A.O. Scott

That the film manages to be understated, calm and intelligent in spite of its wrenching subject matter is perhaps its most impressive accomplishment. In avoiding sensationalism, it feels very close to the truth.

Has a burnished, high-quality look and a heart swollen with maudlin self-regard.

The film's shapeliness and depth are not immediately apparent; for much of its running time, it feels diffuse and anecdotal, but in retrospect you appreciate the subtlety and heft of the story, as well as the tricky profundity of Mr. Ceylan's approach.

Mr. Bielinsky, in what would sadly be his last film, demonstrates a mastery of the form that is downright scary.

Yes Man rarely rises to genuine hilarity. It takes no risks, finds no inspiration and settles, like its hero, into a dull, noncommittal middle ground. Should you see this movie? Maybe. Whatever. I don't care.

Less a parable of literary ethics than a showcase of literary personality, and it is in the end more touching than troubling.

The psychological underpinnings give this picture a charged emotional atmosphere. The dizzying unspoken feelings between the two men mesh so well that the movie seems to have been worked out like a perverse drawing-room comedy.

Fortunately, Mr. Kumai, who himself has shown no aversion to baroque melodrama, leans here toward a plain and direct style that is tasteful and intelligent, a boon, given the predictability of the story. He understands the difference between pitiable and pitiful.

Willem Dafoe steals the picture with his comic timing.

This would-be spicy film has been made blandly palatable.

Although the film is initially clumsy and a little hard to follow, Mr. Alexie takes his time in setting his characters in play, and the visual clunkiness becomes secondary to the eloquent emotional desolation.

If you're looking for laughs, give "Valley of the Dolls" another read instead.

Once the basic conflict is established, the story plods along, alternating between preposterous -- in a bad way -- speeches and even more preposterous -- but in a good way -- shootouts and slugfests.

Often unspeakably funny.

It’s a sober, revelatory and absolutely vital film.

No real mockery is intended by this harmless, mindless grab bag of slightly used gags, which lampoons some of the conventions of recent comic-book epics and adds the expected staples of juvenile humor: urine, vomit and intestinal gas.

So undistinguished that the moments you remember best are those that you wish another, more original director had tackled.

While Mr. Molina and Mr. Cage supply a measure of well-compensated eccentricity, their labors ultimately serve to emphasize the grinding mediocrity of the enterprise.

Some will find profundity in the film's reversals and revelations, but its provocations are not particularly insightful or original. The Death of a President is, in the end, neither terribly outrageous nor especially heroic; it’s a thought experiment that traffics in received ideas.

Mildly amusing but wholly unnecessary comedy.

All it wants to do is scare a smile onto your face, and it often succeeds. After all, how can a movie that offers Michael Jeter as a mercenary not be fun?

The subtext of the relationship is not sexuality, as it is in "Twilight" or "True Blood," but rather the loneliness of children and their often unrecognized reservoirs of rage.

If recent American history is ever going to be discussed with the necessary clarity and ethical rigor, this film will be essential.

A smart, well-meaning project -- never quite pulls itself together. It has a vague, half-finished feeling, as if it had not figured out what it was trying to do. Which may amount to a kind of realism -- an accurate reflection of where we are in Afghanistan.

The title may be mildly provocative in its vulgarity, but the most striking feature of this movie is its dullness.

The moderately arresting Risk/Reward suffers from a lack of resources and is writ small, suggesting that it may play better on television.

It is the funniest and saddest movie Mr. Baumbach has made so far, and also the riskiest.

This compilation of blisteringly tight stunts plays like the world's longest Mountain Dew commercial.

While there is not much chemistry between Mr. Grant and Ms. Barrymore, they are professional enough to work with the movie's conceit while sending flickers of idiosyncratic charm off the screen.

Juno respects the idiosyncrasies of its characters rather than exaggerating them or holding them up for ridicule.

The violence in his (Craig's) first outing, "Casino Royale," was notably intense, and while Quantum of Solace is not quite as brutal, the mood is if anything even more grim and downcast.

A passable piece of hackwork, with some adequately suspenseful passages and a few mild shocks near the end. But the psychological dimensions of the story are so risible, and its supposed insights into race and class so wrongheaded and ugly, that irritation trumps enjoyment.

As it is, Nancy Drew stands as an example of how to take a foolproof, time-tested formula -- a young detective using smarts and determination to solve a case -- and mess it up with superficial cleverness and pandering hackwork. How this happened is hardly a mystery; botched adaptations are as common as BlackBerries in Hollywood. But it is nonetheless something of a crime.

"Queen" is a movie that stoops to jokes like calling Lestat's CD "a monster hit"; the movie is just a plain old monster.

While the gist of Offside is the same (as "The Circle"), its tone is more insouciant, as it celebrates the guile and toughness of its heroines while casting a sympathetic glance at the ethical quandaries facing their jailers.

Diverting, hectic entertainment, which refuses to take anything too seriously, staking out a middle ground between melodrama and farce.

The result is an experience that, even as it feels a bit familiar, is nonetheless engrossing and satisfying.

Doesn't try to cram messages of uplift down its audience's gullet. It's a great eggscape from banality.

The rigor of Mr. Cronenberg’s direction sometimes seems at odds with the humanism of Mr. Knight’s script, but more often the director’s ruthless formal command rescues the story from its maudlin impulses. Mr. Knight aims earnestly for your heartstrings, but Mr. Cronenberg insists on getting under your skin. The result is a movie whose images and implications are likely to stay in your head for a long time.

I can’t, in the end (all appearances to the contrary), judge Mr. Beavan or this film too severely. Making an impact is easy. Making a difference is hard.

A mild exercise in deliberate mediocrity, with chuckles and heartwarming moments distributed as carefully as nuts in a factory-made brownie. The movie's lack of ambition is hardly surprising, but both Ms. Moore and Ms. Keaton, who can wring flustered comedy out of the mildest provocation, deserve better.

Easily one of the finest pictures of 2003 or any other year.

What will happen to her? The strength of this short, simple, perfect story of a young woman and her dog is that this does not seem, by the end, to be an idle or trivial question. What happens to Wendy -- and to Lucy -- matters a lot, which is to say that Wendy and Lucy, for all its modesty, matters a lot too.

Even at a distance from each other (Washington/Travolta), they conduct a tag-team master class in old-style movie star technique, barreling through every cliché and nugget of corn the script has to offer with verve and conviction. Even when you don't really believe them, they're always a lot of fun to watch.

The rare sports movie that deals with -- indeed positively relishes -- humiliation and disappointment.

Ace in the Hole is an acquired taste -- and an unforgettable one.

Babylon is about architecture as a balm, and this is a particularly good time for such a film.

A nimble and winning little romance

Superior entertainment, the most elegantly pleasurable movie of its kind to come around in a very long time.

Mr. Toback's film, partly because it restricts itself to Mr. Tyson's point of view, offers a rare and vivid study in the complexity of a single suffering, raging soul. It is not an entirely trustworthy movie, but it does feel profoundly honest.

Rarely has a movie worked so hard to be so inconsequential.

Mr. Dick, whose previous documentaries have examined sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church, the inner workings of the movie ratings system and the life and work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, is a cerebral muckraker. While his techniques are not as nakedly tendentious as Michael Moore’s (and his movies, as a consequence, are not as much fun), he hardly pretends to be a detached or unbiased observer.

At least it isn't a remake -- though given how slovenly and forced this movie is, maybe that wouldn't have been such a bad idea.

But Babies just might restore your faith in our perplexing, peculiar and stubbornly lovable species.

Get Him to the Greek displays the bawdy-sweet mixture that is the signature of the Judd Apatow school of screen comedy.

This mishmash of emotional tones can't be redeemed by the performers' considerable investment in their work.

One of the most purely enjoyable films ever made.

Though the film’s structure may be tragic, its spirit is anything but.

Enchanting and diverting documentary.

The reason it deserves to be seen in a theater with special glasses on, rather than slapped on the DVD player when the children are acting up -- lies in those airborne sequences.

Never has a film so strongly been a product of a director's respect for its source. Mr. Jackson uses all his talents in the service of that reverence, creating a rare perfect mating of filmmaker and material.

There is some acknowledgment of the terrible effects of the drug trade on residents of Harlem and other poor New York neighborhoods, but for the most part Mr. Untouchable clings to the standard hip-hop mythology of the pusher as entrepreneur, rebel, celebrity and folk hero.

With the exception of some of the battles, which have the angry desperation of Mr. Yuen's inspired martial-arts choreography, Close is a nominal effort.

So shameless in its pandering, sentimental vision of Frenchness as to constitute something of a national embarrassment.

Think of 44 Inch Chest as a piece of chamber music and you can compensate for the thinness of its story and the lack of visual distinction.

The daring but only partly successful Korean film Lies is built around voyeurism.

What really separates "Midlands" from Leone's desiccated, terse genre work is Mr. Meadows's doting attention to his characters' decency. It gives a demonstrative bittersweetness to a likable but small story.

It is all a contrivance; the cast and filmmakers were under the delusion that putting unhappy women in a room would lead to drama.

After a while, Mr. Cerdà exhausts his repertory of spooky effects -- too many dark hallways and illogical, foreboding point-of-view shots -- and you begin to hunger for exposition, always a bad sign in a horror film. Even worse is that, by the time the explanations arrive, you no longer care.

Soars as much as it crashes.

The result is a slick, brutishly effective genre movie: “Syriana” for dummies. Which is not entirely a put-down.

Summer is like an episode of the religious children's series "Davey and Goliath," without the entertainment value of animation and a talking dog.

The movie's writer and director, Tom McCarthy, has such an appreciation for quiet that it occupies the same space as a character in this film, a delicate, thoughtful and often hilarious take on loneliness.

You might, nonetheless, want to see this movie, even -- or maybe especially -- if you have seen “Billy Elliot” or “Bend It Like Beckham.” Familiarity is not always a bad thing, and if the script, by Shauna Cross, piles sports movie and coming-of-age touchstones into a veritable cairn of clichés, the cast shows enough agility and conviction to make them seem almost fresh.

Luckily there is an element of broad, brawny camp that prevents King Arthur from being a complete drag.

Given the stature and the presence that the entrepreneurial rappers-turned-film-moguls Ice Cube and Queen Latifah possess, the fizzle of their scenes is doubly disappointing.

His painstakingly coordinated scenes and exquisitely timed takes are the filmmaking equivalent of wringing every single use from a paper towel and then folding it before disposal.

Overlong, predictable in its plotting and utterly banal in its blending of comic whimsy and melodramatic pathos.

Works as everything but a mystery, yet it is intriguing in a number of ways. And the ending is as resolute as you might have hoped for. It lets Romulus and the movie retain their integrity.

Wants to be sweet and dark at the same time, but it is as distant as a planet's satellite.

There is a blueprint here for what should be the next wave of comedy-concert movies, but the filmmaking team has only used part of it.

Not a terrible movie, just an insubstantial one. All of DiCaprio's charisma and the director's savvy are used to divert us from the fact that there's not much going on.

The Love Guru is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again.

To invoke the name of another underwhelming new film, Sinbad is legally bland.

Max’s righteous anger finds various allies and targets, though it is not always clear who is which. They are played by Mila Kunis, Beau Bridges and Ludacris with just enough panache and expressiveness to uphold the (increasingly irrelevant) distinction between a movie and a video game.

Lovely, uncomplicated though limited movie.

This is one of the best-photographed pictures of the year, but not ostentatiously so; the look is organic to the less-than-glamorous badlands of Sunnyside, Queens.

There's as much at stake in the hilarious, moody and cantankerous film adaptation of "Splendor" as there was in this summer's other movies of comic-book antiheroes like "The Hulk" and "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen."

A few scenes serve as hinges joining this movie to "Flags of Our Fathers." While Letters From Iwo Jima seems to me the more accomplished of the two films -- by which I mean that it strikes me as close to perfect -- the two enrich each other, and together achieve an extraordinary completeness.

The movie he (Josh Peck) is in, The Wackness, written and directed by Jonathan Levine, makes a good-faith effort to steer clear of such clichés, and succeeds and fails in roughly equal measure.

So good because it is one of those rare documentaries that combine information with smashing entertainment.

By interweaving several stories, the movie suffers from a peculiar multiplier effect: it deepens its shallowness.

By the end, Mr. To has proven himself to be a genre hack of uncommon intelligence and soul: a first-rate entertainer who can thrill you into thinking.

The Darjeeling Limited amounts finally to a high-end, high-toned tourist adventure. I don’t mean this dismissively; it would be hypocritical of me to deny the delights of luxury travel to faraway lands. And Mr. Anderson’s eye for local color — the red-orange-yellow end of the spectrum in particular — is meticulous and admiring.

In spite of Mr. Baron Cohen and Mr. Charles’s high-level skills and keen low-comic instincts, Brüno is a lazy piece of work that panders more than it provokes.

The outtakes are not all that great but still better than anything else in the movie.

If the movie looked any cheaper, you might think you were paying more to get into the theater than was spent on making the film.

Mr. del Toro provokes your screams and shudders, but he also earns your tears.

Feels as though it is not about much, but it is so well acted that the lassitude becomes a part of the atmosphere.

Part feminist fable, part romantic fairy tale, it is by turns tart and sweet, charming and tough, rather like its heroine and like Keri Russell, the plucky, pretty, nimble actress who plays her.

The cumulative effect is that of watching misspent lives disintegrate before your eyes. Ms. Miller's canny accomplishment is a triumph, giving the material weight and heart. This is one of the finest pictures of the year.

It parades neither the egghead aspirations of "Star Trek" nor the thick-skulled pretensions of "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," but instead feels both comfortable with its limitations and justly proud of its accomplishments.

The problem with “Dreamgirls” -- and it is not a small one -- lies in those songs, which are not just musically and lyrically pedestrian, but historically and idiomatically disastrous.

Irina Palm is, for the most part, a phony trifle, but at its heart, somehow, is a real and fascinating person.

A smorgasbord that seems to have been picked out of a Dumpster. It clumsily combines a fish-out-of-water story with bits lifted from sources including the "Terminator" movies, "Star Wars," "Starman," "Close Encounters," a couple of Pink Floyd albums and H. G. Wells.

Julie & Julia proceeds with such ease and charm that its audacity -- is easy to miss.

Kevin Costner is suitably flinty in 13 Days, a competent, by-the-numbers recreation of the events surrounding the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

We can only view Windtalkers with the same shaken detachment that characterizes Mr. Cage's Joe Enders, wishing that the codetalkers' real story, a little known and fascinating chunk of American history, had been given its true dramatic import.

Intensely appealing.

After about 20 minutes of "Thing," a concussion begins to look enormously appealing.

The film is much more than a biography of the Clash’s guitarist and lead singer: It’s history, criticism, philosophy and politics, played fast and loud.

Isn't quite as much fun as it could be.

The movie is curiously unmemorable, partly because nearly all of its humor depends on your having seen something like it before, even if you haven't.

An R-rated version of this mess would be only more gratingly dishonest as it tried to hide its weak sentimentality behind a fig leaf of vulgarity.

Mr. Cuarón never quite finds the tone that would allow him to fuse belly laughs with the horror of illness and death, but then perhaps Pedro Almodóvar is the only filmmaker able to mix darkness and light in that way. Still it is hard not to admire the younger man's cheeky self-confidence, and hard not to enjoy the dexterity of his camera movements and the flair with which he attempts both low comedy and high melodrama.

As a group portrait of apprentice intellectuals the film has an almost documentary accuracy. It also has a degree of energy, an appetite for strong feelings and big ideas, notably missing in American movies about the young and overeducated, which tend to specialize in mumbled ironies and tiny epiphanies.

A one- way ticket to infantile heaven.

Extremely enjoyable, though a few degrees shy of perfection.

The flaws in Two Lovers are inseparable from its strengths. You could, I suppose, criticize the movie for being too sincere; too generous to its imperfect, self-deluded characters; too absorbed in their small crises and disproportionate reactions. But that criticism might sound a lot like praise.

Starts with a great idea, but the movie's potential drops faster than the tech stocks on the Nasdaq.

Hannibal, a silly though handsomely staged adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel directed by Ridley Scott, is a movie meant for the whole family -- the Manson family.

The cinematic equivalent of a plate made of spun sugar.

Seems stranded in that nowhereland between irony and sarcasm.

One of the best-known cultural figures of the past half-century, leaves the movie with little to do but add its sometimes sanctimonious voice to the chorus of praise and admiration.

hough the picture is wrenching, at times devastating, it leaves you with that buoyant feeling of having encountered a raw, authentic work of art.

A muckraking effort that will probably play best to the converted.

I found Mr. Zobel’s film touching and amusing, but it also left me a bit queasy.

This is "Pretty Woman" for children.

More abrasively quirky than a lesser Bjork B-side, though the hideous monster who co-stars hails from Iceland, too.

The director's breezy steadiness keeps the movie from hitting us over the head -- well, not too hard, anyway, no small feat since the steroid-juiced sentimentality of the ending may force some to flee before the outtakes unspool under the credits.

What he serves up -- a mixture of moralism and forgiveness, semibawdy humor and cautionary drama, mockery and affection -- may sometimes lack coherence, but never integrity.

While the film is lively and engaging, it also, in the end, feels a little thin, largely because it is unsure of how earnestly to treat its own lessons about fate, ambition and brotherly love.

Whenever the picture tries to be about something bigger, it turns predictable or maudlin or, in a few sad instances, both simultaneously.

Bamako is something different: a work of cool intelligence and profound anger, a long, dense, argument that is also a haunting visual poem.

It is both sad and hopeful, but the film's sorrow and its optimism arise from its rarest and most thrilling quality, which is its deep and humane honesty.

Never shows enough passion to be interestingly bad.

The contradictions of adolescence have rarely been conveyed with such authenticity and force.

Dreary.

It is outrageously funny without ever exaggerating for comic effect, and heartbreaking with only minimal melodramatic embellishment.

For what it is -- a romantic comedy about the rivalry between a jealous ghost and a flaky psychic for the love of a veterinarian -- Over Her Dead Body is not bad.

Defiance presents itself as an explicit correction of the cultural record, a counterpoint to all those lachrymose World War II tales of helplessness and victimhood. This is a perfectly honorable intention, but the problem is that, in setting out to overturn historical stereotypes of Jewish passivity, Mr. Zwick (who co-wrote the screenplay with Clayton Frohman) ends up affirming them.

In some ways his (Anderson) most fully realized and satisfying film. Once you adjust to its stop-and-start rhythms and its scruffy looks, you can appreciate its wit, its beauty and the sly gravity of its emotional undercurrents.

Something to behold; it's just not much to watch, despite admirable ambition and a few tense, well-thought-out sequences.

In spite of Amelia Vincent's toothsome cinematography and the down-home locations, the movie often has the lumbering, literal-minded rhythms of a second-rate stage play -- not a moan or a howl, but a slow, anxious groan.

There's not much here; some of the shots feel so static that you wonder if they're being rehearsed before your eyes.

As it is, the movie is a hodgepodge of borrowings and half-cooked ideas, flung together into a feverishly edited jet-setting exercise in purposeless intensity.

Wanders rather than moves chillingly toward its climax.

While Ms. Dörrie’s film is exquisitely shot, its themes and metaphors are obvious rather than subtle, and its emotional rhythms -- rueful laughter punctuating the pathos -- would not be out of place in a television drama.

Though $9.99 manages to be quirky and enigmatic, it is in the end too self-conscious, too satisfied in its eccentricity, to achieve the full mysteriousness toward which it seems to aspire. It is odd, curious, intermittently intriguing but ultimately more interesting for its artifice than for its art.

Date Night, like so many other films of its type, too often relies on words, catchphrases and inflections that signify a generally accepted notion of funniness rather than being, you know, actually funny.

Mr. Yaguchi's film is so brazenly cheerful and charmingly engineered that even the sourballs in the cast are sucked in.

The access the filmmakers gained to Junge is remarkable, and it compensates for a lack of cinematic flair; it's concrete, cold and hard, with Junge speaking about being a few feet away from arguably the worst tyrant of the 20th century.

The unfortunate thing is that children will probably waste their summers indoors watching "Recess" over and over again.

Romantic comedies nowadays tend to be either aggressively coarse or artificially sweet, and Going the Distance finds a workable middle ground.

The performances are charming and convincing, and Mr. Joelsas does a good job of conveying Mauro’s loneliness and confusion as well as his playfulness. The Year My Parents Went on Vacation may not be terribly fresh or original, but its warm, sweet, nostalgic tone is hard to dislike.

The film’s spirit is refreshingly playful and sweet.

Its flashes of style are sometimes lively but more often seem, like the slavish period décor, to be desperate attempts to overcome the built-in inertia of the genre.

Mr. Loach’s touch is a bit lighter here. “Sweet Sixteen” is a coming-of-age story shot through the lens of social tragedy, while “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” is an epic of historical disaster. Looking for Eric is, by comparison, gentle and sweet and often very funny.

May not be a great piece of filmmaking, but its power comes from its soul's-eye view of how well-meaning patronizing masked a social injustice, at least as represented by this case.

Relentlessly softheaded and softhearted.

Strictly for cultists, and even they might find less than 90 bongless minutes hard to sit through.

Godard's artistry -- the way his scenes are at once archly stylized and informal, the quick precision of his eye -- is unarguable. But the beautiful images and solemn words cannot disguise the slack complacency of his vision.

The agile handling of the soap-opera elements -- conventional plotting at best -- finally makes "Wedding" a pop, facile take on Capulet versus Montague stuff, likable but square.

The director Zhang Yimou honors the unlikely affinity between himself and Joel and Ethan Coen with a remake of their movie "Blood Simple."

Enjoyably lithe and droll yet somehow almost water-soluble; it seems to dissolve onscreen.

Modest and diverting, rough and bland, with some good (if not quite Bette Davis caliber) actors and so-so special effects.

Mr. Patwardhan has located so much information and found so many willing interview subjects that his War and Peace has a riveting intelligence all its own and earns its epic title.

A swift and accessible entertainment, blunt in its power and exquisite in its effects.

The movie is at once a giddy mixture of farce, satire and opera buffa and a closely observed drama of social dislocation and cultural confusion.

Given that movies can now show us everything, the manifestations that Ms. Rowling described could be less magical only if they were delivered at a news conference.

Mr. Fan's documentary is informed by a melancholy humanism, and finds unexpected beauty in almost unbearably harsh circumstances. It tells the story of a family caught, and possibly crushed, between the past and the future - a story that, on its own, is moving, even heartbreaking. Multiplied by 130 million, it becomes a terrifying and sobering panorama of the present.

Mr. Yamada is confident that by taking his time and relishing the leathery arrogance that is the perquisite of a director in his 70's, his audience will follow his whims.

The kind of movie that gives literature a bad name. Not because it undermines the dignity of a great writer and his work, but because it is so self-consciously eager to flaunt its own gravity and good taste.

Even better on a second viewing because the film is such a pure expression of the director's love for the music, a love so infectious it should leave you elated.

The film is slow, rigorously morose and often painful in its blunt reckoning of disappointment and failure. It is also extremely funny.

Coasts to a smooth, frictionless stop, but its star doesn't; he works as if his career depended on this movie.

This is a picture with nothing to prove, and not all that much to say, but its modesty and good humor make it hard to resist.

A nearly flawless piece of popular art, as well as one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film. It provides the kind of deep, transporting pleasure, at once simple and sophisticated, that movies at their best have always promised.

This movie sets out to honor and refresh a youthful enthusiasm from the past and winds up smothering the fun in self-conscious grandiosity.

A movie for people who somehow managed to miss the point of the first picture.

Above all, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a triumph of technique.

Mr. Rosenfeld is a writer whose talent shines through in the way he harvests minute pearls.

The intentionally self-conscious style of R2PC is a little hard to take sometimes because the movie is trying too hard to be funny.

An incisive drama about a waking nightmare.

It's the element of condescension, as the filmmakers look down on their working-class subjects from their lofty perch, that finally makes Sex With Strangers so distasteful.

A shell game passing as entertainment.

The movie is exuberant, strapping and obvious -- a problem drama suffering from a steroid overdose.

It may be best to approach El Cantante less as a movie than as a two-hour promotional video for a must-have soundtrack album.

It's hard to be drawn into a movie if you're never entirely sure what it's supposed to be about, other than about 100 minutes.

There is something both satisfying and frustrating about Madea Goes to Jail. Mr. Perry dutifully gives his audience what it wants, but you can't help feeling that he might also have more to offer: more coherent narratives, smoother direction, better movies.

Mr. Deeds is mostly terrible, a shambles of a comedy that looks as if it was shot by a tabloid news crew.

An unabashed B movie: basic, brutal and sometimes clumsy, but far from dumb, and not bad at all.

Wears its preposterousness with a certain pride. It’s about the cat-and-mouse game between two very smart guys, and it’s perfectly happy to be as dumb as it wants.

A terrifically deft picture about the thick line that separates movie glamour from the real world, and the thin line between common sense and paranoia.

The facetiousness of this project is charming at first -- as is the conceit of depicting the hunt for Mr. bin Laden using video-game animation -- but the charm wears off pretty quickly.

For the most part, everyone struggles through, with at best mixed success. The audience included.

The premise of Every Little Step is no less inspired for seeming so simple and obvious, and it pays tribute to the durability and continued relevance of “A Chorus Line,” which first opened in New York in 1975, before many of the performers in the movie were born.

However you judge the movie’s politics, and whatever its flaws, there is something inarguable, something irreducibly honest and right, about Mr. Jones’s performance.

So assured in its manipulative prowess that only afterward do you realize how fully you've been worked over.

The worst that can be said of the first two-thirds of Tideland is that it is tiresome. Toward the end it becomes creepy, and not in a good way.

Atonement fails to be anything more than a decorous, heavily decorated and ultimately superficial reading of the book on which it is based.

There is something about the film’s brazen mixing of incompatible elements that defies categorization, imitation or even sober critical assessment. It’s anarchic and rigorous, sophisticated and goofy, heartfelt and cynical. The score, by Ennio Morricone, is as mellow as wine. The action is raw, nasty and blood-soaked. The story is preposterous, the politics sincere.

A movie far less interesting than its premise. It is also slightly less interesting than its hugely popular predecessor, "Bruce Almighty."

The overall mood of Hairspray is so joyful, so full of unforced enthusiasm, that only the most ferocious cynic could resist it.

A solid, minor entry in the annals of Boston crime drama. Not as florid as "The Departed" or as sadly soulful as "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" - or even as sticky and gamy as "Gone Baby Gone," Mr. Affleck's previous film.

Its scrupulous, humane sympathy gives this small, sorrowful film a glow of insight and a pulse of genuine, openhearted curiosity.

Mostly mediocre melodrama, though the actors suffering over love's labors lost are quite fine.

An inviting piece of film. Mr. Rubbo's cast of characters have the charisma of true devotees and stoked egos that match their intentions.

So while The Science of Sleep may not, in the end, be terribly deep, it is undoubtedly -- and deeply -- refreshing.

Insanely likable but suffers from anemia.

Packed with revelations and withheld information that comes to life; it is like an old movie castle full of false fireplaces and trap doors.

Beeswax, at first glance a modest, ragged slice of contemporary life, turns out to be a remarkably subtle, even elegant movie.

There is plenty of substance in Absolute Wilson, as it provides a concise and absorbing portrait of a powerful creative personality.

Most watchable during the majestic brutality of the battle sequences. This is not only because of the handsome staging, but also because the keywords sacrifice and honor are evoked with verve and simplicity, more so than in the "exchange of idea" chats between Algren and Katsumoto, which sound like statements being read into the Congressional Record by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

A raucous, rambling comedy, offering some laughs, some groans and a feast for fans of the musical idioms it mocks and celebrates.

Mr. Washington's dry-ice grandeur -- the predator's reflexes contrasting with a pensive mouth -- deserves regard, and his powerhouse virtuosity will almost guarantee him an Oscar nomination.

Mr. Jarecki finds a way to show that denial and hope often grow from the same vine. Lives are built around the way they're harvested -- and this talented director has a feel for the soil.

What is so remarkable about Mr. Langella is that he seems to hold Leonard’s intellectual cosmos inside him, to make it implicit in the man’s every gesture and pause.

When the going gets weird, Hunter S. Thompson used to say, the weird turn pro, but these filmmakers never transcend their own amateurism. They turn what could have been a brilliant exploration of the hidden corners of contemporary reality into an opportunity for gawking and condescension.

High-school cafeteria soup has more flavor than this bland, tepid throwback.

As the shills reveal their souls, the movie turns into an exercise in the very phoniness it initially set out to expose. And since you’ve already paid for the ticket, you might end up feeling cheated.

Strands one of the most gifted casts assembled in some time. Sadly, though many of the actors throw off a spark or two when they first appear, they can't generate enough heat in this cold vacuum of a comedy to start a reaction.

Moves slowly and grimly toward the moment that for the audience is the most engrossing though filled with dread: when things begin to unravel and the participants are no longer aware of the cameras. That is when your shoulders tense and you lean toward the screen.

Funny and brisk, with enough good lines to make the comedy more satisfying than the somewhat routine but still unsettling jolts to the spine.

Tsai not only gives the audience a chance to breathe but also lets us luxuriate in the mood of deadpan melancholy his movie evokes so beautifully.

Elegant and exquisitely tailored.

Intermittently charming, sometimes tiresome celebration of quirkiness.

You don’t have to know anything about Joy Division to grasp the mysterious sorrow at its heart.

O'Horten is about frustration, patience, kindness and the wildness that lurks in even the calmest hearts. What's odd about that?

This crowd-pleasing spectacle is like a series of showstopper sequences from a musical without much attention paid to the story that is supposed to hold it all together.

The level of accomplishment in the filmmaking is overwhelming.

The first 40 minutes or so of Wall-E -- in which barely any dialogue is spoken, and almost no human figures appear on screen -- is a cinematic poem of such wit and beauty that its darker implications may take a while to sink in.

The movie deserves -- and is likely to win -- a devoted cult following, despite its flaws.

One of the pleasures of Ajami, a tough and in many ways unsparing movie, is its deep immersion in the beats and melodies of everyday life in Jaffa and beyond.

Director Sandi Simcha DuBowski latches on to a provocative subject and invests it with a compelling tenderness.

This may be the first movie that runs under two hours and yet has no attention span. Characters are abandoned and picked up; narrative threads dissolve before your very eyes.

An unnerving but unsatisfying chronicle of a German village filled with hidden cruelty, set on the eve of World War I.

Has an offbeat, absurdist charm that turns a potentially creepy conceit into an odd, touching adventure.

Bottle Shock is unable to figure out what kind of movie it wants to be, and flops around between madcap comedy and rousing drama. To borrow a wine-snob term of art, it lacks structure.

A crudely made, half-clever little frightener that has become something of a pop-culture sensation and most certainly the movie marketing story of the year.

The great virtue of Smart People, attributable to Noam Murro’s easygoing direction as well as to Mr. Poirier’s wandering screenplay, lies in its general preference for small insights over grand revelations.

Has the sweat stains of wasted energy; it's dreary, yet frantic.

By the end you know the characters in it so well that you can't believe you've seen the movie only once, yet on a second viewing it seems completely new. And that may be because the world they inhabit is immediately recognizable -- until we get to heaven, it's where we live -- and like no place you've been before.

Marvelously quick-witted and gloriously goofy hand-drawn feature shows there's still more than 21 grams of life left in the form.

In the best B-movie tradition, the filmmakers embed their ideas in an ingenious, propulsive and suspenseful genre entertainment, one that respects your intelligence even as it makes your eyes pop (and, once in a while, your stomach turn).

At under 90 minutes, Around a Small Mountain is, by Mr. Rivette’s standards, a small vignette. It could have been —--and perhaps was -- part of something longer and more complex, but it stands as perfectly on its own as Pic St.-Loup, marvelous to contemplate and changing slightly every time you see it.

It lumbers from one scene to the next with the stop-and-start mistiming generally seen in the outtakes shown at the end of the "Cannonball Run" movies, which this picture resembles in spirit.

Coraline lingers in an atmosphere that is creepy, wonderfully strange and full of feeling.

And the ingenuity of “Sita” — is dazzling. Not busy, or overwhelming, or eye-popping. Just affecting, surprising and a lot of fun.

Ops is too brain-dead to play the incognito war criminal segment for comedy, although when Will is seen thumbing through the pages of a newspaper called USA Daily, the picture has inadvertently tumbled down a Mad magazine wormhole.