Adrian Belic's straightforward film shows the men in action and allows them to tell -- in their salty, no-B.S. way -- their own stories of how and why they do what they do.

Tarantinoid...the machinations are all familiar enough that your unoccupied brain may drift off to wonder how Hartnett's made a career out of bad haircuts.

Every isolated moment or trapping that might be excused in a better film leaps up like a cowlick that just won't behave: Demi Moore drawling through 'Louie Louie' comes to mind.

Hugely ambitious and visually commanding...the kind of artful, textured, defiantly non-mainstream gamble more filmmakers should be taking.

Are Guest and Levy scared of biting the hand that feeds or simply out of touch? In either case, the answer can't be good.

A creepy look at the borderline personalities on both sides of the line between celebrity and citizen.

Will the audience be 'rocked' by the band's wily charms or let down by a slack story that repeats too many decade-old jokes? Stoked or bummed? Everyone knows rock is about rebellion, so f*@# it: call me stoked.

If you can surrender to the film's crazy convictions, it's a popcorn-munching wild ride worth taking.

The greatest adventure and saddest irony--taught alike by teachers to students and students to teachers--is that the big picture of history is writ small and ruthlessly unforgiving in each life--indeed, in every moment.

It takes only a small leap of imagination to get from Jim Davis to GI Steven Green, the 21-year-old alleged rapist-murderer...men like Jim are trying to unwind from something worse than a bad day at the office.

We'd all be better off if we could find our grace without a camera's obstruction, but ironically, Block's film provides a useful direction to see our way.

Though its humble pleasures give cause to pause and reflect on the Spanish filmmaker's occasionally overpraised output, Volver is a diverting melodrama...

It's like a Family Channel movie escaped and hid out in a movie theater.

More concerned with character, well-timed sight and sound gags, and witty banter than it is with smooth plotting....[but] well-worth the plunge.

No film in the history of cinema has succeeded in being more 'outrageously funny'...

That the narration and Field's God's-eye camera draw attention to the film's form doesn't detract from its function: to give us that 'second' in the mirror...

Conversations with God. Nice work if you can get it, and you can get it if you try.

Steel assembles a scrapbook of suicide: reminiscences of surviving family and friends and magnetically morbid caught-on-tape records of people's last living moments on Earth.

Plays like a political Heat, but for the sake of the scrupulously researched social history, a bit of artificially induced pulse-pounding can be forgiven.

When Jeliza-Rose announces in the first scene, 'Today, we're all going on a great trip!', know that it's to the center of an emotional black hole.

The wit of the show is in the clever transplanting of human situations to animal ones, which in turn reflect on the foibles of our daily lives.

Once she makes the sound feminist point that it wasn't easy being a girl in 1768, Coppola proves intellectually taxed.

Broyles and Haggis redundantly hammer home the same point in scene after scene...while fail[ing] in 132 minutes fully to breathe life into their triad of reluctant heroes.

With its compulsive theatricality, Running With Scissors enacts what may be the most unpleasant brand of insanity in a film full of them.

[Rider's] squirrelly film debut amps up Horowitz's wry humor, putting silliness in unintentional competition with the film's action and dramatic elements.

With a bit more discipline, McGrath's wide-ranging film would be the equal of its more straightforward, older brother, but Infamous' many charms deserve their own moment in the sun.

If Shimizu's aging idea of rage-made wraiths were true, caterwauling critics would be crawling all over the multiplex right about now.

A sincere examination of the moment, on the cusp of adulthood, when children must decide whether to get out of the only life they've known or honor it by staying home.

Though American Hardcore doesn't achieve a cogent and authoritative history, it succeeds in giving the general impression of the early-'80s hardcore punk scene.

Delicately balances the inherent drama of the tragic circumstances with the comedy of manners that is the Royal Family's dysfunction, and Britain's ambivalent attitudes to the same.

Though less extreme, the Up series suggests a real-life Truman Show, with subjects sometimes reluctantly allowing their lives to be recorded on film.

Cook's usual persona is annoying, but with his volume turned down here, he's even more of a zero.

More than a stunt...a sincere film that explores cynical sexual discord and hopefully concludes that forgiveness and sexual healing can repair the disrupted currents of modern urban life.

Ours is not to question why; ours is but to watch 'em die.

Kept in balance, The Departed's verbal and visual gifts, gun-toting menace, down-and-dirty existentialism, and bristling suspense should please both sides of the movie aisle.

Scorsese keeps a good handle on the turbulent material of Hughes's sprawling life... spectacular... fleet... admirably eccentric.

Emblematizes De Palma's refusal to take Hollywood seriously.

While women may certainly apply, it's primarily the guys who will find District B13 irresistible.

Flimsy, fake-looking weaponry, bad wigs, grandiose scoring, overacting, simplistic dialogue, illogically elaborate staging, and a plot that goes out of its way to be predictable...

Resembles Crumb in its depiction of damaged souls whose only refuge is art.

Serves two useful purposes: to collect some of the Beatle's wittiest social barbs, and to inform a young audience...

The sum of Gondry's parts may be a hole, but the parts can be pretty darn clever and captivating.

Pure Hollywood hokum, the sort of picture the Duke might star in today. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Aside from lazy screenwriting.

Succeed[s] in recreating the simple pleasures of the old Ealing comedies, which let talented character actors shine.