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

With a concept as thin as this, Planes, Trains and Automobiles could have easily become a repetitious bore. Instead, producer-director-writer Hughes infuses his film with an appealing sense of sentiment and humanity--not to mention many hilarious scenes.

The film lacks the turbulent social context of the 1950s and '60s that lent resonance to the personal uncertainties of Ibgy's forebears -- Holden Caufield, Ben Braddock, et al. But Culkin has a way with quip-heavy dialogue that transforms what might otherwise been irritatingly, solipsistic posing into a great performance.

The storytelling is livelier and more engaging than previous adaptations of Clancy's turgid techno-thrillers.

A triumph of slick direction and lowbrow thrills, marred but not spoiled by a sour aftertaste.

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.

A great and eternally heart-warming film that can stand an appreciative viewing every year through every decade.

Director Altman's work, with its lack of focus and its spontaneous shooting style, can either fascinate or infuriate an audience. Unusually told and well-acted, this film, nevertheless, is forgettable.

Harry and Tonto is a sweet, sentimental road movie that draws force and relevance from Carney's touching and subtle performance.

Director Roger Spottiswoode, who edited a number of Sam Peckinpah movies, succeeds brilliantly in creating the chaotic last days of Somoza's government while at the same time incisively evaluating the moral dilemma faced by war correspondents.

Despite the exotic locale, this is a coming-of-age tale that should be familiar to anyone raised on the tales of Jack London or Robert Louis Stevenson.

In the end, Haar's powerful and terribly sad film speaks volumes, not just about life in contemporary Israel, but in the U.S. as well.

The dialog is wonderful, but at times director Mazursky sacrifices the human element of his story to indulgent camerawork.

Once again, animals talk, sight gags abound, and the complementing temperaments of Hope and Crosby are mined to great advantage.

A deliriously cinematic experience for those with a taste for Grand Guignol, this is a relentlessly energetic nightmare world where quite literally anything can happen--and does.

The title, by the way, is age-old slang for a soldier's complete combat gear, which for the U.S. soldiers in Iraq -- both real and otherwise -- weighs over 50 pounds.

The result isn't very funny: There are clever bits, sure, but they're embedded in long, painfully obvious sequences built around one-shot gags.

There are a few laughs from Grodin and Cannon, but Beatty and Christie are like 400-pound gorillas chasing a milkweed seed. The more Beatty concentrates, the more glazed and distracted he looks.

A powerful film whose influence can be seen in Hud and most other antihero films, East of Eden is masterfully directed by Kazan. All the principals give riveting performances, but it was Dean who emerged as an overnight sensation. Eden also features a quintessentially hardbitten performance from Van Fleet, who won an Oscar for her pains.

But if you stick around for those final credits, you'll also have the opportunity to hear Robin Williams deliver a clean but nonetheless hilarious joke, a reminder of how funny Williams can be when he's not trying so hard.

Each scene is beautifully written and exquisitely shot, and the sum total is an unusually perceptive picture of urban loneliness.

Balaban and Nairn are radiant, with none of the mannerisms that so often make Hollywood actresses look like Stepford teens.

The film is marvelously acted all around, and the fact that there isn't a false note in the entire film is especially impressive given Kureishi's melodramatic contrivances and the fact that his characters are clichés whose behaviors are predictable at nearly every turn.

It's handled well by veteran director J. Lee Thompson, with strong cast support and excellent production values that make it all lavish, rich, and often breathtaking.

Although the lead trio does well enough, the presence of cinema's greatest musical comedy team fairly blasts the screen lovers into orbit whenever either or both of them are onscreen.

The lovely Audrey Tautou and sad-eyed Gad Elmaleh are perfectly cast as a gold digger and the poor sap who loves her, but the real star of Pierre Salvadori's larky, Lubitsch-esque farce is France's impossibly chic Cote d'Azure.

Though the film does not stand up to the 1946 version with Burt Lancaster, it has its own pleasures, including Marvin's rather likable role of an assassin, the exciting robbery sequence, and, of course, the villainous Reagan getting his just desserts.

The execution is masterful and even as you see the building blocks of the climax being put into place, it's a delight to watch them fit JUST SO.

Thick with sexual intrigue and characters who only reveal themselves over time, this subtle mystery unfolds like something a kinder Neil LaBute might have cooked up earlier in his career.

A howl from start to finish.

Dark, cynical, but deliciously funny, Heathers is a fascinating look not just at high school but at the way we look at high school.

By the time Reilly's shaggy life story winds down, it's hard not to wish he'd been your friend, too.

Screenwriter Curt Siodmak patched together the legend of the werewolf by combining elements from lycanthropic folklore, witchcraft, and Bram Stoker's Dracula, creating a new monster for the screen. All elements combined to make a thrilling, scary, and ultimately tragic horror classic.

Their voyage through the body's bloodstream past assorted organs was created by inventive special effects that make this one of the more visually interesting science fiction films of its era.

Many of the sketches show the Pythons' deranged, offbeat humor at its best, but the film begins to pale long before the end and relies on some revolting bits such as a "live" organ transplant and the spectacular (and graphic) explosion of an obese glutton.

Epic, meticulously researched and ultimately disappointing, Martin Scorsese's bloody valentine to the birth of his beloved city is less than the sum of its parts.

Too bad Australian actress Griffiths ("Hilary and Jackie," "Six Feet Under") is as underused as Amy Madigan was in "Field of Dreams": She mastered a realistic Texan twang for the role.

Newcomer Cassidy is excellent, and Hoskins gives a flawless performance.

A rare treat for anyone interested in the American folk revival of early 1960s.

This sleepyheaded atmosphere, augmented by the languid songs of Lou Reed and Arab Strap, hangs so heavily over the film that the viewer is lulled into a state dangerously close to unconsciousness.

Beautifully shot on location in Kenya and filled with touching, almost magical moments, Link's film has been nominated for the 2002 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film.

The success of this effect, which helps elevate the movie above a classy disease-of-the-week saga, rests firmly on Russell Crowe's performance, and it's a strikingly good and moving one.

This stodgy film version of the famous Broadway success was one performance too many.

Filmed as the Beatles were crumbling under the weight of their own legend, LET IT BE is a milder film than its reputation suggests.

Highly sentimental social soaper, subtly crafted by director Stahl.

Fueled by an intense and intricate performance by O'Quinn, the movie is a fascinating examination of America's predilection for appearances over substance.

Seeing it once is fine, but seeing it every day for the rest of your life is not recommended.

Frankenheimer pulls out all the stops to lend excitement to the racing footage--splitting the screen into ever smaller increments, mounting cameras to the cars to get shots taken inches above the track, and using slow motion--but ultimately his obsession with technique becomes wearying, and the plot is simply not interesting enough to stand on its own.

Koyaanisqatsi asks the viewers to ponder their relationship to a social system that has come to dominate them rather than serve them. Much of the film is exhilarating and beautiful in a way that may seem counterproductive to that end. But the cumulative effect is more meditative than frightening. It's not a world-shaking film, but it is an affecting one.

Kassell's visual influences are evident -- she's clearly a fan of the down-and-dirty films of the '70s -- but the consistently fine performances smooth over the rough patches.

Sentimental, manipulative, predictable and utterly charming.

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.

The material is well served by director Roman Polanski, who knows well how to instill a subtle, claustrophobic sense of dread in an audience and has put together a rather elegant potboiler.

In Koepp's comedic variation on a similar theme, the dead are not just unhappy -- they're irritatingly needy.

Falls far short of its grim potential.

Fictional but frighteningly realistic.

It's amusing more often than it isn't, largely because the cast is so nonchalant and, well, French about everything.

The plot unfolds exactly as you expect, but Gedeck imbues Martha with a remarkably subtlety of spirit.

Without their efforts, ordinary moviegoers would never know that air-guitar competitors must craft a series of one-minute routines, some to songs they've only just heard, or that their efforts are judged on the 4.0 to 6.0 scale used to rank competitive figure skaters. Important to know? No. Fascinating? Absolutely.

Conventional to the core but gets a blast of pure, hard-driving energy from Joaquin Phoenix's and Reese Witherspoon's vividly realized performances.

Witty, wordy, well-acted satire of contemporary class and race relations, based on John Guare's acclaimed stage play.

Antal's debut is a sharp, blackly comic hugely entertaining thriller.

This thin chronicle of bad behavior among the rich and self-obsessed is above all painfully derivative, borrowing wholesale from Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy" and echoes Allen's own "Crimes and Misdemeanors."

A suitably glum yet cathartic film experience.

Labelled by many critics as a "thinking person's Ghost," Truly, Madly, Deeply is sensitively written and charmingly acted. Juliet Stevenson brings tremendous depth to a role that was created specifically for her, and Alan Rickman proves himself capable of something quite different from the bad-guy roles for which he's best known.

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

One would have to be heartless not to be engaged by Strictly Ballroom's romantic, dewy sentiment, but the predictable plot is difficult to bear, as are the broad characterizations.

Chalk up another family for Leo Tolstoy and Philip Larkin file: The Paskowitz family is unhappy in its own unique way and mum and dad f**cked them up -- they didn't mean to, but they did.

Surfing isn't inherently service to humanity; it's a sport whose grace and athleticism Brown captures thrillingly, and that should be enough.

The folks at Disney prove that clothes -- and little else -- make a man, and do so with extraordinary style.

What the film lacks in general focus it makes up for in compassion, as Corcuera manages to find the seeds of hope in the form of collective action.

The film's heart is the concert, whose highlights include "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?," "Wimoweh," "Guantanamera" and the crowd-pleasing "Have You Been to Jail for Justice?"

Novice filmmakers Arin Crumley and Susan Buice's charming homemade movie is a surprisingly successful experiment in collaborative creativity that sprang from a larger artistic project: their own real-life relationship.

The film unfolds with all the heart-stopping suspense of a true-crime expose that sheds light on the twisted policies of Kim Jong-il's strange and secretive nation.

Vibrant, funny and tragic documentary.

While it's implausible that all of these mishaps would befall a couple in 24 hours, none of these occurrences is beyond the realm of belief, and Simon has cleverly strung them together in one of his best screenplays.

Great performances by all make this a little gem of a film.

Classy film noir, as you would expect from a team including director Barbet Schroeder (Reversal of Fortune); writer Richard Price (Clockers); and Nicolas Cage, as a loopy, iron-pumping mobster.

The result is a beguiling and often poignant pageant of outsider musicians, but the broken heart of this extraordinary film comes directly from Zobel's own personal experience.

Francis Ford Coppola has turned John Grisham's pulpy bestseller into surprisingly creditable -- if morally muddled -- movie.

An honorable film, beautifully acted, refreshingly un-camp in its take on wide lapels and progressive rock and occasionally coolly moving. It's just that ultimately, there's less here than meets the eye.

Together Cates and Hammond take a thrill-a-minute trip through the San Francisco underworld and along the way develop one of the 1980s' more interesting cinematic buddy pairings.

While the characters are fairly offbeat and interesting, the film is weighed down by some tediously handled camp intrigue, political skullduggery, and $2 million worth of special effects.

This small, sweet drama from Chinese director Wang Quang An is picturesque, romantic and unexpectedly droll tale of life in one the world's most remote regions.

This fifth film should please fans who rate the films based on their fidelity to the canonical texts. But for the uninitiated, it's a dry and slightly dreary introduction to the world of Hogwarts and Azkaban.

A thoughtful, unsparing look at a controversial subject: suicide bombing.

Billed as the first film to originate from the newly democratic South Africa, this disappointing prestige production is a ploddingly earnest adaptation of Alan Paton's 1948 novel.

Story of small triumphs and everyday sorrows is never maudlin or sentimental.

Serves as a powerful tribute to a group of heroes who gave those they saved something nearly as valuable as life: proof that the best of the human spirit can endure even through the worst of times.

Eason balances the clichés of a fairly standard story with convincing realism and a powerful momentum that never flags.

Most of the plot twists are confusing and haphazardly developed, leaving the movie as little more than an excuse to show off Stan Winston's admittedly effective gore effects.

Destined to be a crowd-pleaser though it may be, this collection of Irish quirks and "charm" tied together by a slender plot also leans heavily in the direction of predigested commercial claptrap.

The action sequences are well staged and the twists and turns of the convoluted plot will keep viewers guessing. A competent and unpretentious entertainment.

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.

Cynical, misanthropic and embittered.

Good direction and fine performances keep the pace of this lengthy film moving and prevent the material's descent into maudlin sentimentality.

Silly, fun stuff, with a good supporting cast.

Its assets are considerable: affecting performances (especially Irma P. Hall as blind Aunt T.) and sharp writing.