AUGUST RUSH

There's a scene in the tear-jerker August Rush in which the titular musical prodigy (Freddie Highmore) and a friendly Irish rocker (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) - unaware that they're father and son - engage in a happy bit of dueling guitars in Central Park, their matching grins widening as the improvised strumming reaches its climax. It's a great moment, and I mention it because it's the only one in the film that I didn't find excruciating.

REIGN OVER ME

Even though I have yet to enjoy Adam Sandler in, well, anything, I applaud the comic's attempts to stretch beyond the mumbling, hostile, stunted-adolescent shtick he's employed in such comedies as Click, 50 First Dates, and Mr. Deeds. I'd applaud them more if the films he chooses to stretch in - Punch-Drunk Love, Spanglish, and the current Reign Over Me - didn't wind up every bit as confused and unsatisfying as his comedies are.

RED EYE

Wes Craven's Red Eye is the beneficiary of an original, intriguing leading character and, in Rachel McAdams, exactly the right performer to play her. A good thing, too, because the movie doesn't have a lot else going for it.

CRASH

Crash, the magnificent drama by Million Dollar Baby screenwriter Paul Haggis, fits alongside such sprawling, ensemble-driven works as Grand Canyon, Short Cuts, and Magnolia, movies in which plotlines dovetail within one another and themes enmesh, and where bitter, dissatisfied characters might not wind up more content than before - some might not even wind up alive - but they will definitely have shared, for better or worse, An Experience. (These characters might not receive traditional happy endings, yet they almost invariably find degrees of solace and a measure of hope.) Moviegoers who crave a clearly delineated moral to their stories can be driven batty by films of this ilk; more than once I've heard someone ask, apropos of one of these works, "But what was its point?" Crash, like its predecessors, explores characters so hungry for contact and meaning and understanding in a chaotic universe that they're ready to explode, and oftentimes do. That hunger becomes the point.