It's Jagger's bone-dry, mournfully brittle delivery that gives the film its bittersweet bite. Michael Des Barres and Anjelica Huston make the most of their supporting roles.

The subject may be familiar to those who happened to catch the 1998 documentary "Port of Last Resort," but this remarkable true story certainly bears repeating.

Feather-light and proudly goofy, this Jackie Chan action comedy appears to be aimed squarely at under-12s.

Overall, the film is occasionally interesting but essentially unpersuasive, a footnote to a still evolving story.

Fluff in the tradition of Hollywood's screwball comedies of remarriage, lacking the wit or grace of such classics as "His Girl Friday" (1940) and "The Awful Truth" (1937).

An occasionally surreal meditation on coping with loss, and a love story with a dark side the size of Montana.

The case is a convincing one, and should give anyone with a conscience reason to pause.

Eisenstadt has an unerring sense of comedic rhythm and a knack of cutting away just in time to extract the drop of humor from a potentially pathetic situation.

David Lean's splendid biography of the enigmatic T.E. Lawrence paints a complex portrait of the desert-loving Englishman who united Arab tribes in battle against the Ottoman Turks during WWI.

Solid and engrossing melodrama.

Watching Sarandon and Hawn sashay through their paces is its own reward.

The film's center will not hold. Either crucial scenes were cut (perhaps for length) or Kapur has a problematic sense of narrative structure; sometimes it's unclear who's doing what to whom.

Hauser and Miles go for broke, lobbing their every comic idea at the screen. Some work better than others, and overall tomfoolery like this is a matter of taste.

Before it takes a sudden turn and devolves into a bizarre sort of romantic comedy, Steven Shainberg's adaptation of Mary Gaitskill's harrowing short story about dominance, submission and the twisted sexual dynamics of the work place is a brilliantly played, deeply unsettling experience.

Steers clear of historical accuracy. Herzog is obviously looking for a moral to his fable, but the notion that a strong, unified showing among Germany and Eastern European Jews might have changed 20th-Century history is undermined by Ahola's inadequate performance.

The tiny, impassive-faced Liu is a disaster. She looks cute in her custom commando gear, but she's not actress enough to make Sever's ridiculous, faux hard-boiled dialogue sound like anything but the formulaic nonsense it is.

Imagine the John Waters remake of an Agatha Christie mystery directed by Douglas Sirk, and you'll get some idea of the tone of this retro musical melodrama, which features a cast whose combined wattage could eclipse a small solar system.

Serenely stunning.

Boasts spunk, imagination and a strong performance from Smallville's very talented Sam Jones III.

First-time feature filmmaker Oliver Hirschbiegel maintains a riveting sense of simmering brutality.

Elvira fans could hardly ask for more.

If the ending isn't conventionally happy, it's certainly deeply satisfying.

Bright, who reworked co-writer Stephen Johnston's screenplay, changed all the names except Bundy's so he could "make up stuff," but the irony is how close to the facts -- at least to the degree they're known -- he stays.

Never has the adage "You can't help who you fall in love with" been more lavishly illustrated than in this historical drama.

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.

Inlike many directors with music video backgrounds, Tim Story keeps the flashy cutting to a minimum and lets the story unfold at its own unhurried pace.

The entire cast is extraordinarily good -- many of them are, after all, actors by trade -- but throughout, Zhang is keen to remind his audience that this is only a dramatization.

Two idiots embark on a life of crime to help a deserving teenager attend Harvard in this lowbrow but generally sweet-natured comedy.

Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzman's powerful and sometimes triumphant documentary is not only an excellent overview of the affair, but serves as the perfect finale to his monumental trilogy about the coup and its aftermath, which began with "The Battle of Chile" (1978).

The film not only stands as an important street-level document of that time, but makes a valuable contribution to the growing compilation of 9/11 storytelling.

Nicely shot around New York City, this dodgy mixture of cutesy romance, dark satire and murder mystery uses the same central conceit as Neil LaBute's "Nurse Betty."

Shot in gloomy shades of gray, this earnest but banal story about the legacy of bad parenting strands fine actors in a contrived situation and lets them squirm.

Brimming with ideas, aphorisms, diatribes, film clips and even bits of a story, the film's a gorgeous muddle that somehow manages to leave one both baffled and deeply satisfied.

Derivative, predictable and entirely forgettable, the sort of low-expectations genre picture that generally goes directly to video.

Cynics may scoff, but the spirit of Woodstock -- not the 1999 debacle, but the 1969 original -- lives.

Wrenching documentary.

A searing example of writer-director Billy Wilder at his most brilliantly misanthropic. An uncompromising portrait of human nature at its worst, the film was so far ahead of its time in its depiction of a media circus and the public's appetite for tragedy that it was a commercial disaster when first released, but now stands as one of the great American films of the 1950s.

There's a germ of an interesting idea here, but it's smothered by gloomy cinematography a la "Seven" (1995) and grating implausibilities, like the fact that everyone lives in the kind of cavernous, dankly art-directed dumps that only internet millionaires and trust fund twinkies can afford in the real New York.

Lavishly costumed and shot largely on location, the film benefits from a phenomenal central performance by Lopez de Ayala.

For all its tongue-in-cheek toying with images, it doesn't reward attempts at serious intellectual analysis. It has the air of a surprisingly juvenile lark, a pop-influenced prank whose charms are immediately apparent and wear thin with repetition.

Shot through the bars of a barbed-wire topped cage and staged to a pounding soundtrack, the fight is quite a spectacle, but it's ultimately an empty one.

Fontaine's thoughtful character-driven screenplay is the perfect vehicle for Berling and Bouquet and both are superb. As father and son, they play off each another in fascinating ways as the film moves towards its perfectly modulated, intriguingly ambiguous final moment.

The film nevertheless exerts a strange sort of power that makes for compelling viewing, even as its images force one to repeatedly look away.

The film is dull going, even for the pre-adolescents at whom it's aimed, and feels far longer than it actually is.

Davis not only wrote and directed the film but edited it as well, all of which is no mean feat. Too bad she couldn't have lent some of her own gumption and self-assurance to her pathetic heroine.

Surprisingly, Hurley comes off better than either of her demonstrably more versatile co-stars; she's not much of an actress, but she has an engagingly saucy swagger and her open-mouthed expression of outraged disbelief is priceless.

The result is gorgeous, if ultimately shallow -- much like Simone herself.

The most popular film in Indian history.

Vividly photographed in shimmering colors and driven by a propulsive score.

Too bad that Romanek feels compelled to tie it all up with a banal pop psych explanation that offers an all-too simplistic solution to an otherwise uncommonly complex thriller.

There are worse movies, but that's no excuse. Rarely has so much money delivered so little entertainment.

The lead girls are easy on the eyes, and comic Faizon Love, who plays one of Matt's non-surfing, sumo-wrestler-size teammates, nearly steals the show when the girls teach him a few of their better moves.

Purely literary stuff that's always the first to go whenever a book is adapted for the screen. Unfortunately, as this thin and entirely ill-conceived adaptation from director Neil LaBute demonstrates, that stuff happens to be the lifeblood of Byatt's wonderful book.

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

A masterpiece. It is a credit to Cocteau's genius (and to that of his collaborators) that he has taken the unreal world of a fairy tale and made it as real as the world around us.

Grisly, yes, but it's all done in fun; having tried his hardest to shock audiences with his previous films, it now appears Miike simply wants to entertain, and he pulls out all the stops.

The final moment of Minac's film is a powerful tribute to Winton's heroism and the magnitude of his achievement, easily eclipsing the 90 minutes that precede it.

In a startling move, Oliveira devotes the first 15 minutes of the film to the final moments of Ionesco's play, and it's thrilling to watch.

Also featured are countless cameos from local superstars ranging from the Fall's Mark E. Smith to Mani of the Stone Roses, making the film an absolute thrill for fans of the Manchester scene.

Director Jesse Peretz, onetime bassist for The Lemonheads, cut his teeth on music videos and appears to have embraced the austere aesthetics of Dogme 95 filmmakers without comprehending that an interesting story and well-developed characters are supposed to be part of the package.

The film is filled with Miike's brand of imaginatively staged violence and hints of fetish sexuality, but his sadism, which reaches its apotheosis in 2001's sickening "Ichii The Killer", is tempered by a sincere romanticism and a number of lovely touches.

Actress-turned-writer/director Asia Argento's angry, outspoken, semi-autobiographical rant of a film is strident and occasionally juvenile, but it packs an undeniable wallop.

The irony is that for all its "not your father's spy movie" posing, it's exactly like the later James Bond pictures: predictable, lightweight and 100 percent disposable

It's merely glum when it should be bracingly grim.

The drawn-out effect is deliberate -- director Babak Payami wants his audience to concentrate on the characters' inner development and their isolation -- but his strategy slows the film down to a crawl.

Even during the most intense moments, it's hard to shake the impression that the conspicuously buff-and-polished Justine is only visiting this drab world, her miserable life an interesting career move.

There's way too much CGI gadgetry, some inventive, much simply flashy in the worst kind of video-game way. The kids are nearly lost in the glitz.

Marrying a painterly aesthetic with a defiantly homosexual sensibility, this ironic biopic is probably the most accessible film of avant-garde British director Derek Jarman.

Though some individual scenes crackle, overall the film feels unfocussed and flabby, like a series of acting improv exercises strung together.

However stale the material, Lawrence's delivery remains perfect; his great gift is that he can actually trick you into thinking some of this worn-out, pandering palaver is actually funny.

Even the film's ironic ending is deftly handled, its cynicism is tempered by a certain rueful wisdom.

The film's underlying themes dovetail efficiently with the action but don't generate the emotional gut punch the movie needs; overall it feels padded and logy.

Painfully unfunny and misguided to boot.

Longley has constructed a remarkably coherent, horrifically vivid snapshot of those turbulent days.

The film is ridiculously overplotted, and very little of the plot serves any purpose other than to motivate what you can pretty well guess is going to happen from the outset.

The result is a snazzy kick -- it's never less than hugely entertaining -- that should in no way be mistaken for an unbiased account. But then, Evans is the quintessential Hollywood character.

Shot in grainy black and white, the film features tons of entertaining footage of the band in the studio as well as an enlightening commentary from music critics Greg Kot and David Frick.

Screenwriter Chris ver Weil's directing debut is good-natured and never dull, but its virtues are small and easily overshadowed by its predictability. It's the kind of film that plays better on video than in theaters.

An unintentionally surreal kid's picture.

Casting Caine as Austin's father is a stroke of pure genius.

An extremely funny, ultimately heartbreaking look at life in contemporary China.

What will really shock Western viewers are the luxurious trappings of Handong's world: The tailored suits, Mercedes Benz and expensive Japanese sushi bars have little to do with age-old perceptions of the PRC.

The group's credo, "Live free, stay high," only confirms your worst suspicions about their real motives. And that makes it hard to feel any nostalgia for the good old days or condemn the members who came to their senses and moved on.

Stuart and Margolo are genuine marvels of computer generated special effects, each feather, whisker and strand of fur beautifully rendered. But they're bland and rather boring characters, dumbed down for kids.

The truly heartbreaking sacrifice of a few extraordinarily heroic men is lost under the ponderous score and a series of even heavier speeches.

This breezy romantic trifle isn't nearly as clever as it imagines itself to be, but it's smart enough not to take itself too seriously.

Writer-director Pan Nalin's film is at its best when he focuses on the meticulous, hands-on preparation of herb- and mineral-based drugs; it's also genuinely provocative to hear Ayurvedists argue that healing should be a vocation rather than a career.

Silly, good-natured and thoroughly unpretentious, this giant-spider movie has nothing more on its mind than providing the kind of brainless thrills once delivered by movies like Tarantula (1955), Earth vs. the Spider (1958) and The Giant Spider Invasion (1975).

A rare treat — catch it while you can.

The film's wittiest moment comes before it starts: the familiar MGM lion is replaced by a roaring crocodile when the studio's logo appears.

Medem's stupendously gorgeous puzzle movie features strong performances from its four leads.

Some great things can found in this fluidly kinetic film, well-directed by X-Files series and movie veteran Rob Bowman, including no-nonsense dialogue, epic photography and a terrific score. It's too bad the story is so sloppy and stupid.

This dark, almost mythic heart is what makes the film such an emotionally rich experience.

An illuminating glimpse into what goes on in the dance studio.

Shunji Iwae's film began life as an interactive online "novel" and unfolds in a series of achronological vignettes whose cumulative effect is chilling.

The performance sequences are in color, while the recording sequences are in B&W. Jacquot's strategy allows his cast the benefit of being able to give full performances (Raimondi is a particularly good film actor) while demonstrating vividly that the beauty and power of the opera reside primarily in the music itself.

What ultimately saves the film from both silliness and ponderousness is not its simplistic social message, not its now-stale theme, nor its disappointing characterizations, but rather the dazzling cinematic (and theatrical) bag of tricks which Lang and company employed to keep things moving.

Director Rick Rosenthal ("Halloween II") seems to have forgotten everything he ever knew about generating suspense, relying on cliched shadows and grainy, handheld images supposedly shot by the increasingly terrified students.