Megan Lehmann

When the Powerpuff Girls blink those soulful dinner-plate peepers, you could forgive them anything - even their movie's wafer-thin excuse for a plot.

Overly long and uncomfortably intrusive, but never less than compelling.

Makes a powerful case against the wisdom of budget cuts at universities everywhere.

Uber-hip technique triumphs over substance in Reconstruction.

Indulgent, tedious documentary.

Essentially an hour-long monologue, but this talking head is so engaging that you can't blame director Lech Kowalski's camera for not wanting to stray from the late Dee Dee Ramone's party-ravaged face.

Pray will force you to look at the music as more than just gobbledygook created by musical-bower birds who can't spell.

The dirty old man who became a cult poet and author was a true original, and every minute he's on screen, whether it's reading from his brutally honest work or musing on a hard-lived life for the cameras, it's hard to look away.

It's a wistful yet penetrating film, shot through with magic realism and life-affirming humor, that gets you deep down where you live.

Not as vile as "Sleepover," nor as tangy as "Mean Girls."

A thumping soundtrack, including David Bowie's "Rebel Rebel" and Pink Floyd's "Us and Them," fuels this high-energy look at a pack of underdogs who sowed the seeds for today's extreme sports craze.

Settles into an unflinchingly honest coming-of-age portrait.

This genre-busting hybrid is a scattershot affair - bad jokes land with a thud that seems to echo, but the winning ones prompt hearty laughs.

Lacking a solid narrative beyond the worsening marital crisis, this humor-flecked domestic drama ends up relying heavily on directorial tricks such as splashes of magic realism, giving it a self-satisfied air that quickly becomes grating.

A promising film that is dragged down by the weight of its gray morbidity.

From the incessant rain that blurs the joyless Boston setting to the mysterious decision to make a brunette Hudson look as plain as possible, it's an evanescent fancy devoid of sparkle.

Uniformly excellent performances keep this destabilizing tale ticking, yet one can't help wishing Hollywood had combined this cast and these timely themes with a little bit of imagination to come up with something fresh.

Seems to exist solely to drive this observation home in the most heavy-handed way.

There is much sadness in this finely wrought drama, winner of nine prizes at the Israeli Academy Awards, but the family's hard-won escape from emotional lock-down is ultimately uplifting.

When Gilliam is finally forced to admit defeat, it is nothing short of heartbreaking - for audiences, too, as the few shots that made it into the can hold such promise.

A compelling portrait of a matchless man, who's still going strong at 72.

Winterbottom's bold film, its gritty visuals offset by Dario Marianelli's lavish score, makes real the desperate lengths that refugees -- those running from poverty as well as dange -- will go to.

Jenkins doesn't stint on the sickening reality of Wuornos' abhorrent behavior -- it's Theron's complex, deeply felt depiction of a thoroughly messed-up soul that forces us to look beyond the monstrous nature of her acts.

No light leavens the ashen wash of writer-director Tim Blake Nelson's relentlessly downbeat Holocaust drama The Grey Zone. None.

A true fan's nirvana.

Instructive, cathartic or just too painful? You decide.

Metallica brought back the rights and funded the project, and it's their honesty and willingness to front the cameras, warts and all, that makes this well-edited, often very funny, documentary so compelling.

Snoozy and unconvincing.