Sivan's film is well acted, beautifully photographed and oddly reassuring. It comes perilously close to suggesting that the injustices of colonial rule were the product of morally weak and misguided individuals rather than a system that empowered and enriched foreign interests at the expense of locals.

If the naive dramatic situations and trite idealism can be ignored, the viewer is in for an amazing spectacle of special effects in WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE.

CHAPLIN is the cinematic equivalent of a whistle-stop tour of Europe--the kind that takes you to ten cities in five days at such speed that everything melts into a vaguely entertaining blur.

Ryan is raw and remarkably good, but the film's real star is New York. Draped in post-9/11 anxiety and brimming with a free-floating fear, the city hasn't appeared this threatening since the '70s.

Writer/director Craig Rosenberg is no master of subtlety -- in fact, he seems to have only two settings, whacking excess and treacly pathos -- and the film is awash in ponderous whimsy.

There's much amiss here, with a long catalog of contrived situations that make this film a tough act to swallow.

Broad, hackneyed and stultifyingly predictable.

Goofy and surprisingly slow-moving.

Seriously flawed and not for every taste, the film was shot quickly and on the cheap, and is driven by Argento's slurred, scratchy voice and Bette Davis eyes.

That there's precious little chemistry between buffed-and-tanned stars Parker and McConaughey is only the first of this slight, overly busy film's problems.

Inspired lunacy, Pee-wee's big adventure is one of the most inventive films in recent memory. This clever and wholly original work incorporates a wide variety of cinematic tools with a fresh and unique sense of style.

The group's credo, "Live free, stay high," only confirms your worst suspicions about their real motives. And that makes it hard to feel any nostalgia for the good old days or condemn the members who came to their senses and moved on.

Though the film ends on a surprising and genuinely magical note, it takes its own sweet time getting there; some viewers will have lost patience before the denouement arrives.

The backgrounds are handsome and moody, and the character animation is less distractingly cartoonish than that of films like the otherwise breathtaking Metropolis (2001).

A train wreck of a film whose chaotic, partly improvised story and too-tricky mix of film stocks, image sizes, split-screen effects and color/B&W footage overwhelm some phenomenally beautiful sequences and a memorable performance by Saffron Burroughs.

The film has a certain easygoing charm, choppiness notwithstanding, and delivers several big laughs; if leads Cuthbert and Hirsch were as charismatic as scene-stealing supporting players Olyphant and Marquette, it might have joined the ranks of memorable teen comedies.

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

This unusually rich film tackles not only the social structuring of criminality and sexuality but race as well, and explores the ways science has been used to justify the ruthless pursuit of market interests and, eventually, apartheid itself.

There's tons of professionalism in He's Just Not That Into You, but it lacks passion -- they should have called it "Like, Actually."

It neither works as a stand-alone film nor captures the thrilling sense of somber, pulpy mystery that made "The Matrix" so compelling. Nevertheless, It brings the saga to a satisfying close, and relies less on the clumps of pop-mystical cyber gobbledy-gook that gummed up the gears of "Reloaded" and more on the powerful emotional bonds that bind Neo, Trinity, Morpheus, Niobe, Link and Zee.

Steiger and Ireland manage to give believable performances, but Bronson is unable to evoke a sense of hardness. The direction suffers from too little effective pacing and too much concentration on the pretty scenery.

If you can get past the lips, Ryan gives a touching performance as a woman determined to battle her cancer while knowing life offers no guarantees except death -- an understanding no doubt sharpened by Kasdan's own experience battling Hodgkin's disease as a teenager.

Kristofferson's performance is as monotone as his singing, showing few changes in dramatic emphasis. Unmotivated story riddled with confusion and disarray.

Wearing its patent ridiculousness on its sleeve, this slight but generally agreeable comedy integrates the Airplane/Top Secret school of non-sequitur comedy into a less explicitly parodic buddy flick.

Fawcett is given little to do other than get a suntan and try to look captivating, leaving the comic chores up to seasoned professionals Grodin and Carney, who are just great.

Thinly conceived and thoroughly shallow.

To call Christian's film unpolished is an understatement.

In the end, it all remains a dramatically inert set of talking points, and not even the high-caliber cast can make much more out of it.