Robert Wilonsky

It's the most uplifting movie of a numbing year -- a feel-good film full of songs about feeling god-awful.

At last, his (Howard's) first great (and filling) movie--inspirational, yes, but far from hokey; moving, absolutely, but never saccharine; and gripping, despite its being a fixed fight.

This movie would be worth feting in any season. It's wrenching but never manipulative, stoic but never dull, exhausting but never wearying.

Robots doesn't rely on being current, which will ultimately render it as timeless as any great fable. At its center is a big, beating heart.

Elf may be no more than a pleasant, amusing trifle, a grin that fades well before Thanksgiving, but it also will endure in the way all decent Hollywood-made Christmas fairy tales last if they're rendered with good cheer and good will.

It's everything most movies this year have not been: deeply felt, genuine, gracious.

Where Peter was yee-ha giddy with the discovery of his newfound powers in the first film, he's crushed by the weight of responsibility that comes with them in its far superior successor.

This is phony, absolutely, but the good feeling it leaves behind is plenty real.

A remarkable movie with an unsatisfying ending, which is just the point.

Here it is -- another double cross for which you will, and should, hand over your few grubby bucks.

That's where the movie falters: It tries to give Garcia's book a heart and conscience it didn't need and never demanded.

Virgin is astoundingly astute but also wondrously clever, written with more care and joy than any hundred comedies to come out of Hollywood in years.

Scott and Olds' is an essential movie, and one of the year's very best.

The Dancer Upstairs would have made a suitable double feature with "The Quiet American"; both films unfold slowly, build toward an anxious climax and end with a shrug of grief.

The performances are uniformly remarkable.

It's a thoroughly delightful throwaway--the kind of movie for which cable television was made, from the maker of "Music & Lyrics" (Marc Lawrence), who knows his way 'round a snappy tune.

A celebration of the naughty joke and the courage it takes to tell one.

This Shrek is both funnier and warmer than its predecessor; it's better-looking, too, no longer as clunky and junky as video-game graphics.

Perfectly acceptable, deliriously charming...a goofy Bmovie dolled up like a square-jawed A-list blockbuster.

The Weather Man is not the wacky movie Paramount is selling, nor is it cynical Oscar bait. It's just a little movie about little people trying not to get wet or freeze to death or get burned when they walk outside, and good luck with all that.

As frantic and frenzied as its source material.

The filmmaker who once aimed to enchant his audiences with cheerful stories of beatific visitors from outer space now wants only to scare the hell out of us. E.T., as it turns out, is a mass murderer after all, and we are his Reese's Pieces.

Charlie doesn't have a point, doesn't give a damn about giving a damn. It is what it is: a beautiful goof, a drunken supermodel in search of one more party before the sun comes up.

Nathaniel will sometimes take it too far. It's particularly distracting, and even a little distancing, when he waits till the end of a lengthy interview to tell one of his father's former collaborators and friends that he is Louis' son.

That's all Full Frontal is: a brilliant gag at the expense of those who paid for it and those who pay to see it.

It's bright and spry, giggly and bouncy, but also cuddly with occasional touches of cruelty--a movie in which best friends, when let loose in the wild, suddenly realize one's a little higher on the food chain.

Hard to watch, harder still to ignore.

Provides Hoffman with what he's long deserved: a movie of his own.

That he (Hetfield), and his band, still lives is astonishing enough; that you get to see how and why in a movie so painfully intimate is nothing short of extraordinary.

What makes Crash so gripping--so terrifying in spots, so moving in others, and even a little funny at times--is how nothing happens as we think it will.

Steers' film will likely polarize the audience, which, if nothing else, gives it rare resonance; at least it makes you feel, where many similar indie efforts make you sleepy.

The Ladykillers fits snugly among the Coens' lighter and breezier movies--the ones you forget after you see them once and begin to appreciate and finally adore the more often you revisit them.

Zucker!'s a bona fide hit in Germany, where, apparently, there's been a shortage of Jewish comedies since, oh, 1939, give or take. But it deserves its imported rep; rare's the movie that has an Orthodox Jew tripping on Ecstasy while getting a massage from a Palestinian prostitute hours before his mamala's funeral.

Delightful almost in spite of itself.

If Allen owns The Upside of Anger, she is generous enough to loan it to Costner, who, despite the dim, glazed eyes, is more alive here than he's been in years.

If Dubus' work always resembled some sort of literary therapy session, as has often been said, then Field's version requires grief counseling. It is, at times, that devastating.

A fun and loving biopic

One expects more from writer-director Wes Anderson (and his co-scribbler, Owen Wilson) than such frivolous fun that bears no lingering effect.

One of the most remarkable things about Murderball, which is easily among the year's best movies, is how little of its time is filled with the playing of the game.

As he did in "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz", Wright immerses his heroes in pop culture's detritus and diversions, but doesn't drown them in it. You don't have to be dazzled or tickled by the movie, or get every joke, to be touched by it, too.

If Steven Soderbergh taught Clooney how to act in "Out of Sight," then Reitman has taught him how to stop acting. This is the most vulnerable, the most playful, the most human performance of his career.

A remarkable movie, because, like "Crumb" or even "American Splendor," it adores the very people most of us might ignore if they passed us on the street. It's a love letter to someone who desperately needs one, even 10 years after his death.

The movie is stirringly, thrillingly animated; Stander, as some say around Johannesburg, lives.

May be the most wrenching, profound and perfectly made movie nobody wants to see.

It succeeds where its recent predecessor miserably fails because it demands that you suffer the dreadfulness of war from both sides. That might not make it a milestone, but it's a hell of an improvement.

Just as you feel the numbing, clammy clench of paranoia on your neck, you realize, nope, the grip is just the director's attempt at tickling you to death. Demme's movie had no right to work. It does, and then some.

Willis gives a remarkable, wrenching performance: He is the most fragile indestructible man ever created.

The first Kill Bill was nothing but violence--swordfight upon swordfight, till the clanking of steel blades drowned out anything anyone said. The second is its emotional counterpart, the heart without all the blood drained from it.

Yes, yes--The Incredibles is beautiful to look at, but even more lovely beneath the computer-generated surfaces.

Dark and funny and mean and sexy, damned near pitch-black-perfect considering that at the end of this boozy comedy you wind up with, oh, Osama bin Laden.

The Guys is less a tearing open of old wounds than a balm to be applied over them. It doesn't wallow. It doesn't weep.

The movie works because Berg never forgets to keep his heart in the game and not just his head.

Hoffman, though, is the real gas--the vet getting dopey and loopy and handsy because, hey, what the hell...The midnight cowboy rides again.

Without being too glib about it, World Trade Center is a most improbable thing: an upbeat film about September 11, one of the few stories to emerge from that day to come with a happy ending.

It's vibrant and verdant and heartbreakingly inviting, begging you to escape into a lovely tale in which children, through a simple act of faith, find their own heaven on earth.

The film, from its deadpan start to its languorous finish, provides the most joyous moviegoing experience in years.

The first half of Intolerable Cruelty is more than tolerable; it's a dopey kick full of goofy jokes tossed off so quickly you're reminded less of bickering-bantering Grant and Rosalind Russell than Groucho and Chico Marx.

Scorsese's rockudrama withstands big-screen scrutiny some 24 years after its initial release.

The fanboy in me loves it, being wrapped in the warm projected glow of nostalgia for a movie I've memorized since age 9.

No matter how well you think you know this tale, you do not know it at all. It offers the oldest clichés polished up like some brand-new thing by director Greg Whiteley.

Penn's lead performance is the main attraction here, and it's a fine piece of work--far superior to his overly showy Oscar-winning role last year.

Audiard keeps things shaky, grim, claustrophobic, doomed. His film has the feel of documentary, as he follows Clara through the daily grind that pulverizes her. We're in her head, literally.

What makes About Schmidt so extraordinary is how ordinary its tale is; it's a gray picture about gray people looking for some kind of meaning in their gray lives.

Anderson and Sandler were meant for each other, and their romance is, unbelievably, our reward.

Altman gladly admits there's not much of a story here; his movies are driven by characters.

School of Rock, populated by bright-shiny faces given a "Revenge of the Nerds" happy ending, is light and meaningless but never worthless. It merely aspires to be a good time and is just that and nothing more, a grin-worthy buzz that wears off in the parking lot.

There's something more REAL about this version, more human, more lived-in; though their words may have been penned 200 years ago, when Austen was a young woman writing about her idealized self, this cast and crew nudge the material into the now.

Keaton's so good you almost forget how wonderful Downey is as Steven Schwimmer.

Can barely move during its final half hour, which is a shame, because until then it's a frenetic, engaging ride -- a huge grin, not unlike the one Tom Cruise now hides behind his grownup's braces.

Treacherously funny and wrenchingly sad.

Aimed at the brain, when it should have been one for the heart.

As surreal as it is obscene, as clever as it is crude. It plays like some raw offspring of underground comix and the comedies of the 1920s.

Do not read too much into Burger's mockumentary, then; it's just having a lark, poking fun at conspiracy theorists, taking the piss out of the dozens of docs out there that present themselves as The Real Story About the Killing of John Kennedy.

Johnson, who was computer-generated in "Mummy" and only looked it in "Scorpion King," keeps it engaging, displaying a comedic knack first revealed during his Saturday Night Live appearance in 2000; he has the timing of a Rolex, even when playing straight man to American Pie's Stifler.

It's a movie about discomfort and distance, like an episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" or "The Larry Sanders Show" shot in deadpan black-and-white.

Feels like something entirely brand-new; such are the gifts of Kaufman and Gondry, inventors and magicians.

What Constantine offers is a deceptively thoughtful tale tricked up like an action movie; it's beautiful to look at but even more lovely to ruminate over.

As ridiculous, as mawkish and schizophrenic as The Family Stone is, it's also surprisingly endearing.

Yet the magic of the movie is how utterly wrenching it renders these songs, which thrive alongside the film's simple, eloquent, dusky narrative.

Engaging and revelatory, turning forgotten footnotes and discarded minutiae into the stuff of riveting drama and poignant laughs.

It's but a witty, engaging hodgepodge of archetypes and clichés; it retreads not only the TV show's story lines, but also those of every "Star Trek" and "Gunsmoke" episode. It needed the room of a big screen just to fit all of its influences into a single place.

It's hagiography, yes, but also powerful and poignant.

Breezy and easy to swallow. Its maker, Steven Spielberg, hasn't had so much fun in two decades.

As giddy and antic as any great Warner Bros. cartoon of the 1930s and '40s -- it bears seeing more than once, if only to allow for the sight gags that play second fiddle to the plot, a rarity in animation -- but also resonant and real. In other words, it's the perfect movie.

Though it's a blast to watch, it becomes tiresome over the long haul--25 minutes of Thurman hacking her way through the crowd to get to a woman whose fate we're informed of early on. It's the most climactic anti-climax in recent film history, a no-d'uh coda awaiting the ending it really deserves but never gets. Not this year, anyway.

The film is a whirlwind blur, a kinetic thrill ride through the industrial backwater that was one of punk and post-punk's most fertile Promised Lands: Manchester.

Identity is an outright blast, so fun it's--pardon--scary.

De Sica's 1952 neorealist masterpiece; it's a stark snapshot in which all is revealed about the "daily life of mankind," as the director once offered by way of description.

It may feel familiar, but it's a bleak and profound piece of work.

Signs blessedly displays a sense of giddy dark humor absent from Shyamalan's previous outings. It appears for much of the film he's merely having fun with the genre, goofing on its paranoid roots.

Northfork may be doomed, but the Polish brothers and cinematographer M. David Mullen (who worked with the brothers on their previous features, "Twin Falls, Idaho" and "Jackpot") make the place feel like heaven on earth.

The star's the thing, the only thing, and he's brilliant at playing a thinly veiled version of himself.

Not only an exceptional thriller, but a transcendent summer movie: It assumes, for two hours, you've brain and heart enough to stick with a film that doesn't condescend, doesn't beat you up and doesn't dumb you to death.

My Kid Could Paint That's about art—and it IS art, among the best documentaries ever made about that elusive process of manufacturing something out of nothing. But it's also a must-see for every single parent who believes their children are special, when all they want to be is your children.

Co-directors and writers John Musker and Ron Clements doll it up so marvelously you're sucked into the screen and forced to confront the fact that at their best, these filmmakers can make the two-dimensional astonishingly warm and full-bodied.

It's either the world's greatest infomercial for fame (and its omnipresent companion, notoriety) or the saddest eulogy of all.

If only Condon kept up the Q&A format, because when he ditches it the movie turns flat and familiar.

It has just enough "comedy" to qualify as crowd-pleaser.