J.R. Jones

George Clooney produced and stars in this international spy thriller, which he probably thought of as existential but which registers onscreen as a giant bore.

Ben Affleck directed and cowrote the script; his biggest gamble was casting his irksome little brother as a pistol-whipping tough guy, but the picture is so superbly executed in every other respect that Casey seems more quirky than miscast.

Luhrmann's squirrelly, five-exclamation-point stylings mercifully subside after the first 20 minutes or so, leaving behind a palatable big-screen confection.

Based on a story by Steve Martin of all people, the script seldom rises above formula (Guy Pearce and Neal McDonough are especially ill served as a pair of starchy FBI agents), but its respectful treatment of Islam is both unusual and welcome.

As in "Amores perros," Iñarritu and Arriaga slice and dice the chronology, which helps distract from the warmed-over story elements and focus attention on the superior performances.

Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's perennial stage comedy about yellow journalism in Chicago hasn't much to offer in the way of action, but in this 1931 adaptation director Lewis Milestone (All Quiet on the Western Front) manages to inject a fair amount of visual energy to complement the firecracker dialogue.

Carion might have found a more artful way to dramatize the case's geopolitical impact, but this is still pretty interesting stuff.

It's the angriest comedy I've encountered all year, though it's pretty well spoiled by Carrey, who insists on turning it into a star vehicle with his slapstick and spazz attacks.

By the time director Patrice Leconte arrives at his predictable climax and conventional moral, this lethargic French comedy may not have any friends either.

Watching this quick-buck sequel was about as pleasant as having my wisdom teeth pulled.

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

The main pleasure of this high-stakes-poker drama is watching a septuagenarian Burt Reynolds effortlessly revive his 70s screen persona as a strutting paragon of male shrewdness and sexuality.

Watching Best Worst Movie, you can't help but notice that the Troll 2 crowd consists almost exclusively of people in their 20s, which makes perfect sense: manufacturing an obsession with a terrible movie probably seems more worthwhile if you think you've got all the time in the world.

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.

Martial arts hero Jet Li takes on all comers--with one hand in his hip pocket most of the time--in this absurd but breathlessly paced actioner.

A power­ful drama, but if I didn’t know Green had directed it I probably wouldn’t have guessed.

As the WWF-style villain, Stiller misfires again and again, but Vaughn is reliably funny and Rip Torn has a great part as the underdogs' crotchety old coach.

The movie takes as its mantra and organizing principle President Kennedy's observation, during his 1961 speech to the United Nations, that "every man, woman, and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness."

Notorious on the festival circuit for its excruciating scenes of self-mutilation.

Their relationship is so subtly inflected with fear, envy, and self-loathing on both sides of the class divide that I was drawn in nonetheless. Brody is a compelling presence throughout.

The first 20 minutes are masterful, as Cruise hunts down a killer-to-be; the last 20 are mediocre, as screenwriters Scott Frank and Jon Cohen untangle the mystery they've grafted onto Dick's story. In between lies a conventional but expertly realized cop-on-the-run drama.

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.

A perfect example of the modern comedy mill gone wrong, a prolonged muddle whose plot, specific situations, and improvised quips never line up.

This 2004 video documentary by Werner Herzog arrives in town while his hair-raising "Grizzly Man" is still playing, and it's a fascinating companion piece even though his manipulations are more obvious.

After 9/11 and Katrina, this megabudget remake by Wolfgang Petersen benefits from a similar cultural oomph, though it's just as enjoyably silly as the original.

Rivals the films of Hayao Miyazaki in elevating anime to the level of fine art.

This sitcom setup is as bad as it sounds, and Cox never really surmounts it, though the characters deepen significantly after the missionary is caught caressing the waiter and sent home to be excommunicated and shamed by his family.

Sicko horror flick.

Ronald Bronstein, who wrote and directed the disquieting indie Frownland, steps in front of the cameras for this similarly lo-fi drama, and his loose-limbed performance as the brash, irresponsible father of two young boys establishes him as a genuine triple threat.

It's eminently suitable for children, fully inhabiting their world and finding real laughs there without resorting to sentiment, condescension, or snarky in-jokes for the adults.

Despite a three-hour running time Stone is too occupied with psychodrama to explore Alexander's innovations in battle, and Farrell, clearly out of his depth, seems less a leader of men than a Hellenistic James Dean.

The drama is hampered by a vague screenplay that takes its sweet time explaining the characters' past and never specifies the nature of the boy's palsy and apparent retardation.

By the end of this 124-minute drama I'd have settled for ANYONE else, but like most visits with irritating people, the movie lingers, sharpening one's judgment.

Like her previous feature, "Look at Me" (2004), this relationship drama is mature and intelligent, but the character conflicts are so decorously handled that after a while the whole enterprise begins to seem more like a good waiter than a good story.

This powerful South African drama turns on the debut performance of young Presley Chweneyagae as the hood, and it's magnificent: a stone-faced killer in the opening scenes, he becomes an open book as the story progresses, as frightened, confused, and needy as the baby he drags around town in a shopping bag.

This new version is an almost scene-for-scene remake, which is good news in the first half and bad news in the torpid second.

With its pathetic characters, questionable logic, and wall-to-wall Beethoven, the movie is a serious contender for this year's Golden Turkey award.

Unfortunately Jia --a rather limited actor, judging from the movies excerpted here -- has trouble either articulating or projecting the existential crisis that ultimately landed him in a mental institution, which leaves the emotional center of the film inert.

This operates at the intellectual level of the old "Star Trek" in its limp last season, and the professed humanism is belied by the extreme violence and Nazi-chic production design (not to mention a voice-over that traces the outlawing of emotion to "the revolutionary precept of the hate crime").

Warmly and gently handled, though the central story, detailing the personal politics between him and the six childlike monsters, steadily loses steam.

The comedy approaches true hilarity only when Meyers resorts to the surefire gimmick of having the oldsters get massively stoned at a party, though Streep's dilemma is handled well enough for the movie to accumulate some gravitas as it nears the two-hour mark.

The quiet exploration of late sexuality is remarkable, but the characters' seniority also makes the triangle doubly painful for the woman's husband of 30 years, who suddenly faces the prospect not only of living alone but of dying that way as well.

I can’t deny this is filled with powerfully primal images, but at least one of them--an eviscerated fox that bellows at Dafoe, “Chaos reigns!”­--made me burst out laughing.

Breillat's mix of dramatic skill and feminist intimidation has cowed plenty of critics in the past, but no political agenda could redeem this movie's joyless pedantry.

Accommodates some great water photography.

Lars von Trier is back, so to speak--he's never visited the States, which makes his snide anti-American allegories even more infuriating to some….But the story holds up well enough to deliver a pointed critique of establishing self-rule at gunpoint.

Despite some fine black comedy, this hovers uncertainly between the novel's tragic precision and "Barfly's" existential burlesque.

This dismal comedy joins a growing pile of Murphy disasters.

Funny, honest, and generous, this is mainstream American comedy at its best.

Hawke’s script is admirably light-handed in showing how the hero’s unreasoning passion is fueled by his parents’ painful divorce, and despite the story’s date-movie aspects, its most penetrating observations come not from the kids but from the young man’s estranged father and mother (Hawke and Laura Linney, both superb).

Scenes of harvested frogs provide an apt metaphor for Brazil's miserable have-nots, so apt that Kohn can't resist beating it to death.

As popcorn movies go, this is fleet, funny, and even thoughtful: its central question, nicely underplayed by director Peter Berg, is why power and altruism never seem to intersect.

This is the sort of funny, humane, honorable story that families need more of, though viewers of any age should be hooked by the mystery surrounding the brothers' riches.

Japanese animator Satoshi Kon has a striking sense of composition, but I'm more impressed by his storytelling skills.

A holiday film for the whole family, provided the whole family is obsessed with human waste.

Naturally, age and infirmity are a major subtext of Shine a Light (and, really, any movie featuring Keith Richards). No matter how cadaverous the Stones appear, they keep climbing onstage, and I’ll miss them when they’re finally gone.

The video is narrated by Taylor, who magnanimously presents Newcombe as a Byronic hero, but ultimately proves that the pursuit of success and the pursuit of cool can be equally pointless.

David Levien codirected; the fine supporting cast includes Richard Schiff, Jesse Eisenberg, and Danny DeVito.

The formula works just fine on a more modest scale, without having to carry all the glittering casino sets and A-list movie stars.

This functions perfectly well as a Van Damme vehicle, but it's also a funny and poignant look at a man trapped by his own ridiculous reputation.

Pleasantly acted and moderately funny, but it lacks the genuine bile that made "Heathers" (1987) so bracing.

This teen romance doesn't have a single authentic moment.

Screenwriter Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby) has turned the Italian romantic comedy "L'Ultimo Bacio" (2001) into something smarter, funnier, and more penetrating.

Managed to pull the rug out from under me about three-quarters of the way through, and I still hadn't found my feet when the credits rolled.

The movie gradually deepens from odd-couple comedy into Catholic-themed drama, but it remains marvelously funny throughout. Instead of hitting the easy notes of black humor, McDonagh skillfully modulates between broad character laughs and the men's piercing anguish as the story nears its bloody conclusion.

Fox keeps the suspense story at a low boil throughout, allowing the politics to emerge as the characters deepen.

Tends to let his consumers off the hook--you'd hardly guess that any of these people are responsible for their own financial woes.

The big green babysitter is back, but the charm has evaporated.

Scott Speedman gives a piercing, intelligent performance.

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

Engrossing documentary.

But the big scare scenes seem particularly isolated here, supported by neither the flat characters nor the vague plot.

Director Kurt Wimmer has an eye for jackboot chic (Equilibrium), and the images here have been digitally polished so that the characters' skin is smoother than porcelain. It's a cool effect--I spent most of this interminable actioner wondering if one could bounce a quarter off Jovovich's bare midriff.

Americans desensitized to senseless violence may find the subject matter almost banal, and the interspersed news footage of armed conflict from around the world feels like a rhetorical device. But the coldly telegraphic structure--a series of 71 blackouts following the four strangers to their deaths--yields some striking moments.

As a comedy duo Nicholson and Sandler pose no threat to the legacy of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, in part because Sandler is so outclassed, but mostly because everyone involved is playing it safe.

Verde is too blankly amoral to sustain interest, but the film has isolated moments of haunting poetry.

As in the first movie, Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart are trotted out periodically to add a little gravitas.

Insipid, TV-bland drama.

What Scorsese brings to the table, having created more than his share of rascally villains, is a renewed sense of horror and despair at the power of evil.

The movie flames to life whenever Donald Sutherland moves into frame as the young ladies' relaxed, humorous, and magnificently rueful father.

Buffeted by the usual car crashes and explosions, Wilson and Murphy never develop any comic chemistry.

An overloaded script by Heidi Thomas... defeats a fine cast

This originated as a late-night play, and the humor is correspondingly sophomoric, but I loved Dennis McCarthy's melodramatic score.

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.

The Israeli academy showered awards--best picture, director, screenplay, editing, cinematography, sound, costumes, actress, supporting actress, supporting actor--on this coming-of-age story, which makes its modest whimsy even harder to get excited about.

The scenes are so dramatically cogent the characters' lives seem to stretch far beyond the concluding blackouts.

Animation fans will find this worth the wait.

Victim, for all its compromises, offers a rich mosaic of minor characters, none of them particularly complex but each articulating some British attitude toward homosexuality and the law surrounding it.

There's no real reason it should be set in the 70s, except that the freaky wigs, loud clothes, and wall-to-wall soul classics are needed to bolster the nothing script.

Werner Herzog is a stranger in a strange land as soon as he gets out of bed in the morning: in this travelogue of Antarctica, his perverse curiosity and zest for the harshest extremes of nature transform what might have been a standard TV special into an idiosyncratic expression of wonder.

Armitage adds a slick veneer of one-liners and slapstick to Leonard's novel, but the story has been so spun around that it barely knows how to end.

Unbearably twee mockumentary.

The characters are gently and warmly rendered, and a climactic action sequence involving an unmoored dirigible hints at the stately grandiosity of Miyazaki's masterpiece Howl's Moving Castle.

This comedy is a bilge pump of tacky jokes, fake sentiment, and hollow performances, accompanied on the soundtrack by lite rock and hokey music cues. It should never have been made, though it's probably guaranteed a long life at bad-film festivals.

Vanessa Redgrave bails out this mushy Italian-postcard romance.

The ghoulish tone and Mikkelsen's glassy performance smother any laughs.

Clooney badly botches the spy plot by casting himself as Barris's agency contact... and a truly awful Julia Roberts as Barris's Mata Hari lover (she's soundly upstaged by Drew Barrymore as his devoted girlfriend). Yet the mounting delirium drives home Kaufman's basic point: that a shadow government rules by bread and circuses.

The message, unspoken but inescapable, is that a little sharing might feed wealthy and poor alike.

Jackman and McGregor throw their best American accents behind the effort, but Michelle Williams seems fairly bored as the sex-club partner who wins McGregor's heart. I'm with her.

The connection between the two narratives is supposed to be a big, heartbreaking surprise, though I figured it out well in advance and spent the interim unfavorably comparing this greatest-generation hanky wringer to the British drama "Iris."

Its great distinction lies in re-creating an age when thoughts and feelings were to be carefully considered and precisely enunciated. The best costumers, set designers, and property masters can’t conjure up the mental and emotional spaces of a simpler era; that requires a filmmaker who knows the virtue of quiet, patience, and attentiveness.

It’s one thing to make a movie filled with mayhem and then implicate the audience for watching it; it’s another thing entirely to come back ten years later with the same movie, hype it with a marketing campaign, and try to implicate the viewer again. One nice thing about America is that you can’t be tried twice for the same crime.

At long last, the Dead series may be ready for that final bullet between the eyes.

Seriously uneven but often charming.

In the finest tradition of adolescent identification figures, he's not only ruthless, dispatching numerous baddies with hair-trigger shots to the head, but profoundly desexualized, brushing off the insistent come-ons of a slinky prostitute (Olga Kurylenko) he's taken under his wing.

Unfortunately I can't give this a thumbs-up or thumbs-down; I haven't yet developed an aesthetic that will accommodate a guy firing a bottle rocket from his ass.

As the aching spouse, Moore delivers what is for her an unusually sympathetic performance.

Coogan delivers a winning comic performance as the pompous impresario, but his story has little dramatic momentum of its own; he functions mostly as a pedantic narrator, imposing some cultural significance on the endless party and pointing out more intriguing personalities.

It's worth seeing for the tightly coiled plot, well-realized characters, and novel take on rapacious teen culture.

This Spanish comedy showcases a gallery of popular actresses, but writer-director Manuel Gomez Pereira gives them nothing to work with aside from tiresome romantic complications.

Zbanic's story of an ordinary life stained by extraordinary cruelty cuts deep.

The main characters are a couple of revered high school table-tennis champs (one short and aggressive, the other tall and moody), and their efforts to win a big national tournament accommodate plenty of Zen aphorisms, glaring showdowns, and slow-motion paddle swinging.

It's a subject that guarantees a certain amount of liberal tongue clucking, though director Jeff Renfroe wisely concentrates on suspense instead of sermons.

I've observed this Seth Rogen comedy, and I can report that it's not very good.

Bowdon makes a compelling argument against the defensive maneuvers of teachers' unions and in favor of vouchers and charter schools, but his documentary is no exercise in free-market cant. It merely explodes the fiction that funneling more money into the same highly bureaucratized and politicized system will fix our deepening education crisis.

Engrossing and frequently hilarious.

The epic poem Beowulf gets an imaginative, low-budget workout in this 2005 Icelandic feature by Sturla Gunnarsson.

It's gooey fun for the first reel or two despite an abundance of close-ups that render the frantic action nearly unreadable.

Despite the syncopated score and subtitled patois, this is just another "Scarface" knockoff, with the usual array of bling, booty, and ballistics.

This putrid action flick crawls along for two and a half hours before expiring in a septic field of bad one-liners, halfhearted catchphrases, obliterated cars, vicious slow-motion bullet penetration, graphic corpse mutilations played for laughs, and shamefully hollow bonding scenes between its two dyspeptic megastars.

As in Korine's other movies, characterization is often just amplified weirdness.

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.

Holiday counterprogramming at its finest. This gut-churning horror indie is based on true stories of tourists disappearing in the vast Australian outback... This scared the hell out of me.

Some of the illustrious cast members were on their way up (John Travolta), but most of them were on their way down (Eddie Albert, Ida Lupino, Keenan Wynn).

This fascinating video documentary covers a nine-month rehearsal of Shakespeare's final play by inmates at the Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in La Grange, Kentucky.

Italian writer-director Emanuele Crialese is best known for the art-house piffle "Respiro" (2002), a sun-kissed fairy tale that didn't prepare me for the weight and solidity of this historical drama about a Sicilian peasant family immigrating to the U.S.

Alison Eastwood, whose good looks and last name have served her well as a Hollywood actress, makes her directing debut with this mediocre cancer drama.

A spirited crowd-pleaser.

Overblown and unconvincing, the director's bright, poppy style clashing with the grim subject matter.

Ron Howard directed, with outstanding support from Kevin Bacon as Jack Brennan, Nixon's fierce chief of staff.

It's a solid indie effort with plenty of nice character strokes by screenwriter Megan Holley and razor-sharp performances by Amy Adams and Emily Blunt.

With any luck this biopic of Amelia Earhart will also vanish without a trace. Hilary Swank is sorely miscast as the legendary aviator.

I tend to approach green documentaries with all the enthusiasm of an unemployed logger, but this hard-charging digital video about genetically modified organisms kept me on the edge of my seat with its lucid exposition and frontal assault on Monsanto.

An impressive mix of entertainment and social comment, spinning a great mystery even as it confronts an ugly world.

With one of these two alpha males anchoring nearly every scene, Scott really can't go wrong, but the lead characters are pretty thin, a fact highlighted by generic subplots.

Kwietniowski follows up his impressive debut feature, "Love and Death on Long Island," with this equally absorbing study of a compulsive personality.

The troubled star writhes her way through a red-lit pole dance in the opening credits and shrieks her way through a prolonged torture-porn sequence; after those lurid turns the movie settles into an indifferent mystery plot as the cops pressure the girl to help them find the culprit.

Pegg has some good obnoxious moments, but he's only a few movies away from becoming Dudley Moore.

Repulsive 80s flashback.

The scenes of his incarceration and escape from the place are gripping, thanks mainly to Michael Bowen as the hard-ass staffer who wants to break him. But the movie slides toward melodrama with some stale business about the hero spreading his late father's ashes.

If a bullet hadn't killed John Lennon, this Beatles-scored musical might have.

It plays exactly like a Will Ferrell comedy, but better, because Ferrell's not in it.

Joel and Ethan Coen wrote the story, using the ancient gag of the toxic Santa as a vehicle for their patented brand of misanthropy; Zwigoff and company wring some laughs out of it, though the tone is uniformly mean and vulgar.

Funny, smart, and complacent.

The witty title aside, this is a miserably dull exercise in stingy-Jew humor and post-Jarmusch nonreaction.

Bujalski has a knack for the genuine moment.

The outcome is never much in doubt, but Salvadori artfully choreographs the endless table turning, and the Moroccan-born Elmaleh capitalizes on his striking resemblance to Buster Keaton with a similarly comic composure.

This incredible but true story marks the first time Eastwood's signature themes have found expression in a woman's experience, and the absence of any distracting machismo only heightens his sense of helpless rage at the perpetual anguish of victims' families.

The opening stretch, when the visitor arrives on earth and blithely dresses down mankind, is great fun. But screenwriter David Scarpi has drained away much of the sentiment.

Played by Ron Perlman, he's the most magnetic action hero I've come across in a long while.

The movie premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival, too soon to include a tragic denouement: in April the U.S. command surrendered the Korangal Valley to the Taliban.

Cillian Murphy gives a tour de force performance.

Feels a little soft and boomer-indulgent with its 10,000th rehash of the Nixon years and its soundtrack of trite 60s anthems.

Put this one back on the shelf, and walk away.

It's a terrific story -- part mystery, part farce, part legal nail-biter -- with a last-minute reversal so bitterly ironic it could have been scripted by Billy Wilder.

This began as a one-man show, but Lepage has transferred it beautifully to the screen, where its cosmos of ideas hangs weightless.

Critics, clients, and colleagues all weigh in on the architect, but Pollack is more interested in the mysteries of the creative process, and his studies of Gehry's buildings, deftly edited by Karen Schmeer, capture their dramatic sense of movement and resolution.

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.

The movie is taut with suspense but culminates in wise resignation as the hero comes to understand he's running from a part of himself.

Ehrlich and Goldsmith carve out their own little place in the canon by focusing on the ethical journey of one man who refused to shrug off his own responsibility for the war and atoned for it with a seismic act of civil disobedience.

The swashbuckling first hour is superior to the second, which bursts at the seams with backstory, but a rousing climax makes this the most potent piece of agitpop in years.

The novelty wears off almost immediately, leaving this a real chore to watch; there's something bizarre about low-budget spontaneity being replicated in such a labor-intensive medium.

The more interesting woman is Epper, who comes from a highly respected family of stunt doubles and at 62 shows no signs of slowing.

Before seeing this film I couldn't understand why the producers had given it a subtitle; afterward I realized "Ecks vs. Sever" was probably the full script.

The early scenes of Greene misbehaving on the air are pretty funny, thanks mainly to Martin Sheen as the apoplectic station manager. But I was bummed out by the movie's trite VH1 cartoon of the black power era--especially coming from Kasi Lemmons, who made her directing debut with the hauntingly ambiguous "Eve's Bayou."

In archival photos Petit seems to float between the towers, a tiny black figure against a vivid blue sky; the images are all the more poignant for the unstated fact that Petit is still around when the buildings aren't.

Lorna's sudden change of heart is a pointed example of what the Dardenne brothers' movies are all about. Capitalism may seem at times like a raging river, but every day, all over the world, people try to make it flow in the opposite direction.

As contrived as this premise may sound (and it isn't much better on-screen), writer-director Mora Stephens manages to push the odd-couple story in some interesting directions.

It often seems precious and overconceived, its accumulating crosses and double-crosses as devoid of consequence as a child's backyard game.

This is a polished, palatable intrigue, with a knockout performance from Olivia Williams as the PM's hardened wife and a highly persuasive one from Kim Cattrall, cast against type as his buttoned-up personal assistant. But the mystery is unraveled a bit too conveniently.

It wasn't so bad, aside from the god-awful ending; at the very least Freundlich manages to come up with funnier jokes than the ossified one-liners decorating Allen's recent movies.

Scripted by Pitre and his wife, Michelle Benoit, this is more interesting for its historical setting than for its rather wooden drama, but Tim Curry gives a pretty good performance as the town's whiskey priest.

Apatow became the hottest comedy director in the business by seamlessly combining relationship comedy that didn't bore the guys and wild comedy that didn't nauseate the girls; this is a knockoff, pure and simple, but its wit and ingenuous characters prove how far the bar's been raised.

This is dumb, raunchy, and obvious, but it's also pretty funny, and delivered with the gusto of a Redd Foxx monologue.

A relatively mindless thrill ride that would have made the old NBC execs grin from ear to ear.

The surprise ending is neatly done, but the characters are so thin that waiting around for it is no fun whatsoever.

Jensen's dramatic structure is so visible this sometimes seems like a late Rod Serling teleplay, but Bier has proved highly adept at merging conventional drama with the immediacy of the Dogma 95 movement.

Like "The Verdict," this is a big, crowd-pleasing Hollywood redemption drama in which the lonely hero not only thwarts the corporate villains in the end but silences them with a killer riposte.

A triumph not only for its technical mastery but for its good taste.

An Inconvenient Truth may not save the planet, but it's already gone a long way toward rescuing Gore's public profile.

Enjoyable action comedy from the Clint Eastwood mold, though the comic elements are more fun than the action.

A better name for it would have been the Herschell Gordon Lewis: the godfather of gore himself couldn't have topped this succession of grisly deaths.

The main reason I enjoyed this high-powered action flick and its 2001 predecessor is their willingness to poke fun at the premise of crime-fighting dolls, even though it now has more currency than ever.

The Holocaust subplot is contrived and schematic. Yet the central love triangle is fairly compelling, aided by Krol's fine performance.

The cluttered narrative leaves little room for character development, though director Niels Arden Oplev does manage to accommodate plenty of gratuitous torture and rape.

Chan-wook Park completes his "revenge trilogy" with this ravishing black comedy about a notorious child killer.

Despite all the grand gestures of climax and resolution, there's a pronounced sense of autopilot; the only person who seems to be having a good time is Ian McKellen as the scheming Magneto.

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.

Wonderful first feature.

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.

Pegg and Wright are out of their depth in the second half, when they try to engage the more disturbing elements of Romero's movies, but their disaffected slacker take on the genre is a welcome alternative to the usual bloodbaths.

The most powerful and telling image is a black-and-white still of Kerry burying his face in his arms after he threw his ribbons onto the Capitol steps; it's a moment true enough to cost him the presidency.

The talented cast--manages to rescue the movie as well as the earth.

Director Todd Phillips has become Hollywood's go-to guy for collegiate humor, and though this isn't as funny as his "Road Trip," "Old School," or "Starsky & Hutch," there are some choice sequences of the devious Thornton schooling his milquetoast students.

This melancholy romance is the first Almodovar feature I’ve ever really liked, an expertly fashioned melodrama that steers mercifully clear of his usual puckishness and star-mongering.

There's a lot less here than meets the eye.

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.

The remake begins with the same premise and appropriates the most striking visuals, grafting them onto a more explicable but equally dull George Romero-style doomsday scenario.

The film's opening and closing moments are weirdly reminiscent of "Black Hawk Down," another tale of Western soldiers in over their heads on the dark continent -- clearly no one these days understands manifest destiny.

The songs don't advance the narrative lyrically so much as follow the two characters' uncertain relationship through the slow realization of their themes; in particular a scene in which they first jam together in the back room of a music store is a gem.

The scenes of family squalor are memorably persuasive, but any filmmaker ending her movie with the heroine throwing a crumpled poem into the ocean needs a few more writing courses.

At their best, the Jackasses combine low-brow humor with delectable absurdity (one of my favorite gags from Jackass: The Movie had a guy creeping up on a cougar while dressed as a giant mouse), but here it's almost pure punishment.

Bloody gangsta crap.

Robert Duvall, who played a similar character in Bruce Beresford's "Tender Mercies" (1983), turns up in a supporting role.

Well-meaning but simpleminded biopic.

Dogtooth, a bizarre black comedy from Greece that won the Un Certain Regard prize at the 2009 Cannes film festival, involves a conventional middle-class family--mom, dad, teenage son, two teenage daughters--that turns out to be warped beyond belief.

In the end, this admirably broadens our knowledge of the era but doesn't much deepen it.

The story lurches from heavy-handed satire to heavy-handed drama. Heigl gives a winning performance, though Slattery-Moschkau seldom misses an opportunity to show her prancing around in her underwear.

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.

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.

After trying her hand at Thackeray with "Vanity Fair," director Mira Nair has found a literary property much closer to her heart: Jhumpa Lahiri's best-selling novel about a Bengali couple and their children trying to find their place in American culture.

Compared to their first movie, "The Yes Men" (2003), this one focuses on many fewer hoaxes, but they're more elaborate and potent.

Predictable outrage.

This sublime French farce reminded me most of Billy Wilder.

Bland comedy romance. Grant and Bullock fail to put across the tired dialogue, and many scenes seem ad-libbed--in desperation.

Eventually the action leads to an uncharted island, where the film devolves into an explicit but unoriginal gorefest. [28 May 2009, p.30]

Funny, suspenseful, and well paced, this is definitely the summer's best time waster.

In any normal year this dire comedy would be the undisputed lump of coal in our psychic stocking, but with "Surviving Christmas" still in theaters it's a close second.

Long, heavy, and not particularly edifying Holocaust drama.

Hamstrung by its polemics.

The movie loses credibility with the arrival of Rogen and Bill Hader as two uniformed patrolmen who are drunker and crazier than any high schooler could ever get, but the variety of complications thrown at the three pubescent heroes raises this a cut above most raunchy comedies.

This might have had some potential as a German exercise in self-examination, but as a tony BBC Films production, with the actors all speaking British-accented English (including Jersey girl Farmiga), it reeks of self-righteousness.

The romantic plot, involving his unrequited loved for Garner, is soured by her character's unconcealed shallowness: she won't have him because his genes aren't up to snuff.

This film doesn't really clear the bar, but it's handsomely mounted and proves that heartless manipulation of the weak and gullible never goes out of style.

As romantic comedies go, this is the worst drivel I've seen since Nia Vardalos's "I Hate Valentine's Day."

There are strong turns by Michael Caine as Alfred the butler and Tom Wilkinson as a ruthless crime boss.

The survival drama is genuinely exciting, and the players, both human and canine, put this across with spirit.

Beautifully shot in black and white by Pawel Edelman (The Pianist), this 2000 feature is both funny and unexpectedly touching.

Visually commanding, conceptually beguiling, but dramatically inert.

The word "raunchy" doesn't begin to describe this.

Given the movie's slow, careful development, I was hardly prepared for the cold-sweat suspense of the last half hour.

This has wit and energy to burn, but I can't call it escapism, because tackiness and snarkiness are among the things I most need to escape.

This uninspired comedy drama seems to have been bankrolled by the state tourism board, yet the Celtic music sequences provide welcome relief from the reheated plot.

This may not be a solid biography, but it feels true.

Most of the action in this 2001 indie drama takes place on computer screens, with grainy faces framed by sharp little boxes; the 21st-century conceit is topical enough but the characters and their problems couldn't be more stale.

This eerie drama harks back to sci-fi movies of the late 60s and early 70s that explored inner as well as outer space (2001, Solaris, and particularly Silent Running).

The movie begins to seem a little overloaded and gimmicky once characters from children's classics begin turning up (including Toto from The Wizard of Oz), but it's handsomely mounted.

Writer-director Len Wiseman, now the star's husband, wisely moves this sequel to the countryside and wastes less time dispensing the same grog of grisly CGI combat and mythical mumbo jumbo.

As one might expect from IFC, actors and directors dominate the interview segments, which may be the reason the narrative never finds its way to Heaven's Gate.

Caviezel (The Passion of the Christ) gives a quietly focused performance in the title role, ably assisted by Brett Rice as Jones's father, Jeremy Northam as golf rival Walter Hagen, and Malcolm McDowell as sportswriter O.D. Keeler.

The strain to pull all this together becomes more evident as the movie progresses, and the three-way musical finale, a rickety acoustic run-through of “The Weight,” hardly lives up to the stars’ reputations.

Rudely funny splatter comedy.

The story unfolds at such length and over so many years that politics tend to fade into the wallpaper, leaving an exceptionally rich family story.

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.

Inception delivers dazzling special effects and a boatload of stars, but it sags and eventually buckles under the weight of its complicated premise.

Combines a delayed-gratification romance and rumblings of war.

The gags come fast and furious, and though some are a little stale, Rock and cowriter Ali LeRoi strive for wit over crudity.

Director Laura Dunn presents a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of Bradley, but her advocacy is clear enough in the primal images of natural beauty and her subjects' heartfelt statements of respect for the landscape.

A suitable mainstream vehicle for Malkovich's bruised aloofness.

The documentary becomes more poignant and substantial when old age begins to seriously disable some of the dancers.

Occasionally a movie's subject outweighs any aesthetic flaws, as it does in this unsettling thriller about the extraordinary rendition of terror suspects.

Fully exploits the drama, with scenes, dialogue, and even key visuals pulled from the text.

Michael Curtiz may be the most hotly disputed director of Hollywood's golden age; his filmography includes such classics as Casablanca, Mildred Pierce, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and The Adventures of Robin Hood, but also a numbing succession of undistinguished contract pictures.

Director Bob Clark teamed with nostalgic humorist Jean Shepherd for this squeaky clean and often quite funny 1983 yuletide comedy, adapted from Shepherd's novel In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash.

If "Ratatouille" taught the world that rats have feelings too, Persepolis teaches the same thing about the people of Iran, who in the current political climate are probably in greater danger of being eradicated.

It's a classic fight movie, with Chiwetel Ejiofor as an honorable martial arts instructor...But nesting inside is a sour little 70s-style David Mamet play about the lies, calculations, and ice-cold politics of Hollywood, as the fighter is befriended and then discarded by a callow movie star.

A modest success that makes one wish Soderbergh could find some happy middle ground between funky experiments and "Ocean's Eleven."

Despite the lowbrow story, this is supposed to be tasteful; expect modest nudity, swelling strings, and plenty of water imagery.

Its labored goofiness seldom transcends the stale format.

Comes closer to deification than dramatization--a shame, since the film offers some powerful set pieces and jaw-dropping spectacle.

Offers a steady supply of clever lines but suffers from the patina of self-loathing common to industry lifers and the unfortunate miscasting of straight-arrow Broderick as a depressed, cynical hack.

This adaptation of the best-selling novel by Stephenie Meyer never rises above the level of a teen soaper on the CW, and its pale, sulky boy toys (Kellan Lutz, Peter Facinelli, Jackson Rathbone) are more silly than scary.

The murder trial and the possibility of a real attack on the attorney nicely offset the sexual gamesmanship, though the movie is badly compromised by a final left turn into serious drama and plot machination. Up until that point, it's an uncommonly shrewd and funny farce.

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

Perry's soap opera story lines are awful, with their nobly suffering sistas, gorgeous do-right men, and shamelessly materialistic dream endings. But the movie's message of gospel joy and racial pride couldn't be more sincere, and Perry gives an impeccable comic performance as the title character.