Takashi Miike's frenetic comic yakuza thriller embodies the best and worst this notorious Japanese genre auteur has to offer: It's endlessly inventive, consistently intelligent and sickeningly savage.

Carpenter is trying for a satire of advertising and consumerism under late capitalism, and although the film is great fun at first--especially when depicting the world through Nada's glasses--it rarely rises above the intellectual level of a comic book.

Barber's screenplay is mired in cliches that got old in 1935.

First-time writer-director Matthew Porterfield's small-scale, 16mm slice-of-life drama has the hazy, sticky rhythms of a hot summer day and the minimal narrative of a classic European art film.

This movie is a dreary endurance test.

For all its action, suspense, and intricate plotting, THE PACKAGE comes across as a mostly leaden entry in the political-paranoia thriller category.

It takes a certain genius to make butchered corpses, sociopathic lunacy and meth-fueled debauchery nerve-scrapingly dull, and German director Marc Schoelermann and screenwriters Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (Crank) possess it.

Has a certain silly, kid-friendly charm.

As the Bond series moves deeper into the 1970s, the emphasis moves away from the inventive scripts that made the best Sean Connery films fine examples of the spy genre and toward the kind of feats of daring and visual spectacle that abound in The Spy Who Loved Me.

One hopes Koury will return to this interesting project to flush out the bigger story that continues to lurk just below the surface.

Though the script's twists and turns are fairly conventional and the Davis subplot is handled in an awkwardly obvious way, first-time feature filmmaker Robert Connolly understands the power of style.

The frat brothers have some surprisingly touching moments, and their diverse but perfectly matched personalities generate a fairly steady stream of laugh-out-loud moments.

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.

A risky, not entirely successful comedy about mental disability, based on the novel by Sherwood Kiraly.

Singleton gets points for exposing the hypocrisy of "politically correct" institutions, but stilted dialogue and cardboard characterizations undermine the message.

The entirely computer-generated Hulk is a surprisingly expressive creation — it certainly gives a better performance than Connelly — but the action is late in coming and feels like a long set-up for the inevitable sequel.

This sequel to Alfred Hitchcock's classic is surprisingly good. In Psycho II, Norman is a victim of crazed people who insist on persecuting him and, as a result, seems incredibly sane by comparison. Unfortunately the end to Psycho II contradicts this development, turning Norman into a leering loon in preparation for another sequel.

A very tough movie, Brubaker is not for the squeamish. Director Stuart Rosenberg, whose spotty career includes credits ranging from Move to The Amityville Horror, moved into a higher strata with this one, but no matter who's directing him, one can't escape the feeling that Redford is the man behind the man behind the camera.

The fun is in the mayhem, and there's plenty of it.

Some good gags and expert comedy performances.

An enjoyable but mindless hour and a half of car wrecks that span several states.

Bresson's vision of the miseries of 15th century life -- which was undeniably nasty, brutish and short -- comes dangerously close to the comic squalor of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

The characters are two-dimensional and the story is intensely formulaic.

When characters aren't quoting Alfred de Musset, they're speaking in aphorisms of their own, and the dialogue is stylized and stilted. Happily, Kaas, one of France's most popular jazz singers, has a sensuous, sonorous voice, and Lelouch uses it as often as possible; in many ways, the film is a musical.

Even if you think you know a little something about world music, Cuba's cultural riches may come as a surprise.

Sigourney Weaver and Alan Rickman imbue screenwriter Angela Pell's characters with a quiet authenticity that's surprisingly moving.

The result isn't exactly funny, just profoundly peculiar and even occasionally, unexpectedly poignant.

By no means a landmark, but it is a remarkably pleasant surprise -- so few movies aimed for the whole family show an understanding of why it's actually healthy to pretend.