J.R. Jones

With a score by the Residents, cartoon art by Warren Heise and Timothy Stock, and scenes of the actors commenting on and interacting with the real-life Kurtz, this 2006 advocacy video brings a jumpy energy to its Orwellian tale.

Her (Westfedlt) directing debut is a funny and emotionally credible.

Being taken under Apatow's wing may have been a big career break for writer-director David Wain, but this lacks the sharp personality of some of his earlier movies.

It's still fun to watch, but the first one was better.

This family feature from the Christian production company Walden Media is something of a disappointment after its excellent "Holes" and "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."

It's the epitome of an embedded war report, though Rademacher's at-ease scenes with the soldiers have some of the warmth and terse humor of Ernie Pyle's, and there's some hair-raising footage of a machine-gun firefight.

Though the movie isn’t much to look at, he (Siegel) gets a credibly dark and pathetic performance from the typically comic Oswalt.

Partly funded by the Humane Society, this gripping documentary by Michael Webber rips the lid off a scandal that periodically turns up on local newscasts but then disappears from public consciousness.

The movie's sexual politics couldn't be more regressive--Crudup learns to be a man in the sack as well as on the boards--but it's still a competent middlebrow costume drama.

Thoughtful and impressively mounted.

Portrayed ad infinitum in sci-fi and fantasy, the postapocalypse may now seem about as scary as Post Raisin Bran, but Hillcoat gives it an unnerving solidity by focusing on the drab details of survival and linking them to the more hellish aspects of modern American life.

Unlike many other purveyors of hip comedy, they're consistently clever without being contemptuous of their audience.

Even in its truncated state, this is pretty gripping stuff; just think of it as an epic commercial for the director's cut DVD.

Some have called this neo-noir, but aside from the setting there’s nothing "neo" about it; as in classic noir, the characters are slowly but surely ensnared by their own baser impulses.

Gentle, low-key first feature.

Making his feature directing debut, Hoffman shows considerable generosity toward the other players, which was probably a good idea given his own listless performance as the mumbling title character.

Winterbottom, a Brit who's shot several films in India, carefully notes the local customs and mores that contribute to the young woman's tragic fall.

The long odds against Smith only make his unexpected surge against Carnahan more exciting, and Popper sticks close to the fierce campaigner and his young, mostly inexperienced staffers, capturing all the energy, idealism, dour humor, and unreasoning hope of a Cinderella candidacy.

This remake is good fun, aided in no small degree by Colin Farrell's strutting, dead-eyed performance as the bloodsucker.

Clooney directed with an actor's appetite for vivid star turns, and he certainly gets them from Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Paul Giamatti.

A fascinating allegory of modern-day Iran.

Chanodr has said that he wanted to portray the 2008 financial meltdown in all its complexity, assigning everyone a fair share of the blame. But the real strength of his debut feature is how persuasively it depicts the fishbowl world of high finance, whose executives seem incapable of seeing past their towering salaries and privileged lives.

Vincent Cassel sets a new standard for Gallic cool as the title character.

The racial satire is about as subtle as a sledgehammer, but there's something exhilarating about so blunt a weapon being swung with such wild abandon.

The 3-D element is unobtrusively handled, except when it perfectly re-creates the woman who's always perched on her boyfriend's shoulders in front of you at a concert.

The thing runs more than two hours, but this is the sort of project that's indemnified against charges of excess.

So few movies these days concern themselves with ideas of any sort that a drama like this one, about a man humbled by the consequences of his own intellectual breakthrough, seems even more powerful.

Despite the gimmicky direction and a disappointing climax, this is a distinctive and unsettling comedy.

Too many extraneous elements have been added--the victim here is an aborigine, which prompts a racial backlash against the men and their families--but at the movie's center lies the knotty story of a marriage poisoned by amorality.

Reitman deserves credit for going through with a bitterly ironic ending, but the movie is marred by its warm condescension toward flyover country.

Ali Selim, a highly successful director of commercials in Minneapolis, makes his feature directing debut with this simple and beautifully paced drama, letting the characters breathe and the land speak.

Sunshine does for sci-fi what "28 Days Later" . . . did for the zombie movie -- its tale about a manned space mission to the sun preys on our growing fear of obliteration as we confront global warming.

The Departed is completely engrossing, a master class in suspense. But in moral terms it may be the least involving story that Scorsese -- an artist much preoccupied with morality -- has ever taken on.

Eleven years on, someone in Hollywood has finally worked up the nerve to address the LA riots--but only on the slickest terms imaginable.

A beguiling combination of agrarian ode and “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” deepened by Peterson's square sincerity as he struggles to find himself in relation to his family's land.

The general tone is one of crusty, unapologetic misanthropy, driven home by the formidable Rudd (who also kicked in on the script).

The ugly emotional mess is so respectfully handled that the story resonates far beyond its comic designs.

Vince Vaughn in a wonderfully low-key performance.

Though the pain of this 9/11 story doesn't pierce as deeply as it should, the laughs are consistently humane.

It's a funny and frequently affecting reminiscence from a man whose TV antics obscured a long, respectable career as a stage actor and director.

This 2005 feature has a drab "Masterpiece Theatre" feel, though Pierrepoint is a fascinating study in ethics: he takes pride in his work, wants his victims to die swiftly and painlessly, and considers hanging an absolution.

A 157-minute holding pattern in which neither of the ongoing stories--Harry's conflict with the evil sorcerer Voldemort, the young schoolmates' coming of age at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft--progresses much.

I still can't decide whether it's a masterpiece of sexual provocation or just a really classy stroke film.

The movie is most fascinating when it shows how Chanel communicated her enlightened sense of womanhood through her innovative designs, which in turn helped women feel differently about themselves.

There's rancor here, but also unexpected tenderness.

Stiller and Wilson are still hilarious as the supercool detectives -- there hasn't been a comedy duo this good since John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd.

Ramsay seems to be seriously intent on probing the outer limits of a mother's love and forgiveness, but the boy (played by a trio of child actors) is so unremittingly evil that the movie begins to feel like a grotesque remake of that old John Ritter comedy "Problem Child" (1990).

The movie reunites Pfeiffer with director Stephen Frears and screenwriter Christopher Hampton, who did Dangerous Liaisons (1988); this costume drama doesn't have nearly as much bite as that one, though the age reversal of its central romance gives it a certain topicality.

The Christian themes of forgiveness and sacrifice are tastefully conveyed, and the opening sequence of Nazi bombs falling on London, an event only alluded to in the book, helps dramatize Lewis's fascination with power.

It's formulaic but still fun, thanks to the quick and genial players.

Between the kinetic and often exciting chase scenes, screenwriter David Koepp plays with every teen's yearning for a secret identity, and Tobey Maguire is charming as the insecure superhero.

Coppola's fondness for the operatic gets the better of him as the action approaches a climax, but the movie is girded by a sense of knotty family history.

The documentary is most valuable for its fly-on-the-wall footage of the inventive tunesmith puttering around his apartment and drilling the band on his idiosyncratic arrangements.

Good-humored and enormously entertaining but also sentimental and a little dishonest.

This is cloying, deceitful, and more or less irresistible.

As you might expect, this is hip deep in reminiscence.

Strutting around like a rooster in a thin-lapeled suit, 117 isn't much different from other comic Bond figures, but the movies find a fresh and exceedingly rich vein of comedy in his airy sexism, racism, and colonialism.

This is worth seeing, but only if you think you can tolerate the precious voice-over narration from the couple's wounded cat, delivered by July in a high, scratchy voice.

If you can tolerate 79 minutes of joggling images you’ll probably find this entertaining, though writer-directors Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza overplay their hand with a late-breaking back story that rips off one movie too many.

The mainstream acceptance of porn has also disarmed Smith's formerly outrageous humor, though there's a warm "Boogie Nights"-style vibe to the little family of oddballs Zack and Miri recruit to help them.

Vigalondo explores it (time travel) just enough to keep this thriller moving, and Karra Elejalde is entirely convincing as the unwilling time traveler, who finds himself threatened by not only his past self but his future one as well.

The movie is so clever and smoothly paced that it's easy to overlook the odious story line.

Scafaria, making her feature debut as writer-director, scores numerous laughs off the social dislocation that follows as people realize the apocalypse is imminent (there's a funny sequence at a suburban house party where no taboo goes unbroken).

Gripping drama.

Parts of this are screamingly funny, other parts downright stomach turning, but you have to admire the fact that, for these guys, "anything for a laugh" really means anything. And for all the moronic behavior, there are also some inspired dadaist moments.

Smart and fast-paced.

This handsome period drama is the sort of quiet, homespun story that Duvall, who served as executive producer, has always loved.

As in so many summer behemoths, the real stars are the projectiles--in this case, arrows with their own point-of-view shots, zipping through the air and finding their targets with pinpoint accuracy.

Adapted from a novel by Gabriel Loidolt, this is most interesting for its textured family history and pained religiosity.

Coogan's screen persona is vain, dim, angry, and deeply miserable, and his handful of scenes here with a smilingly harsh Catherine Keener are little masterpieces of comic sadomasochism.

Disturbing true-crime documentary.

Fine character work by Juliet Stevenson, Archie Panjabi, and Bollywood regular Anupam Kher make this well worth seeing.

"A Film by David Schwimmer" is not the sort of credit that fills me with anticipation, but I must admit he's done a solid job with this queasy drama about the rape of a 12-year-old Wilmette girl.

An honorable, squeaky-clean children's drama, this is notable for its relatively penetrating morality and for Scott Wilson's fine performance as the meanest man in town.

Eventually develops into a pleasantly bombastic Bond-style adventure.

Tarantino has already caught some flack for daring to use the Holocaust as material for another of his bloody live-action cartoons, but of course the generation that experienced it for real has mostly faded away. In that sense Inglourious Basterds is a social marker as startling as "Easy Rider" was in its day.

A frightening portrait of a man whose technological genius fails to compensate for his gaping emotional deficits.

Maximilian stresses that Maria was an icon in postwar Germany, yet the saddest thing about her isolation and disappointment is that it's so common.

I expected this to open out into another loud, thumping thriller. Instead it remains quiet and focused, exploring the couple's frayed relationship and the economic divide that separates the husband from his captor.

Like so many satires in the Strangelove mold, this never comes close to working as a story, but its lampoon of U.S. imperialism and military privatization is so bracingly obnoxious I didn't really care.

This strange and beautiful Macedonian feature is a welcome reminder that national cinemas still exist.

The emotions are as gritty as the Edinburgh locales, and the sex is dark, urgent, and deeply selfish.

It's clichéd, ridiculous, and very entertaining.

Elon's documentary is fascinating precisely because its high moral tone is compromised by self-interest.

Dick focuses on a handful of women who were sexually assaulted while on active duty, but they're only the tip of the iceberg; according to the film, which draws all its statistics from government reports, more than 20 percent of female veterans have been assaulted.

It's a hell of a show, though none of the artists gets more than a single number, and most of Chappelle's comic interludes are half-baked. Funnier and more engaging are his perambulations around the neighborhood.

You know you're in for a hard-core art film when you hear more people raving about its opening shot than the movie itself.

In movies like "Happiness" and "Storytelling," Todd Solondz has staged some pretty horrifying courtships, but the one in this seventh feature is surprisingly gentle.

Lacks the toughness of Eastwood's best work.

The movie develops into a painful story of one generation inflicting its selfish compromises on the next. The three leads are uniformly excellent, and the strong supporting cast includes Mark Duplass and Philip Baker Hall.

The video lapses into self-congratulation near the end, as many of the principals reunite for a 2002 retrospective, but for the most part this is a powerful tale of conscience, betrayal, and forgiveness.

At 92 minutes this could hardly be considered a definitive statement, yet its combination of high drama and carefully articulated principle delivers quite a punch.

I'd hate to guess whether most Americans know, any more than these fictional partygoers, what soldiers go through in Iraq. But if the market for movies about the war is any indication, they don't want to.

A winner of the Cannes film festival's Un Certain Regard prize, this stayed with me, though I wasn't always happy to stay with it; the incessant braying of sheep, camels, and children may send you racing from the theater in search of the nearest martini lounge.

This big-budget western bears a striking resemblance to the recent Tom Cruise vehicle "The Last Samurai," though it's more fun and less pretentious.

It provides a more detailed and perhaps more reliable picture of the early movement's motives and practices than anything I've seen in the mainstream media.

The performers are fresh and offbeat, with the diminutive Peter Dinklage (Elf, The Station Agent) especially funny as a gay wedding planner named Benson Hedges.

Contrary to some reports, this is not Jet Li's last action movie--he already has another in postproduction--but it represents his farewell to wushu, the martial-arts tradition that made him an international star.