Lou Lumenick

Literally the kind of movie they just don't make anymore, Michel Hazanavicius' French-sponsored charmer The Artist is a gorgeous black-and-white love letter to silent Hollywood with old-fashioned English intertitles and just a single line of audible (English) dialogue.

Gorgeously photographed by Peter Suschitzky, A Dangerous Method presents a vivid portrait of pre-World War I Europe that's at a considerable remove from the types of madness usually seen in Cronenberg's films.

Brilliantly playing doomed '50s sex bomb Marilyn Monroe, Michelle Williams gets under the skin of the troubled yet vulnerable icon in a way no one else ever has.

O'Grady is very good, but she can't make the hard-to-watch Rid of Me dramatically credible.

Good enough to almost overlook a so-so ending.

Expertly mixing tears and laughs with the sort of alchemy not seen since "Terms of Endearment," this superbly written, directed, acted, and yes, Oscar-friendly movie perfectly captures the blackly comic insanity that can overtake a family forced to confront an impending death.

Nutty Danish provocateur Lars von Trier -- long one of the most annoying filmmakers on the planet -- turns out one of the year's most emotionally resonant art movies.

It's pretty sad if you're a comic and Al Pacino is the funniest thing in your movie.

DiCaprio may well receive a Best Actor Oscar for his tour de force as the conflicted FBI director -- greatly abetted by Hammer (who played the Winklevoss twins in "The Social Network'') in his first major role as the flamboyant but frustrated Tolson.

Ineptly written and directed, the nihilistic The Son of No One flaunts an attitude best summed up by a cynical Pacino -- "A man has to live with s--t.'' Maybe so, Al, but audiences have the option of skipping this bomb.

Veteran character actor Dennis Farina gives one of the best performances of the year in a rare lead part as an aging, down-on-his luck small-time hood in The Last Rites of Joe May.

There are moments of brilliance, like a claymation sequence that manages to simultaneously send up '60s holiday cartoons and "Ghostbusters'' (with Frosty the Snowman instead of Marshmallow Man).

Putting it as kindly as possible, this pitiful romantic comedy directed by Scott Marshall (dad Garry did "Pretty Woman'') peaks with its animated opening credits.

Where Anonymous has it all over "Shakespeare in Love'' is its detailed evocation of London from four centuries ago. The rowdy audience for Shakespeare's first works at the Globe Theatre is especially colorful.

Michael Brandt's soporific thriller is making a token stop in theaters before its January DVD debut. Miss it if you can.

Relentlessly mediocre cartoon.

There's a winning emotional truth in the father-son scenes in this Spokane-shot sleeper, directed with skill and sensitivity by Jonathan Segal.

Johnny English Reborn sounds like a reboot, but it's actually a tired recycling of something that wasn't exactly fresh to begin with.

Spacey does his best work since "American Beauty'' as a tired middle-aged corporate warrior whose greatest compassion, in the end, is reserved for an ailing dog he has to put to sleep.

A dispiriting rehash of dysfunctional family clichés that seems to last longer than Thanksgiving Day dinner.

Make no mistake, Father of Invention is the hilarious Spacey's show all the way.

Basically "csi: East Texas,'' the debut feature of Ami Canaan Mann is long on style and short on coherent storytelling, not unlike numerous efforts by her director dad, Michael, who serves as a producer here.

Spanish master filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar offers up a grisly Halloween trick-and-treat in his first full-out horror movie, an eye-popping and genuinely shocking gender-bending twist on Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo.''

Yet despite the efforts of an excellent cast headed by three top comedy names -- Owen Wilson, Steve Martin and Jack Black -- and tons of beautiful scenery (mostly British Columbia and the Canadian Yukon), this movie stubbornly refuses to take flight, or generate more than a few chuckles.

The Sons of Tennessee Williams, which offers touching interviews with many older gay men, somewhat awkwardly connects this history with the efforts of a gay Mardi Gras crew to keep going in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

There's nothing startlingly original about Estevez's screenplay, yet it has a modesty you seldom see when Hollywood tackles spiritual subjects.

With Paul Newman gone, you couldn't ask for a better senior-citizen representation of Butch Cassidy than Shepard. In his best performance since "The Right Stuff'' turned him into a reluctant movie star, Shepard makes Blackthorn worth seeing.

It's not up to the high standard of the Clooney-Heslov script for "Good Night, and Good Luck,'' or what you'd imagine that, say, Aaron Sorkin could have done with this premise (for starters, sharper dialogue). Or what Elaine May did with the similarly themed "Primary Colors" 13 years ago.

Fast, furious and often funny. But no blood is truly shed (except literally in a playground fight during the opening credits).

Extremely cool-looking in the manner of "Sin City,'' but clumsily staged, slackly acted and mind-numbingly dull, Israeli director Guy Moshe's English-language fantasy is set in a future when guns, and apparently coherent conversations, have been outlawed.

It succeeds mostly thanks to stellar work by the wonderful Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who capably handles the dramatic heavy lifting, and Seth Rogen, who delivers big laughs as his raunchy bud.

It would be possible to appreciate Shannon's fabulous work in Take Shelter far better if the filmmaker lost a quarter of the two-hour running time -- there are many overlong scenes that make this a needlessly tough sit.

Based on a memoir by Nigel Slater, a British celebrity chef who makes a cameo appearance, Toast also charts the budding chef's growing interest in hunky, scantily clad guys. Be warned: Some of the regional British accents would benefit from subtitles.

While the Kassen brothers do an impressive job for newcomers -- the film looks great and performances are uniformly solid -- there's some overly blunt dialogue and dead-end subplots that would have been pruned by more experienced filmmakers.

Even if Corben hadn't photographed Gatien with lighting that makes him look like a horror-movie villain, he'd hardly come off as innocent.

A crowd-pleasing baseball movie for people - like me - who don't like baseball movies...Probably the finest baseball movie since "Bull Durham".

Unlike Van Sant's grittier, less sentimental recent small films, it's twee enough to make your teeth ache. It's the director's biggest miscalculation since "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" 18 years ago.

It's fun, but the script, credited to Hossein Amini ("The Wings of the Dove"), is short on characterization and long on plot twists and wisecracks.

The latter is played by Parker Posey, who looks baffled throughout. As well she should.

A great-looking but wearyingly cliched and confusing vanity production.

Arriving two days before the 10th anniversary of 9/11, Steven Soderbergh's Contagion is a serious all-star thriller about the rapid worldwide spread of a killer virus that's easily the scariest of the disaster films that have followed the attack.

Seven Days in Utopia obviously isn't targeted at us cynical New Yorkers. But it goes down more smoothly than you'd imagine thanks to Duvall and an excellent supporting cast.

Markopolos repeatedly tells us he was scared for his life -- accompanied by hokey archival clips and music -- though nothing actually happened to him.

Spanning two decades in a little under two hours, Higher Ground is a well-acted if slow-moving drama that will reward adventurous audiences with fine performances and a thoughtful approach.

Should appeal more to those who like to watch stuff blow up than understand exactly why the carnage is transpiring.

The overlong Amigo has its heart in the right place, but its approach to complex issues is too simplistic to win over unconverted minds.

I might be able to get past that if Hathaway and Sturgess had any chemistry. There are no sparks whatsoever, and that's always a deal-breaker for me in romantic films.

Rambling, mildly engaging micro-budgeted indie.

Gut-bustingly funny -- perhaps this waning summer season's ultimate guilty pleasure.

It's basically left to the viewer to figure out the historical significance of this drug-fueled odyssey.

You'd be better off renting "Eddie and the Cruisers" (1983) than slogging through this latest, far more dire recycling of the same rock clichés.

Sporadically hilarious but more often just plain crass and contrived.

What follows is a hilarious, slam-bang series of chases and battles that cross "Gremlins" with "Assault on Precinct 13," the two most prominent of many genre films quoted by Attack the Block.

Ineptly directed by Raja Gosnell -- the genius behind the "Scooby-Doo" features, "Big Momma's House," and "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" -- this cheesy-looking flick has lousy animation, worse special effects and the most headache-inducing, blurry 3-D since "Clash of the Titans."

This midsummer crowd-pleaser from the ateliers of Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard is still a great deal more rip-roaring fun than, say, the campy movie version of "The Wild Wild West."

Even with a clever final twist straight out of "The Twilight Zone," this crummy-looking two-hander is a tough sit.

It's an engaging piece of filmmaking on its own, beautifully shot and acted.

Chemistry is the usually misfiring engine that drives romantic comedies, so it's a pleasure to report that Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis are practically combustible together in Friends With Benefits.

Alas, the complications don't arrive nearly quickly enough for the overlong and slow-paced Lucky to really cook.

By far the best scenes are shared by Sneider and his struggling but devoted mother, played by the seldom-seen Amanda Plummer.

It's a reasonably funny religious satire that takes potshots at easy targets but is quite watchable due to the participation of two Oscar winners and two Oscar nominees.

Everything a summer blockbuster should be but rarely is - a whip-smart, slam-bang piece of entertainment where we deeply care about the fate of the central characters.

There have been many untraditional film adaptations of Shakespeare's, but few have been as unorthodox as this one.

Offers well-chosen selections from Aleichem's darkly humorous work.

A long way from his TV portrayal of John Adams, Giamatti seems to be having an especially good time as a splenetic King John, who would not be out of place in a Monty Python movie.

A dull, by-the-numbers psych-ward horror thriller that's sadly a lot closer in quality to "Sucker Punch" than "Shutter Island."