Against all odds, you'll leave this remarkable film caring quite a bit for the old coot -- surely a sign of a very good documentary.

While far from the cream of the mockumentary crop, it's still a pleasant diversion.

A strong cast that flounders in profoundly unappealing material.

The real emotional impact of the film lies in the candid interviews with Crowhurst's wife, Clare, and his son, Simon, both of whom are clearly still haunted by Crowhurst and his fateful voyage.

Actor-turned-filmmaker Ethan Hawke's second feature, an adaptation of his own novel about youthful heartbreak, is hobbled by its singularly unappealing lead characters.

This tale of crime and punishment is wrapped in a veneer of flashy attitude but founders on mundane details.

An excruciating series of gags aimed at kids old enough to think it's funny when a grown-up acts like a small child.

Berman and Pulcini, who turned Harvey Pekar's graphic memoir into the visually inventive, Oscar-nominated "American Splendor," dress this film as an anthropological field diary and add several fabulous touches.

Lurie's film never fully reconciles the story about newsroom ethics with the sentimental drama about bad dads and bereft sons.

McCormack and Cochrane can't transcend the clichéd, meandering dialogue, so Brad and Lexi's dilemma never feels like anything but a didactic contrivance.

Most significant and contrary to the Mormon Church's ongoing position, the film depicts Young as present when the plot is hatched to slaughter the emigrants. Needless to say, this workmanlike but unflinching film won't be playing in Utah anytime soon.

It's a complicated plot, but one that leaves plenty of room for everything a fan could want: gunplay, swordfights, brutal mano a mano fisticuffs, motorcycle races, car chases, Japanese gangsters eating sushi off of topless women, and that old standby, a decapitated head in a box.

The loose, rambling conversations that substitute for action might be more interesting if any of the characters were capable of real introspection. But they're so shallow and distracted they can't even manage sustained navel-gazing, which makes their so-called relationships profoundly uninteresting.

There's no time wasted and no showy effects to detract from the situation -- just sheer tension.

While it doesn't miss a cliche, it also invests every one with vigorous conviction.

While trying so hard to have such a good time, the movie simply forgets to be funny, and begins to grate before the body even cools.

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.

It's mostly very crude, often very funny and a little bit smarter than you might otherwise think.

The one film to see on this most crucial subject.

There's little room for ideas when there are flaming cars to be crashed, and overall the film is an infelicitous hodgepodge that lifts as liberally from "The Quatermass Experiment" (1956) and "28 Weeks Later" (2007) as "Body Snatchers" while leaving all the best bits behind -- even the iconic pods are gone.

Like "Air Guitar Nation," the stranger-than-fiction cast of characters is fascinating, and their high-stakes machinations are nothing short of mind-boggling.

While not exactly in the same league as the visually dazzling "Excalibur" and saddled with cheap looking CGI effects, this Anglo-Italian co-production has quite a bit of fun finding a direct path from the fall of Rome to the birth of Arthurian legend.

Goofy, raunchy and very Japanese, Miike's film will probably play best to fanboys who love "Power Rangers" and "Ultraman" -- and there are plenty of them to go around.

DiCillo's short, sharp snapshot about celebrity and life on the fringe has nothing new to say, but it says it with considerable charm and affection.

The theme song, a wonderful Portuguese version of Bread's soft-rock classic "Everything I Own," is by Dinah, a long-forgotten Brazilian singing sensation of the 1970s who deserves to be better remembered.

Adds little to the annals of werewolf lore. But it's briskly paced and features a couple of clever twists on genre conventions.

There's nothing particularly original about art-director-turned-filmmaker Ray Yeung's good-natured look at a pair of aging gay men in London, other than the fact that these men happen to be of Chinese descent. Beyond that, it's pretty much gay business as usual.

Weighty and downbeat though that sounds, Delpy's film is delightfully light, especially when it's parsing the infinite variety of horrible French cabbies.

Too elliptical to be convincing.

Teenage angst and adolescent agony are the stuff of sharp, observant comedy this quirky, wonderfully dry first fiction feature from documentary filmmaker Jeffrey Blitz (Spellbound).

Strangest of all, Roman Polanski shows up to torture our heroes with a Paris phone book, then subject them to a full-cavity search. A gratuitous nod to "Chinatown"? Who knows? Who cares?

Thank goodness for Pfeiffer's Lamia, a harridan who's lived long enough to get the face she deserves and will do anything to hide it. She's a wicked delight.

This terrible sequel to a bad movie was directed by Fred Savage, the now-grown star of "The Wonder Years," though there's no evidence of any behind-the-scenes adult supervision.

This is a film for hardcore film fans and Francophiles. Everyone else may find little to sustain them beyond the pastiche and shots of Paris.

Everyone involved seems to have been operating from the presumption that gross and blasphemous equals hilarious. Would that it did.

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

It's the rare action picture whose adrenaline-driven thrills neither overshadow the characters nor degenerate into cartoonish preposterousness.

Thanks to the smart casting of Jon Voight as the school’s principal and Lainie Kazan as Yasmin’s beloved Bubbie, the two-hour run time won't be a complete bore for adults.

Biopic cliches hamstring producer-star Jennifer Lopez's pet project.

A little like a leisurely surf through YouTube.

So low-key that it verges on unconsciousness.

If you're expecting anything resembling the beloved cartoon, you'll enjoy the title sequence and nothing else. If, however, you set your expectations just low enough, or are an easily satisfied 8-year-old, you might have a bit of fun.

Wright's haunting performance is the anchor that keeps Ruscio's film from vanishing down a rabbit hole.

Unexpectedly poignant documentary.

The most shocking thing about this ludicrous serial-killer shocker, released the week troubled 21-year-old former child star Lindsay Lohan was arrested on DUI and cocaine-possession charges, is that it's the kind of film actresses generally make when their careers are well and truly on the skids.

While none of this is meant to be taken seriously, the premise demeans Moliere's great achievement.

The anger that fuels Ferguson's film is felt in nearly every frame.

It's handsomely shot by Stuart Dryburgh and nicely acted, and if it tastes a bit bland, you'll soon forget that, along with just about everything else about it.

Best of all, though the Simpson clan is 18 years older, they're not one bit wiser.

British director Shane Meadows' strongest film to date is also his most personal: A stylish fictionalization of his own wayward youth, spent among a group of working-class skinheads in Thatcher's England.

For all the impending doom, the film remains suitable for kids of all ages (the filmmakers even end on a happily reassuring note that is at odds with the film's overall message).

Urzua's unsentimental story of shattered idealism is specific to Cuba, but anyone whose path to adulthood was paved with disillusionment, -- whether they were betrayed by faith, family or institutions – will understand her melancholy nostalgia.

If you don't already have a handle on the complicated conflict at the heart of Darfur's ongoing genocide, you probably won't come away from this harrowing documentary with any comprehensive understanding.

Ellis' slight film has its charms, and the backstory he concocted to lead into the original 18-minute short is effective. But the film lags badly in the middle.

The film's seriousness of intent is unimpeachable – Forman and Carriere see disturbing echoes of the modern world in 18th-century Spain -- but the execution borders on farce.

For all the flash and flutter, the movie overall lacks, well, HEFT.

In what can only be described as a throwback to the awkward "gay" farces of the 1970s and '80s -- think "The Ritz" and "Partners -- this painfully uncomfortable buddy comedy trips all over itself to say something positive while still managing to offend. Worse still, it's just not funny.

What this spectacular-looking sci-fi thriller lacks in originality it makes up for in pure beauty: It just might be the most visually audacious and startlingly beautiful space opera since the original "Solaris."

Quite possibly the final word on a much-maligned genre.

Sweet-natured, formulaic and ripe for an American remake.

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.

Unexpectedly touching -- odd-couple buddy comedy.

Cheadle and Ejiofor are riveting together; they have the kind of apparently effortless chemistry that makes every scene they share a delight. With a dynamite soundtrack under their feet, the two of them rock the house.

Anime enthusiasts will want to take a look, but the film is too uneven to serve as a good introduction to the form.

An uncanny and thoroughly creepy nip-yuck nightmare about plastic surgery and identity.

This fifth film should please fans who rate the films based on their fidelity to the canonical texts. But for the uninitiated, it's a dry and slightly dreary introduction to the world of Hogwarts and Azkaban.

Wongpim pays tribute to classic Italian Westerns in his face-hugging close-ups, but his film is more silly than existentially anarchic, and its exotic quirkiness wears thin quickly.

A painfully slow psychological thriller.

The devil is in the degrees. Pineyro and Ferrer have a fine old time teasing the viewer with the ongoing search for the corporate mole.

To better capture the extremity of Dengler's ordeal, Bale once again underwent the kind of dramatic weight loss that shocked audiences of "The Machinist," but he's downright plump next to the emaciated Davies, who looks like Charles Manson in the end stages of a hunger strike.

8-year-olds of all ages, prepare to storm the multiplex!

The outtakes that accompany the end credits suggest that making the movie was a blast; it's a shame the same can't be said for watching it.

This being a Michael Moore film, the filmmaker is as enraging as the subject: His belligerent court-jester shtick wears thin fast and undermines the segments on universal health-care systems in Canada, the U.K., France and Cuba.

A clever, ingeniously animated film filled with many shining moments.

Rather than concentrate on Ann's disappointed infatuation and providing a satisfactory reason for its failure, Minot and, one suspects, Cunningham in particular, chose to flesh out the character of Buddy.

Luckily the story behind the suds is a pretty good one.

It is ultimately a simplistic film that will play better to youngsters who wish their grandpas were this cool and to parents who are nostalgic for the kind of exceptional childhood they neither had nor can provide for their own children.

Charging Albert's film with looking too much like an American chick flick is to give it short shrift: For all the drinking, dancing and group hugs, by the end of their 36-hour trip down memory lane, the women's problems remain unresolved and poisonous secrets are still leaking out.

The key to enjoying the fourth installment in this testosterone-fueled franchise is accepting that it's a live-action cartoon that makes no effort to conform to the laws of gravity, plausibility or common sense.

The underlying political motivation may be unclear, but the violence and desperation of lives lived in something close to hell on earth is terrifyingly clear.

A small slice of a suspended life, intimate and filled with the mundane details most people forget when the waiting is over and their real lives begin.

Overall, the performances are surprisingly convincing, but the mockumentary elements – feel out of place and the intrusive.

It's an overblown campfire tale that doesn't know when to stop.

Though it's quite possibly an even worse film than "Bruce Almighty," the sequel offers at least one consolation: The smug and increasingly unfunny Jim Carrey is replaced by the very talented Steve Carell.

Though absurdly criticized for being too "white" to play Mariane Pearl, Jolie gives an excellent performance. She portrays Mariane as gutsy, smart, passionate and highly efficient.

Horror buffs in search of a fresh take on the usual grue should embrace it wholeheartedly.

For all its impeccable indie credibility, writer-director Zoe Cassavetes' bittersweet romance is little more than a hipster chick flick in which the same old smart women make the usual foolish choices.

Wragby is a stately manor straight out of English House & Garden, rather than a sprawling, suffocating warren teetering on the edge of a coal pit, and sex is portrayed as a means of personal deliverance rather than a universal salvation, leaving Lawrence's admirers still waiting for the film that will finally do the novel justice.

Director John Dahl keeps a firm hand on Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely's razor-sharp hit-man-in-rehab comedy, which mines the same dark vein as "Gross Pointe Blank"(1997) and "Matador"(2005), and the payoff is both slily funny and startlingly fresh.

Raoul Ruiz's absurdly overwrought phantasmagoria tries to recast the notorious Viennese artist's life as a kind of Divine Comedy: Inferno.

The film's climax, which cuts back and forth between the 16-year-old Dongo (Silas Radies, whose younger brother plays Dongo as a ten year old) making his dangerous debut with the fly-by-night Aurora Circus and the 2002 competition that takes him back to Hungary for the first time in years is nothing short of riveting.

Burtynsky's keen sense of color, pattern and composition are obvious from his work, but equally acute are his thoughts on how he as an artist as well as an inhabitant of the planet fits into the larger scheme of things.

The action has more to do with digital effects than true martial artistry, and is targeted squarely at adolescent boys too young to rent porn and gamers too lazy to yank their own joysticks.

The result is strictly for those who like their comic-book movies short and stupid.

The movie's refusal to treat young girls like silly tramps-in-training is almost radical: It's just good, clean fun and actually offers children of a certain age a role model even adults can feel good about.

Meyrou follows the family through the three day trial, the verdict and its aftermath, but the perpetrators remain a mystery.

With an often very funny story line that eventually touches on parental disappointment and suicide, it's clear that, his debt to Hess and Wes Anderson notwithstanding, Waititi has learned a thing or two from fellow antipodean Jane Campion as well.

It's just a clever, pointed little fable about the price of complacent conformity, slavish worship of the status quo, and trading freedom for the illusion of safety, wrapped in a sugary-sweet, Jordan-almond-colored coating that looks good enough to eat.