M. E. Russell

In the year's least surprising news, Toy Story 3 continues Pixar's near-perfect streak.

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

What damage could Michael Bay inflict on Jason Voorhees that earlier producers hadn't already inflicted on everyone's favorite hockey-masked serial killer? Well, Bay could make Jason Voorhees ... boring.

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."

That cast is precisely what makes the new Arthur so frustrating.

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.

Shrill, unfunny third installment.

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."

Yet another mediocre-to-lame thriller shot in Portland.

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

The film is flat and false in the exact same way that director Anne Fletcher's last rom-com, "27 Dresses," was flat and false.

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.