Mark Holcomb

Nawal's travails are more in the vein of a Latin American soap opera than Greek tragedy, and Jeanne and Simon's climactic, genuinely god-awful discovery plays like artistic sleight-of-hand rather than the profoundly tautological revelation it aspires to be.

Tender irony and dark humor abound in Israeli director Eran Riklis's latest account of bureaucracy colliding with burgeoning compassion.

Porterfield intersperses these delicately underplayed scenes with doc-style question-and-answer exchanges that, while initially jarring, achieve maximum cumulative impact.

A wispy mix of boy-boy romance and noir-lite potboiler, the Shumanski brothers' (Wrecked) latest wastes a promising premise by loading up on tender whimsy and skimping on grit.

This earnest, well-observed weepy has more depth than its genteel trappings might imply.

Unfortunately, Rae's film is split down the middle, and the appeal of its latter half depends on your tolerance for earnest politico-poetry set to wailing rock guitar and Native American chants and extraneously endorsed by celebrity talking heads. The backstory portion of the film, though, is riveting.

Comfortably familiar. It lacks the tension between grandeur and intimacy that characterizes the films it apes.

Continues Disney's trend of crafting animated movies as much for adult viewers as for their pre-adolescent progeny.

An exhilarating serving of movie fluff.

Treading the same supernatural turf trampled by "Somewhere in Time" and "Frequency," director Alejandro Agresti's gooey, ostensibly spooky romance yarn The Lake House flounders less on its thudding familiarity than on its mood- killing dourness.

Unusually impassioned indie.

The scenario recalls everything from "High Noon" to "Unforgiven," but Costner is less interested in grappling with the grim ambiguities underlying those films than in codifying them. There's still much to like, including the warm, thoughtful performances and cinematographer James Muro's fearless use of natural light.

Suffice it to say that if you've always wondered how a fish out of water and a band of resourceful yokels would behave in the Quebec hinterlands, this is your movie.

Stupefyingly benign.

Despite its affinity for whimsy over realism, Small Voices effectively captures the embittered desperation and ragged dedication of its exploited teachers.

It's a remarkably assured and humane feature debut.

These after-school specials are distinctly depoliticized and seem tailored for Western audiences, so the African settings feel oddly superfluous.

Happily, beneath the film's nostalgic veneer and tooth-rattling visual and aural effects lies a mature ambiguity that's unusual for a holiday blockbuster -- and all but unheard of in a Tony Scott movie.

The result is a film as tenacious, peculiar, and likable as Burt Munro himself.

By turns whimsical and painful.

The results are predictably lachrymose, especially with the reinstated "unhappy" ending from the original French version.

Rifkin milks the generic Bukowski-land setting for all its melodramatic potential, but what little grace his tale of precarious skid-row dignity achieves is pushed into the margins by predictable plotting and tiresome histrionics.

Most Wanted isn't aiming for social commentary, but it isn't too difficult to enjoy its good-natured humor.

What keeps Murderball from devolving into redemptive drivel is its insistence on treating the players it profiles as jocks first and disabled men second.

With its lukewarm gender politicking and clumsy performances, Make a Wish achieves only one real distinction: It has to be the dullest lesbian campout movie ever made.

Eschewing the jock-like aversion to "artiness" inherent in most sports docs, John Hyams's contemplative snapshot of professional bull riding, Rank, ups the ante for the form.

What finally makes Town Bloody Hall so compelling -- and unsettling -- is the impression that such serious, spirited debate is a thing of the past.

A fresh and uncompromising account of emotional self-immolation and romantic flux. And it has a happy ending to boot.