A.O. Scott

In his memoir Mr. Bauby performed a heroic feat of alchemy, turning horror into wisdom, and Mr. Schnabel, following his example and paying tribute to his accomplishment, has turned pity into joy.

The blithe cruelties of outdoor living mount up, but the filmmakers refuse to exaggerate or sensationalize their material.

Shrek the Third seems at once more energetic and more relaxed, less desperate to prove its cleverness and therefore to some extent smarter.

If Boat Trip were screened on a cruise ship, most of the passengers would be dog-paddling back to shore.

Nostalgia and comedy are run through a food processor until they become a flavorless paste.

The fallibility of the romantic ideal -- which is nonetheless indispensable on screen and off -- is something Hollywood has trouble dealing with. "The Break-up," in which Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughan did just what the title promised, would have been a more notable exception if it were anything like a good movie. The Last Kiss, while not quite a good movie either, at least deserves credit for its honesty.

Such an amalgam of fairy tales, old movies and tabloid stories that it never develops a life of its own.

Packs a lot into one night, but it's wearying. It's like a kid determined to show you every toy in his room, and there's nowhere to escape.

No Country for Old Men is purgatory for the squeamish and the easily spooked. For formalists -- those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design -- it’s pure heaven.

The result is imperfect, but its roughness is entirely consistent with the way the filmmakers understand the traumatic experiences of displacement, loss and deprivation.

Enormously likable, partly because it is aware of its own grasp of the absurd.

Syndromes and a Century, like its curious title, has the logic of a dream, a piece of music or perhaps a John Ashbery poem. Its coherence is evident; it is too lovely and lucid to be frustrating or dull. But it takes place just on the other side of conscious apprehension.

It feels like both a joke and a turkey.

All in all, it's a mess, and much as Ms. Blunt pouts, Ms. Adams twinkles, and Mr. Arkin growls, there's nothing they can do to clean it up.

Mr. Kitano directed, edited and wrote Brother -- and his style of close-to-the-vest brutality travels extremely well.

Mister Lonely, self-enclosed though it may be, nonetheless demonstrates that Mr. Korine, who showed his ability to shock and repel in earlier films, also has the power to touch, to unsettle and to charm. This is undoubtedly a small movie, but it's also more than that: it's a small, imperfect world.

So unabashed in its cheesiness that it could be spread on crackers; it may spike your cholesterol levels

Mr. del Toro lets loose with an all-American, vaudevillian rambunctiousness that makes the movie daffy, loose and lovable.

In exchange for three hours of your time, Yi Yi will give you more life.

Festooned with yards of gross-out jokes, sniggering allusions and, astonishingly, a sentimental climax that's more repellent than any of the crude effluvia the film is drenched with.

Serves a reheated notion on a creaky TV tray.

Mr. Bader was lucky to get a good cast.

Vivid and visually stunning.

Effervescent and satisfying, a crowd pleaser that does not condescend.

It's fleet- footed, merciless entertainment. But the mixture of laughs, bathos and brutality is a big turnoff.

It is in the fragile bonds that form between the black soldiers and the Italian villagers that Miracle at St. Anna breaks free of its own grandiosity and tells a grounded, moving, human story. Not a miracle by any means, but an earthy inquiry into death, duty, friendship and honor. What we’ve always wanted from war movies.

This mistaken-identity picture is so film-culture referential that the final product is a ghost.

The film isn't even as good as the second-rate game it is based on, which is nothing but a shootout.

Thorough, understated and altogether enthralling documentary.

Probably the most breathtakingly gorgeous film of the year, dizzy with a nose-against-the-glass romantic spirit that has been missing from the cinema forever.

What makes Mr. Crialese's telling unusual, apart from the gorgeousness of his wide-screen compositions, is that his emphasis is on departure and transition, rather than arrival.

The scandal of Antichrist is not that it is grisly or upsetting but that it is so ponderous, so conceptually thin and so dull.

Art is a fairy tale we choose to believe in, and this movie, a fiction confected about real people, is too good not to be true.

A good piece of work more often than not, and this is one of the few times an actor turned director has chosen to subvert the feel-good genre for his maiden voyage.

Mr. Leconte seems at last to have anchored his cinematic gifts to a story worth caring about.

It's empty calories trying to trumpet its bogus nutritional value, and the strain for social importance undermines the picture.

Somehow the story of a young man's coming of age never gets old, at least when it is told with the kind of sweetness and intelligence Adventureland displays.

Mr. Egoyan has shown off these etchings before -- a solemn young woman in lingerie, a handsome older man in the throes of erotic distress -- and the artistry he brings to the display feels tired and thin this time around. Chloe works hard at seduction, but its heart isn’t really in the game.

Wants to be everything and adds up to nothing. "War" is a film that tries to excel on several levels and falls flat on all of them.

It's another of Mr. Toback's quick-talking autobiographies that, like the best pop, have a clock running on their expiration dates.

It may be a bit early to make such judgments, but Battlefield Earth may well turn out to be the worst movie of this century.

Connoisseurs of craziness need wait no longer. Cobra Verde opens today in all its feral, baffling glory. Along with "Aguirre" and "Fitzcarraldo," Cobra Verde completes a trilogy of mayhem and megalomania in hot climates.

The truth about the case of Christine Collins is so shocking and dramatic that embellishment must have seemed pointless, but in sticking so close to the historical record, Mr. Straczynski and Mr. Eastwood have produced a distended, awkward narrative whose strongest themes are lost in the murky pomp of period detail.

Like Tango, Sal and Eddie, Mr. Fuqua and Mr. Martin dig themselves into a pulpy predicament, and then find themselves unable to do anything but shoot their way out. The movie is wounded, but it’s also too tough to kill.

Still never having to say you're sorry.

Ms. Wood's performance bounces with mood swings from anxiety to exhilaration in a movie with moments so realistically painted that your eyes will sting from the fumes.

It is so dishonest that the title Changing Lanes can just as well refer to the cheaply contrived turns in the film.

Something close to a masterpiece, a work of extreme -- I am tempted to say evil -- genius.

The most startling aspect of Robot Stories is not the mix that the director built from spare parts left on the curb but the evolving dramatic acumen of its maker; he's a talent with a future.

There is nothing wrong with the story itself, but the tone is grating and the pacing sluggish. Episodes that might be howlingly funny on the page turn weirdly gross and sadistic on screen.

In Smash His Camera Mr. Galella emerges as a kindred soul for the curious documentarian and as a large, complicated personality in his own right, not entirely likable but admirable for his persistence and the quickness of his index finger.

Mr. Singh may have an artist's temperament, and he shows signs of being a director

John Cusack gives one of his wiliest performances in some time, and one of his most mature, as Nick Easter, an aging slacker drafted into jury duty. He subverts his protracted-adolescent cheekiness and pours the melted charm into something far bleaker.

Like a soft drink that's been sitting open too long: it's too much syrup and not enough fizz.

Couldn't the creative minds at the 20th Century Fox animation studios, hoping to wring a few hundred million dollars more out of their prized family-animation franchise, have come up with something more original?

It has the melancholy mildew of both "Marty" and the 1940's weepie "The Enchanted Cottage."

Mr. Rock's attempts to disentangle himself from his persona while offering audiences a sliver of insight into his world is a lofty ambition, but Down to Earth falls short.

A monumental treat as well as a crafty assemblage of mythologies.

A faithful and disarmingly earnest attempt to honor some venerable and popular Chinese cinematic traditions.

Any movie that awards a former Monty Python cast member a Nobel Prize in anything cannot be all bad. And The Day the Earth Stood Still could be worse.

Something TERRIBLE is afoot. Sadly, that something turns out to be the movie itself.

Lorna's Silence is engrossing and powerful, which may be just another way of saying it's a film by the Dardenne brothers. If it falls a bit short of the standards of their best work, that is only because it is not quite a masterpiece.

Its low-key affect and decidedly human scale endow Once with an easy, lovable charm that a flashier production could never have achieved. The formula is simple: two people, a few instruments, 88 minutes and not a single false note.

The result is a movie that offers uplift without phoniness, history without undue didacticism and a fair number of funny, dirty jokes.

It is to Mr. Gibney’s great credit that while he pays due attention to the outsize, cartoonish celebrity persona Thompson fell back on when his literary powers began to wane, this film concentrates on the bold, innovative journalism that secured Thompson’s reputation and assures his immortality.

An auspicious feature-directing debut by Mr. Webber in so many ways -- a groaning board of temptations for the eye and ear -- that you may almost forgive the film its lack of drama and the perfunctory attempts at characterization. Viewing this film has been likened to watching paint dry; actually it is more like watching a painting dry.

The main problem with The Uninvited lies in its refusal to decide just what movie it wants to be a commercial for. It certainly doesn’t have much in common with "A Tale of Two Sisters," the creepy Korean horror film of which it is supposedly a remake.

Nearly every time Mr. Jordan, working from a script by Mr. Ellis and Nicholas Jarecki, tries for similar effects, he goes badly awry, so that you snicker when the movie is trying to be poignant and groan when it aims to make a joke.

Southern Comfort sent shock waves through this year's Sundance Film Festival, even though it is as much about generosity and courage and tolerance as it is about a potentially discomforting subject.

Neither sensationalistic nor sentimental, Ms. Berg’s film is clear-sighted, tough-minded and devastating, a portrait of individual criminality and institutional indifference, a study in the betrayal of trust and the irresponsibility of authority.

The noisome action sequences of The Mummy Returns are preferable to the quiet times, when the cast is limited to spouting dialogue that is a banal combination of exposition and homily.

As the war in Afghanistan returns to the front pages and the national debate, we owe the men in Restrepo, at the very least, 90 minutes or so of our attention. If nothing else, this film, in showing how much they care about one another, demands the same of us.

Sitting through the accomplished but meaningless Black Hawk Down is like being trapped in an action film version of "Groundhog Day," condemned to sit through the same carnage over and over.

Whatever minor entertainment there is to be gleaned from Mahowny -- set in the early 1980's, mostly in Toronto -- comes in bits and pieces.

About as scary as a sock-puppet re-enactment of "The Blair Witch Project," and not nearly as funny.

A sneaky and smart film noir.

Isn't much of a movie (it'll play much better on the small screen), but the likable chemistry between Dre and Snoop counts for a lot.

A middling superhero movie! I wish I could say that was incredible.

Broken Embraces leaves the viewer in a contradictory state, a mixture of devastation and euphoria, amusement and dismay that deserves its own clinical designation. Call it Almodóvaria, a syndrome from which some of us are more than happy to suffer.

A small movie perfectly scaled to the big performance at its center.

Fitfully amusing.

"Print the legend," Mr. Wilson says at one point, both quoting John Ford and laying the foundation for his own often fact-free fabulous fabulism. And this movie is just that -- fabulous.

A rich, thought-provoking film.

In the arresting Red Road, the dire Orwellian warning that Big Brother is watching has evolved from a grim fantasy of totalitarianism into a banal fact of life.

Undercooked, although it feels enough like a comedy for you to swallow it if you have to.

Unfortunately One Hour Photo turns everyone but the central character into a cutout.

Mr. Duke’s filmmaking is functional at best, and the extreme shifts in emotional tone -- especially a late and disastrous swerve into tragedy -- are handled clumsily in Brian Bird’s script. Yet Not Easily Broken is not easily dismissed. For one thing, the cast is excellent, and for another, its intentions are serious and generous.

Letters to Juliet represents an interesting paradox: it is a movie that is very nearly perfect without being especially good.

This minimalist film is slightly hobbled by its minimal plot; it's the crucial difference between a movie with moments of greatness and a great movie.

The whole affair is pulpy, jokey, sometimes touching and frequently nonsensical: a big mess and, mostly, a lot of fun.

Primarily a riveting genre film that neatly exhibits the director's growing assurance -- Donald Goines would be proud.

Forlorn melodrama, which is low on drama and high on mellow.

The cast manages to maintain its dignity while sweat and dirt go flying around.

Clumsy when it should be light on its feet, the movie takes itself even more seriously than the comic book and its fans do, which is a superheroic achievement.

An entire family chronicle, along with four decades of French social and economic history, is recapitulated as a lavish, hectic dinner, complete with music and belly dancing. It will leave you stunned and sated, having savored an intimate and sumptuous epic of elation and defeat, jealousy and tenderness, life and death, grain and fish.

Given that Untold Scandal is, like its predecessor, an epic story of spreading displeasure, the director's ability to keep it from feeling petty is a major feat.

Mr. Li will come out of Kiss of the Dragon smelling like a rose; the combat couldn't be better. But next time around, he should leave the script to more capable hands.

Culinary purists have observed that much of what passes for the spicy Japanese condiment wasabi at American restaurants is an ersatz concoction of horseradish and green food coloring. The French-language action comedy Wasabi is just as artificial, pumped with horseradish to give it heat in lieu of actual spice.

For rock geeks of any age or taste, the lore in this documentary will be catnip.

Gorgeously shot, moving through the decades in a gentle adagio, it is less a chronicle than a tribute -- and also, to non-initiates in the game of go, a bit of a puzzle.

All it has in common with the original is a few dumb fun scares. In the new version, what we're left with after the scares is just plain dumb.

Mr. Ritchie seems to be stepping backward when he should be moving ahead.

First Sunday sometimes feels more like a script read-through than like an actual movie, but its warmth is likely to carry you through the stretches of cliché and tedium.

It is possible to have a good time at RED, but it is not a very good movie.

The film's ideas are interesting, but don't feel entirely worked out, and Mr. Rockwell's intriguingly strange performance (or performances) is left suspended, without the context that would give Sam's plight its full emotional and philosophical impact. The smallness of this movie is decidedly a virtue, but also, in the end, something of a limitation.

There hasn't been a film in years to use creative energy as efficiently as Monsters, Inc.

The film equivalent of the dark, boring period on a haunted house ride before the gondola crashes into another room filled with dirty mirrors.

Refreshingly tart and lean, forgoing the usual schmaltz and syrup.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine will most likely manage to cash in on the popularity of the earlier episodes, but it is the latest evidence that the superhero movie is suffering from serious imaginative fatigue.

Dogtooth supplies no such explanation and at times seems as much an exercise in perversity as an examination of it.

The kind of old-fashioned, grown-up weepie in which the hearts of men and women are cracked, and the shards flutter through the story. Its directness is the movie equivalent of hot, fresh popcorn.

Sicko is the least controversial and most broadly appealing of Mr. Moore’s movies. (It is also, perhaps improbably, the funniest and the most tightly edited.) The argument it inspires will mainly be about the nature of the cure, and it is here that Mr. Moore’s contribution will be most provocative and also, therefore, most useful.

The only thing that kept me watching License to Wed until the end (apart from being paid to do so) was the faith, perhaps misplaced, that I will not see a worse movie this year.

Persepolis, austere as it may look, is full of warmth and surprise, alive with humor and a fierce independence of spirit.

Here he (Murray) supplies the kind of performance that seems so fully realized and effortless that it can easily be mistaken for not acting at all.

As it develops, Dare lays out some interesting psychological puzzles, though the filmmakers lack the technique to explore them as thoroughly as you might wish.

It is only fitting that a movie concerned with the power and beauty of drawing -- the almost sacred magic of color and line -- should be so gorgeously and intricately drawn.

The intoxicating madness of Tears of the Black Tiger is in the end too willed, too deliberate, to be entirely divine.

Has shockingly little to say.

As ever, Mr. Chabrol’s style is delicate and precise. Comedy of Power is not his deepest or most ambitious film, and its stance of knowing resignation in the face of corruption can feel a little glib. But Ms. Huppert's ferocity compensates for the director's detachment; no French actress is as riveting to watch once the gloves come off.

If Intimacy does anything well, it portrays desperation, in many different forms.

Such few assets aren't enough to alleviate the film's shallowness.

Bland but poised.

Director Alfonso Cuarón works with a quicksilver fluidity, and the movie is fast, funny, unafraid of sexuality and finally devastating.

What Mr. Hanson has done with 8 Mile is make a pop movie instead of a movie about pop. There's nothing disreputable about this.

This is historical filmmaking without the balm of right-thinking ideology, either liberal or conservative. Gangs of New York is nearly a great movie. I suspect that, over time, it will make up the distance.

Precisely because their attitudes are so bluntly hedonistic and apolitical, Harold and Kumar manage to be fairly persuasive when they get around to criticizing the status quo, which the movie has the wit to acknowledge itself as part of.

Proust might have known what to do with the Baekelands, but Mr. Kalin and Mr. Rodman don't make much more of them than the mess they apparently already were.

Nearly 50 years after John Ford's "Searchers" we have arrived at a point in film history when the movie industry can offer a less sophisticated version of the same material.

Deftly swings to a spartan, engrossing climax, and the final twists spell out what the murderers are made of and the setting responsible for creating them. It is a true piece of film magic.

The film calls attention to its own artificial status. It actually knows it’s a movie! What a clever, tricky game! What fun! What a fraud.

What is most impressive is the care with which Mr. Chung manages this risky undertaking. He seems to have made this film above all by listening and looking.

A well-meaning, honorable movie. Which is not to say that it is a very good one.

Among its many achievements, Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There hurls a Molotov cocktail through the facade of the Hollywood biopic factory.

Jar City is chilly and cerebral but also morbidly and powerfully alive to grossness and physicality.

This is the kind of movie the people in it might have made, which means that its revelatory power as an investigation of teenage life in America is limited.

A supernatural soap opera.

Mr. Bar-Lev has made an excellent documentary, but it would have been better if he had not made it at all.

Ms. Peirce’s movie, which she wrote with Mark Richard, is not only an earnest, issue-driven narrative, but also a feverish entertainment, a passionate, at times overwrought melodrama gaudy with violent actions and emotions.

A painfully sincere study in creative passion, sexual ardor and political zeal that embalms a mad and exuberant historical moment within the talky, balky conventions of period-costumed highbrow soap opera.

The best cartoons are built on the contradictory pursuit of meticulously arranged anarchy. But they never seem needy, or desperate for laughs, as Home on the Range does. The film seems hungrier for a pat on the head than a chuckle.

Like many of the nonpolitical terrorist-as-villain spectaculars that have been held back after Sept. 11, has the whiff of something gone stale. Though it may have sat on the shelf for a while, this project had gone bad long before it was released.

Has the dreary one-track banality of a feature-length version of an episode of "Red Shoe Diaries," Showtime's series for people who like soft core but are too lazy to leave the house.

Loads of fun. It has a jamming B-picture buzz -- the kind of swift filmmaking and high spirits that have been missing from movies for a while.

When you hear his (Robert Kennedy's) patient, meditative speeches, from which every note of demagoguery or pandering has been purged, you glimpse the film Mr. Estevez set out to make -- the one you may wish you were watching.

Like his scripts for “21 Grams” and “Babel,” this one makes heavy use of happenstance and temporal displacement, and like them, too, it depends on ideas about human behavior that can only be called preposterous.

Appears to be a somewhat sinister episode of "Nightline."

This film has a conquering spirit. The dankness is replaced by an optimistic blast of sunlight at the end, a contrast to the earlier lighting dimmed with human misery. Mr. Frears blasts away the blight, though he doesn't have to work to restore Okwe's dignity. It shines through from the start.

The experience is visually enchanting, cloyingly sweet, at once utterly chaste and insanely erotic, and finally exhausting. Aficionados will not settle for less.

A revelation comes near the end that is both tremendously moving and a bit disappointing, in the way that the solutions to great mysteries frequently are. This turn does not diminish the accomplishment of Ms. Scott Thomas's deep, subtle and altogether stunning performance, but it does alter the scale of the movie, turning it into a more manageable, less existentially unsettling drama.

The believability comes from the casting: he has found a group of actors and nonprofessionals who interact spectacularly well.

Because the material gives off such a delicious vibe, even though the movie itself feels a little old, you want to like Simone. It would be easier if it were a more forceful comedy. But Mr. Niccol's style is that of reticence -- as a director, he's a little coquettish.

A tour de force of archival research and dogged interviewing, and the portrait it presents is remarkably complete.

May not advance any grand new thesis about the South and its history, but it turns an old house into a rich and strange repository of local knowledge.

When the turmoil of the last 12 months has receded and the 10th-anniversary deluxe collectors edition comes around, this strange, numb cinematic experience may seem fresh, shocking and poignant rather than merely and depressingly true.

It's the central story that's lacking.

There is something graceful and effortless about this performance (Mr. Smith's), which not only shows what it might feel like to be the last man on earth, but also demonstrates what it is to be a movie star.

Regards its characters with affectionate detachment, and assures its audience that no great calamities or revelations are in store. Instead, there are a series of small crises and tiny epiphanies, all adding up to a story that courts triviality in its pursuit of charm.

It’s a small movie, and in some ways a very sad one, but it has an undeniable and authentic vitality, an exuberance of spirit, that feels welcome and rare.

It's this compulsion to solder melancholy to weightlessness that constantly trips up the movie; Mr. Kelly doesn't have the assurance to pull off such a difficult feat.

Could serve as a textbook example of what to avoid in nonfiction filmmaking.

The narrative motion is tricky; first it canters, then shifts into a heady, quick gallop. What's most fascinating about Adanggaman are the scenes that feel like anecdotal rest stops but that are actually building into a nuanced and engrossing whole.

Kandahar feels like a Magritte painting rendered in sand tones, and your eyes are drawn to the screen. There aren't enough of these moments, though, and Mr. Makhmalbaf lessens their power by repeating them.

La Vie en Rose, which Mr. Dahan wrote as well as directed, has an intricate structure, which is a polite way of saying that it's a complete mess... In the end, as often happens in movies of this kind, La Vie en Rose is saved by Piaf herself.

An enjoyable and charming if overactive fantasy.

The proto-punk warriors known as the MC5 left a dent that outlasts their mostly negligible record sales, and the director's curiosity is piqued by the group's sociological impact.

No movie can convey the truth of war to those of us who have not lived through it, but The Messenger, precisely by acknowledging just how hard it is to live with that truth, manages to bring it at least partway home.

Another high-concept Irish Spring comedy.

The cast of The Core deserve Oscar nominations just for being able to speak most of the lines without succumbing to the chortles.

Blown up way past television-set size, the animated film's squiggly lines and rushed renditions are pale and blurry. This may be the first cartoon ever to look as if it were being shown on the projection television screen of a sports bar.

There is no question that the heart of Micmacs is in the right place, but the movie is also a little thin.

Since the movie is about desire -- not so much for sex as for the vitality and surprise that sex can provide -- it is also about power. Few writers can match Mr. Kureishi's knowing wit on this subject, or his skill at dissecting the shifting dynamics of longing and domination.

The opening shots, of Farmer on horseback in his space suit, hint at a strangeness that the rest of the movie never quite lives up to, but it does have a visual freshness that makes the bromides and clichés palatable.

At times The TV Set seems to unfold almost entirely without exaggeration.

This is a high-concept comedy, and none of the jokes are forced, which makes Meet the Parents a singular achievement.

As good as cut-rate animation that seems to consist of screen savers can be.

The draggy, lurching two hours of Knowing will make you long for the end of the world, even as you worry that there will not be time for all your questions to be answered.

The lip movements of the animated figures are slightly slow, so you feel as if you're watching a badly dubbed Japanese creature feature from the 1960's. The dialogue is almost as stilted, and after a while you drift into that half-dream state that inert movies can create.

Inside Job, a sleek, briskly paced film whose title suggests a heist movie, is the story of a crime without punishment, of an outrage that has so far largely escaped legal sanction and societal stigma.

Surprisingly . . . ept given that it is basically a dumb movie about smart people. This smooth but bland thriller may be the best we could expect from such a collaboration.

Much too long. It starts to feel like a flabby, dramatic version of the first "Austin Powers" movie, another exercise in living anachronism as a storytelling device. By the time the picture's final note about German reunification is struck, "Lenin!" has raised a wall of indifference for the audience.

It is an engrossing portrait all the same, a generous introduction to someone worth knowing, who knows an awful lot.

Although it is composed mainly of archival footage and touches on a great many actual events, Double Take, as you may already have gathered, is not quite a documentary. It is, instead, a meditation on a series of loosely related themes drawn together, somewhat tenuously, by the familiar yet elusive sensibility that Hitchcock brought to Hollywood and then to American television.

The middle section of the film has some of the superficiality of a made-for-Lifetime drama of female distress and resilience, a bit too eager to make its points and solve its dramatic problems at the cost of the messiness that would bring the story fully to life.

You might be tempted to say, "Huh?" Or, if you're in the theater, to leave. But wait -- there's less.

The point of it is not, in the end, to explain him or solve the mystery of his life, but rather to spend time in his company and understand why he is someone to be missed.

There are dull stabs at verbal wit that leave you baffled, bored or slightly grossed out.

Though there is a lot to see in Inception, there is nothing that counts as genuine vision. Mr. Nolan’s idea of the mind is too literal, too logical, too rule-bound to allow the full measure of madness -- the risk of real confusion, of delirium, of ineffable ambiguity -- that this subject requires.

The action is the best thing in the picture.

One of the funniest, and most telling, films of the year. The filmmakers call "Kid" a documentary, but the movie is one of the unusual kind that is firmly lodged inside the subject's perspective.

After several scenes of this tacky nonsense, you'll be wistful for the testosterone-charged wizardry of Jerry Bruckheimer productions, especially because Half Past Dead is like "The Rock" on a Wal-Mart budget. And the marked-down price tags are incredibly visible.

There are humor and pathos, but a crucial dimension of intensity is missing. The best I can say is that it's kind of a good movie.

Shallow and harmlessly diverting picture.

The self-consciousness of the premise and the playlike structure of Blind Date clash with the naturalism of Mr. Tucci and Ms. Clarkson’s acting styles, and the film never lifts itself above its origin as a well-meaning, underdeveloped exercise.

The film's seductive lack of pretension will make a fan of you.

Looks like a big-budget version of a Miller's Genuine Draft commercial.

May lead to a new axiom: success has many fathers, but failure has "Project Greenlight."

Does not entirely play by the established conventions of its genre. Its willingness to explore states of feeling and modes of behavior that tamer romantic comedies never go near is decidedly a virtue, though this same sense of daring and candor also exposes its limitations.

Aims for a blend of whimsy and tingly suspense but botches nearly every spell it tries to cast.

The extravagance of the sets and costumes increases the theatricality; Chunhyang is an almost childlike delight for the eyes.

Its ideological leanings are evident and unsurprising, but more screen time for Mr. Nader's pre-2000 (or pre-post-2000) adversaries would have made a richer film.

Less forgivably, the movie is dull.

If in the end the film is neither a cogent psychological thriller nor an effervescent sex comedy, it does at least have an interesting sense of place.

Mr. Rithy Panh makes telling use of a survivor whose ability to communicate lends itself to the subject. The tragedy is that Mr. Vann Nath's powers are used to illuminate these horrors.

If the film were a fight, they'd have stopped it.

As predictable as a fast-food restaurant. The actors' exuberance goes a long way, but not far enough.

Suzy's marriage, Nick's divorce, Paul's work history: none of it is my or anyone else's business. But these things -- these people -- have become, through Mr. Apted's films, a vital part of modern life, which seems to grow richer every seven years, when the new "Up" movie comes out.

It's clear that this is a farce about ambition that is not ambitious enough, right down to its cutesy, punning title.

The end may be a bit of a letdown, but much of Garage Days is choice cuts indeed.

A funny-sad, icky-sweet comedy of family dysfunction.

The real fun is the insect shtick.

There are aspects of “Horton,”... that are fresh and enjoyable, and bits that will gratify even a dogmatic and orthodox Seussian.

Maddin's real point -- and, for admirers of this brilliant and idiosyncratic artist, the true source of the movie’s interest -- is that Winnipeg explains him.

The story of self-discovery through which the writer and director Audrey Wells leads Frances is eminently superficial, although Ms. Wells keeps the movie going with a steady, commanding hand and casts it with an actress who can deftly downshift from serene to sodden.

Blends the least of Woody Allen with a plot complication out of "Love, American Style," stuck together with sitcom glue.

A film in which nothing is what it seems, this is the kind of genre touch that Mr. González Iñárritu expands into something far more haunting.

With Shanghai Knights, he (Chan) has come through with one of his best. This time, it's personable.

The big, climactic fight, complete with an epic snuffleupagus rampage, is decent action-movie fun. And as a history lesson, 10,000 BC has its value. It explains just how we came to be the tolerant, peace-loving farmers we are today, and why the pyramids were never finished.

This movie is a suspense thriller whose only suspense comes from an audience wondering if the picture will hit its promised 97-minute running time.

A loud, seemingly interminable, and altogether incoherent entry in the preposterous and proliferating “action-comedy” genre.

This could be called an art house version of "Pearl Harbor," except that sounds vaguely nutritious, like fat- free yogurt or a historical episode of A&E's "Biography." But Dark Blue World is all empty carbs, like malted milk balls.

Wants to blend thrills and pathos, getting at the many sides of what is, as Mr. Blaustein describes it, a carny act.

Narc is convincing, an entertaining, grimy view of the traps of machismo tucked inside a cop thriller.

A handmade dream, cobbled together from dirt, wood and more imagination than most of us can muster in our most fevered states. Because this Czech master refuses to work in the scrubbed, antiseptic manner of most animators, this fable comes to life as hilarious and creepy.

You are likely to remember this charming film, directed by Nadine Labaki, less for its gently comic, mildly melodramatic plot than for its friendly and inviting atmosphere.

As a poky little character comedy, Cherish is enchanting in a small-scale way. But when Mr. Taylor tries to turn it into a genre thriller, Cherish deteriorates so quickly that it's unsettling -- but probably not in the way Mr. Taylor intended.

A piece of moldy wax fruit if ever there was one.

Bronson invites you to admire its protagonist as a pure, muscular embodiment of anarchy. And perhaps you will, but you may also be glad that he’s still behind bars.

This crude comedy delivers on the "No Shame, No Mercy" threats from the original. Unfortunately, it all adds up to "No Good."

The blandly likable computer-animation extravaganza Ice Age actually seems like a fossil, a relic from another era.

At its best, The Nativity Story shares with "Hail Mary" an interest in finding a kernel of realism in the old story of a pregnant teenager in hard times. Buried in the pageantry, in other words, is an interesting movie.

The documentary doesn't get near the prowess of its subject; it passes through your life like a minor daydream.

More likely to be recalled as a moderately satisfying entertainment than remembered as a classic.

Unfortunately, it is also less than the sum of its parts -- overly long, lacking in narrative momentum and too often choosing sensation over coherence.

Neither Mr. Gibson’s fans nor his detractors are likely to accuse him of excessive subtlety, and the effectiveness of Apocalypto is inseparable from its crudity. But the blunt characterizations and the emphatic emotional cues are also evidence of the director’s skill.

Though finally overwhelmed by a preening lassitude, Hotel is never less than fascinating.

A sequel whose sugar-rush absurdity almost defeats the forces of logic, taste and conventional narrative. It is a defect that might undermine a lesser movie but that in this case proves to be as cheerfully, enjoyably humid as the first blast of summer light and heat.

A show not simply preserved by Mr. Lee’s camera, but brought, somehow, to its fullest, strangest, most electrifying realization.

A washout.

Hedges's intelligent and touching farce, Pieces of April, makes an important contribution to a small and insignificant subgenre: Thanksgiving Day failure. It does so by raising the bar.

A soulless compilation of thrills.

A thriller, a murder mystery and a somewhat self-conscious literary puzzle. All of that is entertaining enough, if a bit preposterous and overdone, but the twists and convolutions of the film’s beginning and end enable a middle that is dizzying domestic comedy.

Harvey Milk was an intriguing, inspiring figure. Milk is a marvel.

In this shaggy-dog version the wolfman’s story is both gratuitously bloody and, finally, bloodless.

You’re left wanting more, but not quite the “more” Iron Man 2 works so hard to supply.

Ms. Bening's precise, pitiless tracing of her character's decline from feisty defiance to pathetic, overmedicated self-delusion gives the film an emotional weight it might not otherwise have.

Is this evidence of cultural decline? It's hard to think of a short answer that wouldn't be made more vivid by the insertion of the forbidden word. So skip it. No, not the movie. What, are you kidding me? No way. Go. Help yourself.

There are a few laughs, but I'm not sure that a comedy is supposed to make you recoil, which is what "Smoochy" does.

The girl-boy-girl threesome, which turns out to be short-lived, is perhaps the most straightforward emotional configuration in this odd, witty, touching film.

If this movie is not a ride, then what is it? One thing it may not be, quite, is a movie.

That it is more -- a small masterpiece, perfect in design and execution -- almost goes without saying, but the film’s profundity and its charm go hand in hand.

Another movie -- Matt Stone and Trey Parker's "Team America," whose wooden puppets were more compelling actors than most of the cast of 300 -- calculated the cost [of freedom] at $1.05. I would happily pay a nickel less, in quarters or arcade tokens, for a vigorous 10-minute session with the video game that 300 aspires to become.

Much of All About Lily Chou-Chou is mesmerizing: some of its plaintiveness could make you weep. If only Mr. Iwai trusted the material enough.

Wickedly absorbing.

Filled with voyeuristic shots as the camera peers through picket fences and windows and around corners; the film looks as if it were shot with a surveillance camera from a 7-Eleven

A potent, assured and ambitious piece of filmmaking brought down by weighted dialogue and, playing Americans, the British actors Adrian Lester and Joseph Fiennes and the Australian David Wenham.

Perhaps the most gripping thing about the ultimately disappointing Japanese horror film Uzumaki is the patient way the picture develops mood.

There is plenty of nonsense, a great deal of stylish posturing and clothes-horsing, and a few action sequences that manage to be both gripping and preposterous.

As it is, the film is more curiosity than provocation, an artifact of a faded world brought to zombie half-life by the cinematic technology of the present.

As a five-minute clip on YouTube, this spoof might be a small masterpiece. As a feature film, it’s both too much and not nearly enough.

Straining to capture artistic frenzy, it descends into vulgar chaos, less a homage to Federico Fellini’s “8 ½” (its putative inspiration) than a travesty.