Ella Taylor

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.

The beguiling Computer Chess is about the dawn — one of many, but that's another story — of the tech revolution. It's also a reminder that you don't need state-of-the-art toys to make a formally playful comedy about man versus machine.

Rousing, quietly outraged documentary.

Solid and inspiring will do nicely for Christmas, but it ought not to be good enough for the Oscar nominations that will almost certainly rain upon this movie's adequate head.

If Gibney was looking for contrition, though, he didn't find it. Armstrong is candid about his doping and his legendary belligerence with the press. But he's confessing, not apologizing. And that "maybe not," mumbled to Oprah, is about as equivocal as he gets — on or off camera.

A warped, but beautiful and strangely hopeful, coming-of-age tale.

Estes never really completes a thought about this sorry group's moral dilemmas.

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.

The director juggles different points of view with aplomb, and her strong script addresses with impressive subtlety the gap between what people say and what they do under extreme pressure.

The elephant in the room of any discussion of Poland and the Jews is that country's less-than-glorious record of betrayal and collaboration with the Nazis. Holland, who is half-Jewish and whose mother was active in the Polish Resistance, doesn't shrink from that legacy.

A freakishly engrossing black comedy about excessively mothered men and the women who enable them.

Magnificently twisted black comedy.

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

Everything about the movie seems excessive to the material. What should have been a small, independent feature without marquee casting -- the story's protagonists, after all, are meant to be the kind of people nobody ever notices.

This powerfully rough slice of neo-realism, hitched to soapy melodrama, puts a heartbreakingly human face on the widespread problem of sexual assault in Mexico.