The sci-fi wonders, including an army of shuddering robo-soldiers and one-man, steam-powered bombers with delicate wood-and-linen wings, are truly marvelous and go a long way toward making up for the film's erratic pacing.

An ambitious drama about gang warfare and the culture of violence, American Me is nothing if not earnest. Unfortunately, this doesn't mean it's a particularly successful film; for every bluntly powerful moment, there's another that's crude and obvious, sometimes excruciatingly so.

Expertly executed action flick that starts out fast and winds up faster. We've seen it all before, but the execution here supersedes the concept.

While there's not much baseball played here, this is an amiable film, marked by the enjoyable cast and some lively, if not memorable, music.

Eastwood is perfection as the New Jersey shoe clerk who, like Miniver Cheevey, dreamed a nostalgic dream and took action to realize it. The actor-director could have gone over the top by satirizing the very character he played so well in spaghetti westerns; instead he gives a sincere, realistic performance that silenced detractors who thought he could only play violent loners.

The cast is charming, the sets intentionally stagy, and the musical performances fine.

Q&A is a pungent, graphic drama sabotaged by a stupid romantic sub-plot, misjudged casting and a truly abysmal soundtrack.

A tightly scripted cautionary tale about what happens when the lights go down in Southern California, hiding behind a generic action-thriller title.

A hard-hitting action thriller.

Likably low-key, character-driven dramatic comedy.

Ken Russell applies his rococo outpourings to Pete Townshend's rock opera and botches not only the visuals but the fine score.

Colors has a tentative, ambivalent feel to it--as if Hopper merely considered himself a hired gun who should avoid imposing too personal a vision on the material.

Spooky and character-driven, this stylish ghost story owes a great deal to contemporary Japanese ghost movies in general and M. Night Shyamalan's "The Sixth Sense" (1999) in particular but weaves a creepy spell all its own.

Lightweight, thoroughly charming fluff.

Sleek, stylish and crammed with girl-power action.

Trapero again proves himself a master of mood, evoking the gritty, workaday world of contemporary Argentina that helped establish him as one of the most important young directors of the new Argentine cinema.

The film's prestige is a doozy, both dazzling and preposterous, but if you're watching closely -- as Cutter advises in the film's first few minutes -- it's flawlessly set up.

A bleak, often repugnant rumination on the harsh realities of urban life, Driller Killer will offend tender sensibilities. But Ferrara is already a distinctive and conscientious talent behind the camera, unmistakably concerned with more than gore-filled exploitation.

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.

PARENTS concentrates heavily on Michael's Freudian pathology; however, in its emphasis on psychological themes, the film loses sight of its story and becomes a confused collection of isolated vignettes. In adopting the boy's single-minded perspective, it prevents its characters from developing, so that Quaid hovers and glowers, Hurt giggles and flirts, and Madorsky lurks in dark recesses without variation from beginning to end.

This melancholy mediation on aging and desire hangs on an exquisite performance from Penelope Cruz.

The story is compelling enough that even glib phrases like "healing through hip-hop" can't drag it down.

Maggie Gyllenhaal cements her reputation as a gifted, if somewhat aloof, actress in Laurie Collyer's sad character piece.

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.

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 sleek and cleverly assembled film is a brutally honest portrait of an obsessive personality, a woman whose mania for control over her weight and the world around her fed her demons and fueled her art.

Shot in grainy black and white, the film features tons of entertaining footage of the band in the studio as well as an enlightening commentary from music critics Greg Kot and David Frick.

Overall this is an assured piece of genre filmmaking that delivers the goods so stylishly it hardly matters that they aren't fresh.