Justin Chang

Judd Apatow's instincts have rarely been sharper, wiser or more relatable than in This Is 40, an acutely perceptive, emotionally generous laffer about the joys and frustrations of marriage and middle age.

Rebecca Hall's enjoyably bubbly lead performance lends the picture an occasional frisson of amusement.

A modestly affecting reconciliation drama wrapped in a so-so sports movie by way of a misogynistic romantic comedy, Playing for Keeps can't stop tripping all over itself.

Even tots may emerge feeling slightly browbeaten by this colorful, strenuous and hyperactive fantasy, which has moments of charm and beauty but often resembles an exploding toy factory rather than a work of honest enchantment.

Part 2 has the bonus of a livelier Stewart performance than fans have been accustomed to. No longer a mopey, lower-lip-biting emo girl, this Bella is twitchy, feral, formidable and fully energized, a goddess even among her exalted bloodsucker brethren.

Hitchcock is a diverting but dramatically insipid account of how the Master of Suspense took his biggest gamble and delivered his greatest success with "Psycho."

A powerful, necessary contribution to a chilling body of reportage that, one senses by film's end, has just begun to take stock of the human costs of a monstrous conspiracy.

For a catalog of aggressively stupid, socially deviant male behavior, Rick Alverson's cheekily titled The Comedy is not without a certain subversive intelligence.

Following the exhaustive efforts of photographer-scientist James Balog to capture irrefutable evidence of the world's glaciers in retreat, first-time helmer Jeff Orlowski's documentary supplies a heroic human-interest angle on global warming that's ultimately less remarkable than the grandeur of its arctic imagery.

The outstanding big-wave footage proves more credible than the overfamiliar dramatics in Chasing Mavericks.

Manages the curious feat of being at once relentlessly energetic and almost continually uninvolving; the title more or less sums up the amount of pleasure to be had here.

A risibly overheated, not unenjoyable slab of late-'60s Southern pulp trash, marked by a sticky, sweaty atmosphere of delirium and sexual frustration that only partly excuses the woozy ineptitude of the filmmaking.

By narrowing its range of voices to Christian leaders, thinkers and writers, Kevin Miller's sober, stimulating documentary on the hot topic of eternal damnation necessarily limits its audience, but achieves a level of rhetorical eloquence that would theoretically appeal to open-minded viewers of any religious stripe.

This exquisitely beautiful adaptation of Yann Martel's castaway saga has a sui generis quality that's never less than beguiling, even if its fable-like construction and impeccable artistry come up a bit short in terms of truly gripping, elemental drama.

A terrific performance by Mary Elizabeth Winstead as a rock-bottom alcoholic is only one reason to appreciate Smashed, an affecting and immersive addiction drama about the unforeseen pitfalls along the road to recovery.

As spirited and irresistible as the college a cappella craze it celebrates, Pitch Perfect is a cheeky delight.

This beautifully designed canine-resurrection saga feels, somewhat fittingly, stitched together from stray narrative parts, but nonetheless evinces a level of discipline and artistic coherence missing from the director's recent live-action efforts.

Never one to shy away from unlikely sources of comedy, David O. Russell tackles mental illness, marital failure and the curative powers of football with bracingly sharp and satisfying results in Silver Linings Playbook.

A defiantly analog rejoinder to last year's tech-savvy baseball drama, "Moneyball," Robert Lorenz's square but sturdy directing debut rests on the wonderfully spiky chemistry between Eastwood and Amy Adams.

Wrenchingly acted, deftly manipulated and terrifyingly well made.

Centered around four outstanding performances, Yaron Zilberman's fiction-feature debut feels like the work of a filmmaker who knows and appreciates the art form under scrutiny, laying a credible foundation for a story that lays bare the often melodramatic passions of the artistic soul.

A glum but tenderly observed micro-portrait of a woman struggling to re-enter society after being released from prison.

Delicately tracing the troubled nine-year bond between two men living in New York, Ira Sachs mines his own memories to sensitive, melancholy if somewhat muted effect in Keep the Lights On.

A routine, even mundane crime story relayed in tones of world-weary fatigue, Killing Them Softly deglams the mob movie to coolly distinctive if rarely pulse-quickening effect.

The writer-director's typically eccentric sixth feature is a sustained immersion in a series of hypnotic moods and longueurs, an imposing picture that thrillingly and sometimes maddeningly refuses to conform to expectations.

After a promisingly funny first half, this tale of three coke-snorting gal-pals trying not to screw up their friend's nuptials all but drowns in its own catty cynicism, turning as stingy with emotion and insight as it is with real laughs.

This muscle-bound meathead extravaganza is a sometimes blissfully cretinous endeavor, delivering the maximum firepower and zero brainpower its target audience expects.

Suffused with the gentle, unforced humanity viewers have come to expect from Hong Kong helmer Ann Hui, A Simple Life is a tender ode to the elderly, their caregivers and the mutual generosity of spirit that makes their limited time together worthwhile.

An eerily precise match of filmmaker and material, Cosmopolis probes the soullessness of the 1% with the cinematic equivalent of latex gloves.

Few movies so taken with death have felt so rudely alive as ParaNorman, the latest handcrafted marvel from the stop-motion artists at Laika ("Coraline").

Crazy new gadgets, vigorous action sequences and a thorough production-design makeover aren't enough to keep Total Recall from feeling like a near-total redundancy.

Hope Springs is an altogether pleasant surprise: a mainstream dramedy that frankly and intelligently addresses the challenges facing a couple after 31 years of marriage.

Celeste & Jesse Forever earns points for bucking formula, but its fusion of snark and sincerity has a calculated slickness that rings increasingly hollow.

What's onscreen feels as half-assed and juvenile as it was probably always envisioned to be, suggesting an umpteenth retelling of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" by way of "The Hangover," or perhaps a far less inspired version of "Attack the Block" transplanted to small-town Ohio.

The French are smelly, vulgar, racist and oversexed, or so it would seem based on 2 Days in New York, a scattershot culture-clash comedy that goes down like yesterday's foie gras.

The family that slays together pays together in Killer Joe, a nasty little Texas noir that transfers Tracy Letts' 1993 play from page to screen with generally gripping results before devolving into an over-the-top splatterfest.

While The Dark Knight Rises raises the dramatic stakes considerably, at least in terms of its potential body count, it doesn't have its predecessor's breathless sense of menace or its demonic showmanship, and with the exception of one audacious sleight-of-hand twist, the story can at times seem more complicated than intricate.

In taut, gripping and deeply disturbing fashion, writer-director Craig Zobel measures the depths to which rational individuals will sink to obey a self-anointed authority figure in Compliance.

There's little doubt that Kazan has written a sly, amusing portrait of male self-absorption and artistic tyranny.

This timely and involving documentary elicits both sympathy and schadenfreude, as Greenfield regards her all-too-vilifiable subjects with a complexity that should impress viewers of all economic and political persuasions.

A well-observed but emotionally muted costume drama that might well have been titled "My Week With Marie Antoinette."

As he did in his Three Gorges Dam documentary "Up the Yangtze," Chang examines how a particular strain of Western culture promises opportunity and prosperity for Chinese youth, even as it remains a continual source of intergenerational tension.

Savages never quite captures the novel's diamond-hard sarcasm, it offers other satisfactions in its visceral immediacy, its overriding sense of danger and a clutch of performances that, whatever one's reservations about the characters, can't help but court the viewer's emotional investment.

Despite a few tonal and structural missteps, this intelligent, perceptive drama proves as intimately and gratifyingly femme-focused as Polley's 2006 debut, "Away From Her."

A Civil War-era actioner of questionable taste and historical accuracy but surprisingly consistent entertainment value.

If they never fully sell the situation, the actors nonetheless deliver strong, emotionally accessible work.

All in all, it could have been worse. Puerile, crotch-fixated and very occasionally, inanely funny, Adam Sandler's raunchiest star vehicle in years has a small saving grace in Andy Samberg's performance.

Absent the infectious live-audience energy of Chris D'Arienzo's legit hit, this affectionate glam-rock-a-thon reps a visually bland staging of frankly insipid material, never tapping into the raucous, go-for-broke energy that would spin the show's cliches into gold, let alone platinum.

Result is far less abrasive than some of its predecessors, but for that very reason seems unlikely to generate the attention needed to meet Solondz's already modest commercial standards.

A wise and impeccably controlled drama that finds Russian helmer Andrei Zvyagintsev in outstanding form.

Develops into an endearingly scrappy and romantic romp that serves up some nice soul-searching moments alongside a steady stream of laughs.

"I had no conception of the depths of your emptiness!" a character shrieks in Bel Ami, and her words take on an unintended resonance as addressed to Robert Pattinson in the lead role.

Elaborately conceived from a visual standpoint, Ridley Scott's first sci-fier in the three decades since "Blade Runner" remains earthbound in narrative terms, forever hinting at the existence of a higher intelligence without evincing much of its own.

Good-humored and endearing, full of energy and color (sometimes neon) if not quite Pixar-level invention.

This bizarre but weirdly bloodless retro-camp exercise is neither funny nor eerie enough to seduce the uninitiated, and will court bemused reactions at best from the series' still-estimable fan following.

This wildly ambitious rumble-in-the-jungle battle epic arrives bearing so heavy a burden of industry expectations, one wishes the results were less kitschy and more coherent; still, the filmmaking has a raw physicality and crazy conviction it's hard not to admire.

Two documentary filmmakers infiltrate a mysterious cult, only to find themselves drawn into the leader's insidious grip, in the taut, compelling low-budget feature Sound of My Voice.

Pitch-perfect performances by Shirley MacLaine and an unusually restrained Jack Black hold together this offbeat true-crime saga, but Linklater's keen eye for human eccentricity flowers most memorably on the periphery.

Like a superior, state-of-the-art model built from reconstituted parts, Joss Whedon's buoyant, witty and robustly entertaining superhero smash-up is escapism of a sophisticated order.

Alternates between intimate wildlife saga and majestic views of the North Pole, offering strong visual compensations for its meandering structure, syrupy tone and excessive sampling of Paul McCartney's back catalog.

An agreeably meandering exercise that brings some clever French New Wave fillips and structural repetitions to Hong's characteristically boozy party. Rougher but more approachable than his previous "Oki's Movie."

The body count runs high at Brangwyn boarding school, but tension, surprise and viewer interest are the real casualties in The Moth Diaries.

This madcap romp runs out of steam well before the finish, but its combo of sweetness and high spirits -- not unlike the chemical composition of the dope-infused brownies that serve as a key plot device -- proves sufficiently ingratiating to satisfy viewers.

Woman Thou Art Loosed: On the 7th Day is crammed with enough melodramatic incident for three movies, all of them seemingly scripted by Tyler Perry in a very foul mood.

Remains as tame in its presentation as its target audience would expect. Students drink beers on occasion, but no one is shown having sex, taking mind-altering substances or using language that would jeopardize a PG-13 rating. On the plus side, the film also abstains from any overt message-mongering.

Tackles a nifty futuristic premise with bargain-basement efficiency and a deadpan, devil-may-care attitude. It's an initially invigorating tactic that proves slapdash and unsatisfying over the long haul, reducing a potentially rich sci-fier to the level of a halfway decent time-killer

After putting male insecurity under a comic microscope in "Humpday," writer-director Lynn Shelton hands the fairer sex a more prominent role in Your Sister's Sister, another winning study of relational boundaries crossed and sexual dares gone awry.

While it's poignant seeing the whole gang again, the tired gross-out antics and limp romantic reprisals keep this hapless if heartfelt effort from qualifying as a decent comedy, let alone a generational classic.

Maddin's singular humor and fabulous black-and-white mise-en-scene can't sustain this fever dream beyond its initial fascination, making for an intriguing transitional work unlikely to broaden his audience.

Poised between revisionist fairy tale and smirking sendup, this gaudy, over-frosted cream puff of a movie half-heartedly positions its famous heroine as a dagger-wielding proto-feminist, yet ultimately suffers the same fatal flaw as Julia Roberts' evil queen: It doesn't really care about anything except how pretty it looks.

A fitfully creepy, overly protracted chiller that plays more like a noncommittal sampler of horror techniques than the vivid nightmare it's clearly aiming for.

It's hard not to be moved by the words of love, gratitude and resilience spoken by earthquake/tsunami survivors and volunteers in Pray for Japan. But well-meaning platitudes go only so far in this sincerely felt, raggedly structured compilation of footage.

A watchable enough picture that feels content to realize someone else's vision rather than claim it as its own. Any real sense of risk has been carefully ironed out: The PG-13 rating that ensures the film's suitability for its target audience also blunts the impact of the teen-on-teen bloodshed.

A likable enough lark that rarely achieves outright hilarity.

Alas, even Murphy's largely wordless, physically adroit performance can't redeem this tortured exercise in high-concept spiritualist hokum.

The key to Seuss' tales, as with all good fables, is not only their cleverness but their surpassing elegance and simplicity, qualities that this busy, over-cluttered contraption of a movie seems entirely uninterested in replicating.

Viewers unconvinced by the "war is a drug" doctrine set forth by Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" will find it amply corroborated by the self-admitted adrenaline junkies here, whose collective war-reporting experience spans an astounding number of overseas conflicts from Sarajevo and Chechnya to El Salvador and Libya.

In contrast with the fragmented kineticism of Paul Greengrass' "Bourne" movies, there's no existential dimension to the shattered-glass aesthetic here; it's just raw, chaotic action, inelegantly shot and staged but no less unnerving for it.

This family-friendly outing captures the story's human snowball effect with a measure of sly, satirical wit, if also an excess of boilerplate subplots and jokey '80s details.

Mackenzie's second collaboration with Ewan McGregor (following 2003's "Young Adam") tritely tosses together two indifferently conceived characters against a backdrop of global panic that generates no urgency.

This cloddishly contrived suspenser is too busy to bore, but too farfetched to thrill, combining routine heist-thriller machinations with dialogue that often thuds like a body hitting asphalt.

This solid if disposable genre exercise maintains a hard-driving line of action and a commitment to one-damned-thing-after-another storytelling that carries it past any number of narrative speedbumps and preposterous detours.

Lovely but listless.

Though its glacial pacing will represent a significant hurdle for many viewers, the film grows steadily more involving as dawn breaks and the men make their way back home, and its unflinching observations of the legal and medical establishment at work frequently rivet. Visually, it's as gorgeous a film as Ceylan has made.

Scene by scene, The Flowers of War is an erratic and ungainly piece of storytelling, full of melodramatic twists and grotesque visual excesses (a bullet pierces first a stained-glass window and then a girl's neck), which are nonetheless delivered with startling conviction.

Though sufficiently well made to suggest a viable career behind the camera for debutante writer-director Angelina Jolie, In the Land of Blood and Honey seems to spring less from artistic conviction than from an over-earnest humanitarian impulse.

This beautifully composed picture brings a robust physicality to tried-and-true source material, but falls short of the sustained narrative involvement and emotional drive its resolutely old-fashioned storytelling demands.

As classy a film as could be made from Stieg Larsson's sordid page-turner, David Fincher's much-anticipated return to serial-killer territory is a fastidiously grim pulp entertainment that plays like a first-class train ride through progressively bleaker circles of hell.

Pixar wizard Brad Bird's live-action debut serves up sights and setpieces of often jaw-dropping ingenuity and visual flair, but it's a movie of dazzling individual parts that don't come together to fully satisfying effect in the final stretch.

Gushing more blood and possessing more stamina than any number of Hollywood hack-'em-ups, writer-director Na Hong-jin's pulse-pounding, mordantly funny genre piece is at times messily convoluted, yet serious and full-bodied enough to achieve a genuinely tragic dimension.

This handsomely mounted picture is, at nearly 2 1/2 hours, far too long and indigestible for a film whose protagonist spends most of her screen time under house arrest.

As anthropology lessons go, Knuckle is strong stuff, and it's easy to accept Palmer's conclusion that the problem he's showing us may well have no solution.

An unexpected treat. Bright and perky, cheeky but never mean-spirited.

Though it retains the buoyant musical stylings and splendid visuals that made its predecessor so distinctive, this chatterbox of a sequel loses its way with a raft of annoying side characters for which the slender narrative framework provides far too indulgent a showcase.

While the film is drenched in atmosphere and packs a verbal and visceral punch, its relentless downward spiral makes for an overdetermined, not entirely satisfying character study.

This complex story from the early days of psychoanalysis engrosses and even amuses as it unfolds through a series of conversations, treatment sessions and exchanged letters.

All the more disappointing, then, that a story so pregnant with dramatic possibilities should wind up feeling like such an unconsummated opportunity. Drawn from Stephenie Meyer's polarizing, weirdly compelling fourth novel, the film is rich in surface pleasures but lacks any palpable sense of darkness or danger.

A mesmerizing companion piece to his 2008 debut, "Hunger," this more approachable but equally uncompromising drama likewise fixes its gaze on the uses and abuses of the human body, as Michael Fassbender again strips himself down, in every way an actor can, for McQueen's rigorous but humane interrogation.

Paring down narrative and character concerns in favor of a breathtaking application of pure thriller technique, Soderbergh's latest picture is a lean, efficient exercise tossed off with his customary sangfroid and wickedly dry sense of humor.

This vulgar romp is a generally harmless, heartwarming affair, a cinematic Christmas cookie almost sweet and flaky enough to cover the fact that it's laced with hash, cocaine and assorted bodily fluids, blood included.

Whereas 2007's well-traveled "Heima" reveled in scenic color imagery of the artists' homeland, this minimalist item strips the band down to its output, fashioning black-and-white performance footage into a uniquely spellbinding experience.

Temperance of a different sort, a willful abstention from trippy stylistic excess, is what makes this 1960-set Caribbean picaresque easily the most lucid screen adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's work, even if it's still several drafts shy of a fully developed yarn.

J.C. Chandor's precocious writing-directing debut is fastidious, smart and more than a bit portentous as it probes the human costs of unchecked greed.

Much as he did with Ruth Rendell's "Live Flesh," Almodovar has taken an ice-cold psychological thriller, penned by a novelist of far less humanistic temperament, and performed some stylistic surgery of his own, adding broad comic relief, overripe melodrama, outrageous asides and zesty girl-power uplift.

Resulting mish-mash of exposition and speechifying opts to summarize rather than dramatize; one spends nearly as much time reading indigestible lumps of onscreen text as one does listening to the often distractingly post-dubbed dialogue.

The real battle in Roman Polanski's brisk, fitfully amusing adaptation of Yasmina Reza's popular play is a more formal clash between stage minimalism and screen naturalism, as this acid-drenched four-hander never shakes off a mannered, hermetic feel that consistently betrays its theatrical origins.

A draggy, generally laugh-free outing that wastes a perfectly good Anna Faris.

This unwieldy drama of conscience in the wake of tragedy is hyperarticulate but rarely eloquent, full of wrenchingly acted scenes that lack credible motivation or devolve into shrill hectoring.

This deliberately paced psychological drama builds an ever-tightening knot of tension around an excellent Michael Shannon, here playing a family man slowly driven mad by apocalyptic visions that could be paranoid, prophetic or both.

This sloppily constructed horror-thriller lacks the satirical bite and action chops to skewer extreme-right-wing zealots with the gusto Smith clearly feels they deserve, instead evincing the verbal incontinence and slack tension that have long dogged the writer-director's work.

While the result is yet another story of African suffering told from a white do-gooder's perspective, this particular do-gooder is intrinsically fascinating enough to warrant attention, albeit more nuanced attention than he receives here.

Will Reiser's semiautobiographical script initially prescribes too artificial a story treatment for its characters but is rescued by a genial, low-key vibe that builds in sensitivity and emotion up through the final reels.

At once delicate and clumsy, tender and twee, Restless wraps the pain of grief and impending mortality in the balm of a teenage love story.

Intriguing but overly portentous drama, which seems far more taken with its own cynicism than most viewers will be.

An inventive marriage of ancient China and Agatha Christie, Detective Dee and the Mystery of Phantom Flame is a lavishly overwrought historical whodunit.

A satirical yet sensitive portrait of life in an evangelical Christian community, Higher Ground marks a startlingly bold directing debut for actress Vera Farmiga.

Joffe's first feature never shakes off the feel of a telepic with above-average production values, and its unsteady lead performances and often garish stylistic touches make a muddle of the source material's psychological acuity.

On a moment-by-moment basis, Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess make this long-arc love story viable, sometimes even vital. But the structural conceit proves more reductive than expansive, the big picture too overdetermined to really sweep the viewer away.

Picture needs every ounce of goodwill it can wring from Rudd's likable lead performance to offset a sour, borderline misogynistic streak for which scattered snickers offer only modest compensation.

If "Freaky Friday" had an impudent, foul-mouthed little brother, it would be The Change-Up, an often needlessly crass, bromance-oriented spin on the body-swap comedy.

This accomplished debut feature avoids most of the usual pitfalls, channeling its outrage into a tense, focused piece of storytelling with a powerful sense of empathy.

Adorable and annoying, patently unnecessary yet kinda sweet, it's a calculated commercial enterprise with little soul but an appreciable amount of heart.

A crusty jewel of a performance by Brendan Gleeson goes a long way toward enlivening an otherwise routine tale of murder, blackmail, drug trafficking and rural police corruption in The Guard.

Mawkish, clunky and unenlightening about female suffering in this or any generation.

It's an absorbing, vividly inhabited tale nonetheless, never exploiting its horrors but rather treating them as tough local realities.

With its accelerated rhythm, relentless flow of incident and wizard-war endgame, "Part 2" will strike many viewers as a much more exciting, involving picture than the slower, more atmospheric "Part 1."

The manner in which the central scheme plays out is predictably moronic, vulgar and juvenile, though the parties involved just about make up for it.

The desire to stay true to what was lovable and enduring about the originals is palpable throughout, down to the amusing storybook conceit of having the characters interact not only with the narrator (voiced by John Cleese), but also with the letters and punctuation marks on the page.

Out there, to say the least, but rescued from risibility by its well-matched lead performances and crazy low-budget ambition.

Movie stars may be less valued than they used to be, but it's still puzzling to see Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts stuck in a romantic comedy as flat-footed and tone deaf as Larry Crowne.

The result may still be a big, bloated spectacle, but it's a big, bloated spectacle you can just about follow.

The rare sequel that not only improves on but retroactively justifies its predecessor, this lightning-paced caper-comedy shifts the franchise into high gear with international intrigue, spy-movie spoofery and more automotive puns than you can shake a stickshift at, handling even its broader stretches with sophistication, speed and effortless panache.

Director Chris Weitz's problematic new picture, which, despite Demian Bichir's affecting lead performance and a strong feel for Los Angeles' Mexican-American communities, emerges an earnest and overly programmatic heart-tugger.

An attempt to infuse an earnest piece of comicbook lore with an irreverent, tongue-in-cheek sensibility yields decidedly mixed results in Green Lantern.

This efficiently assembled primer hardly counts as a revelatory dispatch from the old-vs.-new-media frontlines, but its ideas will engross anyone for whom the viability of traditional newsgathering remains a matter of pressing significance.

After undergoing some unfortunate mutations in recent years, a beleaguered Marvel movie property gets the smart, stylish prequel it deserves in X-Men: First Class.

A disturbing but nonjudgmental study of online addiction and the lure of manufactured identities.

Result is pure-grade art cinema destined primarily for the delectation of Malick partisans and adventurous arthouse-goers.

Less a movie than a ill-advised lab experiment in which classic children's stories are injected with Bond-movie stylings, inane wisecracks and martial-arts mayhem, this manic misfire takes storybook revisionism to ever more irritating ends.

Filtering the world's oldest paintings through the latest in cinematic technology, Werner Herzog delivers a one-of-a-kind art-history lesson in Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

A consistently amusing and not entirely vacuous stunt.

This superhero spin on a largely Eastern legend will appeal primarily to Asian genre aficionados on homevid.

This methodical courtroom drama is charged with impassioned performances and an unimpeachable liberal message. But its stodgy emphasis on telling over showing will limit its reach to Civil War buffs and self-selecting older viewers.

Even the Brit-wit chemistry of Russell Brand and Helen Mirren can't offset the self-conscious degree to which this tame, calculated effort sticks to its source.

Working on a richer and more intricate canvas than she's previously attempted, Kelly Reichardt has pulled off a rare thing with Meek's Cutoff -- a low-budget period Western with a bracing feminist spin.

An exuberantly crafted chase thriller that pulses with energy from its adrenaline-pumping first minutes to its muted bang of a finish.

Schnabel's signature blend of splintered storytelling and sobering humanism feels misapplied to this sweeping multigenerational saga.

Intermittently enjoyable hokum at best.

The candlelight flickers exquisitely even as the passions are slow to ignite in this spare, shrewdly acted but not especially vital retelling of Jane Eyre.

Animism, apparitions, out-of-body experiences, sex with a catfish -- there's all that and more in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's wonderfully nutty Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

Its fun first hour soon gives way to a leaden, expository approach that unwisely favors emotional stakes over speculative-fiction smarts.

A flashy, lunkheaded sci-fi extravaganza sure to appeal to teenagers who like their interplanetary warfare bloodless, their high-school soaps squeaky-clean and their numbers countable on one hand.

Beyond the occasional plot frissons and juicy supporting turns, it's an emotionally and psychologically threadbare exercise.

A welcome dose of honest silliness at a time when most family-oriented toons settle for smart-alecky.

Calmer and less shattering than his masterly psychodrama "Secret Sunshine" (2007), Poetry is a deceptively gentle tale with a tender ache at its center, as well as a performance from Yun Jung-hee that lingers long in the memory.

The key to enjoying Sanctum is to look, not listen.

There's no doubt Johnny Mad Dog means to leave the viewer with a visceral impression of its terrors, on that it largely succeeds. Whether that accomplishment deserves praise is more of an open question.

This high-end softcore thriller is juicily watchable from start to over-the-top finish, but its gleeful skewering of the upper classes comes off as curiously passe, a luxe exercise in one-note nastiness.

As it is, No Strings Attached is content to be sweet rather than edgy, to make you go "awww" instead of "hmmm."

Charming if not especially kid-friendly toon.

Not a particularly funny movie. Indeed, the true dilemma of this misguided seriocomedy lies in the filmmakers' confusion as to whether they're making a side-splitting bromance (nope) or an unsparing, warts-and-all look at screwed-up relationships (sort of).

That rare ensemble piece in which all four principals are not only compellingly drawn but handled with an astute sense of dramatic balance.

A lazy attempt to milk a few more laughs and bucks from the enormously lucrative property spawned 10 years ago by "Meet the Parents."

Comes off as a derivative wisecracking machine rather than a feat of sustained imagination.

A jagged little pill that, in the end, goes down too smoothly.

A bland and innocuous small-fry outing that retains a measure of the original Hanna-Barbera cartoon's charm, though scarcely enough to justify the time, expense and visual-effects trickery it must have taken to inflate an endearing 2D cartoon into a dopey 3D extravaganza.

The ever-perceptive writer-director further hones her gifts for ruefully funny observation and understated melancholy with this low-key portrait of a burned-out screen actor.

Tangled is snappily paced and easy enough to get wrapped up in, propelled by a set of jaunty, serviceable songs from venerable composer Alan Menken and lyricist Glenn Slater.

Like a beautifully tailored suit that starts to smell funny after a few minutes, this sumptuous but stultifying lark sets up a quasi-Hitchcockian intrigue between two strangers abroad, but smothers any thrills or sparks in a haze of self-regard.

Director David Yates spins the series' most expansive, structurally free-form chapter yet -- lumbering and gripping by turns, and suffused with a profound sense of solitude and loss.

This f/x-heavy third adaptation of the Christian-themed fantasy series feels routine and risk-averse in every respect, as if investment anxiety had fatally hobbled its sense of wonder.

The more the film implicates David, the more it distances itself and the viewer, playing out in the emotionally detached but sensationalistic, overripe manner of a tabloid freakshow.

Paul Haggis' middling fourth feature evinces a sometimes pulse-quickening fascination with procedural details, and climaxes with a good dose of swift, suspenseful filmmaking. But what was briskly diverting in the original has been rather laboriously overworked.

Fair Game serves up impeccable politics with a bit too much righteous outrage and not quite enough solid drama.

An audacious premise gets dangerously unstable execution in Four Lions, a ballsy but wobbly high-concept farce that sends up the bumbling schemes of a Blighty-based jihadist cell.

Although fiercely committed performances by Hilary Swank and Sam Rockwell provide director Tony Goldwyn's film with a core of emotional integrity, a less heavy-handed, more informative approach would have served them and the audience better.

A beguiling blend of the audacious and the familiar; it dances right on the edge of the ridiculous and at times even crosses over, but is armored against risibility by its deep pockets of emotion, sly humor and matter-of-fact approach to the fantastical.

An endearingly schizoid Frankenstein of a movie, by turns relentlessly high-spirited and darkly poignant.

The didactic presentation, grim speechifying and tacked-on love story all signify a less-than-healthy regard for the audience's intelligence.

It's a sign of that pic's dramatic durability that "Kid" manages to be as absorbing as it is, despite its nearly 2½-hour running time.

An amusing slice of existential whimsy with an Eastern European bent, Cold Souls posits a world in which humans can have their souls extracted and implanted in each others’ bodies.

In his first studio venture, Michael Winterbottom coaxes forth a staggering wealth of detail from this terse, methodical account of Pearl's kidnapping and murder in Pakistan.

Eschewing character arcs and talking heads in favor of a more poetic approach, this lyrical exercise in avant-garde entomology is the work of an intuitive filmmaker with an often hypnotic sense of composition.

Individual moments are not without their felicitous touches -- mainly due to the cast, which is rich to the point of improbability.

A fabulously designed underground metropolis proves more involving than the teenagers running through its streets in City of Ember, a good-looking but no more than serviceable adaptation of Jeanne Duprau's 2003 novel.

It's a Wonderful Afterlife is a movie to make Frank Capra roll over in his grave from indigestion.

A work of both modest enchantment and enchanting modesty, grounded in a classically Spielbergian realm where childlike wonderment crosses paths with the tough realities of young adulthood.

This intermittently effective thriller serves as a rickety vehicle for its two perfectly cast leads, working better as a slow-thawing two-hander than as a chilly ghost story.

The filmmakers fully retain their offbeat sensibility and attentiveness to character while providing perhaps the sharpest showcase yet for Zach Galifianakis' outsized talents.

For all its visual sweep and propulsively violent action, this bloodthirsty rendition of the Old English epic can't overcome the disadvantage of being enacted by digital waxworks rather than flesh-and-blood Danes and demons.

Plunges into a watery grave early on and spends roughly the next 100 minutes gasping for air.

Unsubtle, uneven and undeniably effective, this take-no-prisoners cancer weepie poses a fascinating moral quandary.

With an invaluable assist from Sam Rockwell, hilarious and wounding as a deadbeat dad who lands a high school coaching gig, it's the rare inspirational movie with more than just winning or losing on its mind.

This maddening yet deftly made, and finally disarming, documentary comes through with enough heart and hilarity to sell its celebrity-stalking shenanigans to genuinely moving effect.

Overplotted and underwhelming, Breaking Point is the type of movie that finds it necessary to invent a far-reaching legal/political conspiracy just so one guy can redeem himself by overthrowing it.

A dour study of terrorism, 1880s style, The Secret Agent represents an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's only London-based novel, the fidelity of which to the original text does not yield a terrifically exciting film.

Aiming for an Alexander Payne-style synthesis of wry comedy and unflinching character study, pic has been made with the utmost sincerity, but the frankly lugubrious material and barely compensating spasms of humor are all but impossible to warm to.

Filtering one school year through the eyes of three young instructors and a rookie administrator, this loosely scripted satire mostly steers clear of cheap shots and over-the-top gags, balancing its comic observations with a real measure of affection for teachers and students alike.

While only the converted will likely see the redemption behind the manipulation, picture delivers a strong enough dose of spiritual saccharine to yield solid if not heavenly returns from its trusty target audience.

Some literal-minded attempts at magical realism are redeemed by the film's emotional texture, winning chemistry between the tyke leads and scrupulous adherence to a childlike point of view.

A frequently mesmerizing if exceedingly strange coming-of-age odyssey.

Falls somewhere between stale retread and half-hearted parody of superhero-movie formulas.

A pair of beautifully mismatched lead performances elevate a predictable drama to unexpected resonance in The Favor.

A joyous, liberated approach to comedy, a genuine sense of the grotesque and pacing so relentless that even the less-than-uproarious bits don't overstay their welcome.

Sweetly amusing, gently anarchic and never mean-spirited.

Despite some clever virtual-reality concepts and projections about the next frontier of globalization, Alex Rivera's ambitious directing debut lacks the vision, or the budget, to pull off its fusion of sci-fi and aspirational saga.

A surprisingly shrewd and energetic romantic comedy.

The future looks alternately grim and hysterical in Aeon Flux, a spectacularly silly sci-fier that plays like "The Matrix" crossed with "The Island" and reinterpreted as a long-lost Michael Jackson video.

Uneven but not unpleasant.

This rambunctious paean to pot retains the trademark Apatow sweetness even as it careens from messy vulgarisms to even messier violence.

Marked by moments of remarkable stillness amid its emotional tumult, the film's classy, perceptive treatment of potentially maudlin material merits wider arthouse attention than it's likely to receive.

It's not the personal, distinctive portrait of misfit girlhood it could have been.

A moving, elegiac, deeply contemplative work that leaves the viewer not with a save-the-world checklist, but rather a spirit of hopeful reflection.

This sharply scripted study of a bereaved woman who literally wishes her partner back from the grave is an impressive directorial bow by British playwright Anthony Minghella. Despite surface similarities with Ghost pic has a different feel and theme.

Writer-director Nick Cassavetes' sprawling dramatization recklessly blurs the line between reconstruction and reality in ways that are admittedly interesting, if more than a little artistically suspect.

The crisply made feature delivers an involving if not always persuasive portrait of religious leaders in conflict.

A fastidiously grim ghost story that rattles the bones of the haunted-house genre and finds plenty of fresh (but not too bloody) meat.

Asch's first feature is intelligent, respectable yet curiously muted in tone and impact, never fully catching the viewer up in either its crime saga or its account of individual rebellion within an insular religious community.

The title says it all. Compact and exuberant, U2 3D may be no more than a pint-sized concert film with a lustrous surface, but the lensing is so vibrant and the music so buoyant, even nonfans may find their eyes popping and their heads bobbing.

Advocacy cinema at its most searingly direct, The Trials of Darryl Hunt is a powerful and unsettling chronicle of the 20-year struggle to free a man twice convicted of a crime he didn't commit.

Emotionally potent performances, gently offbeat humor and writer-helmer Max Mayer's assured touch guide this tender New York love story to a quietly hopeful conclusion.

So far-fetched as to make "Kindergarten Cop" look comparatively austere.

Revealing without being especially compelling, In Between Days offers a bleak, rigorously naturalistic portrait of an Asian-American teenager's physical and emotional dislocation.

Banking on the appealing chemistry of Diane Keaton and Queen Latifah -- with co-star Katie Holmes awkwardly upsetting the balance -- this strained heist comedy about three cash-strapped femmes is watchable enough for a few reels, but lacks the requisite wit and amoral energy to capitalize on its get-rich-quick premise.

Talky in the best sense, the film exhilarates with its lively, authentic classroom banter while its emotional undercurrents build steadily but almost imperceptibly over a swift 129 minutes. One of the most substantive and purely entertaining movies in competition at Cannes this year.

This ultra-gory speculative noir is, at its infrequent best, certifiably nuts; the rest of the time, it's one numbingly brutal slog.

Well-made, often intensely gripping genre piece.

This murky psychological suspenser manages the tricky feat of being as predictable as it is finally preposterous.

Snakes on a Plane is exactly the sort of tasteless, utterly depraved, no-nonsense sluts-and-guts extravaganza it was meant to be.

While roving interviewer Ben Stein extracts some choice soundbites from scientists on both sides of the creation-vs.-evolution debate, the film's flippant approach undermines the seriousness of its discourse, trading less in facts than in emotional appeals.

There's more genuine humor to be gleaned from saying "Woodcock" over and over again than from watching Mr. Woodcock, a wan comic effort barely elevated a few notches by Billy Bob Thornton's passive-aggressive villainy.

Saavedra is riveting as a servant whose unblinking focus on her routine masks a profound loneliness.

A serviceable picture that offers all the sumptuous visual pleasures of a historical costume drama, yet little in the way of actual history.

George A. Romero shows 'em how it's done in Land of the Dead, resurrecting his legendary franchise with top-flight visuals, terrific genre smarts and tantalizing layers of implication.

A picturesque adventure-comedy that quickly capsizes under the weight of its obnoxious slapstick, pedestrian dialogue and general unwillingness to rise above stock ideas and situations.

Not unlike the shiny snow globe at its center, The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause is a thing of consummate craftsmanship, a smoothly engineered and fundamentally lifeless object that's nevertheless capable of giving even the grinchiest moviegoers a brief attack of the warm-and-fuzzies.

Higher on stylistic dazzle than originality or coherence.

A dishy and engrossing peek inside the fashion world’s corridors of power -- every bit as slickly packaged as the publication it seeks to uncover.

An absorbing legal thriller that can't help but taste like exquisitely reheated leftovers.

Title refers not only to its heroine's physical gyrations but also her moral maneuverings as she strives to break out of her lower-class surroundings in this moody, intelligent take on conventional material.

Unsettles without illuminating, marred by narcotic pacing and a blank lead performance.

Filmmaker Daniel Karslake lobs a grenade into the culture wars with his heartfelt, provocative and unabashedly polemical For the Bible Tells Me So.

Thoroughly -- and sometimes justifiably -- infatuated with its own cleverness, this mistaken-identity thriller delights in narrative complication and Tarantino-esque self-awareness.

Well-meaning but dramatically lopsided tearjerker bogs down in generic teen angst and domestic squabbling.

Acquits itself well enough. Gratuitously gory and derivative to the core, Venom manages to deliver some effective frights in between large swaths of voodoo gibberish.

Bland, canned but studiously professional sequel retains most of the principals from Fox's family-friendly 2003 hit, including the ever-reliable Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt.

Though its forays into the subconscious may strike more adventurous cinematic palettes as precious and unimaginative, few will be able to resist Martin Freeman's appealing lead turn or the wry Brit wit that gives this fanciful confection a robust comic core.

Graced with some extra star wattage courtesy of Helen Mirren and Ed Harris, this diminishing-returns sequel sends Nicolas Cage on another quest to strike it rich, get young auds excited about history and solve puzzles that are generally less stimulating than yesterday's Sudoku.

Unable or unwilling to match the visceral chops and moral provocations of superior serial-killer chillers, Righteous Kill is content to be a twisty genre exercise; it's like "Seven" as reimagined by M. Night Shyamalan.

This dire battle-of-the-exes action-comedy severely tests audience goodwill by running an indulgent 110 minutes, crammed as it is with half-baked thriller subplots and aimless supporting characters, as if to distract from the central duo's nonstop bickering.

Appropriating all the external trappings of big-budget fantasy but none of the requisite soul, this leaden epic never soars like the CG-rendered fire-breather at the core of its derivative mythology.

Nowhere near as much fun as its title, playing out like an unusually obtuse episode of "The Wire."

Eco-activist documentaries don't get much more compelling than The Cove, an impassioned piece of advocacy filmmaking that follows "Flipper" trainer-turned-marine crusader Richard O'Barry in his efforts to end dolphin slaughter in Taiji, Japan.

The dancing is more dynamic than the plotting in Stomp the Yard, an energetic if formulaic underdog tale about warring black fraternities specializing in an intensely competitive style of step dancing.

Its unwieldy title notwithstanding, Zathura: A Space Adventure is arguably the best adaptation of a Chris Van Allsburg book to date.

A clumsy but inoffensive romantic comedy.

It has the irresistible freshness of a recipe that many have tried to copy and none have matched: a barbed, sprawling, scintillating vision of a society happily in thrall to its taste buds.

Impressively made and serious-minded to a fault, this physically imposing picture brings abundant political-historical dimensions to its epic canvas, yet often seems devoted to stifling whatever pleasure audiences may have derived from the popular legend.

Deeply intriguing but almost too-faithful adaptation of Philip K. Dick's nightmarish 1977 novel.

In short, this is a Shyamalan movie minus the bravado, the swagger; there are no audacious attempts to pull out the rug from under the audience, no ham-fisted lessons about the importance of religious belief or the power of storytelling.

Foster’s pistol-packing turn as an avenging dark angel nearly sustains director Neil Jordan’s grim vigilante drama through a string of implausibilities and occasionally trite psychological framing devices, with deft support from Terrence Howard as a sympathetic cop.

This cheeky update of a classic fairy tale boasts almost as many talking points as merchandising opportunities.

Brimming with fanciful ideas about life, romance and the rejuvenating power of music, Sueno sings a lovely tune but chokes on its own banal lyrics.