Harlin's brisk pacing leaves little time for reflection, but the whole house of blood-spattered cards dissolves upon even cursory reflection.

The heart of the problem may be that real life youth-sports insanity has far exceeded the bounds of family-friendly comedy.

This vapid, mean-spirited comedy is Lopez's show, and though she is utterly unconvincing as a paragon of down-to-earth virtues, the last laugh was hers from the outset.

The film's bizarreness pales next to that of little-known exploitation film "Sonny Boy" (1990), which weaves similar material into something authentically nightmarish.

For all its shocking content, it remains a rather conventional psychological portrait of Oedipal attraction taken to a disturbing extreme.

The result is so intoxicating, it hardly matters that you've heard it all before.

The kind of brainy human comedy that only this formidable French auteur seems capable of making.

The real-life Modigliani did indeed live a short, tragic life, but this factually inaccurate, plodding film makes it feel twice as long.

The last word on Haskell Wexler's career hasn't been spoken, but it's hard to imagine there's much more to say about him as a bad dad.

It delivers some bracingly nasty gore scenes, but there's no spark left in the run-scream-repeat formula, and a movie whose biggest draw is profoundly untalented hotel-fortune heiress Paris Hilton is in desperate need of some juice.

Ultimately, despite striving mightily to give everyone a fair shake, the film kindled the ire of conservative Christians and Muslims anyway.

Where else are you going to find an extended riff on the weird, weird world of David Lynch movies, an homage to "The Shining" and flatulence gags in the same place?

It's an ideal collaboration: A stylish director desperately seeking substance transforms the first, somewhat flat novel of a promising young writer into powerful and brutally honest film about a highly controversial subject.

But while the material is interesting, it's not substantial enough to sustain a feature-length treatment.

Writer-director Richard Ledes' dreadfully misconceived, pitch-black, film-noir comedy seeks to find the humor in the post-WWII mental hygiene boom, and the result is way off target.

No voice is more vivid than that of the writer of O, who died in 2002.

Driven equally by big questions and the abiding desire for small pleasures, like a decent cup of tea, it's an eccentric, mind-bending head trip that greets every catastrophe with an endearingly goofy smile that embodies Hitchhiker's Guide's Zen mantra: Don't Panic!

It's even louder and dumber than the first XXX, but if watching things fall down and go boom in a very big way makes you cheer, you're in luck.

The almost supernatural turn which Kim's lovely film takes during its final act, however, is totally unexpected, and just one reason why Kim ranks as one of the most justly celebrated talents in contemporary Korean cinema.

Set in Paris in 1975, this sensitive, low-key film is another exquisitely crafted volume in French director Benoit Jacquot's collection of films about young Frenchwomen at pivotal points in their lives.

Inspired mockumentary-a-clef so clotted with in-jokes that it should come with a crib sheet.

The look is rough, but Bujalski's talent is evident.

In stripping her potentially lurid material of salacious appeal, Martel also makes it murky and oddly arid, a mind-numbing exercise rather than an experience.

Its appeal lies in the powerhouse performances delivered by Dench and Smith.

Genuinely gripping, balancing the travails of constructing the tunnel against the characters' stories with considerable skill.

It's informative as far as it goes, but the film's raison d'etre is the simple sight of large wildlife up close and personal, and it's mesmerizing.

Without any deeper consideration of the matter, the film is a grueling experience, and 90 minutes is simply far too long to spend in the company of Jesse Power.

Its talky, sluggish script is so bereft of thrills -- intellectual or otherwise -- that even the film's one masterfully staged sequence... falls flat.