Carina Chocano

The trouble with describing a story this complex and digressive is that it's hard to keep it from sounding complicated and hard-to-follow. But for a movie about movies, it's surprisingly humanistic, cheerful and true to life.

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

Anyone who has seen the trailers for Freedomland, which don't exactly skimp on maternal angst, already knows this is going to be a sad-mommy story. What we don't know is that it may be a bad-mommy story as well.

First-time writer-director Matthew Parkhill prefers to lean on clever plot devices, amp up the roles of the movie's sideline jesters, crank up the static noise and fail to notice that his engaging little romance has broken with reality and veered into hollow pastiche.

The social bite of the popular novel fades into a generic chick flick.

In this sinister but gorgeous and compelling film by director Tomas Alfredson, being human and acting human don't always go together.

So, while the movie at times warmed my own middle-class, private school-educated cockles to a toasty complacency, there's an undercurrent of friendly fascism running through it like a nasty draft.

A resolutely odd, occasionally absurd movie, but it's as charming and stylish as one could expect from this pair - if you like that sort of thing.

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

Deceptively superficial at the outset, the movie deepens into something poignant and unexpected.

A technically inventive, thoughtful, but otherwise not particularly earth-shattering 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.

Pure, unself-conscious macho camp, but it's not like Pacino and McConaughey don't know it. They're pitching tents and romping around in the grass like Jerry Maguire on steroids.

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.

Expertly realized and gunmetal slick, Eastern Promises whirs along with perfect efficiency, but doesn't stir much in the way of visceral horror despite its penchant for treating the human body like a chicken carcass on a block. (Squeamishness, yes.)

Matthew McConaughey and Sarah Jessica Parker look and act, quite attractively, like grown-ups, and their easy rapport makes them convincing and appealing as an on-screen couple. So all throughout Failure to Launch, I found myself wishing they were in a different movie, maybe one as sophisticated as "The Philadelphia Story," which the movie references, but doesn't remotely live up to.

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.

Aside from a riveting adventure story that Herzog tells in all of its terrifying, stripped-down simplicity, Rescue Dawn is a fascinating study of human particularity.

Gives new meaning to "costume drama" in that it is a drama primarily about costumes. But the drama is about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the temple.

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

Brilliantly choreographed and shot, Kung Fu Hustle is often grisly, visually spectacular and unabashedly silly, sometimes all at once.

Not so much phoned in as it is auto-dialed with a text-to-speech prerecorded message in one of those creepy robotic voices.

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

The anesthetized, deadpan performances -- except for Meat Loaf as Anna's gangster boyfriend, who's so over-the-top it appears he stumbled in from another movie -- and dull storytelling result in an unsuccessful mix of screwball comedy, melodrama and noir.

A pompous, overwrought and itchingly claustrophobic psychodrama.

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.

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.

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.

Miniaturist in its level of detail and evocatively abstract, Old Joy captures the weary mood of a generation that's crested its peak along with an era, quietly making a case for how well suited film can be to capturing the finer points of human interaction while preserving their mystery.

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

A plodding, squeaky-straight Time-Life tribute to the greatest generation, the movie plays like a commemorative plaque.

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.

For the most part, it's an uneven if amiable and occasionally inspired comedy about getting through adolescence that hits some false notes along the way.

Lavish production and wardrobe design, as well as beautiful cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe make Goya's Ghosts lovely to look at, but as a portrait of the artist, the movie is a letdown.

Norwegian director Joachim Trier's inspiring first feature Reprise joyfully tackles the process of self-creation, as well as the friendships that feed and sustain it. He captures, in a way that's cool and romantic and heady, the moment in life when nothing matters more than ideas, influences and the possibility of shaping one's life into a work of art.

The camera is so unobtrusive and the acting so naturalistic that it takes a while for a narrative to emerge. When it finally does, you're surprised to find you're deeply invested in the characters.

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

For a relentlessly violent and exploitive noir knockoff, Sin City is mystifyingly flat and static - cartoonish, even, if you want to get tautological about it.

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.

Little more than an extended excuse for a soundtrack.

The film is a rigorously thorough biography and an impassioned accolade. Temple spends as much time on Strummer's life before and after the Clash as he does charting the band's powerful musical and political influence.

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.

Campy, shameless and sophisticated, Lichtenstein's debut is gutsy and original, and it makes "Juno" look positively tame by comparison.

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.

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

No fun at all.

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.

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.

Dreamy and creepy, tender and terrifying, Somersault is a frank and visceral film that at the same time exudes an unexpected innocence.

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.

What begins, rather promisingly, as a visceral yawp against class difference in contemporary South Korea slowly devolves into a prolonged exercise in pointless sadomasochism.

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.

It's always dispiriting to see children's movies succumb to desperate pandering to the coolness imperative, especially since, given the marketing muscle they tend to have behind them, the bigger trick seems to be in getting people not to see them.

The movie feels stubbornly, resolutely disingenuous and one-dimensional. Everything in it isdesigned to make you feel better, so why does it feel artificial and palliative in that really depressing way?

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

A cast this charismatic is bound to make something of the situation. In short bursts, the movie is alternately sunny and charming, dark and weird, confounding and dull.

Carell is lovable as God's unwilling disciple. But the comedy is less than divine.

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

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

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.

Every adult in the movie is a caricature: Close, Janney and Wilson are compendiums of such broad, unattractive traits they make the ladies of "Desperate Housewives" look complex. The men, meanwhile, are weak, clueless and preening, with the exception of Fiennes, who's nuts.

Can't rightly be called a romantic comedy in the dismal, contemporary sense, though it is at times romantic and is consistently very funny. It's also emotionally realistic, even brutal.

Seductive and creepy, perfect for a hot summer night when nobody has the energy to pose a lot of questions.

Taking a cue from David Lynch, Hopkins fractures the narrative from the first frame, but unlike Lynch he doesn't go far enough in establishing a context from which to deviate. If the story fragments we're watching spring from the same mind, in other words, it's not obvious.

Doesn't aspire to be much more than a serviceable summer comedy, and the script displays the engineered precision of a theme park ride.

The fakeness of it all overwhelms, dampening any real excitement. It's hard to care about characters so stiff and one-dimensional they out-cartoon the cartoon originals, and it's hard to watch them bop around like avatars in a flat, airless, digital world.

There's something about Hunt's put-upon persona that grates, and it would be nice to see her for once in a role that doesn't call on her to be so angry, short-tempered and disappointed all the time...Still, all in all, Then She Found Me is a warm, entertaining and well-made little movie and an auspicious debut for Hunt the director.

It's smart, spare, elegant and understated.

As it turns out, spending a couple of hours with emotionally arrested, socially moronic characters is not a whole lot more fun than spending a couple of hours with actual emotionally arrested, socially moronic people.

Ultimately, Youth Without Youth is more intriguing than it is satisfying. It hooks you, then lets you flounder.

Wong brilliantly blends musical styles and eras to create an intoxicating mood.

Martian Child would like to be "About a Boy (Who Thinks He's a Martian)", but, disappointingly, it doesn't even come close.

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

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.

Poignant, wise and unafraid -- just the sort of film for a young person, or any person, for that matter, to make.

What it offers isn't really a nostalgic look at a "more innocent time" so much as a saucy wink at a casually vicious time that is constantly being sold to us as innocent.

It pretty much keeps its pulse steady, its blood cold and its nerves tamped down -- which, combined with cinematographer Remi Adefarasin's architectural Hitchcockian flourishes, lends a queasy, cool air to the proceedings.

As original as it is lovely.