Unforeseeably bad things can happen to good performers.

A visionary film with dramatic myopia.

Too labored to be romantic and too derivative to be funny.

A gothic thriller called Cold Creek Manor extrudes an 80-minute idea -- I may be overgenerous here -- into 118 minutes that feel like an eternity.

To enjoy what's enjoyable in The Fighting Temptations, you've got to take in the music and shut out the words -- not the lyrics of the wonderful songs, but the dialogue stuffed into actors' mouths.

Mr. McCanlies's style lurches between the lyrical, the fantastical (flashbacks to the uncles' youth) and the clumsily antic, and Mr. Osment's performance is woefully stiff and inexpressive.

It is, simply and stirringly, a kind of beau ideal of education, a vision of how the process can work at its best.

Cleverly conceived, skillfully made and performed with unflagging verve, it's a change of pace (slower) and scale (smaller) for Mr. Scott, the director of such pounding epics as "Gladiator" and "Black Hawk Down." Yet this intimate, intricate con about a couple of petty con men selling water filtration systems is also remote and forgettable in the end, a lapidary icicle.

Giddily funny in a singularly American idiom, and shot, by Lance Acord, with an eagle eye for cultural absurdities, Ms. Coppola's film is also a meditation on love and longing, shot through with a sensibility that's all the more surprising for being so unfashionably tender.

Squanders endless opportunities for sharp satire, keeping to a steady course of tame, toothless comedy, and wrapping things up with the kind of vapid ending "The Brady Bunch" would be proud to call its own.

The distance between tawdry and tedious can be amazingly short. It is traveled with Concorde speed in the arch Party Monster.

Goes down fighting, but it goes down just the same.

As the hilariously foul-mouthed, sweet-souled Dr. S, he (Wayans) slaps Marci X to life every time he's on screen.

Mr. Chan proves yet again that he has the virtuosic grace -- and goofiness -- of any of the great clowns of the silent era, and a complete refusal to abide by the laws of gravity. Do let us be clear, however, that the movie's plot, minus a few roundhouse kicks, is straight out of the Scooby-Doo playbook.

Moronic. idiotic. Insulting. Pathetic. But enough with the sweet talk.

Walks a fine line between bold indie film, with the attendant in-your-face roughness, and sodden Lifetime Original Movie.

By the climax, the adult has finally become a responsible though still charming citizen; the child has become age appropriate and, yes, even cuter. Tsunami swell of music. Roll the credits. Minus the charm, that pretty much sums up Uptown Girls.

Pirandello didn't have a patch on its complexities. Here's a popular entertainment with an eclectic soundtrack raising penetrating questions of identity in astonishing sequences that interweave live action with comic-book art.

A fine, heartfelt film, sometimes harrowing in its violence but blessedly free of pretension or bombast, even though it aspires to -- and achieves -- the stature of a classic Western.

A generally mirthless comedy of manners.

Looks like the deformed spawn of a development process gone awry.

See The Magdalene Sisters for its own sake; the performances alone are inspirational. But see it too as an example of how powerful a feature film still can be in the hands of an impassioned filmmaker.

The good news about Claude Lelouch's And Now Ladies and Gentlemen -- there's no bad news -- is that the man who made the sublimely superficial "A Man and a Woman" almost four decades ago has grown in wisdom and artistry, but hasn't lost his love of glossy surfaces.

This portrait of a failing marriage is one of the summer's great discoveries, and a marvel of mercurial intimacy.

A gross-out saga that sentient adults should avoid like the plague.

The worst movie -- all right, the worst allegedly major movie -- of our admittedly young century. More stupefying follies may come, but it's impossible to imagine how they'll beat this one for staggering idiocy, fatuousness or pretension.

A surprise and a not-so-guilty pleasure.

For all its pictorial splendor and carefully calculated drama, this film misses greatness by a country mile.