Steven Soderbergh's direction conjures an understated '70s vibe, striking an apparently effortless balance between grit and glamour.

The folks at Disney prove that clothes -- and little else -- make a man, and do so with extraordinary style.

Essentially a supersize episode that ignores a slew of fifth-season developments and adds yet another monster to the mix, one that owes a striking debt to "Alien."

Ryan has a wonderful way with Hartley's often difficult dialogue, and is engaging even when the rest of the film is not

Yes, it's another gay coming-of-age while coming-out drama, but rarely has the subject been so truthfully addressed.

It's all cutely derivative, occasionally charming and very occasionally clever...but the movie's vague aspirations to being something more than disposable fluff never amount to anything.

First-time director Lisa Cholodenko, who has made a powerful and modish film with a subtle and knowing script, is more than ably assisted by a spectacular cast.

Ford is the problem: He looks great for his age (56, to Heche's 29), but oozes a stolid gloom that snuffs out those sparks long before they can set the lush scenery on fire. In a classic screwball comedy, he'd be Ralph Bellamy.

Unceasingly vulgar and sporadically funny, this revenge comedy rests heavily on the shoulders of former SNL wiseacre Norm Macdonald.

A cool indictment of television's near-irresistible pandering to the inner peeping tom.

If the roller-coaster plot twists lose you, there's always the satisfaction of Douglas's take on a script rife with amusing double entendres.

But the soundtrack will delight anyone whose blood stirs at the strains of "I'm Coming Out," "Le Freak" or "Doctor's Orders."

Director Forest Whitaker, who appears to have been typed as a female-friendly director in the wake of "Waitinh to Exhale's" runaway success, drags out the already painfully slow proceedings with syrupy dissolves, slo-mo sequences and redundant flashbacks, underscoring it all with an intrusively obvious country soundtrack that matches lyrics to emotions with cringe-inducing exactness.

A peculiar and oddly haunting achievement.

The wonder of it all is how bitterly funny the complications are, especially as filtered through Dedee's monstrously self-centered voice-over.

Beatty's contribution to the ranks of recent political satire is bold, merciless and frequently very funny, and his performance is just plain fearless.

The year's most eagerly anticipated green-eyed monster finally rears its ugly head, not with his trademark radioactive roar, but a deafening yawn.

Curl your cynical lip if you want, but there's a place for heartwarming, life-affirming, even weepy dramas, and Robert Redford brings the best-selling novel about a traumatized teen and her wounded horse to the screen with dignity and restraint.

The ensemble performances are perfectly meshed, and the Sprechers deserves special credit for bringing the desperate underside of Posey's brittle self-assurance to the surface.

There are a few inspired set-pieces -- Ruber's creation of a mechanical army is really quite something -- and the score by David Foster and Carol Bayer Sager is generally fine. But overall, this is a bloodless entry into an already highly formulaic genre.

A three-hankie weeper in disaster-movie drag, and its tear-jerking bull's-eyes are separated by long stretches of tedium.

Though too long by a good half hour, Lee's latest film packs a genuine emotional punch, largely because its polemical agenda doesn't entirely eclipse the drama.

Cloying, immature and relentlessly cute, this grating British comedy about two London con men is every bit as shameless as its heroes.

An honorable and well-acted version of Victor Hugo's classic book bag-buster (not the Broadway musical), a sprawling melodrama whose prodigious length and scope have bedeviled all previous adaptations and hang heavily over this one as well.

Dithery, nattering and a bit long for such a conspicuously airy trifle.

The hyperactive Hong Kong action stuff is getting old.

This deliberately provocative story of deception and sexuality packs a punch that's undermined by the director's indulgence.

You come away with a remarkable sense of the filmmakers and actors working together harmoniously as they delve into the heart of relationships between friends and lovers.

Character and plot are the main event, and the film's got both in spades.

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

For all the "touched by an angel" sentimentality, the movie's eerie, slightly menacing vision of black-clad angels lurking in the shadowy corners of unsuspecting lives is genuinely haunting.

Though there's some trashy fun to be had in the film's first half, this cynical sequel -- devolves into space junk even faster than the unfortunate Ross.

The best you can say is that it's all pretty harmless and pretty stupid.

The picture's uneasy but perfectly calibrated mix of brutal violence and goofy humor is pure Kitano -- the scenes in which Murakawa and his henchmen play a variation on "Rock'em Sock'em Robots" with paper sumo wrestlers is just too bizarre -- and its convulsively nihilistic ending is unforgettable.

The story works, in that everything fits together, but the film feels hollow and unfinished, like a run-through for a movie rather than the movie itself.

The whole thing is fun for 11-year-olds of all ages.

Contrived, slapdash and utterly false, this action thriller with a cynically soft center exemplifies the worst end-product of contemporary Hollywood formulas.

The kids are fine, the original songs range from OK to wretched, and Barney is annoying as ever -- even more so, given his big-screen size and Dolby-enhanced guffaw.

Inoffensive and designed to cater to some sort of middle-of-the-road constituency (it's not entirely clear who wants period gangster Westerns to be jolly instead of dark), this film is a huge leap forward for director and cowriter Richard Linklater, and he tackles the genre conventions and period set pieces with eminent grace.

An intelligent and very funny satire about the bloody game of American politics.

A sleazy, seamy, flashy, steamy, vulgar exploitation thriller that revels in every minute of its own trashiness and delivers some pretty solid -- if prurient -- entertainment before strangling in a one-twist-too-many ending.

Rosie O'Donnell's bracing freshness and genuine likability cut through the cloying stuff every time, but there's nowhere near enough of her to balance things out.

This dopey swashbuckler offers little action but lashings of DiCaprio's soft, hairless flesh.

If it's all supposed to be in fun, why does it feel so much like an insult?

The interactions between the raspy-voiced Hurt and various shallowly cheerful Americans are genuinely charming and dynamic.

To make the package look fresh, there's a pile of complications.

This trashy, overwrought thriller gets itself worked up into a fine, sleazy lather that recalls the matricidal glories "Die! Die! My Darling!" and "You'll Like My Mother", then wimps out at the end.

Under the veneer of hip lies a bland romantic comedy wrapped in a layer of less-than-biting lifestyle satire, whose single most authentic moment involves an old woman and her scruffy mutt Buddy. Not cool.

It's all about the amazing look, cobbled together from an astonishingly evocative range of sources: "Nosferatu" and "Mad Love," "Brazil" and "Metropolis," a haunted mosaic of bits and pieces of movie memories.

There's a surprising sweetness under its crude exterior.

This neo-noir pastiche is so preposterously overwrought that you keep figuring it must be some kind of joke, except that it's not funny.

Yes, it's sappy. It's also silly, utterly unironic, a sketch stretched out to feature length, and, if you're in the right mood, pretty darned cute.

The game cast does what it can -- it's a good thing Schreiber is naturally funny -- but the situation is hopeless. This is one wreck better left unexplored.

This melodramatic action opera is a lurid love letter to the guns and poses aesthetic of Hong Kong action cinema.

There's nothing hugely wrong with this picture, if you allow for the fact that it's derivative, predictable and crude. There just isn't anything especially right with it, except for a pretty creepy black-and-white nightmare sequence and a scene that reveals more than most people want to know about vampires' urinary peculiarities, but is certainly something you haven't seen before. Unfortunately, both occur within the last 20 minutes of the film, and there's a formulaic lot of nonsense to huff and puff through first.

It's about as subtle as a steel-toed boot to the groin, but actor Gary Oldman's gut-wrenching directing debut aches with grim honesty.

In the tradition of misbegotten sequels that stagger into theaters long after the original movie's release, this follow-up to 1980's BLUES BROTHERS may find a sympathetic berth with ardent fans. But newbies are warned to stay away, unless they feel compelled to experience endless scenes of pointless buffoonery and crashing cars.

No doubt about it: Unlike David Lean's much-loved classic, Cuaron's film is loosely based on Dickens. And that's just fine.

Even Wong's detractors, who consider him more stylist than auteur, will have a tough time dismissing the extraordinary emotional depth he achieves here.

Director Joe Chapelle knows how to stage a spooky scene, and Going and McGowan supply a refreshing alternative to the shrieking bimbos so familiar to horror fans.

Between Magruder's oily schmoozing and the camera-ready combo of Spanish moss and constant rain, he and cinematographer Changwei Gu whip up some amazing atmosphere.

It's all pure, brainless fluff, but it's unpretentious and "Wannabe" is damnably catchy.

The plot is simply an excuse for a string of good-natured dope jokes (come on -- you have to love that their hookah is called Billy Bong Thornton) and goofy sight gags inspired by everything from Jerry Garcia to Jerry Maguire, most of which are undoubtedly funniest if you're eight miles high.

A spectacular natural disaster spiraling out of control, a crime gone wrong and a poor jerk caught in the middle: Yes, it's a standard action-picture recipe. But what a difference a cast makes.

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.

For all its classy cast and glum polish, this metaphysical horror picture with big things on its mind lacks the malevolent buzz that vitalized SEVEN and THE HIDDEN, two of the more obvious sources from which it draws considerable inspiration.

Unfortunately, the film never really catches fire, despite uniformly high-caliber performances; Day-Lewis, surely one the finest actors of his generation, is excellent.

Richly imagined and resolutely unpredictable, this dark and profoundly optimistic paean to passion -- for glass, for horses, for the thrill of the moment after a coin is flipped but before it falls -- is held together by Gillian Armstrong's solid direction and by strong, if occasionally strident, performances from Fiennes and newcomer Blanchett.

Julie Christie is glorious, and that's most of what you need to know about this slight, loosely structured and self-consciously ironic soap opera in which two couples -- one young and troubled, the other older but hardly wiser -- get themselves into a series of fine messes.

The giddy, "anything could happen" sense that made "Pulp Fiction" and "Reservoir Dogs" so viscerally exciting is missing here. But Tarantino's first picture in nearly three years is a faithful adaptation of Elmore Leonard's "Rum Punch," and its melancholy edge is a wistful delight.

Costner's ponderous post-apocalyptic morality tale feels every minute of its nearly three hours.

But anyone who would be inherently interested in this kind of sendup is unlikely to be surprised by anything in this film -- overall it feels like a trifle, if an entertaining one.

Unlike this year's earlier Tibetan-themed biopic, "Seven Years in Tibet", Martin Scorsese's quietly devastating film really IS about the Dalai Lama.

Instantly forgettable but fun while it lasts, Disney's live-action adaptation of the classic cartoon is an ideal action-adventure thrill ride for kids who may be a little too young for the latest Bond extravaganza.

An overstatement. The movie's too long, and the direction is sometimes slack -- but the script is crammed with withering ripostes, ably delivered by Nicholson and Hunt.

It's both the shortest 3 1/2 hours you'll ever spend at the movies and spectacle of such magnitude that it's hard to imagine feeling you didn't get your time and money's worth.

Ultimately, though, the film is forgettable even by the standards of prefabricated pop ephemera.

Granted, the film is a technical marvel: The many chases through rooms, under floors and behind walls -- including one very scary encounter with a nail-gun -- are all done to jaw-dropping, state-of-the-art perfection.

This rambling exercise in local color has been a pet project of Duvall's for more than a decade, and it's to his credit that he managed to get such a low-concept picture produced. It's also to his credit that he resists the temptation to take easy potshots at religion, particularly of the revivalist variety.

This disappointing sequel to last year's horror sleeper gets trapped in the clichés it's trying to send up.

Although the performances by the star-studded cast are generally excellent, only Billy Crystal really manages to transcend the dour misery of Allen's script: His witty turn as a dapper Satan is a blessed relief from the neurotic gloom.

Consistently earnest and well-intentioned but only occasionally moving, despite the efforts of a generally top-notch cast.

The acting is top-notch and some scenes are authentically well-observed.

The plot is more of the same old running and screaming, but Weaver is worth the price of admission all by herself, which is just as well in light of the less-than-fleshed out characters by whom she's surrounded.

Too bad the film isn't nearly as elastic as the miraculous green goo: It can barely contain all the flubber-induced chaos and still make sense, but the filmmakers don't quit till they've run out of funny things for flubber to do.

Bleak, darkly humorous and surprisingly unsentimental, Michael Winterbottom's film has the desperate air of a cri de coeur, and unlike many fiction films about war, its use of real-life footage seems in no way inappropriate or exploitative.

Piercing, sweetly melancholy and acted with a breathtaking eye for nuance.

Decent songs, an amusing script and some surprisingly imaginative animation.

Long, lumpy and sadly charmless, this adaptation of John Berendt's nonfiction portrait of Savannah, GA, refracted through the prism of a scandalous true-crime story, tramples all over the silkily seductive voice that makes the book so compulsively readable and eerily haunting.

Francis Ford Coppola has turned John Grisham's pulpy bestseller into surprisingly creditable -- if morally muddled -- movie.

This tedious hodgepodge of martial-arts mayhem, bogus mysticism and computer-generated special effects doesn't even pretend to have a plot.

Though consistently handsome, the film never quite achieves the shallow but hugely seductive intensity of its MTV-style opening credits sequence.

This is a movie nasty enough to kill off the major characters twice and still manage to serve up a happy ending.

Henry James's novel of social-climbing, forbidden love, friendship and betrayal, given a lush treatment that neglects neither the elaborate period trappings nor the story's intensely contemporary emotional underpinnings.

Depending on your taste, either much hilarity or a tedious barrage of tasteless, juvenile pranking ensues. Trust your instincts.

She's an adventurous, occasionally reckless filmmaker who deploys a full arsenal of cinematic flourishes, but Lemmons' lack of restraint gets in the way of her storytelling.

Clearly, there's the germ of a good -- potentially even great -- movie here, but it's thoroughly smothered by a pair of lazy, self-congratulatory star turns by Hoffman and Travolta.

Funny, eye-opening and ultimately very moving portrait by director Kirby Dick.