Lisa Schwarzbaum

The best thing going for Selena is Selena herself, played with verve, heart, and a great deal of grace by the increasingly busy Jennifer Lopez (Money Train, Jack, Blood & Wine).

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.

The words belong to Mr. Shakespeare. All else in this Macbeth is the pleasurably fevered invention of brash Australian director Geoffrey Wright.

The title Addicted to Fame hints that Giancola knows enough to count himself among the hooked. But the crappiness of this documentary about a crappy parody of a crappy B movie suggests that he hasn't kicked the habit.

This is familiar psychological as well as stylistic territory for Anderson after "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums." But there's a startling new maturity in Darjeeling, a compassion for the larger world that busts the confines of the filmmaker's miniaturist instincts.

The visual and verbal jokes are as bouncy and multilevel (hip height for adults, knee-slap-size for kids) as we have come, no doubt selfishly, to expect from DreamWorks.

Eight months of interrogation and torture in fetid Abu Ghraib followed before he was released, innocent. None of The Prisoner's showy flourishes -- animation, sound effects, fancy editing -- can match the power of Abbas' stillness as he describes one man's agony in one huge hell.

A cute premise that, upon closer inspection, rings falser rather than truer. It's pretty good, but not nearly as good as Brooks gets.

The intimate movie hums with a back-in-the-hood vibe that gets the two stars playing contentedly, and delightfully, for the love of local filmmaking.

If, as Fincher has said, this movie is supposed to be funny, then the joke's on us.

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

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.

As she did in her striking 2005 debut, "Me and You and Everyone We Know," July creates a fluid cinematic universe.

Terminally muddled crime drama.

It's a stylish scramble of evocative footage, groovy music, and crazy-candid reminiscences from key players still proud to score.

There's a painterly translucence to this ''Springtime,'' and a mystery, too; each frame is as delicately poised and lit as a Vermeer portrait of a woman, beckoning but unknowable.

Moreau's few ripe scenes are choice, and she spices up the joint with her gravelly voice of je ne regrette rien.

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?

The team who made "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" display plenty of whirligig energy, if not much control or lightness of touch.

The denouement of the movie is as preposterously happy as a children's fairy tale. But the moral is ageless.

With him (Schwarzenegger), we return to a franchise we never knew we missed, surprisingly grateful for the star's generosity -- and evident pleasure -- in strapping on the old sunglasses and blasting adversaries to hell.

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.

Every moment spent in the company of Keaton... is such a joy that the whole is more delightful than the sum of the formulaic ingredients. Keaton makes Nicholson bounce the way Shirley MacLaine once did in ''Terms of Endearment.''

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.

Campos (who was 24 when he made this jolting pic) captures the numbing psychic scramble that just might cause the YouTube generation to go morally haywire. Or become filmmakers.

Casé, with her sturdy, elemental body and shining eyes, is the reason phrases like ''inner beauty'' were invented, and she's also the reason this idealistic, naturalistic film by Rio de Janeiro born Andrucha Waddington has been such a success at festivals around the world.

The performances are vividly alive.

Between bouts of decisive action, the characters mill around the French countryside (in lovely costumes, to be sure, by Jenny Beavan) as if unsure of which sexual stereotype to bust next.

Director Scott Elliott, in his feature-film debut, is especially perceptive about what goes on at the edges during deepening family crises, literally at the borders of the screen.

Davies registers believable frustration and deadpan teenage disengagement in equal measure.

An energetically demented psycho-killer comedy set in faux-noir L.A., Seven Psychopaths rollicks along to the unique narrative beat and language stylings of Anglo-Irish writer-director Martin McDonagh (In Bruges), channeling Quentin Tarantino.

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

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.

Ed Helms and Ving Rhames score laughs. But the breakout is "Step Brothers'" Kathryn Hahn as the tough (sales)girl who keeps up with the boys.

The stunning, must-see drama Crash is proof that words have not lost the ability to shock in our anesthetized society.

Part supernatural thriller, part Oliver Sacks-style meditation on the neurological mysteries of perception, and part Buddhist treatise on reincarnation, the story luxuriates in shadows.

It's a tragedy, really: According to the hapless team who made the movie, Our Paige is a relatively interesting young liberal who knows her own mind before the accident and a rather tedious, girlish conservative who fusses about keeping her hair smooth afterwards.

Always the smooth showman, Spurlock avoids answering his own question: Is he selling out or buying in?

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 narrative logic of Swimming Pool slips through our hands like cool water, shimmery and light-dappled, leaving behind the pleasures of summer heat and goose bumps.

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

The frustration of this good-hearted, off-key warble of an indie, written by Rose with Robert Cary, who directed, is that the filmmaking pales when compared with the classic elements of 1950s and early '60s romantic musicals to which it pays homage.

The players are timelessly familiar in American Teen, too. But filmmaker Nanette Burstein tells their stories with a distinctly 21st-century pop and audacity.

Tamahori proves that he can shape a studio picture effectively to his specs; his action sense is as personal as his screenwriter’s. As for Hopkins and Baldwin, the well-matched actors grab their parts with disciplined ferocity.

Which brings us back to Kidman, who really IS sensational here.

The unintended effect of all the melodramatic complications in Transamerica is, oddly, to distract attention from an understanding of exactly what that courage really costs.

In a world full of off the rack thrillers, it's fine boutique quality.

The affectionate, bemused, structurally unkempt portrait is at its best capturing Merritt's close collaboration with his longtime friend and bandmate Claudia Gonson.

What's most amazing in The Amazing Spider-Man turns out to be not the shared sensations of blockbuster wow! the picture elicits, but rather the shared satisfactions of intimate awww.

A cheeky, great-looking, thoughtfully loopy creature feature about the lure and dangers of cutting-edge gene splicing.

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

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.

The mixed-up rhythms of the story rescue Barbershop from bland goodness.

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

The disarming comedic tone -- silly and novel in its lack of cynicism -- is driven by the fearless, cheerful unself-consciousness of Will Ferrell, a big man last seen streaking (all too unself-consciously) through ''Old School.''

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

It's okay for a grown movie critic to admit she cried freely and with great feeling for more than half the movie, and grinned like a dork through the remainder.

In stories like this defiantly unsubtle, structurally clunky specimen, causes women who are considering abortion to think again, and self-selecting audiences to enjoy a light, luxurious weep.

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 filmmakers can't decide whether to trust the period innocence of the book (and play down their casting coup) or let the young man rip as a preteen-babe magnet... So December Boys splits the difference -- safely, dully.

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.

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.

Hope Springs dares viewers to look closely at the remarkable sight of naked adult intimacy and its discontents.

In Catfish, the camera's-rolling readiness to trawl for drama leaves a slimy aftertaste.

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

The political angle is gratuitous, even foolish, and certainly a distraction from the movie's visual strengths.

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.

Grace Is Gone grabs on to a name, a war, and the metaphor-come-to-life of a theme park with rides going nowhere. And we, the people, are spun around and shaken for tears.

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

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

Intriguing creepout.

The fact that it's difficult to believe someone who looks as dewy as Tautou would be so dangerous is much of the game.

A ripe psychosexual compost heap of a drama that emits a provocative scent of rot and nonsense.

The last thing Marber's quartet of modern miserables needs is to be admired; they are the very worst of average people, but on screen they have become the very best of the baddest.

There’s a self-awareness to Shampoo that gives the movie a cleansing sadness and, oddly, makes Beatty an affectingly amoral roue.

An unlikely comedy charmer.

One hell of a creepy little eco-horror picture.

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.

If only for the comedy glory of Sigourney Weaver as a TV network president who confuses acid reflux with gut instinct, this very smart, very funny movie about the making of a network sitcom is a cut-glass gem of a showbiz conceit.

Here, love and attraction between two teenage girls put them on a collision course with Tehran society in general and one girl's troubled, increasingly religious brother in particular.

There aren't many at all like Spielberg and Kubrick, directors willing to lasso dreams (that's Steven) and nightmares (that's Stanley) or die trying. A.I. is a clash of the titans, a jumble, an oedipal drama, a carny act. I want to see it again.

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

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.

Michelle Williams plays Monroe, and she's a wonder. Working opposite a suitably florid Kenneth Branagh as that high thespian Sir Larry.

Harrison Ford? Terrific -- and re-energized.

It's the beaming movie-star intensity of the complicated comic Carrey in the role of the dominant lover and Obi-Wan Kenobi McGregor as the gentle beloved that makes this unfettered, stranger-than-fiction picture pop.

This is an origami story, really, about what a construction of chance the big world is.

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

A surreal, elegantly melancholy, and yet witty ensemble story.

Waving a dubious flag of feminist inclusivity, Cole and screenwriter William Ivory turn cartwheels insisting that girl power, even in the 1960s, trumped class divisions.

Directed, with overfondness for the goofy ways of guys, by Ted Demme and written, with overfondness for the sound of guys pontificating about nothing, by Scott Rosenberg.

McAvoy and Fassbender are a casting triumph. These two have, yes, real star magnetism, both individually and together: They're both cool and intense, suave and unaffected, playful and dead serious about their grand comic-book work.

It exchanges the narrative fluidity of the page for visual composition of such strong beauty that the slowness of the storytelling becomes its own eccentric strength.

The Cell is foremost about singular imagery, a succession of still pictures strung together frame by frame.

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

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

A gaily funny, shrewdly inventive satire.

There's only one Carax, uncompromisingly ambiguous.

Soon enough a pointed ode to New York City nerve-rack and survival skills dissolves into a far more average, less compelling, and sometimes just slapdash-vicious cat-and-mouse game.

New-era losers (the cast is a cheery scrum of relaxed kids, led by genuine whiz pitcher Sammi Kane Kraft in the role created by Tatum O'Neal) now include a rotten kid in a wheelchair.

Wild Grass is itself odd stuff: Sometimes it's as playful as Marguerite's crayon-red corona of frizzy hair, and other times as autumnal as the sight of Georges alone in his study, feeling stuck.

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 young cast is terrific, giving the stories unearned weight.

It's a psychological thriller that actually thrills.

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.

A sharp-looking Mob drama with a gooey moral center.

Kevin Bacon's passionate, sharply drawn portrayal of Billy Magic, a slick, finger-snapping, payola-pocketing disc jockey in early 1960s Cleveland, is the best thing about this conventional but heartfelt semiautobiographical coming-of-age story

The Tango Lesson is about as far away from Al Pacino’s Scent of a Woman hotdogging as you can get; it really is about the scent of a woman, in all her fascinating peculiarity.

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.

Yet precisely because this is by Roman Polanski, it's irresistible to read his sorrowful and seemingly classical take, from a filmmaker known as much for the schisms in his personal history as for the lurches in his work, as something much more personal and poignant.

Hanna's intriguing, disorienting pleasures - the movie is part poetic dreamscape, part sinister spy saga - lie more in the filmmaking flourishes than in the narrative.

Writer-director Tanya Hamilton's intellectually ambitious debut drama Night Catches Us is all the more notable for setting well-drawn fictional characters in a fraught, real moment in civil rights history.

Asif Kapadia's blazing feature debut, a gorgeously photographed saga with a fine sense of the way place shapes personality, has won numerous awards in the filmmaker's native Britain.

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.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1 also bravely faces the future, slipping with expert ease among the thrilling mass of complications (and complicated set pieces) that Rowling throws fans in the final sprint, then guiding the faithful to the fate that awaits everyone in this world, the moment called The End.

A fine example of Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier's (Brothers) talent for weaving together accessible domestic melodrama and issues of ethical awareness of the world beyond our doorstep.

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.

There's a contemplative loveliness to The Way, an affecting personal project both for Emilio Estevez, who wrote, directed, and plays a small role, and for his father, Martin Sheen.

Coppola's stranded royal suggests that at heart, Marie Antoinette was just a simple girl who wanted to have fun, and got her head handed to her.

Cotton candy story with an acrid aftertaste.

Sky Captain is a gorgeous, funny, and welcome novelty.

Filmmaker Jared Hess (who cowrote the script with his wife, Jerusha Hess) installs Napoleon front and center as a punchline in and of himself -- and as that dispiriting product of narrative defeat, a symbol.

A slippery entertainment that's all feints and few punches thrown at a fight card of indistinguishable terrorists, Muslim and otherwise.

Another thinking-person's thriller from director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland, also co-pilots on "28 Days Later."

The hothouse drama Mother and Child is organized like a femme-friendly spa that specializes in treatments for the psyche rather than the skin. Soft New Agey music tinkles intrusively. Sore spots are prodded and massaged. Clients pass one another in the changing room. The ritual is exquisite to some, and excruciating to others.

Inside the Norwegian director's glove of empathy is a fist of unappeasable anger.

Against all odds in heaven and hell, it creeped me out just fine.

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.

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.

A reality-twisting cousin to "Being John Malkovich" -- showcases a Van Damme who's sly like a fox about his own image.

A spare, controlled study in communication gaps and a piercing sketch of suburban American loneliness.

Wide-eyed Sara Paxton and hipster-bespectacled Pat Healy play the joint's only two employees, working each other into a lather of what turns out to be well-founded hysteria. Kelly McGillis is a surprise treat as a grouchy medium.

In One Hour Photo, Williams is a snapshot of human complexity worth framing.

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

This is jumbo-size science fiction, with a handsome, impermeable titanium gleam - and a thick coating of creationism lite.

There's something invigorating about this unpretentious dog tale. And if a penguin drops by to promote his own movie product, well, there's room on the frozen continent for all.

For Yank color in her soap-bubbly movie, director Daniele Thompson has her pal Sydney Pollack appear as...a famous director.

Gillen can't make good on his gaze's search and destroy capabilities.

The performances are relaxed. The open-ended, vignette-like structure of the filmmaking sometimes imitates the movement of weary, life-worn men nursing liquor.

Ineffably Australian and intriguingly (rather than annoyingly) artsy, Look Both Ways introduces a handful of people gobsmacked by life-changing crises, all of them trying to make sense of responsibility, mortality, and connection.

The hardest work falls to Cusack, a subtle actor with a valuable gift for conveying the sadness and loneliness beneath the skin of even the most jaded and self-contained men-about-town.

The first Irish creation I've seen in ages to pull off the high-difficulty feat of trafficking in grit, drollery, and emotion without turning to blarney as a crutch.

The true pleasures of Bound lie in the Wachowskis' inventive updated take on film noir traditions, sensuously realized by cinematographer Bill Pope ("Clueless").

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.

Cloverfield, a surreptitiously subversive, stylistically clever little gem of an entertainment disguised, under its deadpan-neutral title, as a dumb Gen-YouTube monster movie, makes the convincingly chilling argument that the world will end -- or, at least, Manhattan will crumble -- with a bang and a whimper.

An animated family movie about penguins -- in the wake of "March of the Happy Feet," they're the Angelina Jolie of animals, both cute and admired everywhere. Plus, it's about surfing.

An 
unexpectedly revealing, disconcerting documentary that benefits from the filmmaker's unmediated approach, his home-movie-
quality visual style, and his controlled use of on-the-fly moments.

So much goes down on Nick and Norah's one enchanted evening that the best advice is to enjoy the ride -- the actual ride -- around this vibrant new New York.

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

It's as agreeably sweet as advertised, with a particularly yummy performance by Juliette Binoche.

Preposterous-for-no-good-reason supernatural tale.

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 is every reason to learn about the link between jewels and death, by all means, but no reason to try to disguise a term paper as entertainment.

Funny, ungirdled romp - a buddy picture about buddies who actually know what women want.

Strangely inert drama.

Square, sincere, and proud of it.

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

A shaky piece of work, with stumpy cinematography, choppy edits, speechy dialogue, and loose plotlines. And yet: There's an easygoing authenticity to the depiction of Kenya and her world that coexists with the picture's many weaknesses.

The most spellbinding aspect of Bright Future is that the surrealism sustains its own squiddish logic, concluding with one of the most breathtaking film finales of the year.

That's the moral nut of this highly unexceptional episode, a midlife production in which each Enterprise crew member does his or her vaudeville act.

Overworked if heartfelt indie.

Ah, monsieur, you can lead a Frenchman to the Big Apple, but you can't make him a New Yorker -- and that's exactly what makes The Professional so fascinating.

Shortbus is chipper, it's fresh, it emits a distinct musk of controversy. I'll take the longbus.

You see the pattern here? Winter-release slot + travel budget + Liam Neeson = slightly preposterous, routinely violent, apparently lucrative action movie in which the Irish-born star signals inner emotional conflict with his handsomely mashed boxer's face while settling outer physical conflict with his boxer's fists.

Naturally, a subject this right-on draws a right-on cast. Kris Kristofferson, Avril Lavigne, and Ethan Hawke pitch in.

Rambo teaches that fighting sucks, good intentions can be futile, and coalitions of the willing are a charade: A man's got to do what a man's got to do.

A helluva lot happens in 16 Blocks - an outrageous amount, really, along with a coda that deposits the audience squarely at a movieland finale. Who knew that looking both ways before crossing is where the real action is?

In the end, One True Thing suggests, families can be healed even in loss. This may not be a true thing, but at least this emotional drama offers up hope, sweet like one of Kate Gulden's tasty cakes.

There are mountain tunes as powerful as moonshine to be enjoyed in Songcatcher -- but there's also a mighty mushy heap of corn pone to be swallowed.

Shows a beguiling aptitude for self-mockery in the pursuit of polemic.

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.

Writer-director Gérald Hustache-Mathieu sustains a fresh voice influenced by the Coen brothers and the infernal snow of "Fargo."

Steve Zahn makes full use of the many varieties of hyper in his acting arsenal, while Timothy Olyphant has a heckuva good time telegraphing macho mania.

There's no great romantic climax to Don Juan DeMarco (and that may be a drawback for Depp lovers looking to swoon), but there is an airy delicacy to this tall tale that fits in perfectly with the weather these days, the hormones, the whole seasonal gestalt.

Dumont's rigorous, serious attention to the mysteries of good, evil, and faith rewards those willing to be confounded.

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.

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.

A Scottish weepie of such bathos and balderdash that it deserves a drinking game in its rotten honor.

Rutina Wesley glowers with just the right touch of sweetness as a brainy student (and stellar after-school stepper).

In making the radical artistic choice to tell the story as if it were being enacted by players on a stage, Wright falls passionately in love with his own fanciful artifices.

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

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

This steam-driven military weapon of an enterprise is a sobering reminder of just how tinny a musical Les Misérables was in the first place.

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.

Reflect the robust status of Yiddish theater in the early 20th century, and its post-Holocaust decline.

That Annaud and his deft production team create believable dramatic characters without compromising the dignity of the animals they've borrowed as stars -- is the striking (and sometimes unnerving) achievement of a film that also swoops and loops through fairytale hoops.

There may be nothing more fun for actors than experimental exaggeration, especially when filming on a Caribbean island. But there’s nothing that makes an audience feel less welcome than not being in on the joke.

With Green Zone, though, the malaise has finally hit me. So while Damon's Miller uncovers the (inconvenient) truth of why the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, all I want to know is: How does he suggest we get out?

It's as if the star (Douglas) finally gets to integrate all his onscreen personas, all at once.

And among the things this ''HP'' does very well indeed is deepen the darker, more frightening atmosphere for audiences of all ages already familiar with the intricacies of the ''Potter'' landscape. (This is as it should be: Harry's story is supposed to get darker.)

This activist documentary -- alternately impassioned, despairing, edifying, and hectoring about all the ways humans are screwing up the earth in a death rattle of hubris -- shouts, People, do something! In contrast, "An Inconvenient Truth" feels positively hushed.

Adams, of course, is a peach. Her sparkle requires only minor character adjustment and twinkle recharging from her recent triumph as the old-fashioned modern heroine in "Enchanted."

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.

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.

No matter what panache Bier adds, Things We Lost is still a TV-scaled tear-duct drama about a beautiful woman who pushes past sadness in her House & Garden home.

Smith's book is a charmer, but the keys to this ''Castle'' have been misplaced.

A smart, playful, informative pleasure.

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

Driven by Bogosian's finger-snapping dialogue and theatrical structure, subUrbia doesn't allow for much pleasurably Linklaterish lounging; each character has got some serious orating to do before the night is over.

The movie is overplowed, even if Brad Pitt's debut as a Coen comedy player is eye-catching.

The Weather Man is what indie misery looks like when re-created by one of Hollywood's big studios.

The more rink time, the better: As directed by hip-hop music-video king Chris Robinson from a story by "Antwone Fisher's" Antwone Fisher, the skate scenes are a blast.

Timing is everything. And Youth in Revolt is late -- arriving not just at the tail end of the star's sell-by date for this particular kind of character, but more importantly at the tail end of the intended audience's attention span for an inconsequential Sundance-y tale of sexual coming-of-age.

Riveting true-life drama.

This overlong, lurchy homage to John Cassavetes' 1980 film "Gloria" is a mess, but a fascinating one, given Swinton's desperately avid performance in the title role.

That durable, sexy powerhouse Beverly D'Angelo steals every scene she's in.

A comedy of '90s sexual inclusiveness as effervescent as a cold sody pop -- and about as intoxicating.

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

By rocketing ahead 200 years from the previous film and jiggering the story cleverly (with a script by Toy Story coscreenwriter Joss Whedon as late-'90s wiseacreish as Alien3 was early-'90s portentous) to create a Ripley reconstructed through a mix of human and alien DNA, Alien Resurrection power-kicks the whole definition of the Horrifying Other into a fresh, deep, exhilaratingly thoughtful, millennium-sensitive direction. [5 Dec 1997, p. 47]

The chief frustration of this otherwise well-made, well-acted, well-heeled picture -- a movie classy in its artful modesty, with every detail of plot and period furnishings lovingly conceived, every lick of jazz-influenced score true to the times -- is that it is so very self-absorbedly graceful about something so very insular and...unremarkable.

Enough does work, and well, to make Set It Off a valuable model for a new kind of girl-pack story: one that’s not just for girls.

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

Everything is wrong pretty much from the start of this misbegotten adventure.

This unexceptional 1970s coming-of-age story is neither outrageous, new, nor comedic.

The whole film is cracked, but in a stylish, downtown way.

A knock-kneed but likable just-for-girls drama set in 1963 that promotes single-sex institutions as the best breeding ground for future female senators and filmmakers.

Killer Joe throws down a dare by expecting its audience to be the cool connoisseurs of the story's "comic" outrageousness, then rubbing viewers' faces in close-up scenes of brutality that reasonable people ought not to be able to watch. That up-close experience, however effectively done, is a movie specialty that's its own kind of mean.

Perry has taken Shange's feminist word-and-movement portraits of disenfranchised African-American women and turned those howls into...a maddeningly choppy mess of a Tyler Perry movie.

In their way, Mirabelle and Ray are the deracinated West Coast equivalents of a Woody Allen couple.

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.

Wrings laughs from the antics of affable, eccentric villagers who cheerily break the law.

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.

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

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.

Intense but dignified.

Here the fascination is Hurt, so deft at steering his character away from booby-trap clichés that he guides his young costars safely out of sap's way and brightens an otherwise very yellowed tale.

Scottish actor Peter Mullan saves a drama tangled in the seaweed of life lessons from drowning in pathos.

A weightless movie as cheerily artificial as the Old Navy pitchman's bronze skin tones.

Tack on a jarringly upbeat coda that looks like the kids at the studio demanded a ”happily ever after” ending before they would agree to put the picture to bed, and Something to Talk About becomes a safe, generic family story of no particular personality.

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.

Highly unoriginal but nevertheless stirring drama.

There's something almost too controlled, cerebral, and overdetermined about Winterbottom's Western notions.

A funny, shrewd, no-bull family comedy about the relationship between mothers and teenage daughters that allows Curtis the comedian to remember her days as a slinky starlet while making use of her wisdom as the mother of an adolescent girl herself.

Isn't nearly as cheerily unpleasant as it ought to be.

There's a relaxed, unforced, melancholy sweetness and swing to this modest iteration of the "Big Chill/Return of the Secaucus 7" formula, a pleasing directorial debut for screenwriter Jamie Linden (We Are Marshall).

A forceful Neeson and an even more intense Nesbitt (Bloody Sunday) both show their stuff and obscure the unrelieved pain endured by the men they portray.

When Bebop's anime characters stand still, chirping their strangely stilted, dubbed talk and not moving their strangely blank faces, I feel lost on Mars myself.

And yet. And yet, Gawd help me, the always surprising Mark Wahlberg throws himself into his thespian adventure with such radiant wacko energy, so full of Boston beans, that Ted is also kind of, well, impressively nuts.

Scott Sommer's late-1970s coming-of-age novel, with little of the vivid specificity of "Mean Creek," even though the two share a screenwriter and a producer.

An old-fashioned, tastefully constrained supernatural thriller, The Woman In Black embraces the elements of gothic horror movies with pleasing seriousness.

A serving of "True Blood's" Ryan Kwanten in his native accent is the chief selling point of this picturesque, contentedly imitative Australian Western/thriller/Coen-brothers homage, the feature debut of writer-director Patrick Hughes.

Jeunet maintains a firm control of his dreamscape creation, drawing on influences as varied as "Toy Story," "Children of Paradise," and TV's "Mission: Impossible."

Educational and upstanding, a little overacted and more than a little overdramatized. But it's honorable.

For those who wish to decode The Names of Love, there's a sharp commentary on French prejudices, character types, history, and culture embedded in Michel Leclerc's droll autobiographical French comedy.

The enjoyably icky heart of Bug is still contained within the airless, increasingly ''bug-proofed'' room that becomes Agnes and Peter's whole world.

It's not the homosexuality that's dubious here, it's the chicken.

As ever, Egoyan assembles a devoted repertory cast, including Christopher Plummer.

The movie's power is undercut by the overemphasized presence of celebrity traveling environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

This funny, gory stab-athon is as sophisticated about the mechanics of Part 2s as the original was savvy about horror flicks.

In a season of bulging Movies Earmarked for Importance, it is almost startling to come across something as unhyped - and perfectly swell - as The Ice Harvest.

An elegant adventure of a different kind.

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.

An anguished Macedonian drama.

If you sign on, disarmed of irony, for her trip -- I did -- you'll be rewarded with a rare thing that may in itself prove the existence of a Higher Power: a Hollywood entertainment that makes you consider deep thoughts.

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.

Working from a script by his wife, Sarah Koskoff, "High Fidelity" actor-turned-director Todd Louiso shapes the movie to Lynskey's rhythms.

Not coincidentally, African Cats opens on Earth Day. Meeting these magnificent fellow creatures might be a fine way to celebrate.

In theory, Zoolander is ''Pret-à-Porter'' on laughing gas. In practice, however, the movie is an ill-fitting suit of gags, too long in the crotch even at 90 minutes.

It's a pleasure to meet up again with Marion, the distractible, acerbic, New York-based French photographer played once more by Julie Delpy in 2 Days in New York. This bouncy hand-knitted comedy of cross-cultural relationships, also directed and co-written by Delpy, makes a jaunty sequel to "2 Days in Paris."

A painfully polite Iraq war drama pitched at the MTV generation.

The already heavy-footed clomp of Grisham's declamatory storytelling style has been given an extra-thick-soled, wing-tipped, liberal-leaning, reality-tampering kick thanks to a screenplay credited to four writers.

In the most shocking contribution to this self-conscious but fascinating sampling of art challenged by life, Mexico's Alejandro González Iñárritu (''Amores Perros'') makes a horrifying suspense story.

When it comes to crazy, violent, semidelirious, testosterone-laden, proto-Viking tales about a mute visionary one-eyed warrior who breaks skulls, Valhalla Rising is pretty great.

Who knows whether the project is meant to be earnest, ironic, post-ironic, made for adults, made for kids, made to teach lessons, or made to be watched in an altered state? All or none...jeez, this thing is one bumpy ride.

This peachcolored comedy about a wacky family who shove their sadness into a bulging closet is being marketed as ''from the producers of Little Miss Sunshine'' All that's missing from the formula is a Volkswagen Microbus.

The screenplay, by Zemeckis and William Broyles Jr., plumps Van Allsburg's simple fable about the purity of childhood faith in what can't be seen with all sorts of wholly invented characters, complications, and declarations.

We're in David Mamet World. William H. Macy -- the quintessential player of Mamet men in all their impacted rage -- stars in this claustrophobic adaptation.

The ever-magnetic Sam Rockwell is Kenny, Minnie Driver is full of beans as Betty Anne's best friend, Melissa Leo is wicked good as an ornery cop, and, in her two chewy scenes, Juliette Lewis reminds fans why we want her to run free forever.

A strange, black-and-blue therapeutic drama equally mottled with likable good intentions and agitating clumsiness.

The telegenic Lomborg is the on-camera "star" of the show, while his angry critics growl on cue.

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.

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.

Exceedingly blurred rendering of a simply told, artful novel.

An affectionate puff profile.

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.

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.

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.

An ambitious debut feature.

Manages to take great characters and a great plot and leach them of all blood, terror, and excitement.

A Little goes a long way.

A revolutionary life has rarely felt less edgy, or the biography of an iconoclast more bourgeois.

The sides to consider in Taking Sides are all but obscured by cinematic pomposity at best, Holocaust porn at worst.

The soft-spoken, impressionistic documentary (with a hypnotic score built from the sounds of construction) climaxes with a six-minute helicopter-cam view of the colossal structure to which these somebodies have been dedicating their sweat, and sometimes their very lives.

His (Charles Dance) cinematic style mixes the scent of mothballs with that of the lavender in which these ladies are preserved.

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

The characters are tedious, as are the fussy performances of Bale and Beckinsale. Everything good in this rock & roll fantasy belongs to the sexy, worldly-wise McDormand, who makes Jane ripe, real, and irresistible.

Excitement trumps incompetence as one colorful loser recruits another. Pretty soon, the screen is filled with hip actors playing clueless lowlifes, pretending they're in a Bizarro World production of ''Ocean's Eleven.''

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 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.