Kirk Honeycutt

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A muted psychological mystery where filmmaker Hilary Brougher's interest in "solving" a possible crime is superseded by her investigation into matters involving denial, free will and the physical and emotional burdens of pregnancy.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