downing fish sticks and beer. But it may teach them a newfound respect for the sport's champions.

Beesley's film is perfectly in sync with the Lips' unique vision.

The film is simultaneously sweet natured and sharply observed, and if love eventually conquers all, it takes its own sweet time doing it.

Touched with eerie dream sequences, the film casts a strange spell that's enhanced by the rhythmic, almost sensual depiction of the painstaking art of embroidery.

The politics get pretty short shrift, but cigarettes and liquor are everywhere.

The verdict: More thoughtful than Harlin's version, but hardly the invigorating mix of shocks and metaphysical horror needed to revitalize the Exorcist franchise.

Weber's losers really are losers -- envious, spiteful, complacent, mean-spirited and ultimately boring malcontents pickled in their own poison, and they drag his film down with them.

Though it ultimately devolves into megabudget Hollywood action-movie cliches by way of John Woo, Lee's handsome blockbuster is an entertaining variation on the American formulas that have colonized world cinema.

Much of the film's appeal rests with Thai soap-opera actress Panyopas, whose bittersweet charm smoothes over the uglier aspects of Tum's spiral into crime.

The battle sequences and lightsaber battles are gripping, and for every scene that doesn't deliver the goods, there's another that hums with surprising intensity.

Davis' tough, man-of-the-people narration is often annoying, but his words can't diminish the power of his story.

The complete absence of world leaders is a bewildering sign that the world still doesn't care much about small African countries with no exploitable resources to speak of, and a troubling indication that such atrocities can, and no doubt will, happen again.

Harlin's brisk pacing leaves little time for reflection, but the whole house of blood-spattered cards dissolves upon even cursory reflection.

The heart of the problem may be that real life youth-sports insanity has far exceeded the bounds of family-friendly comedy.

This vapid, mean-spirited comedy is Lopez's show, and though she is utterly unconvincing as a paragon of down-to-earth virtues, the last laugh was hers from the outset.

The film's bizarreness pales next to that of little-known exploitation film "Sonny Boy" (1990), which weaves similar material into something authentically nightmarish.

For all its shocking content, it remains a rather conventional psychological portrait of Oedipal attraction taken to a disturbing extreme.

The result is so intoxicating, it hardly matters that you've heard it all before.

The kind of brainy human comedy that only this formidable French auteur seems capable of making.

The real-life Modigliani did indeed live a short, tragic life, but this factually inaccurate, plodding film makes it feel twice as long.

The last word on Haskell Wexler's career hasn't been spoken, but it's hard to imagine there's much more to say about him as a bad dad.

It delivers some bracingly nasty gore scenes, but there's no spark left in the run-scream-repeat formula, and a movie whose biggest draw is profoundly untalented hotel-fortune heiress Paris Hilton is in desperate need of some juice.

Ultimately, despite striving mightily to give everyone a fair shake, the film kindled the ire of conservative Christians and Muslims anyway.

Where else are you going to find an extended riff on the weird, weird world of David Lynch movies, an homage to "The Shining" and flatulence gags in the same place?

It's an ideal collaboration: A stylish director desperately seeking substance transforms the first, somewhat flat novel of a promising young writer into powerful and brutally honest film about a highly controversial subject.

But while the material is interesting, it's not substantial enough to sustain a feature-length treatment.

Writer-director Richard Ledes' dreadfully misconceived, pitch-black, film-noir comedy seeks to find the humor in the post-WWII mental hygiene boom, and the result is way off target.

No voice is more vivid than that of the writer of O, who died in 2002.

Driven equally by big questions and the abiding desire for small pleasures, like a decent cup of tea, it's an eccentric, mind-bending head trip that greets every catastrophe with an endearingly goofy smile that embodies Hitchhiker's Guide's Zen mantra: Don't Panic!

It's even louder and dumber than the first XXX, but if watching things fall down and go boom in a very big way makes you cheer, you're in luck.

The almost supernatural turn which Kim's lovely film takes during its final act, however, is totally unexpected, and just one reason why Kim ranks as one of the most justly celebrated talents in contemporary Korean cinema.

Set in Paris in 1975, this sensitive, low-key film is another exquisitely crafted volume in French director Benoit Jacquot's collection of films about young Frenchwomen at pivotal points in their lives.

Inspired mockumentary-a-clef so clotted with in-jokes that it should come with a crib sheet.

The look is rough, but Bujalski's talent is evident.

In stripping her potentially lurid material of salacious appeal, Martel also makes it murky and oddly arid, a mind-numbing exercise rather than an experience.

Its appeal lies in the powerhouse performances delivered by Dench and Smith.

Genuinely gripping, balancing the travails of constructing the tunnel against the characters' stories with considerable skill.

It's informative as far as it goes, but the film's raison d'etre is the simple sight of large wildlife up close and personal, and it's mesmerizing.

Without any deeper consideration of the matter, the film is a grueling experience, and 90 minutes is simply far too long to spend in the company of Jesse Power.

Its talky, sluggish script is so bereft of thrills -- intellectual or otherwise -- that even the film's one masterfully staged sequence... falls flat.