The less time you've devoted to thinking about the nature and uses of the erotic imagination, the more challenging this will seem.

Slick and surprisingly emotional documentary is really a rare, optimistic critique of globalization.

The charismatic Mac has stepped into leading man roles with surprising ease, but Bassett -- a fine actress in all respects -- is clearly struggling with the film's broad comedy.

Bettany, previously best known as a supporting player, shoulders the burden of a Hugh Grant-style romantic lead surprisingly well, revealing an offbeat charm.

An extraordinary technical achievement.

There's never a dull moment and seldom one that isn't sublimely ridiculous.

The fact that it's based on a true story doesn't make it feel any less trite.

Pointed, unsubtle political satire.

Like the fresh-faced leads, the film is an unexpected charmer.

Less a sequel than a variation on a haunting theme -- the nature and origins of humanity.

Though the film's deliberate pace is sometimes frustrating, it casts a quietly powerful spell and the memory of its images lingers provocatively long after they've flickered into darkness.

It's actually a clever commentary on documentary filmmaking, an pretty good monster movie to boot.

Though many of the risks she takes don't pay off, Elster's film contains a number of stylishly staged set pieces.

This is sorry stuff.

That's not to say it isn't entertaining, only that the scenes which rely entirely on the fragile interplay between Jessica and Ryan suggest a more compelling movie that got lost in the welter of high-speed highway recklessness.

Offers up more of everything: more bloody zombie dogs, more crazy corporate evildoers, more Milla Jovovich unclothed and more over-the-top action scenes.

The remake is infinitely more entertaining if you haven't seen "Nine Queens" -- the details are different, but the surprises are the same and something of the first film's underlying darkness has been lost in translation.

While the film has striking moments, it feels padded with events that seem freighted with narrative weight but end up not mattering at all to the story.

Narrated by NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, the film's form is measured, but its message is incendiary.

Though ultimately the film is all smoke and mirrors, the sensibility it reflects is rich and exciting.

While butching up their hero, Moreton and cowriter Dennis Hensley left out one key ingredient: charisma -- for all his macho swagger, the guy's unbearable.

Though once capable of writing distinct characters, Toback now populates his pictures with one-dimensional conceits who all talk like undereducated hustlers, from college professors to bottom feeders and international lions of business.

No matter how deep one's affection for man's best friend, there's something undeniably fatuous about considering the emotional impact 9/11 has had on a dog named Rain.

Tries to leave the impression of Escobar as a positive force whose dirty money actually saved Colombia's economy while those of neighboring Latin American countries collapsed.

This mean-spirited revenge story would once have starred Cole Hauser's father, veteran B-movie psycho Wings Hauser, and played grindhouses and drive-ins. And it would have been a far more entertaining picture.

Rough-edged but affecting drama.

A convoluted exercise in shifting perspectives and fractured storytelling.

Thoroughly old-fashioned entertainment.

Eye-opening documentary by New Zealand filmmaker Alison Maclean.

It took a village of screenwriters and story creators - including costar Queen Latifah and first-time director Lance Rivera - to cram just about every imaginable stereotype about African-Americans and white people ever conceived into this short, unappetizing comedy.

It's easy to view the story of these brothers as a larger metaphor for the relationship between the two Koreas, which gives the film an added resonance that your typical Hollywood war movie wouldn't possess.

It's alternately stimulating and exhausting.

It comes as a huge disappointment, then, that having cast Witherspoon as Miss Sharp, director Mira Nair and Oscar-winning screenwriter Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park) were unable to resist that impulse to find 21st-century prototypes in 19th-century literary characters, fictional creations whose values lie not in the way they reflect our own narcissistic times, but the way they reveal so much about their own.

It's actually quite interesting, albeit in a supremely self-conscious and artsy-fartsy way.

Though the specifics of the story may be unfamiliar to Western viewers, its broad outlines and underlying themes are universal, and Christopher Doyle's ravishing cinematography transcends language.

Supremely silly but undeniably fun sequel.

Entirely too convoluted for kids and implausible even by the standards set by the original concept.

It's not easy to make a thriller that's both incredibly convoluted and intensely boring, but director E. Elias Merhige scores on both counts with this lame excuse for a spooky crime story.

The film basically follows Moore and Slater's book, but without the details that reveal the strange complexity of the Bush-Rove symbiosis.

It doesn't help that the cast is populated by unfunny actors, with the possible exception of Evans, who is an appealing presence if not necessarily a great comedienne.

Ethan and Lenny's story is silly, good-natured and full of unlikely moves, just like the titular twister.

Unless you grew up in an Italian-American neighborhood like the one featured in this contrived but pleasant enough comedy, you might not know that "chooch" is slang for jackass, a likeable loser who can't help but screw up.

This rich, complex and surprisingly entertaining film also becomes a meditation on filmmaking and the parallels McElwee finds between cinema and, of all things, smoking.

Bart the Bear shows more versatility in his gender-bending role than Lillard, who trots out his old, tired slacker shtick.

It's sweet-natured, soothing and there's a behind-the-scenes/blooper reel at the end that will reassure anyone worried about the animals' treatment during filming.

Pokey, blood-spattered, cheap-scare-larded prequel.

Deville gently reveals that they're all simultaneously hauntingly fragile and amazingly resilient, their smiles as piercing as any resigned gaze.

Lacks the novel's drier-than-dry bite, but compensates with a strong ensemble cast and a series of glamorous party sequences in which the decor has at least as much depth as the guests.

Though occasionally repetitive, Gramaglia and Fields' admirably evenhanded documentary gives the Ramones the respect they deserve: Fans will be grateful and the uninitiated should listen and learn.

Ironically, as the former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman, puts it, Iraq has become what the Bush White House insisted it was at the very beginning, albeit for altogether different reasons: a battlefield in the war against terrorism.

A refreshingly straightforward, conventional approach to the documentary form. (Review of Original Release)

As a treatment of yet another unexplored corner of the Nazi nightmare, the film is revelatory; needless to say it's also heartbreaking.

There isn't a one-note character in the mix, and they respond with haunting, subtle performances that feel utterly natural and unaffected. It's a striking debut for Estes, and a remarkable showcase for the cast.

It's ultimately hard to care deeply about a silly, sheltered girl-woman who's taking an inordinately long time to learn that money can't buy happiness.

More reminiscent of Hitchcock's progeny than of the master's own films, Cedric Kahn's intelligently menacing thriller combines Brian DePalma's sexy style with the ice-cold cool tone of Claude Chabrol and the sense of mounting panic George Sluizer exploited in "The Vanishing."

Though "Pulp Fiction" is the obvious point of reference, but this hugely entertaining Mexican crime comedy is actually closer in spirit to "Go," Doug Lyman's underrated 1998 lark.

A reductive spook show in which a bunch of puny humans get chased around by scary monsters.

Though the violence in this film never becomes physical, the psychic wounds these people inflict on one another cut so deeply you wish it would. It's a grueling experience.

This is a gorgeous, fascinating account of the interplay between the personal and the social, directed with the kind of insight that only an aristocrat turned Marxist like Visconti could afford. (Review of Original Release)

Ruzowitzky concentrates on delivering on sporadic scares at the expense of figuring out how to make individual scenes coalesce into a coherent chiller about medical megalomania.

Good-natured but overstuffed sequel.

Oddly, once removed from the museum setting and strung together into an hourlong feature, it's Maddin's most cohesive narrative.

Lighter than helium but irresistible nonetheless.

It's essentially an urban variation on "The Hitcher" (1986) with nothing much going on underneath.

Even the inclusion of Simon's classic songs isn't enough to solve all the problems of this comedic misfire.

It's easy to see why this violent, thrilling tale broke all box-office records in Thailand: Not only does it stir a sense of deep national pride, but Thanit delivers the goods when it comes to action.

Ultimately the sci-fi fillips — human cloning, memory wipes, empathy viruses — are subordinate to screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce's doomed romance.

Ratanaruang's simple willingness to tie different strands of melancholy melodramas and violent yakuza thrillers together with flashes of surreal mystery immediately sets him apart from the herd.

The film's dispassionate examination of the shifts in Susan and Daniel's relationship as they drift from irritation to barely suppressed panic is at least as nerve wracking.

Although notorious in South Africa, Stander is little known elsewhere and Canadian director Bronwen Hughes' unsatisfying account of his life and crimes is unlikely to earn him a spot on the outlaw celebrity A-list.

Achieves what Hollywood never quite gets right: a tense and timely thriller that also serves as a political and a moral allegory.

In a story driven by questions of loyalty and allegiance, no candidate is identified by party. It's a bipartisan nightmare from which no one escapes unscathed.

The production design is phenomenal, reproducing the series' swinging '60s decor and techno-geek flourishes, from the launch pad under the swimming pool to Lady Penelope's pink roadster, which turns into a mini-plane.

The film's gotcha! payoff doesn't justify the gloomy journey.

The result is a vivid record of live acts whose rough-edged immediacy is an integral part of their appeal.

The homoerotic twists and gender-shifting turns are fun, but they can't hide the fact that the film is little more than a tedious shaggy-dog story with oblique mythological references.

The outlandish premise and greasy title may be a little hard to swallow, but Danny Leiner's proudly moronic film embraces its boneheadedness so cheerfully that its lowbrow charms are nearly irresistible.

All that menace is simply decorative, and it's disappointing that Laconte never properly addresses the intriguing sexual undertones (like voyeurism, exhibitionism and sexual obsession) he uses to darken the film's palette.

This unusually rich film tackles not only the social structuring of criminality and sexuality but race as well, and explores the ways science has been used to justify the ruthless pursuit of market interests and, eventually, apartheid itself.

The film is at odds with itself, trying to present transgendered characters as resourceful and tough as nails while the plot habitually reduces them to traumatized masochists and helpless victims.

Although Zach Braff's promising writing-directing debut is a bit affected, few actors with behind-the-camera aspirations succeed as well as the Scrubs star does with this melancholy romantic comedy.

Thom Andersen's idiosyncratic, three-hour masterpiece is both a dazzling work of film criticism and a fascinating piece of urban anthropology.

If it weren't all so cluelessly sleazy it might be funny.

One youngster -- even a youngster as talented as Rossum -- can't transform a mess of clichés into a little gem.

A bravura tap-dancing finale as exhilarating as it is bizarre.

A refreshing alternative to the hypertrophied spy thrillers in which exaggerated action sequences, over-the-top super-villainy and high-tech gadgetry trump character and plot.

Overall, though, the film drags at 91 minutes, filled with dead air that should be crackling with pulp energy.

A perfect example of how a top-flight cast can compensate for unimaginative filmmaking.

Austrian auteur Barbara Albert uses complex mathematics, chaos theory and the music of Dutch pop sensation A-Ha to explore the connections that link a group of disparate characters.

It's an excellent introduction to a man whose thoughts on war, peace and dissent have become increasingly influential in ever more confusing times.

Shimizu generates a sense of palpable dread in each segment, expertly manipulating tried-and-true scare tactics supplemented by a truly inspired use of spooky sound effects.

Packed with more information than can possibly be digested in a single viewing, the film will be a bracing eye-opener to anyone who hasn't considered the full implications of recent Congressional debates advocating further media deregulation.

Although the story is as predictable as can be -- "surprise" twist ending included -- the performances are better than those in most super-low budget horror pictures, and Jessica Gallant's super-16mm cinematography is surprisingly handsome.

The supporting cast's comic abilities smooth over many -- if not all -- of the movie's flaws.

Although Sonny is computer generated, Tudyk supplied his voice and body language -- provides the story's emotional core, an irony Asimov would surely have appreciated.

The cast, a mix of beauty-contest winners, models, veteran actors and newcomers, is as diverse as the characters they play and work together surprisingly smoothly.

Begun over seven years ago and described by the filmmaker as a work-in-progress, the documentary still feels a bit incomplete.

Moreno's subtly calibrated mix of intelligence, naivete, rebelliousness, charisma and practicality produces an unforgettable protagonist; even Maria's recklessness seems reasonable because it's so clearly rooted in desperation.