Manohla Dargis

While watching Werner Herzog’s My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done you might be tempted to murmur, “My Werner, My Werner, What Have Ye Done.”

Too long by half, burdened with shabby F/X and offering up some seriously weird performances, this pricy foray into science fiction is a muddle of miscues and narrative bloat--along with a lot of frivolous fun.

Diverting if heavily padded, this is the newest addition to an increasingly crowded field of political nonfiction films and certainly the easiest viewing.

It's shockingly inert.

Avenue Montaigne is a bonbon, not a bouillabaisse. But because this is finally a film about desire, it carries a bittersweet tang.

Thou shalt not covet any thing that is thy neighbor's. Maybe DreamWorks should stop trying to be Disney.

That The Assassination of Richard Nixon is as well directed, acted and shot as it is makes Mr. Mueller's inability to invest his film with significance all the more disappointing.

A movie that's nearly as good as its publicity campaign.

Apparently started out as just another soft-core item, or what the Japanese call a pink film, but evolved into something more ambitious, sort of. Certainly it doesn’t look or play out like the typical American pay-TV fodder.

May just be the most boring movie ever made; certainly it's the most boring movie I've suffered through to the bitter end.

There's something about the movie that sets it apart from the usual thriller. Franklin may not be a master of genre like Hammett and Chandler, but he knows that it means SOMETHING when a character throws a punch or fires a gun.

An improvement on the original, but that isn't saying much.

The Host is a cautionary environmental tale about the domination of nature and the costs of human folly, and it may send chills up your spine. But only one will tickle your fancy and make you cry encore, not just uncle.

Wry and tender and delicately melancholic, Woman on the Beach shows a newly confident filmmaker again working near the top of his form after the disappointing “Tale of Cinema” (2005), even if the new film unfolds straightforwardly, with none of the narrative ellipses and puzzle-box complications, the flashbacks and parallel story lines of his earlier work.

The impulse to end on an "up" note, to turn complex and contradictory lives into palatable narratives, is one of the least-examined pitfalls in nonfiction filmmaking. But in her attempt to give their lives a shape that the girls themselves seem to resist, this talented filmmaker has done both herself and them a disservice.

The problem is that while the children are lovely because they are children, there is nothing inherently interesting about them or their lives.

The director has created a slick, newer-than-new, faster-than-fast entertainment to end all entertainments.

It's hard to see what the point is beyond the usual grandiosity that comes whenever B-movie material is pumped up with ambition and money.

In this kind of industrial entertainment, particularly one that seems to be missing some connective narrative tissue, it’s hard to know if the writers or the director can be credited or blamed for what’s left on screen.

From the ample evidence, Mr. Harris’s own life in public was a bust. Ms. Timoner sees him as a cautionary tale as well as a visionary.

Has the glorious look and immaculate technique we expect from Mann, along with a wealth of superb secondary performances.

It’s a theme as familiar as life. The five women, all perfectly cast and almost perfectly played.

Perhaps the real question, then, isn't how you update Spider-Man but why you would even try. Introduced in 1962, the original superhero helped to initiate the age of modern comics. Raimi hasn't figured out how to reconfigure him for the blockbuster age, and there are suggestions.

Barbieri is a natural filmmaker, with an eye for film space and a gift for pacing. Both of his leads are wonderful, but it's Picoy who will break your heart.

Likable, lightweight, absurdist comedy.

That Mr. De Niro and especially Miss Fanning manage to register through all this murk is a testament to their talent, which however squandered does nonetheless shine.

Bruckheimer's latest is in some crucial respects worse than those earlier blockbuster bids ("Gone in 60 Seconds" and "Coyote Ugly") -- certainly it's more fraudulent -- because unlike those films, which don't claim to be about anything other than thrills and tits, Remember the Titans means to be about race.

If only the whole thing were as funny as an Albert Brooks movie.

In his smart, timely documentary about the G.I. Movement, Sir! No Sir!, Mr. Zeiger takes a look at how the movement changed and occasionally even rocked the military from the ground troops on up.

Wahlberg has turned into one of the most sympathetic and persuasive young actors around, and while his new movie remains safely, even shrewdly, in the middle of the road, he rocks.

Doug Pray’s wonderfully engaging look at love and family and the relentless pursuit of happiness, personal meaning and perfect waves.

Mr. Marshall, is not much of a film director. Depending on the budget, his movies look either cheap (like this one) or studio slick ("Pretty Woman"), and tend to have the same flat, presentational visual style that's familiar from most sitcoms.

Here, it's the creepily quiet stuff, the stuff that might be rushed over in a different movie -- Annie shivering alone in bed or being visited by her dead grandmother as she hangs out the wash -- that makes the film more than a generic distraction.

Even Del Toro can't raise the conceptually dead.

Enervating trifle.

There's nothing wrong with remakes, but as this movie amply proves, there's often nothing right about them, either

Mr. Carrey is such an attention hog that most actresses have a hard time holding on to their corner of the screen when he's onboard, especially in broader comedies. But Ms. Leoni never cedes her ground. Both performers exude such acute neediness - there's a touch of Jerry Lewis and Lucille Ball in their mutual frenzy - that not to love them even a little would seem cruel.

The film never comes fully to term, as it were: the visual style is sitcom functional, and even the zippiest jokes fall flat because of poor timing. But, much like the prickly, talented Ms. Fey, it pulls you in with a provocative and, at least in current American movies, unusual mix of female intelligence, awkwardness and chilled-to-the-bone mean.

If the insanely inventive and entertaining Mad Detective weren't so weird -- and in Cantonese -- hordes of action geeks would be lining the block to see it.

Though there's no doubt that Mr. Stone is as serious as a heart attack when it comes to creating an air of authenticity -- hence the sloppily butchered chickens and authorial defecation -- he never settles on a coherent tone for the movie.

A taut, unnerving, forcefully unromantic fictional film.

A misfired, misguided would-be satire.

It's an exasperating, irresistible, must-see mess of a movie about life in the modern world and so very good that even when its story finally crashes and burns the filmmaking remains unscathed.

It’s not easy being green. But to judge from how this hand-drawn movie addresses, or rather strenuously avoids, race, it is a lot more difficult to be black.

To look at Apocalypse Now is to realize that most of us are fast forgetting what a movie looks like -- a real movie, the last movie, an American masterpiece.

Rotoscoping makes certain sense for a film about cognitive dissonance and alternative realities, though both the vocal and gestural performances by Mr. Reeves, Mr. Harrelson and, in particular, the wonderful Mr. Downey make me wish that we were watching them in live action.

The most purely entertaining movie to come out of Hollywood so far this year, and if that doesn't seem worthy of Soderbergh's talents, it's worthy enough for a night's amusement.

An old-fashioned weepie tucked inside a fiercely indicting political thriller.

A divertingly goofy thriller with an animistic bent, moments of shivery and twitchy suspense and a solid lead performance from Mark Wahlberg.

The film was written, directed and somehow willed into unlikely existence by the extravagantly talented Carlos Reygadas, whose immersion in this exotic world feels so deep and true that it seems like an act of faith.

Kusama leads with feminist empowerment, but her sucker punch is a sappy romance.

Mr. Chappelle looks and sounds alternately ebullient and weary. It was directed by Michel Gondry, the madcap genius behind "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," but in its tone and vibe feels like Mr. Chappelle's all the way.

It tells a good story well, and in the process quietly says a little something about what it means to look at the American dream from the bottom up.

Time and again the movie stops short before it really gets started, as with the debates over the big business of organic food.

About the only thing that distinguishes this iteration from those of yore is that the violence is more explicit, the edits are faster, and no one has a stogie stuck in his kisser.

Mr. Jarecki forcefully, if not with wholesale persuasiveness, argues that our business is specifically war.

Throws us directly into the ring for one of the most brutal fight scenes in American film.

Although it's not half bad -- which doesn't mean it's half good -- this horror cheapie comes equipped with a few ideas, a little atmosphere and a couple of serviceable scares.

Madonna may be better in this film than she's been in some of her recent endeavors, especially when she stops screeching her lines, but she's done herself no favors with her choice of material.

The film works its magic largely by sending up, at times with a wink, at times with a hard nudge, some of the very stereotypes that have long been this company’s profitable stock in trade.

Better than the usual Hollywood rot, but dialectical it ain't.

The appealing Mr. Baker never manages to find the right tone for the material, partly because he’s been seriously miscast (he radiates too much decency and intelligence for the role), though more because Mr. Waters never establishes a coherent tone for either the character or his situation.

What's disheartening is that an actress as fine as Ms. Linney has to endure the indignity of such excremental nonsense.

This bit of fluff overflows with so much honest charm it barely matters that it's one in a seemingly endless succession of Tarzan retreads.

Maybe it's the sight of Leguizamo running around dressed only in boots and a well-placed sock that does her in, or maybe it's just that she's seen this movie too many times before. She isn't the only one.

Mr. Miller and his co-writer, Tom Phelan, manage to get under your skin largely with borrowed implements, though they receive solid support from Willem Dafoe and the resourceful veteran cinematographer Fred Murphy.

It's no wonder the faithful continue to forsake the movies, given junky embarrassments like Nights in Rodanthe.

There's delight to be had from watching Burton conjure up one fantastical Edward-inspired scenario after another.

This well-meaning but irritatingly naïve feature delves into the horrors of prostitution, or more accurately, the filmmaker's horror about the subject.

Brilliantly edited and gorgeously shot, Esther Kahn is a dream to look at and, courtesy of Howard Shore's minor chords and high-strung strings, definitely something to hear.

The real-life sisters Hilary and Haylie Duff star in this incompetent spin on the poor-little-rich-girl story.

Driven by different agendas, history and movies often tell two irreconcilable stories, which is why, despite some glints of talent, Hancock has given us yet another film and another Alamo to forget.

One of the pleasures of this intelligent, rigorously thoughtful, somewhat sly film is that it takes place in the space between the inexplicable (no explanation is possible) and the unexplained (enlightenment might be around the corner).

Mr. Godard treads on dangerous ground by linking the historical suffering of Jews and the Palestinians, but his sympathy for both people is so manifest, his sense of history so deep, that the film defies reductive readings.

Doesn't have the courage of its conceit, only an abundance of bad ideas and worse taste.

The risible dialogue, the bulging eyeballs, the heaving bosoms, the digitally rendered hyenas and squirming maggots, the movie fails to achieve the status of the instant camp classic. That's partly because the vibe of the film is too torpid.

Few directors can put loneliness on screen as persuasively or capture the eerie quiet of people waiting for something, anything to happen. It's in moments such as these, when all sense of time disappears and all that remains are bodies in motion and Ken Kelsch's limpid cinematography, that you remember just how good Ferrara can be.

A comedy poised on the knife's edge of tragedy, the film is a gutsy, truthful, deeply rooted vision of contemporary American life, scaled to the size of an ordinary man. It's a humanist triumph strip-mined of bathos and confirmation that, after directing just three features, Payne has become the most gifted comic social satirist to hit our movies since Preston Sturges.

It has the virtue of Lin's tangy wit but it also suffers from the vice of a director who, torn between personal vision and wide public reach, tends to smother his ideas under a veneer of cool.

The Cool School, is, well, cool, but it’s also fairly parochial.

Twisted is rubbish, but it looks good enough, moves fast enough and does improve as it progresses, principally because its plot disintegrtes to the point of outright comedy.

The film can be described as a character study or a fictionalized slice of terribly real life. Mostly, though, it is an inquiry into the mysteries of other people.

The newest in British gangland entertainment and the tastiest in years.

The Benchwarmers is the sort of trash that Hollywood does really well. It is also, to quote Mr. Schneider, "a master's thesis on the form of a quintessential Adam Sandler comedy."

At once an emotional thriller and a domestic horror movie -- a woman's picture with a vengeance, in which the bloodletting is kept to a minimum, and ends up all the more powerful and profound for it.

A testament to movie love at its most devout, cinematic spectacle at its most extreme, and kitsch as an act of aesthetic communion.

Nearly as unwatchable as it is unpronounceable.

Tokyo Sonata, looks like a family melodrama -- if a distinctly eccentric variant on the typical domestic affair -- there is more than a touch of horror to its story of a salaryman whose downsizing sets off a series of cataclysmic events.

A provocation, a coup de theatre and three hours of tedious experimentation.

There's a surprising amount to relish about this gleefully self-conscious, disposable romp through horror's sexiest subgenre, mainly the film's grasp of its own terms.

Exactly the sort of good bad movie that Hollywood does best -- it's big, worthless fun.

Neither ambitious enough to take seriously nor sleazy enough to enjoy, The Quiet flirts with the trappings of exploitation cinema without going all the way.

Man From Plains isn’t about engagement; it’s about disengagement from Mr. Carter’s critics and his more provocative beliefs. It’s also about legacy building.

A sun-kissed German film about a young couple in love and in doubt, might not be perfect, but so much is right and true in this lovely, delicate work that it comes breathtakingly close.

The movie is best understood not in banal docudrama terms but as an impressionistic portrait of a man who, stripped of power, is revealed as grotesquely human.

Ms. Meyers, whose ambitions are telegraphed by her film's title, which directly invokes George Cukor's lovely 1938 romp "Holiday," has created a cumbersome vehicle by saddling Iris with a flamboyantly glamorous Los Angeles double, Amanda. As played by Cameron Diaz with oodles of charm and not an ounce of persuasion, Amanda doesn’t as much mirror Iris's love troubles as throw them into wincing relief.

The film is not a beautiful object or a memorable cultural one, and yet it charms, however awkwardly. Ms. Swank’s ardent sincerity and naked emotionalism dovetail nicely with Mr. LaGravenese’s melodramatic excesses.

Curiously, one of the film's stranger effects is that it's more convincing as a meditation on desire and Hollywood than as a biographical exploration.

It's Zeta-Jones who keeps you watching from start to finish -- You'd have to go back to Joan Crawford in her hungry prime, in films like "Rain" and "The Women," to find another female film star who grabs hold of the screen with such ferocity.

With a body built for action and a smile made for comedy, Smith eases through his scenes -- cool but never scary, a touch hip-hop and thoroughly audience-friendly. And unlike Lawrence, he can act. Smith's ability to put over a scene, combined with his matinee charm, goes a long way to making the film's violence palatable.

What gives the film a formalist kick is that the story unfolds piecemeal as a series of nonlinear moments. What gives it soul are the three lead actors who pull the pieces together with devastating power.

It is the sort of human-scale production that holds your attention with good acting, nice lighting and a screenplay that favors thought over action, thoughtful incident over full-blown episode.

While Slither sometimes feels like a monster-mash, what makes it work is how nimbly it slaloms from yucks to yuks, slip-sliding from horror to comedy and back again on its gore-slicked foundation.

By far the most approachable of the director's recent films, with an emotional depth that's true to life and a streamlined narrative that for long stretches barely contains a word.

It isn't that nothing happens in Poolhall Junkies, it's that nothing interesting does.

Mostly, though, there is Landa, whose unctuous charm, beautifully modulated by Mr. Waltz, gives this unwieldy, dragging movie a much-needed periodic jolt.

The story is too silly, too woefully underwritten, to stake a claim on seriousness.

Mean-spirited vulgarity and homosexual panic.

To his credit, Mr. Hood's meditation on truth and reconciliation doesn't traffic in the cheap thrills of art-house exploitation, like "City of God"; he wrings tears with sincerity, not cynicism.

Generally absorbing if sometimes fog-inducing.

The English director Mike Leigh's best work in a decade.

Beautifully shot by the French cinematographer Georges Périnal (whose credits include Cocteau's "Blood of a Poet"), the film soon evolves from a claustrophobic domestic affair into a mordantly discomfiting look at the betrayal of innocence.

The movie is glorious pulp pastiche without the smirks, which is fitting given the author's ironic humanism.

Hancock makes for one unexpectedly satisfying and kinky addition to Hollywood's superhero chronicles. Touching and odd, laden with genuine twists and grounded by three appealing lead performances.

What Flame & Citron has are decent men taking down Nazis (always a crowd pleaser) and some appealing actors — notably Mr. Lindhardt, Mr. Mikkelsen and Christian Berkel as the head of the Copenhagen Gestapo.

A soulful, piercingly beautiful story.

The jokes don't just fizzle into insignificance; they flop about with gaudy ineffectualness, gasping for air like newly landed trout.

Burger knows how to shoot and this is one feature where the dingy digital imagery arguably makes sense, but it's too bad he didn't work harder at finding something more original with which to test his talent than the JFK assassination and the gimmick of the phony nonfiction film.

And so he zips and zags, keeping aloft in a movie that can’t always do the same.

Pitched as a black comedy, the film thus far seems to have divided audiences between those who think it unaccountably hilarious and those who see it as the latest manifestation of what might be called the new nihilism.

A tale about appearances in which not everything is as it seems, Easier With Practice tries to use phone sex as a way to explore contemporary alienation.

This is the costliest, most logistically complex feature of the filmmaker's career, and it appears that the effort to wrangle so many beasts, from elephants to movie stars and money men, along with the headaches that come with sweeping period films, got the better of him.

More than anything, Munich is a slammin' entertainment filled with dazzling set pieces and geometric camerawork.

One of the graces of Gone Baby Gone is its sensitivity to real struggle, to the lived-in spaces and worn-out consciences that can come when despair turns into nihilism.

Alas, what's missing is the spark of life, the jolt of the unexpected - something beyond tears - to puncture the falseness of a film world, which, by its insistence on its own beauty, obscures the tragedy that the three characters, by their nature, cannot express.

Amusing if unfocused documentary peek at some of the more engaged fans (and opportunists) circulating in the Harry Potter world.

A minor diversion dripping in splatter and groaning with self-amusement.

It's no great surprise that after a tough beginning, Saved! soon starts to sound a lot like the inspirational TV movie (with Valerie Bertinelli).

Pitched between interludes of anxious intimacy and equally nerve-shredding set pieces, Collateral scores its points with underhand precision.

Like the film, the characters mean well and look good. But they're so deeply immersed in their own heads that they can't see the world for their needs.

The film portrays a family undone by grief over the death of a loved one; that, in any event, is its plot synopsis. More accurately, the film is a wallow of authorial narcissism, and a tedious, unrelenting, uninteresting wallow at that.

Director Peyton Reed gets the film's look and, in moments, its disingenuous innocence, but you have to wonder what he and the screenwriters, Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake, thought they were parodying. The actors clearly haven't a clue.

There are a lot of horses but absolutely no sense in The First Saturday in May, a glib, lazy documentary about six trainers on the proverbial road to the 2006 Kentucky Derby.

Anatomy of Hell is more than a lapse; it is a brutal self-parody of a filmmaker who, having stripped down to the nitty-gritty once too often, may finally have nothing left to show.

When We Were Kings is a wonderfully entertaining, at times thrilling, film. Ali is magnificent, Foreman oddly touching, and their fight, which is shown almost in total, makes for superb, nail-biting suspense--even two decades after the fact.

This undiluted nonsense is best suited to DVD-rental desperation. Still, aficionados of cheap cinematic thrills involving beautiful and stupid young people will be happy to learn that while the film fizzles far more than it sizzles, its director, John Stockwell, is a connoisseur of the female backside, which he displays to great and frequent advantage.

Together with his extraordinary performers, Mr. Chéreau breathes life into characters who long ago set a course for death.

Like the film itself, Mr. Dillon’s performance works through understatement.

Like many of Mr. Herzog's movies, fiction and nonfiction, Encounters at the End of the World itself has the quality of a dream: it's at once vivid and vague, easy to grasp and somehow beyond reach.

An erotically charged, beautifully directed story of a woman preyed upon by different men and her own warring desires.

As with the greatest animated films, the triumph of Kon's work lies not just in its beauty and singularly sophisticated storytelling but in how that beauty and storytelling combine to give the films a sting so human you can forget you're watching a cartoon.

He (director Mark Waters) keeps the story light and bright, and he brings out real comic performances from his cast, including newcomer Seyfried, who plays her ditz with Judy Holliday charm.

Known for an elegant visual style, Jarmusch has a great gift for playing actors against one another, for finding complementary eccentrics (Murray and RZA) and uncovering rare gems (Bill Rice and Taylor Mead in "Champagne").

The kind of quietly unassuming tear-jerker that works its way into your heart despite the occasional cries of protest emanating from your head.

Shows a young filmmaker pushing at the limits of cinematic narrative with grace and a certain amount of puckish willfulness.

The cast of mostly unknowns is agreeable if unnecessarily bland, not a Spicoli among them.

A story as creaky as the sub that gives the film its name.

His film may be something of a beautiful lie, but what's true about Sollett's characters is that their dreams, their grace and their struggles are as real as it gets.

A movie of epically assaultive noise and nonsense.

Stories of lost crowns lend themselves to drama, but not necessarily audience-pleasing entertainments, which may explain why Frost/Nixon registers as such a soothing, agreeably amusing experience, more palliative than purgative.

It unapologetically exults in its characters' glorious imperfection. It's good to know that oddballs, outcasts and people who don't look like Barbie and Ken still have a place in American movies and that not everyone in Hollywood pays lip service to the nice and polite.

A dopey if largely painless romantic comedy.

They drink at the pub, they drink at home. They drink until they pass out and then, after they have had a good vomit, they drink again. If that sounds too disgusting to watch, it almost is.

Isn't in league with the Nicholas Ray classic ("Rebel Without a Cause"), but in its ferocious energy and lead performances it's many cuts above most big-screen soap operas.

With so little trust and even less dialogue to back him up, it's no wonder Li rarely takes his left hand out of his pants pocket. His fists aren't furious; they're on strike.

It seems doubtful that Surveillance, a would-be transgression that tries to squeeze dark laughs from the spectacle of human suffering, would be taking up space in theaters if its director were not the daughter of a name filmmaker.

This tough, crackling thriller from director Gary Gray is one of those rare action movies with something on its mind other than moviestar sneers and incessant big bangs.

Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien's hypnotically beautiful cinematic trilogy Three Times doesn't just illuminate faces and objects; it seems to fill them up, as if they were lighted from within.

There may once have been a real movie rattling inside the empty studio package known as The Big Bounce, but no longer.

What’s most striking about Extract, beyond the scarcity of jokes and absence of actual filmmaking, is its deep well of sourness, which at times borders on misanthropy.

Generous, soulful film.

Can he do the thing? Well, yes and no. He -- Mamet, David, celebrated celebrity playwright and less-certain maker of movies -- can do some of the things, like assemble a cast sleek as a cat.

Few American filmmakers create female characters as realistically funny, attractively imperfect and flat-out annoying as does Ms. Holofcener, whose features include “Friends With Money” and “Lovely & Amazing.”

This delectable fusion of New Age babble and luridly bad filmmaking may not "open" you up, to borrow one of the film's favorite verbs, but it might leave your jaw slack and your belly sore from laughter.

Smith has created the raunchiest romantic comedy in recent American film, and one of the most good-natured.

It's the same old bootstraps story, an American dream artfully told, skillfully sold. To that calculated end, the filmmaking is seamless, unadorned, transparent, the better to serve Mr. Smith's warm expressiveness.

Much like its young hero, played by Daniel Radcliffe, the film has begun to show signs of stress around the edges, a bit of fatigue, or maybe that’s just my gnawing impatience.

Like oversolicitous lovers, the filmmakers are hung up on foreplay -- and not enough old-fashioned teenage raunch.

This film paints a haunting portrait of existential solitude, one in which the images speak louder and often more forcefully than do any of the words.

Of course it's dumb, but every 10 minutes or so, it's also pretty funny.

It takes talent to make audiences care about ordinary people doing ordinary things, just as it takes guts to end a movie with something as corny as the sounds of children playing.

Still, despite the visual clumsiness and the production's tattered seams, I found myself rooting for this movie anyway, partly because Lindsey and Ben make a nice fit, as do the actors playing them, partly because the Farrellys bring so much heart to their movies, and partly because Ms. Barrymore inspires more goodwill than any other young actress I can think of working today in American movies.

At once a sick comedy, a bile-raising thriller and a genre pastiche, Save the Green Planet is a welter of conflicting tones, dissonant moods and warring intentions.

An ode to the joy and sweet release of sex, the film manages to be a sincere, modest political venture that finds humor where you might least expect it, notably in a ménage à trois featuring a cheeky rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner."

Malick dangles his maddeningly innocent ideas about life and death and man's gift for self-destruction.

Mr. Gleeson, Mr. Farrell and especially the late-arriving and welcome Mr. Fiennes have great fun rummaging around inside Mr. McDonagh’s modest bag of tricks.

The obstacle that the director Joe Carnahan and his colleagues failed to clear was finding the right self-mocking tone for a movie that was, by the looks of it, too expensive to risk real laughs.

About the only good thing to say about this mess is that it's rotten enough that even Altman cultists may be forced to reconsider their devotion.

The only remotely notable thing about this particular jumble of boos, bangs and door creaks...is that it tries to wed the horror trend with the heated-up God market.

A movie in search of a theme. Svend and Bjarne aren't bad or uninteresting characters, and certainly the two talented actors playing them are inherently watchable. But there's too little meat on these bones.

An enjoyable if somewhat neutered defender of the free world. Make no mistake: Hellboy still has a hide as hard-boiled as Lee Marvin in "The Dirty Dozen," but now he's also wearing a smile.

The big tease turns into the long goodbye in The Twilight Saga: New Moon, the juiceless, near bloodless sequel.

Bridges turns a two-dimensional image into a presence so vital, so filled with breath and blood, that you uneasily fall in love with his character and abandon all thought of the artifice that's brought it to life.

This is, after all, a film in which no one leads life according to script -- but, then, that's also the reason it works.

Irons' doleful lassitude sucks the energy right out of the story and makes this listlessly directed adaptation droop all the more.

Hitman exploits every action-flick cliché imaginable and still manages to be dull. It’s bang, boom, blah -- action movies for bored dummies.

Phony choppers and a startling resemblance to Jon Voight aren't enough to transform Theron into Wuornos, and I didn't buy either the performance or the character for a second.

Parigi -- who's clearly made a close study of Alfred Hitchcock's obsessions and has watched a fair share of intelligent horror perched between cheekiness and Grand Guignol (think "Re-Animator") -- succeeds nicely.

There’s something creepy, and not pleasurably so, about watching children pantomime so much malice and fear.

A drowsy comedy about a handful of kids grooving and roller-skating, Roll Bounce has heart and good vibes but little else to recommend it.

Too short by half, Lost Boys of Sudan affords frustratingly little by way of real analysis and history. But it does introduce us to two extraordinary young men whose faith in this country is almost as unbearably sad as their stories.

Filmmaker Kevin Rafferty makes the case for remembrance and for the art of the story in his preposterously entertaining documentary Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, preposterous at least for those of us who routinely shun that pagan sacrament.

There is also something rather splendid about this extended-play peep show, as if Mr. Maddin had stumbled across a hitherto lost archive of cinema's less-than-innocent past. What makes all this nostalgia for a movie history that never happened is that, as is always the case with Mr. Maddin's work, it's executed with more love than irony and not a whit of derision.

With all the mystery and meaning sucked from the story, the filmmakers do what filmmakers often do when faced with their own lack of imagination: they toss a little sex in with the violence.

The film's gadgetry is pricier, but the leering is strictly the Playboy joke page circa 1967.

Children of Men may be something of a bummer, but it’s the kind of glorious bummer that lifts you to the rafters, transporting you with the greatness of its filmmaking.

It's too little Grier too late, but it's also fairly satisfying to watch.

For all its flaws, its obvious if irrelevant similarity to "Dead Poets Society," it lets us spend some quality time with some of the finest actresses in American film as they give energetic life to one of the most radically underrepresented minorities in Hollywood: the intelligent woman.

Low-key creepy rather than outright scary, the new Amityville marks a modest improvement over the original, partly because, from acting to bloody effects, it is better executed.

A cursory, irritatingly facile look at the human cost of globalization.

Brother is a solid return to gangster form for Kitano, who knows how to transcend the most overly familiar genre clichés without betraying the rules of engagement.

A film worthy neither of Mr. Keaton's talents nor even a desperate horror fan's attention.

The vogue for retro-horror, particularly the stripped-down shivers of 1970's slasher flicks, continues apace in this nasty little piece of work from Australia.

Blind Mountain is a reminder that art sometimes keeps the truth alive far better than the news.

If you thought Abu Ghraib was a laugh riot then you might love Observe and Report, a potentially brilliant conceptual comedy that fizzles because its writer and director, Jody Hill, doesn't have the guts to go with his spleen.

Alternately hilarious and alarming documentary.

Rarely has a film with so much blood on its hands seemed so insistently alive.

At their best, they're closer to the Three Stooges; at their most banal, they're as original as the Red Hot Chili Peppers performing nude with socks on their penises -- It's a hoot.

A would-be erotic thriller with no heat and zero chills, Deception has the kind of glassy, glossy sheen and risible story that mean to suggest "Basic Instinct" but instead invoke lesser laughers like "Jade" and "Sliver."

Showtime is better than the fourth "Lethal Weapon," which was pretty bad, but not as good as the original "Lethal Weapon" or the superior "48HRS."

Sweet and slight and often charming coming-of-age tale.

It is undeniable in its poignancy, an ecstatic vision of what might have been, though as much for its story as for the fact that the whole thing dissolves like a paper fan in rain, an evanescent masterwork.

An icy-cool study of violence both mediated and horribly real.

Spike Lee lost his nerve -- there are moments here, too, when it also seems like he lost his sense.

The pits.

A feature-length talkathon built on a sketchy premise, some unpersuasive psychology, a pinch of politics and strong star turns from Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt, the appeal of all those words runs out long before the director Oliver Hirschbiegel turns off the spigot.

The dog is cute, the children are adorable, and the earth and the sky seem to stretch on without limit in The Cave of the Yellow Dog. Unfortunately, so does the slight story.

The film has the feel of a gift. Particularly noteworthy are Mr. Haroun's eloquent silences, visual and aural.

(Duffy's) assembled a fine cast -- it's hard to take your eyes off the two young leads -- but he's given them little to do but squeeze triggers and mouth platitudes.

Straight-up ridiculous, but it's also consistently funny and nicely played by a well-complemented cast that finds its collective groove and never misses a beat.

Always adept at hitting emotional cues cleanly, Foster in this role also lets herself get lost in the moment, which is something she hasn't often allowed herself to do since "The Silence of the Lambs."

Even in Boarding Gate, a modestly scaled, self-consciously tawdry exercise in genre appropriation, Mr. Assayas manages to say more about what it is to be human -- to desire, to fear, to be alone -- than most filmmakers say in a lifetime.

An accidental entertainment, Equilibrium is a science-fiction pastiche so lacking in originality that if you stripped away its inspirations there would be precious little left.

Alas, as is often the case with lower-end genre movies, the story cooked up by Wiseman and his friends, actor Kevin Grevioux and the film's screenwriter, Danny McBride, is decidedly less important than the look of the film and its influences.

A pleasantly immersive, beautifully animated, occasionally sleepy tale.

With Where the Wild Things Are Jonze has made a work of art that stands up to its source and, in some instances, surpasses it.

Increasingly, reviewing the latest Woody Allen movie has taken on the feel of a dreaded ritual, an annual excursion into careless filmmaking, desperate shtick, and vainglorious misanthropy disguised as cuddly neurosis.

Mr. Polanski’s work with his performers is consistently subtle even when the performances seem anything but, which is true of this very fine film from welcome start to finish.

Late in his new film Kings and Queen, the wildly gifted French director Arnaud Desplechin yanks the rug from under his characters and sends both them and us reeling.

In the end, neither the appealing cast -- nor the force of Scott's stunning imagery is enough to make us understand why these men died.

Mr. Gilroy hasn’t reinvented the legal thriller here, but I doubt that was his intention; at its best and most ambitious, the film plays less like a variation on a Hollywood standard than a reappraisal. It’s a modest reappraisal, adult, sincere, intelligent, absorbing; it entertains without shame.

In his true-life film about four brothers who robbed banks out West during the late teens and early '20s, Richard Linklater seems to achieve the impossible: He makes Ethan Hawke bearable.

A fine and, on a scene-by-scene basis, often better than fine, if effectively unadventurous work.

Isn't just rotten -- badly acted, badly written, badly conceived -- it's dead inside.

See evil. See evil run. Run, evil, run all the way to cable television purgatory.

Rarely does pop come with such sizzle.

The comedy in Alfie is plentiful but bittersweet, and the character's bad behavior pleases more than it repels, principally because the star Jude Law's beauty and easy charm go a long way to softening the edges.

Greatness hovers just outside American Gangster, knocking, angling to be let in.

A relentlessly ugly, unpleasant, often incoherent assault on the senses from Brazil.

The spirit of the law will be upheld (this being Hollywood), but only after everyone has had plenty of nasty fun (this being Hollywood).

Cute and smarmy are nothing new for writer-director Tom DiCillo; what is new is the crushingly unfunny fusion of the two he's hit upon for this film.

Although it's better written and directed than the average Nora Ephron bagatelle, it's easy to imagine Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan slipping into a remake of Son of the Bride.

In the end, it is Mr. Egoyan's fealty to the novel, its feints and dodges, that proves the film's undoing.

Based on Mr. Lepage's play of the same title, Far Side of the Moon carries traces of the theater both in some of the dialogue and in its schematic construction. That said, it has been beautifully shot by the cinematographer Ronald Plante in the kind of high-definition digital video that makes the future of cinema look rather less grim than usual.

Films about environmental catastrophes tend to wax preachy, putting pedagogy and scolding above art. This one, for all its sorrow and the throb of righteous anger it provokes (only about 50,000 antelopes remain), is more than anything a work of creative imagination.

For all his genre-hopping and shape-shifting Spielberg seems to have become too big to tell small stories, which is one reason why the film sputters on one too many false endings.

A fitfully funny comedy.

A memory play and a sleight of hand, Eternal Sunshine is more than anything else deeply sincere. Like Spike Jonze, who directed "Adaptation" and "Being John Malkovich," Gondry succeeds principally by balancing Kaufman's churning skepticism with unflinching hope.

Surprisingly compelling viewing.

One of the most enjoyably inane movies of the season, this faux Southern Gothic offers an embarrassment of geek pleasures.

Lazy, infinitely silly cartoon.

Pleasurable, daffy if at times daft.

What follows doesn't much surprise, since every emotional detail, accompanied by a noisy storm and then a black-out, arrives well in advance of its execution.

While Mr. DiCaprio turns out to be an ideal fit for Blood Diamond, there's an insolvable disconnect between this serious story and the frivolous way it has been told. There is no reason to doubt the filmmakers' sincerity; only their filmmaking.

The crushingly unfunny and slopped-together How to Lose Friends & Alienate People has neither the ambition nor the intelligence to do justice to its source material.

She was guilty, no doubt, but as this immensely moving film makes clear, Aileen Wuornos was also heartbreakingly human.

The more valid question is how anyone who isn't 14 or under could possibly mistake a corporate bread-and-circus entertainment like this for something subversive. You want radical? Wait for the next Claire Denis film.

Duchess of Langeais seems to me a nearly impeccable work of art -- beautiful, true, profound.

Ms. Swinton demands to be seen even when her character is on a self-annihilating bender so real that you can almost smell the stink rising off her. So I sat in my seat, cursed the screen and was grateful to watch an actress at the height of her expressive power claw toward greatness.

Cassavetes isn't much of a director and he never settles on a mood, which he seems intent on ruining with hiccups of goofiness. But there's an underlying humanity to his scenes, a sense that movies are made by people for other people.

Thin but pleasantly diverting documentary

Conceived in the shadow of American pop rather than in its bright light, this tense, effective iteration of Bob Kane's original comic book owes its power and pleasures to a director who takes his material seriously and to a star who shoulders that seriousness with ease.

Ms. Moore is nicely lighted, but she too is poorly served by Mr. Freundlich's unfunny, unfocused screenplay, which basically stitches together a series of short scenes of four people whining in various combinations.

Robot Stories isn't any good. I don't say this lightly. There's no pleasure in giving new directors bad reviews and it's especially unpleasant when what's wrong with their work isn't a clumsy performance or two, a sagging second act or a repugnant worldview, but a near-total absence of filmmaking talent.

Of course, it's terrible -- but did it have to be this bad?

Absorbing if unsettling documentary.

Kept in check by his character's neuroses, Pearce holds our attention throughout, but it isn't until near the end that he manages to break free of his character's and his director's inhibitions.

The women make The Family Stone, especially Ms. Parker, whose nimble performance is reason alone to see the film: not since Philippe Petit has anyone walked a tightrope with such finesse - and in high heels, no less.

A wonderfully eccentric piece of filmmaking -- to demand it cohere to formula would be to miss the point.

Reveals its secrets slowly and with coy deliberation. The storytelling has the quality of a striptease, so that by the end of the film, Le Roux looks radically different from how he appears at the start.