J.R. Jones

For a movie about the importance of memory, Away From Her is appropriately sophisticated in its treatment of time. Polley has broken the chronological story into three sections of unequal length and woven them together, approximating our own mercurial journeys through the past.

"American Casino" and Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story" offered more striking images of the human wreckage, but Ferguson is more successful at nailing the perpetrators in New York and their gullible accomplices in Washington.

The two leads keep the movie afloat with their light-footed class warfare. This Anglican buddy romance is buoyed by a spicy history lesson about the scandalous marriage of the duke's elder brother, Edward VIII, to the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson.

Ratliff fails to deliver on any of these ideas and the ending falters badly, but as horror flicks go this is both smart and suspenseful.

One of cinema's most absorbing fantasies.

The premise of this South Korean import may call to mind that of another, Bong Joon-ho's recent suspense film "Mother," but Poetry is another bird entirely: true to the title, writer-director Lee Chang-dong is principally concerned with rendering emotions that seem inexpressible.

The problem with these feats is that they threaten to overwhelm the film's content, both as complex historical commentary and as aesthetic and theoretical gesture.

Given the breadth of the story, the characters never achieve much depth, but they're part of a larger pattern: the younger ones are eager to find their way into the organization while the older ones are desperate to find their way out

This is marginally better than most, with a few offbeat comic ideas, a reliably droll performance from Vaughn, and, as the parents, four watchable old troupers in search of a fat paycheck.

Medium Cool is also recognized as a pointed early critique of the news media, noting the amoral detachment of TV journalists and the collusion between their corporate bosses and the government to shape a political narrative. But for people who love Chicago, the film may be most valuable as a cultural document, recording a much younger city in the midst of a turbulent summer.

This begins to get interesting in the home stretch, as the woman's chronic deception begins to catch up with her, but for the most part it's an extended Geritol commercial.

The Warners-style slapstick and gentle Anglophilia charms children and adults alike, but what kills me are the fingerprint ridges that fade in and out of the characters' mugging faces, a reassuring reminder that handmade art can still captivate.

Long, heavy, and not particularly edifying Holocaust drama.

Exhilarating.

The real protagonist of Moneyball, however, is Beane himself, played with great charisma by Brad Pitt. (With this movie and "The Tree of Life" competing against each other, Pitt could wind up cheating himself out of an Oscar this year.)

Proof positive that comedy is hard, this debut feature by Hue Rhodes offers a wealth of skilled players and admirably offbeat gags yet seldom manages to generate any laughs.

Though The Kids Are All Right sometimes smacks of political correctness, Cholodenko succeeds brilliantly in making her little clan seem completely run-of-the-mill.

Alternately harrowing and humbling, this is a story of ordinary men whose compassion is tested in the cruelest, most profound fashion.

French filmmaker Agnes Varda returns to the guiding metaphor of "The Gleaners and I "(2000), her documentary about scavengers, though in this visually witty 2008 memoir she's poring over her own past and its artifacts--some of them people.

The outrages of pedophile priests have generated screaming headlines but relatively little understanding of the Catholic culture that permitted and concealed such crimes, which makes this informed documentary by Amy Berg all the more valuable.

So much has been written about the show's emotional importance to single women that I can't possibly add anything, except to say that, in both its TV and movie incarnations, the empty materialism and sincere longing for love always manage to cancel each other out, leaving behind nothing but what this started out as--a sitcom.

Extraordinary 2008 French drama.

The key scene -- is typical of the film's fanciful narrative approach but also its grating pretentiousness.

Jaglom's 14th consists of his usual weakly improvised relationship comedy.

"The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right," declares Hushpuppy, the fierce, nappy-headed girl at the center of this extraordinary southern gothic.

McGee has taken Hitchcock's idea of the MacGuffin to such an extreme that the plot becomes a set of nesting dolls with nothing at the center, but the players conjure up a smoky mood of existential sadness.

Eventually develops into a pleasantly bombastic Bond-style adventure.

This adaptation of Robert Ludlum's third and last Bourne thriller doesn't have much story left, so director Paul Greengrass has to keep it moving all the time.