Carina Chocano

It's the kind of observational comedy, that'll be hard to find come summertime and should be enjoyed while there's still a chance.

A well-photographed inside look at a fascinating culture and its people.

There's a rawness and immediacy to his (Bujalski's) work that cuts straight to the experience, a starkness that's startling in an age of bloated spectacle.

In some ways, it reminded me of the final "Seinfeld" episode. As much as I laughed throughout, I kept wondering what was with all the emotional lessons.

The animated tale has flashes of brilliance but seems assembled from cultural flotsam.

Takes a premise that, in less competent, less empathetic hands, would have had the depth of a pancake, gives it a soul and turns it into a surprisingly sweet and funny ode to male friendship and middle-aged love.

Leatherheads proceeds agreeably, hitting occasional high notes when it isn't getting bogged down in forced slapstick hi-jinks.

The movie is one of the few films I can think of that examines the baffling combination of smugness, self-abnegation, ceremonial deference and status anxiety that characterizes middle-class Gen X parenting, and find sheer, white-knuckled terror at its core.

At one point, Klores thought about making a feature film out of the material, but it's a good thing he decided against it. You could not make this stuff up.

The best thing about the replica is how wholeheartedly Martin throws himself into the physical comedy, which is uniformly hilarious.

Suffers slightly from that not-so-fresh feeling.

Sweet-natured, if somewhat familiar, On a Clear Day features fine performances by Mullan, Blethyn and Sives. Dellal and cinematographer David Johnson paint an inviting picture of Glasgow.

Language this lethal has all but disappeared from the movies, and it's an unmitigated pleasure to observe Caine and Law attack it with such ferocity. Sleuth is nasty fun.

Good Dick carries its messed-up, highly improbable premise so lightly and gracefully that it ultimately comes off as a sweet, plausible and curiously grounded love story -- and touchingly old-fashioned.

Chalk avoids some of the pitfalls of the mock-doc by showing real affection and empathy for its characters, whose funny lives of quiet desperation inspire more than their share of tenderness.

Impossibly long and angular, with a brutally beautiful face, she represents something that's been rare in the popular culture in the past decade: an artist with a voice and a vision.

15 minutes into it, you are spellbound, heartbroken and unaccountably cheered -- your faith and admiration in humanity restored.

28 Weeks Later lacks the streamlined thrust of its predecessor but makes for compelling, adrenaline-fueled viewing just the same.

Why aren't there more American movies like this? I mean smart, unpretentious, sophisticated, un-condescending and cheap.

A sweet, funny and gripping romantic adventure, it's about the limitations of political activism in this day and age, and what happens when your girlfriend and your best friend fall in love.

Gently seductive, genuinely tender and often moving without being maudlin.

Charming and antic, Russian Dolls doesn't quite cohere in the way of "L'Auberge Espagnole" into a clever snapshot of contemporary Europe.

Captures comedian and pundit Al Franken evolving from satirist to activist.

The movie doesn't purport to have her stand for all women, just the crazy ones, and as such, G-Girl is pure, soul-cleansing id catharsis.

Polanski's version, though handsomely realized, is a fairly conventional rendering of the novel that probably won't be counted among his best films.

A surprisingly wry, contemplative movie.

The strange, funny and sad story of a bipolar jazz musician and his long-suffering teenage daughter, reunited after his two-year stay in a mental institution.

The action, heavily influenced by Hong Kong martial arts films, is beautifully choreographed.

The sweetest thing about Fred Claus is that the message about filial love feels genuine. I wouldn't have expected that watching Giamatti tell Vaughn, "You're the best big brother anyone could ask for," would make me choke up, but it did.

A confoundingly mercurial figure, Fujimori is a fascinating subject. But in her focus on the man, Perry fails to paint a broader picture of a racially diverse and extremely complex country.

Enthusiastically smutty and lyrical, the movie attempts to capture the way we unconsciously set the emotional moments of our lives to pop music, turning fits of passion, anger and righteous indignation into elaborate musical numbers in our heads.

Spritely, tender and unpredictable.

This is no nostalgia trip taken by an 83-year-old director. It's a fierce, hot slap of a movie, a shameless melodrama with bite.

Has its share of summery charms, including gorgeous postcard views of Santorini, an old-worldy Romeo-Juliet romance, and some particularly good performances by Tamblyn and Boyd.

A squarely suburban movie with a distinctly bourgeois-shaped window on the world, but it's genuine and exceptionally well observed.

For a druggie movie, Candy is surprisingly dynamic and involving.

Morgen's decision to avoid talking heads recounting events and find a way to dramatize them instead is consistent with his intention for the film. The director wants to bring recent history to life for people who weren't around to witness it, and in that he succeeds pretty admirably.

An unexpectedly poignant ghost story.

Illusion and disillusionment entwine through the film like twin helixes, weaving a dreamy, free-form look at his life and legacy.

Marie Antoinette gives a wide berth to the conventions of period dramas, especially their time-capsule remove, and instead tries to mainline the singular personal experience of the arch-villainess of French history (and freedom history, for that matter). The result is a startlingly original and beautiful pop reverie that comes very close to being transcendent.

What Last Days offers is a blank and narrative-free, but pitch-perfect, dreamscape on which to project your own personal ruminations on Kurt, fame, whatever, nevermind. If you have none, you're on your own.

As sad as it is to realize that youth activism in this country is dead, it's sadder still to find yourself agreeing that they have a point. Just look at what happened to Kurtz.

Buoyed by an unreserved humanism and a cheerful sense of the absurd.

Charming, bittersweet.

What's rare to see, and what ultimately makes Nacho Libre so enjoyable, is the story of an underdog who's allowed to remain a humble clown all the way to becoming a hero.

Swicord has a playful sense of humor and a good ear for dialogue, and the movie pleasantly accomplishes what it set out to accomplish.

An unassuming but quietly heartbreaking drama.

An impassioned piece of activist filmmaking that's as persuasive and entertaining as it is disturbing.

There's something to be said for cinema this perversely naturalistic.

What's best about it is that it seems real by the logic of childhood - it looks as things SHOULD look, if kids had it their way.

Ghobadi uses the lack of resources and the surfeit of drama that had been the lot of the Kurds throughout Hussein's dictatorship and both Gulf wars much in the way De Sica and Rossellini used the European tragedies of the '30s and '40s,

Captures the energy and exuberance of a young nation in the throes of optimism and works it into a foreboding frenzy.

A brutal encounter with mortality told with uncommon humanity, wit and humor.

If Linklater regards the fake culture that has replaced real places with horror, he has nothing but respect and affection for his characters, and the movie is rescued from nihilism by his humanistic view.

At its best at its most absurd.

Among other things, the characters in A Love Song for Bobby Long really know how to turn a phrase, in itself a pleasure so rare it all but demands any flaws be forgiven.

Exciting, distracting and quite possibly permanently concentration impairing, what Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End offers is a wonderfully scenic medley of impressive action sequences so lengthy, elaborate and numerous that remembering what came before becomes a kind of test of mental focus.

a movie about adolescence unlike any other; An intimate portrait of a singular personality in the making and a stark look at our culture of suspicion and conformity.

The movie is as side-splitting as it is creepy, especially when it ventures into surrealistic nightmare imagery.

The tone of The Witnesses is one of randomness. This makes for an ambling narrative, but an atmospheric one that feels authentic despite its unlikely character pairings.

Turns out to be as simple, friendly, kid-appropriate and nontoxic as any major motion picmerchtainment franchise could ever hope to be.

A wry, charming romance about a New York woman who has given up hope of finding love.

Bharat Nalluri directs with a light touch and a great eye for costumes and sets, which are gorgeous enough to make up for any contrivances in the plot. It's pure romantic fantasy, and you won't believe it for a minute. But it's fun to watch Miss Pettigrew and Miss Lafosse live for a couple of hours.

Robbins plays David with the self-assurance that there's no combination sexier than smart, funny and self-righteously angry.

A work of breathtaking imagination, less a movie than a mode of transport, and in every sense a masterpiece.

Sewell and Giamatti ham it up as the imperious pretender to the throne and his ambitious but conflicted minion in this uncheesy but entertainingly tricky mystery. There's more heat between the two of them than between the sappy lovers.

For a film that unfolds mostly in a single location, Interview manages not to feel like a stage piece. But the premise, which may have worked in Holland, gets a little lost in the American translation.

As a niche entertainment catering to an overlooked audience, Boynton Beach Club is remarkable mostly for its optimism and solid performances.

It's too bad that the satire is not more pointed, because Pretty Persuasion is outrageously funny in short blasts, mainly thanks to James Woods at his most gleefully depraved.

As ambitious, honest and subversive as any American movie since "Election."

The beauty of this film is in its lapidary details, which sparkle with feeling and surprise.

What Live-in Maid offers is a pitch-perfect observation of life on a continent where forms are adhered to, distances aren't really kept, and your best friend is the person who knows to pour the cheap domestic whiskey into the empty bottle of imported stuff before your bridge buddies show up to judge you.

Harris, of course, is in a different league from the rest, and his depiction of the tortured writer is remarkably well-realized, considering the nonspecific yet somehow overly familiar inscrutability of the character. Despite its limitations, there's something appealing about the world Rapp has created.

If this strikes some as some kind of gallingly blasé, ostentatious Parisian sophistication, it's far from it.

If the script isn't as well-structured as it could be, the dialogue is refreshingly natural. Kutcher is surprisingly well cast as the awkward, somewhat dorky Oliver, and Peet is charming and charismatic without being cloying or artificial.

For an exquisitely melancholy story steeped in a sense of the past as a succession of great waves of political, ideological and economic change, it's fitting that the movie should end with an underwater sequence. It looks like a dream of a memory of a place about to be wiped out by the next great flood of history.

With Bad Education, Almodóvar is at his most breathtakingly complex and mature, and at his most pessimistic.

Volver is just as funny as "What Have I Done," but it's also more sanguine and complex. Its humor is brighter and loopier, more a function of the characters' indomitable spirit than of their terminal despair.

A glorious blend of kitsch, grit, humor and uplift.

Youth and death meet again in Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, a gorgeously stark, mesmerizingly elliptical story told in the same lyrical-prosaic style that has characterized his latest films.

A giddy, gassy piece of lunatic fluff that recounts Jiminy's rise to fame. In interviews, Short has described Glick as a moron with power, and in Jiminy Glick in Lalawood, he takes us back to the early days, when he was merely a moron.

It's a deeply affecting performance, and it drives this quietly powerful, unrelenting film.

For an unabashedly silly spoof of a girly action flick, D.E.B.S. is unexpectedly fresh, thanks mostly to the sweetly exuberant love story at its center.

So good-natured, and its cast seems to enjoy itself so thoroughly, that the total annihilation of disbelief it requires winds up feeling like a reasonable enough request.

The movie is less an uncharted journey than a 2 p.m. bus tour of a music industry legend. But like an expert guide, Mangold shepherds the story with enough grace, energy and skill to make it worthwhile.

The plot, naturally, is silly and not exactly bound by logic. But it's Judge's gimlet-eyed knack for nightmarish extrapolation that makes Idiocracy a cathartic delight.

Despite the overt message and Manichean universe it pushes, Amu manages some memorable cinematic moments while getting the word out for its cause.

King Kong is an homage not just to the original but to the history of movies themselves.

The brilliance of A Scanner Darkly is how it suggests, without bombast or fanfare, the ways in which the real world has come to resemble the dark world of comic books.

On the whole it feels genuine. Lautner and Dooley are compelling as the sullen, instinctual Sharkboy and the radiant, hot-headed Lavagirl, and it's easy to see why they dominate shy, hesitant Max's dreams.

The alluring surfaces of other people's lives can be deceiving, though generally not in a Nancy Meyers comedy, where the thin veneer of fantasy cloaks ... more fantasy.

Despite very good performances and solid construction, it's a slightly too symmetrical, way too tendentious side-by-side comparison of two families -- Haves, meet the Have-nots -- who come into unlikely contact in the fitfully gentrifying area of Kings Cross.

Whatever its weaknesses, Tsotsi is redeemed by its excellent performances.

Grant's second coming as a rake and an egotist is the best thing to happen to his career since "Four Weddings and a Funeral." He is twice as enjoyable as the preening bad guy as he was as the bumbling good guy, and Weitz makes perfect use of the new persona.

Raucously funny and surprisingly insightful.

Beautifully shot on location in New York and consistently well-acted, but it sticks a little too closely to the surface to be very compelling.

The movie does have its flashes of genius. "Home for Purim," the movie, is set in the Deep South, where Yiddish is spoken with a drawl.

Loverboy is a grim little story, but it's leavened unexpectedly with humor and energy. A stylish and thoughtful director, Bacon marries music to image beautifully.