M. E. Russell

Beautifully acted and accomplishes exactly what writer/director Alan Ball set out to accomplish.

It's pleasantly funny, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, from start to finish, even when it's staging broad, easy gags about baby barf and fat kids.

Taken as a whole -- and it kills me to write this -- it just doesn't add up to much.

As a study of a predator, "Evil" is fascinating and enraging.

It's a relentless finale to the "Bourne" movie trilogy that raises the stakes, pumps up the action and develops old characters while introducing new villains

The Host isn't just a terrific monster movie. This South Korean box-office smash is also a laugh-out-loud comedy and a surprisingly angry political satire.

It's the best kind of complaint. You can see why the $50 million man refers to something he gave away as "the best single day of my career."

Nominated for an Oscar for best documentary feature, it's deeply humane and even more deeply unsettling, in a way that most documentaries about Iraq, which tend toward the polemic, never manage.

Basically "Before Sunrise" for middle-aged people, only with less interesting conversations and a more formulaic construction.

Raimi as a filmmaker is clearly having more fun than he's had in years. So will his fans.

One of this year's funniest movies -- and its most inspirational sports drama -- is a documentary.

If you're willing to do the work, Triad Election pays you in tragedy.

Isn't easy to watch, but it's beautifully written and acted, with a sharp eye for the small embarrassments of divorce.

Nair takes mostly low-key material about a traditional Indian family raising kids in America and turns it into something sensual, funny and quietly devastating.

It's one of the best and strangest films of Miyazaki's career.

It's one of the great horror films of recent years -- and a welcome antidote to the in-your-face sonic assaults that all too often pass for genre fare.

Hugely entertaining.

Despite dancing between a story and a story within a story, something seems simple and effortless about Ten Canoes. Director Rolf de Heer and his all-Yolngu cast offer a take on tribal life that's warm, funny and powerfully alive.

A funny and sincere indie about what happens when an acerbic teen finds herself "in a fat suit I can't take off."

One of the best movies playing in Portland is, I kid you not, a loopy dramatic thriller starring Jean-Claude Van Damme.

The movie's perfectly understated, warts-and-all sense of time and place will send any suburban Gen Xer in the audience flashing right back to their less-cautious days, when mix tapes did heavy lifting as calling cards.

Although the drama suffers from the episodic story structure, Zathura feels less like "Jumanji" and more like a really great episode of Steven Spielberg's "Amazing Stories" TV series.

The writing, acting and filmmaking make Hustle & Flow nothing short of amazing.

I wish Zenovich wasn't forced to skate surfaces when it comes to Polanski's perspective -- his interviews are vague and archival -- but she skillfully works around him to craft a maddening look at one of Hollywood's most infamous trials.

Startling and amazing -- a cinematic hammer to the skull.

By an order of magnitude --- the strongest (or at least the most mature, subtle and emotional) entry in the series thus far.

The final third...is so overblown and anticlimactic that it finally gets you thinking about empty profundity and loose ends.

Miller's global harmonizing never feels preachy -- he's too busy cramming Happy Feet with enough entertainment for three movies.

The only scenes that felt "actorly" come when the pair drunkenly crash an ex-girlfriend's wedding party. Otherwise, The Messenger has a verisimilitude rare in films tackling this subject matter.

It is provocative, smartly made and truly independent.

Enjoys the weird distinction of being one of the year's funniest comedies and one of the best zombie movies ever made.

Lawrence steps up. And her character's fierce independence provides a welcome alternative to certain vampire-fixated young-adult heroines who define themselves entirely through the attention of much-much-older men.

Submarine pulls off a nice little feat: It's a reference-heavy coming-of-age indie flick that feels fresh despite being, well, a reference-heavy coming-of-age indie flick.

The funny and powerfully weird Rango is probably the closest I've seen a big-budget, computer-animated feature get to the comic vibe of my favorite Chuck Jones cartoons -- specifically, the Bugs/Porky Western spoof "Drip-Along Daffy."

A terrific midnight movie of the future -- a tough, funny, fast-moving and tightly constructed John Carpenter riff in which a bickering group fights a pack of space monsters in and around a single location.

The juxtapositions can be beautiful: haunting music played over a water-streaked windshield, a deaf student awakening to the "feeling" of sound, Glennie staring ferociously at a gong as she extracts its vibrations.

Bridesmaids follows the lead of other Apatow productions and finds much of its comedy in pain, horrifying awkwardness and the difficult work that goes into building and maintaining relationships. If you liked this in "Knocked Up," you'll probably like it here.

Unpretentiously fantastic.

In their best moments, Hark's action movies have a what-did-I-just-see giddiness, as if their choreography were springing straight from a cartoon id. Though I could have done without much of the film's CGI-heavy fakery, "Detective Dee" finds that giddiness more than a few times.

It's charming, funny, exceedingly well-made and features enough comically thrilling flying-lizard mayhem to cause your child's head to lightly explode.

Waitress is strange and sexy and personal and wonderful -- a weird little slice of pure feeling -- and it's horrible that Shelly never got the chance to see it delight a mass audience.

By presenting murderers as actors and then filming those actors discussing their sins, the line between performance and soul-searching blurs in unnerving ways.

This is a violent, romantic, beautifully shot and performed film -- with brutal battle scenes and charisma-bomb performances by Asano as the future Khan and Honglei Sun as a rival chieftain and brother-in-arms.

Intimate, funny, moving and incredibly rousing -- even if you're allergic to sports movies.

Funny and weird and surprising and action-packed and genuinely beautiful.

A dry, vicious and deeply moving little comedy that sort of takes the structure of a teen sports movie, then undermines that structure at every turn.

It's better at being droll than laugh-out-loud funny.

The movie's a ride, basically. It's a slick, funny buddy-flick confection about a dork (Jesse Eisenberg), a Twinkie-loving hick (Harrelson), a hottie (Emma Stone) and a sassy kid (Abigail Breslin) who bicker and bond as they drive cross-country after a zombie plague.

If you enjoyed any of Frank's previous work, or thought "Brick" was the bomb, you'll love this.

This is one of Downey's most enjoyable performances, and one of Kilmer's funniest. It's a relationship comedy wrapped in sharp talk and gunplay, a triumphant comeback for Black, and one of the year's best movies.

The movie's biggest charm is its unpredictable, offbeat tone.

Bacon's mature performance serves a story that's considerably less sophisticated than he is, making The Woodsman less "brave" and more a slightly better-made movie of the week.

It's frustrating that a movie about a man so deathly serious about music has largely boiled his life down to addiction and adultery.

This meandering tale of a pack of ticket inspectors working the Hungarian subway system delights in misleading viewers.

The movie is well-acted and a bit frustrating, but also a pleasant little surprise.

On balance, the filmmakers do a terrific job with one of the weaker stories. It's welcome news that Yates is coming back for one of the stronger ones; he's set to direct "Half-Blood Prince."

After the terrifying grotesques that were the live-action "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and "The Cat in the Hat," it was easy to dread a feature-length Horton Hears a Who!. But -- surprise -- the computer-animated "Horton" is largely funny and faithful to the spirit of the Dr. Seuss book.

A nasty little tube of frozen horror concentrate.

The Boys of Baraka leaves you outraged in the way only the best documentaries can.

At its best, Prisoners dwells on the ways the characters affected by the case are held mentally captive -- by conviction, compulsion, procedure, skewed beliefs, rage, and grief -- and how each character's blind spot and/or maniacal focus furthers or frustrates the search for the girls.

A rough little comedy of tone. White, making his directorial debut, asks if the search for self is still heroic when the discoveries are unpleasant.

Though it somehow manages to be a movie about inner peace with crazy, incredibly staged fight scenes every 10 minutes, it is, first and foremost, a movie about inner peace.

The movie has "heart" in a way that doesn't feel cloying or dishonest. And the cast -- especially Janelle Schremmer -- just nails it.

Gosling is excellent playing a character who's fundamentally unknowable.

Waititi is still telling stories of offbeat, semi-delusional New Zealanders, and he's still sprinkling his work with cartoonish flights of fancy -- but this time he grounds the comedy in a big-hearted, bittersweet story about a boy desperate to connect with his father.

Director Tony Scott's runaway-train action flick Unstoppable is semi-remarkable for what it doesn't contain.

Duplicity is perfectly titled: There isn't a second of this smart, twisty, grown-up thriller in which someone isn't lying, cheating or stealing, often from someone they claim to love.

Night at the Museum ends up being a pretty fun all-ages comedy -- if you can survive its first 20 minutes.

The movie still works as a clever little "Twilight Zone" episode with great production values, and it's an impressively ambitious debut for Barthes.

It's a definite crowd-pleaser and a perfectly fun night at the movies.

Arthur is sort of a dull hero, but the grandfather is classic, hilarious Aardman -- a thoroughly British eccentric prone to weird nostalgic/fatalistic utterances.

It's fascinating as an offbeat storytelling exercise.

One doesn't want to oversell the film; you could catch it on DVD and regret nothing. But, frankly, in a marketplace that tends toward cranked-up action thrills, it's just nice to watch a level-headed crime movie aimed at actual grown-ups.

Surprisingly flabby, with lazy writing and some final-act lurches into unironic rom-com that seem at odds with the bizarro premise.

It's quietly brutal stuff, beautifully acted by Fanning, Englert, Christina Hendricks and a word-twisting Alessandro Nivola.

Mike Terry's uncompromising fight for his principles makes for a fascinating, beautifully acted study in philosophical tension.

Kazan has a gift for letting you see her think, even when she's perfectly still; the film's title refers to the ferocious trauma happening between Ivy's ears and her silent struggle to keep it in check.

If you're inclined toward women of the smart/sly variety, you'll leave with a massive crush on Hall. You might remember her as Christian Bale's long-suffering wife in "The Prestige." Here, she comes off as a sort of college-aged, raven-tressed, human rights-obsessed Emma Thompson, only cooler.

Director Kim Ji-woon creates a funny, fast-moving pastiche of Spielberg, Woo, Leone and George Miller, but it's really a must-see for its three big action set pieces -- which go on for a million years each and become almost hallucinatory.

O'Toole just keeps turning up the volume, and it's thrilling to watch.

As horror movies go, The Conjuring is an extremely skillful, entertaining remix album. That's not an insult.

Innocence revisits imagery from the first film. But this time computer animation pumps everything up to epic proportions. The results are overwhelming.

Monster House makes its intentions clear: It wants to wrap you in a thick, warm blanket of 1980s nostalgia.

If you can look beyond the simple-minded Socratic political discourse, The Edukators reveals itself as warm, humane and sad, a movie that genuinely wants you to think about how idealism eventually collides with human frailty, and about what upstarts and sell-outs might teach one another.

The teachers have moxie. The students have courage. Mermin's warm, funny, beautiful and deeply humane documentary certainly honors the latter.

Sneaks up on you. At first, it plays like it might be another in a long line of dullish legal thrillers. But then, in its modest, grown-up way, it keeps getting better and better.

De la Iglesia is a mercilessly agile talent.

Barrymore is terrific with her actors, finding moments for even the smallest supporting players.

Make no mistake: This isn't a relentless button-pushing joke machine like the best Apatow schlumpy-man comedies. I guess I'd describe it as "agreeably ribald."

A bright, sexy, globe-trotting and very French romantic comedy.

Travolta does a nice job, but Bolt is of course the most boring, blandly cute character in the movie.

The movie is directed with real confidence by Batmanglij. He lets his actors breathe, builds suspense in one group-purge brainwashing scene, and lets the mystery unfold in an immersive way that's probably a bit more compelling than its actual scripted payoff deserves.

The movie unfolds in the uplifting manner you'd expect, but its real pleasures lie in its terrific '60s pop-soul soundtrack and especially in its frequently funny performances.

A sweet, intelligent little movie.

Maybe the best thing about Stranger Than Fiction is the way it extracts unexpected work from underrated actors.

The movie's still quite affecting -- in part because of its simple, old-school earnestness, but mostly because Stolzl does white-knuckle work behind the camera to make you feel the height, pain and awe of the grueling ascent, and the bottomless terror and exhaustion after everything goes horribly, horribly wrong.

Where "United 93" was lean and merciless and got you thinking hard about how you might conduct yourself in a no-win situation, World Trade Center is reassuring.

The Other Guys finds McKay back to trying something wildly ambitious with his comedy, and largely succeeding.