Carina Chocano

It's rare for young actors to exude as much charisma and charm as Gainsbourg and García Bernal.

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.

This is a conventional, well-acted, English working-class drama in the familiar realist style, but it does not attain anywhere near the level of artistry and imagination of a Ken Loach film.

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.

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

The Painted Veil has all the elements in place to be a great epic, but it fails to connect, to paraphrase Maugham's contemporary E.M. Forster, the prose with the passion. It's impeccable, but leaves you cold.

Black Gold moves at an inexorable pace, painstakingly building a case until suddenly it looms very large and casts an even longer shadow.

If you're thinking of seeing it, and you're old enough to drive (or even read this), do yourself a favor and rent the original instead.

Impressive as is Wilson's output and oeuvre, it's the fully-engaged, aesthetically driven life that fascinates. And Otto-Bernstein's movie is a portrait of an artist at his most essential, in every sense.

It's billed as an environmental horror story, but The Last Winter bears all the hallmarks of an ever-popular genre that has always pitted science, technology and reason against emotion, awe and nature. It bears all the hallmarks of the gothic: ghosts, death, alienated sexuality, decay, secrets, madness and, of course, awe and trepidation in the face of the sublime power of nature.

Witty, unhinged and fearless, it's exactly the kind of movie we need now.

With its R&B soundtrack and footage of civil unrest, Talk to Me might seem to cover familiar ground. But as an intimate portrait of the complex, fruitful and extremely volatile friendship between trailblazing African American men whose daring came to redefine an industry, it's fresh and revelatory.

Ejiofor brings a calm magnetism and a beatific serenity to his roles that have the effect of knocking you flat -- there's something about this guy that's messianic.

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.

There are moments of beauty here, but not enough to make up for the mannered dialogue and hamstrung performances. Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative won't be prosecuted, but they'll probably be disappointed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It takes a rugged survivalist mentality to sit through 108 minutes of Off the Map, a self-consciously loopy and mystical drama about a family that lives off the map, off the grid, off the land and mostly off their meds in the mangy desert of New Mexico.

Ultimately, Mermin's film is a profound reminder of the things that make us human. Things that don't matter much, in the scheme of things, but loom large when taken away. Things we all have in common.

Yu's film may be challenging to synopsize, but it's thoroughly engrossing and wildly surprising.

The movie's big revelation, though, is Brand's Aldous, whose idiot-Lothario exterior masks a frank, accidentally wise and Yoda-like interior, and whom we grow to like more and more despite getting to better know him and his faults. The same can be said about the movie.

Despite all-around wonderful performances and excellent dialogue, the story never quite coheres narratively. Instead it moves toward a hopelessly bleak -- and I mean bleak -- climax that's more traumatic than dramatic.

A dark comedy with a melancholy streak and punchy sense of humor.

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

Sprawling, awe-inspiring, heartbreaking, frustrating, hard-to-follow and achingly, achingly sad movie.

2 Days in Paris is pure Julie Delpy, figuratively and otherwise. Since first becoming known to American audiences in the early '90s, she's revealed herself to be an artist of sundry and unexpected talents, with a distinctive voice and point of view.

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.

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

As it is, Mrs. Palfrey seems to suggest the Claremont is located somewhere in the Twilight Zone. Where are the televisions? Where are the chain stores? Where are the immigrants? I see the buildings, but where is England?

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

What Teixeira has set out to do, and accomplished brilliantly, is to find drama and pathos in the mundane details, thoughtless betrayals and casual cruelties. What lingers after watching Alice's House are not the moments of conflict but the inexorable rhythms of daily life.

Thought-provoking as it is, Brothers of the Head keeps its distance, choosing to tell a story about telling stories. But the story itself remains an unexploited gold mine.

The India of the movie is more an idea than a reality...Exotic, spiritual and, according to Peter Whitman (Adrien Brody), "spicy"-smelling, it's a magical mystery place where wayward foreigners can go to get their souls back on track.

Immensely entertaining.

The super-hip style is groovy but doesn't mask the fact that Son of Rambow doesn't really go anywhere special or say anything much. For a film about falling in love with the movies, its insights on them are next to nil.

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.

The movie suffers from the same malaise Romero diagnoses in society. It's just too mediated to be scary, despite its zeal for gore. You can't feel the characters' fear, and they don't seem to feel it either.

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.

Any glimpse of emotional honesty comes courtesy of the actors, who manage to do a credible job despite the material.

The problem with Sherry is that, unlike Ryan Gosling's Dan in "Half Nelson," whose humanity transcends his addiction and who is still capable, no matter how uneasily, to maintain relationships with others, she is a terminally uninteresting narcissist with a bad case of arrested development.

Paris Je T'Aime has something going for it that not every movie can claim: It always has Paris.

Marion Cotillard astonishes as Edith Piaf in 'La Vie en Rose.

The result is an insightful look at a remarkable behind-the-scenes life and slice of American and Hollywood history. Told from an outsider's perspective, it sheds light on the workings of a glamorous but often treacherous business.

Slick, adrenaline-fueled fun.

The appeal of the cast, the witty dialogue, the gorgeous costumes and production design, and the refreshingly grown-up subject matter can't be discounted. Maybe it is about compromise, after all, because though Married Life has its moments, it's bewildering as a whole.

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.

Spritely, tender and unpredictable.

A straightforward, surprisingly faithful and definitely loving adaptation of the original.

Alice Wu's debut film is so deft, natural and exquisitely specific, it feels fresh.

In the end, his (Patrick) disaffection make him a singularly uninvolving character, and his disengagement makes him seem alternately shallow, selfish and perverse.

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

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.

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.

In the grand scheme of things, the Dolphin Hotel is no Overlook, but it's no cheesy slaughter motel either.

By turns funny and sobering, sweeping and intimate, the consistently entertaining Inside Deep Throat plays like a giddy prance through the minefield of the last three decades of American sex and politics.

There are some blunders on The Road to Guantanamo. The movie front-loads its first-person accounts with a short list of facts to keep in mind as we watch, creating an imbalance that serves only to undercut the movie's overall credibility.

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

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.

Breillat's first foray into comedy is playful, whip-smart and far breezier in both tone and look than the stylized gender polemics she's known for.

Sarah Silverman has a bright, toothy smile; a sweet, innocent demeanor; and the most outrageously impious sense of humor of any comedian working today. And I don't just mean she's dirty. (She's filthy.) She makes fun of things other comedians wouldn't acknowledge, let alone mock.

Dear Frankie's surprises are few and low-key, but the story wraps up nicely.

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

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.

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.

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

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

A surprisingly wry, contemplative movie.

The movie is at once a flagrant piece of kitsch and an unexpectedly affecting story about an individual overcoming personal tragedy and brutally restrictive circumstances by talent and force of will.

Despite its refreshingly straightforward style and compelling performers, the movie feels encased in an invisible, filmy membrane of its own. Soderbergh keeps his characters on one side of the wall and his audience on the other. As to which is living in the real world, I guess that's open to discussion.

By the time you've gotten through it, you feel spent, loaded down and more than a little disoriented. Part of the problem is that the movie's big concepts - violence begets violence, absolute power corrupts absolutely, everything is connected, my terrorist is your freedom fighter, etc. - are pithy, brief and irrefutable enough to embroider on throw pillows.

Suffers slightly from that not-so-fresh feeling.

It's smart, spare, elegant and understated.

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

An intimate movie in every sense, Conversations With Other Women sets out to explore well-trammeled yet at the same time uncharted territory without grinding any axes. What it offers is a modest fantasy that will be familiar to contemporaries of Bonham Carter and Eckhart especially. It's sad and funny, satisfying and frustrating, totally familiar.

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.

What the movie lacks, alarmingly, is a shriveled black heart, or a big, red tell-tale one pulsing beneath the floorboards -- anything, really, that might infuse it with the sense of true dread that keeps kids coming back for second, third and 11th helpings of the willies.

Bruni-Tedeschi is a lovely actress, and whatever emotion is evident onscreen comes courtesy of her.

Creepy and unsettling, to say nothing of gory, but overall it's a little claustrophobic and uneven.

An exquisitely evocative movie that elevates rueful melancholia to a superpower.

What this is remains mysterious after a single viewing, but not so mysterious as to inspire a second.

The Devil Wears Prada spins Weisberger's rant into a sharp, surprisingly funny excursion into the catty realm of women's magazines. The movie skips the condescension usually aimed at this world in favor of rapt observation.

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

Ultimately, the scale of the production and the expectation built into the release don't entirely justify the effort.

A wickedly funny satire.

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

Captures Los Angeles in a straightforward, naturalistic way, neighborhood-hopping like a native.

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

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

The White Countess takes place in a fascinating time and place, rife with conflict and turmoil. But to watch Fiennes float (and Richardson trudge) through it all, absorbed in themselves and their own private misery, is to wish they'd started falling earlier, if only to knock some sense into them.

The movie loses some of its initial atmospheric tension as paranoid thrills give way to Rambo high jinks.

Moody, mannered and supremely irritating, Christophe Honoré's Dans Paris plays like a pastiche of French cinema clichés through the ages.

Politics recede in the face of the realities of Young's life, and Spiro and Donahue would have succeeded in making the same point had they omitted all but his day-to-day existence. Together, however, they comprise a powerful indictment of the tactical politics that led to the invasion and a heartbreaking account of one man's living with the aftermath.

Ultimately, it's too self-conscious of its role in the marketplace and too hamstrung by its source material to risk being honest at the expense of being liked.

As lovely as some of the footage looks and as committed as are the three lead performances, they serve only to make Rails & Ties play like an exceptionally well-acted and well-made Lifetime movie.

Shot by Ashley Rowe to look like a cross between a Vermeer retrospective and a music video, Copying Beethoven is silly and misguided, if reasonably entertaining for its charming lack of self-awareness, its weakness for lines like "Loneliness is my religion!" and its transcendently beautiful music.

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.