The film unfolds with all the heart-stopping suspense of a true-crime expose that sheds light on the twisted policies of Kim Jong-il's strange and secretive nation.

Crtainly worthy of serious attention and filled with revealing moments.

A delirious fever dream of pulp-western conventions by way of 1950s Hollywood melodrama, Thai filmmaker Wisit Sasanatieng surreal oddity unfolds in heavily manipulated colors so rich they seem ready to leap off the screen, punctuated by spasms of over-ripe dialogue, floridly dramatic songs and maniacal villainous laughter.

Unlike most mainstream filmmakers, Ratnam doesn't try to include something for everyone, but he does deliver several handsome production numbers.

The mockumentary conceit gives a vivid immediacy to the material, and the PAL digital video cinematography is often surprisingly lyrical -- certain shots of empty, fog-shrouded San Francisco sites more than make up in eeriness what they lack in special-effects decrepitude.

Title notwithstanding, there's nothing particularly funny about this political drama from the tireless Claude Chabrol.

In all, it's a peculiar mishmash, simultaneously bland and suggestive.

Formulaic though it is, the story hits the right emotional buttons and promises that hope and dogged work trump despair.

The humor is too adult for children and the plot far too childish for most adults; in fact, everything about the film is really too silly to warrant much consideration.

Ultimately aimed at a Christian audience looking for genre entertainment with a certain sense of propriety (which partly translates into there being no murders), the film tries to serve two masters and doesn't quite deliver for either.

Endearing without being especially engaging.

Del Toro's film ranks with the best examinations of children's inner lives, but be warned: Its haunting insights are best left to adults.

The film, though admirably ambitious, is resolutely earthbound, mired in ick and slime and never more wooden than in the delirious climax.

All behave in ways that may at first seem incomprehensible, but through Moncrieff's expert storytelling, each woman is finally rendered merely human.

This is director Luc Besson's first attempt at combining animation with live-action, and while the look of the film is impressive, he should have focused more of his efforts on fleshing out the script that he adapted from two of his own "Arthur" books.

Despite, or perhaps because of, a flurry of 11th-hour recutting and reshoots -- the film feels rushed and unfocused.

Benigni's artfully composed images are as empty as his political convictions.

It's a shame it's not a better movie, but its small virtues include an uncompromising performance by English actor Jonny Lee Miller.

The superego gets bested by the id in Spanish director Joaquin Oristrell's curious period sex comedy, which mixes intellectual musings on psychoanalysis with vulgar guffaws of the basest sort.

Though at heart a tightly-wound, bitterly bleak comedy of manners, Eyre's film is less funny than brilliantly squirm-inducing, a dissection of bad behavior via rapier-sharp dialogue.

Morgan borrows Christmas-specific nastiness from a wide range of fright flicks, but the result is less than the sum of its parts.

The screenplay, which differs significantly from the novel, is uneven, but the distorted mirror it holds up to the present is disturbingly clear.

Roth's screenplay, steeped in the peculiar rituals, lock-jawed repression and smug sense of superiority of the WASP ruling class that both shaped America's intelligence community and made it vulnerable, is less interested in derring-do than back-room deals and the day-to-day drudgery of spying, driven by the notion that espionage is a cynical high-stakes game played with people's lives and the ante is human decency and connectedness.

This loud, overlong and thoroughly exhausting fantasy, based on Milan Trenc's slim children's book, purports to introduce youngsters to the wonders of New York City's American Museum of Natural History, but in fact aims squarely at hyperactive kids who can't sit still or stand a moment's silence.

"Charlie's Angels" director Joseph McGinty Nichol (aka McG) shows surprising restraint with this emotionally freighted material, weighting the movie heavily towards relationships.

Though O'Toole, whose ruined beauty Michell emphasizes in frequent and tight close-ups, and newcomer Whittaker have a striking rapport, the film's most haunting moments pair him with Vanessa Redgrave -- amazingly, this is their first movie together -- as his ex-wife. They evoke a lifetime of love, betrayal, regret and forgiveness in the space of a few lines, then move on without missing a beat.

It's a lavish entertainment that revels in lurid colors and yet more lurid emotions.

This is sentimentality of the best kind, a touching display of male bonding amid terror and aching loneliness worthy of Howard Hawks at his finest.

John Curran's pretty melodrama rubs off a few of the barbed edges from W. Somerset Maugham's 1925 novel about love and infidelity in a time of cholera, but no matter: the centerpiece is Naomi Watts' outstanding portrayal of an adulteress redeemed.

A deep and astonishingly authentic streak of melancholy runs through this fifth sequel to the 1976 sleeper that made both struggling actor Sylvester Stallone and hard-luck slugger Rocky Balboa international stars.

Chernick may not answer every question about this beguiling and enigmatic film, but you wouldn't want it to: Mystery is an essential part of the Barney experience.

Murphy is a revelation as James, and what American Idol castoff Hudson lacks in technical acting craft she makes up for in raw energy and a voice that could melt the rhinestones off a beauty queen. To complain that Beyonce pales by comparison is to fault her for nailing the essence of the infinitely malleable Deena.

But for all the profane language and sexual frankness, Soderbergh's film is no more cynical or world-weary than its inspirations, and in the end, it feels like a clever trick wrapped around a hollow center.

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

No, it isn't as magically enchanting as the 1952 children's classic by E.B. White, any more than a museum-shop print of La Giaconda is as mysteriously beguiling as Leonardo's original. But this respectful, live-action adaptation of White's gentle tale about an undersized pig, a clever spider and the everyday marvels that too often pass unnoticed is a charmer nonetheless.

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

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.

Starts with a bang and ends in a long, protracted whimper.

Carries an important and timely reminder about the fate of torture victims, so deftly wrapped within a touching and beautifully acted melodrama that the result is the furthest thing from a didactic message movie.

Odd but never dull.

Overall, this puff piece is shapeless, repetitive and feels much longer than it is.

The acting is flat, and the scientist's ideological speeches too bluntly designed to mirror post-9/11 rhetoric. But there's a dreamy fascination to the iconic images of machines fighting a perpetual war for the human creators they'll inevitably outlast.

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

Edward Zwick brings unimpeachable good intentions to his film about the bloody underbelly of the international diamond trade, but when social conscience jockeys for attention with movie-star glamour, glamour always wins. The result is a rip-snorting adventure set against the backdrop of African misery.

Barbarously beautiful and gut-wrenchingly (literally) violent, it's a mesmerizing vision of the past refracted through the dark obsessions of the present.

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.

Philippe Diaz's controversial documentary about the legacy of the brutal 1991-2002 civil war in Sierra Leone -- widely considered the poorest country in the world, despite its rich mineral resources -- suggests that the rebel faction RUF (Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone) was not alone in terrorizing civilians and committing atrocities, most famously the amputation of limbs with machetes.

Writer-director Daniel Burman's dryly humorous, poker-faced comedic style is once again in full play in this funny and touching film about a young Argentine man and his aging father, both of whom happen to be lawyers.

Writer-director James Ponsoldt's first feature is a small, modest movie structured around a fairly simple situation that leaves plenty of room for some fine performances.

The Armenian-American quartet have taken it upon themselves to teach their fans about what happened to their families in that now-forgotten time, a deeply personal mission that has proven effective in politicizing their audiences.

On the list of WWII stories criminally ignored by six decades of combat movies in the past 60 years, the heroics of French colonial soldiers ranks pretty high. But Rachid Bouchareb's powerful drama -- which won the 2006 Cannes Film Festival's best-actors award for its superb ensemble cast and was nominated for a best foreign-language-film Oscar, went a long way toward rectifying the situation, both on screen and in real life.

Solomonoff cuts back and forth between 1984 and 1976, gradually revealing the truth of what happened, but the mystery is less important than the complex relationship between Natalia and Elena, which was sorely tested by events beyond their control.

In the end, it's best to make peace with the film's essential and deliberate inscrutability -- something Lynch fans have learned to do since Twin Peaks -- and to simply marvel at Dern's astonishing performance, which few actresses are likely to top anytime soon.

Slow, solemn going, despite its best efforts at thundering soldiers and comic-relief kings.

The laughs are low, the breasts are high, and the film is instantly forgettable.

After reminding us that the AIDS crisis in the West is far from over in "The Event," Fitzgerald widened his scope with this much-needed perspective on the global dimensions the disease has achieved. Despite the importance and seriousness of the subject, there's plenty of Fitzgerald's brand of sly humor on hand, particularly in the scenes involving the Quebecoise porn industry.

It all feels like an insubstantial short that's been stretched to the breaking point.

LaPaglia and Davis deliver top-notch performances that go a long way toward offsetting the material's didacticism.

Novice filmmakers Arin Crumley and Susan Buice's charming homemade movie is a surprisingly successful experiment in collaborative creativity that sprang from a larger artistic project: their own real-life relationship.

Ultimately, the film feels unfocused and attenuated, despite its brief running time.

A tense and tightly plotted fictional thriller is based on real tactics used by the Stasi -- East Germany's secret police force -- to spy on and interrogate their own citizens.

The cast is unusually good for this sort of film, which only makes the poor execution more regrettable.

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.

While the film isn't entirely amateurish -- shots are cut together and the cinematography is professional if not precisely stylish -- the story feels as though large pieces are missing and the characters behave so inconsistently that there's zero incentive to care about their tribulations.

An intoxicatingly beautiful but painfully simplistic fable about love and death.

Filled with forced yuletide cheer and mixed messages about the true meaning of Christmas, this loud and obnoxious holiday comedy boasts a fine cast and little else.

An utterly preposterous but entertaining sci-fi action brain-bender.

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.

The line separating "fan" from "fanatic" has never seemed as thin or as permeable as it does in this harrowing, and at times surprisingly humorous, case study from actress-turned-director Emmanuelle Bercot.

The film's sweetness derives primarily from the relationship between Ashmol and his unusual sister, and draws much of its richness from the unfamiliar and fascinating world of opal prospecting.

Sex and psychosis mix in this nice looking, Super-8 psychodrama from Patrick McGuinn, the son of former-Byrd Roger McGuinn.

Now seen for the first time in close-up, these "boys" are well past adolescence, which makes Bennett's sympathy for poor Hector a bit easier to take.

As M, Dench knows she has a tiger by the tail and isn't fazed in the slightest. Reservations aside, the film marks the beginning of a new phase in James Bond's history, and it promises to be a gripping one.

Funny moments can be found throughout, but it's mostly silly and scattered.

The sad thing is that Arnett, Shepard and McBride quickly establish a loose, easy camaraderie that's a real pleasure to watch. The shame is that they're working with such unrewarding material.

Neil Armfield's film hits hard because it sensitively shows how life on drugs can never be about anything else, and how the real horror of addiction is not what users do to themselves, but what they do to each other out of loneliness and despair.

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.

Levy and Guest train a glaring spotlight on the self-absorption, vanity, delusions and histrionics of the movie community, but clearly love them even at their silliest.

Seething with suggestions of perverse pleasures and inchoate horror, this dark fairy tale won't win the Pennsylvania-born, London-based Quay brothers any new fans -- it plays to the converted, and the converted know who they are.

Though Estevez's achievement doesn't quite live up to his ambitions -- the climax of Altman's "Nashville" (1975) evokes the same brutal loss of innocence to more shattering effect -- it still contains enough powerful moments to balance the weaker sections.

Bielinsky's "Nine Queens" was a complex romp through the machinations of high-stakes con artists, but this intricately plotted mystery ventures into darker psychological territory and never misses a step.

Strong performances and sharp dialogue distinguish Jeff Lipsky's melancholy second feature, which charts the two-year course of a "perfect" relationship whose flaws are evident from the outset.

Dramatically simple but emotionally complex.

The mystery is marvelous.

Broad, hackneyed and stultifyingly predictable.

With his ersatz-gangsta swagger, the once-again buff Bale gives it his all -- he's got to be the most committed actor in Hollywood -- but the real surprise here is Rodriguez, who has all the talent and charisma of a major star.

London-born director Asif Kapadia's second feature, following 2001's critically acclaimed "The Warrior," is a slow, low-key supernatural thriller whose story is too slender to justify its feature-length running time.

Foster finds the common ground on which his eclectic cast can meet (no small feat when they range from brassy Queen Latifah to "Arrested Development"'s deadpan Tony Hale) and keeps the story's sweetness from devolving into saccharine kitsch.

Tragically, the title of James Longley's beautifully shot 90-minute documentary refers to not only the state in which he found the Iraq during the two years he spent there shooting over 300 hours of footage, but the structure the violent factionalism that divides Iraqi Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds imposes on his film.

In the end, the sheer obviousness of Shainberg and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson's take on Diane Arbus' perverse determination to examine and document the forbidden overshadows even Kidman's beautifully modulated performance, which takes Diane from brittle neurosis to a vaguely predatory ingenuousness.

Nothing much happens on the surface, but worlds of hope, hurt and determination lie right behind the characters' eyes, waiting to be discovered.

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.

Davaa's second fable of animals and the people who love them mixes aspects of ethnographic filmmaking with heart-grabbing story lines that wouldn't be too far out of place in a 1950s live-action Disney feature.

More music and less melodrama would serve audiences better.

Much ado about nothing much at all.

It's not earthshaking or life-changing, but it's cute, occasionally predictable and only requires ACTUAL idiots, like Barry, to act like idiots. As formula entertainment goes, that's a pretty sweet deal.

Only Rejtman's sharp eye for absurd detail and the bleakly subtle joke separates comedy from tragedy in this story of listless Bonaerenses chasing their own tails through successive drab rings of urban hell.

It's a fearless performance and yields some squirm-inducingly funny moments.