Horror anthology with an Arabian Nights (and Hansel and Gretel) framework: a chained little boy postpones his evisceration and cooking by telling scare stories to the chef. Lucky for him it wasn't up to the viewer. He may have survived the first one, featuring a reanimated mummy out of Conan …

Earmarks of American independent cinema: a Tom Waits song behind the credits, the presence on screen of Christopher Walken (a quadriplegic ganglord) and Steve Buscemi (a hitman nicknamed Mr. Shush). Scott Rosenberg's overspiced dialogue ("Girls who glide need guys who make them thump") is so idiom-heavy it is often hard …

Steve Buscemi's debut as a writer and director, an almost shrinkingly modest independent film about and around the clientele of a Long Island neighborhood watering hole, a shades-of-gray corner building with a spindly sapling planted in the sidewalk out front. In his directing hat, he is meticulously observant of the …

Unassuming little independent film (with a surprising number of well-known faces in it) that follows the path of a twenty-dollar bill as it changes hands from ATM to street person to skateboarder to baker to father of the bride, etc. Not much interest is permitted to develop at any particular …

Adam Sandler bids to expand his range -- into niceness, romanticness, sweetness, dullness. (Actually, he had reached dullness before, but from another direction.) His bitterness over his broken heart permits him an occasional lapse, too, into more familiar Sandlerisms. There's a well-conceived screen moment when he misinterprets the mood of …

Adam Sandler bids to expand his range -- into niceness, romanticness, sweetness, dullness. (Actually, he had reached dullness before, but from another direction.) His bitterness over his broken heart permits him an occasional lapse, too, into more familiar Sandlerisms. There's a well-conceived screen moment when he misinterprets the mood of …

A cut-above teen comedy whose nerdy hero is an anachronistic Sinatra fan, aspiring novelist, voracious reader, condemned virgin. When he stumbles on a prospective soul mate who seems his equal in youthful pretension — a Francophile who loves Gainsbourg and Breathless, but who can also correct him on his misidentification …