J.R. Jones

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.

This lame comedy was adapted from a recent British TV movie, though its (quite literal) money shots of the women squealing and hurling cash in the air reminded me of 80s greed capers like "Trading Places" and "A Fish Called Wanda."

The live sets by X, Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, the Germs, and Fear, recorded between December 1979 and May 1980, still thunder after all these years; unfortunately so do the scene's racism, queer baiting, and utter despair.

Directed by John Hillcoat, this Aussie feature perfectly re-creates the charbroiled landscapes and cruel psychodrama of the old Sergio Leone westerns, with John Hurt particularly fine as a raging old mountain goat.

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.

This Indiana Jones knockoff goes down smoothly enough, and Jolie isn't bad at all, though every time she opened her mouth I expected Mick Jagger to come dancing down her tongue.

Wyatt Cenac, the latest addition to "The Daily Show" With Jon Stewart, is the best reason to see this easygoing romantic comedy.

A philosophical comedy about man's place in a universe colonized by Targets and Wal-Marts.

The stock characters and leaden stretches of expository dialogue are welcome evidence that there's still no computer program capable of telling a decent story.

The movie's first half hour is a barrage of lazy narrative pointers--endless expository voice-over, freeze frames and captions to identify the numerous characters--and by the time screenwriter Tina Gordon Chism decides to write an extended scene, the story is already dead in the water.

Watching this is like watching kids play with Hot Wheels--not a bad time at all, but I wouldn't pay ten bucks for it.

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.

After she's forced to confess, director Marc Rothemund doesn't have much to do but marvel at her heroic defiance, and the film is overtaken by its talkiness, claustrophobia, and polarized morality.

Perry hasn't lost his touch for stroking his loyal audience of Oprah women; his enforced happy endings are the car keys taped under your seat.

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

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.

Vince Vaughn in a wonderfully low-key performance.

The story doesn't arc so much as unspool like a stretch of desert highway, but the Ghost Rider is such a powerful amalgam of hot-rod iconography that this is still fairly watchable.

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

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.

Intelligent, moving, but annoyingly self-satisfied.

Most impressive, Cantet tracks the racial and ethnic resentments that simmer beneath the classroom discussions but become harder to quell when the parents get involved.

Writer-director Pupi Avati has a such a fine sense of narrative proportion that this Italian feature unspools like silk.

This inept 2003 melodrama has become a Rocky Horror-style cult favorite...As someone who's watched more bad movies than you can imagine, I'm mostly immune to the so-bad-it's-good aesthetic, though I can see how, viewed in a theater at midnight after a few drinks, this might conjure up its own hilariously demented reality.

Schmidt works the slasher formula for all it's worth, but the repulsive stereotype at the center of the movie dampens the fun.

This dull actioner, written and directed by Mark Steven Johnson, uses voice-over to hurry along Daredevil's genesis tale, and Affleck's rigid performance is a perpetual drag on the story.

Suitable entertainment for boys too young to shave.

Big, cruel, stupid actioner.

The drag-racing saga "The Fast and the Furious" (2001) made stars of Vin Diesel, who promptly ditched the series, and Paul Walker, who bailed after "2 Fast 2 Furious" (2003). Both actors return for this fourth installment.

The cat is computer-generated, as are his one-liners.

The hues are so muted you may remember this as a black-and-white film, but its emotions are as vivid as primary colors.

As usual with Burton, the visuals are much better than the story, and Carroll’s characters are richly realized--especially Tweedledum and Tweedledee, poster children for juvenile obesity, and the raving Red Queen, played with razor-sharp timing by Helena Bonham Carter.

Carefully re-creates the first movie's lightweight romance and mildly cheeky gender comedy.

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.

In one slack exchange, Del Toro intimates that the government wants to shut him up because he knows too much, but apparently someone decided that this thing was silly enough already and the matter was dropped.

No movie with Kevin Spacey as a heartless prick can be all bad, but this gambling thriller, based on Ben Mezrich's nonfiction book "Bringing Down the House," hasn't got much else going for it.

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.

The plot is ridiculous and the characters are cardboard, but none of that really matters once the snakes get into the cabin and start zapping people, the very definition of entertainment.

The equation of Gilliam with Quixote is so obvious to everyone involved that Fulton and Pepe can hardly be blamed for adopting it.

With her tetchy screen persona, Sandra Bullock is well served by brainteasers like "The Lake House" and this passable thriller about a woman who seems to be bouncing between two alternate realities.

Roy's story is fascinating in its own right, exploring the hero's mingled shame over his class background and homosexuality, and painting a vicious portrait of Britain's coke-snorting upper crust in the late 70s.

The aerial dogfights are thrilling, but the script seems to have been written by Snoopy.

Paul Giamatti steals the picture as a sardonic grifter with a phobic terror of dirty toilet seats.

The players appear to be having a good time, though the situation is too sitcom-familiar to be funny.

Disappointment, delusion, dementia, death--did I mention this is a comedy?

Mostly the three comics stick to the Bill Cosby formula, dispensing with racial anger in favor of good-natured and family- and relationship-based crossover material.

The Maid may turn mostly on issues of housework, but it never feels trivial, because Silva is so skillful in exposing the alliances and levers of power inside the household.

Sicko horror film from Australia, whose sadism is topped only by its absurdity.

Brain-dead adaptation of a popular video game.

Though it's aimed at preschoolers, it's tuneful and funny enough to amuse any adult.

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

The characters' undiluted self-interest will seem one-dimensional to all but the worst cynics.

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.

Critics have faulted this 2005 British feature about the Rwandan genocide for focusing on a couple of white characters instead of the 800,000 Tutsis who were slaughtered, but such easy judgments miss the point entirely: this is a spiritual drama, not a political one, drawing a thick line between our good intentions and the selfish choices we ultimately make.

Director Nicolas Klotz paces his mystery plot so luxuriously that it feels like a ride in a company limo, though his ultimate thesis, that corporate culture is inherently fascist, hardly seems worth the trip. The saving grace is Amalric, who looks so sharp in a tailored suit that he can't sense himself rotting from within.

Such is the extraordinary achievement of The Hurt Locker: it has the perspective of years when those years have yet to pass.

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.

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.

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.

Turns out to be surprisingly layered.

Involves a team of divers exploring a vast cave system, an appropriate setting given the hollowness of the story and acting.

Produced by MTV Films, this step-dancing drama is mired in cliche, but with its dingy ghetto settings and hardened, despondent young characters, it's marginally more interesting than "Stomp the Yard," the 2007 movie that inaugurated the subgenre.

The movie's mix of erotic Latin dance and vaguely liberal politics should have young girls swooning in the aisles.

This isn't very good--the puritanical impulses of the slasher genre collide head-on with the sweet-butt requirements of gay exploitation flicks--but a gender studies major could have a field day with it.

Its numerous ancillary characters are so closely observed that even those without speaking parts register as people, in a manner than blurs the line between strangeness and intimacy.

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.

Sitting in the theater, you're liable to buy all this simply for the pleasure of watching Caine work. Like Eastwood and other actors of his vintage, Caine brings to the project not only his own formidable skills but more than half a century of movie history.

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.

Of course no Western director can make a movie about Africa without being accused of colonialism himself, and some critics have faulted The Last King of Scotland for focusing on its white hero as black corpses pile up around him. But although the movie takes place on an international political stage, it's still a drama of individual allegiance.

The September Issue fixates on status and professional one-upmanship; if you want to see a movie that actually treats fashion as personal expression--in other words, art--keep a lookout for Anne Fontaine’s forthcoming biopic "Coco Before Chanel."

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

Never lives up to the hilarity of the opening, partly because the large-scale production smothers the gags but mostly because those gags are so easy to smother.

The stoy makes no sense, and the two lead characters are repulsive, but I must confess I laughed immoderately at this clever piece of junk.

His (John Cusack) quickness and intelligence make him a poor choice to play the flat-footed main character, a rigidly conservative family man who can't work up the nerve to tell his two daughters their soldier mother has been killed in action.

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.

This awful sequel dispenses with any such pretense, its cartoonish characters running an endless gauntlet of hypergruesome violence.

The illicit lovers in this eerie South Korean drama communicate whole worlds without ever speaking.

All singing! All dancing! All squealing! The money-minting Broadway musical has been adapted into the year's most aggressive chick flick, with a score of irresistibly catchy ABBA tunes sweetening the dumb story like peaches in cottage cheese.

Given what Young charges for concert tickets, all his organs could be gold. So I was even more grateful for this documentary of his August 2005 shows at the fabled Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, expertly directed by Jonathan Demme.

The whole thing is pretty stupid, but Angus Macfadyen is watchable as the villain.

The story takes place in 1988 in the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Coney Island, but I could never figure out why; with its pitiless gangsters and virtuous boys in blue, it could have been set anywhere.

Sorry deep-sea adventure.

This Belgian comedy suffers from the fact that its mismatched lovers are so consistently unpleasant; it catches fire only in the scenes between the mother and the daughter.

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.

A superior nail-biter.

Despite a provocative climax, the movie settles into a ponderous collection of soliloquies.

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

Screenwriter Adam Herz is calling this third installment the last, and not a moment too soon: his characters have grown up, but his gags are still trying to graduate from high school.

Caruso and Spielberg probably thought they were reviving the paranoid style of 70s political thrillers, but their story is so implausible it barely provokes a tremor.

This is scandal-mongering fun that also lays bare the deforming power of the male aristocracy.

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

Clooney and Bridges model an assortment of wigs and facial hair as they labor to put across their outsize characters; at its best the movie recalls a subpar episode of M*A*S*H.

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

An almost comically lurid tale of a little boy abused by his malignant hooker mother, malignant fundamentalist grandfather, and malignant surrogate dads.

Visually witty, flawlessly played romantic comedy.

Most of the chills have been faithfully re-created, though first-time screenwriter Stephen Susco hasn't done much to straighten out the muddled narrative.

Excruciatingly narcissistic.

Cheerful mess of a pulp-fiction parody.

Sleekly tooled but eminently forgettable thriller.

The meanest and least inspired kids U know.

There are no big surprises, but Mac and director Charles Stone III (Drumline) hit all the right dramatic notes.

Shelved for over a year, this incompetent mystery thriller stops periodically so some character or other can deliver an expository speech and pull the plot back on track, but by the end the story has turned into a hair ball.

Less about the characters than about the first two movies, whose best scenes it congeals into ritual or parody.

Debutant director Richard Day, a seasoned TV producer, delivers a steady stream of cheerful vulgarity and a few clever gags.

With its diabolical ending, this is the movie equivalent of a crossword puzzle: fun, clever, and disposable.

This typically bloated production from Jerry Bruckheimer is good swashbuckling fun for the first few reels but eventually slows to a halt under the weight of too many doubloons.

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.

At its best this 2005 feature wickedly satirizes the politics of pity--how healthy people buy off the dying with gifts and imminent death becomes a kind of stardom. But the sap begins to flow.

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.

Matthew McConaughey injects some much needed life as the oddball coach who sets out to rebuild the football squad, and David Strathairn, Ian McShane, and Robert Patrick do their best with sketchy characters and artless dialogue.

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.

Extraordinary 2008 French drama.

No movie star appears to have more fun in a crap movie than John Travolta, and his inimitable my-check-has-cleared! glee is the best thing about this lame espionage thriller.

The tag here is more silly than haunting, but this is still a pretty wild ride, with a fine, knife-wielding score by Bennett Salvay.

The movie is compelling now but unlikely to survive its moment.

It's a pleasure to see Jill Clayburgh on the big screen in a story about middle-aged love and sexuality, but she can't rescue this alternately trite and implausible comedy.

As scripted by Michael Arndt, this isn't much more than a glorified sitcom, but it deftly dramatizes our conflicting desires for individuality and an audience to applaud it.

The genuine sense of loss and nicely observed family details don't stand a chance against the generic buildup to the big game.

This British drama is so overplotted it smothers the two main characters as much as they do each other.

Solondz has grown so possessive of his characters, in fact, that he's begun to guard them jealously from any one actor.

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.

At the very least, it's more honest and involved in its portraiture of American soldiers in Iraq than anything TV news of any political persuasion has given us.

Gainsbourg has some cute scenes with Johnny Depp, a debonair stranger she meets in a Virgin Megastore, but otherwise this is a fairly banal installment in the battle of the sexes.

Turns out to be entertaining but shticky.

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

Argento is admired for his voluptuous use of color and his operatic bloodletting; this is lovely to look at, if you can stand to.

Most of the movie, about the search for a magical guitar pick, farts along at the level of a "Wayne's World" sketch.

With Mallick as one of the producers, this Boogie Nights wannabe benefits from an insider's knowledge of how online commerce was born but suffers from a seemingly endless voice-over by the Wilson/Mallick character steering our sympathies in his direction (it's the sort of middle man the movie could have done without).

As creator and head writer of "The West Wing," Aaron Sorkin had a gift for making policy debate seem sexy, but what worked in the context of that liberal fantasy founders badly amid the realpolitik of this cold war drama.

As the bad guy, Jason Patric gets the funniest lines, but there are plenty to go around; though rigidly formulaic the movie is undeniably good-humored, if you don't count all those minor characters getting shot in the face.

The mix of dark humor, creeping suspense, and a sort of apocalyptic tenderness makes this the best horror flick in years.

As Adam Sandler vehicles go, this isn't quite as dire as "Eight Crazy Nights," but any movie that has to fall back on Rob Schneider rubbing his nipples has some serious script issues.

This installment delivers more of the pleasures that made Tarantino the wunderkind of 90s cinema: offbeat scumbag characters, narrative sleight of hand, an extraordinary visual sense, and affectionate genre pillaging.

Gripping drama.

But aside from a few overblown production numbers, Columbus respects the show's smaller scale, and the property itself is a knockout, with great tunes and engaging portraits of East Village bohemians in the AIDS-ravaged late 80s.

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.

This contrived situation leads to a debate over the power of faith.

Jules Verne's novel has been flattened into a standardized Jackie Chan vehicle.

A runaway hit in Hong Kong, this 2002 crime thriller reinvigorated the genre with its airtight script, taut editing, and sleek cinematography.

Smart and fast-paced.

This forced spoof seems to be targeted at lesbian couples and hetero men with severe schoolgirl fetishes; that may be a legitimate market, but I'd hate to be sitting between them.

Holding all this together would be enough of a chore even without the hollow black-pride message.

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

Even Herzog loyalists will have to concede that this fact-based 2009 hostage drama is a serious dud.

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.

This drama, about the three days leading up to the murder, never overcomes its inherent ghoulishness, largely because Chapman, like so many mentally ill people, is a huge bore.

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.

Soulless, hyperbolic actioner.

It isn't bad enough to be good.

An especially lame variation on Crowe's feel-good formula.

The chills are functional at best and the attempts at pathos negligible.

Disturbing true-crime documentary.

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

Long, grim, but utterly engrossing.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the historical premise for this Indiana Jones knockoff.

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.

The scenes in which Charlie plays catch with the ghost of his Red Sox-happy brother are only the most mawkish in a movie whose every element is calculated to set a 12-year-old girl's heart thumping.

A turkey of Rubenesque proportions.

The cultural cock-strutting gets to be a bit much, but Neville handily captures the excitement of an art scene percolating, breaking wide open, and finally burning itself out.

Chicago native Steve Conrad, who scripted "The Weather Man" and "The Pursuit of Happyness," makes his feature directing debut with this low-budget comedy, which isn't as broad as its premise might suggest.

Making Shakur the narrator works pretty well at first...But once he becomes an overnight star at age 20, his relentless self-articulation to Tabitha Soren begins to sound like the usual white noise of celebrity, his ideas about race and power in America potent but undeveloped.

The performers all move a lot better than they talk, which is bad news for the insipid melodrama but good news whenever the characters hit the floor in furious competitions between rival crews.

Fickman mostly soft-pedals the play's homosexual panic, generating a comedy that lacks both the verbal sophistication of its source and the sexual sophistication of its target audience.

There's a gothic backstory to all this, which makes no sense but looks pretty cool.

Slack direction from Walt Becker (National Lampoon's Van Wilder) sullies this formula comedy, but the cast is agreeable.

Kline gives an interesting performance playing against type, but with its action plotting and sensationalistic scenes of women being brutalized, the movie often seems to be exploiting as much as illuminating the problem.

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.

There's a great "Office Space"-style satire to be made about big-box stores screwing their working-poor employees, but Hollywood studios covet DVD rack space at those same stores, so instead we're supposed to get excited about which of these two idiots earns more gold stars.

This is a complete mess, making up its story logic as it goes along, though in contrast to the sluggish "Shanghai Knights" its chief problem is having too many ideas instead of too few.

It has all the virtues of fine stage drama: narrative economy, honest emotion, and characters so closely defined that the most pedestrian encounters between them are revelatory.

Sinister and beautiful, this mostly black-and-white animation from France culls the talents of six artists and designers.

Glowna presents this smoky German feature as an elegy for lost youth, but it's so tumescent with male self-pity that I couldn't wait for it to end.

The premise for this sci-fi actioner makes sense for about four seconds, after which you begin to wonder why everyone on the planet would willingly become a shut-in.

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.

Isn't really a satire of Hollywood so much as a chance for Short's wealthy showbiz buddies (Steve Martin, Kurt Russell, Kevin Kline, Whoopi Goldberg) to poke very gentle fun at themselves and stick it to the press.

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.

Entertaining if superficial.

This didn't make me laugh much, but I liked the music, a patchwork of samples culled from the various atomic-monster epics.

This parallel-reality shtick would be OK if the gun violence weren't so awful--but staging a murder again and again for the sake of some undergraduate head game is no more defensible than using it to pump up an action flick.

Judge races through some of his most provocative ideas in the opening minutes and ignores his story's many logical inconsistencies; the movie is bracing for its bile but ultimately more frustrating than funny.

So stale and complacent that it could be a rerun of "Love American Style."

Someone should tell these guys you can't score a touchdown throwing lateral passes.

Another go-round for the premise of an overaged kid insinuating himself into a stranger's family.

The script favors routine "Odd Couple" gags over the sort of comic contemplation of motherhood a writer like Fey might have brought to the subject.

Strikes an impressive balance between the gathering tension of its noirish plot and the philosophical implications of the characters' compromises. That balance slips in a morose and dreadfully lethargic third act, but before Ceylan goes all Kiarostami on us this is a substantial European entry in a genre that American filmmakers can't seem to master anymore.

The end is swollen with macho brooding before the hero finds the inner strength to accept the advances of another incredible dish.

This never rises above a date movie, but it's functionally literate.

Silberling has the nerve to play it for laughs -- This is clearly an actor's movie, but only Sarandon and Holly Hunter (as the attorney prosecuting the murderer) rise to the occasion.

At 85 minutes the movie is beautifully focused, reaching deep into its characters as they confront terrible secrets but never sacrificing momentum as the mystery unravels.

The stilted performances are especially unfortunate when one considers what a fine documentary Clark might have gotten out of the same material.

Singer draws heavily on the 1978 hit that launched the Warner Brothers franchise, with Brandon Routh dully impersonating Christopher Reeve as the Man of Steel, Kevin Spacey getting all the good lines as the villainous Lex Luthor, and stock footage of Marlon Brando proving that death isn't always a good career move.

With the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy completed and the next "Chronicles of Narnia" movie two years away, fantasy aficionados needing a Yuletide fix may have to settle for this dull sword-and-sorcery epic.

The episodic structure works to the movie's benefit, highlighting the eccentric supporting characters and allowing Mendes to smoothly downshift from hilarity to sadness.

Shane Acker has expanded his Oscar-nominated short 9 into a full-length feature whose splendid visuals are dragged down by a tedious story.

Yu's portrait of Darger, which clocks in at 82 minutes, skims over the only aspect of his life that commands respect: his craft.

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

This is superior family entertainment--warm, thoughtful, and connected to the landscape.

The plot of the picture is familiar, but it's realized with such delicacy and affection for the characters that it seems as fresh and warm as its verdant setting.

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

The fun hardens into Fun after he's (Mr. Incredible) lured out of retirement and imprisoned in a remote island compound, though the sleek computer animation is spellbinding as usual.

The road of excess leads to the palace of boredom in this overblown monster epic.

An explosive but scrupulously journalistic drama about the radical group that terrorized Germany for nearly 30 years.

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

As the star-crossed couple, Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon contribute all their own vocals, and their soapier scenes together reminded me of no less than the 1954 "A Star Is Born."

This wretched remake was helmed by Raja Gosnell, perpetrator of the live-action "Scooby-Doo" movies. I'm partial to Quaid and Russo, but there are limits.

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.

Costner has the stoic routine down pat, and there are some spectacular action sequences of helicopter rescues on the high seas, but Kutcher is in way over his head.

I guessed the big plot twist as soon as Franklin began setting it up, which gave me a good 40 minutes to appreciate the fine supporting cast and weathered coastal Florida locations while waiting for Washington's character to catch up with me.

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.

This has its sappy moments, but both women give wonderfully detailed performances, aided by Michael Learned as Hunt's mother and Chris Sarandon as the calm, cold minister.

Patrick Dempsey and Michelle Monaghan make an agreeable pair in this above-average comedy.

Absorbing thriller.

Ulliel, the meek missing soldier in "A Very Long Engagement," makes such a tedious Lecter that this quickly becomes a chore, though Dominic West ("The Wire") is good as a French detective on the madman's trail.

Schizoid romantic comedy -- The first half of the movie is full of broad but capable comedy, but the original film's sexual and class politics are clumsily handled, and the mood turns serious with all the subtlety of a falling guillotine blade.

I wondered if the movie would end with a round of knock-knock jokes, but instead there's a hilarious trash-talking session with the four guys sitting around gutting one another like fish.

It exchanges the police subplot that gave the earlier film its steady pace for a lot of pointless backstory about the mother-fixated stalker.

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.

Leone's artful editing of close-ups to communicate the characters' spatial relationships is always a pleasure, and here he unveils his stylistic signature—extreme close-ups of the characters' eyes—as Van Cleef surveys the villain's wanted poster.

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.

Watching John Leguizamo labor to keep this leaky vessel afloat, I was reminded of all those Hell's Kitchen melodramas James Cagney rescued in the early 30s.

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.

Pretty dispensable, though it has one of the best homosexual-panic gags I've ever seen.

The bar for historical accuracy in Hollywood biopics hasn't always been this high -- paradoxically, it's been rising even as the public has become more ignorant of history.

The action plot is lousy with cliched suspense scenes of back-road executions halted at the last possible instant.

By now the hypocrisy of simultaneously condemning and exploiting the audience's sadism has become so commonplace in American movies it hardly seems noteworthy.

This ends on an uplifting and philosophical note, equating moral blindness with the literal sort, which you'll probably appreciate if you haven't already slit your wrists.

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.

Whitney frames this as the pilot for a reality TV show, but if that doesn't pan out he can pitch it to al Qaeda as a recruiting tool.

Emotionally charged but not entirely honest documentary.

Columbus beautifully realizes many of Rowling's fantastic conceits -- but for the last hour I was searching for a spell to make the credits appear.

What might have been a serious drama about coming to terms with violence and loss turns into a crowd-pleasing and increasingly far-fetched remake of "Death Wish."

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.

Brothers Brad and John Hennegan track six thoroughbreds in the qualifying races running up to the 2006 Kentucky Derby, yet the horseflesh isn't as interesting to them as the owners and trainers, an odd assortment of moneymen and equine gurus with a culture all their own.

Contrived hunk of feel-good.

Andrews is still a treasure, but the series's currency is plummeting.

Jeb Stuart directed, his well-rounded portrait of the community partly undermined by the slack editing; with Rick Schroder as the minister and Michael Rooker as the defense attorney.

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.

The staging is wooden, the story insipid, and the dialogue sequences mostly painful, but the film’s integration of song, dance, and story (“100% All Talking! 100% All Singing! 100% All Dancing!”) was a clear narrative advance over the music pictures being released by Warner Brothers and Fox, and the score is great.

After decades of revisionist westerns, this drama by TV veteran David Von Ancken is impressive for its stubborn classicism.

Larry Doyle and John Hamburg's script is full of holes, but this is still pretty damn funny--thanks mostly to Barrymore, who seems to be retracing Lucille Ball's trajectory from sex kitten to comedienne.

From "Beavis and Butt-Head" to "King of the Hill" to "Office Space," Mike Judge has become our most dogged examiner of middle-American foolishness; no other comedy filmmaker more skillfully exploits that nagging sense that you’re surrounded by idiots.

Rodriguez retreats into gruesome violence and flaccid comedy, grasping feebly for topical relevance by referencing the current immigration fracas.

A more accurate title might be "Sub-Bad."

Ruppert makes a compelling argument that the world is approaching a paradigm shift unlike anything in human history.

The serious Catholic themes that made the original film genuinely disturbing have been flattened out into a cartoonish backstory.

In a tale filled with perverse twists of fate, the most perverse may be that Overnight, not "The Boondock Saints," is Troy Duffy's masterpiece.

A colorful cast whose combined energy lifts the story off the ground.

No laughs here, just the dull ache of seeing Heder slotted into a standard piece of Hollywood twaddle.

This high-decibel shocker is an insult to intelligence and faith alike.

Cuba Gooding Jr. is the kind of guy who does ten minutes of shtick every time the little light in the fridge comes on, and for years I've been waiting for him to just go away. If this dud comedy is any indication of the scripts he's getting, I may not have to wait much longer.

Despite all the horror and anguish, the film ends on a note of serene acceptance, deep gratitude toward the dead, and wonder at the unlikely miracle of life.

Thoughtful and complex.

Despite Jarecki's varied success in bringing these six people's stories to life, their stories personalize our current geopolitical predicament and remind us that in a democracy no one can shrug off responsibility for the war.

More or less restages Tobe Hooper's 1974 original, including its much-loved family dinner scene.

You can't set the comedy bar much lower than spoofing the old Rock Hudson-Doris Day romances.

With its finger-popping jazz score and beat-inspired interior monologue (in second person, no less), this might seem comical if it weren’t so rooted in existential dread.

An engrossing tale of ego, strategy, and the limits of human intelligence.

De Niro gives a crafty performance, and director John Polson (Swimfan) maintains a pleasantly low-key suspense. But the ending is a disappointment.