Amy Biancolli

To be fair, War of the Buttons is a film with a modest agenda. It does not attempt to provide a complete or even vaguely realistic depiction of the rural French resistance in the endgame to World War II. Instead, it provides a fable.

The main source of astonishment is the precision exhibited everywhere, from the slyly vintage look of Rodrigo Prieto's cinematography to the gradual, cinching tension in Chris Terrio's careful screenplay.

It is pure, retro-cinematic joy.

Any movie that features a character calling herself Fat Amy has a pretty firm grip on irony. It helps that Fat Amy is played by Rebel Wilson ("Bachelorette," "Bridesmaids"), my favorite eccentric Aussie practitioner of lip-curled comic timing.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower hurts. It hurts because it depicts the loneliness, anxiety and all-out quivering mess of adolescence in a manner not often seen since John Hughes' heyday.

The cutest darn thing in Hotel Transylvania is the way Count Dracula spazzes into a brilliant red devil-face when provoked. The second-cutest thing is his annoyed response to being misquoted by idiot humans.

When the screenplay sticks to the tricky business of living - trying, then screwing up, then stumbling forward anyway - it hits its mark with confidence, and the big ensemble cast responds with tight little performances of affecting vulnerability.

When it's over, this documentary lingers as a testament to extraordinary human bravery. It stands as one of the most heartbreaking and suspenseful sagas of the year.

The best scenes are filmed inside the cruiser, dashboard shots that face inward instead of out, catching Gyllenhaal and Peña in moments so playful and true they make all other buddy cops look bogus by comparison.

Features an exceedingly dapper Richard Gere in a series of nice suits and handsome close-ups that serve no purpose other than to remind us how exceedingly dapper Richard Gere looks in nice suits and handsome close-ups. The rest of the movie registers as a loss of: time, money, talent and logic.

In the end - and every story needs one - The Words is a decent, ambitious, unoriginal film about a decent, ambitious, unoriginal writer. Both aim for greatness. Both fall short.

Headland works hard to reconcile the wild and the tame; if she never quite gets the balance right, ya gotta admire her bold juxtaposition of overdose-resuscitation gags with lessons on self-loathing and bulimia.

In its way, the film is more concerned with the love between friends than the sex between strangers.

The whole thing runs about an hour too long: It should have been a TV show. The adventure's too big for the kids who would love it the most.

It all adds up to a fine, funny exercise in disheveled self-deprecation: a self-portrait of a guy who can't control a major portion of his life. Which, when you get right down to it, could describe almost any of us.

Some films are harder to watch than others - not because they're bad, which makes for a different sort of painful viewing, but because they touch on areas of such profound moral discomfort that the mere act of watching makes us feel complicit. We feel like gutless witnesses to a crime. And that's what makes Compliance such a hard thing to stomach.

What makes this whole thing work is, first of all, Wilee's ride, an elegant machine that lacks any gears or brakes.

As for Butler's screenplay, it's less beguiling than preachy.

The kid is a charmer, the message is heartfelt - love your kids while you can - and, OK, the ending might jerk a few tears, even from a crank like me. OK, it did.

The resultant spoofery is nonpartisan, or at least vague - we never learn which of these flesh-pressing idiots is the Republican and which is the Democrat - and raucous in its send-ups of the moral, financial and sexual peccadilloes of the common political animal.

Much like its own characters, it dithers too much - and it dares too little.

When its biggest trick is finally revealed, it is not entirely satisfying.

For all of its dazzlingly rendered cityscapes and nonstop action, this revamped Total Recall is a bland thing - bloodless, airless, humorless, featureless. With or without the triple-bosomed prostitute.

The combative, off-putting Dark Horse features many of writer-director Todd Solondz's usual preoccupations: misery, complexity, stunted emotions, misplaced dreams.

The less-good stuff: the pirates, who are so blandly and predictably drawn that they sap all the personality out of Peter Dinklage (as an ugly ape skipper), which isn't easy. And the plot, which just barrels forward with very few surprises.

The film is its own beast, and it's a rare one.

So. What part of this is boring? All of it.

No matter how well made, well acted and well intentioned, Lying Dingbat Procrastinator movies are excruciating to watch. Case in point: People Like Us, a film hell-bent on dragging its protagonist (and, sadly, us) through the LDP narrative playbook.

For all of its transgressive plush-toy sex and screw-'em humor, the plot is pretty standard stuff.

Make no mistake, this is advocacy cinema; interviews with Defense Department and military officials notwithstanding, there's not much effort, on Dick's part or anyone else's, to consider any point of view besides the victims' and those who love or speak for them. That's what makes it difficult to watch. And that's what makes it necessary.

Sweet and serious as it is, the second chunk of Seeking a Friend is the lesser of the two - and hard to reconcile with the more acidic comic outlook in the film's first half. The obvious movie referent is Lars von Trier's "Melancholia," a much nastier film in a much lovelier wrapping: This one lacks an eight-minute Wagner montage.

The script is as bland as they come.

The film's editing and pacing are appealingly straightforward, not to say blunt, and the humor runs from dry to bone-dry to parched.

Doesn't require anyone to love metal, or even like it. It only requires us to laugh at it - and other exemplars of bloated '80s pop, from Starship to Journey - and it does so with a campy and attitudinous spirit that's hard to resist.

The fact that Grandma is played by Jane Fonda, flouncing around in natural fabrics, should tell you something. It should tell you there is no casting decision or character nuance or plot turn too obvious to indulge.

Even within the rules of its own peculiar world - a world well stocked with talking savanna denizens and monkey-powered superplanes - the film is completely irrational.

The screenplay is so cognitively impaired that the filmmakers might have been better off hacking up "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," "Dazed and Confused" and "Dude, Where's My Car?" and then sticking together random bits with masking tape. At least that would have made some sense.

The formality of Moonrise Kingdom - the orderly structure and dreamlike perfection of it all - is as poetic as any film I've seen this year.

If you're looking for cinema verite, look elsewhere. If you're looking for a fun, fizzy sequel in a franchise left for dead 10 years ago, have at it.

It's loud, it's large, it's stupid, and its best gag involves a chicken burrito.

The Dictator's over-the-top rant against the rank lunacy of authoritarianism deploys comedy like an act of violence; it's outrageous, quick and leaves us breathless, whether from laughter or shock.

One can argue the movie's finer points, but in the end, there's no escaping its creeping pile-up of evidence that Mother Earth is critically dehydrated - and we need to do something, fast.

At no point during the movie does it strike him that mass extermination might be classified as "rude." No, Frank has the courage of his convictions, which include the belief that most of America has already flushed itself down the toilet.

Given the number of real-world cults that have ended in major bloodshed, there's some irony - and no small narrative coquetry - in any drama on the subject that ducks out so pointedly at the finish.

There are moments of genuine pathos, genuine humor, genuine surprise. As much as the film adheres to the strictures of the standard comic-book movie, it also pops with a knowing, loving, Whedon-world jokiness that keeps everything barreling along.

The results are often comical, but Pickering who made the film in tribute to his mother, the real Linda White - imbues them with faith in something, maybe dignity, maybe love, maybe just the simple human urge to keep on moving.

That the film happens to be in 3-D, with digitized settings and backgrounds, doesn't detract from the timeworn charm of watching blob-like characters lurch erratically through harebrained comic pratfalls.

None of this bears much or any resemblance to the real world, but the violence crunches, the editing snaps and the humorous one-liners pop at well-timed junctures.

Supposedly he's suffered, supposedly there are demons lurking within, but guess what: This is a movie. If we can't see it, it's not there.

Coiro, who directed and co-wrote the film with Ritter, has a firm hold on snappish humor and bookish references, but the whole thing sags under a creaky narrative structure.

American Reunion isn't a total wash. Its one saving grace is Eugene Levy as Jim's dad.

If you don't guess the big twist in the first 30 minutes, Intruders is half of a good movie. If you do, it's about a third of a good movie. Either way, there's a whole lot of bad movie to contend with.

Israeli writer-director Joseph Cedar imbues his tale of academic maneuvering, misunderstanding and mystery with the zest of passion and the zing of intrigue, It's a vivacious film, having its little fun with suspense-flick conventions (including Amit Poznansky's bouncing score) that build to a climactic finish.

This is better than any of the "Twilights." It features a functioning creative imagination and lots of honest-to-goodness acting by its star, Jennifer Lawrence.

Apart is an attractive-looking piece of work, and I'll always admire any genre film that errs on the side of understatement.

It's really strange, and it's really subtitled.

The film's emotional complexities don't allow for much of the canned sentiment that normally gets dished out in romantic dramas; what emerges instead, over several reels, is endearingly tender and complicated.

You know what? The whole thing is harmless.

With most movies, the question for viewers is: Who should see it? With Project X, the most pressing issue is: Who shouldn't see it?

For what it is, it's well done, well filmed, well outfitted with ordnance and, well, exciting. However, in script, characters and plot, Act of Valor offers only the barest minimum.

What's missing is any real menace - the signature Miyazaki freak factor that turns spirits into monsters and parents into pigs.

If the characters weren't so well drawn, if the effects weren't so convincing, and if the upshot weren't so ghastly, the moral component wouldn't carry any weight. But Trank tells his tale with an emotional and visual crispness that gives the superhero genre its best crack at naturalism so far.

For a time, Journey 2 becomes a lost episode of "Lost," then it becomes "King Kong," minus the ape. Then it becomes a ukulele music video featuring the Rock's take on Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's "What a Wonderful World."

If, in the end, the movie fails to generate much beyond several crackling jump scares and a nicely gothic mise-en-scene, it has enough mood, and enough Radcliffe, to carry us through the mist.

What a treat to find a movie so bright-eyed and true - without a trace of bathos - in its depiction of such a harrowing subject.

A handsome but gabby take on the standard survivalist thriller that's more concerned with lofty metaphysics than which poor blockhead is about to bite it next.

Moaadi is the standout here, subtly evoking filial worry and fatherly pride in one scene, popping off with rage in another: He's believably decent, believably flawed. A Separation touches on religious strictures and the role of women in Iran, but it does so with a light hand and not a twitch of condemnation.

What's missing is any hint of realism. There's no grit to it anywhere.

The film isn't half as deep as intended, but parts of it are very funny - someone actually barfs onto a stack of art books - and the parts that aren't may as well be.

Like most ruckuses, it is frequently loud and not always intelligible.

The film is a vehement drama and a fitfully amusing snark fest set to Nicola Piovani's jaunty circus music. It winds up only half-succeeding at both.

The film benefits most of all from Rees' careful screenplay, which dances that shifting line between fear and emergent hope. One of Alike's poems says it best: "Even breaking is opening. And I am broken. I am open."

The film is sweet. Its observations of life in the aftermath of death ring true, especially for anyone who's traveled the contours of mourning. And although it doesn't rank among Crowe's greatest films, it's a better, tighter, more disarming piece of grief work than his baggy and zigzaggy "Elizabethtown."

Such are the timeless joys of the books (and now the movie), this sparkling absurdity and knack for buckling swash under the worst of circumstances.

If you widen your eyes and turn off your brain, it all adds up to cracking good fun.

Screenwriters Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan have clarified a few things that needed clarifying, camouflaged a few things that needed camouflaging - and gently tugged some passive flashbacks into the active present. It's a cagey adaptation.

Many scenes in Outrage are crisply filmed and stylish enough, as serial assassinations go. But the film doesn't add up to much.

The Sitter is not (Funny). At all. By any definition, although an argument might be made for the alternate meanings "perplexing," "deceptive" and "slightly unwell."

Even his wife barely knew him, recalling for her son the peculiarities of raising a family amid Daddy's cloak and dagger - and if she's baffled by his behavior, what hope is there for anyone else?

The result is a diligent brand of gloom. When it isn't being diligently gloomy, it's being obvious. When it isn't being obvious, it's being sneaky, and when it isn't being sneaky, it's marching toward a climax of B-movie violence, stupidity and nuttiness that summarily bumps off the movie's least annoying character.

Shame has a lolling pace and stunning visual clarity. Structurally, it's close to perfect - its precision echoed in the Glenn Gould piano recordings of Bach keyboard works that Brandon listens to obsessively.

There's nothing dark about Arthur: It's as bright and twinkling as a Christmas tree, decked with warmth and humor.

A triumph of simplicity, innocence and goofy jokes.

Lindberg, who wrote a book on the subject called "Punk Rock Dad," is at the center of this sweet, revealing and proudly foulmouthed ethnography on rock and the modern dad.

About as loony and soapy as a movie can get. In other words, it's about as loony and soapy as the novel, and I say this as one who obsessively consumed all four installments in Stephenie Meyer's mega-selling series.

Herzog, as ever, is obsessed most of all with human nature: Into the Abyss explores our deepest urges to love, and live, and kill.

Let us recall that the first film was, in its blithely vulgar way, hilarious. And let us demand a moratorium on coked-out-baby jokes, which seriously kill the buzz.

So if you don't mind, I'll just go back to believing that someone named Shakespeare (whoever he was) wrote Shakespeare's works. And I'll just go back to regarding them with awe.

All in all, the 3-D animations wow without gimmickry, Banderas purrs without peer - and it's a cheerful movie.

Chandor's writing goes to some darkly interesting places, and there's fun to be found in individual performances.

Those who should go near The Big Year, if not flock to it, are fans of avians, mild PG comedy and gorgeously shot travel footage dotted with humans.

If the movie ends too abruptly, it still gives plenty of screen time to its nicely screwed-up central character. And it's still a solid, assured feature debut from the latest brothers to watch.

Director-co-writer Gary McKendry seems to know a thing or two about hard-fisted fight scenes, but he muddies up the visuals with obligatory spasms of shaky-cam.

Because Benavides is a south Texas town, the screenplay touches inevitably on the flow of immigrants at the border - and resentment at their presence. But All She Can puts a new face on this resentment, highlighting the frustration of legal Mexican Americans.

Rod Lurie's heated but empty-headed remake re-creates the original's trudge toward savagery but can't re-create its social context - and doesn't bring anything new to the table.

Spiffy-looking, well-intentioned but ultimately witless film.

This is brutish, visceral stuff - a type of raw-meat violence that's undeniably cinematic but seems, to this worried parent, ill-fitted for PG-13.

Until its final seconds, Seven Days in Utopia is just a piece of gee-whiz, G-rated, nicely shot evangelism outfitted as a golf movie. Then it cuts away at the pivotal moment that's normally the life's blood of inspirational sports dramas - and becomes something vastly more obnoxious.

Richard Attenborough nailed that purity 64 years ago, and Sam Riley nails it now. His Pinkie is a slim, mesmerizing package of immaculate and undiluted evil, clear as a stick of Brighton Rock candy.

All of this amounts to so much stylish nostalgia - not half as repulsive as the splatterific torture porn currently dominating the horror genre, and not half as cynical, either.

The protagonists and their idle dreams of a fiery wasteland may well be nihilistic. But the movie - with its stunning cinematography and lingering aftertaste of old-school heartbreak - most assuredly is not.

It's a celebration of nerd pride in all its many-feathered glory.

Good story, great characters, a setting plucked from history - and a multiracial, multigenerational ensemble cast stacked with fabulous actresses. But the thing that makes The Help such a rousing crowd-pleaser is its generous helping of baked goods.

Crisp, acid-tongued and sharply acted, it's the sort of exercise in tangy Celtic cynicism that's become one of the Emerald Isle's most reliable exports.

The film is often funny and even more frequently vulgar, exploiting every last chance for raunch in the full-chassis exchange of two grown men. The only thing missing: male nudity.

In its most touching moments, the film achieves a kind of sad and waltzing rhythm all its own. In its least, it's precious and plodding; the metaphoric link between grief and housework drags like a mop on a bathroom floor.

Some of the film is imaginatively put together. But the melodrama feels forced - manipulated by filmmakers hell-bent on teaching its main character a lesson or two about life and the need to seize it.

What matters most in this sad, sobering movie is not what anyone says; it's what goes unsaid for most of the running time.

What distinguishes Cap is his humble backstory, which involves neither hairy gods nor hot-dogging test pilots but a kid from Brooklyn who just wants to fight for freedom.

After watching Project Nim, a distressing portrait of a misguided 1970s language experiment, you'll be glad you're not a chimp in a cage. But you might want to revoke your membership in the human race, which comes across as a narcissistic, hedonistic, self-absorbed, neglectful, anthropomorphizing and arrogant bunch of hippie-dippy know-it-alls.

The epic and impassioned close that the saga deserves, a sweeping Wagnerian finish that's taut with suspense and wet with emotion.

A Better Life isn't an instant classic, but it tells its story with a simplicity and compassion that other urban dramas would be wise to emulate.

Its urban devastation knows no peer. Robots smash into each other with steely ferocity, and the humans - well, they do a fine job providing comic relief.

Most of the cast doesn't know what to do with their shallow characterizations and lackluster dialogue. The best lines were harvested for the trailer - so if you've seen that, you've seen it all.

The movie turns lighter and less morose as it rolls along, which is good for viewers who prefer a bit of honey to offset the bitter taste of hormones.

There are pros and cons to this Green Lantern, a half-campy, half-compelling adaptation of the superheroic DC comic books.

It looks like an exploding art project - but fails to capture the books' childlike voice and charm.

Ayoade is well known to British viewers for his role as a coddled nerd in the sitcom "The IT Crowd," so it's fair to expect laughs from his directorial debut feature. But much depends on your mind-set; U.S. audiences could have trouble with the movie's less-than-sunny worldview.

A minor but sometimes touching documentary.

Uneven, occasionally silly, true, but it's also an improvement over 2006's "X-Men: The Last Stand."

Is it good bad? Nah. It's just bad. It's so bad it makes "Machete," the other movie based on a mock trailer from "Grindhouse," look like high-gloss Kubrickian satire.

This dark and seedy follow-up to 2009's blockbuster comedy has a quite a retro message - suggesting that civilized men carry inside them a monster, a "demon" within, that requires constant taming.

For all of its brutal flashbacks and heavy-handed devices, The First Grader works best when it works quietly.

Nostalgia for the Light is a strange and stunning work of art: a poem disguised as a movie about astronomers in the Atacama desert of Chile.

A film of great hilarity, humanity, idiosyncrasy and grade-A, eyebrow-singeing raunch.

A crappy 3-D conversion job mars this otherwise competent, energetic and cheerfully hambone Marvel adaptation from director Kenneth Branagh.

In style and structure, it mimics an old-style studio effort, a culture-clashing comedy of manners that's tinged with melodrama and filmed in a smart progression of medium shots.

As a runner, the robber is dogged; as a robber, the runner is efficient, explosive and fast.

Some movies are in-between and inoffensive and harm absolutely no one. Prom is one of those.

Like its protagonist, Ceremony is as smart as it is exasperating.

May be Disney's most pointedly feminist effort since "Mulan."

A road trip into the heart of that bumpiest of territories, the adolescent id.

The humor's a little strange, and the action's a little frenetic, but all of it whooshes past in a swirl of tropical color and pseudo-South American bonhomie. Gorgeous scenery meets oddball characters and mild ethnic stereotyping.

The film about violence and retribution is a tough piece of work, subtle in some ways, obvious in others, viscerally affecting throughout.

The chief problem with Your Highness is its lack of imagination - its misuse and overuse of language and visual riffs that are only marginally amusing at best.

Rubber has its share of jollies, at least when it isn't boring us to death with the fourth-wall-busting monkey business. Although I appreciate Dupieux's efforts at satire, the audience-interaction subplot goes nowhere fast.

Rendered nearly unwatchable by overblown close-ups and an unrelenting shaky-cam.

The effect is an endearing and plainspoken clarity that stops just short of naturalism; the people in his movies don't seem real, exactly, but we end up caring about them as though they were.

Rodrick Rules has a brighter comic edge than its predecessor - and a bit more spunk.

The story gets away from itself as it barrels forward. The tiny bit of sense it makes at the beginning is quickly sacrificed in a conclusion so facile, illogical and cheap that it could use a dose of NZT itself.

A smart, juicy entertainment, but it's the kind of straight-up legal drama that hinges entirely on crafty storytelling and across-the-board solid performances.

An artfully depraved piece of South Korean torture porn directed by Kim Ji-woon, is a skillful serial-killer thriller in keeping with the likes of "Saw."

Catherine Hardwicke's prettified movie is a strange adaptation because it supplants the woodsy horror of the original fairy tale with two new elements: a romantic triangle and a witch hunt.

It is, all in all, off its rocker. But it's gorgeous.

Every last joke in the movie - verbal gags, visual gags, musical cues, camera moves - is crushingly literal.

This is a terrible movie. It has no business being as terrible as it is, because it boasts a perfectly acceptable horror premise and a perfectly acceptable cast.

Best reason to stay home and rent "Disturbia": I Am Number Four is a little better and makes loads more sense than "Eagle Eye." But neither has the sass and pluck of "Disturbia."

As weird as it sounds.

Through it all, Tatum tries like crazy to Act. His eyes pinch. His brow scrunches. Most of all, he clenches his jaw, little creases of muscle flexing below his ears as he labors to emote.

In creating his modern homage to the classic film, Im has twisted all the heated melodrama into a satiric - and in the end, surrealist - attack on the terrors of the polished upper class.

If the movie packs a weaker punch than the original, it has less to do with the action sequences than the script (by Edmond Wong, son of Raymond, who wrote the first), a flimsy affair with subpar villains.

For all the hellfire histrionics and well-timed jump scares, there is actual, admirable intellect behind The Rite.

Solid performances, and a sincere faith in the dignity of the average working stiff, save it from getting too preachy.

This is a remarkable movie: lovely, slow-paced and almost silent, rich with pathos and deft comic gestures.

Despite bursts of hilarity and an A-list cast, this is a dark, difficult, weirdly existential film - like some seriocomic spin on "I and Thou."

A tough slog through emotional swamplands. It's murky when it needs to be clear. But Hedlund is the big news here.

Baughman and O'Hara's documentary spews out so much information in just 111 minutes that the movie would have benefited from a longer run time and tighter focus.

This is the first Focker installment not directed by Jay Roach, who did a good job balancing the yuks with the more outrageous gross-outs. That comic-revolting parity shouldn't be much of a challenge for "American Pie's" Paul Weitz, and yet the skeevier bits aren't especially funny.

The film is confusing and awkwardly timed, and it drags.

This sequel is also goofy, also eye-popping - see it in Imax 3-D if you really want to fry your optic nerve - and also weakly scripted. And yet the sheer size of the thing works against it: The effects are absolutely spectacular, but they blow the goofy-cheesy quotient straight through the roof.

Megamind, it turns out, is a villain to root for.

Narrated by Lomborg, the movie uses lecture excerpts, clips of terrified schoolchildren and interviews with (mostly) like-minded scientists to get his points across.

Once it gets rolling, Unstoppable doesn't pause for breath.

An arty, ruminative and slow-paced film that's being marketed as a big ol' alien-invasion flick. Just don't expect an invasion flick.

The King's Speech is a warm, wise film - the best period movie of the year and one of the year's best movies.

There aren't that many songs this time - just a handful, reprised ad infinitum. You get to sing most of them, so I'm sure you've noticed how bland they are.

The third and most uneven film adaptation in the series.

This one is a long, archetypal journey that screeches to a halt a few stops short of its destination.

A tonally confused, fitfully entertaining film about a pathologically two-faced man.

It's still a spirited look - well written, beautifully acted, full of uplift - at lovably cheeky heroines on the march for a little respect.

Spitzer was undone by his zipper, but as Client 9 makes clear, he was also undone by his refusal - or inability - to make nice with some of the state's most powerful characters.

"Hornet's Nest" isn't the best of the three (that would be the first film, "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo"), but it's the most challenging.

The title promises a film that never really materializes: something nastier, smellier, more nihilistic than the skittish morality tale at hand.

A first-class genre entry stacked with dandy performances and some crackerjack action to boot.

Gluck also directed "Fired Up!," another teen charade with lots of quick-witted verbal raunch. Easy A does a few things better.

This is one helluva drama, with one helluva star turn by Jennifer Lawrence as Ree.

A fine, fun remake of a movie that updates, transplants and reimagines the original without sacrificing its heart or goofy charm.

Vast, beautiful and meticulously detailed.

At its simplest, "Fire" tells of Mikael's efforts to exonerate Lisbeth. At its most baroque, it explores a vast web of sex trafficking and deep-rooted conspiracy that goes back decades and touches on Lisbeth's inflammatory background.

Another innocuous film about another unusual girl.

Eisner has almost nothing on his mind, no political rumblings, nothing behind the urge to upgrade vintage trash.

Melissa Rosenberg's screenplay is faithful enough to Meyer's soap-operatic inclinations, but I kind of wish it weren't.

A typical vehicle for Ferrell's atypical humor.

In Step Up 3D, what's going on is: nothing.

A compact British drama that does more with only three people and a few modest settings than most movies do with computerized bloat and a cast of hundreds.

You can't fool me. I know it's actually a parlor game.

A movie about an obese Harlem teenager who's raped by her father and abused by her mother. It's depressing, devastating, harrowing and repulsive. But there are lyric flights of hope interspersed among that raw naturalism, and that's what makes this movie amazing.

Perrier's Bounty puts on a pretty good show: fast, foul, corny, strange.

Handily beats back the evils of boredom.

For Kline's performance alone, The Extra Man is well worth seeing.

The acting is immaculate; the editing is seamless; the imagery is blunt.

This is a handsome, conventional biopic, as fluent and polished as its subject matter.

It's a remarkable film: A gritty, gut-churning, crime thriller based on a true story. Its greatness lies in its unwavering fidelity to human nature and the unstoppable laws of the wild.

What joy it is to watch the man (Douglas) slime himself on camera.

It's harmless.

An imperfect, fascinating film about an imperfect, fascinating man.

It does for hit men what "Up in the Air" did for frequent-flying corporate terminators, minus the comic tang.

Visually, Jonah Hex is an orgy of overstatement: rapid edits, garish colors, harsh light.

This breezy action comedy is a noisy affirmation that life goes on after 50, that retirement doesn't mean redundancy, and that nobody - young or old - can wear a long cream evening gown like Mirren.

In this case, it's considerably better, adapting the 007 template in a story of a crazed bald cat named Kitty Galore (voiced by a hissing, chichi Bette Midler) and her malevolent plot to conquer the world. It's brilliant in its simplicity

This is spellbinding, transporting, damn near indescribable and the latest indication that Christopher Nolan might be the slyest narrative tactician making movies today.

This is a sobering piece of advocacy cinema.

A little movie with a lot of hilarious swearing and an unexpectedly big heart.

It isn't a long journey. Kisses clocks at 72 minutes, which feels something less than feature length. It's long enough to include a few cliches and nagging questions, yet it's short enough to leave you wanting more.

Although this one indulges in unnecessary CGI enhancements, it's still a striking piece of character-driven horror, and it ranks among the more understated fright fests to hit the mainstream in recent memory.

The movie as a whole is a mixed bag, offering up stiff shots of skepticism and a few provocative thoughts on correlation and causality.

The movie's name is Life as We Know It, but that seems incomplete. The predicate's missing. The full sentence should be "Life as we know it is over," i.e., nuked by the sudden and irreversible arrival of a human infant.

In Secretariat, the fictionalized bits are simple exaggerations - broad, Disneyish adjustments in races and other realities.

There are six standard types of violence in film these days: Tarantino, comic book, Scorsese, martial arts, horror and stupid. For stupid, look no further than Centurion.

Flipped succeeds when it backs off the gluey nostalgia and focuses instead on the subtler pitfalls of adolescence - the tough stuff, the moral stuff, the constant tacking between fear and courage.

After sitting through Takers with my stomach rearranged by hyperactive camera spazzing, I hereby formally request all directors and cinematographers to just get a grip already and STOP. WIGGLING. THE CAMERA.

Never Let Me Go is gorgeous. And depressing. It's exquisitely acted. And depressing. It's romantic, profound and superbly crafted, shot with the self-contained radiance of a snow globe. And it's depressing.

The whole thing is monumentally gruesome and just as monumentally cynical, a riot of grisly cliches designed to titillate and amuse.

The film has some chuckles, if no belly laughs; it has some warmth, if no great heat.

Inky-black humor does strike on occasion, and when it does, it's surprising. So is the movie's star, who sweats and shrieks with game intensity and a capacity for discomfort that would impress a Byzantine saint.