Lisa Schwarzbaum

The Cuban escapade, designed to provoke, backfires when he loses focus by including Cuban firefighters in an homage to 9/11 first responders.

The technique is impressive. But it would count for little if the human story -- of a magnetic, resourceful, and, in the way of all Rohmer heroines, articulate woman who was mistress to the Duke of Orleans -- weren't engrossing on its own dramatic terms.

A disconcertingly jumpy tale of breathtakingly crummy parenting, the windblown movie dares a tolerant audience not to call Child Services.

Frankenweenie is a cool little flipbook of historical Burtonian style. It even brings back old friends, including "Beetlejuice's" Winona Ryder and Catherine O'Hara.

Even an audience moved to tender patriotism might wonder how Scott, a proven master of ''Gladiator''-size visual showmanship, could have bombed away the personality of every man fighting until he's left with nothing more than pure combat.

Anna's thoughts matter because, as played by the wonderfully nuanced newcomer Alycia Delmore, the no-bull responses of this perceptive woman are a key to Humpday's sly, wised-up feminist outlook.

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

Ellis (The Good Wife's Graham Phillips), an alienated teen, smokes weed and hangs out with a goat-obsessed, pot-cultivating surrogate father (David Duchovny, hidden by hair). New Age details aside, though, Ellis is easily identifiable as a distant cousin-by-genre to J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield.

The two are unlikely compadres — no Hope and Crosby, just a couple of average guys walking, talking, and looking for the love of good women. But Poirier establishes an attractive, believable friendship between the immigrants.

Duck Season unfolds with a slaphappy logic that only looks casual. In fact, every unfinished conversation and banal picture on the wall (one's of ducks) matters as four little people share one memorable little day.

As engrossing and logic-resistant as the state of dreaming it seeks to replicate, Christopher Nolan's audacious new creation demands further study to fully absorb the multiple, simultaneous stories Nolan finagles into one narrative experience.

It’s only when you’re in the grip of the climax that you realize how richly the filmmaker has painted a landscape that to other eyes might appear so parched.

Drawing on a documentary visual style he deftly employed in "One Day in September" and "Touching the Void," director Kevin Macdonald uses McAvoy's boyishness to treat Garrigan's apolitical foolishness as yet another damn mess in one African country's hell.

Hanks towers as a near naked, near biblical man. Zemeckis tells his story -- the screenplay is by William Broyles -- with a control magnificent in what isn't shown as much as in what is.

Shine beams with warmth, sensitivity, and fine taste.

The startling power of Tomboy, a beautiful, matter-of-fact French drama about a young girl who wants to be a boy - and for one singular summer around her 10th birthday passes as one - begins with the one-of-a-kind natural performance by Zoé Héran as Laure.

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.

Although the talent of a kid with the last name of Culkin may not, at this point, register as such a novelty -- Rory follows brothers Macaulay and Kieran -- there is something precociously mature but natural about the work of this youngest Culkin sibling that stands apart.

Quite grand, quite exotic, David Lean-style epic.

This sincere, delicate, and intrinsically religious comedy may also become that most unexpected of blessings - Danny Boyle's first family classic.

Haunting and hopeful.

May be the most kick ass demonstration yet, for the majority of American moviegoers, of what the fuss is all about.

The production feels self-congratulatory and illuminated only dimly.

Achieves its exquisite tension--deepening beautifully from a "Death in Venice" setup to an imaginative meditation, on art and life, of uncommon sensitivity.

Deserves sympathetic attention, if only for the family-values specifics loaded into the story, and the way mildmannered stars Ben Shenkman (Angels in America) and Tom Cavanagh (Ed) embrace their instructional roles.

The fine Polish director Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa) pays her respects with a daringly murky-looking movie that demands viewers enter the void too and meet Socha and his Jews as real, flawed men and women behaving in flawed ways under suffocating conditions.

It's a lovely, original, Australian take on a climactic moment usually thought of as all American.

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.

The worldview, the sense of childlike fun shaded with adult melancholy, and the joyful, serene attention to visual oddity and wordless beauty could only be made in Japan. And, specifically, made by Hayao Miyazaki.

A desert of shrill juvenile jokes and clanging chase sequences.

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.

Despite the best of intentions, an actress who makes her own headlines gets in the way of the big picture.

Breakdown feels at first so casual, so comfortable with its own small expectations (a good but unglamorous cast, a sturdy but unspectacular plot), that the authentic feelings of suspense are a surprise.

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

If only Roberts' warmth, coupled with Javier Bardem's scruffy sexiness as Felipe, were enough to compensate for the folded-map flatness of this production.

Sean Baker's singular little ultra-indie is a strikingly unsentimental study in female friendship between unmoored souls in L.A.'s bleached, glamour-challenged San Fernando Valley.

Amir Bar-Lev's engrossing film is as much about the stubborn ambiguities of art, truth, meaning, and relationships as it is about the authenticity of the Olmstead oeuvre.

Glued tightly from page to screen, Sin City is so seduced by the visual possibilities of sin that style becomes its own vice.

Without ever dipping into indignity among wet, half-naked men, Shower sparkles with joy.

Among all the chess-piece players on the board, the star is the only one who really builds a solid emotional foundation for his character.

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.

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

Turns out to be the funniest, most risk-taking, most incisive movie of the summer.

There's wit but never a wink in this smartly shot production, which pays homage to the 1980s without fetishizing the era.

Veteran French farceur Francis Veber proves that feature-length idiot humor is not limited to the Farrelly brothers.

The spectacular battle scenes are the engorged heart of the delirious adventure. But Woo also gets maximum romantic value from Tony Leung as a war hero married to Chiling Lin as the tea-pouring beauty.

A small cubist masterpiece about crime and punishment set in that most split-level of environments, Los Angeles.

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.

Gorgeously shot tableaux of random adolescent brutality are interrupted by flashes of computer garble and chat-room talk, backed by ''Lily's'' music, with its blend of Debussy-like arpeggios and Enya-like sighing.

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 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _.''

It's left to Caine to wink and nod at his own contribution to real caper classics of the 1960s and '70s, produced with more emphasis on fun and less on instructive fact-finding.

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

Time, Kim Ki-Duk's pointed commentary on surfaces and consumer fads -- with particular meaning for plastic-surgery-obsessed South Korea -- is as tautly ''pretty'' and inexpressive as the results for those who compulsively seek cosmetic perfection.

Campion's big-sisterly encouragement of Cornish's lovely, openhearted performance -- and Whishaw's well-matched response -- results in a character instantly, intimately recognizable to anyone remembering her own first love.

A pitiless yet elegiac Australian Western as caked with beauty as it is with blood.

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

What matters is that Tiana triumphs as both a girl and a frog, that dreams are fulfilled, wrongs are righted, love prevails, and music unites not only a princess and a frog but also kids and grown-ups.

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.

The romantic troubles of three Irish-Catholic brothers on Long Island don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

A warm embrace of tradition and boisterous, ethnographically rich local culture.

When the florid speeches of volcanic rage and frustration draw to a close - and when Collins and Gooding complete their acting exercises - we still have no clue who these men are and what sent them down their intersecting moral dark alleys.

An irresistibly vibrant concert-tour documentary.

It's a bouncy, loose limbed, ''families do the darnedest things'' sitcom that elicits ungrudging laughs.

The real soullessness here is built into the production, a polished adaptation of Hong Kong-style filmmaking that, with its cast of depressive characters, allows for little Hong Kong-style joy.

It's agony, in a rewarding way, to squirm and cringe and groan through an ordeal so realistically re-created.

With a taste for dark lyricism, the director delicately emphasizes the contrast between surface innocence and subterranean danger, and between grown-up secrets and boyhood bravery.

A pleasurably unsettling, sunbaked tale of sex and politics set in late-1970s Haiti.

The movie was a major success for Melanie Griffith, sure, but it was as the secretary's boss ... that Weaver combined all of her star qualities, pulled in laughs, and took home an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Had Latura et al. paused for even a moment to acknowledge what they were doing, Daylight might have been a whole other ball of fire.

At the bone, Zombieland is a polished, very funny road picture shaped by wisenheimer cable-TV sensibilities and starring four likable actors, each with an influential following.

This gripping if tamped-down drama is steeped in ancient Albanian culture, where the real, tragic consequences of blood feuds can keep families trapped in their homes for generations.

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

Often has the rambling feeling of a home movie Blaustein made for his buddies.

The Corporation has better manners and a longer fuse than ''Fahrenheit 9/11.'' But the acerbic, sardonically illuminating Canadian documentary shares with its American cousin a certain bleak leftist glee in pursuit of its cause.

Poorly engineered: lurchingly paced, the dramatic conflicts duct taped together.

A movie at once understated and radical, deceptively unremarkable in presentation and ballsy in its earnestness. Don't let the star's overly familiar squint fool you: This is subtle, perceptive stuff.

There are pleasing outcomes for almost everyone in Happy Endings, and that's not good news.

A work of American art as classic as it is modern. Note to tourists: Leave before the very end of the credits and you'll miss some of the best and funniest roadside sights.

Undoubtedly downplays the seamier, less attractive experiences of Arab women and men in Tunisian cabaret culture, and plays up the fairy-tale charm of the universal ''Flashdance'' formula in an unusual setting.

A nifty, entwined, ultimately gripping adaptation of British crime writer Ruth Rendell's novel ''The Tree of Hands'' by French director Claude Miller.

Sophisticated, funny, and joyously subversive animated bug epic.

Sagnier is yummy.

The subtle selectivity of Leconte's eye, how he moves with great control from gesture to gesture, is matched by the disciplined intensity of the performances.

A quietly dazzling microcosm that's always just this side of eerie, just that side of tragic.

Lathan, charismatic and beautifully strong, holds the screen in every scene.

Nothing is new, which is a problem. Nothing is particularly funny or endearing, which is a worse problem.

The deliriously enjoyable noir comedy-thriller Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang does nothing by halves and everything by doubles.

Many have tried, but none can match Malick's touch for shuffling a deck of elegiac images (water/sky/clouds/rain) and fanning out the hand to express what speech cannot; he's a master, too, of incorporating sound that is often wordless but never empty.