J.R. Jones

Unfortunately, this comeback movie, a labor of love for mush-headed screenwriter and star Jason Segel, errs on the side of sweetness and nostalgia; except for a few good zingers from balcony dwellers Statler and Waldorf, there isn't much here for mom and dad.

Cheadle's quiet, superbly modulated performance as an ordinary man driven to heroism by hellish events reminds us that the slogan "no justice, no peace" has a private as well as a public dimension.

Rivers comes across as a consummate professional but also a genuine person, ruthlessly honest about her life decisions and utterly devoid of self-pity.

Visually and dramatically it works well - it's Shakespeare by way of "Black Hawk Down" - but as an allegory of modern-day geopolitics it doesn't really go anywhere.

The grand architecture of Milan and the icy rhythms of composer John Adams set the tone for this elegant Italian drama about the suffocating power of family, wealth, and tradition.

The 37 Yale and Harvard players Rafferty interviews are such a rich and articulate cast of characters that the season leading up to the game and the game itself become an epic story.

Claudel commits the cardinal sin of withholding the full story until the very end, when it spills out in a histrionic scene between the two sisters and largely exonerates the older one.

The movie is enjoyable for its flashy surfaces--the witty editing, the narrative forecasting, the droll omniscient voice-over--but as drama it seems superficial.

Though it easily surpasses most American action flicks, it suffers from the old commercial imperative of making the protagonist a nice guy, something Refn has seldom bothered with in Europe.

The immersive quality of 3-D is particularly well suited to undersea documentaries, and this one, directed by Howard Hall ("Into the Deep"), offers a close-up look at such fantastic creatures as the fried egg jellyfish, the mantis shrimp, the sand tiger shark, and the thuggish wolf eel.

Bale dominates the movie as Dicky Eklund, a pathetic loudmouth who's let his own fight career slip away from him, yet what really holds this together is Wahlberg's low-key, firmly internalized performance as a man torn between his loyalty to the clan and his responsibility to himself.

It's a fascinating cultural artifact and a stomping good time.

Powerful second film by writer-director Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent).

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

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.

The language has been changed to English, of course, which is the only real reason this movie exists; the story development, desolate tone, and key set pieces are mostly copied from the original movie, which in turn was based on a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist.

Bong's opening and climactic scenes, in which the old woman bops around to a dance tune amid a vast field of yellow grass, are typical of the movie's cockeyed poetry.

By focusing on Strummer and giving a fair amount of screen time to his years in the wilderness before and after the Clash, Temple arrives at a more poignant and mature statement of what this committed band was all about.

This is the usual cartoon of hound dogs, roadhouses, antebellum mansions, and Civil War reenactments. Aside from that, it's not a bad date movie.

The same virtue doesn't apply to his commentary, which is too general to rise above the pedestrian; the movie works best traveling from the eye straight to the conscience.

The black/white duality isn't terribly interesting, but as in most of Aronofsky's films, an intense horror of the body and its uncontrollability fuels the rhapsodic psychodrama.

This sequel to the apocalyptic splatter flick "28 Days Later" . . . (2002) is still well equipped to rip your face off.

You'd have to be a real curmudgeon not to enjoy a show with Ruth Brown, Mavis Staples, Solomon Burke...

The plot of this PG action thriller, a remake of the 2002 Danish film Klatretosen, is so full of holes that even middle schoolers might give it the raspberry, but a bigger problem is the three leads' lack of on-screen chemistry.

This drama about an obese, illiterate black teen in Harlem practically guarantees some emotional uplift. But when it arrives, eventually, its authority is unimpeachable, so deeply has director Lee Daniels (Monster's Ball) immersed us in the depths of human ugliness.

Bujalski has a knack for the genuine moment.

This 2005 feature is demanding to say the least, but its pulse-slowing rhythms leave a real sense of peace.

Holofcener's work is often classified as comedy of manners, but at her best she trades in something much more resonant--the comedy of mores. Here she dives into the fascinating matter of why some people impulsively give and others compulsively take, and how people are taught to second-guess and quash their own generous impulses.