Dana Stevens

Portman toils slavishly to realize Aronofsky's mad vision. It isn't her fault that, despite Black Swan's visual splendor and bursts of grand guignol excess, this emotionally inert movie never does grow wings.

This non-balletic adaptation by the Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky is something gnarled and stunted and wrong, something that should never have been allowed to see the light of day. How's that for a holiday-ad pullquote?

The very existence of Four Lions is an act of audacity; the fact that it's also smart, humane, and frequently hilarious is nothing short of a miracle.

Boyle's skill at wringing physical and emotional reactions from his audience is impressive; watching 127 Hours is, as intended, an experience of grueling intensity.

Block intended this movie as a loving portrait of his relationship with his daughter. Instead, it's a reflection, and not always a kind one, of the man behind the camera.

Even knowing what's likely to come-the doors opening on their own, the skeptical characters scoffing at metaphysical explanations, the unheeded warnings from paranormally gifted guests-doesn't make it any less nailbiting to watch.

Though I found Hereafter meandering and occasionally sentimental, I couldn't help but admire Clint Eastwood's ambition in taking on-headfirst-the greatest fact of human existence.

It's a clever idea bogged down in sophomoric sloppiness. Sitting through it doesn't feel like eternal damnation, but it's not exactly heaven, either. It's a $9.50 tour of adolescent purgatory.

Mr. Costner's relentless, root-canal humorlessness turns what might have been an enjoyable B-picture throwback into a ponderous drag.

Mild, harmless and occasionally affecting, possessing the fizz of diet soda and the sweet snap of slightly stale bubble gum.

An intellectually engaging movie. But Mr. Jia's careful objectivity and regard for material detail are not matched by narrative rigor.

It does have its tart, fizzy moments.

Like an uncommonly artful and well-acted after-school special. I don't mean this as a put-down: its combination of realism and fretful moral inquiry is best suited to the tastes and sensibilities of young teenagers who devour young-adult fiction.

Acting is not really the point of this movie, which seems to arise above all from Mr. Spielberg's desire to reaffirm that he is, along with everything else, a master of pure action filmmaking.

Sivan has accomplished something extraordinary: he has given political extremism a human face.

Glory Road is satisfying less for its virtuosity than for its sincerity, and also because it will acquaint audiences with a remarkable episode that had ramifications far beyond the basketball court.

Clouds is about the dumbest intelligent movie I've ever seen.

I certainly can't support any calls for boycotting or protesting this busy, trivial, inoffensive film. Which is not to say I'm recommending you go see it.

Certainly Shrek 2 offers rambunctious fun, but there is also something dishonest about its blending of mockery and sentimentality. It lacks both the courage to be truly ugly and the heart to be genuinely beautiful.

Mr. Boe keeps a safe distance from his characters' inner lives, he does succeed in conjuring an atmosphere of elegant melancholy and metaphysical anxiety.

Unpretentious, smartly written and a lot of fun.

Though a dramatic (even melodramatic) narrative eventually takes shape, what you remember is the succession of moods and observations through which it emerges.

It is not so much a documentary as a fictional film about the making of a documentary, or perhaps a documentary about the making of a fictional film about the making of a documentary. If this sounds a bit maddening, it is, though the confusion that The Blonds induces is clearly part of its intention.

Seems both overplotted and underimagined, though there is at least some creativity and a dose of realism, evident in the hairstyles themselves.

A package of cinematic Pop Rocks, a neon-hued, defiantly non-nutritive confection that nonetheless makes you laugh at its sheer bold novelty.

Small-scale and loose. It feels oddly long for a Woody Allen picture, but its relaxed, casual air gives the humor room to breathe, and a gratifyingly high proportion of the piled-up one-liners actually raise a laugh.

On its own, apart from whatever beliefs a viewer might bring to it, The Passion of the Christ never provides a clear sense of what all of this bloodshed was for, an inconclusiveness that is Mr. Gibson's most serious artistic failure.

In any case, what is on screen is a delightful respite from awards-season seriousness - a feather film, you might say, that actually tickles.

Crude, unpolished, yet curiously dreamy.

Like a ham-fisted high-concept public service announcement, directed with stagy deliberateness and written with tin-eared vernacular speechiness.

Mr. Richard's film makes a persuasive case for Langlois as one of the most important figures in the history of film and therefore in the history of 20th-century art.

Walks the delicate boundary between politically inflected realism and costumed sentimentality.

Since her character wears no historical costumes and suffers from no debilitating ailment, it is likely that Ms. Curtis will be overlooked when Oscar season rolls around. This is a shame, since it is unlikely that any other actress this year will match the loose, energetic wit she brings to this delightful movie.

Some of the performances show flashes of idiosyncrasy and flair that are nearly snuffed out by the pedestrian script.

A Serious Man is an exquisitely realized work; the filmmakers' technical mastery of their craft, always impressive, has become absolute. The script reads like a novel, densely allusive, funny, and terse.

Sensation, not sense, is the point of this exercise, and what it lacks in originality it makes up for in effective if cheap moments of fright and dread.

Of all the twists in Catfish-the most surprising of all is what an honest and thoughtful film it turns out, against all odds, to be.

Unlike most movies of this kind, which run out of steam and ideas as they go along, Johnny English gains momentum, nudging you along from a few stray giggles to helpless, giddy laughter.

Reasonably good fun, even if, in the end, it's not really very interesting.

It works on the mind as well as the funny bone and the gag reflex.

The narrative scheme, the brooding period atmosphere, the understated score (by David Byrne) and the precision of the acting also make the story seem more interesting than it is.

In the end, though, Robots is hollow and mechanical, an echo chamber of other movies and an awkward attempt to turn the intrinsically scary sensitive-robot theme into something heartwarming and cute.

Feels more like a grueling road trip in search of a family comedy.

Los Angeles Plays Itself, in spite of its length, is rarely tedious, an achievement it owes mainly to the movies it prodigiously excerpts.

For his part. Mr. Freeman shows himself, once again, incapable of giving a bad performance.

The film has its creepy, suspenseful moments -- but it shrinks a rich, strange story to the dimensions of an anecdote.

Ms. Gleize, through a series of oblique, half-comic scenes and meticulous, rhyming visual compositions, offers up an elegant, discursive essay on carnality and carnivorousness -- on sex, death, meat and the ravening hunger for companionship.

The Weitz brothers -- notorious as the authors of the "American Pie" series -- handle the sentimentality of the story with a light, sweet touch.

There's a little more sex than you'll see on WB, but mostly there's an atmosphere of brooding psychodrama and erotic cruelty that falls somewhere between "Cries and Whispers" and "Say Anything."

The rapprochement between Rémy and Sébastien is beautiful to watch, and all of the characters in The Barbarian Invasions are played with a lusty warmth that makes them lovable even when they are being tiresome.

A passionate, angry piece of advocacy, but it is equally, and in consequence, a brave and necessary act of truth-telling.

A wise, gentle and sad new comedy by Zhang Yimou.

Not entirely without charm.

For all the talk of artistic and amorous passion, the film is trapped in snobbish inertia; its idea of period drama amounts to a kind of highbrow name- dropping.

This violent meatball western deserves to be forgotten quickly.

With the help of an ensemble that is nearly flawless, she (Troche) assembles the damaged human elements of Ms. Homes's world with patience and precision, and more often than not chooses dry understatement over easy satire or obvious sentiment.

Like Christopher Walken or Marlon Brando, Mr. Pacino frequently uses his gifts to make mediocre movies more interesting. Everything else in The Recruit may be tiresomely predictable, but he, at least, is not.

To call The Son a masterpiece would be to insult its modesty. Like the homely, useful boxes Olivier teaches his prodigals to build, it is sturdy, durable and, in its downcast, unobtrusive way, miraculous.

It seems almost unthinkable that such a charismatic, generous and lively man could be gone. It also makes you understand what it means for a country like Haiti to lose a citizen like Jean Dominique.

The skills on display in Freestyle are too varied and idiosyncratic for one movie to contain, but this one at least offers a heady, rousing education in an art form that is too often misunderstood.

The violent scenes veer vertiginously between slapstick, soft-core pornography and raw documentary, leaving you repelled and confused, as well as fascinated.

Depp's witty, spare performance gives the picture a poignancy -- a depth of feeling, if you'll allow the pun -- that Mr. Demme's hectic direction and the hurried script by David McKenna and Nick Cassavetes don't quite earn.

A charming, silly family Christmas movie more likely to spread real joy than migraine, indigestion and sugar shock. The movie succeeds because it at once restrains its sticky, gooey good cheer and wildly overdoes it.

A near-perfect piece of popular entertainment, a children's classic.

Soldini's amiable new comedy suggests that an older, better Italy of imagination, rationality and civility survives on the fringes of a modern nation obsessed, like most others, with consumerism, empty prosperity and easy pleasure.

The movie is, above all, a showcase for its stars, who seem gratifyingly comfortable in their own skin and delighted to be in each other's company again, in another deeply silly, effortlessly entertaining movie.

A stylish, ingeniously constructed bit of hokum, a sparkling trinket of a movie that's as implausible as it is irresistible.

Lovely though it is to look at, it does not reveal very much. Sampling the works of three prominent directors in one sitting may be what gives anthology films like this one their appeal, but the experience is often more frustrating than fulfilling.

So unlike most Hollywood coming-of-age stories as to seem downright revolutionary.

As fizzy as the first, but not quite as refreshing. The pleasurable, eye-popping sense of surprise has diminished, and the teasingly referential attitude shows signs of fatigue.

A slyly effective thriller and of a deft comedy of romantic confusion. Whatever its shortcomings as a consideration of globalization and its discontents, The Edukators succeeds brilliantly in telling the story of a man who falls in love with his best buddy's girlfriend and doesn't know what to do about it.

This picture achieves a level of badness that is its own form of sublimity. You almost - please note that I said almost - have to see it to believe it.

The film's warm, sweet sentiments are genial and unchallenging, and its jokes are low-key and gentle.

Mining the incest prohibition for laughs in what's essentially a light romantic comedy is a bold move, and for the first two-thirds of the movie, it works surprisingly well. But as long as the Duplasses are willing to go there, I can't help but wish they'd gone a little further.

The simplicity of the tale becomes a bit tedious.

It is hard not to admire the independence and ambition of The Beautiful Country, even if the film does fall short of its epic intentions.

Comedy, like marriage, takes more work than this.

Land of Plenty, is like a clumsy, well-meaning intervention in a family quarrel. Mr. Wenders may not have the power to heal the rifts his movie acknowledges - and his account of them may not always be persuasive - but there is nonetheless something touching about his heartfelt concern.

Even his fans may find themselves frustrated, since the film observes Mr. Franken closely without generating much insight into him.

By allowing the stories to play off one another and allowing layers of meaning to accumulate before we even notice them, the filmmakers capture some of the essential strangeness of life -- the way our relations are governed by laws that remain invisible to us until art reveals their workings.

A brilliant feat of rug-pulling, sure to delight fans of movies like "The Usual Suspects" and "Pi."

While not a great movie, is a very good movie about greatness, in which celebrating the achievement of one major artist becomes the occasion for the emergence of another.

Café Lumière stands in relation to "Tokyo Story" as a faint, diminished echo. It is nonetheless a fascinating curiosity, a chance to witness one major filmmaker paying tribute to another in the form of a rigorously minor film.

He (Ford) slips into the role as if it were a pair of well-worn loafers, the left inherited from Peter Falk, the right from Clint Eastwood, and then proceeds, with wry nonchalance, to tap-dance, shuffle and pirouette through his loosest, wittiest performance in years.

The Ram is sometimes--often, even--a manipulative, self-pitying man, but Rourke and Aronofsky paint his portrait with a rigorous dignity.

A work of inspired simplicity.

Both entertaining and empty: an emotional shell game that leaves you feeling cheated even though, on the surface at least, everyone is a winner.

The inhospitability of the land emphasizes the spare precision of the narratives and helps to give them an atavistic power, as if they were tales that had been handed down since the beginning of time.

The parts of Get Rich or Die Tryin' that feel most genuine have to do with friendship and family, rather than with criminal intrigue. But the movie ultimately lacks an emotional core. It will certainly make 50 Cent even richer, but it wouldn't have killed him to try a bit harder.

The sharks are scary, and the ocean is vast and indifferent, but the most effective parts of Open Water, which is ultimately too modest to be very memorable, evoke a deeper terror, one that can chill even those viewers who would never dream of putting on a wet suit and jumping off a boat.

And it's true that this movie's absolute tone-deafness, its complete disconnection from our current economic and geopolitical reality, by moments achieves a perverse Warholian profundity.

At once wildly metaphorical and distressingly literal-minded, Shadow of the Vampire tries, with mixed success, to be scary, funny and profound all at once.

Reflects the sensibility of the generation it holds up to critical scrutiny, and it's a cunningly ambiguous act of self-portraiture.

The interest of To Be and to Have, though, is not sociological: it is not really about the French educational system, rural life or even the way children learn. It is, rather, the portrait of an artist, a man whose work combines discipline and inspiration and unfolds mysteriously and imperceptibly.

Being Julia may not make much psychological or dramatic sense, but Ms. Bening, pretending to be Julia (who is always pretending to be herself), is sensational.

Lord Lloyd Webber's thorough acquaintance with the canon of 18th- and 19th-century classical music is not in doubt, but his attempt to force a marriage between that tradition and modern musical theater represents a victory of pseudo-populist grandiosity over taste - an act of cultural butchery akin to turning an aviary of graceful swans and brilliant peacocks into an order of Chicken McNuggets.

Smart, sincere and sloppy film.

Ultimately too thin for its length and too dependent on easy assumptions about its characters. But it does demonstrate that Ms. Collette is more than able to carry a movie, and it leaves you hoping she will soon have another chance to do it.

Stringent, clinical and almost unbearably moving.

Btter-than-average screen Shakespeare: intelligent without being showily clever, and motivated more by genuine fascination with the play's language and ideas than by a desire to cannibalize its author's cultural prestige.

A modest, restrained picture, as small and satisfying as one of Woody Allen's better recent efforts.

You realize you are witnessing a psychodrama of novelistic intricacy and epic scope.

At times Good Morning, Night feels as claustrophobic as the apartment itself, and you may feel that the director is handling his volatile material with a bit too much delicacy. But the movie's atmosphere is a curious mixture of obliqueness and intensity.

Cinematically, Doubt is something of a dud. But if it remains a play, it's an ingeniously structured one, with smart, thought-provoking words spoken by fabulous actors, and how often do most of us get to see one of those, whether in three dimensions or two?

Completed before the release of "American Beauty," this contrived, puffed up little picture nonetheless seems like a ripoff, perhaps because it mines the same tired assumptions and unexamined stereotypes about suburban family life.

Offers the rare pleasure of watching a major director return to his own material and rework it 30 years later. This story of a pitiful jewel heist gone so profoundly wrong that it approaches the scope of Greek tragedy isn't quite a remake of "Dog Day Afternoon."

Mr. Boyle has hardly lost his sly, provocative perversity or his ear for the rhythms of unchecked violence, but he does seem to be maturing. It's as if, in contemplating the annihilation of the human race, he has discovered his inner humanist.

A disjointed, sometimes fascinating mélange of moods, associations and effects.

Holds together in spite of its flaws.

A tour de force of grime, fluorescence and destinationless velocity, is more concerned with atmosphere than meaning.

Nothing is particularly believable here, but there are still a few moments of silly, sinister fun.

This is a supremely well-executed piece of popular entertainment that is likely to linger in your mind and may even trouble your conscience.

Its pleasures are almost obscenely abundant.

If all this does not quite add up to a coherent movie, it does produce a bouncy, boisterous and charming one, which becomes downright thrilling when it shows the bands in action.

The movie can -- indeed, should -- be intellectually rejected, but you can't quite banish it from your mind.

Lan Yu is like a less dizzily gorgeous companion to Mr. Wong's "In the Mood for Love" -- very much a Hong Kong movie despite its mainland setting.

Surprisingly enough, it often soars to heights of not bad.

Like a bottle of lukewarm Champagne -- an expensive one, judging by the label -- America's Sweethearts opens with a promising burst of effervescence and quickly goes flat.

Metropolis retains its power to overwhelm, trouble and move because it is connected to the deep anxieties of modern life as if by a high-voltage cable.

If I had a child near Dre's age, I'd drag him or her out of "Marmaduke" and into The Karate Kid--but not before requiring an at-home screening of the still unsurpassed original.

An unadorned, unsparing chronicle of a young man's descent into a nightmare of delusion, paranoia and self-destructive behavior.

The movie is so small and emotionally constricted that it gives Hoffman too little room to explore his range.

Is it or is it not stupendously friggin' rad? And the answer is yes. For most of the first hour, a good portion of the second, and even many of the 40 minutes left after that, Avatar is stupendously friggin' rad.

With tact and enthusiasm, Mr. Polanski grabs hold of a great book and rediscovers its true and enduring vitality.

It's not one of Kurosawa's great films.... But it is, within its own proportions, nearly perfect.

Much more effectively terrifying than the usual overplotted, underwritten Hollywood thriller.

The visual intensity and the relentless degradation visited on the characters begins to feel prurient and dishonest.

Polanski, who was a Jewish child in Krakow when the Germans arrived in September 1939, presents Szpilman's story with bleak, acid humor and with a ruthless objectivity that encompasses both cynicism and compassion.

As drama, Stage Beauty is both timorous and ungainly, words that might also describe Ms. Danes's performance.

The aesthetic of Full Frontal is as rough and grainy as the off-the-rack digital video in which much of it was shot.

A cautionary essay on the risks to democracy posed by the fight against terrorism.

It's as if the director, Andrew Fleming, and the screenwriters, Nat Mauldin and Ed Solomon, set out to make a movie that would be mediocre in every respect. If so, they have completely succeeded.

The two central performances help the lesson go down easily, and Mr. Duperyon's unassuming, slightly ragged realism gives the movie a sweet, lived-in charm. Mr. Sharif, grizzled and white-haired at 71, has lost none of the charisma that made him an international movie star in the 1960's, and Mr. Boulanger, in his first feature film, shows impressive self-assurance.

The result is a mountain of honest, nourishing corn, a lavish evocation of simplicity that, for all its showy sophistication, has an appealing emotional directness. For all its sweep and scope and movie-star magic, Cold Mountain is studded with fine small moments and deft supporting performances.

An exquisitely simple movie. Mr. Kim manages to isolate something essential about human nature and at the same time, even more astonishingly, to comprehend the scope of human experience.

Remarkable for its genuine, unpretentious lyricism.

Unfortunately, these actors are subject to Mr. LaBute's usual dramatic method, which is to cobble together a preposterous moral outrage and then wave it in front of our faces, asking us to believe that it is a window, or even a mirror.

Superfluous though it may be, The Honeymooners is not so bad.

It's a movie best appreciated for the costumes, the sets and Ms. Theron's haughty athleticism.

There is a lot of violence, but not much action; a plot involving vengeance, jealousy and double-crossing, but not a great deal of suspense.

Sandwiched between the musical numbers are an eclectic assorment of cameos, including Willie Nelson, Queen Latifa and Elton John. The funniest one comes during the closing credits, when the rapper Xzibit testifies that the Country Bears were a formative influence on hip-hop, certainly something the Eagles could never claim.

Is, in the end, a boisterous love song -- a funny valentine to London, to chaos and to human decency.

The general talent and dedication of the ensemble mitigate the script's occasional lapses into sentimentality and noisy confrontation.

The story is so crowded with incident and implication as to be both nonsensical and impossible to act, so the actors, when they are not bursting into fits of temper, smile mysteriously.

Shows the human face of both communism and its victims, and shows how hard it is to tell the two apart.

As a cultural artifact, Talladega Nights is both completely phony and, therefore, utterly authentic. Or, to put it differently: this movie is the real thing. It's finger lickin' good. It's eatin' good in the neighborhood. It's the King of Beers. It's Wonder Bread.

The film has a richer, more various visual texture than most documentaries, combining still photographs, black-and-white video and Super-8 film, sometimes with wild sound or none at all.

The script (by Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender) strains hard after a few easy jokes, and the whole movie feels dull and trivial.

With its flashbacks, split-screen montages, decade-jumping soundtrack, sped-up action and frequent shifts of light and color, Wonderland feels like "Law & Order" on crack.

Laborious and logy when it should be madcap and effervescent.

The film's resolute indifference to fashion makes it, perhaps paradoxically, a refreshing piece of old-style entertainment, accompanied by a whooshing, trembling score by Edward Shearmur.

After a while the movie spins its wheels, unable to find much emotional traction in the icy bleakness.

Proves that a movie about goodness is not the same thing as a good movie.

By the end of The Watcher you'll need your own prescription.

Though its story is fuzzy, the acting and direction in Final give it an air of quiet, dignified ambition.

By the end, even the irrepressible Mr. Foxx seems tired and defeated, and we can only hope he perks up in time for his next movie.

Like finding that perfect stage of moderate drunkenness in which the senses are sharpened rather than dulled, and time passes with leisurely grace.

At once endearing and unbearably show-offy, it seems to be the product of a sensibility formed by age-inappropriate reading.

A seriously flawed movie wrapped around two nearly perfect performances.

"Ouch!" is also what you might exclaim as you pinch yourself to stay awake through the film's slow, labored contrivances.

The final scene is a piece of cunning visual wit that makes you realize how artful and sneaky Cure, has been beneath its clinical, deadpan surface.

Unfortunately, the movie's real setting is a sentimental fantasy world, and its story is a spectacularly incoherent exercise in geopolitical wish fulfillment.

Hardly a work of state-of-the-art virtuosity, but rather an example of quiet, confident craftsmanship that tells a sweet, charming tale of intergalactic friendship.

Mr. Guest and Mr. Levy's jokes are sometimes so subtle as to seem imperceptible, until you realize that they are everywhere, from the broadest gestures to the tiniest details of dress and décor.

The baby-faced Thomas Sangster nearly steals the show in the much smaller role of Paul McCartney.

For what it is -- a big, expensive, occasionally campy action movie full of well-known actors speaking in well-rounded accents -- Troy is not bad. It has the blocky, earnest integrity of a classic comic book, and it labors to respect the strangeness and grandeur of its classical sources.

Rather than assaulting you with self-congratulatory tears, it leaves you with a bittersweet glow of wisdom and an appreciation of the small triumphs and difficult labors of love.

Madagascar arouses no sense of wonder, except insofar as you wonder, as you watch it, how so much talent, technical skill and money could add up to so little.

I suppose Rumor Has It could be worse, though at the moment I'm at a loss to say just how.

An appealing blend of counter-cultural idealism and hedonistic creativity.

It's instructive to compare Bully with Jean-Pierre Ameris's "Bad Company," which tackles similar themes and manages to be explicit without stooping to cheap salaciousness. It's a genuinely disturbing film. Bully, in contrast, is merely disgusting.

At its best, L.I.E. offers a rich, dark, bitter slice of contemporary life. But the film's arty embellishments undermine its bleak vision, making it, in the end, a little too easy to take.

That they're English and elderly apparently makes their antics screamingly funny to people who would turn up their noses at similar humor in a film like "Scary Movie."

The problem lies in the calculating pretentiousness of using human misery to make shallow entertainment seem serious. It's worth comparing Spy Game with "The Tailor of Panama," John Boorman's far superior exercise in post-cold-war spycraft.

A dreamy, impressionistic inquiry into the legacy of the 1960's, but it's less concerned with history than with mood.

There's a curious mismatch between the surface of the movie and what lies beneath it. Wong's technique is layered and detailed like a couture gown, but the story it hangs on is as generic as a seamstress's dress form.

Captures the true spirit of the holiday. It's mildly sentimental, unabashedly consumerist (with anything-but-subliminal advertisements for McDonald's hamburgers and Nestlé candy tucked inside), studiously inoffensive and completely disposable.

A quiet, slow-moving tale, very much in tune with the gradual rhythms of traditional agricultural life.

The Social Network wants to be a social satire, a miniaturist comedy of manners, and a Greek tragedy; it bites off a lot, at times more than it can chew. But even the unmasticated morsels are pretty tasty.

The occasional obviousness of the film's themes is more than balanced by the subtlety of its methods and by the stolid, irreducible individuality of its protagonist, Hussein.

Mr. Murphy is not given much to do in this sloppy, good-hearted sequel, so he graciously allows himself to be upstaged by all manner of animatronic, celebrity-voiced talking animals.

Unfortunately, The Invisible Circus, which follows Phoebe as she retraces her dead sibling's steps from Paris to Berlin to the coast of Portugal, doesn't so much illuminate Phoebe's confusion as share it.

The main problem with Such a Long Journey is its storytelling. There is simply too much happening.

Thanks to Jim Sheridan's graceful, scrupulously sincere direction and the dry intelligence of his cast, In America is likely to pierce the defenses of all but the most dogmatically cynical viewers.

Narrative coherence is perhaps not among the film's virtues, but its loopy, cluttered story is part of the fun. And a clearer, simpler plot might have required the sacrifice of some delightful grace notes and visual marvels, like the elastic-necked geisha or the one-eyed ambulatory umbrella.

Like licorice, Marie Antoinette is a confection you either love or hate, and both affects seem tied to your feeling about the director herself and her apparent identification with Louis XVI's bride. For my part, I can definitely say that I love licorice and hate Marie Antoinette. But I'm still wrestling with the enigma of Sofia Coppola.

In an era whose culture was defined by what the literary critic Richard Poirier called the performing self, Mr. Ali's persona was one of the greatest performances of all.

It lacks the fevered sincerity (and the political timeliness) of Romero's original, but it's tightly scripted, cleverly cast, consistently scary, occasionally funny--everything you could ask from a well-made and completely unnecessary remake.

The movie itself triumphs by similar means; it is a marvel of unleashed childishness, like a birthday party on the edge of spinning out of control.

It skips from buoyant satire to domestic melodrama, leaving behind a curious mix of emotions.

With a neck-snapping jolt, turns into the scariest exercise in cinematic sleight of hand since "The Blair Witch Project."

Offers the kind of experience that makes you glad movies exist.

Unfortunately, all of these supremely expressive vehicles come equipped with drivers, principally a pair of crash-test dummies played by Paul Walker and Tyrese, whose low-gear dialogue makes the whine of engines sound like the highest poetry.

That Garfield speaks in the supercilious, world-weary drawl of Bill Murray is some small consolation, as are a few of the animal tricks.

Has a quiet, cumulative magic, whose source is hard to identify. Its simple, meticulously composed frames are full of mystery and feeling; it's an action movie that stands perfectly still.

An old-fashioned movie-movie, the kind that's substantial enough to go out to dinner after and discuss all the way through dessert.

The latest bit of damaged goods offered up in the Miramax clearance sale, Underclassman plays like the longest episode of "21 Jump Street" ever made.

A curiously thrilling and often hilarious experience.

Mr. Kang is a gifted choreographer of bloody chaos, but he has enough range and imagination to strew a few interludes of haunting tenderness amid the shell casings and ketchup packs.

The acting is impeccable, and the intentions are serious and noble, but the affection it elicits stops short of love, and its coziness never risks true intimacy.

Luckily Mr. Reygadas has talent to match his ambitions; or, rather, gifts that undercut them sufficiently to give his film a prickly, haunting poignancy.

Unquestionably minor, perhaps deliberately so, but it is nonetheless intermittently delightful.

This warm, sorrowful film plays like a downbeat variation on an old World War II picture from Hollywood.

An investigation, at once lucid and enigmatic, of exile, loneliness and the fragile possibility of friendship.

Feisty, intellectually engaging.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie does not live up to Mr. Russell's performance.

Soul Kitchen is sprawling, undisciplined, raucous, occasionally crass-and so full of life you forgive it everything.

Eastwood's furthest venture yet into the comic possibilities of his flintier-than-thou persona.

The only thing missing is a coherent story -- or even, for that matter, an interesting idea for one.

Because of its relentlessness, its crawling pace (the 77 minutes pass like 2 1/2 hours) and its sometimes confusing story, A Time for Drunken Horses may not be for every taste, but it's still an affecting, and in its way beautiful, movie.

It has an air of melancholy humor as its characters fumble toward normalcy.

Ms. Agrelo and Ms. Sewell deserve praise for discovering and illuminating this delightful corner of an educational system that is often portrayed in the grimmest terms, but their execution falls a bit short.

One of the best entertainments this season has yet offered.

At its best when it forsakes earnest psychological exposition for magic realism, when, instead of trying to explain Kahlo's life, it conjures the moods and sensations that fed her art.

The Dreamers, which is disarmingly sweet and completely enchanting, fuses sexual discovery with political tumult by means of a heady, heedless romanticism that nearly obscures the film's patient, skeptical intelligence.

It's a question of whether or not the movie speaks to your secret, unregulated, inherently ridiculous experience of identification and desire--not who you should be, but who you are. Does the warm blood of a teenager still flow beneath your icy grown-up flesh?

The raw intimacy of some of the scenes -- whether they take place at a diner, in the death house or in the bedroom -- is breathtaking.

Whatever your opinion of the war - and however it has changed over the years - this movie is sure to challenge your thinking and disturb your composure. It provides no reassurance, no euphemism, no closure. Given the subject and the circumstances, how could it?

It is impossible not to marvel at Mr. Suleiman's knack for turning rage and hopelessness into burlesque.

The film's powerful individual scenes seem like excerpts from a missing whole, well-appointed rooms in a house whose beams and girders have been cut away.

The inexplicable use of split screens and multiple images does little to bolster the power of the speakers' testimony. If anything, the technique is distracting. Material as emotionally and intellectually challenging as this requires no gimmicks at all.

A witty and acute examination of friendship, ambition and betrayal in the Parisian literary world.

Like Lou Ye's "Suzhou River," a Hitchcock homage similarly set in Shanghai's demimonde, So Close to Paradise offers an intriguing and sometimes self-canceling mixture of emotion and style.

After The Hurt Locker (which is without question the most exciting and least ideological movie yet made about the war in Iraq), everyone will remember Renner's name.

Like "Spartacus," this movie is engaging because it's actually about something: the love of learning, the clash between science and religious faith, and the grim fact that political change often proceeds on the foundation of mob violence and genocide. Agora engages more effectively with this kind of big historical idea than it does with human drama.

Like the best war movies -- and like martial literature going back to the Iliad -- it balances the dreadful, unassuageable cruelty of warfare and the valor and decency of those who fight.

Mr. Pucci, emerging slowly from behind a stray lock of brown hair, plays Justin's ambiguous transformation with deft understatement. And Mike Mills, who wrote and directed, keeps the film from slipping either into melodrama or facile satire, the two traps into which this genre is most apt to fall.

An unexpected delight, a film that weds the humor and magic of a folk tale with a very modern feel for the psychological dynamics between men and women and for the subtle politics of male rivalry in a macho culture. It has been made and acted with intelligence and evident love, which deserves to be requited.

Even fans of open-wheel racing, the high-speed, high-stress pastime that is the subject of Renny Harlin's hectic new film, may walk away from it more logy than exhilarated.

The visual beauty of the film, rather than distracting from the troubling story, makes it more troubling still.

Ballets Russes does tell a marvelous story of midcentury show business, encompassing both the most exalted expressions of pure art and the sometimes grubby commerce that sustained it.

The script of Before Sunset is both rambling and self-conscious, and at times it has the self-important sound of clever writing. But though it is sometimes maddening, the movie's prodigious verbiage is also enthralling.

A happy, nasty and frequently hilarious assault on 20 years' worth of youth pictures.

A loose- jointed, not especially memorable comic caper with some lovely moments of humorous invention, many patches of clumsy writing and a few game performances.

Revisits the San Francisco of the late 1960's and early 70's, a time and place so encrusted with legend and cliché that you might wonder if there is anything left to say. It turns out there is quite a lot -- which the filmmakers have brought triumphantly to life.

Possession is in the end an honorable, interesting failure. It falls far short of poetry, but it's not bad prose.

Its warm, occasionally off-putting individuality is more like what you look for in a friend than in a movie, and like a friend it invites you to see the unique beauty that lies under its superficial flaws.

While there are some genuinely dazzling moments of visual bravura, the marriage of flatness and depth that Mr. Aramaki attempts doesn't quite work.

In general, and in spite of its deft use of archival video clips and interviews, Giuliani Time offers a superficial reading of recent New York history, zeroing in on the headlines while often missing the context.

The time is right for a breezy, captivating New York romantic comedy. Sidewalks of New York is not an especially good movie, but it will do.

Leconte's visual instincts are so impressive that they outstrip his story, leaving us flushed and dazzled, but also, as after a long night of champagne and baccarat (to say nothing of other irresponsible pleasures), hungry, tired, and homesick.

I realize that the fear of contracting writer's block from a fictional character is crazy, but in the brilliantly scrambled, self-consuming world of Adaptation it has a certain plausibility.

In casting about for new sources of fear, Marebito achieves its own level of mediocrity.

A film that even a rabid lowbrow like Homer Simpson (or, when the mood strikes, this critic) would find beneath his dignity.

Watching Jackass 3-D was like being plunged into a Hieronymous Bosch painting of hell, yet this very reaction attests to the franchise's primal, diabolical power.

Moves nimbly from behind-the-scenes comedy to melodrama, with occasional stumbles into pop psychology and film-noir violence.

It might have been a satisfying if not terribly original piece of historical melodrama, but its clumsiness turns it, against its best intentions, into half-baked operatic kitsch.

Polished and bouncy without being overly mawkish or unduly obnoxious. Above all, it is short.

He [Clooney] has found a cogent subject, an urgent set of ideas and a formally inventive, absolutely convincing way to make them live on screen.

It is the work of a master -- of more than one, for that matter. Mr. Godard, who once called it "my first real film," was showing the obsession with, and mastery of, cinematic technique that would make him one of the culture heroes of the 1960's.

Mr. Stone has taken a public tragedy and turned it into something at once genuinely stirring and terribly sad. His film offers both a harrowing return to a singular, disastrous episode in the recent past and a refuge from the ugly, depressing realities of its aftermath.

Disturbing, infuriating and often very funny film.

Perhaps the most satisfying Bond movie since "The Spy Who Loved Me."

The real question raised by The United States of Leland is not why, but how. How, that is, did so many talented actors find their way to this dreary and derivative study in suburban dysfunction?

The cast, working in conditions that appear to have been only slightly less dire than those portrayed in the film, work together in a grim, convincing improvisatory rhythm.

She (Varda) plucks images and stories from the world around her, finding beauty and nourishment in lives and activities the world prefers to ignore.

Alan, who Mr. Sachs has said was based on his own father, is a great character - passionate, complicated, bursting with life. Those words also describe Mr. Torn's performance.

The first really good spy movie about the impossibility, under present historical circumstances, of making a really good spy movie.

Exists in a realm beyond sense, and induces in the viewer a trancelike state, leaving the mind free to ponder the mysteries of the universe.

Enemy at the Gates has its deficiencies, but the first-rate cast is not among them.

I don't know how much The Score cost, but it's pretty close to worthless.

Spider-Man, while hardly immune to these vices, is, like Mr. Maguire, disarmingly likable, and touching in unexpected ways.

A wry exercise in geriatric uplift.

It doles out information so arbitrarily that you are robbed of the twin pleasures of figuring out clues and figuring out you've been fooled.