As a document of the ever-mutable musician's signature persona, a wraithlike androgyne with a head full of apocalyptic dreams, it's fascinating.

With all the glossy sex, you'd be forgiven for thinking Zalman King was directing, except that even King knows you don't need such a ludicrously complicated plot to show pretty people having sex. Each character is so burdened with gratuitous back story that it's exhausting trying to separate the grain from the chaff, until you realize none of it matters at all.

De Marken and Freeman preserve the group dynamic by dividing the screen into six parts, each mini-frame capturing actions and reactions from a different camera angle, and while the film drags in spots, the performances are unusually powerful.

Anchored by Friel and Williams's exceptional performances, the film's power lies in its complexity. Nothing is black and white, starting with the girls' complicated relationships with their parents, which are simultaneously nurturing and fraught with psychological peril.

Hailed as a clever exercise in neo-Hitchcockianism, this clever and very satisfying picture is more accurately Chabrolian.

Violent, deliberately operatic, and makes ambiguous social statements.

To his eternal credit, Jones gives his considerable all and even coaxes a startling note of poignancy from one scene, while Smith just bops along, lobbing gags and grinning at the special effects.

A harmless, if ultimately inane, fantasy-comedy vehicle for youngsta-rapper Lil' Bow Wow, a 15-year-old who's already an alarmingly accomplished scene stealer.

Andersson creates a world that's at once surreal and disturbingly familiar; absurd, yet tremendously sad. The haunting score is by ABBA's Benny Andersson.

The action sequences are so franticly dizzying that they make "Run Lola Run" look as though it unfolds in slow motion.

By the end, it should be perfectly clear just why Cho is so loved by so many different types of people. Raunchy though her material is, it embraces all comers, regardless of gender, sexuality, race or ethnicity. And it's never been sharper — or funnier — than it is here.

Warm, funny and often brutally honest profile of an aging divorcee and her three very different daughters.

The story's self-conscious seaminess cries out for the ministrations of a filmmaker like direct-to-video auteur Gregory Hippolyte.

This amazing footage alternates with interviews that include more than a dozen surviving members of the troupe, whose recollections are by turn funny, touching and mind-boggling. What a time!

Essentially a feature-length episode of the popular Nickelodeon animated series, this faithful expansion is savvy enough to stay put.

This is a terrible movie in its own right, tasteless and condescending -- if Sandler's character is an Everyman, than the Everyman of today is a boorish jackass

The satire is broad and easy, while the romance is thoroughly unconvincing.

A film such as this, which relies on mood, atmosphere, and ideas, rather than plot, depends on its acting to be effective, and the entire cast is extraordinary, with Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek both giving their finest performance ever.

The Sisyphean ordeal at the heart of the film strongly recalls Roman Polanksi's 1958 short "Two Men and a Wardrobe," while Lachow's loose, improvisatory approach -- as well as the occasional self-indulgence -- feels more like Henry Jaglom.

Comic Tommy Davidson, in particular, is hilarious as gangsta rapper Puff Smokey Smoke, who falls for Juwanna and then, in a twist lifted directly from the queen of all drag farces, 1959's "Some Like It Hot," decides he still loves her after she's exposed as Jamal. After all, nobody's perfect.

As a debut it holds out the promise that Montias might do something more interesting in his next film.

Like "Lone Star," this group portrait mourns a rapidly vanishing American landscape while acknowledging that the past, free of corporate homogeneity though it may have been, is never the unspoiled paradise it appears in retrospect.

French director Helene Angel's dark but deftly handled fable about familial violence has a terrifying, fairy-tale atmosphere that's in perfect keeping with its unique point of view.

Renner's performance as Dahmer is unimpeachable, fascinating without being charismatic, and Kayaru's Rodney is a marvel of complicated characterization under difficult circumstances.

The film is an encouraging effort from McCrudden -- he manages to avoid the staginess of the recurring two-characters-in-a-hotel-room set-up -- and features a standout performance from Williams.

The film proceeds from an utterly fascinating notion. As with A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Spielberg's admirable intent is to create a prescient, serious science-fiction movie.

It's quite an achievement and makes a strong argument in favor of traditional animation — this is the first Disney feature since "Dumbo" (1941) to feature watercolor backgrounds, and they're beautiful. But beautiful illustrations and a funny premise can't save this well-meaning kid flick from its dully plotted story.

Its idiomatic wordplay and social satire is vintage Wilder, and the opening sequence where Dino performs in a nightclub is one of the funniest things that Wilder has ever done.

Frei assembles a fascinating profile of a deeply humanistic artist who, in spite of all that he's witnessed, remains surprisingly idealistic, and retains an extraordinary faith in the ability of images to communicate the truth of the world around him.

With this perceptive, however bloody, film, Ishii makes it disturbingly clear that a culturally instilled sense of shame and fear of being shunned mean that women like Chihiro are doubly victimized, both by their attackers and the society that should protect them.

For all its crime-story elements, this richly colored, beautifully shot film is really a story of the friendship between Singer and the kid he calls ZigZag, a relationship made all the more poignant by the fact that Singer is very sick.

The movie deals superficially with Native American pride and racism in the ranks, but it's hardly about the codetalkers at all: Neither Woo nor the screenwriting team of Joe Batteer and John Rice seem to appreciate the bitter irony in a Native American soldier protecting his land by serving the very government that took most of it from him in the first place.

There are moments of wonderful insight, but while the booming, fully animated adventures of the Atomic Trinity (by "Spawn" creator Todd McFarlane) that Care intercuts with the live action at first seem a good idea, they ultimately upset the film's carefully established mood.

A fun and fanciful comic adventure, based on the novel "The Death of Napoleon" by Simon Leys, that takes a great premise and runs with it.

This savvy adaptation of Robert Ludlum's action-clogged 1980 bestseller benefits from the fact that the filmmakers were smart enough to throw out most of the book's preposterous spills and thrills and concentrate instead on its intriguing central character.

The movie's captivating details are all in the performances, from Foreman's barking-mad Taylor to Thewlis's smoothly sinister Freddie and Bettany/McDowell's hard-eyed gangster, an amoral bottom-feeder with an expedient streak of sadism.

As live-action adaptations of cheap, unapologetically stupid cartoons go, this is top of the line: The cast is appealing, the sets brightly colored and fun to look at, the mystery as lame and goofy as any featured in the many inexplicably beloved Scooby-Doo cartoons.

The film is virtually wall-to-wall music with very little commentary -- it's obvious that, given the chance, these musicians would much rather play than talk.

Virgil's naïveté isn't entirely believable, but his essential goodness is, thanks to a solid performance by Jordan, and that's really what makes this modern urban tragedy unusually affecting.

Hopkins and Rock are a surprisingly good mix; Hopkins actually underplays his role as a company man with a barely acknowledged conscience, while Rock's manic impulses aren't allowed to run riot.

Its high-definition video images -- are coated with a convincing sheen of disgust, and Huston's performance is riveting.

The idea is more interesting than the screenplay, which lags badly in the middle and lurches between not-very-funny comedy, unconvincing dramatics and some last-minute action strongly reminiscent of "Run Lola Run." Great soundtrack, though.

Suffers from an excess of material crammed into too little screen time. There's so much story that the characters get short shrift; you have to wonder, for example, what became of Siddalee's three siblings.

Too daft by half -- it might have been better if Ken were less loony, especially because his nuttiness verges on implying that loons love large women -- but supremely good natured.

Not only is it a reintroduction to a fascinating culture that has survived 4,000 years in a remote and most inhospitable climate, but it's also the first film ever directed by an Inuit filmmaker and featuring an all-Inuit cast.

The impulses that produced this project, which brings together three short, English-language films by African female filmmakers into a feature-film package introduced by rap icon Queen Latifah, are commendable, but the results are uneven.

The film is surprisingly successful in developing a sense of mounting dread.

Film's real sticky wicket is that the bad guys not only threaten to nuke a major American city but do it — a conceit that might have been more amusing before terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center using hijacked commercial jets. Witnesses said the WTC attack looked like a movie; they didn't say it was a movie they wanted to see.

Saturday Night Live veteran Chris Kattan more or less steals the film as the racially confused Mr. Feather, a white supremacist bad guy whose speech patterns tend to get down and funky against his will.

Though smartly written and handsomely produced (the film's visual polish is remarkable, given its modest budget and the swanky settings the story dictates), this film would benefit greatly from more bite.

It quickly becomes clear that Nijinsky's disordered thoughts are simply the rantings of a man losing his grip on reality. They're sad and occasionally evocative, but they're not especially interesting in and of themselves, and do nothing to evoke or illuminate Nijinsky's genius.

Deftly manages to avoid many of the condescending stereotypes that so often plague films dealing with the mentally ill.

Excellent performances from Jacqueline Bisset and Martha Plimpton grace this deeply touching melodrama.

A triumph of art direction over narrative, but what art direction!

A must-see for martial arts enthusiasts.

It starts slowly, but this contemplative drama's cumulative effect is genuinely haunting.

There's some fun to be had in seeing two of TV's resident sweetie pies, Campbell and ER's Noah Wyle, play unrepentant sons of bitches, but it's not enough.

It's a testament to both the timelessness and the prescience of Herman Melville's 1853 story "Bartleby, the Scrivener" that it can be so easily updated with so few changes.

Nolan's intention was clearly to cast the material in a more conventional Hollywood mold without turning it into namby-pamby nonsense, and he succeeds admirably.

Think "The Lion King" redone for horses, with fewer deliberate laughs, more inadvertent ones and stunningly trite songs by Bryan Adams.

Colorful and deceptively buoyant until it suddenly pulls the rug out from under you.

Everett remains a perfect Wildean actor, and a relaxed Firth displays impeccable comic skill.

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.

This superbly played film, directed with remarkable skill for a first-time feature filmmaker, is truly an adult drama.

Wickedly funny and surprisingly sweet film may be the perfect star vehicle for Grant. He's full of piss and vinegar and has at long last set aside the wobbly, stammering persona best left at "Four Weddings and a Funeral."

Flawed but undeniably provocative and brilliantly acted by Gosling.

And while it was always clear that Lucas cared more about special effects than acting, here his lack of interest has produced phenomenally wooden performances from newcomers and veterans alike: Only the imperious Christopher Lee, as baleful Count Dooku, emerges unscathed.

One hopes Koury will return to this interesting project to flush out the bigger story that continues to lurk just below the surface.

Barney has been criticized as willfully esoteric, but if traditional meaning is once again elusive in this film, it remains an enthralling aesthetic experience, one that's steeped in mystery and a ravishing, baroque beauty.

Happily, a feeling of genuine comradeship among these athletes shines through, and their irreverent, go-for-broke comments are a jolt of fun compared to the usual canned epigrams from pampered sports multimillionaires.

The film's poky pacing is a liability -- the setup takes an awfully long time.

It's a documentary, but the filmmakers couldn't have scripted a more revealing microcosm of profiteering and exploitation.

If ever a movie cried out to be French, it's this one, and not just because it's a remake of Claude Chabrol's notoriously icy La Femme Infidele (1968).

Lame, derivative comedy.

The plot's contrivances are uncomfortably strained, and ultimately your reaction to its featherweight story of love and serendipity will be determined by how charming you find the dithering, slack-jawed Janice.

The effect is one of gorgeous puppets, a removed perspective that makes some of the most powerful political and social events in history seem like the sad, desperate flailing of monkeys.

Gowariker's stunningly choreographed, four-hour spectacle (reportedly one of the most expensive films in the industry's history) is a fascinating mix of Hollywood genres and tropes.

Feels more like a 90-minute pilot for a TV series than a feature film.

Slight and whimsical.

It's a surprisingly uplifting experience, and in the end, unmistakably a Kiarostami film.

The film often teeters on the brink of melodrama and is saddled with a sappy original score.

Overall, it's a curiously lifeless affair.

The film may be lighter in tone than Imamura's more recent work, but it still has a number of serious things to say about life in contemporary Japan.

He (Allen) seems to have forgotten that comedy is all about timing, letting individual scenes meander -- often to accommodate his own stammering monologues -- and giving viewers far too much downtime in which to consider the staleness of many of the film's gags.

This fast-paced entertainment is a surprisingly successful mix of spectacle and human-scale drama.

This film represents a perfect match of filmmaker and material. Akerman's fondness for long, static takes and circular, recurring dialogue perfectly suits the maddening repetitions that set the tone of Proust's darkest work.

Marker revisited (the film) in 1993 after the fall of the Soviet Union: He trimmed an hour and added a remarkably prescient coda: "Terrorism has replaced Communism as the ultimate evil."

This deliriously unsettling film evokes H.P. Lovecraft's exquisitely creepy stories of encroaching madness -- not so much in story terms but in its perversely spooky ambience -- with a subtle dose of David Lynch's dark sense of humor.

Adapted from Kirsty Gunn's acclaimed novel, New Zealand director Christine Jeff's debut feature is a small masterpiece of atmosphere.

With its thumping soundtrack, absence of body hair and a camera that practically pants over every bulge, curve and crack of the male form, the film is really closer to porn than a serious critique of what's wrong with this increasingly pervasive aspect of gay culture.

Interestingly, the real horror lies in the film's depiction of the era: The sight of guillotined bodies -- naked, headless and dumped under the shady trees of Picpus -- is truly shocking. Rarely has the horror of the Terror been so graphically and effectively evoked.

The film is graphic without being lurid, and the naked emotions onscreen are far more shocking than the naked bodies -- though there are plenty of those, in all shapes and sizes.

The truth of the matter is that, given the thoroughly manipulative, red-herring plot twists that get her to the happy ending, most audience members will have ceased to care about whether she lives or dies long before the matter is settled onscreen.

If the sign of good documentary is its ability to enthrall you regardless of your prior interest in the subject, then Stacy Peralta's hugely entertaining film earns high marks.

While the homeless, the mentally ill and the generally downtrodden are scattered about like so much shabby furniture, Rifkin has no qualms about wallowing in their filth, but he misses the tragedy of their lives -- just as he misses everything else.

Its misogyny, homophobia and overall grossness undermine the tired gags, and its relentless portrayal of African-American women as money-grubbing hootchie mamas (the sole exception is, of course, Dre's mom) would be wholly unacceptable if a white filmmaker had been at the helm.

Despite the futuristic setting, which relies so heavily on GGI effects that it looks like a feature-length production concept painting, this film is painfully predictable.

This is a thoroughly conventional story of one man's search for redemption in the neon slime; its multiple flashback structure is just a way of parceling out information, not a device used to undermine the narrative.