M. E. Russell

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.

Is there anything more depressing than when middlebrow filmmakers decide to remake bona fide classics that did not, under any circumstances, need to be remade?

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.

Might actually be the stupidest movie with good intentions that I've ever seen.

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.

I just wish the movie wasn't also so monologue-choked, muted to a fault and fond of oversimplifying financial lingo to the point of meaninglessness.

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 film is competent without being spectacular or thrilling.

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.

Eat Pray Love is magazine-spread self-help bullcorn with the highest possible production values, and I wasn't having any of it.

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.