Carina Chocano

Romantic comedies have become so cannibalistic lately that Hitch stands out for what seem like major innovations by comparison.

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.

Often surprising and thought-provoking (the urge to euphemize is characterized as a drift away from reality), "****" is as funny and cathartic as the word it celebrates, and nearly as perversely shock-happy.

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

Slick, adrenaline-fueled fun.

Unlike so many computer-animated movies, "Horton" doesn't have that garish, sealed-in-plastic effect that can be so claustrophobic.

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.

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

A humanist parable about how to be a good person, live a good life and make gallons of lemonade when life suddenly hands you lemons, it's predictably delightful and delightfully predictable.

Hopefully, the girls who see Nancy Drew this summer will take their cues from the smart, engaged, intellectually curious character Roberts so charmingly portrays.

Though atmospheric and occasionally suspenseful, its gimmickry keeps it from being transcendent.

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

Spanning two decades and a momentous war, Memoirs of a Geisha displays all the pomp and grandeur of an epic, but you wouldn't call it sweeping.

Stahl and Farmiga give layered, restrained performances that keep what might have been a schlock fest with an improbable twist ending from devolving into trashiness. Instead, Brooks and his actors manage to render an involving and thoughtful story from some pretty dubious material.

A remarkably compelling presence, Spiridonov commands attention without pandering or appealing to pity. In fact, for a 6-year-old, he is possessed of an uncanny poise.

If a more elegant and succinct explanation of what compels some people to go to art school has ever been filmed, I haven't seen it.

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

The uncomplicated humanism of Joyeux Noël, with its Christmas message of peace, feels at once irrefutable and refreshing.

It's hard to fully empathize with Don's season of remorse. It's the big problem with Broken Flowers, and one I don't think the movie -- for all of its funny and occasionally poignant touches -- ever really transcends.

The movie's pace is appropriate to its mood, which is crisp, melancholy and gently cruel.

The low-key charm of its setting underscores the easygoing performances of a relaxed, well-matched cast. Kristofferson doesn't oversell the grizzled grandpa routine or talk down to the little girl.

A lively and entertaining disquisition on the purpose and uses of knowledge in a world that cares less about scholarship than quantifiable results.

Despite the snappy brilliance of the setup, Prime doesn't entirely deliver on its promise -- something about the way it ends feels like a cop-out, and the opportunities for humor aren't exploited quite as well as they could be.

Schreiber takes Foer's sprawling, multilayered, multigenerational beast and hones it into a post-Glasnost buddy picture; a polished nugget of a road movie, focused mainly on Alex and Jonathan's growing sense of identification with each other and with their origins.

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.

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.

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

One of those relatively rare comedies that's at once puerile, charming and very funny throughout.