Ella Taylor

Best seen as a performance movie, featuring music (by Iris DeMent and Taj Mahal, among others) too wonderful to be overpowered by director Maggie Greenwald's plodding direction and leaden screenplay.

Though I'm not fully convinced that cool and jazzy is the way to go with one of the great civil-rights battles of 20th-century America, George Clooney's elegantly muted take on Edward R. Murrow's fight with Joe McCarthy offers many riches, notably a wicked character study of Murrow and a sexy homage to the pleasures of teamwork when the team is a bunch of smart-ass liberal reporters making common cause against a wannabe dictator.

This latest offering from the Jim Henson stable puts a cheerfully broad new spin on the boy-and-his-dog franchise.

If you’re going to have your emotional responses shunted around like a gear stick, it might as well be by someone who writes dialogue as funny as Curtis does.

Transamerica is about as sexual as "The Brady Bunch." It's about an intelligent woman in excruciating transition to a new body that will line up with an identity she's held all along.

Brotherhood has its goofy side -- it's a sleek, creepily atmospheric popcorn entertainment.

Inescapable is Nadda's first foray into thriller territory, and her inexperience shows in awkwardly mounted fight scenes and clumsy car chases, not to mention an almost fatally explanatory script.

The movie's antique Rockwellian look is its greatest pleasure.

Good, colorful fun, and by virtue of its emphasis on escape through individual initiative rather than class solidarity, more likely to succeed with American audience.s

This being Disney, wholesome character-building messages abound, but for once they're freshly spun as cautions against stereotyping both ethnic and canine.

This film is brave enough to admit that not all failed movie careers are the result of evil corporate suits, and Affleck makes us care that this likable but weak-minded man threw away what was solid and good in his life for the chimera of fame.

All shiny surfaces and clever moves designed to blur the lines between fantasy and reality and uncover the kinkiness that lies within us all.

The movie still retains the goofy charm, stylish visuals and attention to character of its fine 2002 predecessor. Queen Latifah is a warm and plummy new presence as a voluptuous lady mammoth whose only drawback is that she was raised by possums and thinks she's one herself.

The same quiet ecstasy that made the final moments of "Under the Sand" so moving works on the viewer here too, inspiring joy and naked grief in equal measure.

Individual artists were assigned their own characters and given free rein -- characters and locations shift on a dime from naturalistic to baroque -- with the result that the movie's formal imagination surpasses and redeems the banal tedium of some of the dialogue.

Watching Charlie Wilson’s War is like sitting through a very long episode of "The West Wing."

Enjoyably shameless confection.

The movie is casually, glamorously multiracial, and Washington is great fun, but the final glory belongs to actor John Billingsley, who plays one of those rumpled minor characters plugged into thrillers to keep you guessing whether they're light relief or something more sinister, and who, in a few memorably funny scenes, shuffles away with the movie.

A pretty decent action picture.

Raymond De Felitta's directing is straightforward, tactful, lyrical where necessary and never mawkish, and though Reiser's script offers no grand insights, it's full of sharply observed and funny detail.

Some amusing new characters are added (love the Russian doorman), and the 2-D animation, simple and serviceable after a tortured production history, is fine. But the jewel in the movie’s crown is its gorgeous pastel palette, alternating with warm earth tones.

By turns merry, tough-minded and sweetly nostalgic.

If Zhou Yu’s Train is finally no more than whimsy, it’s classy, delicate whimsy, a testament to the way romantic love, however unsatisfied, continues to drive itself.

The filmmakers are pretty nimble at filling the screen with snappy graphics and canny editing to keep you alert and amused.

Yet for all its willful blurring of the lines between documentary and fiction, Assisted Living is the least self-conscious of movies.

An engaging biopic that would totally lack surprise were it not for Reese Witherspoon, and a healthy touch of ambivalence about the populist myth that bound The Man in Black to his adoring public.

Call Lovely, Still life-affirming if you must, but its uplift is designed less to reassure than to honor the difficult process of how we deal when faced with the loss of those we have loved.

It's a sweet-tempered folly in which all's well that ends well.