Lisa Schwarzbaum

It's scariest as a parable about the evil that exists in the hearts of adolescent boys.

There's a tidiness and affection to this British homage to John Hughes movies.

Married Life congratulates its audience on a sophisticated, humorous complicity in the obvious immorality of Harry's murder plans, as well as in Richard's own ungentlemanly designs on his pal's gorgeous girl. Every adult, the movie suggests, has got a secret.

Bon Voyage arrives like one of those old soldiers who stumbles from his hiding place unaware that the war is over and the world has changed -- and with it, French cinema.

The pleasure of any Star Trek movie lies in experiencing the familiar mixed with the inventive.

In their stark, black-and-white visual style, they are redolent of Italian neorealist cinema or fine muckraking WPA photojournalism.

In Final Destination 5, Death makes the point yet again that it will not be cheated. And happily for those of us who enjoy the FD series' grotesquely clever premise beyond reason, unfortunate folks still refuse to pay attention, with inventively dire consequences.

With the same affinity for stories of culture clash he showed in "The Quiet American" and "Rabbit-Proof Fence," director Phillip Noyce embraces the tale with gusto.

And if real eroticism is missing - this is a Disney movie, with bosoms heaving more in a gentle parody of heaving than in full desire - the great discovery of this Casanova is Hallström's recovered capacity for play.

At selected moments the Pee Wee's Playhouse-scaled visual goofiness and flights of thespian bravura in this long-awaited movie adaptation of Douglas Adams' goofy-wise cult classic are in perfect celestial harmony with the existential tomfoolery of Adams' peerless (and peerlessly Monty Python-British) creation.

Broody fun.

A parable for adults -- particularly men.

Had O. Henry set his stories in China, he might have come up with Happy Times, a comedy for which the adjective ''bittersweet'' could have been invented.

Aware of its own cuteness because the dialogue plays by the rules of meta-entertainment.

Dark of the Moon is hardly a fleet production, but here Bay makes his best, most flexible use yet of all the flamboyant bigness at his command: Computer-drawn characters and human actors seem to occupy the same narrative for once.

There's only one Carax, uncompromisingly ambiguous.

What a fun-dumb relief! In the isolationist Expendables world, all foreigners are bad news. All buddy bonding is done with a wink. All pretenses of art are checked at the door. Someone even says, ''I'll be back.'' (Guess who?)

Re-creating that ensemble buzz and that alcoholically fueled soul scraping is an almost impossible task, but in She’s So Lovely, director Nick Cassavetes, working from an unproduced script by his old man (who died in 1989), gives it a ballsy go.

The movie is sometimes profound in its simple, optimistic message of friendship -- and sometimes it's plain simple.

A genial story of friendship among three young African-American men that gets far on charm even when the cinema technique falters and stalls.

Perfume misses some of the subtler base notes of Süskind's creepier, more self-aware original, but Whishaw and Tykwer blend the movie into something quite heady in its own bottle.

It's impossible to watch Tony Kaye's theatrically supercharged, equal-opportunity button-pusher without experiencing a welter of emotions -- which is just what the filmmaker planned.

The performances are tender, the script elegant, the cinematography (especially during a virtuoso chase scene in a soccer stadium) artful.

The air smells sweet and there's a thrumming beat in Bossa Nova.

The best vignette, at the very end of the film, is the story Auster originally wrote for a newspaper as a Christmas piece, the one that inspired Wang to make Smoke in the first place. It's the one you'll want to inhale.

Sad, menacing, empathetic story.

Not Fade Away is Chase's reward to himself - a transparently autobiographical work, his first feature-length film, and one that he's said he has wanted to make for years.

Jindabyne -- named for the lakeside town in which the troubles spill -- can't contain all that the filmmakers want to throw in. Best to keep glued to the taut performance by Laura Linney.

And here's the revelation: Miley Cyrus is a really interesting movie star in the making, with an intriguing echo-of-foghorn speaking voice, and a scuffed-up tomboyish physicality (in the Kristen Stewart mode) that sets her apart from daintier girls in her celebrity class.

About two people on a stage, talking their way into and out of alienation.

The writer-director bestows honor -- generously, apolitically -- not only on the dead and still living American veterans who fought in Ia Drang, but also on their families, on their Vietnamese adversaries, and on the families of their adversaries too.

And the guy is really good at his job: He knows how to combine impossibly macho action plus attractive self-amusement into a reliable rhythm of ooof! and wink-wink.

There are moments of real funniness in this smarter-than-anticipated goof-fest.

For a visual bonus, Hugh Dancy appears in bike shorts as the lone male Jane-ite.

All the nuggets of spoken wisdom rattle around with a tad too much space and (at 2 1/2 hours plus) too much length.

As is true in most buddy pictures, the real love in This Means War is between FDR and Tuck. Pine and Hardy are an odd choice as Men Who Bond. Pine behaves like a player on Entourage; Hardy broods as if he thinks dating is torture. But as a result, they're kind of cute in an itchy and scratchy way, ­bumping shoulders in a pantomime of what men do in love and war.

Sophie Scholl has a certain quiet dignity that wins its audience popularity honestly.

There's a lovely gravity and specificity to the story that transcends instances of bumpy filmmaking.

Best part: Colorful Croatian-Danish actor Zlatko Buri´ reprises his role as the jovially menacing foreign heavy out to collect his dough.

You're either in the mood to go along with the puzzle pieces or you're not. I'm not usually a puzzle-piece fan myself, not when it's clear that the filmmaker rigs the moves. But I couldn't help but fall for the repurposed real estate, and cheer for the lady strong enough to break through walls when she senses a child is waiting.

For those newbies, this update, starring peppery Disney re-do queen Lindsay Lohan as wannabe car racer Maggie Peyton, is as serviceable an introduction as any to the notion of a sentient set of wheels.

Fiennes speaks with his body what the script cannot formulate about what it's like to be a man apart. The actor creates particulars of time, space, class, and personality with one crook of a finger, one twist of a wrist. I call that nobility of craft; he's the actors' prince.

As a follow-up to his striking 2002 directorial debut, "The Believer," this second obsessive study in fanaticism by writer-director Henry Bean has its own delirious integrity and outsider-art charm.

Tautou is a fascinating, unsmiling, petite presence with a severe brow and an androgynous appeal, so much so that I wish Alessandro Nivola (Junebug) were a more robust beau as Arthur ''Boy'' Capel, the love of Chanel's life.

This feature-length dose of boyish sexual fumbling and fantastically dirty British slang is bound to expand an American viewer's vocabulary.

This measured bio-production might be viewed as a lesser companion piece to "Vera Drake" -- although in the case of Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman, all the period-piece tastefulness makes for a story more instructive than emotionally tangible.

Shaped and softened by producer Ivan Reitman, screenwriters Len Blum and Michael Kalesniko, and director Betty Thomas, however, the movie-star Stern is a defanged tiger, funny but tranquilized.

Mouret not only stars (opposite a delicate Ledoyen) as the slightly schlemiely fellow in want of a woman's affection, he also wrote and directed this enticing, weightless divertissement.

May be the first time travel fantasy to move grown fellows with 401(k) accounts to tears.

As charmingly verklemmt New York women with bad luck in men and good luck in apartments go, Nora Wilder in Broken English has all the breaks.

The filmmaker's decision to shoot the past in color and the present in murky black and white is an inspired visual translation of psychological truth.

The troubles are broad, the plot twists giant, and the performances cheery in this carol to ethnic pride in Chicago's traditionally Latino Humboldt Park.

And for a movie that stars acts of God, this work of mortals provides surprisingly little liftoff. The stuff that whips through the angry skies in Twister is the most exciting part of the spectacle. Essentially, we're turned on by debris.

Best of all, there's a lot of Jolie, barrels blazing. The star's fearlessly sexy hauteur is unique in the biz today. And when she works it in Wanted, she kills, bullets optional.

The inevitable heavy-handed life lessons about jealousy and responsibility are doled out — courtesy of writers raised with Dr. Spock and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood as spiritual guides. But the creative team also dispatches overeducated parenthood and post-permissive childhood with wry, observant wit.

As a horror picture, Blair Witch may not be much more than a cheeky game, a novelty with the cool, blurry look of an avant-garde artifact. But as a manifestation of multimedia synergy, it's pretty spooky.

There's also a Disney den of big, comically dumb-looking bad guys who turn sweet when Rapunzel sings to them. Because Happily Ever After never goes out of fashion

The loveliest moments put both politics and theatrics aside, conveying the strange beauty of a hard life involving little else than fish, water, and gray sky.

With sharp riffs on the intersection of '80s pop culture (ALF, Kid 'N Play, Ronald Reagan!) and 21st-century culture (Twitter, Viagra, Second Life!), this Time Machine is a fun dip into a pool of memories that are best forgotten again once the booze wears off.

Mike Myers and Austin Powers may stick to their old Beatle boots, but they've both come a long way, luvvy. For proof, just look at all the A-list celebrities-I-won't-mention happy to crash the party.

These tales are as highly designed as fashion layouts. But they're as relaxing to thumb through as those NYT Magazine trend pieces.

Enlightenment is good, Dai acknowledges. But the movie's more provocative assertion is the notion that ignorance was also a kind of bliss.

Even Moore's target ticket-buyers are likely to squirm with concern, unsure of who the real weasels and idiots are in this large, unkempt, rambunctious country of ours.

Director Roger Michell (''Notting Hill'') conveys some of the sharpest insights into the woman buried beneath the wife and mother in those early scenes, using ragged, vérité-style camera work that takes merciless inventory of a certain stripe of posh, hard-edged modern family life in which dowdy grannies are invisible.

Roots matter, is Angelou’s Hallmark-style lesson. So for good measure, novice screenwriter Myron Goble also includes an unsubtle subplot about a candelabra that has been in the family since slaves were freed, thereby throwing one more ingredient into this thick dramatic gumbo.

In Tarantino's besotted historical reverie, real-life villains Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels are played as grotesque jokes. The Basterds are played as exaggeratedly tough Jews. The women are femmes fatales.?

There's fun robot stuff, some good philosophical ideas, and a brief, nutty Willis-Ving Rhames reunion 15 years after "Pulp Fiction."

A light romantic do-si-do.

The audience for this grimly disquieting film is, or ought to be, self-selecting.

It's also filled with scenes of extraordinary survival challenges. But the result is oddly impersonal and undifferentiated.

Perhaps the highest praise that can be given Paltrow is that there are no appreciable performance gaps between her green talents and the rest of the truly top-drawer cast.

The class warfare in The Housemade feels dated, but there's something nicely kinky in this lusciously photographed erotic Korean thriller by Im Sang-soo.

Skarsgard's utter finesse in the role provides a satisfying warmth.

A dark, ambitious, unsettling piece of work.

It's got the pleasing proportions of a stocking stuffed with agreeable little treats in the absence of an exciting big surprise.

A vinegary fable with a Splenda aftertaste -- is a harbinger of hope not only for future feminist comedies of any grit but also for ''SNL''-staffed feature films that don't disproportionately suck.

Hits you on the head until you laugh.

Smith profiles five extraordinary American homes, and because the owners seem fully aware of the uses and abuses of fame, it's a pleasure to enjoy their eccentricities.

The story may be thin, but the project, a feat of stop-motion animation, is made with generous care by the same impressive LAIKA studio artists who conjured up the gorgeous "Coraline."

Overly fussy and self-conscious in its noir details. But in The Missing Person, Buschel makes striking use of the Mike Hammer/Philip Marlowe tradition.

An anguished Macedonian drama.

A great subject goes a long way in this standard but effective entry in the amazing-kids documentary category.

Not your average divorce gift: Clean's writer-director Olivier Assayas created the role of recovering rock-world druggie Emily Wang for his ex-wife, art-house/action-pic royalty Maggie Cheung (In the Mood for Love).

The Stoning of Soraya M.'s drawn-out torture sequence is harrowing and lurid.

This jovial tour through changing attitudes toward cannibis is so plugged into pothead logic that the opening credits are rerun at the end.

Until he wraps things up much too neatly and idealistically, Koepp puts together a sturdy and efficient thriller.

Fun in its raunchy unwieldiness.

Although the big picture itself gets mushy, the small moments, especially involving Fey, are sharp.

Like the comic strips of Ben Katchor, Tokyo Godfathers artfully appreciates the beauty and humanity in junked lives and landscapes.

The three are so full-bodied and so powerfully affecting that you're carried along on the pleasure of being in the presence of their extraordinary talent.

Dustin Hoffman, a 75-year-old first-time feature director better known as a great old acting pro, conducts at a pleasant tempo.

The footage, by Dereck and Beverly Joubert, is stunning.

It took me two viewings to enjoy the landscape of Weerasethakul's mysterious jungle -- so very thick, steamy, and foreign -- without wishing for clearer trail markers.

Excessive, but I, like Mr. Jingles, can't resist the Christmas-season cheese.

The Dutch born Janssen sparkles serenely.

If it's not up to the cups-and-balls elegance of previous Mamet movies like ''The Spanish Prisoner'' and ''House of Games,'' if it piles on more psychological fake-outs than is safe in a setup this size -- well, at least it's got that talk, that language, that thing Mamet does that is at this point as identifiable as the cadences of the Bard.

Allen has fun in his imaginary French capital, turning his star-studded cast loose to interpret their characters as they wish.

Hands On a Hard Body itself is sometimes as bumpy as a panhandle dirt road, but out of the low-budget roughness and moments of Lettermanesque ain’t-folks-nutty humor, sharp portraits emerge of contestants as well as of the families and friends who massage, feed, and revivify the flagging bodies.

Everything you've ever loved (or hated) but were afraid to laugh at in Asian martial-arts movies, ''Matrix''-ian bullet-time actioners, and Farrellyesque slapstick comedies -- all rolled into Hong Kong's highest-grossing local production ever.

A lot of fun early in the evening, when the Rat Pack ambiance is novel, but gets bleary by 4 a.m. in the story.

Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe) makes a believable cocky lad who signs on for the con; an oddly bewigged Ben Kingsley is fussier and too actorly as his handler.

When Rock finds his authentic swing as an actor as well as a comedian, he'll be, like, a movie god.

Ridicule gently suggests that the culture of sound bites has deep roots.

An amiably raucous, scorched-earth mockumentary.

The title refers not only to particular music by Beethoven but also to the fictional string quartet of Yaron Zilberman's fussily genteel, overplotted Manhattan tale in which interpersonal stresses build to a crescendo when one of the foursome becomes ill.

Slippery issues about trust, parental responsibility, and the inalienable American right to personal and political freedom are ceded to Hollywood's inalienable right to stage high-pitched chase scenes and a shocking big finish.

The documentary takes on its own engaging shape - one of edgy editorial and political ambivalence.

This fresh and interesting story about a tight-knit clan of Irish grifters in the rural South who make their living scamming is a ''con men on the road'' picture all the more welcome during a season of junky action thrillers and indie-style explorations of kinky sex.

Tobey Maguire's characteristic placidity makes a fine mask for a man who is thoroughly awful.

The drama ultimately retreats to safer, duller, more illogical, and more reactionary impulses and stereotypes.

The dramatic conflicts are soapy and unsubtle, but Karanovic pours intense authority into Esma's scarred psyche.

The mechanical beauty and android possibilities of the future excite the filmmaker, and that's where Minority Report becomes an alluring postcard from the edge. But it's an edge over which Spielberg never seems to want to step.

Bridget's most attractive asset is that she's played by Renée Zellweger.

Almereyda's fascination with creative creatures and their mysterious ways is abundantly clear. And distracting.

A muscular, ardently naturalistic retelling of the ninth-century Anglo-Saxon saga.

There's great music, an excellent dog, and that indescribable Kaurismäki tension between misery and a cosmic joke.

Parker has a great time being the anti–Carrie Bradshaw while Keaton-as-matriarch is a particular joy -- funny, beautiful, elegant, touching, and at ease with a familiar, get-out-your-hankies holiday subplot.

Teasing drama whose relentless good-deed/bad-deed reversals are just interesting enough to make a sinner like me pray for an even more interesting, less symmetrical, less obviously cross-shaped creation.

Both script and direction are the work of the glittering comedic polymath Stephen Fry.

The animals are dignified cuties and the humans are boisterous archetypes, and if you want the heart to have more darkness, you’re barking up the wrong vine.

A traditionally dressed, old-fashioned drama, starring Kevin Kline in the Robin Williams role -- is as much about the moral development of the adult as about his boys'. More so, maybe.

This is all grimy, guy on guy fun, right down to the fevered, bad English dialogue.

Working from a script cowritten with accomplished Siberian filmmaker Sergey Bodrov, the director creates a taut picture of a place, and a liberating moment of choice.

Fiennes' very skin participates in the project -- his fingernails are nicotine-stained the color of tea bags. The performance works; it's a ballet, a concerto of big, big Acting.

Mirren's all-out display in this distinctly British absurdo-literary extravaganza had me wishing Elinor were my own fabulous auntie and that she'd lend me some magic items from her closet.

Superbad is cute if you like guys who aren't even remotely bad, in a coming-of-age tale so old-fashioned the girls might just as well be wearing bloomers.

An adventurous song selection and stylish narrative techniques put a strangely romantic face on a harrowing story that's a parental nightmare.

The film makes excellent use of the cold Scandinavian landscape to emphasize the story's gloomy loneliness. And Rapace and ? Nyqvist have compelling chemistry.

Monsters, Inc. has got that swing, that zippity, multilevel awareness of kids'-eye sensibilities and adult-pitched humor.

The cast is tasty, including Vincent D'Onofrio as a friendly fellow Mob guy, Val Kilmer as the head of the Cleveland PD, Christopher Walken as an underworld power broker, and a bunch of character actors hoping for a remake of "The Sopranos."

The story is glossy junk begat of just-plain junk anyway: Lauren Weisberger, who wrote the hiss-and-tell roman à clef best-seller on which the picture is based, was herself an assistant to Wintour.

Add The Unforeseen to the catalog of artfully produced nonfiction films that show how humans are screwing up the planet.

Visually witty and even marvelous when it comes to depicting the spectacular creatures evolving at a speed previously known only in the Bible.

In this slapdash production directed by Mel Smith ("The Tall Guy" but also, alas, "Radioland Murders"), written by Richard Curtis ("Four Weddings") and Robin Driscoll, there's just enough unrepentant self-centeredness missing to take the hilariously brutish edge off Bean's game for those who know him.

Suicidal depression has rarely looked so amusing.

There are stretches of big fun in Big Trouble, and little pleasures too.

As filmmaking, the docu is only travel-diary so-so. But the chance to experience the machine-gun rhymes of ''the Turkish Eminem'' - a young man called Ceza - is priceless.

And there's that perfect soundtrack, jammed with hit after timeless hit. So integral is the music to the heat of Chill that even a now-hackneyed scene like ensemble-dancing-while-cleaning-the-kitchen (to the Temptations' ''Ain't Too Proud to Beg'') takes on a glow far lovelier than the chore warrants -- as does this ingratiating, fake movie.

Must viewing for the Bridezillas set, this winning pageant of gaudy bad taste is the work of some of the U.K.'s most popular comedy performers.

Somewhere in all the blood (sickening realism is a selling point), a question is posed: When does the one fighting a monster become a monster himself?

Merida may be a headstrong heroine, a feisty animated hybrid who calls to mind Katniss Everdeen, Bella Swan, and the neo-fairy-tale protagonist who faces off against her evil stepmother in "Snow White and the Huntsman." But she is also, for safety's sake, a nice girl in a pretty green dress who loves her family and believes in dynasty.

Flirting is a little too weighed down with stage business to soar. But episode for episode, it's one of the ha-ha-funniest movies currently around.

A Little goes a long way.

Jaa, mesmerizing as ever to behold with his pinwheel moves, also (co)directs for the first time.

The result is weightless entertainment that's both camp and true, a warped adoration of star-quality actresses as amazing creatures who can project the lives of fictional characters as well as the essence of their own fabulous selves.

One of those thrilling confluences in pop culture that rewards audiences for thinking the worst about politicians and the best about movie stars.

Knows what it needs to do for both its stars, does it, and doesn't make a federal case about it. I'd watch these two together again in a New York minute.

This is a movie about actors acting; who cares why Juliette was in the pen?

Among the drawbacks: Director Érik Canuel jumps through hoops in an effort to make the stage piece (by William Luce) move like the movie piece it isn't.

A Lebanese variation on sweetly soapy dramas about Women Who Bond With Wet Hair.

The movie is a rigged game of clichés and platitudes, but fans will be pleased by additional proof that Latifah is a lovable Queen but not a pampered princess.

In The Informant!, that brain -- screwy and yet capable of doing important undercover work -- free-associates like Ellen DeGeneres on a swing through Walmart. Cute, but as even Agent 86 would say in "Get Smart": Missed it by that much.

There's so much dark material jammed into this complicated, conflicted, challenging, and charismatic man's (Gibson) own noggin that sometimes he knows not, I think, what he's done. Here, behold, Mel Gibson has made the weirdest, most violent movie of the year.

It's a royal, finely modulated double performance by an actor who always wears his powers with graceful modesty.

Escape 2 Africa is pretty tame, but it knows how to keep its own turf tidy.

Look, but don't be touched: There is much to see but little to remember in this telling of a battle we are meant never to forget.

The classy production, with its aesthetic graces, is especially convincing about the charisma of the man, a performance specialty of the great Bardem.

But the great revelation in this version is the terrific, beautifully controlled work of Alexander -- Seinfeld's most gifted actor, whose recent movie roles have not allowed him to show his range.

The Reckoning, with a script by Mark Mills, demands close attention; it's a play of words and ideas crowding for consideration.

The point is, wherever he is, this James Bond is pissed. And that ceaseless anger begins to curdle every sequence that might otherwise bring a little happiness. I mean happiness for us, the viewers.

Has a sensuous, intimate filmmaking style that overrides The Wedding Song's more precariously loaded plot parallels.

Shortz's gentle manner and French-foreign-agent mustache go a long way toward making him a thinking girl's pinup nerd - and this despite the man's pitiless insistence on making the Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle ''tough as a _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _.''

This is an action-comedy sequel so indefatigably preposterous and farklemt -- as they say in certain Upper West Side saloons -- that it actually improves on the original.

An inviting international audience-pleaser.

A gentle, traditional (like, from the last century) romantic comedy.

Also starring: the landscape, beautifully photographed by cinematographer Lu Yue. The look is rosily glamorous in sophisticated Shanghai, and mistily poetic on the quiet island to which the mobster and his party escape.

Diverges to become something quite powerfully unnerving and guilt-ridden.

This very earnestly American prison gives off an unusually mellow European air.

This latest market-savvy bit of circuit preaching is less cartoonish than Perry's previous big-tent revival meetings.

Another contemporary story about a woman with a successful career punished with a lousy personal life.

A tacit auteur-to-auteur endorsement of the inalienable right to make movies--regardless of talent or sobriety or adult responsibilities--is what gives American Movie its uneasy kick.

For all Golino's comeliness, she's upstaged by the windy beauty of the landscape, and by Crialese's attention -- in an Italian neorealist way -- to the routines of daily life in an insular, traditional culture.

Beauty competes with vacuity in Elephant, and for a good stretch of writer-director Gus Van Sant's maddeningly passive ode to high school innocence and Columbine-age youthful evil, beauty wins.

Duplicity doesn't have depth -- but it does have Julia Roberts, in full Hollywood movie-star mode.

In making a movie about the hot mess of Afghan history, a sense of reserve turns out to be a useful tool for peace.

The performances are mediocre. The heart is big. The weather is swell.

Absolutely, probably more comfortable with human romantic complication than the usual stuff released on Valentine's Day.

Misfit teens in the process of forming a high school band learn life lessons and raise their goblets of rock. But there's enough of a strong filmmaking backbeat in Bandslam to carry the movie's light tune.

The three kindergarteners make up for their lack of irony with laser-power eyes, radical post-post-postfeminist blithe confidence, and some of the coolest retro-futuristic animation style this side of Gerald McBoing-Boing.

The storytelling in A Royal Affair is traditional bordering on square. But the historical drama itself - about how an idealistic German doctor influenced a silly king, romanced a queen, and brought the Age of Enlightenment to 18th-century Denmark - is kind of amazing.

The result is a picture half sweet, half bitter. Charles Dickens would approve.

It ought to be seen, because it's a work of moral and spiritual mystery.

Intense but dignified.

For this 21st-century Nick and Nora Charles, the flame is kept alive despite his nighttime anti-snore nose strip and her nighttime bite guard -- thanks to a shared appreciation of the hilarity of nose strips and bite guards.

There’s something earthy and elemental in this tale that was missing in Blue, something quirky and (measured by Kieslowskian standards) energetic.

That sense of déjà vu is at once this Harry Potter's balm and its limitation: many charms, but few surprises.

At this point in the actor's career, it is pretty well impossible to tell when Malkovich is camping it up, or just being John Malkovich. Under the end-of-civilization circumstances of Warm Bodies, he's just the right guy for the job.

Newcomer Jessica Haines is transparent and heartbreaking as the prof's unorthodox daughter, a victim of violence as the old ways crumble.

This is what a videogame movie looks like now.

The villainous Polluter-in-Chief is eloquently played by Robert Knepper, familiarly loathsome as T-Bag on Fox's "Prison Break." And when Knepper and Statham get together, there's a fine showdown of grimaces.

The natural, pleasurable 1990s hipness [Lohan] brings to her assignment is therefore all the more impressive. Hayley-holics should be grateful to this new girl at camp too.

The cinematography is consistently hipster handsome, the script is bracing in its lewdness, and Brosnan adds no unnecessary weight to Noble's meaninglessness.

There is also a manufactured symmetry, an every-gal's-got-issues roundness, an HBO sitcomitude to the movie that undercuts its own observational intelligence.

Everyone in this madly good-looking clan has got soapy problems as befits an aspirational, say-amen holiday movie.

Aside from the awesome flames and pyrotechnic scenes of crisis, danger, and part-of-the-job bravery, the movie is a quiet salute; it does its job.

My new theory is that Willis' own aesthetic soul is more old-world than he knows, and that he works best with directors who either are (Luc Besson) or might as well be (M. Night Shyamalan) European.

Square, sincere, and proud of it.

In the end -- an ending of such power and narrative originality (in both book and movie) that those who know it ought never breathe a word to those who don't.

A handsome epic, a brave-hearted 19th-century man-saga from the director who made the period piece man-sagas ''Glory'' and ''Legends of the Fall.''

This is a pretty, surface-y documentary rather than the kind of exciting one Vreeland would have demanded, declaring, "You gotta have style!"

The whole thing wobbles, like the garish, trashy, sexy shoes the young folks are wearing this summer on their way (in droves) to movie theaters, intent on abandoning themselves to pleasurable mindlessness.

If you loved Amy Sedaris before in a golfer-lady wig and inbred chump's grin, you'll maybe love her again here, while wishing she had another TV-episode-size venue for her talents

Blinking his puppy-moist eyes and grappling with an English accent, Downey struggles so manfully in the role that one cuts him a lot of slack; working earnestly on her Irish brogue and mussing up her cupcake demeanor in the service of verisimilitude as a wise madwoman, Meg Ryan’s performance is, refreshingly, less precious than she’s been in a long while.

The History Boys is as much about the meaning and value of reading and learning as it is about the ho-humness of genital fondling by sir with love.

It's worth seeing this stark adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure just for the extraordinary performance of Christopher Eccleston as Jude Fawley, the stonemason in turn-of-the-century England whose dreams of university scholarship are thwarted. And British telly director Michael Winterbottom sustains a fine atmosphere of dank misery.

Plot leaps that are fun on paper look generic on screen; here's another lawyer movie in which the characters are only as interesting as the actors playing them.

Audience empathy for the displaced Redlichs, coupled with the filmmaker's proffered charms of wise natives and their mysterious rituals, goes a long way toward making this lyrical travelogue a crowd pleaser.

Writer-director Georgia Lee never leaves any doubt that the bonds of ethnic family devotion are a charm against any woe more serious than an engagement to the wrong white guy.

While the compiled testimony is strong, some larger context is missing.

An Orson Welles-size Gérard Depardieu does gallant work as the town's leftist mayor.

With no climactic showdown and no comforting revelation of motive or reassuring psychoanalytic diagnosis, the nerve-rattling potential of this sly, paranoia-inducing story may sink in only later.

The character can be a dolt, but Cornish is a marvel, exuding a reckless hunger and prowling with a sexuality of potent directness.

It's Kind of a Funny Story may be the first psych-ward drama to draw on John Hughes movies for tonal reference.

Nettelbeck has a particularly lovely sense of behind-the-scenes restaurant choreography. And her warm, patient understanding of little girls' psyches guides young Maxime Foerste, as the turbulent niece, to a terrific performance.

This is a character study more than a forward-moving drama, plopped down with exquisite photographic care in a beautiful New Mexico desert, and starring good actors who make a feast of their flavorful roles.

With his large bod, soft features, and air of goofy sweetness, Jason Segel is a natural fit for Jeff, Who Lives at Home, a goofy, sweet comedy.

Martin and Hunt are exactly the right lively but not sticky authority figures to keep the house (and the comedy pace) bouncing.

Cheery, silly, splattery, and respectful of its elders (and betters, particularly Sam Raimi's "The Evil Dead").

Certainly Garden State is a very American specimen of debut indie form, its loose, goof-about scenes of comic melancholy reinforced with the glue of quirkiness over cracks in the narrative development.

The inventiveness is still superior and the network of fiends and family is extended.

Dense with plot intricacies, thick with atmosphere, and packed with showy roles for a hip ensemble.

Streep is a pleasure to behold; less so the rest of The Iron Lady.

The star (Allen), unleashed, is so energetic in his approximation of a bearded collie -- his nose sniffing the air, his whole being (which toggles between human and canine form) overcome by the need to fetch any stick thrown -- that his slobbery charm carries the picture.

With his ripe lips, flirty eyes, and pre-Calvin Klein-era androgynous appeal, the 24-year-old Warren is utterly believable as a boy who drives Natalie Wood plumb insane with sexual frustration in William Inge’s overheated melodrama.

A moderately adorable, musically wacky, ecologically activist CG family comedy.

Surprisingly square portrait of avant-garde artist and director Robert Wilson.

Ballard, working from a screenplay by Robert Rodat and Vince McKewin, lets the melancholy hang in the air with a few too many poetic shots of the lonely girl. But as Thomas teaches Amy how to spread her wings, any lacy sentimentality (as well as the jarring tree-hugger subplot about meanie land developers) falls away, revealing the soaring beauty of the flying sequences.

The vérité fascinates, even if the artifice is obvious.

Munro's stark lily needed none of this gilding.

Robbins the agitprop celebrity may be blowin' in the wind, but Robbins, the son of a folksinger, knows how to get audiences clapping along.

There's much that's simplistically grand, worthy, and fine in Perdition. If I yearn for less measured filmmaking that cries out with more reckless despair, it's because I think hell on earth is a meaner, much more interesting, and far less tidy cinematic place than Mendes trusts his audience to handle.

The leisure-time viewer will say, ''Hey, this is sort of like "Casablanca," so why play it again?''

Chaos reigns for much of The Dark Knight Rises, often in big, beautiful, IMAX-size scenes that only Nolan could have conceived. Yet when the apocalyptic dust literally settles on this concluding chapter, the character who lingers longest in memory is an average Gotham City cop named John Blake, wonderfully played with human-scale clarity by Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

The movie flies by pleasantly, and is then instantly forgettable. Perhaps Jules Verne can explain the science of that.

Impressively unflappable and natural, 23-year-old Lohman -- whose best known credit is perhaps a role on Fox's short-lived ''Pasadena'' -- holds the whole plot together skillfully.

She's no Mary Poppins: Maggie Smith is more like a cheery Angel of Death in the light black comedy Keeping Mum, one of those dutifully daft British diddles (complete with Rowan Atkinson as a vicar) that, except for the blunt sex talk, might have been constructed decades ago.

True deft wit is just plum missing from this good-natured, flat-footed, eager-to- please, tee-hee Western.

This is high-quality work from a professional (Gibson) who, news reports have suggested, has recently sunk to terrible lows in his nonprofessional life.

Where the movie falters is in sustaining the tricky balance between pastoral life lessons and creepy suspense.

There's a pomo twist to the whole overeager enterprise, in all its theoretical, film-school charm: Similar to 2010's "Machete," the movie was born from a fake 
 trailer commissioned by Grindhouse directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez.

As he did in his striking 2005 first feature film, "Man Push Cart," about a Pakistani street vendor in New York, perceptive indie filmmaker Ramin Bahrani looks at what others overlook and finds drama in everyday details.

More a sampling of previous crowd-pleasers...than a fashion statement all its own.

The disciplined performances play against schmaltz, and the casting is inspired.

The old-pro twosome of Streisand and Hoffman make such sexy and inviting ethnics (as a certain kind of movie likes to think of a certain kind of Jewish character) that they blithely prevail over the been-there-done-that gags.

She may be follically blond, but as an actor of distinction who's all of 25, Reese Witherspoon reveals interesting dark roots even as she plays golden girls.

The Guilt Trip is not about Rogen, bubbeleh. Streisand is her own once-in-a-lifetime trip, looking gawjuss with that divine voice and those killer fingernails, and the sight of the lady scarfing down four pounds of beef at a Texas steak joint is one a Streisand lover can now cross off her bucket list.

As Demme's audienc we're at the mercy of political passion overshadowed by style.

Actually, there's one other way to approach Matchstick Men, and that's to forget all about neuroses and con artistry and admire the movie instead for the unsettlingly beautiful directorial study in geographical mood that it is.

Leder establishes a syncopated rhythm unlike anything we're used to in a catastrophe spectacle.

Nanking, a carefully nonpunitive documentary of remembrance, is emotionally draining, as it should be, but it's also overstructured, as it needn't be; the actors are intrusive in a story that isn't theirs.

None of this detracts, however, from the terrific piss-and-merlot performances of Channing and Stiles, or from the committed participation of Frederick Weller as a Neil LaBute-era businessman caught in the lounge between two she-devils disguised as businesswomen.

Spiderwick is set in the present, but goes for an overall design look of dainty, cozy, William Morris-y arts-andcraftiness.

This hip send-up of the superhero lifestyle has a bunch of great comic bits from a group of great, eccentric talents, but not enough bourgeois discipline to see the story through.

"Revenge of the Nerds" is way cooler in its proud defense of geekosity, no question. But anti-ditz role model Amanda Bynes just happens to be cute.

Harrison Ford? Terrific -- and re-energized.

Black Book may be the looniest use of the Holocaust as a playground since Roberto Benigni served up his infernal clown act in "Life Is Beautiful."

Suggests that finding one good priest is a feasibility, but it takes a miracle to meet one as hubba-hubba as Ed Harris.

The facts are so awful that Dear Zacharycan be forgiven much of its antsiness--as a memorial, as a condolence to Bagby’s parents (who became activists for judicial reform in their late son's honor), and as a howl of grief.

Like Bill Murray and Greg Kinnear before him, this funnyman reveals serious acting chops.

But Levinson's passion to explain how he got from there to ''Sphere'' gives Liberty Heights its own farkatke Hollywood integrity.

Stephen Rea, Aidan Quinn, and Alan Bates play Desmond's legal eagles, and when joined by Brosnan, the sight of this grandiloquent quartet lolling in pretty Irish settings is a pleasant enough thing, 'tis.

Doesn't take advantage of its own possibilities, either as a hard-boiled gangland battle or as a soft-boiled, interracial Shakespearean love story.

The storytelling structure is far more interesting than the story itself. And the elegiac pictures of boats and water are, dismayingly, most engrossing of all.

But where would these lads be without the pop-culture-happy language of Quentin Tarantino to fuel their bull sessions? Nowhere, that's where.

On the other hand, this proud graduate of the School of Cleary Classics wishes that, like the young heroine herself, Ramona and Beezus dared more often to color outside the lines.

Never shocks or even offends by ascribing fully adult cruelties and erotic activities to obnoxious kids; such harshness wouldn't flatter a cast this moussed and magazine-layout-ready.

Even by Soderbergh's standards of serious playfulness/playful seriousness, Full Frontal is a tricky novelty item: The director himself has variously described it as an ''experiment,'' an ''exercise,'' and a ''sketch.''

As is so often the case since his "Monty Python" days, Gilliam is best at visual games and weakest at storytelling.

Marigold Hotel achieves what it sets out to do: Sell something safe and sweet, in a vivid foreign setting, to an underserved share of the moviegoing market.

Soft sexual and racial jabs replace the more daring political commentary of the original, a crude classic from the Roger Corman factory.

The cockeyed devotion with which writer-director Roger Donaldson dramatizes the story of New Zealand motorcycle legend Burt Munro and his classic 1920 bike in The World's Fastest Indian is in direct proportion to the cockeyed devotion with which Munro himself pursued his lifetime goal of setting a land-speed record at Bonneville Flats, Utah.