Michael Phillips

Like Charles Ferguson's excellent Iraq documentary "No End in Sight," "Countdown to Zero" has an agenda but has the cogent, reasoned rhetoric to support it.

Guaranteed to make you think twice about what you're paying for what you're drinking.

The movie begins with a tragedy and eases into a more interesting blend of drama and comedy than we've gotten in this genre lately.

He could dance brilliantly right up to the end, it’s clear.This Is It may be a court documentary, but as a heavily lawyered portrait of an artist, it’s still pretty compelling.

Extraordinary.

A massive and rather tiring showcase for Bollywood action hero Akshay Kumar.

A triumph of disparate tones, colors and intentions. Like many, I have loved this thriller of conscience and betrayal most of my moviegoing life...Its brand of romantic fatalism is particularly seductive to teenage males, I think, and those who never fully recover from that moviegoing state of being.

The film is a singular achievement.

There is a good deal of honest charm in this story, and in the three principal performances.

Extraordinarily raunchy, occasionally funny.

A satisfying and movingly acted story.

The result is both a success and a disappointment. It's Kind of a Funny Story, divided into neat little daylong chapters in Craig's stay, lacks the staying power and bittersweet layering of "Half Nelson" and "Sugar."

Slick, ice-cold and enjoyable, The Bank Job is a bit of all right.

Enough talk; enough flashbacks. Sometimes the best thing a mystery can do is give its protagonist a reason to run like hell.

The emotions and crises feel pre-sanded, smooth to the point of blandness.

Enough with the snatching, already.

Overstuffed, formulaic but very easy to take.

It's tough to get on board with these monsters. They don't get the banter they--or we--deserve, and the screenwriters lean on wearying stereotypes.

The film's pretty good about saying why so much in the culture encourages a political life in the closet, either tacitly or directly. But even The Advocate had a problem with calling it a brilliantly orchestrated conspiracy.

One can’t help but wonder if Ephron would’ve been better off focusing exclusively on Child: She’s simply more interesting screen company.

But by not "saying" ANYTHING about the lives behind all the lovely, easygoing footage of infants making their way to their first steps and beyond, Babies feels a tad dodgy (and repetitive) by the hour mark.

I enjoyed it as much as any Allen film of the last 20 years.

It works from a specific place and lets audiences relate to that place, and the people in it, like trusted intimates.

This is one of the real finds of 2008.

Since I sort of liked “Step Up 2: The Streets,” I’m not surprised I sort of liked the remake of Fame.

The results are boring boring.

This is “True Lies” without the striptease or the Arab-maiming.

The film is a fancy-pants muddle in terms of technique. And if Bloom doesn't do something about his smirky tendency to troll for audience approval, his career may be severely limited.

Rescue Dawn is Herzog's first English-language screenplay, and this is part of its problem: The hushed conversations between prisoners sound only fitfully idiomatic. Also--crucially--Herzog can't find a way to make his own big finish feel authentic, even if things did happen roughly this way.

The way Diary of the Dead chooses to deliver its gore, you know you’re in the hands of a grown-up uninterested in the excesses of the “Saw” or “Hostel” pictures. I mean, there’s gore, sure, and flesh gets eaten. But the way Romero shoots and cuts the shot of a girl’s reunion with her parents, one dead, one undead, it’s played for keeps--the right kind of gross, with a touch of mournful gravity.

Ellen Page is key to its success, as much as Cody, or director Jason Reitman.

Here’s the surprise: Bandslam may come from synthetic materials, but the characters are a little more complicated than usual.

A gem made by a filmmaker who loves life, and knows how to capture its ebb and flow and sweet complication.

Last Chance Harvey is what it is: a pleasant put-up job, held up by world-class pros.

I didn't half-mind Fired Up, but half a mind is more than it deserves.

Eleven years ago director Campbell made "GoldenEye," the first of the Brosnan Bond pictures. Casino Royale trumps it every which way.

The acting is uniformly strong, the visual approach self-effacingly honest.

The acting is quite deft, if extremely broad, but screenwriter Kundo Koyama seesaws uncertainly between jokes and grief.

Date Night is a product substantially inferior to the material routinely finessed by Carell and Fey, on their respective hit shows, into comic gold.

The film is easy to take, though it must be said: It's almost 100 percent blather.

Black Snake Moan strikes me as hogwash. It fundamentally does not work; its consciously far-fetched, out-there notions of the things damaged people do in the name of love are reductive and go only so far. It's as if the premise were tethered to a radiator or something.

Calling a sequel Are We Done Yet? is like calling it "Enough Already."

If a Warner Bros. social-protest film from the early 1930s somehow got into bed with an American indie from the 1970s, how would the love-child turn out? Like this.

No halves about it: Half Nelson is a wholly absorbing and delicately shaded portrait of an educator played by Ryan Gosling, a young man harboring an offstage secret.

Writer-director Thom Fitzgerald's ambitious but hopelessly inchoate AIDS drama is actually three separate, sequentially-told stories.

Earns its happy ending like few other contemporary dramas concerned with the fate of a child. It puts you through hell for that ending, in fact, hell being modern-day Russia.

Things We Lost in the Fire finds Bier at an interesting juncture, half-Dogmatic, half traditionalist.

The most interesting thing about this slick but frustrating picture is the way it puts Crowe’s Hoffman at the center of our mixed feelings.

Yet it's worth seeing because the sights are truly something. Claudio Miranda's pearly cinematography, Donald Graham Burt's luscious production design, the visual effects supervised by Eric Barba--everything blends, and none of the seams show.

It's all a little ultra-cool for me. Shakespeare was right. Revenge is a dish best served ice-cold, not cool.

Apted and his collaborators are so in awe of their subject they neglect to bring him to full human life.

It's gut-grinding, to be sure. But a misjudged degree of cinematic dazzle obscures the outrages at the core of Standard Operating Procedure.

Day-Lewis... the role of a lifetime.

There's a tremendous amount of material here, and the script covers too much of it, often confusingly.

A kinetic delight, Reprise comes from director Joachim Trier, born in Denmark but raised in Oslo, Norway, and it’s a highlight of the filmgoing year so far.

It's sort of fun, certainly more so than the "National Treasure" pictures, as well as less manic (a little less) than the recent "Mummy" films.

The closing shot of Charlie Chaplin's face in City Lights, his heart breaking: the highest form of screen acting, the most effective tear extraction exercise the medium has yet to offer.

The slapstick is crudely executed. And the movie never makes up its mind regarding how nasty the ghost of Kate is going to play her revenge tactics.

It’s an unexpectedly emotional experience, seeing and hearing this luminous source of happiness again.

The film has one objective: to smack its audience in the face with fleeting, competing wows, over and over.

When the story’s twist arrives, you half-expect Twohy to throw in a couple of reels from "Dead Again," plus outtakes from "The Usual Suspects." It’s a lulu; I'm just not sure if it's the sort of lulu that will lead to great word-of-mouth.

After seeing No Reservations you'll be hungry for a really top-flight meal. And, to go with it, a better film.

"All right" doesn't begin to describe it. The Kids Are All Right is wonderful. Here is a film that respects and enjoys all of its characters, the give-and-take and recklessness and wisdom of any functioning family unit, conventional or un-.

Ashes of Time Redux remains a hermetic and rather frustrating work, dotted by lonely, windblown figures dwarfed by the sand dunes of western China.

The movie expresses honest concern for the plight of so many newcomers to America, legal or illegal. What it lacks is moment-to-moment credibility.

A Prophet pushes its protagonist into circumstances he did not choose but in which he watches and learns and kills and eventually becomes all he can be, albeit criminally. Certainly Muslims living in France have embraced the movie and Malik, played by Rahim

Spiritual journeys, even if they’re comedies, don’t really lend themselves to the extreme, anal-retentive formalism found in every frame of The Darjeeling Limited.

The action beats are so relentless, no sooner does one chase end than another begins.

Dreamgirls is performed, shot, edited and packaged like a coming-attractions trailer for itself. Ordinarily that would be enough to sink a film straight off, unless you're a fan of "Moulin Rouge." But this one's a good time.

The word masterpiece costs nothing to write and means less than nothing in an age when every third picture and each new Clint Eastwood project is proclaimed as such. After two viewings, however, Letters From Iwo Jima strikes me as the peak achievement in Eastwood's hallowed career.

Striving for low-key character comedy, Diminished Capacity ends up diminishing its returns.

It’s half-crock and half-sublime, which seems about right for its subject.

At its best, it's buoyant pop entertainment focused on three things: speed, racing and retina-splitting oceans of digitally captured color.

The result just might be the most hypocritical feature in the history of film as well as the history of hypocrisy, and along with serving beer, I hope they show I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell in hell.

A mild and static attempt at sincere camp.

Jumper, the film, goes everywhere and nowhere.

Rock takes his Good Hair job as a documentarian seriously enough to be interesting, but not so seriously that the film groans with earnestness.

Its sense of humor is more sly, more sophisticated and more interesting than most PG-13 or R-rated comedies at the moment. The film may be animated, and largely taken up with rats, but its pulse is gratifyingly human.

Turns out to be nothing special. Well, the music is. The storytelling is not.

The very elements of Eat Pray Love that helped make it a success in 40 languages -- the breezy prose, the relentless sorting-through of dissatisfactions, a steady stream of intriguing sights -- turn the film into a travelogue with a little spiritual questing on the side.

Legendary is so intent on paying heartfelt tribute to dogged young athletes that it neglects basic story needs.

The actors, remarkable and seasoned, take care of their end of things, stylishly and (when and where it can be arranged) truthfully.

The only people humiliated, really, are older people and heavy people and nerds and vegans and black people and mothers who breast-feed their 4-year-olds. Everybody else gets a pass.

Rosenbush strives for a difficult blend of spoof and sincerity with Zen Noir. In the spirit of rebirth, let's assume that the next time he makes it, it'll turn out fine.

At its best, Wright's film is raucous, impudent entertainment.

At one point Rourke delivers a monologue about his time in Bosnia, and the conviction the actor brings to the occasion throws the movie completely out of whack. What's actual acting doing in a movie like this?

The funky, enjoyable Hamburg-set comedy Soul Kitchen is a celebration of co-writer-director Fatih Akin's home base, a spacious, moody city of apparently limitless industrial warehouse space - like Chicago.

Sissako has an unusual camera eye, patient and alert to the ebb and flow of both the courtroom sequences and the outside scenes. The music is wonderful as well.

Some actors are dinner. Kevin Kline is dessert, and his comic brio saves the film version of The Extra Man from its limitations.

Around the halfway point it starts getting interesting and the people who put it together are at least working in a realm of reasonable intelligence and wit and respect for the audience.

Duchovny and Moore have their moments; they're like two preening sharks working on commission.

This movie's good. It's fast, deftly paced and funny.

As generic as its title, College Road Trip feels like a first draft, the one the studio brings to the rewrite team that, in this case, never got hired.

All in all? A curious preachment yarn for peace, one which makes you wonder if the filmmakers couldn't wait to get to the climactic aerial dogfights.

I’m flummoxed as to why the movie left me feeling up in the air, as opposed to over the moon. Partly, I think, it’s a matter of how Anderson’s sense of humor rubs up against that of the book’s author, Roald Dahl.

The film is worth seeing, if you have any fondness for the writer who co-created "Beyond the Fringe" and who is second only to Stoppard in his sprightly but mellow wit.

Too much of the contrasting comedy in Nanny McPhee Returns is shrill, laden with routine computer-generated effects and pounded into dust by James Newton Howard's shut-up-already musical score.

Strives to be nothing more than easygoing and heartwarming.

This one slice of the American experience amounts to one of the best films of the year.

A surer hand behind the camera might’ve finessed the jokes more effectively, or established a consistent and satisfying tone.

From director Ken Loach, England's longtime disciple of social realism, comes his most audience-friendly picture yet

A gripping documentary.

A dramatic true story has been made into a diffident biopic.

It pulls audiences into a meticulously detailed universe, familiar in many respects, wacked and menacing in many others.

The kids are magnetic.

I like its devotion to the drab outskirts of Sin City, and Buscemi's performance is right up his alley without being entirely predictable.

Tommy Lee Jones is marvelous in the film. He has one scene in particular, a simple two-person encounter, that's as good as it gets in the realm of American screen acting.

Hampton and Wright have been more than sensible when it comes to Atonement. They’ve responded intuitively to a tale that is half art and half potboiler, like so many stories worth telling.

Pulls you into a well-observed world and its characters.

A surprisingly heartfelt father/son relationship, handled with restraint by director Todd Holland.

While I may argue with the little guy's taste in musicals, it's remarkable to see any film, in any genre, blend honest sentiment with genuine wit and a visual landscape unlike any other.

The funniest bit in the crude but diverting Soul Men really makes you miss Bernie Mac, who died in August, a few months after completing the picture.

Raimi knows how to modulate his technique, as with the coolly controlled morality tale "A Simple Plan," but he's a firm believer in the power of an active, expressive camera, as well as the value of insinuation.

A remarkable downer-upper paradox: a bruising tale of teenage resilience, honest and emotionally complicated and alive.

In the end it depicts its subject as lost, and pitiable--like Richard Nixon, but more a pawn than a dark knight.

The movie’s partially redeemed by Seyfried, who makes her character more than a repository for audience sympathy. (Her make-out scene with Fox is handled with more suspense and care than anything else in the movie.)

Mafioso is shaped like a comedy, and it is one, but its intentionally jarring clashes of tone and rhythm are truly out there.

Carell's pal and "Daily Show" colleague Jon Stewart has a cameo as himself, one of a chorus of godless media star non-believers who do not see God's larger plan for Evan. Yes, well. At least "The Daily Show" is funny.

Outside the bedroom, the wartime swirl of intrigue never develops beyond postcard imagery, however. This is one of the major disappointments of the film-going year.

Director Morelli and editor Daniel Rezende know how to set up complex lines of action and keep the screws tight.

The pacing throughout is languid. Your eye becomes fixated on the hideous 70s wallpaper behind them. If only the story's interstellar narrative developments had the intensity of that wallpaper. Rod Serling might've gotten a great hour out of it (the story, that is, not the wallpaper). It simply is not two hours' worth, no matter how many quantum leaps into the unknown Kelly takes.

Writer-director Stewart Wade expanded his festival-circuit short film into a blobby, watery feature-length enterprise, unredeemed by its cast (though Sally Kirkland shows up as Todd's mom).

The story is both a muddle and a drag.

The film should've aimed higher, given all that these people endured to have their story told.

Less polished but more fun than "Dreamgirls." Both are drag revues at heart, one funny, the other serious. I prefer the funny one.

It's the big stuff that doesn't really work, at least well enough to be called special.

At its sharpest Elissa Down's feature directorial debut is guided by intense, rough-edged emotional swings that feel authentically alive, even when the script settles for tidiness.

Allen is obsessed with the notion of getting away with murder, mulling over which personalities can shoulder the psychological burden of killing without remorse, while others crumble under the pressure. The problem is, you don’t feel the human sweat and strain in Cassandra’s Dream, despite game work from Farrell and McGregor.

Church is most at home in his character’s skin; aside from the game but strident Quaid, all the leading players are ideally cast. It’s the script that isn’t ideally cast.

If older kids and adults seek out this picture, which 20th Century Fox and Walden Media clearly aren't sure how to sell, they may well find themselves drawn into a subterranean world of considerable imagination.

It has the air of an officially sanctioned tribute rather than a probing study, but it's stirring all the same.

Is director David Fincher's film the stuff of greatness? Not quite. But the picture is very, very good.

The mordant wit and paradoxical melancholic bounce you find in a great many Eastern European filmmakers informs every joke and rosy sexual encounter in the work of Czech writer-director Jiri Menzel.

Not bad, not great, a little less pushy and grating than the usual.

Clean, precise and terribly sullen, After.Life is like its female protagonist. It feels stuck between worlds, or genres.

By today's standards, it is only medium-bloody, though it's more than usually grim, its young protagonists sullen enough to qualify for the "Twilight" movies. Yet it affords precious little sadistic pleasure, partly because it "dares" to lay out more directly the pedophiliac demons plaguing Freddy the serial killer.

Sensational, grandly sinister and not for the kids, The Dark Knight elevates pulp to a very high level.

As a director, Kaufman isn't yet his own best salesman. He's not enough of a visual stylist to sell his script's most challenging conceits. But the cast rises to a very strange and rich occasion.

Some movies pack such a terrific central idea, even their flaws can’t stop the train. District 9 is one of them.

Routine cinema but rich history.

It's a lot of fun. Its spirit is genuine and, even with the odd vomit gag, fundamentally sweet.

Nothing in this movie is properly focused; everyone keeps talking about a character whom we never meet and does not matter; the tone keeps slipping around from indolent satire to thudding sincerity, and the Challenger shuttle disaster backdrop is queasy-making at best, offensive at worst.

Partly real and partly, increasingly, fantastic and outlandish in its wishful thinking.

A lot of director George Miller's film is gorgeous and exciting. Its craftsmanship and ambition put it a continent ahead of nearly every other animated feature of the last couple of years.

I find Lars and the Real Girl adorable in the worst way, bailed out only by most every member of its excellent cast.

It's a big ice cream sundae, this one -- not great documentary filmmaking but tasty all the way.

The dialogue can drive you crazy with its self-consciousness.

Borat is a rarity: a comedy whose middle name is danger, or as the Kazakhs say, kauwip-kater.

Too much of the film is a muddle, and it feels like work, not play.

May have a dull title, but it's lively, idiotic fun, at least until it goes too far past "too far" into the realm of "far too far."

While director Armando Iannucci's brand of satire -- just plausible enough to be painful -- isn't for all tastes, it's a little bit of heaven to hear screen characters spew such eloquently vicious bile.

It's fitting that a drama trading in classified information would turn out to be such a cryptic bugger.

The theater building is a four-story monster, and by the end of the picture we know it very well, in all its broken-down glory.

It’s a little “Karate Kid,” a smidge of “Fight Club” (with none of the ironic ambivalence toward violence that David Fincher brought to that story), a lot of “The O.C.” (evil boy Gigandet played an evil boy on that series), and presto: probable hit.