Like its seven subjects, it can't see past the immediate demands of addiction, and the film becomes a seemingly endless string of scenes depicting shooting up, nodding out and waiting around for the next fix.

The generally competent B-list actors are hobbled by cliché-ridden dialogue but do their best to react in remotely plausible ways each time the script nails them with some new melodramatic contrivance.

While this flight should have been permanently delayed due to extraordinarily offensive conditions, there are no signs instructing you to remain seated should you decide to discreetly exit before your tour of the unfriendly skies is over.

The movie is at its best when it's most straightforward. Flights of fancy like the child angel perched on Melvin's ceiling or his conversations with the black-clad Sweetback, who appears to undermine his confidence at crucial junctures, seem forced and pointless.

By turns profane, vulgar, unpredictable, scabrous and perpetually somewhere between buzzed and three sheets to the wind, Bukowski opened a window onto a fringe world of blue-collar drudgery and alcoholic self-obliteration with his blistering, bleakly comic dispatches from the gutter.

The film is marvelously acted all around, and the fact that there isn't a false note in the entire film is especially impressive given Kureishi's melodramatic contrivances and the fact that his characters are clichés whose behaviors are predictable at nearly every turn.

The first 45 minutes of this wickedly clever comedy features the smartest, tartest high-school satire since Alexander Payne's "Election."

Writer-director Henry LeRoy Finch's ripely overwrought exercise in Southern Gothic psychodrama, which happens to unfold in a picturesquely decaying house in Maine.

The kids, especially the Breslin siblings, are cute. Cusack is underused, but makes her annoying, potpourri-loving suburban mom seem sympathetic. And Corbett is well-cast as an eminently suitable, if slightly dull, life mate for the newly grown-up Helen.

Even those who dismiss Von Trier as a talented sadist might reconsider after seeing this revealing and ultimately poignant documentary -- and the funny thing is, on the surface it's not even about him.

It may be a simple matter of cultural dissonance, or maybe just a bad translation, but it's hard to see why this obnoxious romantic comedy about a lifetime-long relationship between two mischievous adults locked in an ongoing game of "Dares" was such a huge hit in its native France.

If any film can be considered required viewing as the conflict in Iraq continues to drag on and be reported, surely this among them.

The results are quite frightening and far superior to the lengthy gloom and doom that fill many earlier Bergman films. A magical movie, Fanny and Alexander is likely to be the achievement for which Bergman will be most remembered. (Review of Original Release)

In fact it ends, as all good romantic comedies do, with a wedding, though the identities of the newly married couple might be the least predictable thing about this cheerfully ham-fisted celebration of love and family in modern-day Madrid.

Freighted with far more serious issues than most movies of its kind but neglects or glosses over most of them.

Tierney's so-serious script lacks any trace of humor, which might actually have made this depressing film feel a bit more real.

Ratnam, known for integrating controversial cultural and political themes into popular melodramas, bundles a multitude of coming-of-age traumas into the kind of juicy, overwrought narrative that was once a Hollywood staple.

Awash in pop-culture jokes that will fly over the heads of tots and delight their parents, this vividly colored romp is a worthy sequel to the 1991 Oscar winner.

Shattering documentary.

This tepid romantic comedy not only fails to break the rules, but it follows them to the letter.

Even the dramatic heavy hitters, who include Cox, Gleeson, O'Toole and Julie Christie, as Achilles' mother, are powerless in the face of Pitt's yawning hollowness.

Not since Larry Clark's "Kids" (1995) has the threat of HIV infection been used so gratuitously, driving a narrative that ultimately has nothing to do with the AIDS crisis.

This film's rhythms suggest nothing so much as a weirdly macho telenovela, full of family drama, isn't-it-ironic humor and maudlin twists of cruel fate.

While sometimes evocative, they don't add up to a satisfying movie any more than, as several characters are cautioned, coffee and cigarettes constitute a healthy lunch.

For the first hour director Arau and his co-writer and wife, actress Arizmendi, negotiate the story's tricky mix of comedy, social satire and science fiction with surprising aplomb.

Pearce can sing, but Drum's trademark "speaking out" -- free-associative ramblings that recall Jim Morrison of the Doors at his most embarrassingly pretentious -- falls far short of the hypnotic effect Tyler describes.

A beautiful, slow-motion melodrama.

Long expert at unforgettable characterizations, Techine turns his talents toward creating an evocative sense of time and mood.