M. E. Russell

It's an ambitious, passionate, grief-stricken work of film art.

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

In "Upside" Allen's marble face acts as the pressure-cooker lid on a hilarious hissy fit.

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

Unpretentiously fantastic.

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

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

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.

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.

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."

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

A gorgeous, life-affirming movie. On paper, it sounds lurid bordering on ridiculous.

A sort of anti-date movie, a smart but deeply cynical study in failure, with our sense of loss growing in direct proportion to the characters' romantic hopes.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Weaver is hilarious and horrifying.

A nasty little tube of frozen horror concentrate.

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.

De la Iglesia is a mercilessly agile talent.

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.

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

The film is a minor Christmas miracle: It succeeds on its own terms, despite the gossip hounds' best blood-sniffing efforts, and dares to be an entertainment rather than a statement.

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.

If you're an actual adult who likes old-school Westerns, this won't disappoint you.

Odd, beautiful and ambitious film.

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

The film continues the tone that "Half-Blood Prince" set: we're leaving childish things behind, and human and magical concerns are starting to mingle in a grown-up way. When "Part 2" hits theaters eight months from now, I suspect I'll appreciate the buildup to a (literally) explosive finale. It's going to be a long wait.

Other than flubbing the dismount, Stick It is smarter and funnier than it has any right to be.

It's one of the few genuinely funny comedies in a dismal movie summer.

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

Daniel Day-Lewis may be one of our great actors, but he trips over a few Method-acting speed bumps in wife Rebecca Miller's third writer-director effort.

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.

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.

The movie's as casual as its lead characters' approach to changing history; it's also lewdly and frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious -- especially if you wasted any of your youth watching a certain brand of '80s comedy schlock on HBO at 2 a.m.

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.

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.

Fox uses her earth-tone-clad, Ivy-League-schooled characters the way Jane Austen used hers: taking their privileged, rigid social structures and building a stage to explore deeper human problems.

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

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

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.

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."

The film is exquisite on every level, full of sadness and emotional surprise.

Hugely entertaining.

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.

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.

Paul "Surfer Boy" Walker turns in a very credible action performance if you give him a Jersey accent, cover him in grime and beat the ever-loving tar out of him for two hours.

In the parlance of the kids today, the movie totally goes there.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Watts is a champ for seeing this through now that she's actually famous.

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

C.S.A. has a love-it-or-hate-it bite that probably will lead to a few passionate post-screening discussions.

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.

A sweet, intelligent little movie.

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

Despite the hot-button pedophilic story hook (I'm surprised Jeff and Hayley didn't meet on MySpace.com), Hard Candy ultimately beats with the heart of a stagier, more complicated psychological revenge picture along the lines of Roman Polanski's "Death and the Maiden."

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

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

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

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

To my thinking, the grand simplicity of the metaphor is a big part of In Time's oddly retro sci-fi charm. Niccol is practicing the old-school craft of making a barn-broad alternate-reality that forces you to think about the way we all consensually agree to participate in systems -- even when those systems are hopelessly screwed up.

This isn't a crime comedy, exactly. It's a slightly absurd, minimalist noir, in the ZIP code of "Blood Simple" and "Fargo."

It's hard to argue with the movie's big heart, solid craftsmanship, likable characters, decent acting, gorgeous scenery or the fact that it's going to leave its audience blubbering and smiling.

I suspect audiences will divide sharply on the movie's wild tone shifts. I found them sort of fearless.

There is something, well, awesome about watching these vivid young women realize that music isn't always made on computers as they give their bands cool names like the Ready and get onstage after five days and ferociously sing earnest lyrics they wrote themselves.

The film's climax is a bit of a jumble, but by then Hillcoat has built his world so vibrantly that it hardly matters. And the hard-charging soundtrack -- featuring Cave, Warren Ellis, Ralph Stanley, Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson -- is an absolute blast.

A movie adapted from a novel inspired by a person who probably never existed.

The movie is gorgeous to look at, the script has a killer twist and the cast is competent.

The film suffers slightly from diminishing returns -- its first third is by far its scariest -- but it's still a bold, artful take on a popular horror idea.

Ultimately, it's a formulaic sports movie for kids that hits the expected dramatic beats.

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.

Mullan makes the journey more than worthwhile, but don't go in expecting profundity.

One of those hard-to-pin-down movies where you're not quite sure which sort of story the filmmakers wanted to tell.

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

The movie's pretty good, occasionally very good. But I also kind of hope they don't make another one.

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.

It's a gorgeous, strange little piece -- but I did find myself wishing it poked fewer aces out its sleeve after urging us to pay such close attention.

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.

I'm pleased to report the new Land of the Lost movie keenly understands that what was once scary is now ridiculous.

The movie is strongest when it stays with Bateman and Spacey, who play greatest-hits remixes of their best-loved performances.

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."