Aduaka's comprehensive account of an African nightmare covers a lot of important ground, making this flawed film worth seeing.

An unabashed call to action that shines a spotlight on a problem whose intimate medical nature relegated it to the shadows.

A remote, Israeli desert town is the setting for this droll, endearing comedy about an accidental cultural exchange that very quietly says some very important things about contemporary Arab-Israeli relations.

We already knew Hudson and McConaughey weren't exactly Gable and Lombard from their first romantic pairing in "How To Lose A Guy in 10 Days," but director Andy Tennant's complete lack of inventiveness comes as a surprise.

Preposterous, disingenuous, remarkably unfunny and genuinely distasteful.

Little more than a shaggy-dog tale about two hit men killing time in the picturesque, medieval Belgian city of the title, goosed with crackling dialogue and generous dollops of gore.

The end result is an entertaining tour film.

It's not that you can't go home again. It's that you SHOULDN'T, at least not in a lowbrow Hollywood comedy, because your family will inevitably be lewd, crude, loud and obnoxious.

This ambitious independent feature eschews gore in favor of rubber-reality ambiguity.

Character-driven thriller, which plays out against a backdrop of desperation, self-loathing and grinding poverty.

A brisk dramatic comedy that combines melodrama, humor and social critique in equal measure.

It's hard to know who bears the brunt of the blame for The Eye's stunning dullness.

For parents who were unable to secure tickets for the young fans in their households, it's nothing short of a godsend.

This madcap paranormal love triangle is charming on its own terms.

Thoroughly heartfelt. But though Trachtman alludes to the impact that Lior's special needs and local fame has had on his family, she seems uninterested in exploring the larger history of beliefs and traditions concerning mentally challenged people and their closeness to God.

You'd have to be more than merely intoxicated to find anything about this dismal stoner comedy remotely funny. You'd have to be unconscious.

Techine's unwillingness to soften his characters reflects a rare honesty about human nature that's rarely seen in movies, particularly movies about fatal illnesses, and his film is an engaging and particularly French character study.

Portabella has no interest in conventional biography -- it's hard not to suspect that he included the tale of Felix Mendelsson (Daniel Ligorio) discovering the score for the "St. Matthew Passion" wrapping a meat delivery precisely BECAUSE it's probably apocryphal.

The result is the farthest thing from a bland, spineless sequel: It's a brutal, insanely excessive successor to grindhouse pictures of yore.

Formulaic but well-acted variation on the theme of pursuing your dreams through dance.

The musical number that runs during the closing credits funnier than anything that precedes it, which isn't saying much.

Even worse than its hypocrisy, gratuitous homophobia and cheap proselytizing, the movie is dull.

Proof that the US has no monopoly on white-trash humor.

Lee deserves a lot of credit for attempt the same kind of complex story structure Quentin Tarantino made look so easy in "Pulp Fiction": Like Tarantino's interlocking stories, Lee's four segments occur achronologically and come full circle in a neat twist at the very end.

The gritty location shooting, the absence of a soundtrack and the casting of non-professionals in key roles help capture an all-important sense of place with almost documentary precision.

The film is bold stroke that hopes to push Romanian society forward by staring into the dismal failures of its recent past.

It's a bit like a Chinese "Splendor In The Grass."

The film's mix of cheap gags, macabre coming-of-age story, social satire and Cronenbergian body horror is apparently meant to gel into black comedy, but it never quite does.

The thrills are few and the expository dialogue tediously overwhelming in this preachy cautionary tale about getting too big for one's britches.

An efficient but shallow fright show.

The actors -- especially Klein and Bernthal -- deliver startlingly powerful performances.

Once the star of some of the finest movies of the '70s and '80s, Keaton has begun making just this kind of chick-flick comedy with increasing regularity at least since 1996's "The First Wives Club," and it's gotten so she's not even trying to get into character anymore.

Few of China's Sixth Generation filmmakers have turned to their country's explosive economic growth and its attendant upheavals with so sharp an eye and so heavy a heart as Jia Zhang-ke.

Light, formulaic and soft around the middle.

What one interviewee calls a "fog of ambiguity" surrounding what was and wasn't officially authorized shielded superior officers and key members of the Department of Defense -- namely Donald Rumsfeld.

A slack combination of faith-based inspiration and broad 'hood comedy.

Director Uwe Boll sticks with what he knows -- how to turn video games into dull, cheap-looking movies.

It's wholesome fun for the whole family.

It's a serious and well-researched consideration of natural childbearing vs. hospital delivery that explores the larger social conditions and assumptions that shape women's choices.

The result is yet another tired, ultimately incoherent horror movie that undoes the promise of its pretty good premise and potentially interesting story structure with dull scares, sloppy ending and a pair of unconvincing, leaden lead performances.

It's a "Taxi Driver"-inspired odyssey into violence and insanity that runs close to two hours -- a long time to be riding shotgun with a madman.

It's about ordinary people living in the shadow of nagging, day-to-day racism, and about the music that reminds them of what's right with the world rather than what's wrong.

The filmmakers know the tropes of spooky movies: Glowering shadows, squeaking playground equipment, eerie storms and half-glimpsed forms, but the film rests on Rueda's subtle, intense performance, rooted in every half-articulated anxiety that ever gnawed at a parent's brain.

Ambitious, deeply flawed and studded with sequences that achieve pure, majestic greatness.

The film's major draws are R-rated gore and some nice physical effects, proof that a man in a top-of-the-line monster suit can still be more effective than CGI.

Rob Reiner's feel-good tear-jerker, in which dying well is the best revenge, wants to be heartwarming. But first-timer Justin Zackham's screenplay is so stridently formulaic and disingenuous that the film falls flat at every inspirational turn.

Polished, pokey and cloyingly formulaic, Denzel Washington's directing follow-up to "Antwone Fisher" is a Harpo -- as in Oprah spelled backwards -- Production all the way.

The French-language voice cast is first-rate, although the film will also be released in the U.S. in an English-language version featuring Sean Penn, Iggy Pop and Gena Rowlands in addition to Deneuve and Mastroianni.

The period detail is evocative, Watson and Etel are particularly good, and baby Crusoe -- a computer-generated image seamlessly woven into the live action -- is a slippery little star in his own right.

With 20/20 9/11 hindsight, it's clear that covertly arming the Mujahedeen wasn’t such a good idea after all, but neither Nichols nor Sorkin wants to spoil the fun.

It shares all the original's shortcomings —--it’s too long and too loud and filled with historical disinformation -- but none of the snap that made "National Treasure" fun for kids and a guilty pleasure for some adults.

It's tough going relieved only by some lovely Irish scenery. -

Tim Burton's grand guignol fantasy transforms Stephen Sondheim's 1979 musical-theater piece into a cheerfully gothic morality tale.

When Cox is performing, the movie is firing on all cylinders.

Freakies fans will swoon.

They’re baaaaack.

Matheson's bitterly ironic ending -- which pivots on the nature of Neville's legend -- is gutted and turned into formulaic pap.

In real life the opportunity to make amends is rare, though the attempt may produce great art. In The Kite Runner, we get neither.

Surprisingly compelling, if not up to dealing with the larger political issues it raises.

Coppola's awkward screenplay never finds its tone -- or perhaps it deliberately evokes the pulp conventions of WWII adventures, horror films, weepy melodrama, psychological mysteries and superhero origin stories as a way of evoking the fundamental artificiality of the cinema. Either way, it never comes together into a cohesive whole, and is seriously undermined by Roth's morose performance.

For a family-friendly holiday comedy, it's still coarse, formulaic and occasionally just plain weird.

What Guttentag and Sturman gain in dramatic immediacy, however, they lose when it comes to historical context, and the chance to offer insight into why such things occur in the first place -- and continue to happen today -- is lost.

Jamal's comedy of family dysfunction is essentially a sitcom episode writ large; it's not subtle, but it's good-natured and hits its marks with ruthless efficiency.

De Felitta's portrait of Paris -- who died in June 2004 -- isn't always flattering, but it is genuinely moving on many levels, none of which require knowledge of or even interest in jazz.

For the most part, the result is a smashing success, filled with great performances and exquisite production design. But those final moments, in which the true nature of the story is revealed, are an unmitigated disaster.

For all the complicated backstory, weighty themes, action set pieces and fanciful production design, the film is oddly unengaging.

With its flashy, music-video style edits, rock-scored montages and septuagenarian cast, it’s hard to say who, exactly, is the right audience for this unusual comedic drama.

Though ultimately flawed, the film's depiction of velvet-gloved cruelty and matter-of-fact betrayal is surprisingly potent, and it's pure pleasure to watch Bacall prowling the corridors of power, tossing her golden mane and tossing off world-weary observations in a voice pitched somewhere between a purr and a growl.

Ritchie wraps this folderol in cinematic razzle-dazzle, including animated sequences, reverse motion, trompe l'oeil production design and tricky lighting. But it's still claptrap.

Diablo and director Jason Reitman never undercut Juno, whom Page brings to a fully rounded life (no pun intended) that verges on the frightening: Her vulnerable center doesn't belie her formidable exterior -- it just makes her more than a sitcom-patter machine.

In the end, Bill emerges as someone truly unique and someone who we feel privileged to know.

What a waste. Check out "Breakdown" or Aldo Lado's 1971 Italian giallo "Long Night Of The Short Dolls" for a far better treatments of the same subject.

Amalric is extraordinary, creating a character literally without moving a muscle.

Veteran conspiracy buffs probably won’t find much of Stone's material particularly new, but Stone’s film does serve as a neat summary for the rest of us while offering a number of intriguing insights into how conspiracy theories work and what they say about specific cultural and political climates.

Wu is able to demonstrate both the timelessness and the universality of stories which, on the surface, sound extreme and unique.

Beautifully encapsulates the film's sensibility, a bizarre mix of reverse cool and childishness.

It's all mean-spirited, foulmouthed sniping.

Says many things at once without much perspective or clarity.

The Savages is funny in the if-you-didn't-laugh-you'd-cry way and superbly acted by all involved, including the supporting cast of home-care attendants, nurses, hospital administrators, intake personnel and nursing-home staff.

The film gets off to a slow start and runs long, but Gold and Helfand effectively stake out their own piece of a large and complicated issue.

Intelligently acted but oddly stagnant adaptation of Brian Morton's acclaimed novel.

This is pure big-budget formula filmmaking.

Light and sweet, comfort food dressed up with a dash of exotic spice.

Odd, quasi-mystical movie that’s too silly for adults to take seriously and frankly too weird for kids.

Special kudos to Adams, who nails the distinctive body language of Disney's spunky good girls and manages to make Giselle's relentless optimism seem charming rather than a sign of mental deficiency.

This violent action is stylish but painfully formulaic, even by the undemanding standards of video-game narratives.

In the end it remains an academic exercise, though a dazzlingly ambitious one that’s well worth seeing.

The movie has a monster problem -- the more you see of them, the less scary they are -- most of the characters are standard-issue types, and Harden seriously overdoes the pious psycho bit.

Fast paced and engagingly acted.

Katzir's documentary is as much a labor of love as Spaisman's theater, and it's often rough around the edges.

First and foremost a showcase for the latest developments in motion-capture and 3-D technology.

Steeped in what may be the ultimate postmodern irony: Talen's impromptu, defiant piece of performance art with political undertones has actually taken on a spiritual dimension.

It's a shame to see such dedicated performers flay their psyches in the service of such fundamentally shallow material.

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.

The film is by turns strident, obvious, righteously angry and inspired.

Working from a script by TV actor Dylan Haggerty, Araki manages to capture what he's been trying to say all along about the lives of the stoned and indifferent with the kind of effortlessness those earlier attempts sorely lacked.

Huge in scope and beautifully shot on location in South America, this ambitious production is undone by terrible casting choices.

Delivers equal parts overwrought tedium and mind-bending beauty, spiked with brilliant throwaway images that more than make up for Kelly's heavy-handed hot-button pretensions.