You have to have a certain affection for any movie in which a stressed-out Mother Nature announces ominously, "Don't mess with me -- I'm pre-El Niño."

Anemic chronicle of money grubbing New Yorkers and their serial loveless hook ups.

Hardman is a grating, mannered onscreen presence, which is especially unfortunate in light of the fine work done by most of the rest of her cast.

Once Kim and Heidi finally meet, it becomes something much more complex: a gripping drama of culture clash and familial responsibility that also serves as a stinging metaphor for U.S. involvement in Third World nations like Vietnam.

Penn, in particular, is so subdued he's hardly there, while Hurley's seductive, hyper-articulate Adaline is actually ludicrous, sucking suggestively on ice cubes and reciting poetry like a phone-sex operator pretending to be a book-reading babe.

A modest but finely tuned look at small-town life.

The real problem with the new film, however, is a certain lack of chemistry between the leads; Wilson is game, as always, but his part is seriously underwritten, and while Murphy raises trash talking to the level of a fine art, he seems to be operating in another movie altogether.

Good-natured fun; it doesn't always work, but it's not for want of trying.

Campbell Scott's fiendishly mercurial performance as razor-tongued womanizer Roger is a revelation but it's only one of this nimble film's pleasures.

An appealing, if decidedly unconventional, buddy picture that seems to channel "Midnight Cowboy" while going its own quirky way.

Where "Charade" unfolds in a fantasy Paris full of glamorous white people, Demme's film takes place in a gray tangle of streets teeming with multi-ethnic Parisians. Newton and Robbins mimic Hepburn and Matthau, while Wahlberg is the anti-Grant, lumpen and thuggish rather than beguilingly debonair.

While the story is thin, Clouzot uses his immense skills to raise the picture above the standard for the genre.

Once the excellent Rhys and Corunder are off-screen, the film's overall staginess and the inconsistent work of the supporting cast become glaringly apparent.

Though occasionally enlivened by fanciful sequences suggesting the surreal power of Kahlo's vivid inner life, it's often mired in the mechanical accretion of incidents that blights most biographical films.

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.

A vivid telling of a familiar story -- the rise and fall of a street criminal -- bolstered by exceptional performances and a clear-eyed take on the economics of dealing and the pathology of ghetto fabulousness.

The movie is simultaneously soft and icky; the gross-out effects are grafted onto a sub-"Tales from the Crypt" ghost story that never scares up any serious chills.

In an outstanding ensemble, Spall is particularly good.

Overall, the filmmakers are a little too reverent -- it would have been interesting to hear Derrida respond to criticism leveled against deconstruction as an academic methodology -- but then again, they're not entirely in control here.

Refreshingly serious look at young women whose relative freedom doesn't mean they're particularly free.

There's terrific chemistry between Perez and Auteuil.

The story's rhythm is so bogged down in unnecessary characterization that the film can hardly breathe.

Extremely difficult but worthy film.

A sweet-natured coming-of-age/raising-of-consciousness drama.

Cocky, vulgar and very noisy picture.

Dense collage of digitally altered images often looks shockingly like some super-hip media agency's show reel.

A frighteningly good horror movie with enough solid scares to freeze the blood of ardent fans and newcomers alike.

This ultra-stylish film is far more interested in exploring its own central image -- the camera -- than the forensic minutia of the mystery.