A.O. Scott

The movie's comic heart consists of a series of indescribably loopy, elaborately conceived happenings that are at once rigorous and chaotic, idiotic and brilliant.

The picture, which fails to achieve its ambitions or to fulfill our expectations, is ultimately worse than a violent piece of hack work, in which the director isn't interested in displaying his integrity -- or taste. You'd be better off downloading the trailer: a much more convincing piece of storytelling.

The movie turns into a cobweb of tricky spins and twists that seems like a hip-hop version of "Ruthless People."

It feels willed, aggressive and unconvincing -- clammy rather than cool -- in a way that suggests artistic frustration rather than discovery. The water shortage may be a metaphor for the director’s creative desiccation, which his admirers can only hope is temporary.

What we see on screen is a lumbering, flat-footed fancy-dress melodrama.

Backstage isn't as good as the rap documentaries "Rhyme and Reason" and "The Show," but it still casts a keen, observant eye...on this world.

A worthless piece of garbage.

Pallid compared with the flaming id of television's "Will and Grace," the happy swizzle stick Jack, who's all appetites. When series television is more entertaining than a series of short independent films, that's something to worry about.

Mr. Reiner and Mr. Kudlow may not quite merit full-metal glory, but they don't deserve oblivion either, and Anvil! The Story of Anvil makes both a case and a place for their band.

The film, not unsurprisingly for a holiday- (and football-) season release from a major Hollywood studio, plays this story straight down the middle, shedding nuance and complication in favor of maximum uplift.

The lampooning is sometimes funny and occasionally offers up a tidbit of small truth. But much of it is awfully familiar.

Sensitive, modest, thrillingly self-assured first feature by So Yong Kim, was one of the standouts of the 2006 Sundance Film Festival -- exactly the kind of thoughtful, independent work one hopes to find there and too rarely does.

The Orphanage, a diverting, overwrought ghost story from Spain, relies on basic and durable horror movie techniques.

There are worse things than loutish, laddish cool, and as a series of poses and stunts, Sherlock Holmes is intermittently diverting.

When Suddenly finds its soul in the last half-hour, the title begins to make a lovely sort of sense.

Like a zombie picture directed by one of the undead.

Like a half-empty glass of Coke that's been sitting out for a couple of days; sure, it looks like cola, but one sip tells you exactly what's missing.

The curious thing about The Visitor is that even as it goes more or less where you think it will, it still manages to surprise you along the way.

Manages to be fairly entertaining in that exhausting, rackety, late-summer-kiddie-movie way.

From 300 hours of material, Mr. Longley has created a collage of images, sounds and characters, an intimate, partial portrait of an unraveling nation -- a portrait that gains power partly by virtue of its incompleteness.

The obsessive crosshatching of allusion, spoof and homage that gives Grindhouse its texture is the product of a highly refined generational sensibility.

Mongol -- or, as I prefer to think of it, "Genghis Khan: The Early Years" -- is a big, ponderous epic, its beautifully composed landscape shots punctuated by thundering hooves and bloody, slow-motion battle sequences.

In trying to make "Othello" more lifelike and bring it down to a younger audience -- in effect, to make it more democratic -- the adaptation has rendered the material artless.

The movie is staged like a pit stop -- Reindeer Games goes from being fun to being laughable.

The thicket of relationships that the director, Hiner Saleem, has created and weaves his cast and camera through is so invitingly hotblooded and crowded with hilariously melodramatic incident that the snowbanks are not nearly as forbidding as they initially seem.

Frequently brilliant, finally baffling film.

The problem with the baroque and overripe Tattoo Bar is that everybody has a past. And there's so much crosscutting to those pasts in flashbacks, it's hard to keep track of whose past you're witnessing.

Few people other than future airline passengers should be subjected to such misery.

A Christmas Carol -- I mean the source material, without a corporate possessive attached to it -- remains among the most moving works of holiday literature, and Mr. Zemeckis has remained true to its finest sentiments. He is an innovator, but his traditionalism is what makes this movie work.

A bit of a puzzle. This is a good thing, since most movies plop down in easily recognizable categories and stay there, troubling neither their own intellectual inertia nor that of the audience.

Serves up its scattershot plots as if they were lined up on a menu, moving from appetizer to entree: there are more intrigues here than in the court of the Medicis.

I hesitate, given the early date and the project's modesty, to call Into Great Silence one of the best films of the year. I prefer to think of it as the antidote to all of the others.

The real flaw is that the movie's best features -- the aching clarity of its central performances -- threaten to be lost in a wilderness of metaphor and mystification.

The best nondocumentary American feature made yet about the war in Iraq.

One of the most subtle and inspired comedies you'll see this year.

It is intermittently engrossing, though a little overextended for the deadpan approach that Mr. Bitomsky uses.

May not be perfect, but it honors its source and captures the key elements -- the humor and good sense, as well as the sheer narrative exuberance -- that have made White’s book a classic.

Once you have seen a sheep munching on a bloody human leg, you may think twice about your next leg of lamb. On the other hand maybe you'll be inspired to seek vengeance. To provoke one of these responses -- vegetarianism or a defiant meat eating -- may be the point of this odd, amusing film.

A goofy and remarkable film.

It's in the small touches that this movie comes alive, and it's rare that directors can pull off this kind of thing.

It is a heartbreaking film, and cruelty sometimes seems to be not only its subject but its method. Like the child on a high cliff that is one of its recurring images, the film walks up to the edge of hopelessness and pauses there, waiting to see what happens next.

The trouble with movies like those in the "Friday" series is that their success can lead to a need to inflate their importance, inviting pretentious descriptions like "folkloric" when "Friday" is much closer to chitlin circuit comedy.

The entertainment formula behind this short and nasty movie - devised according to someone's idea of what teenage boys with the guile, the facial hair or the "guardian" to gain admission to an R-rated movie are likely to enjoy - is sloppy and simple.

It is a reasonably skillful exercise in genre and style, a well-made vessel containing nothing in particular, though some of its features - European setting, slow pacing, full-frontal female nudity - are more evocative of the art house than of the multiplex.

A diverting if not terribly original on-the-cheap horror film.

The film falls far short of its goals, but it is a classic of sorts. It belongs in that Blockbuster on Mount Olympus, where pristine new copies of "I Changed My Sex," "Dracula's Dog," "Blackenstein" and "Battlefield Earth" play constantly.

It's a mirror and a portrait, and a movie as necessary and nourishing as your next meal.

The humor is coarse and occasionally funny. The archly bombastic score, by Edward Sheamur, is the only thing you might call witty. But happily, Jennifer Coolidge and Fred Willard show up, as the White Bitch and Aslo the Lion, to add some easy, demented class.

Does a thoughtful job of streamlining the bloody realities -- both literal and psychological -- of China's Cultural Revolution into roughly two hours of film.

The mildly xenophobic humor includes one of the few inventive mime insults seen in a movie; Eurotrip may be stupid, but it's not dumb.

This breathless demi-noir has so much bounce that we barely get any time to mull over the gaping holes in its moth-eaten plot. It is competent but extremely slight.

Dour and bleak, yet this melodrama -- which doesn't amount to much of anything -- may stick with you.

Mr. Shyamalan may be the only mainstream director hankering for success with a need to understate; he is like Shaq without the tattoos. The result is a mastery of craft that may leave some hungry for more.

While impressively made, this impassive and cold feature fails, in a spectacular fashion, to deliver the thrills.

It works in so many ways except for the script, which sounds laughable. And sadly, when Lost and Delirious trips over its own two feet, it is laughable. It needs to follow Paulie's advice and rage more.

Nearly every melodramatic impulse has been suppressed in favor of a calm precision that serves both to intensify and delay the emotional impact of the film’s climactic disclosures.

An often watchable, though goofy and lurid, blast of a costume drama set in the late 15th century.

A weak-witted comedy.

This bloated spectacle has all the get-up-and-go of one of the legendary late-era Elvis Presley concerts. The picture feels longer than Presley's career and as irrelevant as he was by the end.

Awkward, obvious and sporadically -- very sporadically -- amusing.

A dreary crash of malapropisms and slapstick maimings wrapped very loosely around a murder mystery.

The movie wants desperately to function as a romantic tragedy, with passions glancing off the thoughtless pursuit of satisfaction. But Vatel can't really define the differences between the two; it settles into a period funk, as shallow as the court popinjays it seeks to expose.

Brazenly self-confident in its refusal to pander to the imagined sensitivity of its audience. In this it differs notably from Albert Brooks's "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World," which approached some of the same topics with misplaced thoughtfulness and tact.

Our judgments, in any case, may be superfluous, since the director, Mathieu Kassovitz, has already publicly described it as "pure violence and stupidity."

Not especially good, but there is enough rough artistry in Mr. O’Connor’s direction to make you wish the film were better.

It's one of the rare films for which a blooper reel would be redundant.

The art is lacking, but the material is remarkable enough to make up for pedestrian filmmaking.

Reign Over Me uses the rhythms and moods of comedy to explore, and also to contain, overpowering feelings of loss, anger and hurt. And like that earlier movie ("The Upside of Anger"), this one is maddeningly uneven.

It's an interesting, maddening mess -- not a terrible movie, and by no means a dull one.

This film, Mr. Caetano's feature-length directorial debut, has an emotional integrity that's concise and direct.

Probably the worst thing you can say about Hollywood Ending is that it has one: it turns out that Mr. Allen wasn't being ironic after all, he just made a comedy that feels ironclad.

The blossoming of her ambition, as much as her love life, drives the story forward, and turns Coco Before Chanel into a costume drama worthy of the name.

Mr. Herzog’s film is a pulpy, glorious mess. Its maniacal unpredictability is such a blast that it reminds you just how tidy and dull most crime thrillers are these days.

The only people who could be surprised at this movie will be those who wandered into the wrong multiplex theater by mistake.

Tacky and disposable.

October Country feels at once personal and objective, a fascinating hybrid of two important tendencies in the modern documentary.

A mellow dream of a movie that's an acquired taste. It's attractive because of the oblique way that Mr. Wenders ambles through a murder mystery that's stronger on characterization than on plot.

Relax, the staging of the action sequences is as viciously elegant as you've been primed to expect, though there is a dispiriting more-of-the-same aspect to the picture.

The Exploding Girl can also make you feel bad about wishing that she were just a little more interesting.

Plays like something picked up at a vintage store; you can see all the greasy fingerprints from those who have handled it before.

Has the sleepy feel of an urban fairy tale, but getting there is a long trip.

The picture has a daring attention-span deficit and an epic silliness that can be awesomely entertaining.

It's an oddity that will be avoided by millions of people, this new Pinocchio. Osama bin Laden could attend a showing in Times Square and be confident of remaining hidden.

There are no simple answers or obvious conclusions to be gleaned from this movie, which, like its soundtrack, is both sad and vibrant, meandering and formally sure-footed. It is an exciting debut, and a film that, without exaggeration or false modesty, finds interest and feeling in the world just as it is.

The movie's advertising tagline ("Starsky & Hutch — they're the Man") needs to be amended. The film belongs, completely and utterly, to Snoop Dogg.

When the biggest compliment you can pay a picture is that it is professional and not smug, there's a little something missing, like invention.

The characters and situations are interesting enough, and the filmmaking is sufficiently skilled to provide a measure of reasonably thoughtful entertainment.

World on a Wire, while too slow and diffuse to count as a lost masterpiece, is valuable in expanding our sense of what Fassbinder could do and is also a source of much visual and intellectual pleasure in its own right.

Guilty of behaving like a petty thievery corporation; it steals from so many other sources that we're forced to realize that it has little of its own to offer. As such, it can't help but fail to meet expectations, given the talents involved.

Nimble and self-assured as Mr. Daniels’s direction may be, he could not make you believe in “Precious” unless you were able to believe in Precious herself. You will.

This movie incites curiosity tinged with confusion and irritation. It bristles with interesting ideas — about friendship and freakishness, honesty and anger — and intriguing characters, all of which may blossom in later episodes.

A giggly cocktail, though it's more foam than drink.

All hope is lost for those trapped in theaters with this picture.

A memoir, a history lesson, a combat picture, a piece of investigative journalism and an altogether amazing film.

Slight, charming and refreshingly candid little picture.

Mr. Block has put his parents’ life, and his own, into this film with such warmth and candor that it may take more than one viewing to recognize it as a work of art.

Mr. Peck's gambit works, and the result is a great film and a great performance.

The movie is full of juices that give it a healthy, pungent flow.

The screenplay, by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, tosses out a few chewy bits of B-movie wit, most of them supplied by Mr. Jones, who expresses the ambivalence of an African-American visiting the motherland through a series of bitter jokes.

Lacks more than subtext: it barely has text. At times, the picture seems to have been edited with a blowtorch. But it gets the job done efficiently and swiftly.

The filmmakers know how potent the material is, and they don't hammer away at the obvious.

Perhaps the directors are under the delusion that the dodging and leaping can make up for an ending that leaves the cast members of "Killer" adrift and nearly scratching their heads in puzzlement.

There's more to everyone here than we're initially led to think. The Good Girl is like a neurotically charged post-millennial take on the trailer-park comedies that Jonathan Demme once claimed for himself.

The brilliance of Stuff and Dough is that it wraps this powerful, disturbing drama in an anecdote from ordinary life. As is often the case in recent Romanian movies, the acting is so accomplished as to be invisible.

There is a grungy high spirit during the first third of this film, but then it dissipates like a mist from an aerosol can.

Seems to just drift to a close rather than pronounce an end. This can be a result of wrestling with a daunting subject and not being up to its demands.

So campy it reflexively sends an elbow to its own ribs.

After watching the fascinating and compelling new documentary Lost in La Mancha, you may forever wonder how it is that movies are made at all.

Modest in scope, but it feels complete, fully inhabited, in a way that more overtly ambitious movies rarely do.

Will Finn and Tess find the treasure before the bad guys? Will they put aside their differences and rekindle their love? Yes to both questions! I haven’t spoiled anything, by the way. But perhaps I’ve saved you some trouble.

Though Mr. Noé; displays prodigious filmmaking technique, his punk-operatic meditation on life, love, anger and -- most important -- guilt is superficially inventive, but singularly adolescent.

Both refreshing and confusing, the film equivalent of an ice cream headache.

A bad-taste comedy with a heart.

Not that Cairo, Nest of Spies is meant to be a thriller, but even as a self-consciously anachronistic knockabout farce it rarely rises to the level of wit, either verbal or physical.

You'll see better film on ponds.

In spite of its sometimes tiresome, sometimes amusing lewdness, follows a gee-whiz romantic-comedy formula that would not be out of place on the Disney Channel.

In spite of its modest scale, tactful manner and potentially dowdy subject matter, is packed nearly to bursting with rich meaning and deep implication.

The storytelling and the visual style are rarely more than workmanlike, and the big scenes arrive punctually and are played with minimal nuance.

May feel redundant, but it is stylish and intelligent.

Not everything that happens in Fighting entirely makes sense -- it’s a fable, after all, and a fable doesn't necessarily have to -- but it breathes with a rough, exuberant realism that you rarely see in movies of its kind.

The stripped-down narrative is almost an apology for the ludicrous story -- but it's just not enough of one.

Does it have to be so witless, so stupid, so openly contemptuous of the very audience it’s supposed to be pandering to?

The performances give the movie more flavor and life than the situation does; it often feels like prechewed Bubble Yum.

Half a movie at best. The broad humor at times derails Mr. Murphy's performances, but the movie provides a vehicle for him to display his reach.

In the end Babel, like that tower in the book of Genesis, is a grand wreck, an incomplete monument to its own limitless ambition. But it is there, on the landscape, a startling and imposing reality. It's a folly, and also, perversely, a wonder.

Silent Waters is several different movies, and most of them feel negligible and meandering, until the film finally packs a wallop.

The law of diminishing returns is enforced so stringently that the movie succeeds not only in negating its own comedy, but its very being.

I don't think Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is an altogether bad movie. It's just a movie with no particular reason for existing, a flashy, trifling throwaway whose surface cleverness masks a self-infatuated credulity.

Has the advantage of being an unusually good superhero picture. Or at least -- since it certainly has its problems -- a superhero movie that's good in unusual ways.

Except for the access the director, David Teboul, had to Mr. Saint Laurent's inner circle, "Times" wouldn't be out of place on A&E.

The most voluptuous comic-book movie ever made.

Almost creates a sense of dread as you sit watching its raft of aimless, self-absorbed neurotics clang into one another.

Amusing but extremely derivative.

No-Good Men, Foolish Choices and Birth on the Floor of a Wal-Mart.

So what kind of a movie is Crash? A frustrating movie: full of heart and devoid of life; crudely manipulative when it tries hardest to be subtle; and profoundly complacent in spite of its intention to unsettle and disturb.

So beautifully realized as a mood piece that it takes a while for a slight disappointment to register.

A Viagra suppository for compulsive action fetishists and a movie that may not only be dumb in itself, but also the cause of dumbness in others.

When it clicks, the picture should shock you into laughter -- enough to make you wish it were better and applaud its efforts anyway.

It is for the most part a jumpy, suspenseful caper, full of narrow escapes, improbable reversals and complicated intrigue. But it has a sinister, shadowy undertow, an intimation of dread that lingers after Irving's game is up.

The problem with We Own the Night is that it mistakes sentiment for profundity, and takes its ideas about character and fate more seriously than it takes its characters and their particular fates. “I feel light as a feather,” Bobby says in a crucial scene, at which point the movie starts to sink like a stone.

After a while the humorless solemnity of The Rocket stifles any interesting sense of Maurice Richard as a character. The hockey sequences are nicely done, though, and give a reasonably good sense of what a great player he was.

More of a hoot than any picture dealing with the bloody, protracted fight between the Soviet Army and the Afghan mujahedeen has any right to be.

Volver, full of surprises and reversals, unfolds with breathtaking ease and self-confidence. It is in some ways a smaller, simpler film than either "Talk to Her" or "Bad Education," choosing to tell its story without flashbacks or intricate parallel plots, but it is no less the work of a master.

May be simple, but it's also simple-minded; this is, after all, a movie determined to transform its Rebel soldier heroes into men of the people, making it as neglectful of politics as last summer's "Patriot," which evaded that nasty issue of slavery during the America Revolution.

The movie is smart in small ways, yet an underachiever in big ones -- but it will probably play very well on television. On the big screen, it's distended and diffuse.

Dan in Real Life is neither wildly farcical nor mockingly cruel, but rather, for the most part, winningly gentle and observant.

Mr. Leconte gives this meeting of opposites in Claude Klotz's script a lovely, sportive élan, instead of making it register as lumpy, obvious polemics.

Who would have expected Ms. Zellweger --- and Miramax -- to come through in a musical? And it's one of the few Christmas entertainments to run under two hours. Who couldn't love that?

Not for the faint of heart, the movie is unsettling and startlingly true to life. At least that’s how it seemed to me. To the minors I happened to be accompanying, it seemed to be reasonably good fun.

In spite of its raw, explicit moments, the film is at heart a sturdy morality tale about innocence and corruption, wealth and want, sex and power.

Mr. Goode shows all the charisma of a stalk of boiled asparagus molded into the likeness of Jeremy Irons.

The adoring and adorable documentary on the philosopher Jacques Derrida.

Underwhelming, amusing only in fits and starts.

About as threatening as the real-life insect the apparition resembles; its large, mossy wings may scare some people, but the bug can only damage your woolens. The movie flirts with more damage than it can actually cause.

You can have a perfectly nice time watching this spirited adaptation of the popular stage musical and, once the hangover wears off, acknowledge just how bad it is.

The sophistication of the stylized minimalism here in Infernal Affairs is dazzling.

A shallow yet empty action extravaganza.

It is all perfectly dreadful and at times appallingly funny. Mr. Solondz winds thin tendrils of narrative around the dinner-table conversations, and allows everyone a chance to be earnestly foolish, unguardedly selfish and also, almost by accident, cruelly honest.

It's been a long time since a commercially oriented film with the scale of "King" ended with such an enduring and heartbreaking coda.

New York becomes a complex character in this vital and sharply intelligent film.

Like its title, it's a clumsy contraption.

It is startling that a three-hour film dealing largely with the history of the Middle East should find no time to mention either the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the role of oil in the region. And it is more than a little unsatisfying to see the complex history of American conservatism reduced to the dreams and schemes of a handful of intellectuals.

Raises expectations that it has no real inclination to fulfill. The movie's best bits would stand alone nicely on YouTube, or on Funnyordie.com, the comic video boutique of which Mr. McKay is an owner and where he sometimes dabbles in short-form hilarity.

The most indolent waste of screen time since Andy Warhol's marathon shot of the Empire State Building.

Plays like a nutty psychological mystery.

Does it sound as if I hate this movie? Don't be silly. But don't be fooled. This movie does not like you.

Because of the movie's wonderful shamelessness, its mordantly funny chills and fights are huge turn-ons. A B picture in love with the zest of its comic-book origins, it embodies that medium's pulse-pounding spiritedness and silliness.

Thankfully, Mr. Grimaldi and the screenwriters have no great lessons to impart or messages to deliver, and the film, while uneven -- sometimes too on the nose, sometimes anecdotal and diffuse -- is generally absorbing, thanks mostly to the quality of the acting.

The filmmakers’ evident affection for the book expresses itself as a desperate scramble to include as much of it as possible, which leaves the movie feeling both overcrowded and thin.

Best and most touching when it shows how willing punk is to eat its young.

Although it is briskly directed and enjoyably stylized, the film is shallow -- but empty.

The extent of the need around the world is so enormous and overwhelming that the efforts of the doctors in this sobering film seem both vitally necessary and woefully inadequate.

Sembène is a far more adroit and elegant storyteller than many may be accustomed to seeing.

Though it is modest, almost anecdotal, in scale, 12:08 East of Bucharest is also characterized by a precise and sneaky formal wit.

It is a deeply personal piece of art that never descends into the confessional or the therapeutic, and a work of social and literary criticism that never lectures or hectors, but rather, with melancholy, tenderness and wit, manages to sing.

A modest, intermittently engaging film.

This dumb, only intermittently (though sometimes even intentionally) funny sequel presumes that since almost everything else from the 1980's has come back, why not the cynosures of the "Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Friday the 13th" movies?

An action movie, a basic training movie, a swaggering sea adventure, a home front melodrama and an inspiring tough-love heroic teacher fable. If the aggregate of all these movies is exhausting and occasionally overwrought, some of the parts are stirring and effective, though not exactly fresh.

This movie, without being particularly good, is nonetheless far less hysterical than "Da Vinci."

For his sins poor Stewart is kidnapped, tortured and shot up with horse tranquilizer after his leg is broken. It’s disturbing, and somewhat baffling too, until you grasp that this hapless sucker is a surrogate for the audience.

Manages to squeeze in several different endings — like a bad pop song that doesn't know when to fade out. But as Mr. Schwarzenegger's stature as an action figure diminishes, his effort to retain a piece of the market is touching.

A kind of murder mystery, but eventually the only victim is the audience's interest -- the picture is uncompromising and inauspicious.

Yet there is so little characterization that when the sub goes down, you may find yourself confused as to which of the supporting cast members lived through the torpedo blast.

Even though it is sometimes dull and generally thin, there is something winning about the movie's genial lack of ambition.

The time does pass agreeably enough, and if Cairo Time does not amount to much, it does evoke a wistful state of feeling and a complicated city with enough skill and sensitivity that you wish it had dared more.

In its sweet, lackadaisical way, Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind illuminates the pleasures and paradoxes of movie love.

If the extremity of Hallam's temperament tests the limits of our sympathy as well as our credulity, Mr. Bell's ability to seem by turns sweet and scary prevents us from losing interest entirely.

The pieces of New York, I Love You make up a parallel city that no one would want to live in, much less visit.

What makes Leap Year so singularly dispiriting is precisely that it is bad without distinction -- so witless, charmless and unimaginative that it can be described as a movie only in a strictly technical sense.

Good pulp depends, above all, on a ruthless sense of economy, and Three Monkeys is just a bit too profligate, too fancy, to be entirely convincing.

A desperate, broad comedy.

This Lady Chatterley, winner of five César awards in France, feels bracingly fresh, vital and modern.

Lebanon is meticulous, nearly clinical in its attention to what happens in war -- specifically what happened in the first days of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 -- but it is also a palpably and intensely personal film.

The much too long, primitively plotted family action adventure Hidalgo, directed by Joe Johnston, has a handful of well-handled sequences but, given the young audience the film is intended for, the picture may be like having to finish an entire pot of broccoli to get a couple of jelly beans for dessert.

Might be described as an epic landscape film, a sweetly comic coming-of-age story or a lyrical work of social realism. But the setting -- a windswept, sparely populated steppe in southern Kazakhstan -- gives the movie a mood that sometimes feels closer to that of science fiction.

In spite of its limited perspective on Vietnam, its churning, term-paperish exploration of Conrad and the near incoherence of its ending, (it) is a great movie. It grows richer and stranger with each viewing, and the restoration of scenes left in the cutting room two decades ago has only added to its sublimity.

Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Allen, who have never aspired very far beyond their affable television-comedy personas, are easier to watch than Mr. Travolta or Mr. Macy, who both undertake what can only be called acting. This is more than the picture deserves, but then again, so is Ray Liotta, as the chieftain of the bad bikers, and so is Ms. Tomei.

Lame, long, ugly joke of a movie.

The movie itself is a nonstop barrage -- somewhere between a riot and an orgy -- of crude, obnoxious gags and riffs. If you are a connoisseur of sexual, scatological or just plain stupid humor, you will find your appetite satisfied, even glutted.

So minimally plotted that not only does it lack subtext or context, but it also may be the world's first movie without even a text.

It swerves from thriller to romantic comedy to farce without much conviction, though you can occasionally salvage a glimmer of amusing possibility. Mr. Williams scores with a few throwaway jokes.

Sweet Sixteen shows that he's (Loach) as capable of anger as his protagonist and just as eager to draw attention to an unchanging problem: the blight of generational poverty.

Don’t be fooled. The Brave One, though well cast and smoothly directed, is just as crude and ugly as you want it to be.

The resultant mix of dreaminess, violence and politics is a bit unwieldy, but it sticks to your ribs. You'll savor pieces of Duck, You Sucker in your head much later: the mark of a work by a true voluptuary, the overspill in whose craft comes as much from enthusiasm as arrogance.

Originally intended as a cable television series, Middle Men bears some telltale scars of hasty, clumsy truncation. Still, there is a raffish vigor that makes the movie watchable despite all-over-the-map storytelling and a fuzzy, superficial grasp of the salient themes.

In its modest scope and mellow tone, 35 Shots of Rum resembles Olivier Assayas’s "Summer Hours," another recent film by a French director who has sometimes trafficked in provocation and extremity. Both movies embed extraordinary thematic richness within a simple, almost anecdotal narrative framework, and both achieve a rare eloquence about the state of the world by means of tact and reticence.

If in hindsight An Education might make you a little queasy, it is hard to resist, like David himself.

This competently made picture seems a rehash, and not a terribly interesting one. What's remarkable about it is how unremarkable it is.

The lack of narrative sophistication allows an Ecstasy-like disposition to set in; "Liberty" becomes goo-goo eyed over itself. It lacks the discipline to define Anna sufficiently; rather, it portrays her as either a lovable naïf or a spoiled narcissist in desperate need of a lesson.

The most transcendently, eye-poppingly, call-your-friend-ranting-in-the-middle-of-the-night-just-to-go-over-it-one-more-time crazily awful motion pictures ever made.

Edge of Darkness is reasonably well executed, but its competence reeks of fatigue. Another dead kid. Another angry dad. Another day at the office.

There are few concert movies that were filmed were such abiding feeling and respect. It's of a potent vintage that goes down deceptively smoother with age.

Every effort to expand the range of feature-length animation beyond the confines of cautious family fare is to be welcomed, and budding techno and fantasy geeks are likely to be intrigued and enthralled.

A valuable and intelligent introduction and tribute to their anarchic, uncompromising and absolutely peculiar genius.

If only the story were leaner and more nimble -- but then again this is a Ridley Scott film, so you go in expecting bombast and bloat in the service of leaden themes.

The movie doesn't turn out to be as benignly right-wing as it initially suggests, though the plot turns can be spotted a mile away.

A clumsy and confused adaptation of Michael Chabon's 1988 novel.

What makes Le Amiche so bracing -- so sad and, sometimes, so funny -- is that its heroines are fallible, flawed, vain and powerful, each in her own way. They often make one another miserable, but their company is always a pleasure.

With its pointed narrative, the film makes its case with a minimum of pushiness and a subtle nod to its crowd.

The history presented in The Wind That Shakes the Barley hardly feels like a closed book or a museum display. It is as alive and as troubling as anything on the evening news, though far more thoughtful and beautiful.

Mr. Tsai's films are held together internally, and connected one to another, by an elusive, insistent logic that is easier to recognize than to describe. But once you do start to recognize it, each new movie offers passage to an exotic place that feels, uncannily, like home.

A sizzling, artistic crackerjack and a model of its genre, pegged on a harassed man's moral decision, laced with firm characterizations and tingling detail and finally attaining an incredibly colorful crescendo of microscopic police sleuthing.

The dazzling, high-flying silliness is quite an achievement. The movie is better than it deserves to be, given its origins: a ride at Disneyland and Disney World.

You won't come out unaffected, because the depths of intimacy that the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu plumbs here are so rarely touched by filmmakers that 21 Grams is tantamount to the discovery of a new country.

Thornton's performance is lost in a film that is more of a schematic success than a dramatic one.

The picture itself is about, yes, cycles, and as tiresome as that sounds, 10 minutes into the film you'll be white-knuckled and unable to look away.

Mr. Law doesn't disgrace himself here, though he doesn't have much to do, and the director, Po Chih Leong, is deft at creating atmosphere, but it's an atmosphere we've all seen before.

Soderbergh rallies a seismic jolt of enthusiasm, and the movie is an elating blaze of flair and pride.

When it's over, the realization of how much the movie means to you really sinks in; you can't get it out of your heart.

The directors Andrew Rossi and Kate Novack may not be great filmmakers -- it's hard to tell, based on this bare-bones picture -- but they know a great story, and more important, how to tell it.

Drab and incoherent teen comedy.

Can't redeem the moves toward its predictable happy ending. But the movie has a protagonist who has a great time getting there.

Meet the Robinsons is surely one of the worst theatrically released animated features issued under the Disney label in quite some time.

For a film full of murder, jealousy and fatalism, Snow Angels feels curiously small and anecdotal, and its impact diminishes as it nears its terrible conclusion.

A somber, absorbing and only moderately preposterous new thriller.

Couldn't be more artless.

A comforting, sentimental tale of a kind that would be insufferably maudlin if made in Hollywood and unbearably affectless if it showed up at Sundance. Somehow it’s easier to take in French.

Its formal novelty aside, Redacted rarely hits the audience with a genuine shock or a clarifying insight. It churns through a set of ideas and emotions that are confusing and unpleasant, to be sure, but also, by now, dispiritingly familiar.

As the director, Anne Fletcher, methodically cuts back and forth between two weddings, she makes the reasonably insightful, moderately funny point that modern American weddings, however they may strain for individuality and specialness, are all pretty much alike. The problem is that much the same could be said about modern American romantic comedies.

Gives a remarkably thorough and detailed account of the difficult conditions facing American soldiers in Iraq.

Something not seen in movie theaters for a long time: an intelligent, modern screwball comedy, a minor classic on the order of competent, fast-talking curve balls about deception and greed like Mitchell Leisen's "Easy Living" and Billy Wilder's "Major and the Minor."

As well done as it is, Wonderland feels predictable. There is no sad turn in these characters' lives that you cannot see coming about an hour before.

Not a great film, mainly because it can't transcend -- and, indeed, lays bare -- the intellectual flimsiness of its source. But it is, nonetheless, full of examples of what good filmmaking looks like. For all its chin-rubbing, brow-furrowing attitudes, it does not, in the end, give you much to think about. But there is, nonetheless, a lot here to see.

Mixing pop savvy with startling formal ambition, Mr. Mann transforms what is essentially a long, fairly predictable cop-show episode into a dazzling (and sometimes daft) Wagnerian spectacle.

A lively minor addendum to the grand tradition of Italian fraternal cinema.

The modestly assembled Love Object... is only periodically derailed by its tone; Mr. Parigi sometimes overplays the humor in the midst of all the deadpan.

He (Lenny) is completely appalling, and also completely himself, a kind of mad, disturbing integrity that is both matched and mitigated by the honesty of this lovely, hair-raising film.

A playful parlor trick, a departure from the performance-art films that have made this director's reputation. In keeping with his lighter side, *Corpus is also fun; imagine a Looney Tunes segment or an episode of Nickelodeon's "Kablam!" directed by Red Grooms.

Its frank good humor stands in sharp contrast with the strange combination of timidity and exploitiveness of more widely distributed recent teenage comedies.

It's more of a mash note than a formal documentary, and there's nothing wrong with that.

What gives the movie its power is that even the most innocuous scenes in the boys' lives are shadowed by dread.

What saves Breaking and Entering from foundering altogether in earnest self-regard is Mr. Minghella's evident affection for London, a city of inexhaustible architectural and human variety.

Pootie Tang may be raw and slovenly -- hey, it often is raw and slovenly -- but it succeeds as a laugh getter because of the spot-on satirical notes. You might say that the movie walks it like it talks it; I'm not sure what Pootie would say.

The reckoning with the past, which has occupied West German society since the 1960s, has been painful and divisive, which makes the calm, empirical spirit of this film all the more impressive.

A sharp, small-scale comedy of male misbehavior that turns out to be one of this dreary spring’s pleasant cinematic surprises.

In the hands of a more literal-minded filmmaker The Tracey Fragments might well have been dreary and unbearable, a chronicle of florid self-pity justified by arbitrary cruelty. Instead it is fierce, enigmatic and affecting.

If a movie of this kind didn't traffic in overstatement, it wouldn't be doing its job, which is to provide a strong dose of simple, rousing emotion.

Its bone-deep willingness to do anything to entertain is exhausting.

The Counterfeiters is a swift and suspenseful thriller, and perhaps a little too entertaining for its own good.

Takes all the Christmas season's bad vibes and converts them into an achingly funny and corrupt dark comedy.

A curious, somewhat ungainly movie. But it is also rich and fascinating. At times you think you are watching a clumsy stage pageant superimposed on a documentary; it’s so stiff, and yet at the same time so real.

Delicate and altogether satisfying romantic comedy.

Even the handful of moments that are amusing feel recycled from old sketches of Mr. Murphy's.

An instant classic, a comedy that captures the sexual confusion and moral ambivalence of our moment without straining, pandering or preaching.

Simultaneously stirring and dispiriting.

While she (Lopes-Curval) portrays the brittleness of their lives with lovely splashes of generosity, the lack of condescension doesn't change the fact that there's not much drama to be found in those very limitations; her characters don't do much beyond getting on one another's nerves.

Some of this is affecting, some of it tedious, and the film's inconsistencies of tone are made more glaring by its peculiar look.

Getting an audience so caught up is no small feat; it is a tribute to the directors' storytelling.

There's not much going on here, and there is little suspense.

Not exactly uproarious. But Mr. Murphy, going back at least to his Gumby and Buckwheat days on "Saturday Night Live," has always had the ability to turn broad caricature into something stranger and more inventive.

Mr. Lin makes the anxious grasping of these kids for some kind of emotional turf -- their own need to shatter the stereotypes that bind them -- the heart of Better Luck Tomorrow, a scenario that keeps the movie's blood racing.