Carrie Rickey

This small story that tells the much bigger story of the New Economy's bubble and burst is less a documentary than it is breaking news.

Here are five gifted actors at the top of their games as five characters in search of what makes a family.

Set exactly a century ago, The Last Station is a droll tragicomedy starring those battling Tolstoys, whose family is unhappy in its own way.

The most challenging obstacle encountered by reformers like Canada and Michelle Rhee, the embattled chancellor of education for Washington, D.C., are the unions extending tenure protection to teachers who underperform.

Enchanted and thrilling film.

In the end, Atonement sorts truth from fiction as it delivers a shattering kick to the solar plexus.

It is a damning indictment of the individuals and institutions who made money while customers lost their shirts.

If there's a more passionate love story out there, then I haven't had the privilege of seeing it.

Shaft is still enormously involving. It's popcorn, but very fresh.

Although rough, it's a gem.

This sparrow's flight lifts the heart.

A seven-word review: Very good performances. Much too much weather.

While this charmer about a canine James Bond does not pack the emotional punch of "WALL-E," it's frisky fun to see the white shepherd get a new leash on life.

Shakespearean but overlong, The Dark Knight is two hours of heady, involving action that devolves into a mind-numbing 32-minute epilogue.

This is a quiet, meticulously plotted chamber piece, not the booming, lightning-paced orchestral affair we know as the contemporary action film in the Age of Ludlum.

Swing Vote is messy and its targets are relatively safe. But its aim is true. And Costner's performance hits the bull's-eye.

For the first 100 minutes of his 117-minute film Spielberg holds the audience in a grip of fear. When Ray and Rachel take refuge in the storm cellar of a survivalist (a miscast Tim Robbins), the director's grip relaxes only a bit, but the film never recovers from this excursion into the Gothic.

Callan McAuliffe, a handsome Australian youth, looks right as the perma-press Bryce.

Stronger on character than on story, the film version of Janet Fitch's best-seller is shaped and propelled by the astonishing performance of Alison Lohman.

A scabrously funny look at the cutthroat game of statecraft.

Develops microclimates of mood without fully developing the same shadings of character.

Unlike Gondry's previous features, Human Nature and Eternal Sunshine, Science lacks the sturdy armature of a Charlie Kaufman screenplay to support its eccentricities. The flood of delight in the film's first 90 minutes slowed to a trickle and, finally, a drip.

Haggis' earnest and eloquent film about the impact of the war in Iraq on U.S. soldiers, and by extension, their nation, is human-scaled. And as deep and harrowed as Jones' crevassed face.

Parental Guidance is an engaging comedy that bridges multiple generation gaps, making it that rare movie that grandparents, their kids, and their kids can enjoy.

Between the earnest boy, his playful mammal, the film from actor-turned-director Charles Martin Smith is a winning family entertainment.

On a Paris rooftop about an hour into this 2-hour film, the tone shifts and the atmosphere lightens into giddy farce.

For a film about suicides, Wristcutters: A Love Story is strangely life-affirming. This film about slackers stuck in limbo between life and death is upbeat in an offbeat way.

Cluttered as it is colorful, Robots is a visual delight.

While at times the improvisational dialogue sounds like audio filler, the three leads are poignant and perceptive.

A story with a beginning and end but without a middle. Two slices of bread without the sandwich meat, I wrote in my notes.

Overall, Matchstick Men, which is based on the novel by Eric Garcia, is more memorable for Lohman's naturalistic acting and Scott's mannerist direction than it is for its O. Henry surprise.

Steamy and sexy with a smack of sadism, the movie is a throwback to old-school Hollywood action/romance.

The film is suffused with the generous, nonjudgmental spirit of Uncle Tomas, whose live-and-let-live attitude warms like the sun and who helps Magdalena and Carlos make the safe passage from adolescence to maturity.

Though African Cats is G-rated, scenes of animals chowing down on other animals are not for the faint of heart or delicate of stomach. I don't think it's suitable for those under 6, and they should be prepared for real animal behavior. But it's deeply involving and primally moving.

Paradoxically, the closer Mendes gets to his characters, the more remote Perdition becomes. One wishes that his film had as much heart as it does art.

A ridiculously entertaining romp based on the graphic novels of Bryan Lee O'Malley and directed, with mash-up mastery, by Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead).

For the most part, the film's musical numbers are dynamic, propelling the story forward. The same cannot be said about Peter Barsocchini's colorless screenplay.

Probably better than anyone else working today, Donaldson knows how to knit a thriller. Each time you think this taut yarn is about to unravel, that's when he pulls the wool over your eyes.

The kung fu sequences, although enjoyable, probably would not make the Jackie Chan Top 10. However, Chan's acting is his most affecting since the 1993 policer "Crime Story."

Apatow's film succeeds in having its virginity and losing it, too. Like "Wedding Crashers," it purges its cynicism with romanticism.

Eloquently adapted from the collection of A.M. Homes stories of the same title, Troche's film derives its voltage from the way it burrows to find that the connections within -- and among -- families are very much alive.

Actresses such as Maglietta are why movies were invented: You never get tired of her mercurial personality or of her infinitely compelling face.

Exceptionally funny, unexpectedly tender, and lewder than a teenage boy's dreams.

Stunning, beautifully observed character study.

Miracle really isn't about the game. It's about the game as metaphor for united we stand.

This unsettling, shaggy, surrealistic pillow of a movie - a mixed bag more funny-strange than ha-ha.

Once you get past that golden swag and curtain of hair, Paltrow's performance is devastating, cutting to the pith and marrow of parent-child relations. The other actors in this stagebound movie fare less well.

Told in a leisurely though concise 92 minutes, Shower is a purifying and refreshing spray of hope that family and lifestyle differences can be reconciled. Lovely.

Should you take the kids? Boys 8 to 11 are the target audience for this gross-out film. A better question might be, should they take the parents?

Bills itself as a comedy but unfolds as the drollest of dramas, an extended-family album for the age of abortion, adoption and donor sperm. It's a cheeky story about turning the other cheek.

So profoundly does The Third Miracle live up to its title that Agnieszka Holland's exceptional meditation upon a priest's crisis of faith might win the endorsement of archdiocese and agnostic alike.

An involving fantasy for beamish boys and girls - and their parents.

He (Lee) combines the daredeviltry of Buster Keaton with the devil-may-care of Errol Flynn.

While most of the talking heads, including the funny and articulate Barbara Ehrenreich (herself a breast cancer survivor), are not likely to join runs and walks for the cure, Pool shows how such events create community and sisterhood.

This intelligent, postmodern biography from director Irwin Winkler and screenwriter Jay Cocks uses Porter's songs, by turns haunting and hilarious, to decode and reconstruct a life hinted at in the familiar words and music.

An enjoyably sudsy romance starring a moody Keanu Reeves, a broody Sandra Bullock, and the titular structure - a jewel box of glass and steel perched on stilts over Lake Michigan.

The film underscores the power of reading, and applying what we read to problem-solving. The story suggests that we don't really see the natural world around us, and if we did our lives, like Jared's and his siblings', would be immeasurably richer.

Also quite fine is the film's musical score from David Byrne, as unsettling and edgy as the story.

Sobering and wildly entertaining.

This delicious adventure of crude betrayal and elegant revenge is yummy even when reheated by director Kevin Reynolds.

While the impulse for his concert may have been confession and atonement, the cumulative effect is one of a guy struggling mightily to reconcile his divided self.

As efficient and zippy as its subject.

It's half hilarious, half serious; all poignant.

First and last, Appaloosa is the slow-but-sure story of the friendship between Virgil and Everett, one a man of action surprised by emotion, the other a man of emotion surprised by action.

Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis' Lemon Tree is a lively deadpan comedy which, like his prior film "The Syrian Bride," satirizes Israel's bureaucrats while remaining sympathetic to citizens who live within and adjacent to Israel's disputed borders.