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.

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.

Patriot reflects on nothing, except perhaps that the American Revolution was a golden opportunity for Mel Gibson to go postal.

If The Lincoln Lawyer has nothing new of substance to offer in its tale of life on the judicial margins, it has relaxed L.A. atmosphere to burn.

Sentimental? Certainly, but in a part of the world where hope and optimism haven't shown their faces in a long time, it's hard not to feel carried along by the generously conciliatory spirit that warms The Other Son, as it did "The Band's Visit." Movies have rarely been known to change the world, but you never know.

The movie’s glib trafficking in illness, death and pinched little faces to jury-rig our emotional responses (Gibb was inspired by the equally likable, equally pandering Czech film "Kolya") lost me at hello.

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

Like many neglected offspring, Gregory comes across as an eternal child himself, hooked on his capacity to enchant but rarely able to listen to anyone other than the actors over whom he has such power.

Inner life comes hard to Knightley, and she never gets a grip on the mounting emotional turmoil that threatens to crush Anna as she progresses from stylish young hipster-about-town to kept woman to bereft mother to paranoid social pariah.

Though the progress of this ill-matched love triangle is fun to follow in its self-consciously wacky way, the movie's chief pleasures, at least to a Western eye, are anthropological.

Anchorman has one amusing character, a dumb weatherman played by Steve Carell, and a nicely observed set piece about what newscasters really say to one another when they're shuffling papers between segments. Otherwise it's a long string of heavy-footed sight and sound gags.

There’s nothing postmodern about this "family," unless postmodern means never having to grow up.

Lunacy feels programmatic, the repetitive working through of an idea that had me checking my watch.

Niftily shot and edited, The Grace Lee Project isn't just a witty unpacking of stereotype. It's also a welcome freshening of the old documentary saw that there's no such thing as an ordinary person.

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

Undertow seems to be straining to say something at once tragic and heartwarming about fathers, sons and brothers, but I'm damned if I know what it is.

Jacquot seems unwilling to either shape his story or offer commentary, a standard New Wave strategy that, in this instance, makes for a tale as vague as it is nouvelle.