Stone, the master of the epic conspiracy and the operatic spectacle of diametrically opposed forces at war for men's souls, is so entangled in the trees that he's lost sight of the forest -- who could have imagined?

Presenting facts in a wrapper of fiction only muddies the waters, and many of the film's subtler points are likely to slip by viewers who haven't first read Schlosser's book. Other salient points are shoehorned into the dialogue, rendering key scenes preachy, heavy-handed and dramatically inert.

First written in the early '80s, Terrence Malick's fourth film in three decades is a trancelike take on the relationship of Native American princess Matoaka - better known by the nickname Pocahontas and English adventurer John Smith.

Slick, stylish and super-violent, but also oddly dull.

Overall, the film falls into some comforting cocoon midway between affectionate spoof and adoring homage, much like Keillor's warmly nostalgic show.

You can't beat on Dead Man's on value-for-money terms, but it's like an all-you-can-eat buffet -- everything's tasty, the surfeit is sickening.

Hip, jokey western from cult director Sam Raimi. Recommended as an antidote to anyone still suffering from Wyatt Earp hangover.

In the end, sharp writing and terrific performances can't compensate for the fact that the back-and-forth between a sour scribe and a manipulative celebrity doesn't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

Part horror, part comedy, THE LOST BOYS is a vampire thriller that brings some interesting twists to the genre, but is nearly defeated by director Joel Schumacher's heavy-handed efforts to bring an MTV-like sensibility to the traditionally gothic material. Despite its flaws, however, the film is an interesting addition to vampire cinema.

The story's incredible coincidences, lazy cynicism and easy ironies recast a real-life horror story as easy-to-dismiss melodrama, complete with sequential "happy" endings.

Zakarin's semiautobiographical screenplay hits all the sitcom beats.

Sweet-natured, episodic comedy-drama.

Zack & Miri stand out as Kevin Smith's most thoroughly representative film -- both for better and for worse.

Though not as good as Terminator, the film has a better-than-usual script for this sort of thing and shows a lot of humor. Schwarzenegger isn't especially good as an actor, but his presence is impressive, and he is beginning to show some style, if not much substance. For action fans, one of the picks of the litter for the year.

Uneven tragicomedy.

The New Jersey locations and soundtrack help ground the story in a particular time and place, and Schroeder delivers a terrific performance.

Ramshackle as comedy and mundane as drama, this noisily energetic and splashily - literally - photographed hang-ten flick doesn't wipe out due to spectacular surfing stunts and the fun of seeing McGregor and Zeta-Jones in pre-stardom mode.

Phoenix gives a nice performance as a man caught between loyalties but blind to the realities all around him, but Gray's screenplay is filled with clunky, Dr. Phil-sounding aphorisms that stop the movie cold.

This isn't your usual kiddie fare: Beneath the initial glare and blare is a quietly literate script by first-time writer-director Zach Helm that deals directly with big issues like believing in yourself and living on after a loved one passes away. But is it heavy? Not really.

Deeply personal film that often feels more like an artfully produced home video than a documentary.

Unfortunately, the characters feel more like symbols than people, despite strong performances, including what might be Portman's finest work to date.

There isn't an original moment in the mix, but it's not as crass or vulgar as much of what passes for "family friendly" entertainment, and it keeps the precocious pop-culture references to a blessed minimum.

Between the gratuitous climaxes that seem to occur every 10 minutes, Kasdan parades a myriad of stereotypes before us and never develops them. In fact, he never really explores any of his characters but only provides them with enough motivation to justify the slaughter of dozens of people.

Sally Field's flawless performance as a mother whose imminent death reunites her four grown children elevates a fairly formulaic melodrama in the made-for-Lifetime mode into something considerably more memorable.

This likable adventure is basically "Lassie" with scales and should appeal to the books' large audience of adolescent boys.

To help break the monotony, Frost relies on relentless digital effects; there are so many shots of giant golf balls whizzing toward the screen it looks like the film was meant to be projected in 3-D.

Ask yourself this: Did the title make you laugh? If so, you're probably the target audience.

Ultimately, Tenacious D is a sight gag -- two unprepossessing, chunky dudes rocking out like wiry guitar gods -- supplemented by spot-on digs at the macho bombast and Dungeons & Dragons silliness that drives heavy-metal mania.

If only Reiser or director Raymond De Felitta had been able to resist the fart jokes and the sloppy male-bonding scenes, this could have been a terrific little movie. As it is, it's shamelessly manipulative shtick brightened by sharply drawn supporting performances.

The first half of Home Alone features the sugar-coated sentimentality that can usually be found in a Hughes film, while the second half is full of unanticipated sadism.

Yes, it's great that Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton and Bette Midler -- all women of a certain age, though they've done their best to make sure no one's certain what it is -- get to carry a major motion picture, playing college chums reunited by the perfidy of men.

It's a pleasure to see the articulate, disciplined Telfair succeed where so many other young men have failed, but ultimately his path to success is so smoothly upbeat that there isn't much urgency to it.

A stylish but disappointing spoof which lacks the satiric gusto of director Pedro Almodovar's earlier works.

This didactic drama is set safely in the past and says nothing about the culture of conformity at all costs that hasn't been said before.

In the end, despite Williams' extraordinary, nearly wordless performance, it's impossible to fathom what this young woman is experiencing at her moment of crisis, because we never knew what could have brought her to such a desperate pass in the first place.

Written in the aftermath of a bitter divorce, Mamet's paranoid rant -- an explosion of middle-aged, white-collar, white-men's rage at losing ground to everyone, from women, hustlers, African Americans and homosexuals to the younger generation nipping at their heels -- is as bilious as ever, but time has overtaken and defanged it.

It's a handsomely mounted but poky thriller undone by a fatally miscast lead.

Compelling on a personal level.

Though obviously aimed at a younger audience, The Goonies is packed with four-letter words. Sure kids speak like that, but writer Chris Columbus and director Richard Donner rely on obscenities as a substitution for clever punch lines, tossing in a few sex jokes and a touch of racist humor as well.

The lesson -- that three into two won't go --has been learned by other improbably attractive couples in "bold" movies about youthful experimentation and its long-term consequences, but the word never seems to get around.

MOTEL HELL could have been a great black comedy, but the uneasy direction of Kevin Connor fails to get most of the picture off the ground.

The action come fast and thick, and the sentimentality reaches near-operatic proportions.

Don't hate him because he's beautiful, decent, awesomely powerful, modest and just plain good. That's the big blue Boy Scout package - take it or leave it.

Jane Austen deserves better than to be subordinated to her own creation, the spirited Lizzy Bennet.

With its attractive cast, beguiling score and relatively straightforward narrative, this dark fable of letters and lust is one of Greenaway's most accessible works.

The unfortunate fact is that it's more than a little dull when it isn't preposterous.

An entertaining road movie with a topical point: The three passengers on this cross-country trip are U.S. soldiers who've just returned from Iraq.

None of it really adds up to much but it's smart, low-key fun -- terrible title and dangling preposition notwithstanding.

Eminently worth seeing, even if it leaves you wishing it were as consistently inventive as Aardman's first feature, "Chicken Run" (2000).

The silliness of the whole concept is handled with a sly sense of humor by director Dante, with some tongue-in-cheek appearances by Keenan Wynn, Kevin McCarthy, Paul Bartel, Barbara Steele, and Dick Miller adding to the fun.

As unpalatable as stale wedding cake.

There are no laughs to be had here, though, unless you count nervous titters and frat-boy sniggers at the very thought of, you know.

The minutiae of Carter's book tour isn't always enthralling, but his personality drives the film: pious, stubborn, devoted to his wife, curious, professional, warm and yet slightly removed from the fray, conciliatory, meticulous, self-effacing, funny, decent, intellectually rigorous and firmly committed to his positions.

Staying with Tie Me Up! demands some patience, but the director's timing never fails him, and he brings things to a close on an upbeat note.

A lurching, addlebrained biopic that lacks even the crackpot energy of JFK, Oliver Stone's Nixon struggles to invest its nakedly venal subject with tragic dignity.

Regardless of the artistry involved (though the street-level anxiety of post-9/11 New York is far better evoked in Jane Campion's underrated "In the Cut," The Brave One ultimately never really strays from the same moral low road as "Death Wish."

Moreau gives a beautifully sensitive performance as a woman who finds herself at a literal and figurative crossroads, a performance for which she was quite justly rewarded the Cesar Award in 2005.

There's always been a wide streak of the tediously naughty little boy in Besson, and all the seductively stylized images in the world can't hide it.

The face may be vaguely familiar, and if the name "Mimi Weddell" doesn't ring a bell it will after you've seen Jyll Johnstone's affectionate documentary portrait of this unstoppable nonagenarian model and actress.

The results feel slack – sometimes funny, but slack.

There are no surprises for anyone who's seen the earlier version, and younger horror fans may find the modest body count and restrained gore unsatisfying.

The story delivers enough twists and turns to be engaging without feeling like work, and the overall vibe is dangerous and flirty rather than brutal or excessively graphic.

Danish writer-director Ole Bornedal delivers up a stylish thriller whose murky, shot-through-pond-scum cinematography is its most distinctive feature.

Renaissance Man is an exceptionally unoriginal comedy with a heart-tugging streak as big as Fort Bragg, but it succeeds perfectly well on its own unambitious terms.

At best, Batman Forever is mildly diverting, brainless fun that feels like a long trailer for a better film.

While snowboarding enthusiasts will eat up every minute of its two-hour running time, it's thin stuff for the unconverted.

Expect lots of earsplitting music, garish visuals and badly staged martial arts action.

Though the raw material is juicy stuff, the details and the larger picture never come together and the cast is uneven.

Spike Lee's adaptation of a solid, if overpraised, crime novel by Richard Price is slickly made and well acted. But with most of the novel's subplots stripped away, it emerges as just another polemic about the scourge of drugs in the African-American community.

Admitting that it's formulaic doesn't make it any less so, but it's enjoyable in a mushy, easily digested sort of way.

Given its premise, it's hard for any Hostel sequel to be little more than a rehash.

Has a certain silly, kid-friendly charm.

Overall, it's like watching a home movie of a charming relative.

Television director David Von Ancken's metaphorical revenge Western wears its influences on its sleeve, but adds nothing to the genre that hasn't already been explored in the quietly demythologizing films of Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher, the baroque, operatic Italian Westerns of Sergio Leone and his less-familiar peers, and even in Sam Fuller's deranged, post-Civil War psychodrama "Run of the Arrow"(1956).

The result is a one-joke movie.

Rios is the glue that holds Johannesson's neither-fish-nor-fowl film together.

Ryan Schifrin's first film is a pleasant surprise, an old-fashioned monster movie that relies more on genuine suspense than bare breasts and blood.

The story is complex enough to be absorbing, but its pedantic quality makes it -- and its lessons -- all too easy to forget.

The cast is little more than the sum total of golden skin, firm flesh and blindingly white teeth, but in a film that demands them to be half-naked and soaking wet most of the time, looks trump technical acting skill every time.

It is fragmented and episodic, and many of Bukowski's best bits are oddly truncated.

A window into bygone morals and mores.

What is interesting is Ceylan's depiction of life among the Turkish upper-middle classes, a world rarely seen in international art-house cinema outside his own films.

The result is undeniably gorgeous, but it's all busy surface, beautiful bodies and ironically absurd plot contrivance, occasionally awkward references to political events in '70s Spain notwithstanding.

Director/cowriter Adrian Garcia Bogliano's self-conscious throwback to the kind of gritty black-and-white gore films that used to play drive-in theaters and urban grind houses is a short, sharp shocker that gets surprising mileage out of the oldest formula in the book of the dead.

Davis led an unquestionably inspirational life, but The Express, however heartfelt, is uninspired.

A combination of muddy sound mix and players with heavy accents (particularly Chinese superstar Gong, who seems to have learned her lines phonetically) renders large swaths of dialogue incomprehensible, but the details of what's being said and done don't really matter.

Veterans Danner and Wilkinson effortlessly make Anna and Stephen more interesting than all the youngsters combined.

This is not a film for neophytes: It proceeds from the assumption that the viewer is familiar with the events and people of Jesus' life, and is probably right in doing so: Its intended audience is seriously Christian.

We're more likely to snicker at this marauding monster than scream.

Far from proving the reality of the Horatio Alger myth it peddles, Chris Gardner's story is worth celebrating precisely because he managed to beat the odds stacked so high against him. Steve Conrad's screenplay is also curiously but insistently silent on the subject of race.

It's dramatically unsatisfying.

Efficient if uninspired documentary.

Jackman and McGregor are a delight to watch.

Peter Weir's talent, so evident in his Australian work, remained dormant here, but Depardieu's lively performance is a redeeming factor.

Nat comes off as flat-out crazy and more sad than amusing or heroic.

Exquisitely shot and the dark poetry of Levi's words, read at intervals throughout the film, is brought to haunting life by a suitably weary-sounding Chris Cooper.

And yes, that is Salma Hayek in the chorus line of sexily sinister nurses, perhaps repaying Taymor for lending her dramatic credibility with "Frida."

This scrappy, ultra-low budget comedy, made in 19 days for $70,000 by North Carolina School of the Arts graduates Jody Hill, Danny McBride and Ben Best, comes with its own Cinderella tale: It debuted at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival but failed to find distribution until comedian Will Ferrell and his business partner, Adam McKay, championed it.