Carrie Rickey

Flavorful and fun. "Muy sabroso y divertido," as Martin might say.

It is painful, it is funny, and it marks the remarkable debut of Wysocki.

Movie and book both are delightful, but very, very different.

Much as I was moved by the film, I have one reservation and one warning. The framing device of the older Pi recounting his story to the author (which worked so well in Martel's novel) is intrusive and significantly detracts from the story.

On stage variously with Boyz II Men, Jaden Smith, Miley Cyrus, and Ludacris, Bieber carries himself like a squeaky-clean homeboy with an angelic voice. On him, swagger looks sweet.

In its final act, Akeelah is as exciting as any Final Four matchup. What it may lack in cinematic art it compensates for in abecedarian adrenaline guaranteed to pump the pulse and the spirits of viewers from 10 to 90.

Like most great comedies, Hitch confects a sweetly appealing fantasy.

The heroine of this story is the eloquent Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett's mother, who recalls her fight to have an open-casket funeral for her son.

Stanford and Neuwirth are performers of such nuance that a mere glimpse of his body language and her bawdy language speak volumes about the difference between love and sex, the ideal and the real.

Spiced with melancholy and magic, Micmacs is an imaginative live-action film with the playfulness of an animation like "Ratatouille." Similarly, it is a fable of subterraneans who change how life is lived above ground in a Paris that is both retro and modern.

Any resemblance between this film and "Casablanca" is purely deliberate.

For lovers of classical French cinema, and I am one, this earthy throwback is a whiff of lavender borne by the bracing winds of the mistral.

A haunting neo-noir about a man told by a palmist that his karma is about to run over his dogma.

The parade of senators parroting the rationale for invasion - what we now know was misinformation - does not undermine Young's story. Given the private's eloquence, the flashbacks to 2002 are superfluous.

Robert Evans has been variously described as the Hugh Hefner of Hollywood, a Tinseltown Gatsby, the Lancelot of the backlot.

Cage and Leoni make it offbeat.

A tiny jewel of a film.

Bakula is the ideal surrogate for a perplexed audience. Similarly, Whitacre's exasperated wife, played by Melanie Lynskey, is drily funny.

Whatever you call 21 Jump Street, this potty-mouthed and drug-laced reimagining of the 1980s TV show has one of the highest laughs-per-minute ratios since the "Naked Gun" films.

Bee Season is lit by human sunbeam Flora Cross as Eliza.

Though it might be Moliere for Dummies, it's infinitely more fun than French director Ariane Mnouchkine's tedious 1978 film portrait, a Moliere for Smarties that ran four hours plus and, like Tirard's movie, explored the comedy of tragedy.