Kirk Honeycutt

Is Kill Bill a homage to great Asian action movies? Yes. Is Tarantino trying to outdo his cherished masters (on a budget that dwarfs their films)? Of course. Is there any other point of any of this? Let's see "Vol. 2."

This is a discouragingly limp movie in which nothing is at stake.

Infamous gives you the unique opportunity to see how two sets of filmmakers can take exactly the same story, make extremely tough though different choices in emphasis and tone and achieve brilliant movies.

The filmmakers were right to believe that a live-action version of this story would have failed to achieve the universality Persepolis does.

The issue of sexual politics so dominates the story that it's a relief when an emotional showdown involves family rather than workplace issues. Not so surprisingly, these are the movie's best scenes.

A sobering yet hysterically funny documentary.

The movie suffers perhaps from too many characters and subplots but all the actors appear to have fun with their characters.

The guy knows how to make a heart-pounding movie; he just happens to be a cinematic sadist.

Hopkins' performance flat-out works.

A downbeat story line layered with philosophical discourses will restrict the audience to fans of the animated genre.

There is something undeniable hypnotic and bewitching about Tatia Rosenthal's $9.99, which if nothing else is a candidate for the most unusual film of 2008.

The new gimmick here is that all the flying body parts and absurd impalements come in 3D. And that's about as inspired as anything gets in this edition. Story and character get chucked to the sidelines as the arena has room for only death scenes.

This is, in a way, a real horror film about everyday things and a disconnected family.

Will richly award locals with sly in-jokes and a wonderful comic performance by Bruhl. Non-Germans will certainly get the essence of the humor but may find the movie long and repetitive.

In retelling the still-astonishing story of the political career of Eliot Spitzer, a shooting star whose spectacular crash might forever obscure his accomplishments, Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney has all the ingredients for a potboiler: greed, corruption, sex, power, overweening ambition and jaw-dropping hubris.

A pitch-perfect ensemble comedy that burrows deep into the mind-set of white, upper middle-class Angelenos, anxious to strike the right balance among career, family, love life and money but never quite pulling it off.

His heart -- and musical soul -- is in the right place, but the film makes you at times uncomfortable with black and Southern stereotypes that may hinder some from fully enjoying an otherwise benign and cheerful tall tale of the Saturday night when rock came to rural Alabama.

The final episode of George Lucas' cinematic epic "Star Wars" ends the six-movie series on such a high note that one feels like yelling out, "Rewind!" Yes, rewind through more than 13 hours of bravery, treachery, new worlds, odd creatures and human frailty.

This fascinating relationship gets smothered in pointlessly long takes, repetitive scenes, grim Western landscapes and mumbled, heavily accented dialogue.

The movie entertains, but it's a shallow entertainment where you have no rooting interest in the outcome.

Awesome will please fans of the band, but expect little crossover to nonfans. No new ground is broken here. From a cinematic point of view, Awesome represents simply a monumental postproduction salvaging effort.

New wave Bollywood at its best, a Hindi-language film from a Mumbai studio that shows the influence of American and foreign films.

May be too clever for its own good. Essentially, it's the story of weekend scientists who build a time machine in a suburban garage. But this nearly gets lost in a miasma of technical jargon and scientific conjecture.

It's a pleasure to experience Scorsese as a circus master. One just hopes he doesn't continue in this vein.

A slow meander through the mostly stagnant life of a character hardly worth the bother.

The 3-D footage of Titanic does speak volumes, and sometimes the sheer fussiness of all the ghosts and archival images get in the way. As huge as the Imax screen is, when six different images vie for one's attention, it looks cluttered.

Now Batmanglij and Marling deliver another terrific and engrossing venture into speculative fiction, Sound of My Voice.

Moore stays "on message" here from first shot to last. There is no debate, no analysis of facts or search for historical context. Moore simply wants to blame one man and his family for the situation in Iraq the United States now finds itself in…So the real question is not how good a film is Fahrenheit 9/11 -- it is undoubtedly Moore's weakest -- but will a film help to get a president fired?