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As a romantic spectacle, writer-director Anthony Minghella's Cold Mountain fails miserably. This is because the beautifully photographed and staged would-be Civil War epic emphasizes the visual elements over the romantic.

HOLLYWOOD (Box Office Mojo)—Moviegoers around the world have decided to see The Lord of the Rings with the time that is given them.

Director and writer Vadim Perelman's dark drama, the philosophical House of Sand and Fog, would dim the brightest Christmas tree. But Perelman has created that rare motion picture: a true dramatization of ideas.

The partially-nude Calendar Girls, starring Julie Walters and Helen Mirren, is burdened by a fragmented plot, half-formed characters and an appealing premise that peaks too soon. When the older women of Yorkshire, England pose nude for a charity calendar, they cover half their breasts. The cover-up reveals director Nigel Cole's conflicted approach.

The latest movie made for IMAX theaters, The Young Black Stallion, is Disney's prequel to the enchanted 1979 picture The Black Stallion and, as an IMAX release appropriate for children, it's marvelous. Just don't expect it to come close to matching the brilliant, beautifully photographed original, or its entertaining sequel, 1983's The Black Stallion Returns.

Big families have provided comic movie material for a long time, from The Brady Bunch Movie, based on the television series which borrowed its premise from several wacky, zany family movies, to Please Don't Eat the Daisies, With Six, You Get Eggroll and Yours, Mine and Ours.

A plot about college intellectuals, rising young actresses, a soundtrack with pop standards—director Mike Newell's Mona Lisa Smile has so much going for it, including a bold role for Julia Roberts: college professor. It's too bad Newell's college girl movie is packed with cliches.

HOLLYWOOD (Box Office Mojo) - The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King pulled in $17.0 million on Thursday, down 50.6% from its record-breaking $34.5 million Wednesday (revised upward from the previously reported $34.1 million estimate).

HOLLYWOOD (Box Office Mojo)—As the journey ends, the record-breaking box office run begins.

The third and final installment of The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King has finally arrived. Director Peter Jackson's big screen rendering of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic trilogy is sure to please its fans but is not as consistent in quality as its predecessor The Two Towers.

Tim Burton's visually striking Big Fish is like a fishing expedition. The catch takes a while, but the waiting is what fishermen relish. During the anticipation, director Burton presents a colorful panorama. Burton's bizarre fishbowl is not for everyone, including this reviewer, but he casts his line as far out as one might expect from the man who created Batman and Edward Scissorhands.

Nancy Meyers presents a romantic romp in Something's Gotta Give, played like a pajama game with laughter, tenderness and a great cast—for the most part. Writer and director Meyers, who wrote Private Benjamin, Baby Boom and Father of the Bride and directed What Women Want—delivers wry, adult humor.

Anyone who has ever been or has ever wanted to be besotted by Japanese culture will find Tom Cruise's newest star vehicle The Last Samurai everything they could have hoped for in a movie about that most aesthetic, mysterious and maddening civilization. A mixture of the epic, the tragic, the philosophical and even romantic, the movie delivers a rousing tale of honorable men trying to survive in a world that no longer values them.

At the end of any story, be it a great novel or a coworker's tale, there has to be a feeling of satisfaction, a feeling that the time devoted to it was well spent, that at the end you can answer the question "so what?" without hesitation. Unfortunately, Ron Howard's newest opus The Missing fails this fundamental test.

Bad Santa is probably one of the cruelest, nastiest, most offensive Christmas movies ever, and it's also probably one of the worst. This dark, dark satire about a couple of conmen who rip off malls during the Christmas season could have been funny, insightful and biting—an attack on the mindless materialism, false benevolence and manufactured cheer that brings out the worst in the holiday-minded.

From 1967, when he co-wrote Bonnie and Clyde with his partner David Newman, to his current picture, The Human Stain, which has been caught in a cultural controversy, writer and director Robert Benton's movies have left their mark on Hollywood.

Like his earlier feature Amores Perros, director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's 21 Grams uses tragedy and coincidence to bring three very different people together. And while his redemptive tale sometimes borders on TV movie tearjerker territory, the presentation doesn't.

Writer and producer Bob Gale, who created and wrote the Back to the Future [official Web site] pictures with director Robert Zemeckis, is a force of nature. At 52, the Missouri native possesses the youthful enthusiasm one might expect from the man who transformed a fun, brilliantly conceived adventure into one of America's favorite movie trilogies.

Shot in quasi-Technicolor as a tribute to the movies of the 1950s, Anything But Love is a congenial romance that lacks conviction. Writers Isabel Rose and Robert Cary, who also directed the picture, do manage to bring a theatrical sense to the screen.

There is no arguing that director Peter Weir's latest effort Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is a handsomely produced and technically skilled effort, evoking the classic sea adventures of Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks. But for all its compelling realism of life at sea during the Napoleonic Wars, the movie fails because it is emotionally flat.