Newsday's Movie Reviews

'Starting Out in the Evening'

Andrew Wagner knows the world of the Upper West Side Jewish intelligentsia from the inside. In the vivacious comedy "The Talent Given Us," he related the road trip of a New York City family with photo-realistic precision, its effect magnified by the cunning deployment of his own father, mother and sister as his actors.

'I'm Not There'

Todd Haynes has thrown down the gauntlet with "I'm Not There," and not just because he remakes Bob Dylan from simply the poet laureate of his generation into the first living celebrity/ singer/songwriter to be portrayed in one movie by six people - including a woman (Cate Blanchett) and a 12-year-old African-American boy (Marcus Carl Franklin).

'Enchanted'

If I were an 8-year-old girl - OK, make that an 8-year-old girl clever enough to make informed connections between 1980s pop and post-millennial Top 40 - I would think "Enchanted" was better than a week of snow days or 10 Justin Timberlake concerts. But I must report that despite its scattered charms and the magnetism of its leads, "Enchanted" is a shimmering pastiche of missed opportunities.

'This Christmas'

Anyone old enough to remember vintage TV game shows such as "I've Got a Secret" or "What's My Line?" may recognize some of the behavioral patterns exhibited in "This Christmas," a teeming, warm-hearted family melodrama whose characters may need to familiarize themselves with the title of another old game show: "To Tell the Truth."

'Hitman'

In the realm of sensitive-assassin movies like "Hitman," the viewer is expected to come equipped with all kinds of knowledge about genetic engineering, corporate espionage, and the nuanced machinations of post-Soviet governments. However, when the film cuts to the snowy "Dr. Zhivago" landscape, the subtitle tells you we are now in "Moscow - Russia." Just in case you thought it was Idaho.

'August Rush'

If there is anything more deflating than a captivating child actor as he transitions into gawky adolescence, it is watching it happen in a lousy movie.

'The Mist'

Stephen King is all things to all filmmakers. To Frank Darabont, he's a left-of-Noam-Chomsky nihilist who thinks the military and the religious right are to blame for anything and everything that ails us.

'Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium'

When a toy shop is about to be abandoned by the man who has watched over it for the better part of 200 years, it can be forgiven if it shows symptoms of acute separation anxiety.

'Beowulf'

Here's my five cents - or whatever it's worth - about the high-tech, performance-capture animation technique director Robert Zemeckis uses in his version of "Beowulf." No matter how "real" everything is made to look, no matter how the technique stretches the plausible to breathtaking degrees, you're still aware that it's all animation. And dazzling technique alone will always keep the audience at a distance - albeit an enthralled distance - if the film doesn't also offer emotional depth and complexity.

'Margot at the Wedding'

"Margot at the Wedding" is a dryly written and sensitively performed movie about people you can't bear being around for more than five minutes. There's no getting around either of these incompatible aspects of writer-director Noah Baumbach's follow-up to his Oscar-nominated "The Squid and the Whale."

'Redacted'

Those of us who regard Brian De Palma as a great, misunderstood American director revere him for the same qualities, more or less, that make his detractors crazy. That is to say, it is impossible for him to make a movie without calling a lot of attention to the mechanics and artifice of making movies.

'Love in the Time of Cholera'

"Love in the Time of Cholera" suffers from a serious case of Big Movie-itis.

'The Life of Reilly'

If your chief claim to fame is working game shows done up like Dame Edna's seafaring nephew, the world may not be banging at your door with offers for your life story. Charles Nelson Reilly wrote one, anyway, in the form of a one-man memoir that lifted many a broken spirit Off-Broadway in the wintry shadow of the 9/11 attacks. And an exuberant story it is, at least as digested and heightened in this truncated performance, filmed before an audience at the end of the show's L.A. engagement. (Reilly died in May from complications of pneumonia.)

'What Would Jesus Buy?'

The answer to the title question is an Xbox 360, at least according to some of the knuckleheads interviewed for this pseudo-expose of America's Christmas buying habits.

'Southland Tales'

In this era of franchise cash cows such as Harry Potter and "Pirates of the Caribbean," a body can grow very nostalgic for the '70s, a decade when there were still studio executives crazy enough to bankroll the risque fancies of Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman and Francis Ford Coppola in their visionary prime.

'Lions for Lambs'

Probe beneath the din of heated rhetoric and impassioned banter that makes up "Lions for Lambs" and you can feel the exasperation of its director/co-star Robert Redford and writer Matthew Michael Carnahan ("The Kingdom") as they haul this unwieldy polemic into the mainstream. It's as if the movie were saying to its audience: After all the documentaries and dramatizations detailing all the lamentable fallout of American foreign policy since 9/11, you still don't seem to be listening. So we're going to stop showing and just start telling, if necessary, even yelling this stuff in your ears.

'No Country for Old Men'

Few actors convey the fatigue of disillusionment as plangently as Tommy Lee Jones.

'Fred Claus'

To call "Fred Claus" the cinematic equivalent of fruitcake may be too generalized a slur, unfairly taking in those who are to fruitcakes what Alice Munro is to short fiction.

'Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037'

There's a subgenre of cinema that revels in the making of things, tangible objects whose creation might appeal to the mind's eye, but grabs its hand as well. The thing might be the Sistine Chapel ("The Agony and the Ecstasy"). It might be Limoges china ("Les Destinées Sentimentales"). Somewhere in between lies Ben Niles' gorgeously composed and photographed making-of movie, about the gestation and birth of a 9-foot Steinway concert grand.

'Steal a Pencil for Me'

Some may think the Holocaust has nothing new to offer up, but Michele Ohayon says otherwise. In her expertly made "Steal a Pencil for Me," she tells of Jack Polak, who presents the thesis of the film: "I was in concentration camp with my wife and my girlfriend. It wasn't easy."

'Saawariya'

This hot-house hallucination by director Sanjay Leela Bhansali suggests a subcontinental "American in Paris," except there are no Americans and the Paris in question is a Las Vegas hotel. Based (very loosely) on Fyodor Dostoevsky's "White Nights," it finds common ground between the films of Stanley Donen, and the conventions of the Bollywood musical (beyond all the singin' in the rain).

'Choking Man'

Can a morbidly introverted Ecuadoran dishwasher find happiness with an effervescent Chinese waitress in the shadow of the El train in Jamaica? It may be the plot question, but it's hardly the point in this intriguing drama from writer-director (and music-video pioneer) Steve Barron.

'War/Dance'

If crowd-pleasing documentaries such as "Spellbound" or "Mad Hot Ballroom" weren't as prevalent as they've lately become, then "War/Dance" might have an easier time being taken seriously by those who think it somewhat underplays the context of a brutal civil war in northern Uganda at the expense of its rousing chronicle of children from that war zone competing in a nationwide contest of scholastic musicians and dancers.

'American Gangster'

"American Gangster" opens with an incendiary tableau that finds Denzel Washington, as Harlem monster-in-training Frank Lucas, lighting a match to some poor slob for crimes unspoken. He shoots him dead, finally, but not before the wretch has tasted the agony of an ignominious death.

'Martian Child'

Those who, as children, felt coziest in their own private zone of benign weirdness will find much to identify with in "Martian Child," especially at the outset. Indeed, there's a lovely little zone of deadpan whimsy sustained through the first couple of acts by its two principals, John Cusack as science-fiction writer David Gordon and Bobby Coleman as his adopted child Dennis, who insists he's from Mars. Their chemistry mostly beguiles until the movie just can't help itself and dives headlong into a giant vat of sticky melodramatic contrivance.

'Darfur Now'

Can art move us to take action? And if its specific goal is to stir us to action, can it be art?

'Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten'

Rock music seems to be producing fewer and fewer icons like Joe Strummer, the lead singer of The Clash who died in 2002. A musician who valued integrity and meaning even while operating inside the glitzy record industry - and, later, well outside of it - Strummer regarded music as more than entertainment, a larger force that had the power to transform lives, and perhaps the world.

'Bee Movie'

Possibly not since Alfred Hitchcock uncaged a flock of mourning doves in the center of Times Square to pitch "The Birds" has an animal picture generated as much dopey stunt-mongering and stumping as "Bee Movie."

'Dan in Real Life'

Dan Burns seems, on the surface, to be yet another of those anal-retentive klutzes on which Steve Carell's been all but cornering the market. His eponymous "Dan in Real Life" is a widowed advice columnist intent on carrying on his gig while single-handedly raising his lively handful of daughters.

'Before the Devil Knows You're Dead'

Has a strip mall ever felt as bleak and sorrowful as the one that provides the scene of the crime for "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead"?

'Jimmy Carter Man From Plains'

The most action-packed movie out this week doesn't contain a single car crash, CGI explosion or shoot-out. Some nasty words are exchanged, and the smoky aftermath of a suicide bombing can be glimpsed on a TV screen. But there is otherwise so much crackling in the one-man megathlon that is "Jimmy Carter Man From Plains," the book-tour movie could displace the spelling-bee and crossword-puzzle flick as this year's "Transformers" for the voting-age set.

'Music Within'

The ceaselessly babbling protagonist of "Music Within" is Richard Pimental (Ron Livingston), a would-be debating star who lost his hearing while serving in Vietnam and went on to help pass the Americans With Disabilities Act. While Richard is able to fake his way as a hearing person into good jobs, he becomes aware of the intense social prejudice against the physically challenged through his friendship with Art Honneyman (Michael Sheen), a cerebral palsy sufferer whose sharp intelligence often gets lost in his tortured speech and mannerisms.

'Rails & Ties'

Is there any working actress who has wept as fulsomely and inexhaustibly as Marcia Gay Harden?

'Pete Seeger: The Power of Song'

With his warbly voice and backwoods smile, Pete Seeger may have been the hippie's hippie, a folksinger who maintained his Ghandi-esque tranquility even while persecuted by Joe McCarthy and stoned by angry mobs. A new documentary, however, shows that the man has had his moments.

'Slipstream'

Say this much for Anthony Hopkins' project: If he's going to indulge himself as a writer-director-star, it's probably better that he goes completely off the wall than serve up his own version of Hollywood's Anthony Hopkins shtick of serpentine elegance or avuncular menace.

'Bella'

A whisper of mystery and sprinkling of magic loft this parable of broken souls somewhere above the New York streets where it so comfortably tells its tale.

'Lynch'

According to this very intimate, predictably eccentric and off-kilter portrait of filmmaker David Lynch (captured during the making of last year's masterpiece, "Inland Empire"), the director can be defined by abbreviations: TM (for transcendental meditation, his passion), DV (for digital video, as in "I'm finished with film") and .com (as in "Hello davidlynch.com members.")

'Mr. Untouchable'

Genre-jumping filmmaker Marc Levin, whose last documentary, "Protocols of Zion," was a gutsy examination of post-9/11 anti-Semitism, has an even tougher job on his hands with Leroy "Nicky" Barnes: making the man interesting.

MOVIE REVIEW

'Gone Baby Gone'

One of the problems with movies about endangered children is that the children end up being abstractions upon which adults get to act out moral postures and psychological traumas. In most cases, this tempts one to conclude that children in these movies aren't people so much as objects used for exploiting the audience's fears and anxieties, a process that seems as seedy as the behavior most of these movies tend to demonize.

'Rendition'

The film industry has sold so many millions of tickets over the decades exploiting torture and maiming as entertainment, one may be forgiven for greeting its occasional displays of soul-searching with an attack of cynicism.

'Reservation Road'

When bad things happen to good people, do we really want to know?

'30 Days of Night'

Among the grazing herd of young, virtually transparent Hollywood heartthrobs, Josh Hartnett could probably be voted Least Likely to Have a Reflection in a Mirror. So it's apt that he's in a vampire movie, even one as silly as "30 Days of Night." In it, Hartnett plays the last line of defense between bloodsucking ghouls and the various misfits of Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost North American settlement and a place where the sun doesn't rise for a solid month in winter. This makes it an ideal feeding ground for the undead. Less ideal is the movie itself, especially for those who would like to see the horror genre become something other than a runaway meat wagon driven by the Marquis de Sade.

'Things We Lost in the Fire'

Trying to explain the meaning of "fluorescent" to his young son, the saintly and soon-to-be-deceased Brian Burke (David Duchovny) says it means "lit from within." "Am I fluorescent?" his son asks. Dad answers: "Yes, Dory, you are."

'Wristcutters: A Love Story'

The suicidal characters of Goran Dukic's road comedy dwell together in a mirthless afterlife that looks very much like waking life, if all bright colors were washed away and the landscape were strewn with detritus.

'We Own the Night'

Brothers, loyalty, the Russian mob and New York City's outer boroughs at night continue to fascinate filmmaker James Gray. "We Own the Night" marks his third feature in a dozen years following "Little Odessa" and "The Yards." It's a bare-knuckled crime drama set in 1988 that stylistically could have been made that year and emphasizes Gray's strengths as a director while drawing attention to his limitations as a writer.

Review: 'Lars and the Real Girl'

There are so many things that could have gone wrong with "Lars and the Real Girl," one hardly knows where to begin.

'Control'

The 1980 suicide of Ian Curtis, lead singer of the British post-punk quartet Joy Division, is a poignant side plot in 2001's raucous survey of the Manchester rock scene, "24 Hour Party People." Watching "Control," which places the melancholy trajectory of Curtis' life front and center, your correspondent confesses that, as much as he admires the craft and intensity of Anton Corbjin's biopic, he couldn't help but remember how much better a time he had at Michael Winterbottom's woozier but more exuberant movie.

'Elizabeth: The Golden Age'

Poor Virgin Queen. She has all of England in her thrall, a Machiavellian adviser to carry out her dirty work, ladies in waiting to do her up in flowered head-pieces and shimmering green gowns - no, let's wear the blue tonight, shall we? - and heads of state laying exotic gifts at her feet. But when happy hour rolls around, Elizabeth I can't get arrested.

'Terror's Advocate'

You know you're in for something when the first two people in a movie are Cambodian mass-murderer Pol Pot and his lawyer. But Jacques Vergès had defended a lot of people - from Algerian resistance fighters to Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie - and it's his Zelig-like journey through the politics of the postwar 20th century that is the contentious subject of Barbet Schroeder's unwieldy, unforgettable film.

'Golda's Balcony'

Valerie Harper will be forever associated with the two most iconic Jewish women of the 20th century - Rhoda Morgenstern of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and Golda Meir of Israel. She reprises her role as the latter on screen in director Jeremy Kagan's adaptation of William Gibson's play.

'Khadak'

This mystic-mythic Mongolian dream film unrolls like a graphic novel, one in which the panels were rendered by Cézanne, Magritte and a painter of Mao-era socialist-realist poster art. Directors Peter Brossens and Jessica Woodworth create startling, deliberate imagery that's almost too voluptuous.

'O Jerusalem'

There are moments, especially early on, when this historical adventure by director Elie Chouraqui resembles "The Godfather": The same burnished tones, the same '40s-era middle shots, the same vintage cars, streets, people.

'Sleuth'

One would imagine it is something of a bittersweet triumph for an actor to endure long enough to revisit a glory moment from his youth, albeit from the vantage point of an older character. Unlike many of his classically schooled contemporaries in England, it was never in the cards for Michael Caine to ascend from playing "King Lear's" Edgar, say, to Lear himself. But then how many veterans of the Royal Shakespeare Company can lay claim to having done two film versions of the super-hit stage thriller "Sleuth?"

'The Heartbreak Kid'

With both Ben Stiller and the Farrelly Brothers, relativism doesn't enter into the equation. You're either comfortable with their squirmy, wormy species of comedy or you'd just as soon look away until their movies are over. "The Heartbreak Kid," which reunites Stiller with the Farrellys for the first time since 1998's "There's Something About Mary," offers an interesting dilemma for both sides of this divide.

'Feel the Noise'

Breakdancing, cheerleading, marching bands and other youthful pursuits have all become fodder for teen movies, so why shouldn't reggaetón, a burgeoning Hispanic offshoot of hip-hop, get its due?

'Michael Clayton'

George Clooney makes money the old-fashioned way: We earn it.

'My Kid Could Paint That'

She watched her dad paint, picked up a brush, and did her own thing. Pretty soon, the abstract canvases of 4-year-old Marla Olmstead were on the walls of a local Binghamton cafe, then a gallery. The press picked up her scent, Jane Pauley wanted her, Inside Edition phoned, NPR followed suit. Within the space of a year, an Olmstead original went from $250 to $15,000.

'The Seeker: The Dark is Rising'

What's up with English women novelists and their desire to see adolescent boys duking it out at the front lines of cosmic death and destruction?

'The Good Night'

If they handed out Oscars for resourcefulness, Jake Paltrow might rate a prize for coralling sister Gwyneth, Danny DeVito, Penélope Cruz and Martin Freeman of Britain's "The Office" for his feature writing-directing debut. Nearly as award-worthy is his having finagled shooting rights on a prime block across from the Metropolitan Museum, in broad daylight.

'For the Bible Tells Me So'

For some, it will be nostalgic seeing that old gay-bashing beauty queen Anita Bryant getting a pie in the face, or the not-yet-scandalous preacher Jimmy Swaggart endorsing murder in God's name, as long as it involved homosexuality. ("It's a bomnation!!!")

'Lake of Fire'

"Lake of Fire" needs every one of its 152 minutes to lay out the full range of opinion, nuance and history surrounding the abortion debate in the three decades since the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision.

'The Kingdom'

Like children and neo-conservatives, a good war action thriller wants the face of evil to be unambiguous and clearly defined. If we're not seeing a lot of these films set in Iraq at the moment, it may be because it's a little problematic sorting out the good guys from the bad. The war in Iraq is also too much of a hot potato to stir a strong consensus at the box office: A dramatized Iraq thriller with something for everyone would either be spineless, tasteless or all of the above.

'The Game Plan'

Why isn't Dwayne Johnson a big star by now? The camera loves him. He's funny, self-deprecating and takes the occasional quirky chance with an off-the-mainstream-reservation experiment like the someday-to-be-released "Southland Tales."

'The Darjeeling Limited'

Movies are unique in their power to mess with our sense of what's real and what's made up. This blurring of lines is felt most perversely in how we tend to define stars by their roles. Intellectually, we know they are not the characters they are playing. But the myth-making force of the camera and the chameleonic talents of the actor conspire to make us wish, if not believe, that they are.

'Lust, Caution'

Ang Lee continues his Sherman's march through the genres of world cinema - he's already tackled domestic drama, Jane Austen, martial arts and hetero/homosexual westerns. So it might be time to ask just what an Ang Lee film is. Does he have a style? Is there a trademark to his taste? Like his English colleague, Michael Winterbottom, is Lee content with anonymous versatility? Satisfied with elegance?

'Feast of Love'

The graying, autumnal tableau of Portland, Ore., is enlisted to give "Feast of Love" an arresting emotional tone of cozy, wistful melancholy. The atmosphere's balance of grit and gloss is so impeccable, it only makes you wish the rest of the movie was as well-wrought. But it isn't, despite the impressive talent behind and in front of the camera.

'Trade'

An unusual commodity - a genuine dramatic thriller with a social agenda - "Trade" takes the reluctant viewer by the hand and leads him along the sex-slave trail leading from Mexico to the eastern United States.

'The Assassination of Jesse James'

As Bob Ford, a bedazzled 19-year-old with serious self-esteem issues, Casey Affleck floats into Jesse James' gang like an apparition. He takes the material form of a hobo clown - an effect redoubled by his mangy stovepipe hat and the crooked grin he flashes in a wan attempt at claiming his space amid the camaraderie.

'Good Luck Chuck'

Dane Cook plays a handsome dentist who is God's gift to women. Once a date goes to bed with him, she is guaranteed to marry the next guy she goes out with.

'Into the Wild'

Christopher McCandless could have been a contender. At 22, he graduated from Emory University with an A report card, a Harvard Law School option and a rubber-ball bounce in his step that is the stuff of a job recruiter's dreams.

'The Jane Austen Book Club'

Let's begin our discussion of "The Jane Austen Book Club" on a positive note, shall we? It's a rare and welcome sight when a movie dares show its characters in the throes of physically awkward activity without letting it define these characters' principal traits. Indeed, the whole point of the movie's credit sequence, in which characters struggle with parking, ATM cards and other necessary irritants, shows how modern life makes helpless klutzes of us all.

'Sydney White'

In this broad, mean-girls take on "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," Amanda Bynes plays a teenager with the rugged soul of a plumber's daughter and the elite aspirations of her late, sorority-gal mom. At home, she wears plaid shirts and wields a wrench to the manner born, but she enrolls in the whitest university in the country and rushes at the blondest, uppitiest house on campus.

'Trade'

An unusual commodity - a genuine dramatic thriller with a social agenda - "Trade" takes the reluctant viewer by the hand and leads him (it's hard not to think of him as "him") along the sex-slave trail leading from Mexico to the eastern United States.

'The Last Winter'

Larry Fessenden, currently being blown away by Jodie Foster in "The Brave One," has balanced a career playing toothless street characters with one making horror movies that have intellectual bite.

'Eastern Promises'

David Cronenberg's "A History of Violence" was one of the best recent movies that, by today's saturation standards, next to nobody saw. Set in a farmland backwater of Indiana, it starred Viggo Mortensen as a clean-living family man who guns down two vicious thugs in his diner and inadvertently exposes a cautiously concealed past.

'The Brave One'

It can't be easy being Jodie Foster.

'Mr. Woodcock'

That Americans worship their children only makes Billy Bob Thornton more deliciously, subversively funny as a tormenter of the young. He made them suffer in "The Bad News Bears," abused them in "Bad Santa" and is back in business as the nightmarish gym teacher of "Mr. Woodcock," a movie that commits various sins of excess, except regarding Thornton. There's not nearly enough of him.

'Across the Universe'

There's so much to like, even love, about "Across the Universe" that you're even more exasperated about its faults. Now, possibly, you've dated a person who fits this description, too. It's plausible that you've married or been tempted to marry such a person because it's the things that drive you bonkers about that person that perversely make you want to come back for more.

'King of California'

Good things happen when Michael Douglas exposes his edges to the elements and smudges his screen persona with thick dollops of shadow. "King of California," a sweet-tart, agreeably laid-back comedy, gives Douglas his best opportunity to let the demons dance since 2000's "Wonder Boys," and he comes through with a performance of consummately manic grace.

'December Boys'

Those who got all worked up over Harry Potter's first screen kiss will doubtless hit the proverbial ceiling when they see Daniel Radcliffe, Potter's cinematic surrogate, as an Australian orphan getting sexually initiated by a sultry blond teen named Lucy (Teresa Palmer).

'Ira and Abby'

Having just been fired by his analyst of 12 years, the eponymous 33-year-old neurotic played by Chris Messina stumbles downtown on Broadway in a stupor, passing Fairway and then Zabar's. Anyone who's done any time on the Upper West Side knows they've got their markets turned around, a blooper that sums up the always-just-a-bit-off photorealism of this assertively Manhattan-centric "divorce comedy."

'In the valley of Elah'

With some actors, characters emerge through the eyes or the walk. With Tommy Lee Jones, they seem to flow from the lines in his face.

'Silk'

Baby-faced Michael Pitt is a throwback to the sullen sensuality of '50s Method idols James Dean and Marlon Brando: just right for the Kurt Cobain knock-off of "Last Days" and the homeless Cinderfella of "Delirious."

'Forever'

With the blithely spiritual "Forever," documentary vet Heddy Honigmann set out to find life in a cemetery. She succeeds at Père-Lachaise, the fabled Parisian resting place of Marcel Proust, Heloïse and Abelard, Maria Callas, Modig- liani, Simone Signoret and Jim Morrison.

'Great World of Sound'

To paraphrase an old adage, never eat at a place called "Mom's," never play cards with a guy named Slim, and never work on commission for a guy named Shank. It seems obvious advice, without even knowing that Shank (John Baker) is the prince of darkness in Craig Zobel's brilliantly original "Great World of Sound," and a heartless hustler whose only gift is knowing how to exploit the talents of others.

'3:10 to Yuma'

The clock in the old Western town tolls three times, signaling the long-awaited moment when a crippled rancher must escort an unrepentant villain to the train station to catch a 3:10 out of town. We take a deep breath, girding ourselves for the violent denouement to follow and sighing for a day when one could head to the platform 10 minutes before the scheduled departure, confident in the expectation that an inter-city train was actually going to arrive on time.

'The Hunting Party'

Is anyone ready for a wry action comedy surrounding the bungled search for Osama bin Laden? It's doubtful, but writer/director Richard Shepard thinks there is something risibly absurd in the seeming inability of global intelligence agencies to ferret out high-profile international criminals hiding in plain sight.

Shoot 'Em Up'

"No one owns life," Beat iconoclast William S. Burroughs famously said, "but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death." It would appear from watching "Shoot 'Em Up" that owning a carrot can be just as lethal - and through many more means than those suggested by a mere skillet.

'The Brothers Solomon'

Welcome once again to the Moronic Threshold. This week's challenge: getting through an hour and a half of watching socially challenged ninnies named John (Will Arnett) and Dean (Will Forte) Solomon grin their way through wormy faux pas and dorky degradations.

'The Bubble'

New York-born Israeli filmmaker Eytan Fox is something of a phenomenon, an out gay director whose gay-themed films enjoy considerable cross-audience popularity. "Walk on Water," which he co-wrote with his creative and domestic partner of 18 years, Gal Uchovsky, notched the highest international grosses of any Israeli film. On his home turf, his love song for two Israeli soldiers, "Yossi & Jagger," topped that film for sheer controversy, despite Israel's relaxed recruitment policy regarding gays in the military.

'Fierce People'

Fifteen-year-old Anton Yelchin looks too slight to do anything as burdensome as shoulder a movie, particularly one that bears as as much narrative freight as "Fierce People." A frizzy-headed wisp of a thing who resembles pianist Evgeny Kissin in his teen-prodigy prime, he seems more redolent of after-school skateboarding or a community production of "Godspell." But he provides the essential core of gravity that keeps this oddly weightless drama from floating into space.

'Romance & Cigarettes'

Film musicals are such a precious commodity these days that those of us who venerate them guard their reputation like some oft-maligned minority group afraid to be implicated in a crime. Whenever a particularly clumsy one is inflicted on the public, one reacts with knee-jerk panic: Is it bad for the genre?

'In the Shadow of the Moon'

What "In the Shadow of the Moon" would like us to pretend is that there was a time when the nation was united by a confidence that nothing was impossible; that we were, as a people, intrepid, adventurous and defiant of the unknown. In actuality, Americans were as split over the space program as they are about anything else, but the sense - in retrospect, at least - is that by going to the moon, we showed we were capable of doing something for the sake of doing it. We did it. And by never doing it again, the film implies, we became somehow lesser beings.

'I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With'

In his big-screen debut as writer/producer/director/star, "Curb Your Enthusiasm's" Jeff Garlin references "Marty," Jackie Gleason's Poor Soul and the old "Abbott & Costello Show," in which a beleaguered innocent walked amid the crazies.

'The Nines'

One can easily imagine reading John August's script for "The Nines" and being so impressed with its allusive dialogue and philosophical reach that one couldn't wait for the movie to be made. And August, who wrote the scripts for such quirky studio productions as Doug Liman's "Go" and Tim Burton's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," might seem to be the only one who should direct this metaphysical inquiry into the creative process.

'Death Sentence'

In "Death Sentence," Kevin Bacon descends onto the throne left vacant by the late Charles Bronson, that of a law-abiding worker bee turned one-man killing machine bent on avenging his family.

'Self-Medicated'

At 17, Monty Lapica found himself in an adolescent psychiatric hospital in St. George, Utah, a snake pit of prison-like prohibitions and draconian punishments. He had been committed by his mother who, anxious about his spiraling drug habit and antisocial stunts in the wake of his father's death, had him kidnapped and carted off for rehabilitation.

'Exiled'

Since their release in 2005 and 2006, respectively, Johnnie To's "Election" and "Triad Election" have attained cult status as contemporary classics of Hong Kong action.

'Balls of Fury'

So now it would seem, from watching "Balls of Fury," that Christopher Walken has joined the legion of stand-up comics, student actors and bar-stool mimics trolling for laughs by doing bad Christopher Walken impressions. This isn't necessarily a complaint. First of all, if anyone's earned the right to pan-fry his image, it's Walken. And second, whether anybody's Walken impression hits or not, the attempt alone is absurd enough to summon a reluctant giggle or two.

'The Nanny Diaries'

Perkiness is not, as yet, a major element in Scarlett Johansson's repertoire. So far, she's shown an engaging aptitude for being droll, phlegmatic or, most intriguing of all, drolly phlegmatic. Her gift for wry self-containment makes her, on paper at least, a semiperfect fit for the eponymous role in "The Nanny Diaries," the movie version of Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus' dishy page-turner about life as a caregiver for a well-heeled, messed-up Upper East Side family.

'Mr. Bean's Holiday'

That Rowan Atkinson has gotten so much mileage out of his rubbery, convulsive and gibberish-prone character Mr. Bean strongly suggests that there is an abiding hunger for sustained physical comedy in the movies. If "Mr. Bean's Holiday" does nothing more than make you wish there were more gag-oriented slapstick on the big screen, it will have served its purpose - especially if it also makes you wish for someone else to come along who does it better.

'Resurrecting the Champ'

Most of Rod Lurie's movies have thus far been triumphs of inflation. Melodramas such as 2000's "The Contender" and 2002's "The Last Castle" are pumped up by schematic plots and Manichean black and white characterizations. "Resurrecting the Champ" breaks this pattern by conflating its many story lines and giving us morally grayer people to root for. Viewed one way, this is growth. Viewed another way, it's the same hyped-up frenzy with a wider lens.

'Dedication'

If you frequent romantic comedies, you are familiar with the Big Sprint. This is the climactic moment when a character comes to his senses and, as if propelled by Cupid's wings, runs halfway across town to reclaim the love he has so foolishly sabotaged. In the really scurvy rom-coms, the Big Sprint is generally followed by the Big Ovation, when the kissing couple is cheered on by a peanut gallery of strangers mystically united by the shared conviction that love is all you need.

'September Dawn'

On the morning of Sept. 11, 1857, about 120 unarmed men, women and children who had stopped in Utah on their way from Arkansas to California were brutally murdered by a raiding party whose ties to the Mormon Church remain in dispute to the present day.

'Quiet City'

It seems oxymoronic that the plotless, intimate, no-budget, non-actor movies known as "mumblecore" - exemplified by the work of Andrew Bujalski ("Funny Ha Ha," "Mutual Appreciation") - should be called anything at all. But haiku have a name, and what haiku are to poetry, "mumblecores" are to movies.

'Right at your Door'

If Rod Serling had had a shot at penning a post-9/11 scenario for "The Twilight Zone," it might have come out something like this compact and creepy suspense thriller of apocalypse, Los Angeles-style.

'Hannah Takes the Stairs'

Most of the actors who comprise the small ensemble of Joe Swanberg's stiltedly improvisational romantic dramedy end up in the shower at one point, invariably with the actress playing the titular character.

'The Hottest State'

To be great, love stories need something going on besides romance - Montagues and Capulets, Nazis in Casablanca, the Nortons living upstairs - or they cease to have a point beyond the two conflicted people involved.

'Superbad'

"Rush Hour," Smush Hour! If you want a comic duo that's more original, more daring and - oh, by the way - funnier than Chris and Jackie, "Superbad" submits for your approval Jonah Hill and Michael Cera, the Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton of 21st century dweebiness.

'The Invasion'

Any movie serving up the fourth version of a familiar story isn't expected to shake the planet, much less transform it.

'Sunflower'

Father-son relationships have been a pet bugaboo for Beijing filmmaker Zhang Yang. The father of the 40-year-old director is also a film director, so it's perhaps not surprising to see Zhang's protagonists ensnared in a classic generational trap, caught between following in their father's footsteps and trying to forge an independent identity.

'Love for Sale'

Films that define the downtrodden solely by their poverty may as well leave their subjects alone, especially in light of Karim Ainouz's complex portrait of plummeting womanhood.

'The 11th Hour'

"Tragedy" may be the most overused word in the lexicon of mass media, but as portrayed in "The 11th Hour," our looming environmental disaster is positively Greek: We know what's happening, and we know what to do. If we don't prevent calamity it will be because of pride, greed, sloth and willful stupidity. And a failure to vote green.

'Death at a Funeral'

The very American filmography of Frank Oz includes Miss Piggy, Yoda and "What About Bob?" and yet, like Woody Allen and Robert Altman before him, he has taken his camera back to the motherland of England. Why? Because Oz needed something you can't find here: decorum. You can't make a comedy of manners without manners; you can't produce an Oscar Wildean regard for propriety and/or bad taste in a land where Britney Spears is spelled Britney Spears.

'Primo Levi's Journey'

If the title of this startling beautiful movie relegates it to the limiting pigeonhole of "Holocaust film," it would be both unfair and imprecise.

'The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters'

You might expect a documentary about two adult men competing for a Donkey Kong high score to be dull at worst or quirky at best, but how about gripping, exciting and even inspirational?

'Daddy Day Camp'

And we thought we were going to see a summer recreation comedy.

'Underdog'

Somewhere the ghost of Wally Cox is weeping.

'The Bourne Ultimatum'

Paul Greengrass' family name is something of a misnomer, redolent as it is with pastoral reveries and consoling scents of summer. The films of this British-born director, by contrast ("United 93," "The Bourne Supremacy," "Bloody Sunday"), are jangling, unsteadying affairs, foaming with tumult and calamity. After two hours at a Greengrass movie, one is ready for a two week vacation.

'El Cantante'

Behind every great man, if we may get real for a moment, is a great publicist, business manager, financial adviser, attorney, tax accountant, general practitioner, hair stylist, dermatologist, image consultant and maybe, if he behaves himself, a great woman.

'Hot Rod'

A charmless idiot, a clumsy rip-off of "Jackass" and one more tiresome exercise in arrested adolescence -- add them up and you have "Hot Rod," starring rubbery faced Andy Samberg and prompting a question: What does producer Lorne Michaels think he's doing? Making money, of course, but after coasting on the long-since exhausted glory of "Saturday Night Live" for so many years and creating cultural pollutants like Samberg, you'd think the man would have some shame. Apparently not.

'Bratz'

"Transformers," the summer's other toy-based movie, seems like an exercise in Reichian minimalism compared with the symphonic awfulness of "Bratz." It's a movie just this side of the so-bad-it's-good line of demarcation, but not one without an intelligence behind its depravity.

'Becoming Jane'

When "Becoming Jane," Julian Jarrold's speculative biopic on the love life and artistic breakthrough of Jane Austen, engages in the kind of elegantly barbed give-and-take reminiscent of its subject's novels, it's a breeze to watch. When, however, it decides to behave like a typical 18th century costume romance with everything but ripping bodices, it plods along on too-familiar country roads, disclosing itself as being more commercial product than art-house curio.

'The Willow Tree'

Perhaps the least internationally known of top-rank Iranian directors, Majid Majidi is making a startlingly strong case in this fable that the blind are closer to God than you and I.

'The Ten'

I've got no problem with movies that want to spin naughty stories off the surface of the Ten Commandments. I do have a problem when I'm waiting too long to laugh at them. I did hear a few giggles from others watching "The Ten," the unwieldy sketch compilation directed by David Wain ("Wet Hot American Summer"), and I imagine there was a lot of giggling in whatever rooms were used to come up with this stuff. The problem is that somewhere between concept and execution, there's got to be something else to which one's humor glands can attach.

'The Simpsons Movie'

In politically repressive cultures, filmmakers often resort to allegory, magical realism and metaphor to sneak painful truths about their society past the government censorship machinery and penetrate the defenses of a populace cowed by fear.

'No Reservations'

Like the planet-sized gourmand of Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life," director Scott Hicks' "No Reservations" consumes and regurgitates everything in its path: The career of Catherine Zeta-Jones, any credibility Hicks ("Shine") still has, and even Aaron Eckhart, who is the new Jeff Bridges, one who can balance a caper in his cleft chin. Based on the popular German comedy "Mostly Martha," it doesn't leave a bad taste. It doesn't leave much taste at all, save perhaps for the cloying echoes of Velveeta cheese.

'No End in Sight'

In one of the more dumbfounding moments in "No End in Sight," a home video depicts an American contractor gunning down Iraqis from a truck with show-offy abandon. Country music blares from the vehicle's stereo, providing a grotesquely upbeat, "Smokey and the Bandit"-like soundtrack to the violence.

'This Is England'

England, home of rich-kid ragamuffin Oliver Twist and society pretender Eliza Doolittle, loves its transformation stories. The working-class protagonist of Shane Meadows' 1983-set drama goes through a metamorphosis as well, albeit not of the sort that fills one with joy at the hidden possibilities of the disenfranchised.

'Moliere'

There are at least a dozen good reasons why you never see Moliere comedies at the movies. Most of them are illustrated over the course of Laurent Tirard's precious new film, a faux bio-pic in the form of a quasi-Moliere play.

'The Camden 28'

The early 21st century wave of documentaries, most of them making pointed and not-so-pointed allusions to the Iraqi War, has led the way in recovering the collective lost memories of activism's past glories. Anthony Giacchino's thoughtful, poignant and spirited "The Camden 28" is an exemplar of this movement.

'I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry'

Time flies when we're supposed to be having fun. Six years ago, you couldn't utter the words "firefighter" without "hero" appended to it. Now, it's apparently OK to portray New York's Bravest as homophobic meatballs - or "guidos," as they're described during one moment of this Dennis Dugan-directed laugh-fest - knuckleheads who wouldn't have the sense not to drown while staring up, slack-jawed, into a rainfall.

'Hairspray'

When a vehicle has been around the block as many times as "Hairspray," it can begin to shift its weight around, depending on who's behind the wheel.

'Cashback'

Richard Lester, that great ex-pat American director of manic British comedies ("A Hard Day's Night"), loved to speed up time. Sean Ellis, a young British photographer making his directing debut, prefers to stop it.

'Goya's Ghosts'

The capricious, often cruel nature of justice - or, more precisely, injustice - has been a constant theme in the movies of Milos Forman. Whether in a psychiatric ward ("One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"), an Austrian imperial court ("Amadeus") or in an American courtroom ("The People vs. Larry Flynt"), Forman's artistry always seems aroused, if not angered, by the seeming arbitrariness of judgment imposed upon human beings, whether by other human beings or by destiny.

'Live-in Maid'

Hard times have fallen upon Bebe, a doyenne of fashionable Buenos Aires (gorgeously played by Norma Aleandro, the redoubtable Argentine star of "The Official Story" and "Gaby: A True Story").

'Talk to Me'

Don Cheadle is an absolute gas in "Talk to Me," a bio-film as hot-wired as its mouthy DJ subject, Ralph Waldo "Petey" Greene.

'Interview'

"Interview" all but fulfills the latter mandate with enthralling performances by director/co-writer Steve Buscemi and Sienna Miller enacting the often dreary, usually abasing tango of celebrity interviews. Adapted from a film of the same name by murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, Buscemi's "Interview" moves forward in static bursts that are contained by the avid, yet unobtrusive direction and the intensity of the two principals.

'Tekkonkinkreet'

With a color scheme suggesting a bowl of Trix and all the hopefulness of a burning fuse, this exquisite anime from director Michael Arias and screenwriter Anthony Weintraub (based on Taiyo Matsumoto's serialized manga) is far less cartoonish than, say "Pirates of the Caribbean 3." And its characters are the most poignant, and convincingly human, of the summer.

'Drama/Mex'

It's hard to watch Gerardo Naranjo's busy but empty drama and not sigh for a day before Robert Altman multiplied the number of primary narratives in a single film by 24 and Quentin Tarantino advanced that revolution by twisting time back on itself like a parabola. Naranjo has only two intersecting plot threads and one time hiccup, but that doesn't prevent his film from feeling underwritten and disjointed.

'Time'

All but blinding us to the forest with his trees, South Korea's Kim Ki-duk has proved he can create epic allegories without making the sacrifices to character and detail usually necessary to Big Message filmmaking (see his "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring" of 2003).

'My Best Friend'

The inexhaustible Daniel Auteuil is Francois Coste, a finicky antiques dealer more intimate with prized objets than people. After he rebuffs his business partner's observation that he hasn't a single close friend, he accepts a challenge from her: produce a best buddy in 10 days, or pay her a deep-pocket penalty. The clueless Francois initiates the help of Bruno (Dany Boon), a motormouth taxi driver who puts him through an impromptu training course on how to meet folks and nurture friendships. Francois charges into his initiation like a bull in a tchotchke shop, alienating strangers at every turn. But then when he's not looking - and isn't that how these things always happen? - he and Bruno forge a bond that seems to mean as much to the cabbie as it does to Francois. Which brings up the chief psychological hole in this otherwise diverting dramedy from Patrice Leconte: If Bruno is such an engaging people person, why is he so dependent on Francois for emotional sustenance?

'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix'

The movie version of the fifth Harry Potter novel may well be the most prosaic so far. This, at the outset, doesn't sound at all like the best thing one can say about any movie. And it is not to say that "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" doesn't provide you with as much spectacle and visual thrills as the four Potter movies before it.

'Rescue Dawn'

A Welsh childhood never stood in the way of Richard Burton inhabiting a wide range of American roles, nor has it had any inhibiting impact on the very American trajectory of Christian Bale's career. This, despite his having made a spectacular film debut in Steven Spielberg's masterwork "Empire of the Sun," playing the most English of English boys imaginable.

'Introducing the Dwights'

Brenda Blethyn channels "Gypsy's" stagestruck Mama Rose in "Introducing the Dwights," giving a brassy, collar-grabbing performance as a moonlighting Australian comedienne who toils by day as a kitchen worker but always finds time to commandeer her kids' lives.

'License to Wed'

Weddings are recipes for divorces. I recall the time a college buddy tied the knot in a breathtaking mountaintop ceremony overlooking a valley in Colorado. In the week preceding, he and his fiancee had become so embattled over family tensions and party plans, they had to agree to marriage counseling after the honeymoon or else the wedding would be called off.

'Transformers'

We knew it would be dumb. But we had no idea it would be so much dumb fun.

'Ratatouille'

The hero in a children's film is usually one of two types: the ordinary kid who must face an extraordinary challenge, or the gifted child who must learn how to use his gift. Although the hero of "Ratatouille" is not a human but a fuzzy blue rat named Remy, he belongs in the second category, and his story will resonate with anyone who ever felt a little different than his peers.

'Evening'

At one crucial point in "Evening," one of the characters lashes out at another for being more in love with an "idea" of her instead of who she is as a person. This condemnation can be easily applied to the whole movie, which comes across more like someone's half-realized idea of literate, profound drama than the real thing.

'Live Free or Die Hard'

"Is the circus in town?" John McClane (Bruce Willis) asks as he's attacked from the skies by armed terrorists. Those of us looking on in dark rooms should shout back with impunity: Look around you, silly ragged man! You're bringing the circus with you!

'Evan Almighty'

If you saw 2003's "Bruce Almighty," in which Jim Carrey starred as a hapless television reporter who suddenly acquired the powers of God, you might remember a scene that focused on a pre-fame Steve Carell.

'A Mighty Heart'

Angelina Jolie gives a brittle and beautifully contained performance as Mariane Pearl, the journalist wife of a Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and beheaded by terrorists outside of Karachi.

'1408'

The folks who brought you "1408" may be hoping you've forgotten "The Number 23," wherein Jim Carrey suffers a numerology meltdown and bounces off the walls of a haunted hotel room. In "1408," John Cusack also goes bananas in a spooked hotel suite with a malignant room number. Jim Carrey. John Cusack. Oooo-weee, is there a voodoo alphabet thing going on here as well?

'Lady Chatterley'

Whatever prejudices you may harbor about "Lady Chatterley's Lover" from either the book, the sundry film versions or its colorful legacy as porn lit for the high of brow, they gently smash to bits when Marina Hands steps onto the screen.

'The Real Dirt on (Hippie) Farmer John'

Every life has at least one tale that is movie worthy. But very few folks have the eloquence and force of personality to portray their own story on screen, at least not in the peculiarly winning combination embodied by John Peterson.

'Broken English'

Early Hollywood always cast single women as loose, loony and/or lethal. But from the '70s with ("An Unmarried Woman") through the '90s ("A Single Girl"), the real, less-than-operatic tribulations of being an unattached female provided directors - most of them male - with the stuff of high drama.

'Manufactured Landscapes'

The sense one gets, staring at Edward Burtynsky's epic pictures in Jennifer Baichwal's not-so-epic movie, is of being a collaborationist. It's unavoidable: Within Burtynsky's large-format photos of awe-inspiring industrial moonscapes - electronic factories in China, masses of assembled faceless human drones, and the deconstruction of ships in Bangladeshi shipyards - is a sense that there's no going back, nothing to be done, so we may as well rationalize, and aestheticize.

'Black Sheep'

It's still relatively early in 2007, but this wry comedy about sheep gone baaaaad promises to be the best vampire-flesh-eating livestock movie of the year.

'DOA: Dead or Alive'

"DOA: Dead or Alive" aspires to be nothing more than a sanctuary from thinking. Say you just graduated high school or college, and the beach isn't an immediate option. You can just walk into any screening of this video-game adaptation and let its divine dumbness waft over you like sea breezes. It even comes with its own volleyball game, complete with bikini-wearing beauties, for distraction.

'Nancy Drew'

In "Nancy Drew," a droopy new movie with remote connections to a literary heroine of the same name, the dauntless girl sleuth and her dad exchange their bucolic middle American hometown for the tinsel and inflated gas prices of Los Angeles. Shortly upon arriving at their new home, a blowsy Hollywood rental agent gives Nancy the once-over and quips, "You're a makeover just waiting to happen."

'Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer'

Surf's down on the banks of the Thames and the snowfall's up over the African desert. Another day, another ecological disaster at the movies.

'Fido'

An organza-and-chiffon-shrouded nightmare of June Cleaver proportions, "Fido" is ostensibly a film about a boy and his dog, except the dog is a zombie ("Is Timmy in trouble?" "Arrrghhhwwaah"). But the real story is about Mom and her rotting house servant: In a world where conformity is currency, Mom would prefer a sensitive corpse to a live conservative. Therein lies a lesson for us all.

'Gypsy Caravan'

If one were out to undo stereotypes about the Gypsy lifestyle, one could think of at least a dozen better ways of going about it than trailing itinerant performers as they traipse around 16 cities. Still, it's hard not to be impressed by the breadth of cultural personalities embodied in the Romani musicians and dancers of "Gypsy Caravan," which couples concert clips from a North American tour with in-situ interviews with the artists on their home turf.

'Beyond Hatred'

Saints walk among us, we learn, via this Olivier Meyrou film, which may be nonfiction but manages to elude being pegged a documentary.

'Eagle vs. Shark'

This well-executed but cringe-inducing comedy by New Zealander Taika Waititi more or less exemplifies the divide currently dictating taste in movie comedy, a schism reducible to a single question: Do you want to laugh with people, or at them?

'Unborn in the USA: Inside the War on Abortion'

A profoundly depressing movie, and not just because of the often gruesome tactics employed by the anti- side of the title debate: As portrayed by filmmakers Stephen Fell and Will Thompson, Americans are so inarticulate, illogical and/or sanctimonious when it comes to this issue that they can barely speak across the divide, much less come to some reasonable conclusion. And as the filmmakers explore some of the more strident factions of the anti-abortion movement - the photographer who collects fetal parts, or the woman who makes little embryo dolls to commemorate her customers' regretted procedures - you realize politicians will be exploiting it for as long as it serves them.

'Strike'

She is known as "the mother of modern Poland." Anna Walentynowicz, an intrepid Gdansk shipyard worker whose firing in 1980 triggered the Solidarity movement, has undergone a romantic makeover on her way to the movies.

'Ocean's 13'

During the first of two contemplative moments in the 30-ring circus that is "Ocean's 13," George Clooney gazes upon a leviathan Las Vegas resort and recalls when the Dunes Hotel stood in its place.

'Surf's Up'

Movies about penguins can't help but be cute. Movies about surfing can't help but be pretty and a bit dull. Movies about surfing penguins -- well, you can see where I'm going with this.

'La Vie En Rose'

"I couldn't care less about America," says a dismissive Edith Piaf in "La Vie en Rose" amid her first U.S. tour. "They don't get me and I don't get them."

'You're Gonna Miss Me'

Everyone loves a rock-and-roll madman, but Roky Erickson is, or at least was, the real thing. With his band 13th Floor Elevators, the charismatic Erickson emerged as a leading light of the 1960s psychedelic rock scene, but a drug bust led to his incarceration in a psych ward. Many shock-treatments later, Erickson devolved into an overweight, shuffling recluse. His story almost amounts to a real-life "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," but there's a happy ending: Erickson continued to make music -- howling, sometimes horrifying music -- that earned him a small but loyal fan base.

'East of Bucharest'

The so-called Romanian New Wave, shouldered by last year's "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu," is less like an explosion of fireworks than flowers busting through the sidewalk. One mournfully droll little blossom is this comedy by Cannes honoree Corneliu Porumboiu.

'Belle Toujours'

I wouldn't bet the house on it, but the prize for most delayed sequel in all of filmdom could probably go to this compact lark from Portugal's Manoel de Oliveira, which picks up on characters from "Belle de Jour" 38 years later.

'Chalk'

Fifty percent of teachers quit within their first three years, says a title card at the start of the scrappy mock documentary "Chalk." And to what should we attribute this depressing statistic? It's hard to say from watching the movie -- which more closely resembles an affectionate locker room towel-snap than a hard-nosed exposé.

'Crazy Love'

It's easy to see why Dan Klores, director-producer of the documentary "Crazy Love," was so enthralled by Burt Pugach and Linda Riss, a pair of Bronx lovers who made headlines in 1959, and again in 1974, and yet again in 1996. Klores happens to be the former chief executive of a major publicity firm, Dan Klores Communications, and he's chosen a media sensation that could be spun any number of ways: Is it a tragedy? A horror story? A senseless human train wreck? Or is it, after all, a love story?

'Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End'

Heads up! A basketball analogy is coming your way from left field -- or, more appropriate for our topic, the port bow.

'Bug'

Long-practicing creepologist William Friedkin's quasi-experimental and utterly mental "Bug" is so intense and loony it may work at some theaters like audience repellent. Still, it's a fascinating exercise in paranoia and terror that sticks to the brain like intellectual flypaper: Even viewers who decide they don't like it will find the film as hard to shake off as the insects that plague our two principal characters.

'Golden Door'

The immigrant experience has become a kind of shorthand in the shared memories of second-, third- and fourth-generation citizens. Somehow, as such stories are now told, great- (or great-great-) grandma and grandpa got on a boat in Europe and made it to Ellis Island, got themselves processed and zap, they were Americans.

'Paprika'

Whether viewed as science-fiction in the manic, shape-shifting tradition of Philip K. Dick or as a hyperbolic analogue to the movie industry, "Paprika" is like little else you regularly experience in animated or live-action movies. Those for whom the pictorial style of Japanese anime holds no charm won't care about its densely layered narrative or about how clever it is with its cinematic references. The rest of us can once again wonder why so few animators in this country even try to take their art to such exotic extremes.