Ella Taylor

Nielsen beautifully embodies the sadness and confused sense of unreality that attend our appetite for the Internet's cheaper thrills.

Though it's fun to watch Garcia let out his inner goofball, the jewels in the crown of At Middleton are the dynamic sisters Farmiga.

Relaxed and goofy in "Dave," "A Fish Called Wanda" and a host of other comedies, Kevin Kline has an endearing way of subverting his own grandee impulses when he's being funny. Give the actor a dramatic role, though, and he comes on all Shakespeare in the Park.

Slight but immensely enjoyable charmer.

One worries from scene to scene about whether the movie is a work of experimental art or just another ruthless intrusion into the life of a dying and, to some degree, broken woman. I'm willing to bet that Maximilian fretted over this too, for the film is as tense and fractured, as alienating -- and, finally, touching -- a work as it undoubtedly ought to be.

Gorgeously framed by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, the Turner-esque beauty of the landscape at harvest time only adds to the creepiness as the Girl makes do, makes friends, and then unravels in the most creative ways.

So cleverly executed that one forgives -- just -- the frenetic pace and absence of down time.

It's rare these days to see an old-fashioned, elegant chamber-piece movie about life and art - let alone one with Christopher Walken as, of all things, a steadying influence.

Though Saved! is funny and irreverent, Dannelly isn't just taking potshots at fundamentalism. He creates a viable world, then riddles its surface piety with underground transgressions that call into question not Christian belief but slavish, intolerant religious practice.

With acting as good as this, Wonderland gives you all the expected pleasures of eavesdropping on the intimate lives of others.

Munich is at best a muddled prayer for peace whose weakness stems not from its politics but from the misconception of its main character. Avner is not just a fictional character, but an absurdly improbable expression of Spielbergian schmaltz.

So it's no surprise that this stately but inert biopic wakes up only when von Bingen becomes less of a singing-nun superstar and more of a human unglued by her own flaws.

Like "Heat," Collateral will doubtless go down in film history as the noir marvel it undoubtedly is, but I don't quite buy its characters, and I came out of the theater still wondering what it had to say. Me, I have a soft spot for that old ’60s radical.

I was with Roger Dodger all the way until its vile hero had an 11th-hour burst of insight that defied all belief. I didn't buy it, but I do want his therapist's phone number.

No new narrative ground is broken, but there's a lived-in, musical feel to this tale of a fiercely independent, thoroughly screwed-up building contractor (Ashley Judd, in a pleasing return to the directness of her first significant role, in Victor Nunez's "Ruby in Paradise").

The film is as lively as a cricket and often very funny, but it's not for the cyberpunk crowd.

This gifted actress (Charlize Theron), who hasn't always chosen her roles well, treats this as her big chance to show what she can do, and she's convincing enough that you're not constantly looking for a Hollywood star of more than average pulchritude under all the cosmetic baggage.

Even by my super-wimp standards, Aron's exit is surprisingly coy, coming from a filmmaker who gets his kicks from goosing the hell out of his audiences.

Neither Waters' funniest film nor, by a long chalk, his most radical. But it is, as promised, a passing of the torch and an article of suitably perverse faith in the next generation of nutso cinéastes.

Columbus' sequel is faster, livelier and a good deal funnier than his original, due to the presence of some new characters.

Absorbing tale of coming of age in a multi-ethnic Paris suburb.

Gabrielle, a quietly insidious tale of domestic warfare that makes the protagonists of Bergman's "Scenes From a Marriage" look like pussycats, will exasperate and satisfy in roughly equal measure.

A serious work of analysis, rooting the resistance to reform in Third World government corruption and Western profiteering.

The ghost story is not half as satisfying as the lovely indie mood piece tucked inside it about a community tending to itself in the wake of a recent wound.

Pretty good as pretty good goes, with Jude Law turning in an efficiently chipper, if palpably less dark, performance than the one that earned Michael Caine his first Oscar nomination.

Not that How Do You Know doesn't have its moments of shamelessly entertaining shtick, much of it furnished by Nicholson (watch for a very funny visual gag about his proclivities for much younger women) and by Wilson as Lisa's current squeeze.

There's much to be said for a film that, however cheesily realized, sticks in memory for four decades.

The film’s beauty is that, like any good novel, it refuses to sew up its meanings for the audience.