Manohla Dargis

Less gore is more here, and what a relief. The Woman in Black isn't especially scary, but it keeps you on edge, and without the usual vivisectionist imagery.

A first-rate art-house thriller, Miss Bala tells the strange, seemingly impossible story of a Mexican beauty queen who becomes the accidental pawn of a drug cartel. It's an adventure story that could be called a contemporary picaresque if it weren't so deadly serious.

There are a couple of movies, or rather a couple of story ideas, tucked in Loosies, an amorphous, laugh-flecked drama about a New York City pickpocket that mostly comes across as a feature-length advertisement for its likable star and writer, Peter Facinelli.

The revelations keep coming in Sing Your Song and it's hard not to go googly eyed when, for a 1963 CBS special, you see Mr. Belafonte discussing the march on Washington with some fellow marchers, Mr. Poitier, Marlon Brando, James Baldwin, Charlton Heston and the film director Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

The absurdity of the story in the largely thrill-free thriller Contraband, its hairpin twists and outrageous coincidences, may keep even hungry action fans away. That's too bad because the story doesn't matter. (It rarely does.)

The scariest thing about The Devil Inside is that a major studio like Paramount Pictures, which is distributing it, may be able to squeeze more profit out of a tedious, tediously exhausted subgenre that was already creatively tapped out when "The Blair Witch Project" spooked audiences more than a decade ago.

One problem is Jimmy and his mother's dialogue, which continues in the same clichéd vein as the opening scenes of him alone yelling and yammering into his cell.

A metaphysical road movie about life, death and the limits of knowledge, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia has arrived just in time to cure the adult filmgoer blues.

Both Ms. Marjanovic and Mr. Kostic are very fine (like the rest of the cast they deliver their dialogue in Bosnian) and they navigate the contradictions of their characters' feelings, the flashes of hate, the surrender to desire, with delicacy.

Whatever the case, you may not buy his happy endings, but it's a seductive ideal when all of God's creatures, great and small, buxom and blond, exist in such harmony.

Yes, you may cry, but when tears are milked as they are here, the truer response should be rage.

Like the screen Tintin, the movie proves less than inviting because it's been so wildly overworked: there is hardly a moment of downtime, a chance to catch your breath or contemplate the tension between the animated Expressionism and the photo-realist flourishes.

Gets back to action basics with globe-trotting, nifty gadgets, high-flying stunts and less loquacious villainy.

Mr. Mekas makes little attempt to smooth out his transitions between takes or scenes, which only reinforces the intensely personal, even handmade nature of the work.

While it's frustrating that Mr. Palmer doesn't dig deep into the complexities of the fights, one of the movie's strengths is the honesty with which he confesses his doubts about them.

Some of it, though, is absurdly comic, like the shot of a guy on a Segway that exists for no reason other than that someone here thought the movie could use a small laugh right then. It did. It could use more.

A pleasurably sly and involving puzzler - a mystery about mysteries within mysteries.

A rush of a movie from South Korea that slips and slides from horror to humor on rivers of blood and offers the haunting image of a man, primitive incarnate, beating other men with an enormous, gnawed-over meat bone.

Not everything is as elegantly executed, including a tiresome, would-be comic subplot involving an African diplomat and a clandestine casino that drags the story down badly and comes close to noxious racial stereotype.

Then too there's the sheer pleasure of hearing these words spoken by an actor like Mr. Fiennes, whose phrasing is so brilliant, you might be tempted to close your eyes if his physical performance weren't equally mesmerizing.

A sun-scorched noir, Rampart tells a familiar story with such visual punch and hustling energy that it comes close to feeling like a new kind of movie, though it's more just a tough gloss on American crime stories past.

Waves of melancholy wash over the story and keep the treacle at bay, as do the spasms of broad comedy, much of it nimbly executed by Mr. Baron Cohen.

Ms. Williams tries her best, and sometimes that's almost enough.

An amiable sequel with not much on its mind other than funny and creaky jokes, and waves of understated beauty.

The latest and best of the movies about a girl, her vampire and their impossible, ridiculously appealing - yes, I surrendered - love story.

The story that emerges is programmatic and largely unsurprising, but these children give it messiness, joy and life.

The woman in Christopher Munch's lovely, delightfully idiosyncratic Letters From the Big Man, resplendent with its own dense forests and cloudy Oregon days, has already fallen to earth and is looking for a way back up or maybe just forward. She gets help from a sasquatch.

Mr. Eastwood doesn't just shift between Hoover's past and present, his intimate life and popular persona, he also puts them into dialectic play, showing repeatedly how each informed the other.

Although there's more romance in "Buck," a classic American survivor story in the triumphant individual vein, in Pianomania the very dry, very accomplished Mr. Knüpfer makes engaging company both because he keeps enviable company and because he's a full-on geek, though one possessed by pianos.

Mr. Maggio's strengths here are his people (not their stories), a sense of intimacy and textured place rather than the generic hoops he forces the characters to jump through.

The tick tick tock of the mortal clock gives the science-fiction thriller In Time its slick, sweet premise.

Largely a conventional, wan affair, despite its art-cinema flourishes.

Mr. Lee gathers together a lifetime of hurt without conveying that there's something personal at stake.

There are several genres nimbly folded into The Skin I Live In, which might also be described as an existential mystery, a melodramatic thriller, a medical horror film or just a polymorphous extravaganza. In other words, it's an Almodóvar movie with all the attendant gifts that implies: lapidary technique, calculated perversity, intelligent wit.

Lighter than a meringue and as insubstantial, the French boulevard comedy The Women on the 6th Floor was designed for the gentle laughter it easily earns.

The world of My Joy is grim, though the experience of watching it and piecing together its fragmented story strands is anything but. It's suspenseful, mysterious, at times bitterly funny, consistently moving and filled with images of a Russia haunted both by ghosts and the living dead.

A feel-good and slightly bad comedy-drama about a young man's fight against cancer, aims to put a tear in your eye and a sob in your throat, if not for long.

Whatever the case, Mr. Owen and Mr. Statham (who provides a nice duet with a chair) make a prettily matched pair amid the pileup of sub-Bourne action set pieces, sad laughs and clichés.

It's hard to imagine anyone but Mr. Pitt in the role. He's relaxed yet edgy and sometimes unsettling.

Shot in handsome, often vividly contrasting black and white, "____ Year" weighs in as an attempt at poetic expressionism, a bid to create a visual representation of Colleen's diffuse and fragmented mind. Mr. Archer's narrative ambitions are laudable, and some of his images (the cinematographer is Aaron Platt) are striking, though a lot of scenes also look like glossy fashion magazine layouts come to relative life. These poses and pretty rooms may accurately reflect Colleen's visual aesthetic, the world she inhabits or wants to, but whether hers or Mr. Archer's, it's not compelling.

In many respects Ceausescu turns out to be as much the author of this brilliant documentary as the director, Andrei Ujica, who waded through more than 1,000 hours of filmed state propaganda, official news reports and home movies to create a cinematic tour de force that tracks the rise, reign and grim fall of its subject.

Soderbergh's smart, spooky thriller about a thicket of contemporary plagues - a killer virus, rampaging fear, an unscrupulous blogger - is as ruthlessly effective as the malady at its cool, cool center.

Nannerl, the subject of at least three novels also titled "Mozart's Sister," is in this film meant to be something more than a chapter in her brother's biography though it's not exactly clear what. Somewhat frustratingly if reasonably, Mr. Féret never settles on whether she was a genius, a martyr, a feminist cause, a disappointed daughter, a resigned woman or all of the above.

Mr. Kwanten, meanwhile, best known for playing the sweet, dim Jason Stackhouse on the HBO show "True Blood," gives Griff the delicate, ethereal affect of a man who's an alien in his own world except when he's running down an alley in a disguise. He's a pleasure to watch.

Mr. Momoa has some awfully big biceps to fill. He rises to that task with a pumped physique made for ogling. Thankfully, he also shows glints of self-awareness that can make hypermasculine blowouts like these more watchable and were largely missing from Mr. Schwarzenegger's wide-eyed turn in the first "Conan the Barbarian" (1982).

If you tune out the dialogue, which is packed with raunch that has neither rhyme nor story reason, there are passable moments. The interludes of Nick shifting gears as he tries to beat the clock on another pizza run are nicely managed and say something about a character whose talent behind the wheel is a kind of grace note.

The camera movements are graceful, almost ethereal, yet the objects themselves - with their impastos of organic and inorganic materials, their metaphoric resonances, historical allusions and intimations of war - feel unmistakably weighty.

Save for Ms. Davis's, however, the performances are almost all overly broad, sometimes excruciatingly so, characterized by loud laughs, bugging eyes and pumping limbs.

Made for European television and originally divided into six one-hour episodes, the movie now runs an absorbing, astonishingly fast four and a quarter hours.

There's more here than initially meets and sometimes assaults the eye, including the hyperbolic dudeness of it all.

It's good, canny-dumb fun.

There's a story, in case you're looking for one, though it's almost an afterthought, just the thin glue holding everything together, including the fine cast, the sense of broody place and the fatalism that seems to come with it. Mostly there's Mr. McDonagh's playful, sometimes overly cute language, which serves the actors and also threatens to upstage them.

The stories in The Interrupters, a hard wallop of a documentary, may weigh heavily on your heart and head, but they will also probably infuriate you.

Favreau wavers uncertainly between goofy pastiche and seriousness in a movie that wastes its title and misses the opportunity to play with, you know, ideas about the western and science-fiction horror.

A coming-of-adulthood story that improbably blends a plaintive drama with romantic longing and far-out science fiction.

The results are about as naughty as that sounds (not very), but it also makes for a fairly giggling good time.

There are enough decent moments in "Snow Flower" that you can at times see the remains of a better movie amid the jolting transitions between past and present, but these eras never really speak to each other, much less to you.

A grave and quietly moving story about a South African girl of extraordinary character, does something that few painful dramas accomplish: It tells a tale of resilience without platitudes about the triumph of the human spirit or without false promises about an unclouded future.

Childhood ends, this time forever, with tears and howls, swirls of smoke, the shock of mortality and bittersweet smiles in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, the grave, deeply satisfying final movie in the series.

Ironclad alternately feels, plays and sounds like an abridged television mini-series and a feature-length video game.

The pleasures of Ms. Breillat's work are its commitment and seriousness and its raw, sometimes very funny perversity: she's lets everything hang out, without apologies.

A solid yet fleet French thriller about a society kidnapping and its shockwaves.

Cheery, corny and perhaps calculatingly unoriginal, this is packaged entertainment so familiar it feels like a remake and so wholesome you could swear Sandra Dee starred in the 1959 original. Think of it as "No Sex and the City" for tweeners.

A quiet, steady burn filled with stretches of unsettlingly reverberant silence cleaved in half by a midpoint eruption of violence. Here there is before, and then there is after.

The loggerhead turtle is a threatened species, and one day all we may have left are its computer-generated analogues. Its fight for existence is plenty dramatic already, and is a story worth telling honestly.

As is sometimes the case with movies that take on civil and political rights without force-feeding the audience,A Better Life" plays the human interest angle hard. It tries to put a lump in your throat and a tear on your cheek (it succeeds), pumping your emotions doubtless in an attempt to look nonpartisan.

Ms. Diaz has found her down-and-dirty element in the kind of broad comedy that threatens to get ugly and more or less succeeds on that threat.

In some sense it was beauty that saved Mr. Brannaman, that of his conscience and that of horses, which, having been tied to humans long ago, became companions, workers and for some, as this lovely movie shows, saviors.

Green Lantern is bad. This despite Mr. Reynolds's dazzling dentistry, hard-body physique and earnest efforts.

As in many road movies, the trip becomes an occasion for philosophizing, a journey inward and out as the men joust and parry, improvising and entertaining each other, at times by imitating, hilariously, someone else (Michael Caine, Sean Connery).

Animal people sometimes say the wackiest things, but here, alas, they never satisfyingly address the ethical questions of what it means to capture and keep wild animals. Happily, while this movie's head may not always be in the right place, its heart is.

With its spy-on-spy globetrotting, old-fashioned villains, flirty but prematurely swinging minis and fan-boy bits (look for an eye-blink-fast tribute to "Basic Instinct" and a cameo from the cult actor Michael Ironside), the whole enterprise has an agreeable lightness, no small thing, given its rapidly moving parts.

In wistful tone and mood, Beginners at times hazily evokes the films of Wong Kar-wai, including "Chungking Express," a different kind of memory piece.

The stilted and awkward physical and vocal performances in combination with the visually flat cinematography bring to mind the look, sound and visual texture of American daytime soaps, an association that perversely makes the movie more and more watchable.

The funniest, most reckless moments in The Hangover Part II, the largely mirthless sequel to the 2009 hit "The Hangover," take place in the final credits.

City of Life and Death isn't cathartic: it offers no uplifting moments, just the immodest balm of art. The horrors it represents can be almost too difficult to watch, yet you keep watching because Mr. Lu makes the case that you must.

The movie is smart about a lot of things, including the vital importance of female friendships. And it's nice to see so many actresses taking up space while making fun of something besides other women.

Nominally a story about sex, lies and faithfulness, Last Night is more truly a cautionary tale about mousetrap narratives.

With a visual style and a deadpan humor that owes an obvious debt to the Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki ("Drifting Clouds"), they hold their shots long enough for you to scan details, look deep into faces and think on how little (or much) it takes to be happy. Here a painted Jesus hovers on a chipped wall, but it's an unholy family of three that finds heaven on earth.

Nasty, brutish and as cuddly as a crusty old sock fished out of a sewer, the beaver or the beav, as I like to think of him, owns the film.

A stirring, unexpectedly moving story of love and blood.

In a free-for-all like this, where the laws of gravity and dictates of narrative logic are left to eat dust, it doesn't matter when anything takes place or why.

The 3-D is sometimes less than transporting, and the chanting voices in the composer Ernst Reijseger's new-agey score tended to remind me of my last spa massage. Yet what a small price to pay for such time traveling!

It's a modest film, if only in scale and apparent budget, about some of the greatest questions in life, like the existence of God, our capacity to see beyond our own vanity and the legacies of fathers, both blood and state.

The French director Bertrand Tavernier deploys some smart ideas in this film, a period story about wars on the battlefield and those closer to home, but there's something a bit goatish in his attention to some female charms.

Its mood is so muffled and point so submerged, it's difficult to see why Mr. Reeves and the rest of the cast pooled their talents to make a movie about a nowhere man going no place in particular in Buffalo.

May be better enjoyed in an herb-enhanced condition. Getting stoned is, after all, a running joke in this comedy, which is as thin as rolling paper and just as ephemeral.

In the end there might not be much to this tale other than titillation, but there's plenty to be said for Ms. Ronan, who was the best thing about "Atonement" and holds her ground against forceful screen presences like Ms. Blanchett and Mr. Bana.

While it can be seen as an environmental horror movie (if you must), Rubber doesn't dig down but instead merrily rolls on, as Mr. Dupieux plays with narrative and form. In one wonderful cinematic coup the tire spots a crow and shifts toward the bird so that it's framed in the tire hole, an angle that turns the tire into a camera. Point. Click. Explode.

In crucial ways, Source Code, written by Ben Ripley, recalls "Moon," Mr. Jones's accomplished feature debut about a solitary astronaut played by Sam Rockwell. Source Code is bigger, shinier, pricier.

One problem is that while Mr. Masset-Depasse frames Tania's status in vague political terms, he doesn't make an argument. Instead he creates heroes and villains in what is, by turns, a prison flick, a psychological thriller and a maternal melodrama.

Trying to parse meaning in "Mia" is secondary to its main point, which is its look, created with 500,000 hand-drawn frames. That's impressive in an age in which most mainstream animation is done with computers.

A family circus of dysfunction that's so familiar you may feel tempted to place bets on how everything will shake out.

There are modest pleasures in a familiar story told differently enough that you're happy to keep guessing and watching.

While Paul seems great conceptually, he's not particularly interesting or surprising.

With modest resources, some nice digital camerawork and an appealing cast - the likable Ms. Jones draws you in easily - Mr. Shapiro keeps you engaged even when his story falters.

My, what sharp teeth Ms. Hardwicke doesn't have: working from David Leslie Johnson's screenplay she takes on the story's grown-up themes of sex and death directly but weakly.

One reason filmmakers like Mr. Nolfi seem attracted to Philip K. Dick's work, beyond the brilliance of its ideas, is that his unembellished writing style leaves them room to make the stories visually their own.

This is the kind of cornball entertainment that rainy afternoons were made for. Throw in a cozy sofa too. Beastly will size down well on your television.

Whatever the case, it's dispiriting that the draggiest, soppiest scenes in Hall Pass, as well as the most disgusting gag, involve women.

Despite its A-movie aspirations, as the chases continue and the plot holes widen, Unknown quickly settles into the familiar B-movie comfort zone.

A worthy, intensive labor of love that took years to shoot and edit, and it's also more gripping than a lot of recent Hollywood thrillers.

The story, which starts promisingly only to stop, restart, sputter and come to a wheezing, disappointing puff of nada, proves the least satisfying part of the whole. The finale certainly isn't earned, but all the nasty, tiny jolts throughout the movie do prick the skin nicely.

The importance of seeing, seeing the world deeply, is at the heart of this quietly devastating, humanistic work from the South Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong.

Tim isn't super anything (though he proves heroic), and what makes Cedar Rapids a low-wattage pleasure is its insistence that his ordinariness - with his decency and sense of wonder - is pretty extraordinary.

The director Alister Grierson, not grasping that bad dialogue is sometimes best delivered quietly, encourages his actors to shout and thrash about, and so they do, like fish out of water and performers out of their depth.

With no grand speeches or oversized gestures, Mr. Katz creates a specific world that gracefully enlarges with universal meaning.

Choreographed by the film martial-arts veteran Sammo Hung, the fights are spectacularly designed and performed, relying more on muscle and skill than wirework.

There's some limited entertainment to be found in a movie as insistently conflicted as The Mechanic, but the accretion of sadism, humorlessness and antediluvian sexual politics is finally more exhausting than enlivening.

When an actress gives herself as wholly as Ms. Steen does here, a filmmaker should return the favor with a comparable level of craft and commitment, which is largely absent from this movie.

It's impossible not to cry at their suffering, but whether you'll feel anything is another story.

An assaultive fiction about Liberian child soldiers made with boys and girls who actually fought in that country's recent war, left me wrung out - furious, confused, deep in thought.

A lovely drift of a movie, Go Go Tales commands your attention even as it lulls you along. Conspicuously inspired by John Cassavetes's "Killing of a Chinese Bookie," among other touchstones, it is a sincere and inspired meditation on art and creation, but in a loose, funny key.

Though seriously miscast as an unreformed alcoholic, the bronzed Ms. Paltrow gets by with a thin, serviceable voice (she sings her own songs) and an actor's confidence.

The Illusionist is both a modest homage to its writer and a melancholy look at a lost world.

Apparently, because all the good jokes were used up in the first two "Fockers" movies, the wisenheimers behind the latest installment in this unnecessary trilogy decided to bring in some spew, opening a sick toddler's mouth like a fire hydrant and letting it rip.

In some ways, much like Charles Laughton's "Night of the Hunter," which the Coens quote both musically and visually, True Grit is a parable about good and evil. Only here, the lines between the two are so blurred as to be indistinguishable, making this a true picture of how the West was won, or - depending on your view - lost.

An airless, sometimes distressingly mirthless comedy.

A sequel with far less color and cinematic imagination, and many more bells and whistles, including a freakishly special-effected Mr. Bridges going mano a mano in cyberspace with the grizzled real deal. Twice as much Jeff Bridges does not necessarily mean twice as much entertainment - bummer.

Equal parts appealing and appalling innocence, with a spark of anarchic menace, Mr. Galifianakis is good enough to make you almost forget the movie.

It's the kind of outrageous, excessive flourish that can make Mr. Scott's work so enjoyable in the moment. He doesn't do much, but with a handful of appealing actors in tow, he sure keeps that machine going.

Ms. Denis has an extraordinary gift for finding the perfect image that expresses her ideas, the cinematic equivalent of what Flaubert called le mot juste.

Best appreciated for its sustained creepy vibe and sporadically arresting images, Heartless moves from one outré moment to another, from one self-conscious allusion to the next ("Donnie Darko" and "Taxi Driver"). It doesn't go anywhere special or much of anywhere, though it goes there in appreciably icky style.

Tiny Furniture is at times more pleasurable to think about than it is to watch, more of a conceptual coup than an enjoyable experience.

That film does have its attractions, notably in its two solid leads and standout support from Mr. Pearce.

Both newcomers to Mr. To and longtime admirers should be prepared for a master class in directing.

Once again, Bob Fosse's "Cabaret" haunts the stage with derbies and splayed legs, but with results that are strictly Sally Bowdlerized.

A strong filmmaking voice was clearly not called for in an entertainment that has been carefully calibrated for maximum blandness. Mr. Apted is aboard to keep the franchise sailing along or at least afloat, which he does.

Jolie never ignites, and neither does the movie. Mr. Depp doesn't fare better with a role that forces him to play meek and disappointingly mild, despite a few screenwriter-supplied tics.

Certainly the fictionalized brood in All Good Things is equal to the Friedmans in terms of dysfunction, and they're loaded.

Black Swan is visceral and real even while it's one delirious, phantasmagoric freakout.

A small movie with a full heart, Undertow takes an old idea - the loving, lingering ghost - and gives it reverberant, resuscitated life.

A passably amusing romantic comedy with a laugh-strewn script that's almost undone by the hard sell of an enterprise that drills every emotional beat into your head.

As it turns out, Mr. Perry, while busily establishing his economic independence, has been finding his voice as a filmmaker. And here, working with fine performers like Ms. Elise, Anika Noni Rose, Phylicia Rashad and Kerry Washington, he sings the song the way he likes it - with force, feeling and tremendous sincerity.

Those swayed by the argument in Client 9 that some of the rich and powerful whom Mr. Spitzer crusaded against might have exploited his stupidity should find all this enthralling. Others might just remember the hubris.

Mr. Alfredson directed the second movie as well, and his work is again essentially functional, limited to clumsy action sequences and television-ready conversations. He doesn't prettify the violence in either movie, which might be unintentional but makes them feel more honest than the first did.

What keeps the film's fragile realism intact are actors who can make even small moments count.

Pugilists and philosophers of all kinds converge in Frederick Wiseman's mesmerizing documentary Boxing Gym.

The results prove disappointing, simultaneously over the top and underwhelming.

McGrath, who adapted the novel, manages to catch the flavor of it without its tang.

Kitano uses exaggerated acting, choreo-graphed violence and, most radically, the rhythms of everyday life -- farmers pounding the earth, the syncopated plop of falling rain -- to turn this genre story into a crypto-Kabuki play and one blissfully idiosyncratic diversion.

The film is consummately professional but phlegmatic, a slow fizzle.

An entertainingly ridiculous update of Mary O’Hara’s 1941 children’s novel, “My Friend Flicka.”

In his genre pastiche The Good German, Steven Soderbergh has tried to resurrect the magic of classical Hollywood, principally by sucking out all the air, energy and pleasure from his own filmmaking.

In Next, a crummy action and speculative-fiction hybrid, Nicolas Cage plays a guy who can see into the future two minutes at a time. It's too bad that Mr. Cage couldn't tap into those same powers of divination to save himself from making yet another inexplicably bad choice in roles.

Turning ordinary life into movie magic is one of the most difficult, least-heralded challenges for any filmmaker. What makes Freaky Friday a charmer isn't how far-out things get for this mother and daughter, but how sweet and distinctly un-freaky a kid, her mom and their love for each other can be.

A comedy without a shred of obvious filmmaking and an endless stream of good, bad, sometimes terrible, often absurd jokes.

It’s hard to know what the director Allen Coulter could have done to improve Will Fetters’s absurdly contrived, yakky script about love and loss, largely set in the summer of 2001. But Mr. Coulter doesn’t help matters by infusing the movie with grave self-importance.

Indeed, one of the nicest things about this jewel of a film is that there isn't much of a story at all -- just a handful of delicately drawn characters moving through life that is at once familiar and yet slightly elevated by a director who loves the good in people more than the bad.

There is very little fun in The Ice Harvest, which wouldn't pose a problem if the film had some fleshed-out ideas to go along with the booze, the booty and the recycled plot points.

Some of the funny stuff is actually funny, some of it is funny and yucky, but most of it is just stupid.

Filled with brilliant filmmaking and features outstanding performances, but it's neither profound enough nor pop enough to be great -- it's mournful, serious, beautiful and, finally, pointless.

What counts in a movie like this are stars so dazzling that we won't really notice or at least mind the cut-rate writing and occasionally incoherent action. Sometimes Mr. Pitt and Ms. Jolie succeed in their mutual role as sucker bait, sometimes they don't, which is why their new joint venture is alternately a goof and a drag.

What Jackson's Shaft can't do is talk the talk, or much of anything else, in director John Singleton's feature-length insult to one of the more cherished modern screen icons.

No matter how seriously everyone works to make the CIA impossibly sexy, the illusion that these pencil pushers are incarnations of Bond, James Bond, is difficult to sustain.

This is life as it’s lived, not dreamed. And this is a family bound not only by sorrow, but also by a shared history that emerges in 114 calibrated minutes and ends with a wallop.

Enjoyable, unabashedly trivial caper flick.

All setup and no payoff.

Principally a work of gorgeous surfaces, shot mostly in silvery black-and-white film by the cinematographer Mott Hupfel, with an occasional splash of saturated color.

A murder mystery, a call to arms and an effective inducement to rage, Who Killed the Electric Car? is the latest and one of the more successful additions to the growing ranks of issue-oriented documentaries.

One can never get enough of this prodigiously talented octogenarian artist and his bestiary.

It's a demented kitsch mess (although the smeary digital video does match the muddled narrative), but it's savvy about celebrity and has more guts and energy than much of what will open this year.

It is a depressing story, certainly, as well as moving, confusing and, at a fast 72 minutes, at once undercooked and overpadded.

Mr. Broomfield maintains a level of cool detachment throughout. That's to the good of the movie, which, though technically exemplary, falters dramatically on occasion, becoming dangerously close to overheated whenever the characters speak for any length.

Feels newly hatched. Some of the laugh lines creak as loudly as grandma's rocker and the cultural references send up billows of dust.

The concept of an intelligent woman is apparently so exotic to Ms. Bullock and her director, Phil Traill, that they frantically kook the character up, as if female smarts were a kind of disability. This being a contemporary big-studio release, I suppose it is.

But since Costner canít save his movie, it's something of a stretch to think he might be able to save the world.

The film's screenwriters conjured up a very clever gimmick when they decided to revamp a favorite 60's television show. Too bad they forgot that a gimmick is no substitute for a screenplay, never mind a real movie.

These guys have dumbed down a comic book.

In the end, what gives me reluctant pause about this bright, cheery, hard-to-resist movie is that its joyfulness feels more like a filmmaker's calculation than an honest cry from the heart about the human spirit (or, better yet, a moral tale).

A thoroughly, sometimes gaggingly broad and sly conceptual laugh-in.

Mr. Jennings and Mr. Goldsmith have held onto a genuine sense of childlike wonder, which works as a nice corrective to what might otherwise come across as an overabundance of hip.

It's the sort of unassuming discovery that could get lost in a crowd or suffer from too much big love, and while it won't save or change your life, it may make your heart swell. Its aim is modest and true.

I laughed a couple of times, but mostly I was bored out of my mind and not a little depressed.

If the screenwriter and director had followed their cinematic instincts fully, they would have collaborated on one of the more satisfying political thrillers in years; instead, they've managed to create three-quarters of one.

Has the virtue of sincerity but not that of restraint. Unlike Terrence Malick, whose shadow looms over the film's visual style, the Smiths over-explain, not grasping that all those barren fields and blood-red clouds are doing plenty of work for them.

Never before has a fiction film so clearly and to such devastating effect laid out the calculation of the Nazi machinery of death and its irrationality.

The overall vibe is morbidly entertaining, though something of a downer, partly because it's unclear if Mr. and Mrs. Pugach know that they are such sick puppies, partly because it's unclear if Mr. Klores cares that they are.

There’s something irritatingly self-satisfied about Funny People, which explains why, though it glances on the perils of fame, it mostly affirms its pleasures.

Dreary, claustrophobic drama.

There is something heartening about Mr. Burton's love for bones and rot here, if only because it suggests, despite some recent evidence, that he is not yet ready to abandon his own dark kingdom.

One of those movie equivalents of a freeway pileup -- it's a mess, at once insistently watchable and a total dead end.

It's good -- when it's not adrift in an absence of meaning.

A junky-looking romantic comedy that’s neither remotely romantic nor passably comic.

In this context Ferrell seems more than just comic relief. He's a reminder that the greatest, deepest laughter doesn't come at the expense of some other guy, but from the glints of self-recognition we get when the screen becomes our mirror.

There's never been a movie director like Catherine Breillat, a fearless visionary and one hell of a woman.

A surprisingly affecting mood piece.

Worth commenting on only for its shocking ineptitude.

At once illogical and insultingly stupid, filled with dead-end twists and the sort of dialogue that makes a mockery of actual adult relations.

Pitched at the divide between art and industry, poetry and entertainment, it goes darker and deeper than any Hollywood movie of its comic-book kind.

A mainstream, eager-to-please, relatively generic endeavor, not an auteurist showcase.

Lightly stained a nicotine brown and topped by two male actors who could steal a movie from a basket of mewling kittens and an army of rosy-cheeked orphans, the film is as calculating and glossy a hard-luck tale as any cooked up on the old M-G-M lot.

Watching this well-behaved adaptation of one of Greene's most personal novels, you can't help but wish that the novelist had been around to write his own script.

Drama/Mex means to say something about its country of origin, though it’s hard to know exactly what.

The amateurish production values might be pardonable if the clichés -- the hard-core porn star with the soft heart, the therapist who needs to heal herself -- inside the poorly lighted, badly shot images weren’t so absurd and often insulting.

It's funny how movies about smart people often play so dumb.

A terrifically clever film; has a soft-boilded heart.

Effectively fashioned, as jolting as it is polished, as well as a surprising, insistently political work of commercial art.

The television commercials for the movie say something about this being the same team that brought you “Face/Off,” which is about as relevant to this picture as noting that Paul Thomas Anderson got Wahlberg to drop his pants in “Boogie Nights.”

Cyrus is more finely tuned than their earlier movies ("The Puffy Chair," "Baghead"), but it shares a similar, almost aggressive lack of ambition. John doesn't work hard and neither do the Duplasses, who don't want their audiences to break a sweat either. That's too bad, because Cyrus is more interesting and fun when you're recoiling at the effrontery of its comedy and not its conventionality.

Black Book works only if you take it for the pulpiest of fiction, not a historical gloss, its stated claims to "true events" notwithstanding.

Mimi Leder shows none of the vigor she exhibited when directing for E.R., and screenwriters Michael Tolkin and Bruce Joel Rubin betray a real aptitude for hack work.

Mackenzie has greatly tempered the story's brutality the old-fashioned way: He puts an appealing, sympathetic star at the center and surrounds him with beautiful visuals, with a darkly contrasting color palette of bruising black and blue.

Unfunny comedy. Nearly everyone is terrible except for Cumming, who just does what comes naturally and steals his every scene.

One of the strengths of Breach, a thriller that manages to excite and unnerve despite our knowing the ending, is how well it captures the utter banality of this man and his world.

Hilarious, unnerving and remarkably intimate portrait of multiethnic adolescent life that lends vigorous new meaning to the term "teen movie."

Since Mr. Wright and Mr. Pegg are essentially parodying self-parodies, they have also smartly kinked up their conceit by setting most of the film in a sleepy village that might as well be called Ye Old English Towne, thereby wedding one of the most irritating British exports to one of the most absurd American ones. Think of it as "The Full Monty" blown to smithereens.

There's not much more to this adaptation of the Nick Hornby novel than charm -- effortless, pleasurable, featherweight charm.

It's no great surprise that the best part of The Anniversary Party is the acting, even if Leigh and Cumming don't always direct themselves as well as they do some of their co-stars.

The latest masterwork from Hayao Miyazaki, places emphasis on the natural world, its tumults and fragility.

In this attractive, smart-enough, finally un-brave movie Ms. Barthes peeks at the dark comedy of the soul only to beat a quick, pre-emptive retreat.

Although its leisurely pace might be a bit tough going for restless Westerners, Mongolian Ping Pong is the kind of film that should rightly be seen by children, not just adventurous adults.

At once a heartfelt story about a family undone by violence and an overburdened allegory of fascism.

At once an old-fashioned freakout and an environmental cautionary tale (mess with Mother Nature and she'll mess with you right back), the film combines two genre standbys -- lethal contagion and the undead -- and gives them a wicked, contemporary spin.

The remake doesn’t as much improve on the original as match it goofily amusing moment for moment.

It won't make you bleed, just howl.

A lovely, drifty first feature that feels less like a documentary and more like an act of rapturous devotion.

As the requisite love interest, Amy Smart gives the film's only professional performance, while co-star Eric Stoltz, as the story's villain, walks somnolent through the scenery with what seems to be barely suppressed mirth. Given the deeply unpleasant plot machinations and amateurish direction, the actor's amusement is understandable.

Mr. West shows a real gift for the genre, particularly in his ability to generate dread with pinpricks rather than bludgeoning shocks, something even veterans twice his age have difficulty achieving. After years of vivisectionist splatter, here is a horror movie with real shivers.

Even a starring role in the American version of the British show "The Office," which has given Mr. Carell a higher profile, conveys neither his sheer likability nor his range as an actor, both crucial to making this film work as well as it does.

The film isn't just banal, it's aggressively, arrogantly banal.

A premise so patently absurd, so implausible, they might as well have pitched it to the Oxygen channel.

A great goof of a film...However daftly amusing, and periodically inspired, Men in Black is distinctly short on character and plot, even for a cartoon.

Doesn’t seem as if it would translate easily to the big screen. It hasn't.

The result is that what was once insignificant is now insufferable.

Like the film itself, the performance (Giamatti's) is deeply controlled, played with restraint and with microscopic attention to detail.

The worst thing about Event Horizon--written by Philip Eisner, directed by Paul Anderson--isn't all the gore decorating the 21st-century space ship that gives the movie its name, but the filmmakers' reliance on shock edits and headache-inducing sound F/X to obscure the fact that this is one of the most derivative movies to hit screens in memory.

With her ductile physicality and undeniable charm, Witherspoon remains acutely present even when everyone else -- director, writers and cast -- has checked out.

Only once, in a quick sketch of "Planet of the Apes" -- does the humor seem to spring from pure movie love. In nearly every other respect, the film is so lazy, solipsistic and overpleased with itself it's hard not to believe that this time the Evil Empire has won not just the battle, but the war.

Has many of the virtues of a faithful screen adaptation and many of the predictable flaws.

A film of startling originality and beauty -- feels like a communiqué from another time, another place, anywhere but here.

More than anything else, Ask the Dust feels like a compendium of desires - for a city, for a woman, for youth.

One of the best films to open so far this year, but greeting each new work from a favored director as if it were equally brilliant can't be good for anyone, the director included.

The jokes would be funny even if they weren't perfectly timed, but what makes them come across as so poignant is the seriousness with which the director and his co-conspirators deliver their jabs and japes.

Everything in Matchstick Men moves and looks right, from John Mathieson's cinematography to Tom Foden's production design, so it's puzzling that the film fizzles rather than fizzes.

Despite such floundering, Lymelife keeps you hooked, mostly through Mr. Hutton, Mr. Baldwin and Kieran Culkin as Scott's older brother, Jimmy.

The actors in 24 City bring their own existential realities to their short, touching performances. In the end, the deep emotions they stir up -- the actress Lv Liping delivers a harrowing story about a lost child -- constitute another kind of monument to the workers of Factory 420.

Twenty-four years later -- digitally spruced up, with some scenes shaved and others padded with previously cut material -- Scott's film still shreds nerves.

Alas, Mr. Fabian, directing his first feature-length fiction film, uses a club whenever a feather would do. He also mishandles the actors, in particular Mr. Neill and Ms. Okonedo, both of whom have been incomparably better elsewhere.

A film in which the mechanics of the plot are far less interesting, and vital, then the interior landscape of men who exist outside the law.

While much of the unlikely charm of the Farrellys' newest comedy, Stuck on You, comes from its conceptual purity, much of the film's humor comes from its blissful impurity.

A cringing romance that Mr. Vinterberg tries and fails to spin into a political allegory.

A tediously didactic, often condescendingly reductive 10-part lesson on cinema.

A dreary indulgence. An unfunny satire set in the world of daytime soap opera, it isn't offensive enough to inspire passionate response.

Mr. Pitt is himself a supernova luminary, of course, and part of the attraction of this film is how his celebrity feeds into that of his character, adding shadings to what is, finally, an overconceptualized if under-intellectualized endeavor.

The 3-D is necessary to the film only in so far as it keeps your eyes engaged when your mind starts to wander. Stripped of much of the original poem’s language, its cadences, deep history and context, this film version of Beowulf doesn’t offer much beyond 3-D oohs and ahs, sword clanging and a nicely conceived dragon, which probably explains why Mr. Zemeckis and his collaborators have tried to sex it up with Ms. Jolie, among other comic-book flourishes.

Funny, audacious, messy and feverishly inspired look at America and its discontents.

Although Ms. Davenport pushes the analogy between this modest rescue operation with America’s invasion of Iraq a bit too forcefully, she nonetheless makes her point with persuasive, touching candor.

Mainstream moviemaking, with its commercial directives and slavish attachment to narrative codes isn't particularly hospitable to ambiguity...which may help explain why Mr. Shanley's film feels caught between two mediums and why Ms. Streep appears to be in a Gothic horror thriller while everyone else looks and sounds closer to life or at least dramatic realism.

There is pleasure in such useless beauty, of course, and pleasure too in drifting with the jellyfish amid the wild blue yonder of a great filmmaker’s imagination.

[Proyas] hasn't yet learned how to enliven his characters as fully as his sets. Part of this is structural (somnolence is built into the script), but the greater fault lies with Proyas' direction of his performers, most of whom deliver their lines in a strangulated whisper.

An inert, respectable bore.

Neither here nor there, the film is “Elf” without the goofy jokes, Will Ferrell or heart, “Bad Santa” without the smut, Billy Bob Thornton or spleen.

Like too many big-studio productions, Cloverfield works as a showcase for impressively realistic-looking special effects, a realism that fails to extend to the scurrying humans whose fates are meant to invoke pity and fear but instead inspire yawns and contempt. Rarely have I rooted for a monster with such enthusiasm.

There are not one, but two wars raging inside this adaptation: one between the North and the South, and another, more calamitous war between art and middlebrow entertainment.

Like most of his movies, Capitalism is a tragedy disguised as a comedy; it’s also an entertainment.

Glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged.

It's possible that Maggie Gyllenhaal will never become a major star, but there isn't an American actress in movies today who holds the screen with as much deep-seated soul.

The film is at once breathtaking and ridiculous, and it's the tension between these two extremes, as well as Carax's own intoxicating style, that makes it essential viewing.

Whether through craft or constitution, Mr. Norton invests Walter with a petty cruelty that makes his character’s emotional thaw and Kitty’s predicament all the more poignant.

With In the Pit [Rulfo] isn't advancing any totalizing theory, a treatise on transportation or an argument about alienation; he is, rather simply and elegantly, revealing the secret human face of a seemingly inhuman world.

Marc Forster takes a maximalist approach to this mumbo jumbo, which means that in addition to lots of wacky angles, shiny surfaces, seemingly endless stairs, and sets of twins, triplets and quadruplets, he deploys the unsettling vision of three talented actors - Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts and Ryan Gosling - straining credulity and neck tendons in the service of serious claptrap.

There's so little going on with either the film's story or its characters, however, that there is plenty of time to get lost in cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's eerily beautiful visuals.