Lisa Schwarzbaum

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 winning -- Gyllenhaal is particularly sharp as an aggrieved sibling, and there's mutual zing in her scenes with Reilly.

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

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

Wargnier directs his French historical drama, a foreign film Oscar nominee, in a way that allows little perspective on the extent of Stalinist cruelty; even when terrible things happen, they do so sedately.

What blows us away is the power of Ifans' moist puppy eyes and chilling smile as a true believer undeterred by reality.

In such an audience stroker, where casting is everything (on Broadway, James Gandolfini brought exciting menace to the role of Mr. Longstreet), Winslet and Waltz jell while Foster and Reilly flounder, unable to make sense of what kind of people they're supposed to be.

A dark, ambitious, unsettling piece of work.

Writer-director Salvatore Stabile has a good eye for the details of hard-luck ordinariness, and he sketches believable family bonds with a minimum of flourish.

Director Sérgio Machado, who worked as an assistant to Central Station's Walter Salles, lingers sensually over every wrong move his attractive tragic trio make.

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

This galvanizing cinematic work is also gorgeous, experimental, alive with a Scandinavian strain of chutzpah, and artistically elegant.

Renner's Cross is a conflicted hero built to take advantage of the "Hurt Locker" star's best qualities as an actor - his default intensity, the way he conveys that complicated mental calculations are taking place under cover of watchful stillness, even underwater.

Bale exists all too large under the circumstances, a well-fed actor playing at emaciation for the sake of a fiction about a character whose torment is as unreadable as his vertebrae are countable.

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.

Genre-hoppers like Steven Soderbergh ought to love this neat triple doozy. [Note: From a review of the entire trilogy.]

A portentous and goopy Dutch drama.

The message that comes across is: We're all screwed, and then we die. Ba-DUM.

In aiming for a new kind of lit-drama cool, Jane Campion freezes the warmth right out of Henry James' expansive heart.

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

Pandaemonium goes a long way toward capturing the compelling delirium of opium among a crowd of freethinking British iconoclasts.

Goldberg, for all her character's tough bluster, is sweet too: Her performance here is contained, modulated, dignified without cushioning the Whoopi edge that makes her work so interesting and uncategorizable.

I do wish the movie's ending weren't so squishy. It's been changed from the finale that Sundance audiences saw earlier this year and now reeks of focus-group testing.

Storyboarded with precision, and enhanced with a resonant score by Deborah Lurie, Acker’s handsome, feature-length 9 is, for all its visual flights of fancy, grounded in an apocalypse-proof message graspable by any schoolchild.

A small, heartfelt film.

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.

This sloppy, pleasant comedy by playwright and TV producer Robin Schiff (Almost Perfect) is an amiable mess, a padded-out expansion of a play called "Ladies' Room."

These movie guys specialize in snapping vignettes of human inconsistency - no fancy lighting required.

The antics are wacky -- but far from Wilde.

To contextualize the story's lack of subtlety, it helps to see these casting choices as ongoing penance for the time when, as a boy, Chen denounced his own father to the Red Guard.

The Clearing is what's known in the biz as an alternative for adult moviegoers. Which is to say the film is a performance-driven drama devoid of special effects and loud noises. On the contrary, it's a meditation on midlife weaknesses and compensation.

The movie may be more bogus than a Gucci bag for sale on a Fifth Avenue sidewalk, but at least the backgrounds are real.

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.

Commits sins of romantic comedy as well as sins of spiritual tragedy.

The crowd-pleasing comic Euro-drama The Concert is, at its musical center, as full of ripe emotion as Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D Major. It's also as darkly funny as a Slavic farce, a composition of sweet cacophony.

A notorious opinion divider last year at Cannes, Battle in Heaven is less about heaven or battle, or hell on earth, or the soul of Mexico, and all too much about gawking. And so, for all the ''shock'' of the movie's clinical carnality, this battle is lost.

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.

Could it be that the director of "L.A. Confidential," "Wonder Boys," and "8 Mile" has been defeated by characters on a first-name basis with brisket, by women who, in Susannah Grant's screenplay, represent avatars of joyless workaholism and joyless sexaholism?

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

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.

The production feels self-congratulatory and illuminated only dimly.

The filmmaker keeps himself squarely on screen. This is fine when he engages in throwdowns with the bigots but distasteful when Levin shows himself reacting to footage -- unseen by viewers -- of the beheading of reporter Daniel Pearl.

Labored miscalculation of a teen-trend comedy.

There's a double meaning in the title of this folksy, relentlessly political, heavy-handed story, written and directed by Mark Herman and set among the coal mines of Yorkshire, England, in 1992.

Crystal turns in his best (read: least sappy) performance in ages, getting through an entire movie -- most of it, anyway -- without mugging.

Gandhi tries to dodge criticism of his mocking scam by rationalizing that even a phony wise man can offer real solace.

A thriller made from a completist's checklist rather than with a cultist's passion.

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

There's something already exhausted, however, in the intrusively gauzy, wobbly, blurry, zoomy digital-video look of the piece.

While each Yorkshire playmate-of-the-month warmly assesses her own undewy flesh, the movie gives off a happy vibe of appreciation -- for the dignity of the real Rylstone lot, the actresses who play them so lovingly, and the simple, flower-bed borders of the story.

David Schwimmer directs this smarmy Hot Topic drama with empathy for the craft of acting but less interest in the craft of making a movie move.

Funny, director and co-writer Dani Levy suggests with no little coldness, how the scent of money can do what religion, ideology, and ethical principles cannot.

A comedy that might have made Butch and Sundance jump off a cliff.

This cranked-up drama wants it both ways.

And although director Paul Anderson treats the story with appropriate deadpan respect, there are enough sparks of humor (particularly generated by Linden Ashby as a shallow martial-arts actor who worries that he's a fake, with good reason) to amuse the adults accompanying the 10-year-old boys in the audience.

The newcomer kids are delightfully...kidlike. Cosmic bonus: "The Office's" Rainn Wilson plays a New Agey science teacher.

Very ''Waking Ned Devine.'' There's shrewd wit to Pouliot's gentle, no-bull farce.

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

Enough to anesthetize the living.

Holland's empurpled bio-fantasy is hooey with an anachronistic feminist slant from start to finish.

Rachid Bouchareb's intensely dramatized, passionately partisan story of militancy in the struggle for Algerian independence from France after World War II makes effective use of "Godfather" storytelling theatrics.

Tower Heist is the cinematic version of a Trump property: overblinged, eye-catching, and essentially tacky.

A realistic drama that looks and feels as inevitably true and moving as a good documentary.

What's missing from this by-the-numbers drama is a sense of abandon.

Miller's theme is innocence, the loss of it, and the reclamation of equanimity in the face of that loss, and the music she makes is haunting.

Engages in the cinematic equivalent of not inhaling.

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.

In our summertime-movie world of aliens and superheroes who look all too familiar, Dodge and Penny look all the rarer in their precious humanity.

Ice Age: The Meltdown blithely looks on the bright side of life, amassing a screen full of vultures to sing and dance ''Food Glorious Food'' and daring us not to get happy.

Somewhere in this broody ''Twilight Zone''-ish story about magical thinking (and the lure, to filmmakers, of garish casino culture) is a provocative and maybe even shocking thought on the Holocaust as a crapshoot.

This strong, assured Band of Brothers-style drama from director Jang Hun makes universal points about bonding, misery, loyalty, and the senselessness of war through a portfolio of soldiers.

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.

It's the first futuristic disaster movie that's as cute as a button. Which, when all the special effects blow over, is what we Americans like in a monster hit.

Don't leave before the final frame -- if you're still breathing.

The twist in The Double slack mystery-thriller is revealed with a shrug about a third of the way in. After that, it's all about Gere looking grim, and Grace looking stricken as he learns what we already know.

This charm-filled documentary about passionate Harry Potter fans (and one foe) leaps all over the place.

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.

A lot of Money Never Sleeps - too much - is about Gekko père's desire to reconnect with his very angry daughter.

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

A gaily busy kid flick.

Because the talk never gets beyond statement making, and because the characters emit none of Chekhov's radiantly lived-in soulfulness, there's plenty of time to appreciate the sun-kissed landscape.

Grant is game for a new level of meta-ha-ha, joke's-on-me in Music and Lyrics. But with Drew Barrymore as his costar, this bland, light romantic comedy insists on keeping the commentary as disposable as one of the '80s gumball tunes Grant used to swivel to as Alex Fletcher, a washed-up '80s pop star.

Exhausted as the premise already is -- hapless boomer learns that real manhood is a function of committed fatherhood -- Old Dogs nevertheless finds ways to make the lesson even less tolerable.

Tatyana, the embodiment of a heroine whose still waters run deep, requires more maturity than Tyler as yet possesses.

An effortlessly clever animated confection.

This otherwise entertaining, aficionado-oriented production, with its circus-act technology that lets a viewer feel, briefly, like a member of the Petty racing dynasty, is as gaudily patched with corporate sponsorship as the sport itself.

Anderson's adaptation is heavy on production numbers in which jingles come to life and light on conveying any real feelings of Eisenhower-era darkness the prizewinner herself might have felt during her decades of marriage to an abusive, drunken man.

Peculiarly bloodless.

There's a grim modern parable to be read into the dangerous effects of the gospel-preaching local crazy lady Mrs. Carmody (brilliantly played by a hellfire Marcia Gay Harden) on a congregation of the fearful.

This is interesting stuff. So why does The Last Stand feel driven to dumb itself down, as if embarrassed by its own ideas?

Stepping into sacred shoes once worn by Kevin Bacon, Wormald handily owns the role for a new audience. Same goes for a terrific Miles Teller (Rabbit Hole) in the sidekick role of Willard so memorably originated by the late Chris Penn.

Hoffman acts the hell out of the role.

So much is satisfying in KC that its shortcomings are all the more discordant.

There's no denying that when it comes to communicating a certain delirious romanticism of character shaped by thousands of hours spent sitting in the dark, the artist who made this showpiece is a master.

Pirate Radio is, in the end, about as rock-revolutionary as a tea break. But the choppy production floats on a great soundtrack (the real pirates are the Rolling Stones) and is buoyed by an inviting cast.

The film is notable for its nice performances, its handsome photography, and its very active music. If the preceding praise sounds generic, so is the movie.

Even those who don't know a foul tip from a chicken wing will be able to spot the desperate plays.

It is fun, though, 
 to see the younger Hanks play a murderer - it's like seeing Justin Bieber work blue.

Everyone involved fulfills his or her job requirements adequately. But the magic is gone, and Shrek Forever After is no longer an ogre phenomenon to reckon with. Instead, it's a "Hot Swamp Time Machine."

What's shocking this time is how tame Sacha Baron Cohen's newest wild man is, for all the kerfuffle the comedian can stir up on the ­promotional trail.

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.

A "Romeo and Juliet" tragedy of surprising power.

Examination of one of the English language's most useful utterances and why the sound packs such a friggin' wallop.

The always surprising Watts creates a woman at once contemporary and retro. And Norton, as a producer as well as star, concedes enough space for Schreiber and the effortlessly fascinating Jones to earn their own spotlights.

A nifty horror movie that doesn't claim to be anything other than a zippy exercise in creature-feature entertainment.

The whole cast is museum quality, and the ''music'' performances are pitch-perfect in their dissonance.

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

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.

The movie bubbles with intellectual curiosity and narrative ambition.

MIB3 is one giant leap for mankind because Josh Brolin shows up to play the younger Agent K. And he just nails the feat, triumphantly creating a riff on/homage to the Tommy Lee Jones-ness of K that goes much deeper (and funnier) than a simple imitation of drawl and speech patterns.

A slight romantic comedy about five winsome Australian university students who fret and joke about their romantic woes when not talking about movies and cinematic theories. Each has a charming quirk — one (Frances O’Connor) is a cute lesbian, another (Alice Garner) is writing a thesis on Doris Day — but none is deeper than a bag of Reese’s Pieces.

Not one bit of the story tracks. But with these women in these roles, you're asking for truth?

I'm holding the filmmaker responsible for getting us all back again - to feelings of excitement and delight. Vital as they are, Gollum and Bilbo can only do so much to keep us enchanted. Is Jackson able to sustain the magic in two more installments? I peer into Tolkien's Misty Mountains and embrace the journey.

I love the princess squad.

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

What's on screen is lazy, second-rate, phoned-in -- a heist in which it's the audience whose pockets have been picked.

Best of all, a revisit with Jedi makes a viewer appreciate spectacle, presentation, mythology -- that, and the power of a bitchin' helmet to speak volumes in a language even an alien can understand. [Special Edition]

Still, it's only just a jump shot or two before Glory Road settles into its rudimentary, music-cued rhythms of classroom civics lessons punctuated by on-court action.

For one of those obstreperously original books that are themselves impossible to translate, Everything Is Illuminated is impressively well lit.

Milla Jovovich slinks cartoonishly as Stone's seductive wife, on a mission to compromise the lawman. Lordy.

The performances are razor sharp. And the ideas in this movie are, no kidding, big.

A drama about corruption in the city's transit system that's not only hard boiled but also dipped in egg batter dialogue and deep fried.

Connoisseurs of digital animation, graphic novels, and the history of dystopian art will have plenty to discuss about Christian Volckman's visually striking, technically impressive black-and-white animated feature Renaissance…But no one will be talking about the movie's banal plot, the trite dialogue, or any of the indistinguishable characters who offer a bleak futuristic vision of cinema that's all style, no soul.

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.

Graeme and Clive, representatives of a nation of nonbelievers in UFOs and big dinner portions, come to the psychic capital of a country that wants to believe, and they're transformed. In Paul, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost do likewise, in celebration of what the Spielbergian cosmos is all about.

With every detail in this clever peekaboo, the sly filmmaker dangles the possibility that fiction is fact and that Yvan and Charlotte are real -- or at least as real as the movies.

Oscillates between streaky black comedy and sanitary instruction.

Heavy on mood and murk.

The hero himself has been denatured for a young, late 1990s audience with little appreciation for real suavity or sex play.

As loose and restful as pajamas.

The power dynamic may charm the French, but it's likely to push the cringe buttons of local moviegoers in Obama's post-"The Green Mile America." Apart from the wince-inducing moments, The Intouchables is often a pleasant buddy picture.

This mediocrity disguised as entertainment, this greed promoted as synergy — this, to paraphrase that seminal media study, Broadcast News, is what the devil looks like.

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

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.

With those piercing eyes, Owen makes a lovely, soulful Joe, of course. But it's not the nice papa we want to understand here, it's the unapologetically naughty one.

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

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.

The fact that this formulaically winsome movie, directed by British TV helmer Julian Jarrold, is based on product-line changes at a real Northamptonshire factory does little to freshen its approach.

A wildly romanticized Australian druggie drama.

Close's passion for the character she plays - 
a role, she has explained in interviews, that has absorbed her since she first played Nobbs on stage 30 years ago - contains its own intrigue.

The Human Stain is, contradictorily, drained of color by the spotlight turned on its charismatic leads. Between the labors of simplifying the story for the screen and accommodating the stardust of world-class actors, an essentially, uniquely American tragic hero and heroine are bleached of real American tragedy.

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

This hankie-yanker is an emotional cheat.

Remains a sampling of stagy scenes barreling to a gruesome climax, parts greater than the sum of the whole.

It's the parental mush about trusting one's kid to make her own discoveries and blah blah blah (spoken in a Sandlerized version of a Dracula voice) that drains the movie of blood. What's left are platitudes, and Sandler singing a novelty song in a Transylvanian-accented falsetto.

Downey's head and heart are in the right place, but the movie is more in pieces than whole, and more about iron than about men.

Not to get all Dorothy about it, but when it comes to Cars, there's no place like home. The emotional punch of the original is inextricably rooted in the movie's appreciation of off-the-beaten-track America, and all that homegrown vintage car culture signifies.

There are no zombies to distract from the plausibility of Right at Your Door. And that's what makes this smart, coolly horrifying American indie thriller one of the scariest movies you're likely to see all year — a post-9/11 nightmare about terrorism, panic, and paranoia with real, waking-life implications.

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

The voices of Liam Neeson -- as the film's narrator -- and his late wife, Richardson, inevitably add to the project's poignance.

Watch for the ''Mrs. Doubtfire'' syndrome: In Santa drag and padded for laughs, Scott demonstrates how to be a more sensitive, more funsy parent than boring old Mom.

Working from a stagy script by Sam Catlin, director Danny Leiner uses a dainty palette of tristesse (untouched when he made Dude, Where's My Car?) to suggest that the shadow of 9/11 makes every discontent more pathetic.

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.

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.

An alarming male wallow passing as a fetching date-night dramedy.

A pompous and garbled parable about how terribly, terribly difficult it is to make it as a creative artist, and how important it is to maintain high standards of haberdashery.

Politics is almost an afterthought in this balky, attenuated film.

A bouncy, well-built, delightfully nasty tale of resentment, desperation, and amoral revenge that does for employer-employee relations what Danny DeVito and Bette Midler did for the bonds of matrimony in the great 1986 Zucker brothers comedy "Ruthless People."

You can forget about veracity, since this gauzy and sometimes dopey romanticization can't be trusted.

Goes where all too few films dare to venture these days -- into the heart of moral darkness.

The individual components of director Marc Abraham's David-and-Goliath drama are roundly unexceptional; the script, soft and teach-y; the performances, earnest.

First-time writer-director Rodney Evans makes a ballsy leap into historical fantasia, with heartfelt fervor outrunning stray moments of artistic gawkiness.

It's Complicated is middle-aged porn, the specialty of Meyers, who also set ladies and interior decorators drooling over homes and gardens in 2006's “The Holiday.”

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.

Plays more like a teaching tool than a dynamic drama.

So shameless is The Kingdom, ignoring consequence and treating its audience like cash-dispensing machines with buttons to be pushed rather than thinking individuals willing to consider the reality of America's entanglement with the Middle East.

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.

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.

Bale is mesmerizing and Rodriguez keeps up with him as the whole unsafe contraption zooms.

Laddish, one joke, genre scrambling rock & roll fairy tale.

Bassett's natural dramatic fierceness, so powerful when incited to action, is at odds with the knee-weakening sexual surrender required by the story.

An artlessly powerful performance by newcomer Nicole Behaire anchors American Violet.

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.

Russian-born Xenia Rappoport gives it her tragic-heroine all as an abused Ukraine prostitute-turned-sneaky housemaid in Italy in The Unknown Woman.

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

The movie is rotten the way that only a denatured made-for-export slice of Gallic nostalgia can be.

Does a great job of being in two places at once: In the head and gangly bodies of kids, and in the hearts of those of us who have survived grades 6-8.

The movie, by Dutch director Jan Kounen, is all surfaces, set pieces, Significant Looks, and voguing -- the same strictures Chanel and Stravinsky sought to bust.

Reproducing a period-piece screwball comedy for a modern audience turns out to be one playful, self-deprecating wink too many for the star, who also directed Leatherheads.

That The Big Kahuna is hardly more than a sketch or curtain-raiser is not the fault of the play in itself -- it's short-film size, not feature-worthy.

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.

Apted keeps the speechifying and dramatic poses away from Grant (poor Hackman’s the one forced to say, ”If you could cure cancer by killing one person, wouldn’t that be the brave thing to do?”). And he gives the star room to do clean work without the fussiness that marred Nine Months.

The mechanics of the actual plot are pretty amazing. Singer has assembled a top-notch international cast.

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.

The Arrival looks and feels awfully small and cheap. In that way, the movie does feel like those science-fiction classics of the ’50s. But back then, sweaty heroes didn’t utter lines of ’90s dialogue like ”I look like a can of smashed a–holes.”

Everything about Foster's ocular intensity is riveting, but little in this hushed vigilante drama makes sense.

In moments that have nothing to do with representing the weight of love (whatever that is), the film comes alive: when Ami Ankilewitz isn't a symbol - just a man who, for instance, loves a woman.

Real Steel is directed by "Night at the Museum's" Shawn Levy, who makes good use of his specialized skill in blending people and computer-made imaginary things into one lively, emotionally satisfying story.

The movie whips up a big old puree of ingredients borrowed from other cinematic recipes.

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.

However admirably Minghella urges a break from complacency and an entry into a state of local/global compassion, his characters are position holders rather than people.

Nothing Lee has done is as flashy or as mucked up as Bamboozled.

The signature Eastwoodian music that the director lays over the proceedings - piano tinkle, guitar pluck, and an echo of Rachmaninoff out of Noël Coward's Brief Encounter - can't hold the assemblage together.

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.

There are instances when the filmmaker tries for Western iconography and settles for ''Full Monty'' ingratiation.

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

As a work of art, the movie, shot quickly on digital video, is genial enough if unrefined.

The result is a pageant long but not deep, noisy but not stirring, expensive but not sumptuous.

Clooney proves himself to be a true movie star and romantic leading man. His charm, his energy, even his ease with children (one of any adult actor’s most terrifying challenges) carry One Fine Day into irresistibility.

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.

No schmucks were harmed in the making of Dinner for Schmucks. That's the problem.

A boggy mix of fact, fiction, and changeable wigs and beards worn by Heath Ledger in the title role, manages to shrink the grandness of the myth without clarifying our understanding of the man.

What feels enjoyably outré in the 1998 coming-of-age novel by Jonathan Ames (creator of HBO's Bored to Death) feels oppressively outré in this deadened, literal adaptation.

The movie works hard -- desperately hard -- to be all things to all audience segments. And the visible effort erodes the sense of gaiety, of unfettered fun.

The intrepid one is the outstanding Josh Brolin, who does such a phenomenal job in the title role that he carries every scene he's in to a place of subtlety and integrity far beyond what Stone needs to make his attention-grabbing noise.

A Smith production is always noisy, shambling, and liberally smutty on the outside while conservatively gooey on the inside.

There's not a moment in Bagger Vance that can't be anticipated.

It challenges, this nervy oddity, like modern art should.

This Debbie Downer of a drama is a bitter slog.

But in this standard athlete-dies-young presentation, we never do catch the magic that made Steve Prefontaine a towering figure. Instead, this Pre is a shaggy-haired, sentimental favorite -- a teen angel rather than an Olympian.

The observations about parenthood, pro and con, are quick and smart, and Scott effortlessly steals the show, softening Westfeldt's brittle cuteness.

Parse the philosophy behind the spill of words, though, and you'll find intellectual jumble, junk. Better to nod to Yes as a drowsing chant than take it seriously as a statement of global concerns.

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

The story and setting may be ancient, but under the direction of Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland), and with a nicely textured screenplay by Macdonald's Scotland coscreenwriter Jeremy Brock, the vigor is fully modern.

The gooey sanctity of the bond between fathers and sons all but nullify Jackson's zesty performance.

It's tastelessness like this, served up as fair-game dish to a Downton Abbey-loving audience, that sours the flavor of this tittery production.

An only-in-the-movies mother hustles pool to raise the money to abduct the son she's been forbidden to see since her divorce.

There's a kind of tough beauty to this deft, satisfying thriller.

Scott gets into the zip and rush of urban energy with an enthusiasm bordering on hilarity.

In the handsome, haunting submarine thriller Below, the usual perils of deep-sea maneuvers are heightened by psychic unraveling.

The sum is no greater than the ''Fame''-style saga of any one of them, and Graff, an actor and screenwriter making his directing debut, is less successful at developing each story than at conveying his general affection for the curtain-call species.

Let loose in a plot that's surprisingly modern about sex and relationships, Morton gives Eva's torn longings an immediacy that transcends a lot of damp, 1950s rusticated preciousness.

French director Jean-Jacques Annaud, who brought his interest in self-discovery and untamed places to Quest for Fire, The Lover, and the IMAX 3-D film Wings of Courage, is at his best re-creating the serene exoticism of the Dalai Lama's Tibet. But the spark of the holy that the Dalai Lama lights in Harrer flickers only fitfully in all the wind in this production.

Walking and Talking is saved from utter banality by a script dotted with occasional buoyant moments of tenderness and wit, as well as by the light touch of its attractive cast.

It's probably the impresario's best-made movie yet, his most joyful, and his most moving.

An appalling, jaw-dropping movie that will cause serious nightmares.

Her death was shocking; this well-made telling of her life is inspiring.

The movie implodes, with each actor less vivid than he or she ought to be and each character less connected to the others than necessary for such an arbitrary plot.

Filmmaker Reed Cowan (himself gay and raised Mormon) documents the church's considerable financial influence on Prop 8's passage. Then he expands his sad and furious homegrown film to record the misery of gay Mormons sometimes driven to suicide over being rejected by their church and families.

German filmmaker Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) noodles around with form, composition, and sexuality in 3, a playfully pieced-together, beautifully shot, and secretly ridiculous drama about a triangular relationship among blasé Berliners.

Three stories by the guy who wrote Trainspotting, banged and smashed into a film by Paul McGuigan with none of Trainspotting's charm and all its grotesquerie.

The movie flaunts its comedy roots like a messy bleach job.

Ewan McGregor and Eva Green are easy on the eyes as lovers in Perfect Sense, an intriguing apocalyptic romance with a multi-purpose title.

Peculiarly coy feminine-empowerment fable.

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.

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.

Writer-director Paul Andrew Williams' unnecessarily hectic debut feature won several British film festival awards, no doubt for its bounty of low-budget stylized violence and blood, as well as its thing for prostitutes and runaways.

Under the direction of "Bend It Like Beckham's" Gurinder Chadha, this festively busy and exuberantly multicultural charmer is its own intriguingly postmodern creation.

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

This dazzling reverie of a kids-and-adults movie, an unusual collaboration between lord-of-the-cult multimedia artist Dave McKean and king-of-the-comics Neil Gaiman (The Sandman), has something to astonish everyone.

After teeny indies, this studio release retains the trademark love of warped American gothic that the Polishes share with David Lynch and the brothers Ethan and Joel Coen. But the unexpected streak of yearning sunniness -- the Spielbergian touch of boyhood dreams propelling a grown man -- gives The Astronaut Farmer a warmth that's new for them.

Part punk-drab British art-house portrait of underclass despair, part bloody vigilante pic, Harry Brown is shakily held together by industrial-strength sound design and the expertly employed theatrics of Michael Caine in the title role.

McCarthy's rawhide has become movie Naugahyde, a substance unknown in literature or in nature.

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.

Guy Ritchie's second feature, is a faux tough caper modeled lock, stock, kit, and caboodle on his earlier film ''Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.''

What's missing in The Missing -- despite throwing in The Everything, from magic trinkets to group hugs -- is soul.

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.''

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

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.

An affecting, old fashioned, antiwar war story.

Hilariously fake and rude. And thus true and tonic, if you know what I mean.

This cautionary tale might be easier to swallow if all that stuff didn't look like it came from a Sky Mall catalog.

Even the championship showdown feels polite.

A peculiar combination of willful meandering and matter of fact violence, and it occasionally confounds in its attempts to exalt.

Under Reitman's deanship, Ferrell lets his freak flag fly and Vaughn unlooses a notably funny, light-on-his-feet lunkheadedness.

Gruesome stuff — and yet Body Bags moves along with such jaunty, good bad taste that it’s hard not to smile.

A comic-book superhero has seldom squandered so much screen time being conflicted about his heritage and destiny -- and I don't mean conflicted in a sexy, Wolverine-y, ''X-Men'' way, either; a big-budget comic-book adaptation has rarely felt so humorless and intellectually defensive about its own pulpy roots.

The director has said that the plot was influenced by a real English thief named Valentin who showed up at his door one day to repay money stolen a decade earlier.

An awfully tidy, infernally sparkly study in skewed blessings, made manifest by Committed Acting from Sigourney Weaver.

Robert Downey Jr. is an uncomfortable sight as the school's hard-drinking, overstressed principal.

Forget "Monty Python," You Don't Mess With the Zohan is a circus that never really flies.

Bee Season answers the question no Talmudic student or fan of "Unfaithful" has thought to ask: What would Richard Gere look like as a learned Jewish scholar and teacher?

Buscemi is stymied here by the inertia of his material.

Here we are again: not entertained, not nearly enough, by an installment of the ''Star Wars'' epic that, for the first time, exhibits symptoms of...nerves. And a chill, conservative grimness of purpose, rather than an excited thrill at the possibilities of cinematic storytelling.

Not since "Snow Falling on Cedars" have I seen so pedigreed a lit-pic sit there like such an inert teapot, available only to be admired for its mysterious, ineffable Asian teapotness.

Tentle, dreamy animated sci-fi tale.

Simplest of its charms is the opportunity to watch Mortensen adapt his charismatic demeanor of wary, taciturn soulfulness from that of a Middle-earth king-in-waiting to one fitting a half-Lakota horseman in 1890.

Bleak, scathing, and utterly compelling.

Think of this witty, economically gory little tour de force as "28 Days Later" written by linguist Noam Chomsky.

Insistently sullen, nihilistic, and successful to the point of smugness at transmitting buzzkill, Art School Confidential is the second collaboration between art-house cartoonist Daniel Clowes and director Terry Zwigoff.

Everyone in the cast (including Geoffrey Arend, Mark Webber, and Caplan's Party Down colleague Martin Starr) is talented enough to deserve a stronger story line than this.

I don't know if it's ickier to assume that writer-director Brad Silberling (Moonlight Mile) thinks the culture-clash jokes he pushes in 10 Items or Less are charming because they're earnest, or because they're tongue-in-cheek. Either way, this sale is void.

With (Keanu's) stiff body language and wooden delivery, his every word falls like drops of flat Diet Coke rather than intoxicating wine.

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.

The filmmaking is rudimentary in The Treatment, Oren Rudavsky's adaptation of Daniel Menaker's novel, but the feeling for the patient-and-shrink dynamic is authentic.

The unexpected star is Hathaway, looking cool as a runway model in the role originated by Barbara Feldon, lithe as a (pink) panther, and displaying great comic timing.

Korine remains unnecessarily smitten with sordidness, and there's plenty of it here.

Hunt is so vibrant that the movie suffers when she's not around.

A light romantic do-si-do.

The movie's hide-and-seek attitude toward truth mirrors the intricacies of one lover getting to know another -- an arresting notion of the heart that's much more than paper-deep.

The superb character actor Celia Weston (In the Bedroom) is truly breathtaking as Ronnie's boozer mom.

This is strictly substandard stuff, with imitative creepy noises, vertiginous camera angles, and long pauses.

This movie is as packed with flashy bogusness as a lead singer's tight leather trousers. On the other hand, there's nothing bogus about the charisma and tough sweetness of Wahlberg.

To Winn-Dixie's great credit, both as a book and as a dandy, dignified movie, there's nothing condescendingly lesson-like in the wisdom India acquires.

You know what you want to see if you want to see The Notebook...You want to see girls in pretty 1940s dresses, soldiers in stirring World War II uniforms, handsome automobiles and equally handsome Southern landscapes. You want to see romance overcome adversity.

As it is, the story collapses like a bad tip to Liz Smith. Still, there's something brash, retro, and even stupidly touching about all the chatty mania, and the way Baitz and Pacino get off on paranoia, conspiracy theories, and the lure of 1960s idealism.

A slick, synthetic, self-important drama that thinks it is saying more than it is simply because of its subject matter.

More like a summer-camp theater project than a studio movie.

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

Cassavetes throws in everything he can recycle to grab a core-demo viewer -- slutty teens making out, blaring rock music, guns, split screens.

The movie luxuriates in cinema references while laughing at its own fetishes -- a neat talent.

Hits you on the head until you laugh.

This wan, formulaic teen movie from ''Metro'' director Thomas Carter is afraid to pump up the volume on its own interracial, hip hop Romeo and Juliet story, lest it challenge even one sedated viewer or disturb the peace.

The hoot and giggle of a girl-power fairy tale blended from potions of ''Monty Python,'' ''Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,'' and ''Shrek.''

The charms of Evans (from 1995's oddball Funny Bones) and Lane (who's at his best playing to the balcony) are lost in all the detailed hubbub.

The two stars appear to be as bewildered by the turn of events as we are.