Kirk Honeycutt

It skips merrily along the surface with its over-the-top vignettes but never seems to arrive at a destination. Nevertheless, the journey is more than half the fun as every actor attacks his role with relish.

Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers does a most difficult and brave thing and does it brilliantly. It is a movie about a concept. Not just any concept but the shop-worn and often wrong-headed idea of "heroism."

At the heart of the film is a powerful performance by the beautiful and most promising Hao Lei as its tempestuous, complex heroine.

So like much of this film, the viewer is turned into an observer. You never feel close enough to the action, either in the ring or in the kitchens, living rooms and tough streets where the story takes place. The characters engage you up to a point but never really pull you in.

A compelling and illuminating story of four people who form an unlikely and momentary friendship of considerable depth.

Downey plays off his own bad-boy image wonderfully. The writers give him great lines to work with and ditto that for his Girl Friday, Gwyneth Paltrow's Pepper Potts, whose own svelte lines cannot be improved on.

Reygadas has hitched his austere and protracted style to an allegorical tale of subtle strength and depth.

The film, narrated ably by Leonardo DiCaprio, who seems to share the audience's amazement at what is appearing onscreen, is over too quickly in a mere 43 minutes. So line up and see it again.

Indeed, White Swan/Black Swan dynamics almost work, but the horror-movie nonsense drags everything down the rabbit hole of preposterousness.

Simply lets the sinfully gorgeous music and emotions sweep over an audience.

Think of Please Give as a finely tuned short story with every glance and gesture full of suggestive meaning. Drama is not high on the agenda here. There is a bit of comedy and, briefly, sexual mischief even though it doesn't look like much fun.

One's appreciation of this film depends largely on one's ability to be amused by a Dadaist prankster and interest in the Pop Art scene in the middle of the last century.

Blind Shaft, a well-acted and well-produced film, is a quiet though searing indictment of contemporary China.

A sweet-natured holiday comedy that derives no small amount of specialness and energy from the fact that the movie offers a glimpse of contemporary American Indian life.

David Yates, in his go at the helm, throws the emphasis on the gathering storm clouds even as Harry and his fellow wizardry students make further discoveries involving the opposite sex.

The story itself is silly and exaggerated.

This exercise in style and tongue-in-cheek melodrama from Canada's iconoclastic Guy Maddin will be lionized by admirers for its audacity, but will wear thin for many audience members, who will find it tedious and repetitive.

One of the finest costume dramas in a long while.

Starts off an aggressively derivative sci-fi thriller, then morphs into an above-average chase melodrama.

Bielinsky is a most expressive director, achieving considerable nuances and depths of emotion with characters' looks, gestures, body language and silences.

The stroke of genius is, of course, the film's hero -- the big, lovable bear that is the Chinese panda.

Even the art house crowd will find the film off-putting not only because of its vagueness but because of its thoroughly unlikable characters.

Christian Bale plays Dieter Dengler and this is one of the actor's most complex and compelling performances.

This animated all-penguin musical is terrific fun.

An entertaining piece of supernatural nonsense whose sheer audacity disarms all (well, nearly all) skepticism.

This is a slicker, shallower exercise. It's hypnotic as it unfolds, but once the credit roll frees you from its grip, it doesn't bear close scrutiny.

This is a minor film from a master, which is disappointing, but nevertheless it has its charms, most notably in the acting by a cast of stage and screen veterans.

Whatever one's opinion of Johnston's art, this is documentary filmmaking at its finest.

If you were keeping score, it would be Quentin Tarantino 1, Robert Rodriguez 0.

It’s a film that doesn’t always work but when it does you almost hear an audible click. Violet & Daisy has its share of these ah-ha moments.

The results are entertaining -- up to a point.

Jones displays a firm hand at the helm -- you sense that he is well within his comfort zone in this environment -- and performances including his own are lively and convincing.

A muted psychological mystery where filmmaker Hilary Brougher's interest in "solving" a possible crime is superseded by her investigation into matters involving denial, free will and the physical and emotional burdens of pregnancy.

Exquisite storytelling, acting and visuals.

This is a pretty minor film from the filmmaker. It feels like more of an exercise in plotting and movie nostalgia than a story about real people.

The result is an insightful, exuberant, probing, long-winded and even exhausting look at what it takes for a performer to have a life in the theater.

This is the mother lode all action/suspense directors search for and Lee, who usually doesn't work in that genre, has hit it.

A fanciful and melancholy portrait of exiled Russian poet Joseph Brodsky.

From its uninspiring title -- and certain turnoff for young males -- to its limp slapstick and uneven acting, A Cinderella Story arrives with a dull thud.

The character and geographical jumps leave you in a muddle with thinly sketched personalities and confusing plot points. Worse, dialogue dense with nuance and shaded meaning flies by too quickly.

If there is a disappointment, it is this: The anticipation may have exceeded the realization. It's a damn good commercial movie, but it is not the film that will revive the musical or win over the world.

In the end, an audience has far too much knowledge about Gregoire's movie projects and finances and far too little about what makes anyone here tick.

The film does not stand up to the current crop of music/concert films like "U2 3D," which brilliantly uses 3-D to show the Irish band in concert so as to encapsulate its relationship to its fans, each other and their own music, and "CSNY: Deja Vu," which hones in on the political connection Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young have to their music.

Anurag Kashyap's Black Friday is a superb and devastating piece of cinema that with justification can be compared favorably to Gillo Pontocorvo's classic "The Battle of Algiers" in its dispassionate yet sweeping journalistic inquiry into cataclysmic social and political events.

Everyone involved -- actors, crew, director Susanne Bier and screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen in their second collaboration -- are in peak form in this unflinching look at repressed feelings and emotional devastation.

The writing is often clever and the overall production playful and intelligent.

A hit-and-miss affair. It has moments of unexpected, offbeat comedy, but most of the time neither the characters nor the situations engage the viewer.

The film does achieve moments of catharsis, but it can be heavy going.

It's workmanlike and engrossing, but what sticks in the mind are Frank and Richie, not what anybody does.

As convincing as the manipulated footage of the President's death in Chicago in October 2007 is, the movie itself cannot be more unconvincing in its approach.

Rock solid performances by up-and-coming German actress Julia Jentsch as Sophie and Alexander Held ("Downfall") as Mohr along with an excellent cast of supporting players insure that no one mistakes this for a lifeless docu-drama.

This is a performance without the histrionics and emotional outbursts that accompany most portrayals of addiction. This feels closer to the truth.

While winning no points for originality, Baumbach and his co-conspirator in the script, Jennifer Jason Leigh -- have created an all-too-convincing portrait of a 40-year-old man in emotional freefall.

What is lightly sketched in the novel, where much is left to the imagination, blossoms into full-blown, richly detailed life in the movie.

In the end, this is a smart movie that could have been smarter. The script feels like it was a draft or so away from total clarity and focus. But the energy of the cast and a dive into an unfamiliar world make the movie rather addictive.

By keeping things simple and understated, director Chris Weitz and screenwriter Eric Eason have crafted a little gem where humanity is observed with compassion, not condescension.

Making a vampire movie without any bite is like removing guns from a Western.

A fascinating film even if it never completely pins him (Verges) down.

Demonstrating a mastery of the medium that belies his status as a first-time feature filmmaker, writer-director Ali Selim has crafted in Sweet Land a tale of pure Americana that speaks both to the immigrant experience and the nature of love.

The movie does say a lot about female athletes and the changing role of women in American society, but in aggressively pursuing the formula, writer-director-producer Tim Chambers is prone to exaggeration and a moralizing tone.

The documentary is an act of political activism. Guggenheim and his politically conscious producers, Laurie David, Lawrence Bender and Scott Z. Burns, have no interest in either challenging Gore's viewpoint or giving opposing opinions equal time. The film is simply a conduit for Gore's message.

Beat has a moody, furtive quality that jibes perfectly with the perplexed life of a pianist-gangster.

A sometimes clever, other times grating mix of live action and animation that plays tricks with levels of movie reality as the world of fairy-tale animation invades contemporary New York.

Reunites one of the best voice casts ever for an animated film to create a shrewd entertainment that again successfully aims its jokes at various age groups.

Lights will put in more appearances at festivals before achieving a brief theatrical window for Kaurismaki devotees to gaze through. Most will do so with discouragement.

A 3D movie that will intrigue kids and adults alike but might play raggedly in both camps.

Catch Me If You Can represents a distinct change of pace for director Steven Spielberg. This is a lighter movie than he has made in a long while, and you sense his relief that nothing much is at stake.

Not since Woody Allen's "Radio Days" has anyone created such a cinematic Valentine to the wonderfully imaginative medium of radio as A Prairie Home Companion.

It's all Kovacs for 94 minutes. Which means the viewer experiences a perilous tug-of-war between annoyance at the extreme artificiality of the conceit and admiration of the gutsy performance by an actress who must, literally, carry the movie. Annoyance wins out, unfortunately.

Dick's strongest points are that these raters receive no training and are given no standards by which to judge movies. Experts in child psychology or media or social studies are not consulted. Nor are they allowed on the board. The days of counting F-words or pelvic thrusts need to end, and in the film's quieter moments, Dick makes this case compellingly.

A high-wire act that almost slips as it edges perilously closer and closer to the edge of improbability. But it never does.

Michael Moore intelligently, comically and incisively diagnoses and calls for the treatment of a sick U.S. health care system.

Challenges audiences with an unrelieved portrait of self-destruction and horrific violence. American movies don't get much grimmer than this.

Maybe Humpday needed more characters and a less claustrophobic atmosphere. Maybe the film needed to be bolder and break a few boundaries itself. Maybe it could have better explained why these two men still need to be friends. Whatever the case, it certainly needed a better payoff.

The film falls into an interesting intersection between documentary and feature, between reality and fiction.

Delicious slapstick, droll wit and terrific characters make Aardman's first venture in CG cartooning a great success.

In a summer of remakes, reboots and sequels comes Inception, easily the most original movie idea in ages.

Doillon never lets his characters slide into cliche. They act and react from a wealth of contradictory impulses and long-standing prejudices in this masterful tale of frustrated desire.

A mesmerizing, richly nuanced inquiry into Israel's revenge of the Munich massacre of its athletes.

By avoiding sentimentality, Millions emerges as a simple tale told with sympathy for a child's point of view.

The film is a deft, graceful and often poignant story of a woman's quest to find her own identity and a spiritual sanctuary that will give her life hope and meaning.

If you liked the play and the compelling ideas Bennett kicks around, the movie makes for an intellectually invigorating couple of hours.

A temperate, evenhanded perhaps overly timid film about an intemperate time in South Africa.

The film never ventures, even once, into a situation that does not reek of comfy familiarity.

Eye-popping yet ultimately thin and shallow as a page in a graphic novel.

The movie boils down to one character, acting under enormous pressures of space and time, racing to solve a mystery. In this case, that may be good enough.

The film is thought-provoking but not terribly involving.

For all the work that went into the whimsical creatures and painterly palette, the voice actors more or less steal the show.

Brilliantly sung by an extremely talented lyric theater company in Cape Town called Dimpho Di Kopane. Whether this all works will be a matter of opinion -- mine is that it does not -- but the experiment is fascinating.

In this film, everything comes down to the acting. Chris Cooper, one of our finest screen actors, gets inside the mysterious traitor. Ryan Phillippe has just the right gung-ho determination tempered with a touch of naivete as O'Neill. Meanwhile, Laura Linney nails the role of a career agent.

You might call the film "Rear Window Times 100."

This is the perfect illustration of the banality of most scare movies.

A fascinating, mythological western.

Marks Disney's rediscovery of a strong narrative loaded with vibrant characters and mind-bending, hilarious situations.

The film feels contained — its design, visual effects and cinematography all in the right balance and proportion. Spider-Man is the hero, and not some element in the filmmaking process.

This is an accomplished suspense-action piece that touches on universal themes of brotherhood, exile, love and honor.

A somber, often downbeat depiction of human savagery and treachery as well as of human kindness. Writer-director Anthony Minghella has meticulously crafted an intimate epic.

Christian McKay's impersonation of young Orson Welles is sensational in this enjoyable, though slight, historical fiction about a teen who spends a memorable week with the legendary wonder.