While sumptuously beautiful, the film is often stilted and undermined by some painfully amateurish performances that no good intentions can smooth over.

Viewers who remember Max Baer may, however, take issue with the way the film treats this charismatic fighter. In 1933, Baer became an important symbol of Jewish strength when he faced off against Hitler's favored fighter, Max Schmeling, and while reducing Baer to a bloodthirsty villain makes it easier to root for Braddock, it's an unfair bit of character assassination.

The skating photography is excellent and, like the documentary's soundtrack, songs from the Stooges, Blue Oyster Cult and the Weirdos set the proper mood. But this dramatization does nothing Peralta's documentary didn't do better.

And while Ivy League-educated psychologist Green considers himself a natural teacher, his teaching technique involves pitting students against each other and haranguing them with rants that run from gentle, good-natured ribbing to flat-out verbal abuse, delivered at an ego-crushing volume.

Like most contemporary romantic comedies, the film's plot works only if you accept that everyone behaves like a complete and utter idiot at all times.

This stunningly photographed documentary captures extraordinary images of ocean-based life.

A riot of artfully grungy hotel rooms, sleazy costumes and sordid behavior, Allan Mindel's directing debut gives off the smug air of hipsters at play, making it hard to care what happens to any of its lost souls and inept opportunists.

Despite outward appearances, Paolo Virzi's utterly charming fable is actually a razor-sharp political satire.

Readers hate to see their favorites messed with by filmmakers, and though devotees will notice changes from Brashares' novel -- some slight and some more substantial -- the film remains true to the book's spirit, and the deviations shouldn't alienate them.

Israeli director Keren Yedaya's remarkable debut feature, which won the 2004 Cannes Film Festival Camera d'Or, is a powerful study of a teenager's willingness to do anything to save her mother, a Tel Aviv prostitute who may be well beyond salvation.

An intoxicating dream of a film that speaks to the daydreamer in all of us.

Bojanov's sad subjects could as easily be in Detroit or Glasgow or Marseilles. What keeps his film from being a relentless wallow in wasted lives is its surprising conclusion.

This Canadian production -- while somewhat impressive for its low-budget roots and loose but inspired plot twists -- is a tedious exercise in shoddy horror that's just as forgettable as 99 percent of its straight-to-DVD kin.

Witless farce.

Sandler's performance is aimed squarely at the fans who love his smarty-pants man-boy shtick and Rock gets off some funny lines, but overall this is one dreary, formulaic slog through sports-movie cliches.

Slickly animated and cleverly written.

In the end it's all seductive surface and no substance, but Lough has a bold eye and a vivid sense of uniquely urban beauty.

A grim meditation on faith and betrayal that focuses on a relatively obscure corner of Holocaust history: the fate of the Catholic clergy under the Third Reich.

Christopher Browne's fun, surprisingly exciting film probably won't convert anyone convinced that bowling is something you do while downing fish sticks and beer. But it may teach them a newfound respect for the sport's champions.

Beesley's film is perfectly in sync with the Lips' unique vision.

The film is simultaneously sweet natured and sharply observed, and if love eventually conquers all, it takes its own sweet time doing it.

Touched with eerie dream sequences, the film casts a strange spell that's enhanced by the rhythmic, almost sensual depiction of the painstaking art of embroidery.

The politics get pretty short shrift, but cigarettes and liquor are everywhere.

The verdict: More thoughtful than Harlin's version, but hardly the invigorating mix of shocks and metaphysical horror needed to revitalize the Exorcist franchise.

Weber's losers really are losers -- envious, spiteful, complacent, mean-spirited and ultimately boring malcontents pickled in their own poison, and they drag his film down with them.

Though it ultimately devolves into megabudget Hollywood action-movie cliches by way of John Woo, Lee's handsome blockbuster is an entertaining variation on the American formulas that have colonized world cinema.

Much of the film's appeal rests with Thai soap-opera actress Panyopas, whose bittersweet charm smoothes over the uglier aspects of Tum's spiral into crime.

The battle sequences and lightsaber battles are gripping, and for every scene that doesn't deliver the goods, there's another that hums with surprising intensity.