Ann Hornaday

A sweet, even delectable diversion from the more explosive cinematic fare of the season.

Emerges as the summer's first true must-see film, required viewing for everyone, but especially audiences in Washington.

A delicate, if slightly smoggy, feeling of regret hangs over Greenberg, a quietly funny portrait of grown-ups growing up.

Dark, dank, damp, grim, dingy and dour, Dark Water is a tasteful but unremitting bummer.

By the film's self-congratulatory final shot, Stevie has become less a portrait of a sorry young man's difficult life than the story of auteurist arrogance and self-deception run amok.

Falls as flat as a bottle of corked Bordeaux.

One part historical drama and one part futuristic adventure, Timeline resembles a "Star Trek" episode by way of "Scooby-Doo."

It's just another modest, unsurprising little heist flick. So why is it so much fun? Newman.

Along with such colleagues as Abbas Kiarostami and Moshen Makhmalbaf, Panahi has perfected the art of realist filmmaking,

A movie that throws out the rules with audacity, assurance and admirable moral seriousness.

Tells Yuri's story with the same bravado and stylishness as Scorsese at his finest, with bigger-than-life characters and situations splashing across the screen in breathtaking scale.

That such a masterful depiction of American heroism and can-do spirit has been created by a German art film director known for considerably darker visions of obsession is an irony Herzog no doubt finds delicious.

Once you get the hang of Figgis' own brand of coercion -- one based on an intricate sound design and musical score -- you find yourself happily going along for the ride.

If the setting is claustrophobic, it's also bracingly beautiful, a contradiction that is every bit in keeping with Sokurov's preference for ambiguity over clarity.

When the tone goes from daffy to dour in the course of a harrowing plot point, the story becomes more forced than fierce.

The kind of bland, generic, high-concept midsummer comedy that drives a critic to the thesaurus in search of new ways to say "vapid."

Imbued with a greater degree of psychological darkness than before.

Leaden, laugh-free, lacking anything resembling a heart, mind or soul.

Winds up being a touching portrait of that rarity in the movies: a recognizably human couple with recognizably human problems and quirks.

Like all the Dardennes' films, L'Enfant is a vivid, Dickensian report from the most dispossessed precincts of society. But the film concludes on an optimistic note, at least for the Dardennes. It's still the worst of times, the filmmakers seem to suggest, but we're still capable of humanity, if not hope.

Has bells and whistles, superb technical sophistication and dazzling visual effects, sound, fury and Reese Witherspoon. What it doesn't have is heart. Like so many vehicles that have popped out from the DreamWorks Animation snark tank, Monsters vs. Aliens is too clever by half.

An uneasy mix between "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and the "The X-Files," and one not nearly as smart as either.

Engaging entertainment and a great work of art.

A small, self-contained gem of incisive writing, superb acting and rich, expressive visuals.

Even if Scream 3 lacks the punch and verve of the first two installments, it manages to wring some ironically metaphysical comedy from the movie-within-a-movie motif.

A crafty, swift, subtly stylish thriller.

A grisly, depraved and wholly uninvolving exercise in empty mannerism.

Never manages to achieve the balance between authenticity and eccentricity.

The satirical edge has been dulled in a film that is dominated, and ultimately swamped, by its star's mannered, pixilated performance.

It's a promising concept, albeit melodramatic, but what keeps the movie from halfway working is its infernal preciousness. [03 Sep 1993]

With one foot planted in the world of comic book fantasy and the other firmly stuck in the grim realities of high school, this is one of those rare family films that truly work for the whole family, even if Mom and Pop might find themselves needing earplugs during some exceedingly long and loud passages.

Accomplishes a delicate balancing act, that of entertaining the audience with the thrills and adventure of the Andrea Gail's final journey.

Parading through most of the movie in a cutoff T-shirt and bikini briefs, Ricci takes the stereotype of the oversexed farmer's daughter to gothic extremes; Jackson's character, named Lazarus, is similarly drawn with oversize strokes.

The Loss of Sexual Innocence is belabored, pretentious and often willfully opaque. [25 Jun 1999]

For all its stylishness, verve and moments of visual poetry, the relentlessly punishing slapstick and overall cruel tone left me cold.

Small, quiet movie that imperceptibly takes its viewers by their throats and doesn't let go

When a Stranger Calls never manages to convey the primal, almost atavistic terror that has earned John Carpenter's movies and the "Scream" franchise their places in the teen horror canon. The most lasting psychological effect of this pulp non-classic will most likely be limited to a deep pathological fear of Architectural Digest.

It evokes a warmed-over Fox TV special.

A big, sexy, sun-splashed thrill ride, is what a summer movie ought to be: not totally mindless, but more interested in jangling your nerves than engaging your brain.

Has the sentiment and sweetness of a good coming-of-age movie but lacks the drive and pulse that makes for a great rock and roll movie.

The Cortez family flies into action with the same testy family dynamics, silly humor and cool gadgetry that animated the first Spy Kids.

The movie dazzles with its slick lines, but there's a situational intelligence at play too -- little vignettes involving minor characters are begun at one wedding and then evolve into major events at the next.

A searing, apocalyptic and finally breathtaking drama.

A movie that soars whenever Child is on the screen and sags when Powell shows up.

Seems fatally out of tune, with every staged encounter falling as flat as the protagonist's hot-ironed bob.

To his (Snipes) credit, there are few other stars who could breathe a degree of credibility into a film like The Art of War.

Always predictable in its outcome, but it still retains a certain charm, mostly because of Meadows's cheerful sympathy and affection for his motley crew of characters.

A sumptuous period drama.

A grand, sweeping nostalgia trip that evokes the sickness of an era even as it tries to find its essential humanity.

Sean Penn sings a powerful and poetic hymn to America with Into the Wild, his sweeping, sensitive and deeply affecting adaptation of Jon Krakauer's best-selling book.

Firmly ensconced among the forgettables in Stiller's career, a generic romantic comedy of the one-from-column-A, one-from-column-B variety.

Watching Spacek dance around the bedroom, slowly loosening up while Laura Nyro plays, is one of the joys of this cinematic season.

Jarmusch manages to imbue banality with surprising beauty and humor.

At some point the foul language, lascivious sight gags, references to sex toys, violence against animals and cruelty toward children simply ceases to be funny.

The Darjeeling Limited"has its charms, chief of which is watching three terrific actors evince with unforced ease the rewards and resentments of brotherhood.

With its urgent post-9/11 context and often brutal violence, it seems off-key to describe Body of Lies as a nifty political thriller, but that's what it is.

With surprisingly good production values and sly, underhanded wit, Willmott never tips his hand, steadily guiding the satire to a genuinely stunning, back-to-reality conclusion.

The first two-thirds of Joyeux Noel are strangely inert, but the film ends with a moving and surprisingly sophisticated meditation on the definition of moral duty.

It testifies to art's vitality and endurance, despite its marketers' -- and sometimes even its makers' -- efforts to the contrary.

This smart, fanciful and brilliantly staged comedy takes a truly one-of-a-kind premise and makes it, of all things, a weirdly profound meditation on consciousness, identity, fame, gender and reality.

It's less a movie than a delivery system for sensory pleasures, sunny romance and designer-label stuff that in real life would result in diabetic shock (or at least a ruined credit rating).

Paris is a funny, sad, romantic and deeply felt love letter to a great city. If you can't book a trip now, it's the next best thing.

Dinner for Schmucks has already raised hackles in the Yiddish-speaking community for the breathtakingly offensive epithet in its title (and it's not "dinner"). But it turns out that this comedy of humiliation, starring Paul Rudd and Steve Carell, isn't nearly as off-putting as it might have been.

The best advice to filmgoers who appreciate smart, mature, humanist movies is, simply, Go.

A predictable and outlandishly contrived take on the Pygmalion myth.

A bummer, but one that manages to stick to its depraved convictions until the strange and bitter end.

Spiked with some genuine show-stopping musical numbers, and the sheer pluck of its young cast is nothing if not admirable.

It's lewd, crude and socially irredeemable.

This is an exceptionally assured debut, and Montiel exhibits rare care with editing and sound design. His real forte, though, is casting, to which a brief scene featuring Downey and the incandescent Rosario Dawson powerfully attests.

Chances are, after they've passed the two-hour mark, viewers will share the same collective, if unspoken, wish: Go, Speed Racer. Go.

As Crossing Over makes its patronizing points, by way of two-dimensional characters and billboarded plot points, it recalls other, better movies that dealt with the same subjects far more deftly.

Can be recommended even if just for the presence of Elaine May, who turns in her most charmingly ditzy performance since "A New Leaf."

Alternately edifying and alarming film about nuclear proliferation.

The movie, a lyrical blend of documentary and fiction filmmaking techniques, offers a bold example of the rewards of crossing boundaries -- stylistic, cultural, temporal and even commercial.

Audiard delivers on and exceeds the promise he evinced in that earlier film, drawing viewers into the densely layered, ruthless ecology of a French prison and, against all odds, making them not mind staying there awhile.

Giamatti provides those small moments of triumph that Duets pretends to celebrate but instead stifles with its sense of superiority.

A tired piece of hackery, made only slightly less distasteful by a couple of inspired moments from supporting player Alan Cumming.

John C. McGinley from "Scrubs" gets to strut some of his comic stuff as the deranged builder, but he's the only passable feature in a property that should be condemned.

A star isn't born in El Cantante as much as it's reconfirmed. She's still here, and she's still got it.

How can we make the entire movie disappear?

Maybe the easiest thing would be to skip the movie altogether. Godard has created such a hermetic, uncompromising world that only the hardiest cinematic spelunkers are likely to appreciate its depths.

Agora, Alejandro Amenábar's absorbing historical drama, proves that, in an era of movies made for iPhones with artistic ambitions to match, there are still filmmakers willing to swing for the fences.

Belabored, ostentatious, overlong behemoth.

If its made-for-TV sensibility explains its chaotically blobby shooting style, it doesn't clarify a plot so painfully padded that it looks for laughs in strange digressive asides regarding bratwurst and coffee.

Ravishing, often entrancing paean to a pastime that has hooked more than its share of hard-core addicts.

Follows the youngsters over the course of a tumultuous year, during which time Cuesta and screenwriter Anthony Cipriano succeed in making the audience care desperately whether they're okay and whether the adults in their lives do the right thing. The lingering question is why that should be so improbable.

It's a miracle: A tough, honest, bloody film set so far from the bright lights it feels as if it's on a different planet, yet knowable and absolutely compelling from start to finish.

Dense, ironic and thoroughly engrossing caper melodrama.

Made with uncommon skill and assurance, the film never succumbs to rank sentimentality, but it manages to get at the nuances of human relationships.

The film is ultimately too self-regarding, too smug to be transcendent itself.

You won't be disappointed, and you will be deeply, quietly moved.

Thanks to an accomplished cast, anchored by Elsner and Wepper, and observant filmmakers, very little in Cherry Blossoms is lost in translation.

Thanks to Rock's running monologue, combining scathing humor with trenchant observations, the film manages to be side-splitting even while making its most poignant points.

An extraordinary collective act of moral and physical courage is relegated to a backdrop for a mushy, synthetic family melodrama.

A joy to watch.

At a time when the country is engaged in fresh debates about the fragile relationship between privacy and national security, this particular chapter seems worth revisiting.

As earnest as the performances are, something seems to be lost in the translation.

Even with Hudson's triumphant arrival and an overall fizzy mood of singing, dancing, pop nostalgia and camp, Dreamgirls is an uneven crowd pleaser.

The movie's chief value is to preserve Phoenix at the height of his wary physical grace, which recalls a young Marlon Brando.

It's one of those movies whose appeal depends on the viewer's tolerance for watching French people suffer, smoke and sigh prettily.

Crammed, cheek to jowl, with bleak moments, high hopes, sweetness and naked emotion.

Aside from Cedric's admittedly appealing persona -- he's always watchable, even in dreck like this -- there's absolutely nothing to recommend The Cleaner.

An interlocking ensemble piece in the tradition of "Crash" and "Babel," but with welcome dashes of whimsy and magical realism.

Often astonishingly beautiful, but in a way that's the problem: You wonder what visionaries such as Tim Burton or Michel Gondry might have done with the material. As it is, "Benjamin Button" is little more than "Gump" by way of "Dorian Gray." It plays too safe when it should be letting its freak flag fly.

Grown Ups finds Sandler reverting to lunkheaded, lazy-laff form.

Good points aside, In Good Company is a bland, occasionally phlegmatic pastiche of cliches and dull encounters.

Somersault faces the difficulty of representing a girl's unspoken desires and anxieties, a challenge Shortland rises to with terrific skill and aplomb.

Abrams keeps the action clicking along in 5/8 time, and Cruise is at his scowling/smiling best as he jumps, shoots and leaves. (See Tom run! Run, Tom, run!) Best is Philip Seymour Hoffman as the baddie; the film's best sequence features him playing Cruise playing him at a swank party in Vatican City.

No one can deny the powerful reality that weaves its way through Bamako.

Nothing comes easily in Atonement, especially its ending, which, both happy and tragic, is as wrenching as it is genuinely satisfying. How fitting, somehow, that a novel so devoted to the precision and passionate love of language be captured in a film that is simply too exquisite for words.

It wants us to believe that being popular and getting the cutest guy in school really is the key to happiness. Like, how totally last century is that?

Never makes the Jordans' tribulations feel like anything more than yuppie angst.

Artistically, You, Me and Dupree is a mess. Technically, it's an abomination. Spiritually, it's a void. Commercially, it'll probably be a big hit.

The movie's best moments belong to Bill Murray,

Mafioso may have been made in another era, but it stands as a classy, even radical rebuke to the film school posers who keep recycling the same tired gangster tropes.

The movie is, to borrow Rob's phrase, unassailably cool.

Lee has created that rarity in filmmaking: a movie we need, right now.

A film of rare intelligence, beauty and compassion.

In many ways Fish Tank joins "An Education" and "Precious" as an acute, empathic portrait of a girl growing up, but more than those films Arnold leaves viewers with a feeling of unsettled ambiguity.

Gator never emerges as anything but a blatant and outspoken -- and virulently brutal -- jerk.

Fantastic Mr. Fox imparts lessons as profound as "The Road's" about love and gratitude and awareness of others. It just has more fun doing it.

May not be the most nutritious movie on the table, but it lives up to its sweet promise.

To call Lawrence a poor man's Richard Pryor libels not just Pryor but also the 33 million Americans currently living under the poverty line.

It's an exhilarating, funny, very sweet movie.

It's impossible to watch Defiance without experiencing a vicarious thrill of resistance and revenge.

Offers audiences a real rarity in theaters these days: a good, honest cry.

Attal, who resembles a young Robert De Niro, seems as addled as a director as his character is as a husband, throwing all manner of distractions onto the screen in order to divert the audience.

Thank heaven for William H. Macy, whose portrayal of Happy's sheriff strikes the only honest note in a film that earns its laughs the cheap way.

It's the talk...and the extraordinarily expressive faces of those who do the talking, that accounts for its engrossing, enchanting powers.

First-time director Chris Gorak is no Rod Serling, and in his hands the enterprise tends toward the lurid, especially after his nifty third-act twist.

An often lively investigation of the social forces that produced the original movie and made it an unlikely political shibboleth in the ongoing culture wars.

An engrossing piece of social history, a lively, astonishingly well-documented excavation of that period.

Another soundtrack-driven, disposable, not entirely objectionable teen movie.

May not be perfect but must be given credit for all that it does right.

Stardust has it all: sweetness, magic, lusty wenches, evil witches, tankards of mead, a gay pirate.

His [Director Mike Figgis's] techniques do make the film at least watchable.

A piece of holiday cheese that even Harry & David wouldn't touch.

It's impossible to tell whether the film's ending is happy because it's happy or because it's ending.

As a comic actor, Allen's palette is limited to varying degrees of beige. He is not only boring, he's obnoxious and narcissistic. Where's the ASPCA -- the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Audiences -- when you need 'em?

It will all look pretty ridiculous to grown-ups, but to 13-year-old boys (and adults with well-tended inner versions thereof), Biker Boyz will be the perfect testosterone-fueled, flash-edited, music-driven joy ride.

That rare romantic comedy that dares to choose messiness over closure, prickly independence over fetishized coupledom, and honesty over typical Hollywood endings.

Gets viewers inside these tense, emotional and occasionally terrifying events with immediacy and, given the confusion of the time, remarkable clarity.

Harrowing, controlled and diabolically self-assured, Joshua leaves filmgoers teetering on their own emotional precipice, wondering just where pathos ends and pathology begins.

You know a movie is in trouble when its biggest laughs come not from its lead players but from a dog and a car

At its best, The Last Station vividly illustrates the enduring Russian gift for iconography, whether spiritual, secular or something in between.

Its mood of ennui and dread will haunt long after its title character's beaming grin has faded.

Von Trier has assembled a fearless troupe of gifted actors - especially Jorgensen - to explore the outer reaches of human cruelty and vulnerability.

Fake or not, Unknown White Male doesn't live up to its tantalizing potential.

With this film, del Toro seems to have created his manifesto, a tour de force of cautionary zeal, humanism and magic. At this writing, Pan's Labyrinth is the best-reviewed film of 2006 listed on the movie review Web site Metacritic.com, and for a reason: It's just that great.

It's difficult to know whom to root for.

Admittedly, this is the stuff of lurid adolescent distraction, not great cinema. Jennifer's Body is strictly a niche item but provides a goofy, campy bookend to "Drag Me to Hell" on the B-movie shelf. Watch it, forget it, move on.

Smith makes it look easy, but underneath the physical high jinks and slick veneer of I, Robot lies a performance of real discipline and intelligence.

But by the time Willis's character saves this considerably long day, it's filmgoers who will no doubt feel like prisoners, as a movie that promises to be a taut nail-biter devolves into the kind of silly, overblown climax parodied so beautifully by Robert Altman in "The Player."

There's good trash: throwaway, intellectually undemanding action movies that, despite their heavy body counts and hard edges, are executed with a touch of class and a sunny disposition.

Rarely has an act of such cinematic cruelty as Tideland been perpetrated on filmgoers.

Smart, funny and often viciously cruel, this is a romantic comedy for people who are too old to believe in fairyales but wise enough to accept a happy ending when that's what life gives them.

It gets under your skin and into your head, and you don't want it to leave.

It's a depressing little kingdom, even when Gordon tries desperately to goose the drama with the requisite "Eye of the Tiger" riffs and some junior high-level palace intrigue.

Gosling's performance is a small miracle, not only because he's so completely open as a man who's essentially shut off, but because he changes and grows so imperceptibly before our eyes.

An unsurprising, undistinguished piece of post-summer, pre-holiday detritus.

Clocking in at two hours-plus, Glastonbury at times gives viewers the impression that they're slogging through the three-day plunge into mud, music and madness themselves. But for all the posers with light sticks and piercings, there are moments of Dada-esque beauty, not to mention some great music.

A lively, compulsively watchable but ultimately sobering film about the men who make their living off prostitution.

Why this movie -- a rushed, wildly uneven, tonally jumbled caricature -- and why now?

In this case, the adage would go something like "material, material, material," also known as the Nicolas Cage Rule: Good acting can't overcome bad taste.

Jarecki has created a tour de force of narrative ambiguity, and in doing so has made one of the most honest reality shows ever.

Unrelentingly grim, unremittingly gross and unforgivably unattractive, 28 Days Later is an orgy of troubling images and bestial sound effects.

Garden State features some wonderful performances, chief among them an engaging, even courageous turn from Natalie Portman.

Compulsion, self-deception and the slippery nature of evil are explored with fidelity and supreme control .

The result is a perfect combination of slapstick and satire, a Platonic ideal of high-and lowbrow that manages to appeal to our basest common denominators while brilliantly skewering racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and that peculiarly American affliction: we're-number-one-ism.

Arrives as the perfect midsummer movie, a comedy about a flawed-but-functional family that, like "Toy Story 3," captures the drama of growth and separation in all its exhilaration and heartache.