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.