Ella Taylor

Anemic.

Brilliantly edited for drama and irony, The Goebbels Experiment juxtaposes little-seen German propaganda films with excerpts from Goebbels' diary.

Has the sprawling canvas of an epic and the emotional heat of classical melodrama.

What the movie lacks is a point.

Remember the Daze has the irony-free, instant-nostalgia earnestness of your high school yearbook, but watching it is not likely to conjure your own youthful emotions -- it’s more like flipping through the generic memories of a complete stranger.

The movie blows a fresh wind of disrespect, high drama and lush romanticism through that stolidly middlebrow subgenre, the period drama.

A triumph of production design...As a character study, though, The Aviator is downright squeamish.

(Cage's) performance feels embalmed in the accumulated shtick of an actor trapped in excess.

This heartfelt tale of disintegration and acceptance, seasoned with family devotion, will both raise and soothe the anxieties of those of us who regularly ask ourselves why we came into the kitchen two minutes ago.

Raising Helen is the kind of movie you watch on a plane while muttering “utter crap” under your breath -- and then burst into tears.

One senses that this is an intensely personal project for Binder, who is not as forgiving as he might be toward the mercurial mother. Still, the film is carried by Costner and Allen, who project a chemistry so incrementally built on reluctant camaraderie, they almost seem like siblings.

Pretty good going for a ton of moisture.

The film, like the beleaguered country it depicts, has a raw, neurotic, brawling yet tender vitality.

That You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is not more dull is due in large part to the adorably flamboyant Punch (late of Dinner for Schmucks and Hot Fuzz).

This Rob Reiner comedy jogs along pleasantly enough to the finish (Costner is charming as always in over-the-hill-ruin mode), which entails a less-than-shattering insight about love and marriage.

Their endless groupings and regroupings, their brief encounters and power struggles are framed by an armory of cinematic devices that will be familiar to any Desplechin devotee.

Though hardly a major work, The Burial Society has going for it something that many of the snickering noir comedies currently littering the field lack. Underneath its cheeky amorality, there beats a heart.

A fresh, buoyant, mischievous and rather jolly meditation - if that's the word for a movie as divinely nuts as this one is - on the meaning of life in an unhappy world.

A fetchingly improbable match of material and directors.

Precious little history of any kind shows its face in Marie Antoinette. The omission is strategic.

My own view is that, like me, the LAPD was defeated by the movie's incestuously proliferating plots. I've seen Dark Blue twice, and I still don't have a handle on all its comings and goings.

Under Peter Hewitt's phoned-in direction, Garfield chugs along like the slow train to Chattanooga, with only Jennifer Love Hewitt, as the local vet, twittering pertly in a desperate effort to raise Jon's feeble pulse.

The Girl From Paris may not have half the smooth technique of "Swimming Pool," but it has 10 times the heart and soul.

It's a tribute to Robert Gordon's nifty screenplay and Dunne's cheerful way with digression that Addicted to Love, even as it broadens into screwball, also deepens into a character study full of surprising left turns.

The movie is driven almost entirely by its exhilaratingly subversive characters.

The question is not how bad this excuse for a domestic comedy is (medium cringe), but how the gifted Fred Schepisi got suckered into directing a vanity project.

Good fun, though not more than up-market situation comedy studded with the usual leaps out of period-speak to swipe at contemporary Hollywood.

As naked and bitter and mesmerizing a display of self-pity as you've seen outside as Edward Albee play. By the end of this willfully grimy yet oddly beautiful movie, Billy and Layla have earned grudging sympathy.

The visual jokes -- one standout is an army of ogres condemned by the Pied Piper to perpetual line-dancing -- are pretty irresistible.

Not just one of the best Hollywood movies about race, but, along with "Collateral," one of the finest portrayals of contemporary Los Angeles life period.

It plays out more like a 12-step program than a human drama.

Slow and stately.

Superbly adapted by Fred Schepisi from the Booker Prize-winning novel by Graham Swift, Last Orders pays quietly passionate tribute to the unsung working-class generation that fought World War II and survived to take up apparently humdrum lives.

Goes the distance to avoid banalizing the dilemma of a reasonable couple unhinged by unreasonable events.

This fluidly paced film, with its keen observation of the confused longing for love, family and stability in an inherently unstable world, nonetheless keeps faith with the Czech genius for holding the tonal line between tragedy and the absurd.

So oppressive is Peggy's world -- Year of the Dog is the best evocation I've seen of how much worse it is to be depressed in a sunny climate -- that when she finally loses control, it feels more like catharsis than madness.

Vincere, which comes as close to grand opera as can be achieved without anyone actually bursting into song, feels like a big movie -- handsomely mounted, full of dark shadows counterpointed with stray shafts of light, with dramatic close-ups of faces driven by passion and madness and heavy silences brutally interrupted by clashing tympani.

Mired in noir cliché, the movie manages to be simultaneously overwrought and undercooked, with the Bambi-eyed Akhtar giving such a relentlessly inscrutable performance, one wants to poke him with a stick.

Duck Season is not (yet) the work of a great filmmaker, but it's the kind of movie in which a fledgling director traps his talent in a bottle and saves it for next time.

Made with the slick, shorthand complacency of a TV movie, Beautiful is so overstuffed with contrivance, you can hardly breathe.

The famously lovely mug of Tilda Swinton (cast as Kurtz’s wife) merely distracts, and I couldn’t help feeling that this potent story would have been far better served by a straight-ahead documentary.

Adaptation is hardly profound, but it's one of the most soulful and loopily romantic movies I've seen all year.

Might have something interesting to say about cultural ambivalence by and toward the maternal impulse if only it had a spark of originality or verve.

Jindabyne wears its class politics lightly, weaving them into a ghost story about the intimate connection between how we treat our living and our dead that will hover around your shoulders long after you leave the theater.

Replete with false dilemmas, assisted by a dreadfully stagy screenplay and directed with all the animation of a tableau vivant, Metroland is such a draggy bore.

The most indelible moment I took away from Sunshine, in which a tiny figure in a golden space suit floats away from the ship into the gravitational pull of the sun, is one of ecstatic, appalling loneliness.

While Grizzly Man is never less than a fascinating portrait of a troubled Peter Pan who couldn't function in human society and tried to remake the animal kingdom into his own private Hanna-Barbera cartoon, it fails to establish Treadwell as much more than a serious headcase, let alone a titanic figure.

Compared to the glib, pandering rosiness of most current chick-flicks, Anywhere but Here is a class act.

Too long, too slow, too self-consciously chatty and too much at the mercy of a slim premise that doesn't wear well under endless repetition.

Unlike the object of its scathing attention, Kirby Dick's documentary about the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board is merry and bright and loads of fun.

A thrilling example of the cunning political allegory woven into vivid concretism that invigorates contemporary Iranian cinema, Mohammad Rasoulof's Iron Island takes as its monumental central image a sinking ship, symbol of decaying autocracy and the faint hope of liberation.

The movie is loaded with good intentions, but in his zeal to squeeze the action and our emotions into the all-too-familiar dramatic arc of the Holocaust escape story, Minac drains his movie of all individuality.

Going down with the Titanic was a picnic compared to what Leonardo DiCaprio has to weather (an Alice in Wonderland hairdo, for starters) as Louis XIV in this unwittingly nutso adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' 1850 novel.

A warm, conciliatory entertainment.

Cliché, or experiment with cliché? Really, it’s not worth sticking around to find out, since the action mostly involves the monotonous Romain Duris standing around in his underpants or sitting on the toilet banging on about why love has fled.

As reasoning, this is manipulative -- as filmmaking, it’s dull.

One of those passionately atmospheric movies, like Jane Campion's "The Piano," that sounds idiotic on paper, but whose ambiance, charged with eros, rage, regret and optimism, is strangely moving.

Directed by Agnès Jaoui, who made the equally delightful "The Taste of Others," this comedy of manners with a serious purpose centers on a group of loosely connected neurotics, all working in the rarefied worlds of amateur chorales.

Adds up to little more than a cynical marriage of marketable commodities -- Lohan, NASCAR and the durably profitable Bug himself.

The kind of art film that's rarely seen anymore -- the kind that trusts the audience to be as intelligent as the director.

Directed in humongous close-up by former dancer Jon M. Chu, Step Up 2 the Streets is suavely choreographed by Jamal Sims, Nadine "Hi Hat" Ruffin and Dave Scott.

This suffocatingly pleasant cross between "Sliding Doors" and "Six Degrees of Separation" is barely rescued by one beautiful scene.

Michèle Ohayon falls into the old documentary trap - the illusion that once you've found yourself a lovable eccentric to follow around with a camera, you automatically have a movie.

Macdonald's singular achievement is to restore -- through interviews and archival footage -- the dead to such vivid life, you weep for them and for their families, who have only memories to live off.

Directed by Swedish filmmaker Mikael Håfström, who's clearly new at the genre, this aptly named movie is riddled with obvious parallels, crude moral talking points, a script so awful it's practically avant-garde, and a vain attempt at comic relief by RZA.

The setup and execution of this quietly histrionic tale of the distorting power of thwarted love are so patently ridiculous that the urge to laugh gets in the way.

Blessed with a lovely score and strong acting, but crippled by an awkward, mawkish script.

Ondine plumbs the country's most resonant fairy tale and plays impishly along the borders of postcard fantasies of Ireland.

By the end of this mercifully short excuse for a horror movie, you'll be wishing the beast had chowed down on the entire ensemble.

Like so many movies of its kind, Dead Man's Shoes gets hopelessly lost in vicious process, and so loses all sight of anything you might optimistically call insight.

The film is not emotionally subtle, but it is beautifully shot, by cinematographer Declan Quinn, with a grainy, impressionistic eye that mimics a perpetual dance of shards of remembered experience.

A stripling of 24, Tierney has a very young man's immature passion for unrelieved misery, which borders at times on the tedious, at others on the downright comical.

Only at the end, when one of the principals makes a decision you don't see coming, does Face fleetingly weigh in as a movie you haven't seen a thousand times before at ethnically correct film festivals.

No matter how tactful and sensitive Franklin's direction, he has made himself complicit in a polarization that panders to anti-intellectual populism even as it caters to women's movement backlash.

The script is so intellectualized that I couldn't help feeling I was witnessing not two complex people locked in struggle, but the opposed souls (and classes) of Germany: Sophie, emblem of the cultured, tolerant and enlightened humanism of the middle classes duking it out with Mohr, resentful member of a disenfranchised proletariat from whose ranks sprang Hitler's most loyal quislings.

Like most television directors, Shergold is good with actors. Jowly, impassive and rigid with righteous dignity, Timothy Spall makes a wonderfully meticulous Pierrepoint.

If you liked "Love, Actually," you'll love this too, another small jewel in the crown of unabashedly commercial, cheerfully middlebrow, eminently exportable British fluff.

There's something oddly moving about the film purely as a love story between two people who were more alike than was good for them, yet somehow stuck it out. What we see in Frida is not Kahlo the painter, but Kahlo the love of Rivera's life, as he was of hers.

So never mind the Xmas schlock -- go treat yourself at once to this sensationally entertaining soul food.

In the end what drives the movie is the hip young filmmaker's struggle with himself -- his showman's need to toy with our anxieties threatening to overwhelm his desire to make amends to all the servants he took for granted growing up.

Absorbing documentary about gay marriage is most persuasive when most specific.

The worthy text of Mad Hot Ballroom is undercut by the real source of its energy, the heat of competition and the pure joy of winning.

Gröning makes us fully feel the rhythms of their lives, but for the same reasons that most of us couldn't or wouldn't last in such a stripped-down environment, the movie, at just shy of three hours, starts to feel oppressive after two.

Rapp's creepy, ghoulishly funny and, finally, touching new film.

Divided We Fall briskly, often hilariously, forbids us to wallow in the specious comfort of untainted local heroes or irredeemable villains.

Too bad for Gilliam and everyone involved, but in the departments of spectacle and schadenfreude, great fun for us.

As pristine a distillation of Palestinian rage as I've seen outside the evening news.

This gossamer work is one of the loveliest examples of minimalist cinema I've seen in a long time.

The movie’s old-school feminism is true to its subject, and Theron proves charismatic enough to stand alone as an emblematic working-class heroine doing what she has to do without benefit of feminist theory. I’m even willing to forgive this rousing drama its coy, flirty ending, if only because its heroine has the grace not to drive her pickup truck off a cliff.

By staying focused on the children -- frightened evacuees from the London Blitz whose parallel war in Narnia both taps into and finally quiets their unspoken terrors -- Adamson keeps faith with the humanity of Lewsis' tale.

The movie feels oddly undercooked and aimless.

Seattle filmmaker James Longley's poetic essay on the plight of ordinary Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds trapped in a war simultaneously waged over their heads and in their faces stands head and shoulders above an overcrowded field of documentaries about the Iraq war.

Pressma's intermittently amusing screenplay, some good-natured cameos by a bunch of his famous friends, and an intelligent performance by Chess — playing herself opposite TV regular Alan Rosenberg -- save the day and the relationship.

Not terrible for a movie featuring John Travolta as a literature professor, but not too good either.

You begin to wonder whether a story is ever going to show up. When it does, it's worth the wait for a long and well-turned set piece coordinating the heist, and two lovely flips in the plot.

The best I can say for Smiling Fish is that it's capable and pleasant, which ought to sound a warning note louder than if I'd said it was awful.

It's hard to know whether to be impressed or appalled by Eva Mozes Kor, the Holocaust survivor in Bob Hercules and Cheri Pugh's fascinating documentary who has made forgiving the Nazis her life's work.

Aniston plays her depressed character with enough conviction to guarantee that practically every scene will be stolen out from under her by minor characters, among them a pricelessly funny Zooey Deschanel as a Retail Rodeo employee who vents her rage and frustration on the customers.