Manages to make its live actors sound -- and even sometimes look -- computer generated. This wan, sluggish comedy wouldn't pass muster as a premium-cable original, but here it is on the big screen.

Throbs with an ambition that sends it soaring, then brings it down.

The most elegantly crafted and confidently directed of all his (Cronenberg's) films, it's a calm, chilling portrait of a blighted soul and, just as calmly but quite stunningly, an evocation of the thought processes behind the blight.

Affecting but formulaic.

Edward Norton makes an art of self-containment. No contemporary actor gives less away to more effect, and he's at his closely held best in 25th Hour, a drama of redemption, directed by Spike Lee, that seldom rises to the level of his performance.

Casts a spell and then some -- a ringing testament to the power of motion pictures.

J.Lo should sue her handlers for damages.

A surprising, entirely beguiling little film.

This ambitious, entertaining movie, which showed at film festivals earlier this year, has been hailed in some quarters as a masterpiece worthy of Arthur Miller's Willy Loman or Sinclair Lewis's George Babbitt. Yet its social comments are stained by condescension, and its uplift is sustained by sentimentality that Mr. Nicholson's prickly Everyman can't conceal.

Mr. Crystal underplays his role wisely and well, while Mr. De Niro parodies -- maybe the better word is pillages -- himself and his career with scary gusto.

Adaptation, like "Being John Malkovich" before it, is far from a well-made film, even on its own flaky terms. But it's a brave, sometimes brilliant one, with a phantasmagoric ending, full of love and hope, that defeats prose description. Never was an adaptation more original.

By turns intriguing, boring, frustrating, amazing and stirring, this is a tour de force that, necessarily, lacks dramatic force, but one that creates a dream state of seemingly limitless dimensions.

A movie of minimalist moments (Molly's tiniest gestures speak volumes) and lovely, almost holy tableaux.

An appallingly tedious Hanukkah comedy that must have bubbled up from the Porta Potti of his subconscious.

Unexpectedly thoughtful, as well as touching.

A movie's script is its fate, which means this one is doomed.

What's new here is a severe deficit of style, or even craftsmanship, both in the action sequences and what passes for human interludes.

Beautiful (sometimes sublimely so), daring (sometimes outrageously so), seriously crazed and terrifically funny.

Ever since the movie made a brief appearance late last year to qualify for Oscar consideration, Mr. Caine's performance has been hailed as the best of his career, and surely that's true.

Everything and everyone is observed sharply, succinctly and indelibly.

Has its flaws, but it's better, as well as darker, than the first. It's also longer, by nine minutes, but hold that protest to the Kidney Foundation; the time flies, albeit in fits and starts, like players on a Quidditch field.

May be something of a stunt, but it's a fascinating stunt that holds your attention from the start to shortly before the finish.

Affecting, even touching, provided you can put up with its sclerotic pace.

A glorious feature-length documentary -- This film will leave an indentment, and a deep one, on anyone who loves great, joyous music and cares about the people who make it.

The tone is that of a telenovela -- soap-operatic at heart -- even though the film was adapted from a 19th-century novel.

Transcends its star's controversial career and, in the bargain, stands head, shoulders and heart above every other Hollywood movie that we've seen so far this year.

Yet dramatic energy is in short supply. The actors move about this elaborate movie museum in a modified dream state, as if living in the present while rooted in the past. But the strategy doesn't work. It's an imitation of lifelessness.

Comes briefly to life, after many longeurs -- many large longeurs in IMAX -- with the discombobulated entrance of B.E.N., a dysfunctional, hyperverbal robot voiced by Martin Short.