Kyle Smith

As a French Resistance thriller, Free Men is so-so, but it is driven by a mischievously interesting idea: that Muslims and Jews have more in common than they normally allow.

In The Kid With a Bike, Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne offer a sly but finally banal update of the Italian neorealist classic "The Bicycle Thief."

[Director Kaye's] dedication to the material is admirable, but his tactic of following one dismal development with an even more depressing one comes to seem monotonous and pointless.

The funniest movie I've seen in more than a year.

Once it calms down and stops trying to be funny, it turns into a thoughtful and intriguing drama.

When they came in to pitch A Thousand Words, no doubt by calling it "Jerry Maguire" meets "Groundhog Day," a studio exec should have raised the palm of rejection and said, "When you stop being sadly derivative and write an original idea that's as good as those two, come back."

Demonstrating the limits of being too clever in a genre movie, the art-house chiller Silent House lets the tenseness of its first act trickle away.

Credit Westfeldt, who is also the writer and director, with a classic setup for farce, brightly executed.

So there is courage and cheekiness here. What there is not is a story, or much insight or even anger; anyone expecting an indictment of Iran will be sorely disappointed.

This charming kid's-eye movie, full of comical and vivid detail about the lives of these cheerful children, has the loose, lanky feel of a memoir and of French New Wave films.

Tim & Eric seem driven by a hatred of the audience and a wish to punish the same. Every episode of every sitcom I've ever seen is funnier than this movie, and I used to watch "Just Shoot Me."

The Lorax is awful, like chronic disease.

Refreshing as it is to see the military portrayed as something other than a band of neurotics and creeps, there's a reason this brand of rah-rah and bang-bang didn't outlast the age of Whitesnake and Marty McFly.

The only part of this movie anyone's ever going to remember is the pair of scenes in which Ghost Rider pees flame.

This indie documentary is egregiously Hollywood in spirit. That a take-charge white football coach can buck up a place like Manassas HS with some gridiron grit is a lie we want to believe.

The cheesehead noir Thin Ice presents Greg Kinnear in a role that's almost too easy for him: He's a morally flexible Wisconsin insurance salesman for whom honesty is the least-likely policy.

Like "Once," this film is a tender little piece of heartbreak.

With great power comes the responsibility to make a decent movie, but the mysterious force running through Chronicle is the power to supersuck.

How cheap-looking is the modern-day romantic tragedy Private Romeo? Take a couple of friends to see it, and the amount you spend may exceed the amount the filmmakers did.

Safe House may strike you as a brilliant movie, provided you've seen fewer than, say, 10 spy thrillers.

Banal at the beginning and preposterous at the close, the British horror film Kill List jumbles together wildly incongruous ingredients to create a dramatic mush.

This jagged blob of a movie features a solo dance in the 1930s scored to the Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant," several scenes of a rich Manhattan woman chatting with the ghost of Wallis Simpson and a Sotheby's auction that draws a crowd reaction of the kind associated with "Family Feud." Yet I found the movie fascinating. Except for the boring bits.

France's Declaration of War has it all: comedy, romance, fantasy, musical interludes and a child with a brain tumor. Wait - what?

Forsaken in a cruel wilderness, a man looks to God and pleads for help. Receiving no answer, he says, "F- -k, I'll do it myself."

This strange and eerie noir is more a collection of knockout scenes than a fully realized story.

Haywire is a wannabe, or rather a wanna-B, and that B is for "Bourne." As each imitator comes and (rapidly) goes, my appreciation for the best superspy franchise deepens. Even top directors - in this case Steven Soderbergh - can't figure out the trick.

The French affection (affectation?) for conversational film reaches absurd proportions in the talkathon Domain.

Romantic comedies are often as contrived and irritating as Loosies, but few feature a lead character so lacking in appeal.

Contraband aims to be dumb fun but gets only the first half right.

For a sex movie, Norwegian Wood is about as dry as a pocketful of sand. Even for a film set in a land that considers paper folding an exciting activity, this is dull stuff.

Soulfully directed by Michael Cuesta ("L.I.E."), Roadie is short on narrative momentum, but it's a perfectly attuned character study of this rock relic and his middle-aged sorrows.

In the compelling but slow-moving Iranian film A Separation, a downbeat family drama of no particular distinction gradually turns into a mystery that raises painful moral questions. There may be several guilty parties.

Sincerely directed by one woman (Phyllida Lloyd, who did "Mamma Mia!") and smartly written by another (Abi Morgan), the film stars an unsurpassable Meryl Streep, whose ability to empathize with her characters has never been more gloriously impassioned than it is in this titanic performance.

So the film is a head-spinning mix of dead babies and romantic dinners, pillow talk and mass executions. Blood and honey don't taste right together.

It's not a knock on Steven Spielberg to say he is history's finest maker of children's movies. His capacity to evoke simplicity, awe, beauty and unconditional love are his genius, and his vision of the children's story War Horse is a gorgeous, majestic fable about a boy who yearns to be reunited with his steed.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is, as you'd expect, rubbish, but the word is slightly too kind. The David Fincher film (like the very similar Swedish one - released in the US just last year! - and the book) is not even good rubbish.

Depravity and addiction can be dramatic and fascinating, or they can be as they are in this week's indie filthathon Cook County.

So moron-friendly they should have called it "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Checkers." The skill level in the script is elementary school, my dear Watson.

Thick-necked, booze-loving and angry men beat each other with their naked fists: so far, so Irish. But the feuding clans in the documentary Knuckle actually think their habits of antagonizing one another can be fixed by just one more problem-solving brawl.

I still can't believe I Melt With You went there. Over the top, off the hook and just plain bonkers, it makes its mark.

Thanks to his (Oldman) mastery, and Alfredson's, no film this year left me hungrier for a sequel.

It's smart, funny, agreeably perverse and simultaneously abrupt and exhausting.

I'm not, finally, sure what Leigh is saying - but she is a filmmaker with a voice.

Moreover, in attempting to update the play to a buzzing CNN world, Ralph Fiennes proves that as a director, he makes a fine actor.

As the movie drags on, though, it takes on a throbbing, sick monotone. This isn't a concert, it's a bass guitar solo, all thumping blackness.

Ho-ho-huh? Arthur Christmas is an animated kiddie comedy that delivers all the wonder you'd expect in a movie about a guy delivering one package. Maybe they should have called it "UPS Man: The Movie."

Young Hugo (Asa Butterfield), a boy who literally lives inside the clocks he manages in a grand Paris train station in the 1930s, embodies one problem that bedeviled even Dickens: He's boringly nice.

There are several adorable musical numbers that make excellent use of Adams. Segel's dancing is . . . well, he reminded me of a huge star: Big Bird.

Fascinating though it is, the movie is thin on historical materials.

Even at a supposed celebration, the well-bred and well-off aren't really happy at all. So the title is ironic. Thanks for that profound insight.

True, the stars are very good at what they do, but so what?

"Happy Feet" was one of the greatest and most original animated films, but the sequel can't even decide what it's about for the first 40 minutes.

Wince-worthy as Guttenberg is, he cannot be accused of being worse than the amateurish direction and the trite script (both by Allie Dvorin) stuffed with insufferable romcom banter and putrid dirty jokes. Some films go straight to video; this one should have bypassed that step and headed for the incinerator.

The magical mystery that is Paul McCartney may never be solved, but for fans (the line forms behind me), the new documentary The Love We Make includes some memorable displays of his world-conquering charm.

Take a stroll down London Boulevard if you enjoy surly, smart, hard-edged British crime movies like "Sexy Beast" and "Croupier."

Werner Herzog looks at the death penalty in Into the Abyss, and as is almost always the case, to look through his eyes is to marvel.

If it's violence ye seek, and violently confused storytelling, look ye no further.

It has a pleasing smallness -- it's cinematic chamber music -- that almost makes you overlook its inability to really explain its subject.

Killing Bono begs to be remade with A-list stars but, given Neil's history of near-misses, probably won't be.

This movie doesn't get huffy, it gets laughs.

The indie road movie Janie Jones is billed as "inspired by the true story" of its writer-director, David M. Rosenthal. Impossible. No one's life is this boring.

This future looks awfully passé: The stimulus didn't work out. Neither did 1917 Russia.

The legend of Thompson is immortal, though, and it'll fall to each generation to jam him into its own mold. Depp and Robinson's view is that Thompson was like a mullet: a party in the back but all business upfront.

This time the execs are lobbying us, yet the public grows increasingly furious as our tax dollars fund corporate welfare, bailouts and dumb ideas like the $41,000 golf cart that is the Chevy Volt.

This small movie carries great allegorical weight as it echoes the Manson Family, the long list of failed utopian communes that culminated in Bolshevism and the one-child policy that in China has prevented the births of untold numbers of girls.

Everything plays out exactly as you'd expect in a cheerful, well-meaning movie in the style of something made for the Disney channel.

Making a true story of social injustice into a gripping narrative requires more imagination than is contained in this well-intentioned but uninspired effort.

The shtick movie Paranormal Activity 3 is the horror equivalent of vaudeville comedy: a little patter, a little pie in the face, repeat.

Cage and director Joel Schumacher, who has fallen so far from the A-list that he provokes a demand for new letters of the alphabet after Z, have each found their cinematic soulmates.

Misshapen, malodorous and firing its grubby tentacles across the room in a feeding frenzy, The Thing reminded me of a roomful of journalists immediately after someone announces Open Bar. The movie's victims disappear like cocktail peanuts and without a whole lot more significance.

Footloose won me over early, with a sequence in which the hero gets all heavy metal while restoring his badass ... VW Bug.

Sorry, but if your sensibility is pure trashy camp, don't expect anyone not to laugh when you try to be earnest.

Real Steel is to action what the Anthony Weiner habit was to sex: It's so virtual, so distant from the thrill, that you wonder what the point is. Do you really want to pay to watch an actor playing a kid who in turn plays what amounts to a video game?

This film is narratively inert (we spend a lot of time listening to the same questions being asked over and over) and, like virtually all docs in its genre, less than vigorous in its pursuit of truth.

This is essentially a student film offering nothing but absurdly contrived coincidence.

Recalling the lesson about bringing a knife to a gun fight, a British documentary filmmaker brings a spoon to a hatchet job in the film Sarah Palin: You Betcha!

For a 90-minute movie, Margaret has a thin story. So it's unfortunate that it runs 2 1/2 hours.

In Machine Gun Preacher, Gerard Butler says, "I've done a lot of things I'm not proud of that hurt a lot of people." But enough about "The Bounty Hunter," "The Ugly Truth" and "P.S. I Love You."

It's a shame that, after nearly 40 years of writing about rock, Cameron Crowe is receptive to the clichés of the genre.

A reasonably uplifting kids movie if you don't think about it too much. I get paid to think about things too much, and effective as the movie is, it nevertheless left me slightly put off.

A snarly Euro-thriller with crust under its fingernails and bad breath. It doesn't care if you like it, which is why I kind of do.

Actual abduction may be preferable to the movie of the same name, but only if your kidnappers don't torture you by forcing you to watch it.

The film achieves near-poignancy in its final act, when we finally meet one of the two elderly tipplers, plus a friend who occasionally stayed at their apartment and endured their shouting matches.

Jane's Journey is an exceedingly graceful and dignified sleep aid.

The main reason to see it is for the hilariously nasty uses it devises for a bear trap, nail gun, etc.

The good news about I Don't Know How She Does It is that it's so bad that it's another ovary-punch to the formula chick flick. Bring on more films like "Bridesmaids."

A thoroughly amateurish effort at capturing clued-in and smartass teens.

All of the actors are enjoying themselves, and the movie is stuffed with history, atmosphere and vivid characters. What's in short supply, though, is laughter.

A cheap exploitation picture wrapped in miles and miles of stale would-be Oscar scenes.

The real mystery is this: Even if you find this guerrilla art project utterly fascinating, why would anyone bother to release an incomplete film about it?

Chlamydia, gonorrhea and Jason Sudeikis are three reasons to stay well clear of A Good Old Fashioned Orgy, but they're not the only ones.

A bit more context about some of the topics the witnesses discuss would have been welcome, but Whitaker's stark, unshowy style is probably the most effective way to approach 9/11.

Graham Greene's guilt-and-gangsters tale "Brighton Rock" gets an even more melodramatic telling than in the 1947 film version courtesy of first-time director Rowan Joffe, whose histrionic adaptation screams "student film" with practically every frame.

Harks back to a 1960s idea of what a horror film should be.

So this bourgeois-bohemian movie is, in a way, as serene in its obliviousness to the exterior world as its man-child subject. It's not essential, but it is endearing.

Luc Besson keeps ralphing up scripts about beautiful lady killers, but that doesn't mean you have to keep seeing them. Case in point: Colombiana...[a] dull cable-TV-quality item.

A dumbass "Kick-Ass," the superhero comedy Griff the Invisible sits on the screen like a steaming lump of Kryptonite.

Gentle, tender and very French, The Hedgehog is cinematic poetry -- too bad about that prosaic plotting.

Feeble comic one-liners and slow pacing combine for a routine fangfest in this remake of the 1985 film.

It has a certain commitment to its cause, and by that I mean it supplies the necessary flayings, slayings, beheadings and, um, a be-nose-ing, all of it dancing to the tune of those amusingly stilted He-Man declaratives - King James Bible cadences applied to comic-book visions. It knows it's a B movie, and gets on with it.

It isn't every day that one witnesses, via a camera mounted with the driver, some of the final images in a man's life before he crashes into a wall at enormous speed. Whether you'll feel good about yourself after watching is up to you.

Fine for fans? Sure. This stuff is crack for fans. Crack is really bad!

Final Destination 5, which, despite its lowbrow story, turns out to be one of the fastest-moving films of the year, is a suspenseful and macabre exercise in dread for the absurdly cosseted.

Tenderness and good intentions don't necessarily add up to a movie.

A pointless drama that trafficks in cliché.

They probably should have called it "Beneath the Dignity of the Planet of the Apes," but Rise of the Planet of the Apes is tolerable if you'll just keep in mind that the original feature was an overachieving B-movie.

The movie is more a situation than a narrative, and it's repetitive and depressing. One interrupter -- a murderer who did 14 years in prison -- says of the program, "In essence, it's just a Band-Aid." At best: One of his colleagues gets shot in the back for his peacekeeping effort.

How dark is this comedy? It's a big hit in Ireland.

Really it's just a trashy bid to be the "Scarface" of Mesopotamia.

Pity the crowds expecting another cute comedy like "Date Night" who wind up at Crazy, Stupid, Love. It'll be like asking for a burger and getting served escargot.

File this one in the same category of edgy Long Island comedies as the equally smart 2009 Alec Baldwin film "Lymelife."

Sarah's Key belongs to the Holocaust for Dummies section of Harvey Weinstein's History for Dummies series of mer etricious glossy dramas that ransack global events and turn them into middlebrow women's weepies to fill his trophy case.

Adding goofy uncertainty to shoulders as wide as the East River makes for a disarming hero in one of the spiffiest WWII action yarns ever to march out of Hollywood.

This is all as pure and sunny as lemonade.

The documentary Tabloid shows that an oddball lead character and a smirky style do not necessarily add up to a complete movie.

Deep, disturbing and funny.

Coincidence and contrivance are the name of the game throughout.

Idiocy can be funny, but let's not forget that for all of this movie's aspirations to be out-there, it relies on the staple of the sitcom mentality.

The film's attempt at a sort of beautiful anguish works best in its middle section. It takes far too long to get going, and it doesn't have much of an ending.

In the appalling documentary If a Tree Falls, a narrator referring to an arson attack by the Earth Liberation Front solemnly intones, "In one night, they had accomplished what years of picketing and writing had never been able to do." Well, yes -- terrorism does make short work of red tape, doesn't it?

Lenny this is not. Still, it's nice to know that the son of a lawyer and a microbiologist can get into Harvard and make something of himself.

Things are so dull, rote and humorless that when signboards in a European scene read "Mondiale Grand Prix," I at first thought they said "Mondale Grand Prix," which sounds like an unwanted award this movie could easily win.

There's no way to put this gently: Watching people slam their heels and toes on the boards while drifting around the floor is about as fascinating as watching the carousel rotation in your favorite microwave oven.

As Popper himself notices, his and the penguins' saga gets so endearing that it could have been narrated by Morgan Freeman.

The American Muslim comedian Ahmed Ahmed does lots of jokes about how he isn't a terrorist. How odd: As I sat through his tepid act, I could have sworn he was bombing.

The loose feel and sense for random comedy (as when a bore suddenly starts lecturing Coogan about the geological details of the cliff he is standing on) are spiffy.

The mystery is why the filmmakers thought third-graders or anyone else would be willing to pay for this master class in tedium.

Appalachian mountains get blown up to extract coal in the documentary The Last Mountain, a film in which activists are at least as hot as the TNT.

Only rarely does the film present a genuine insight, such as the observation that many black people loved to dress up in their finest for church because, during the week, they were so often dressed as servants and manual laborers.

The excruciating and the hilarious mingle nearly to perfection in this marvelously visualized and deeply felt British film.

Director Matthew Vaughn, who did last year's delightful "Kick-Ass," doesn't do witty this time around, but he does keep up a spiffing pace while making the action blaze.

If Ed Wood had directed "The Silence of the Lambs," it might have been as unintentionally hilarious as the goofball would-be thriller The Abduction of Zack Butterfield.

Camp often means a lack of feeling and generalized disdain; not so in Spork, which has as much heart as "Sixteen Candles."

It wouldn't be right to say that, half an hour after Kung Fu Panda 2 ended, I was starving for laughs again. In truth, I was starving pretty much all the way through.

First-time writer-director Adam Reid has a lightly endearing touch as he allows the actors plenty of space to be warm without being cute.

Rookie director Sean Kirkpatrick keeps stomping on the drama pedal while blowing the cliché horn, yielding scene after tired scene of predictable developments as the principals keep shoving guns into mouths and screaming obscenities.

I suppose you have to give credit to the movie for coming up with some badass killer mermaids.

Their '50s-style comedy mugging not only don't come across to Americans, it's hard to believe even New Zealanders would care.

For a noir, the film is way too talky and convoluted, yet for a physics lesson, it's trash.

Everything Must Go is cinematic pointilism. The big picture is familiar -- busted middle-age man, suburban alcoholic despair -- yet the details are so finely rendered that the overall impression is potently strange.

Unlike many films that hope to be called black comedy, it does not skimp on either the black or the comedy.

Even when scary, Murray is somehow funny, too, and he steals the show as always.

An open- and-shut case, but that doesn't mean it can't also be an entertaining one.

Suspenseful though it is, the movie is quiet to the point of being sleepy, and Worthington is simply not working out as a screen star.

It's the snobs against the slobs at a Martha's Vine yard wedding in Jumping the Broom. Mostly, it's a tie: Both sides are equally irritating.

There's plenty of smash, thunder and brawl for the kids. But in taking a bit of Hulk and a bit of Superman while re-imagining Excalibur as a hammer, Thor amounts to putting new horns on old ideas. And the screenplay sounds like the lyrics of Spinal Tap.

This mild drama plays out like one of those dull message movies that TV networks used to crank out almost weekly, but the earnestness is at times almost appealingly old-fashioned.

The movie has the feel of a weary business trip.

Parents should take their children to Hoodwinked Too! Hood Vs. Evil, if only because kids are never too young to learn the important and liberating skill of walking out of a movie and demanding a refund.

If you're wondering why this movie must stretch past two hours, it's because it takes that long to read every item in the cliché dictionary.

This genre flat-lined a long time ago. Why won't it stay dead?

Seldom does The Bang Bang Club show much interest in the big picture of South Africa. When moral issues do come to the forefront, the big worry seems to be not questionable behavior but bad publicity.

A kind name for this attitude is false moral equivalence, or perhaps post-imperial cringe. A less kind one is Western self-hatred, or an urgent plea to tolerate the intolerant.

Fly Away is more situation than story, though, and the Germann character's welcoming, almost saintly vibe doesn't fit.

Though a bit stiff in the joints and acted by an undistinguished cast amid TV-movie trappings, this low-budget adaptation of Ayn Rand's novel nevertheless contains a fire and a fury that makes it more compelling than the average mass-produced studio item.

Why doesn't anybody just buy a gun? I guess the female characters spent all their money on tight tank tops.

At best a sporadically amusing sketchbook of theater types.

At its best, the movie is an unbearably precious slice of stale imitation Wes Anderson. But at its worst, it's dull and strangled by its own would-be jaunty deadpan.

Though the movie has some engagingly quirky moments, everything falls into place far too easily for much suspense to build, and the romance between the two leads seems as contrived as everything else.

Hanna doesn't go wrong immediately. It takes at least 2½ minutes.

Attempting to fill Dudley Moore's top hat in Arthur, Russell Brand rapidly descends the rungs of the comedy ladder from "unfunny" to "irritating" to "vulgar" to the bottom one - "Andy Dick."

Picture Monty Python writing an unusually odd "Twilight Zone" episode directed by surrealist Luis Buñuel. Or just empty your mind of all sense: This is Rubber.

The script is blaring and obvious at all times, and in his second directorial effort, David Schwimmer doesn't have a clue how dull it is for the audience to endure scene after scene of anguish, crying and screaming matches

Hop gives us . . . a bunny who poops jelly beans. That idea doesn't fill you with seasonal joy? Neither will the rest of the movie.

Director Susanne Bier's chilly morality play is slow to get started, but once established, its three parallel stories comment provocatively on one another.

Creepy spirits in old-timey dress, ear-stabbing sound cues, slamming doors and bloody handprints: The horror flick Insidious isn't scared to be trite.

Writer-director John Gray, who created "Ghost Whisperer" on TV, is a son of Brooklyn whose love for the borough is as thick as a pint of Guinness, and he keeps finding fresh ways to present familiar plot points.

Far too childish to intrigue adults yet too slow and dull for kids.

Combining narrative heavy-handedness with an airy disdain for the details of the situation, director Julian Schnabel gives us a one-sided view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Miral.

Seventh-graders are far cooler and more anarchic than depicted in this often-dopey movie, which is aimed at more of a fourth-grade sensibility.

May serve as a useful way to introduce teens to what World War II in Europe was like.

An essential document of bad taste that needs to go right into the time capsule. History must not forget.

At the end, as Shadyac proclaims, "I stopped flying privately" (well, hurrah for you, Mahatma), renounces his Pasadena mansion and moves into a trailer park, the results of his epiphany grow funnier than any of his movies.

Bateman has rarely had the opportunity to play a snarling lawman, but with his cool aviators and his bristling putdowns he's perfect, too.

Limitless may please a few looking for a shallow fantasy thriller, but won't fire up the synapses of the intellectually demanding.

Plotwise, the movie can (like many a Brooklynite) barely be bothered to comb its hair. Just when the pace needs to pick up, everyone sits around discussing fruity drinks.

The hopelessly dated 1968 play "The Boys in the Band" yields a surprisingly sprightly and multifaceted documentary, Making the Boys.

The movie, a sequel to 2009's much more sprightly and amusing indie "Women in Trouble," seems to be reaching for Robert Altman territory. Instead of offering many intriguing stories, though, it can't come up with even one.

If you're in the mood for a clichéd gangland B-movie, though, you could do worse.

I have no idea how to blow up a two-page fairy tale into 100 minutes of blockbuster, but frankly I was hoping for more backstory about the titular cape in Red Riding Hood. Thread count? Machine washability?

Isn't quite insipid, although if it were a little better, it could be.

With its poky pacing, thin characters, obvious message and predictable plot, the movie amounts to a cinematic sermon that, like many of those given in houses of worship, has a good-hearted message that will be difficult to deliver to a snoozing audience.

A deeply felt evocation of a place and a people by writer-director Matt Porterfield, who set this largely improvised film in his own lower-class Baltimore neighborhood.

The film achieves a mild uptick in the final act, with a surprise change of heart and a race to save a little girl, but up till then it's thickly earnest -- a conquista-bore.

For all of its homicidal aliens and toothy beasts, I Am Number Four did contain one element that genuinely unsettled me: the line "produced by Michael Bay." Nooooooo!

Wind power plus solar power equals hot air in the propaganda piece Carbon Nation, a documentary so disconnected from reality it could have been produced by President Obama's speechwriters.

This "Alfie" meets "Boogie Nights" bio fizzles because, although Sassoon never stops talking, he never says anything.

A long slog through ancient muck, so-so sword fights and dumb luck.

Maybe the Midwest isn't actually like this, but if it were, would that be so bad?

You know you're in trouble when you're suffering a comedy shutout and the pinch-hitters you send in are Kidman and Dave Matthews.

A drippy romance that makes Nicholas Sparks look like Leo Tolstoy.

It sounds like it was written by the star pupils at the Cameron Academy of Screenwriting.

Stirring as it frequently is, The Way Back is a good movie that should have been a classic.

A 42-minute TV soap has more story than this limp and familiar tale of domestic woe.

The movie is much like a really long beer commercial - but a really dark one.

Patsy Cline. Loretta Lynn. Gwyneth Paltrow. If you buy that progression, you'll buy Country Strong, an unintentionally campy drama.

A movie that appears to have been shot entirely on leftover sets from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

For boldness of execution as well as vision, The Red Chapel stands out as a singular, important comedy.

Getting a small cohort of humanity dead right is an impressive artistic achievement, but Mike Leigh's beautifully modulated English drama Another Year advances even farther.

A small but shattering film that marks its writer-director, Derek Cianfrance, as an artist of real depth, observes relationship dynamics at a molecular level, welling with as much understanding as Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage."

Since this low-grade comedy doesn't really even attempt to be funny, the purpose of the movie is to establish (or reinforce) a feeling of luxurious old-timey melancholy.

Black was already the world's biggest little kid, and he might be the only actor who could have made this movie such nimble fun.

Little Fockers may not be the worst, most vulgar, most pathetic and least funny picture of the year. But it's a strong contender for second place behind the picture Brett Favre allegedly sent over his cellphone.

To compete with the quintessence of nullity that is Sofia Coppola's insufferable Somewhere, imagine a film called "Wanna See Me Crack My Knuckles?" or possibly "Let's Learn How Long It Takes This Shallow Dish of Liquid To Evaporate."

It isn't much of a contest: The clear winner is John Wayne, because the Coens are playing his game. The Duke couldn't do the Coens' sly in-jokes, but they've never been able to reach out and move the audience to heights of emotion. Before now, they've never tried.

Cavanagh, the always-engaging former star of "Ed" (with whom I am friendly), and the adorable Faris (whom I don't know -- but feel free to look me up, Anna!) make the non-animated scenes amusing, as the ranger and the documentarian fall in love and fight to save the park. But the script doesn't give them a lot to do.

It contains no poetry. It simply conjures up a horrible feeling -- and then sits back awaiting congratulation.

An eyeball party. The score by Daft Punk, which veers from homages to Hans Zimmer's thundery work in "The Dark Knight" to a retro-'80s synth sound, surpasses magnificence.

not so much a movie as an "act," one that belongs at a club called Shenanigans or maybe Chuckleheads.

Cool It -- complete with its own slide show and witty graphics -- amounts to a devastating rebuttal to Gore-ism.

I wouldn't want to see five movies like this one each week but it's a cheeky, madcap joyride.

Porno plus Parkinson's don't quite add up to sexy fun.

A supernatural take on "Death Wish" meets "Faust," Heartless is an uneasy mixture of B-movie shocks, social commentary and sentimentality that shows a potent imagination at work.

The laziness of this filmmaking (which assumes you know that Gray killed himself in 2004) is of a piece with the emphatically uninteresting tales told by a classic dinner-party bore who once referred to his ramblings as "creative narcissism." He was half-right.

Everybody flirts with everyone else as director John Irvin pours on a level of shopping-mall-gift-shop-kitsch that would shame Wayne Newton.

Never amounts to anything more than a rambling, studenty exercise in undergraduate cinema vérité. Some expressive, arty photography and a mildly satiric attitude toward stage poseurs do little to make the picture bearable.

The eye-popping and entertaining The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader offers a merry seafaring jaunt together with plenty of adventures led by magically empowered kids.

Pity the boxing movie that thinks it can be both "Raging Bull" and "Rocky."

Inspector Bellamy leaves a sense not unlike a summary of Chabrol's entire career -- of guilty stains seeping away in every direction, of motives hidden and of endless stories that frustrate full understanding. To Chabrol, no life is ever a closed case.

It raises tangled questions about whether it is better to live humiliated or arm yourself, yet for the most part it's dramatically inert, talky and directionless, and it ends quietly without saying much of anything.

A sour, plotless and witless comedy-drama based on the final Mordecai Richler novel, wants to remind you of "Sideways" and its forlorn drink-moistened soul search. Giamatti is an ideal casting choice, but even this talented actor can't sell a lovable-jerk

I didn't buy how The Next Three Days plays out - but I almost bought it, and that's good enough for a thriller.

Fair Game stars three imposing performers -- Naomi Watts, Sean Penn and Sean Penn's lavish and intemperate hair, a fuming gusher of crazy-ass Sweeney Todd locks that dominates every scene. I couldn't tear my eyes from it, maybe because I couldn't maintain focus on anything else in this histrionic and shamelessly misleading wonk-work.

Let us return to reality (all this happened less than three years ago; do documentarians think we don't read the papers?).

If Swedish villains are this dumb, put me on the next plane to Stockholm. Just don't make me watch these idiotic movies on the flight.

See his movie now, brag about your discerning taste for undiscovered talent later.

There isn't enough plot in this amateurish mope-athon to fill up a half-hour TV show.

A 2010 movie that could have been made in 1940.

When an 80-year-old director turns his attention to death, you hope for some insight, or gravitas, or even whimsy or anger. Hereafter has none of that.

Although the film is, by design, an unwatchable mess on one level and its one joke about 8 mm filmmaking would play better as a music video or a TV commercial, there's no denying the crazed dedication to detail.

A movie steeped in sin that squats awkwardly in a cinematic purgatory between tawdry and talky.

The minimalist style keeps the suspense warm. The movie is unusual among teen horror flicks in that it largely avoids the usual cheap thrills and bursts of scare music. Instead, it carefully repeats isolated images and sound bites until they take on a shivery power.

The doctors and nurses who care for America's wounded troops on the battlefield and in hospitals get their due in Fighting for Life.

A few magic rocks and tepid battle scenes do little to inspire interest in the goings-on as Malcolm McDowell and Eric Idle spout villainy and punch lines, respectively.

Destined to enchant the slumber parties.

The movie falls into the same uneasy category as "Eight Legged Freaks": too tongue-in-cheek to be thrilling, not funny enough to be a comedy.

The film, made by two Cuban-American exiles (and produced by their friend, Charlize Theron), makes an ironic point about Cuba: This is a land where the grandparents are revolutionaries (or at least say they are) but the kids are yearning for capitalist globalization.

As usual, Hartnett exhibits the acting ability of linoleum; his performance would not be measurably changed if he lapsed into a coma halfway through. Only an amusing cameo by David Bowie enlivens things, but he's onscreen for just about two minutes at the end.

A taut suspense flick for grown-ups.

The dullness of this writing is more than matched by the dull look achieved by director Allen Coulter, who appears to have shot the film through a piece of yard-sale Tupperware.

The transformation of the girls from winsome wisecrackers into whiny bling-obsessed chuckleheads is complete.

Kids will be as enthralled by this film as you were by the live-action Disney movies of the '70s. It doesn't get any sweeter than a roomful of mattresses with kids and dogs jumping on them.

Damonically awful.

The main reason for Winter's Bone to exist is that it delivers a little voyeuristic thrill -- a bit of poverty porno -- for the critics who awarded it their highest honors at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

Suggestion: When making a film called Run Fat Boy Run, how about hiring a fat boy?

It's strange enough to be raised by your aunt. For young John Lennon, things get stranger still when he finds himself dating his mother.

The year's dullest movie has arrived: the deeply silly Badland, which is as dead as winter and twice as long.

Like its subject, a lawsuit that is expected to go on for another 10 years, Crude has no ending. This is the perfect ending for this Goliath versus Goliath documentary about powerful personal-injury lawyers taking on a powerful corporation.

There's a geyser of ambition in the visually stunning The Fountain, but the story of a thousand-year quest for the Fountain of Youth eventually trickles out.

German guilt gets a vigorous workout in the penetrating and symbolically important documentary Two or Three Things I Know About Him.

Succeeds completely at failure; the unified incompetence of its writing, directing and acting suggest a man who manages to be on fire and drowning at the same time, just as the bus runs him over.

A formula flick that should have tapped out in the script stage.

The film is an exposé only of a filmmaker's senseless contempt for the military.

Boring movie.

For a kiddie adventure, the movie, based on the Jeanne DuPrau book, has a pleasingly moody, eerie quality.

Grotesquely unfunny comedy.

Though Freddy is basically the same guy as in the 1984 original, his back story is different. For a few minutes the movie threatens to become interesting -- then retreats.

It's an underdog story with teeth.

The audience, if any, for Chaos Theory is going to be hit with a little puff of celluloid flatulence. The movie won't linger in the air, but that doesn't make it any less embarrassing.

Wajda, who lost his father in the purge, gives the film an awful silence and mystery at its core.

Strip away the alt-country soundtrack, though, and you've got a Bette Davis fallen-woman-redeemed picture from 1937.

Delivers plenty of smart dialogue and devises a number of excellent reasons to photograph his cast in situations that suggest the working title for the film might have been "Women in Underwear."

Better than decent. But if Stallone (who wrote and directed the flick) had pulled a few punches to the heart, it could have been truly worthy of that first, glorious movie.

The dialogue isn't ridiculous, and sometimes it's witty: A cynical cop (Donnie Wahlberg) doesn't buy Jamie's theory that the doll had something to do with the murder: "The mystery toy department is down the hall. This is the homicide department."

Turns out to be one of the most absorbing films of the year. Plus it has lots of wiener jokes.

Its script isn't worth the papyrus it's inscribed on.