Mackenzie and Marber opt for an anonymous viewpoint of clinical detachment, which generates about the same psychodramatic tension as reading the "DSM-IV."

The mysticism only mystifies; its hieroglyphics are vividly rendered, but Bee Season never manages to spell them out.

A widescreen wallow in socially enforced slum nihilism brought to you by Miramax, Tsotsi could be pegged as "City of God" relocated to the Soweto shanties, but it eschews the ironic swagger and strobe-speed action of Fernando Meirelles's lurid jigsaw for a more conventional arc.

Oddly, in representing a private conflict as the microcosm of an unsolvable catastrophe, Free Zone only manages to miniaturize both.

[Rhys Meyers] remains trapped in an enervating road movie - shelved so long that Rhys Meyers still appears to have baby fat - summed up when Finbar, who turns up in Finland (natch), asks whey-faced Danny, "You couldn't find anything better to do than to come find me?!"

She (Dunst) provides the only major element of Bring It On that plays as tweaking parody rather than slick, strident, body-slam churlishness.

Gonick's visceral impulses have drawn comparisons with John Waters, but the starry-eyed collision of gross-out gags and candy-sweet sentiment owes as much of a debt to the Farrellys as Bruce LaBruce.

Can any American filmmaker other than the Farrellys make a rom-com in which the principals engage in activities apart from the tiresomely tireless dissection of rom?

Arriving just after the best year for animated film in recent memory, Fantasia 2000 doesn't play like a celebration. In its sentimental yearning for a golden age when another one's upon us, it feels a little like a rebuke.

The last scene reads like an admission of defeat.

Too flimsily built and baldly unfunny to bolster Cruz's charms, but Almodóvar's blessed Virgin is, as usual, winning and guilelessly seductive.

Mehta feels compelled to twist the screw, shamelessly plying her audience with mawkish tropes wearing the garb of "innocence."

Hysterical but inorganic, lacking blood, sweat, or tears.

Slack, saccharine script.

Agathe de la Boulaye, as The Painter, gives off an appealing air of good-natured amusement, which is appropriate given her surroundings.

The exposition is thick, the characterization choppy, the wigs terrible.

Not a movie that can afford to take itself seriously.

Like grieving itself, the film is awkward, messily honest, and sometimes darkly funny.

The Wedding Planner achieves the dubious but perversely impressive feat, for its 90-minute duration, of neutering Jennifer Lopez.

Ms. Cruz...once again proves her inability to give a bad performance even under the worst of circumstances.

Jones's documentary, named for the opening song on Foxtrot, is most effective as a poison-pen missive to Corporate Rock.

The movie is a technical marvel from its lysergic cinematography (by Decha Srimantra) to its pulsing-vessel sound design, but it has no identity apart from its influences, however dazzlingly they're deployed.

The Road Home is foremost enthralled, however, with its lead actress -- wide-eyed and pigtailed, revered in close-up after stunned close-up.

A genuine consciousness-raiser, but it's less a social-realist narrative than a high-volume rally.

The script offers neither a sustained narrative arc nor strong characterizations.

A startling letdown after (Léa Pool's) plaintive, understated coming-of-age tale "Set Me Free."

A discombobulating mix of blood-and-grit docu-realism and moony multiplex contrivance.

The film allots far too much time to the cultural exchange program between the fugitive and his aide, in which Otomo can recap his sorrowful biography to a sympathetic audience surrogate.