M. E. Russell

It's got a big heart and high spirits on a low budget and actors who refuse to phone it in.

A basketball documentary where the climactic game looks like a Hong Kong wire-fu epic.

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.

This is a perfectly serviceable thriller. It's just not the New York family crime saga it clearly wants to be.

This movie is a powerfully silly brain vacation. It's a by-the-numbers underdogs vs. bullies comedy.

Starts well, builds drama and then proceeds to fly sort of crazily off the rails.

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.

The flashback itself is a romantic dramedy that's far smarter than junk like "27 Dresses." Unfortunately, to enjoy that flashback, you have to ignore two gargantuan idiocies: No sane father would twist his daughter into knots by telling this story. It's full of booze, cigarettes, infidelity and sex with women who aren't Mom.

The cast is almost uniformly spectacular -- particularly Angela Lansbury as a wicked aunt and Raphael Coleman as the sardonic, bespectacled child who delivers hilarious, verbose asides and somehow makes it look effortless.

Surprisingly dull.

A surprisingly fatalistic, way-above-average ski documentary that lays out a 35-year history of the "extreme" end of the sport.

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

The King feels like a morality play without any morals.

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."

Shrek 4 is at its best when it's sadistically doing these character remixes; you can feel the filmmakers' glee at getting to shrug off story continuity and make a mess.

The movie never recovers from its cheesy center.

The fun thing about Eclipse is watching Lautner emerge as the Han Solo of this series, getting all the laughs and calling Edward and Bella on their preciousness.

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.

If you approach First Snow as a straight thriller, it's not terribly satisfying.

Mostly connects with a fairly tight story -- even if it feels less like a movie and more like a really good episode of a "Shrek" TV series.

Is it style over substance? Absolutely. But as with "Ocean's Eleven," style wins -- only just barely this time around.

A modestly charming family crowd-pleaser despite too-broad characterizations by many in the supporting cast.

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.

Minkoff lets the fight scenes go on for a while, which is nice, and all the best bits are in the middle, when Jackie and Jet spend a lot of time playing off each other.

Bees is a movie in which a bunch of powerful African American women get their lives upended and in some cases destroyed so a little white girl can feel better about herself.

But if it's going to be diet Pixar, at least it's action-packed diet Pixar -- with overwhelming, detail-choked production design that occasionally had my jaw lowering like a forklift.

It's inoffensive and shiny and competent and kids will dig it, and I can already barely remember a single thing that happened.

The characters devolve into boring narcissists. And the movie devolves into a broad-brush dark satire of emergency bureaucracy that feels a lot sillier than the post-9/11 panic attack of the first half-hour.