Kirk Honeycutt

The details are what matters, and thanks to a cast of all-star British elders and a mischievous sense of humor, the filmmakers bring those details to vivid life.

The film's pretentious style and fractured storytelling preclude any audience involvement in the coy melodrama.

The film is nothing if not provocative.

The vigor and pace is electric, and the movie features three showy performances by Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning and Michael Shannon.

Everything today's young audiences are conditioned to want: incessant noise, jumpy editing, torrential music, shallow, overblown characters and sheer emptiness at its core. Imagine yourself trapped inside a two-hour video game, and you've got the Night Watch experience.

Amusing dark English comedy produces its share of chuckles.

An artistically arresting yet narratively lame and strangely unfocused cartoon aimed at older children and young adults.

Director Jean-Francois Richet shows a career in crime with pulse-pounding moments of pure cinema, then lets you decide what to make of this homicidal sociopath.

A fine dramatic comedy with fresh characters, witty dialogue and a keen interest in how relationships must have developed among frontier folks, tyrannical ranchers, no-nonsense lawmen and -- oh, yes -- the complicated women on that frontier.

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

The film isn't just not funny, it is off-putting.

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

A "soft" epic, a film touching on childhood fantasies with sturdy, unwavering characters driven to evil or good. More "Harry Potter," in other words, than "Beowulf."

For a man apparently making his first film, Woolard carries the movie like a pro. Cross your fingers that this is no fluke, for this guy could be a real comer.

All of this results in way too much relationship chatter and not nearly enough comedy, romance or even dysfunctional relationships. We want to laugh -- but at what?

Only one of the three episodes of the anthology film Eros delivers on the title's promise.

Director Robert Zemeckis not only deploys 21st century movie technology at its finest to turn the heroic poem into a vibrant, nerve-tingling piece of pop culture, but his film actually makes sense of Beowulf. In Zemeckis' hands, it's an intriguing look at a hero as a flawed human being.

It is truly a mess.

A thoughtful and reflective love story about the impact of time on true love.

The curious thing here is that Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor rewrote this long-in-development screenplay. Yet the authors of such smart comedies as "Sideways," "About Schmidt" and "Citizen Ruth" can't move the film away from the world of easy laughs and sitcom jokes into a realm where sexual prejudices and presumptions get examined in a whimsical yet insightful manner.

Beautifully acted and written so its themes are touched upon glancingly rather than with full force.

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.

If you're going to make a weepy, there's no reason you can't make it with intelligence and insight as the makers of My Sister's Keeper have done.

This remake turns a fondly remembered horror/thriller into a mild and tedious suspense film.

The film, while heartfelt and directed by multiple-Oscar nominee Lasse Hallstrom, is dramatically stillborn.

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

Hysterically funny yet melancholy comedy.

The film achieves its power through a careful gathering of crucial details, in wordless glances, cruelties of nature and of man and the relentless determination to gain the promised land.