Though the raw material is juicy stuff, the details and the larger picture never come together and the cast is uneven.

Rescued from its inclination to smug, celebrity-testimonial-driven hagiography by Gehry's own considerable charm and infectious enthusiasm.

Film does show why so many young people raised in such communities find it so difficult to ever leave.

Klapisch's use of split screens, fragmented images and nouvelle vague-ish editing would be annoying if it weren't so in keeping with the youthful exuberance his characters haven't quite lost.

Nat comes off as flat-out crazy and more sad than amusing or heroic.

The end result is the very definition of a summer movie: breezy, undemanding and a carefully balanced blend of the familiar and the not-quite-what-you-expected.

This failure is especially surprising because Zwigoff not only reunited with "Ghost World's" writer, ingenious graphic artist Dan Clowes, but he aimed to satirize a rarefied sphere both know all too well: the art world.

Throughout the film, doors slam, windows shatter and poor, battered Betsy wakes up screaming with tiresome regularity; even Sutherland appears bored by it all.

The child actors are bland, the adult characters are forced to act like dunderheads to keep the paper-thin plot going, and the generic-sounding Jimmy Buffett songs are just a LITTLE out of sync with the film's target age group.

Driven by Edward Norton's and Evan Rachel Wood's riveting performances, writer-director David Jacobson's tense drama samples bits of cinematic Americana from sources as diverse as "Shane," "Badlands" and "Taxi Driver."

A sweat-slicked, near-abstract ballet of blood and sand.

Uneven tragicomedy.

The lesson -- that three into two won't go --has been learned by other improbably attractive couples in "bold" movies about youthful experimentation and its long-term consequences, but the word never seems to get around.

Mitevska telescopes centuries of conflict between nations into an intimate story of siblings whose hopes for the future are being slowly poisoned by the sins of the past.

Bendinger pulls out all the stops visually, using bold set design, frantic editing, extreme angles and computer image multiplying that turns what begins as a Busby Berkeley exercise in synchronized movement into a kaleidoscopic infinity of handsprings and back flips.

One of the most harrowing, viscerally upsetting films ever made.

Sentimental, manipulative, predictable and utterly charming.

Once you get past the lengthy, graphic geyser-of-liquid-excrement gag, it's not as irredeemably vulgar as it might have been.

If there's a gay cliche who doesn't flounce through this feel-good German comedy, he must have been out of town when the casting call went out, but its fundamental good nature is tough to resist.

Bill Murray plays the secondary role of a nameless American gag writer brimming with one-liners about the absurdity of Cuban life, Dustin Hoffman has a cameo as kvetching gangster Meyer Lansky.

Works better as a look at life among a family of Croatian immigrants in Vienna during the nightmare years of the Balkan conflicts than an exploration of the psychosexual tension between a prostitute and her son.

The message this oddball film propounds is pretty much standard stuff on the Oprah circuit.

It concludes Park's trilogy on a dual note of circular tragedy and fragile hope, while working equally well as an introduction to his universe of retribution and repentance or as a stand-alone thriller with a darkly feminist twist.

It's full of humor, pathos and a deep humanism that comes as a warm blast in this age of lifeless, cinematic junk.

It's simply one of the most beautiful films he's (Hou Hsiao Hsien) made to date.

Gets the details right while missing the big picture.

Douglas and Sutherland do crackling hostility with devilish glee, and the fireworks are nothing if not entertaining.

Runs out of story a good half hour before it runs out of spooky images, but it comes to a quietly chilling conclusion far more haunting than any bloody mayhem.