Lisa Schwarzbaum

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.

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

Minghella makes an enticing, intelligent, well-shaped picture about the extreme perils of class envy and sexual panic.

What this Manchurian Candidate for a new generation makes up for in timing, it lacks in discipline and edge.

Baumbach's movies are addictive dispatches from a genteel jungle of white privilege, where highly educated people behave badly. I can't take my eyes off the exotic wildlife.

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

A delightfully weird, if occasionally too arty, documentary as darting in its structure as a dragonfly's flight.

They also make joyful music, communicated, both by the singers and their playful, sensitive documentarian, with an authority that quite knocks off socks.

The biggest strike against Rango, though - for both the movie and the hero - is that the lizard is so damn ugly.

As an exception to the norm, Kitano doesn't appear this time, confining himself merely to writing, directing, and editing.

An old-fashioned romance-and-sickness picture, a publicity-grabbing sex picture, an Apatow-lite horny-boys picture, and a liberal satire on pharmaceutical-industry excesses committed in pursuit of pill sales - all in one.

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

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 premise, the structure, and the men-at-twilight conversation in Patrice Leconte's ingratiating drama feel cloyingly predetermined at times, but the sight of Hallyday and Rochefort luxuriating in their contrasting manly personas is a kick.

Martha Marcy May Marlene leaves a viewer hanging, quite literally, lost in an enveloping fog of mood without resolution. Olsen, meanwhile, definitely marks her arrival.

That the story is so oldfashioned and domestic and the family so average and secular is, in its way, the wind beneath this Broken Wings.

Zigzags across the conventions of genre, occasionally driving on the shoulders of black humor -- it's a road movie for the way we process suspense today.

Subplots go nowhere, and characters -- many played by well-known actors -- barely get screen time. Willem Dafoe, Salma Hayek, and Jane Krakowski are among those who are there and gone.

The title Terror's Advocate is both a statement of fact and a worrisome understatement in a documentary as slippery as its subject.

With In Between Days, the filmmaker captures feminine melancholy with rare precision. Find this movie.

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).

A historical drama as static as it is stately.

Lasse Hallström calms Irving's typically busy 1985 best-seller with a balm of the Swedish director's typically soothing lyricism.

So sharp and dryly urbane in its mod-Brit take on the noir, noir, noir, noir world of gambling, dames, and pulp fiction, it makes higher-profile attempts like ''Rounders'' look blah, blah, blah, blah.

Leconte (''Ridicule'') gives his heart to the luck of romance, to the dream state visual style of Fellini, and, most lyrically, to the passion of the dagger point swoon.

Dazzling psychological cat-and-mouse drama.

This is a sensual, psychologically modern costume drama influenced by both "The Godfather" and gals' guides to empowerment.

"Old Boy's" vivid star Choi Min-sik plays a terrible schoolteacher -- yet another damned soul in Park's inflammatory, inimitable movie inventory of hell on earth.