Scott Foundas

While the entertainment value of Cloverfield is highly negotiable, it's clear that Abrams has consciously aligned himself with those filmmakers who have used the template of a grade-B monster/invasion movie -- Don Siegel, George Romero, Steven Spielberg -- as a stealth vessel for social commentary.

An unusually bright, inspired look at the perils of breaking into the acting business.

Its jazzy rhythm and economy of form place it closer to a 1950s film noir, shot through with humor so dark you need a flashlight to see it.

As before, Bujalski's preference for nonprofessional actors, his ear for the rhythms of conversation among bright young 20-somethings and his adept use of a roving, hand-held camera (this time shooting in fuzzy black and white) lend the film an invigorating energy.

Serviceable, wholly uninspired.

They ought to be a whole lot scarier than they are in this tepid genre offering from director Robert Harmon, whose debut film "The Hitcher" set a high bar for screen terror in the 1980s. Pic looks like a holiday gobbler.

It's an unconscionably funny sex farce that, by its end, turns into a tender and honest romance, an acute portrait of loneliness and, believe it or not, a musical. This is a movie Blake Edwards might have made.

Almereyda has crafted an uncannily revealing portrait of a major American artist at work, all the more remarkable for the deceptive casualness with which it unfolds, as if Almereyda had just shown up.

A perceptive character drama both delicate and tragic.

Pretty formulaic stuff: bland self-empowerment tinged with warm fuzzies in all the right places. But what makes this "Somebody" something is Pasquin's deft touch and understanding with the material.

Its characters are as flimsy and expendable as the title suggests, while only the most gullible of viewers (i.e., those who've never seen a David Mamet picture) will likely be duped by the painfully et cetera who's-conning-whom antics or the mounds of forced sentimentality under which they're ill-disguised.

Unabashedly tasteless, wholly trashy and, also, hugely entertaining.

At the movie's core, disguised with pitch-perfect Minnesota accent and bushy comb-over hairdo, the perpetually underrated Kurt Russell (as the late coach Herb Brooks) delivers a brilliant performance of immaculate control.

By the time of its medical-operation climax, Stuck On You has focused so much on ennobling the disabled that it comes to resemble a segment of the Jerry Lewis telethon.

The quiet and intimacy of what is essentially a two-character piece are well juxtaposed by Brooks against the vast desert expanses of her home country, captured in sumptuous wide-screen cinematography by the great Ian Baker.

It's all fitfully amusing, thanks in large part to Bouchard's richly comic performance, but the movie is never very involving, and it overstays its welcome by a good, long while.

Watching the passionless Phantom, with its geriatric story-framing device, gooey dimestore romanticism and tawdry pop ballads about unrequited yearning, feels akin to dying and waking up in your parents’ easy-listening-radio hell.

What seduces most about Ask the Dust isn't its verisimilitude, but its gloriously old-fashioned backlot sheen - the L.A. of old Hollywood movies and of our collective fantasies.

Result is imperfect and overlong, but hugely ambitious and often breathtaking.

A stunning work, revisiting controversial events with journalistic objectivity and a meticulous eye for detail.

It's rarely a good sign when a movie feels obliged to add the words "a fable" beneath its main title -- and Undertaking Betty is no exception.

Part dewey-eyed paperback romance, part acid-trip planetarium show, this extravagantly silly movie comes on like the second coming of "2001."

Southland Tales pilfers large chunks of its plot and visual style from Alex Cox’s "Repo Man," Kathryn Bigelow’s "Strange Days" and Shane Carruth’s Sundance-winning "Primer," and unlike the makers of those films, Kelly hasn’t digested his influences and made them his own -- he’s more like the slacker college kid who’s just enough of an intellectual poseur to bluff his way to an A. That said, Southland Tales isn’t entirely without its pleasures, chiefly The Rock.

Open Water is just one tedious scene stretched out to feature length. It's terrifying all right, but only for what it says about the extents to which a couple of hungry actors and a bullish director will go to turn themselves into overnight celebrities.

A steaming compost heap of high-art pretense and half-cocked psychoanalysis that almost makes you sorry Nicolas Roeg isn't making pictures anymore.

Though Akel and Mass share writing credit, Chalk was actually shot in a loose, improvisational manner in the mode of Christopher Guest's films, and its best set pieces are like devastatingly effective pinpricks puncturing the Hollywood hot-air balloon of inspirational teacher/coach melodramas.

Tries to combine the suspense of old Saturday morning serials with the gusto of producer Jerry Bruckheimer's action pics. Falling short on both counts, this long, and long-winded, series of middling cliffhangers won't pump the adrenaline of action aficionados or -- the family crowd.

Three words of advice to those who haven't yet seen it: Run, don't walk. Composed of excerpts from hundreds of locally shot movies past and present -- from grade-A prestige pictures to unrepentant grade-Z schlock -- Los Angeles Plays Itself serves as Andersen's exhaustive but never exhausting attempt to reconcile the myriad identities of the world's moviemaking capital.

Worms is one of those rare kiddie flicks that successfully adopt a child’s-eye view of the world, where nothing is more important than saving face on the playground and where parents are as distant and clueless as storybook giants.

The Lives of Others wants us to see that the Stasi -- at least some of them -- were, like their Gestapo brethren, “just following orders." You can call that naive optimism on Donnersmarck's part, or historical revisionism of the sort duly lambasted by the current film version of Alan Bennett's "The History Boys." I, for one, tremble at the thought of what this young director does for an encore.

The most enjoyable film Besson has had his name on in eons.

The flawed, fascinating Land of Plenty is easily Wenders' most vital work in more than a decade -- a troubling meditation on terrorism paranoia, poverty and homelessness.

A one-joke movie if ever there was, but the joke happens to be a good one -- a Tracy-and-Hepburn-style battle of the sexes in which Kate can fly and blast through walls -- and director Ivan Reitman (who made Ghostbusters) feels at home with the mix of screwball and supernatural.

The picture shows vital signs only in a few scenes where Cedric takes on the additional role of his own lecherous uncle, but it's too little too late.

The Weather Man begs to be taken seriously and can't easily be dismissed; it kicks around in your mind for a good long while after you've seen it. Cage, who does his finest work since "Leaving Las Vegas," has stripped himself bare of the patented tics and mannerisms he honed in one Jerry Bruckheimer movie too many.

A cobwebbed, mummified horror entry that makes obvious, cartoonishly grotesque demands for attention.

Put simply, this second feature by the young Austrian director Hans Weingartner is a put-on -- a glib anti-capitalist rant in which the rhetoric rarely rises above the you-too-can-save-a-child-for-less-than-the-price-of-coffee level.

A scabrous, provocative and often funny social satire about the American dream, Spike Lee's flawed but fascinating She Hate Me addresses everything from corporate malfeasance to the African AIDS epidemic, barely catching its breath in-between.

This appalling multiculti upgrade of the ’50s sitcom is about as funny as a bus accident.

The imagery is startling not just for its symbolic resonances, but for the breathless intensity with which it sears the screen.

A screwball road movie set in a middle-of-nowhere town, Kwik Stop suggests "It Happened One Night" as reimagined by David Lynch or Hal Hartley.

Queen Latifah gives a spectacular performance in this hugely enjoyable wish-fulfillment fantasy.

The Chorus is sham art and questionable entertainment, but at the very least it sends you whistling out of the theater.

McKinnon's direction is nothing if not atmospheric -- his best scenes unfold with a pungent languor that suggests the power of the backwoods to turn hours into days and days into years. If only the sum total were a movie more "In the Bedroom" than it is everything-but-the-kitchen-sink.

Kinnear and Romijn-Stamos appear to be vying for the title of filmdom's least-convincing married couple, while Robert De Niro, as the movie's modern-day Dr. Frankenstein, takes his own expert career slumming to a new depth -- he's become an evil clone of a once-great actor.

Not just the funniest but the smartest comedy around by a mile.

Welsh director Sara Sugarman and the great cinematographer Stephen Burum (Hoffa, The Untouchables) keep the visuals bouncing along in bright, primary-color-intensive fashion, but the movie has no real heart and even less soul.

Chandrasekhar is a master forger of images and situations from horror movies past, but unlike Wes Craven did in "Scream," he doesn't build on them in any way, and the result is the opposite of what's intended; the movie is stultifying.

Looks with fresh eyes at a new millennium in which, seemingly, the entire world is bought and sold in neatly wrapped packages engineered for mass consumption.

In its depiction of a fleeting, but nevertheless factual, peace in the Middle East, Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven may seem a more quixotic Hollywood fantasy than all six Star Wars movies lumped together.

The result is (no pun intended) a powerful wake-up call, not just for Hollywood but for a nation that once fought passionately for the eight-hour workday and now, ever more willingly, works itself to death.

After a lively first half-hour, the scenes start to feel heavy, as though Serrano suddenly decided he was actually making a meaningful drama, and the ensuing, halfhearted political satire is like an extra weight on top of that.

Though the story hardly lacks for event as it traces Khayyam's ascension from the peasantry to the royal court, the period costumes and sets look to be on loan from Medieval Times, as do most of the actors, and the boxy, harshly lit compositions make everything feel even more cardboard.

The vaporous Wonderland never moves beyond its grungily romanticized view of the past.

Moments of genuine insight alternate freely with those of banal psychologizing, but even then there can be no denying that the filmmaker has an ear for a certain brand of self-absorbed discourse often overheard in restaurants and bars in the shadow of the Hollywood sign. And given the choice, I’ll take Henry’s home movies over Jonathan Demme’s any day of the week.

This won't be remembered as one of the prodigiously talented Armstrong's great films (My Brilliant Career, High Tide, Little Women), but it's still 90 percent better than everything else out there.

Astonishingly inept alleged satire.

A warm, spacious road movie with a stirring sense of the wide-open landscapes of the American West.

The film unfolds at a deliberate pace, with a soundtrack occupied less by dialogue than by the sounds of water flowing and crickets chirping. And if you listen carefully enough, you might just hear the sound of one hand clapping.

It's a rich idea for a comedy, even if the filmmakers seem timid about making the pic the full-on satire it might have been.

It's a timely, noble undertaking ill-served by a dry, history-textbook style that is at once too much and not enough.

Assembled in a straightforward, television-style presentation that gets the better of it.

What gives Rocky Balboa its unexpected pathos is the titanic humility of Stallone's performance, the earnestness with which he plays a man knocked down (but not out) by the ravages of time.

The movie is basically on one level and Faris on another -- in that exclusive aerie occupied by Judy Holliday, Carole Lombard, Lucille Ball and a few other blissfully original comedy goddesses.

The thunderous clashes between armies of computer-generated Trojans and Mycenaeans, when they do arrive, feel decidedly un-epic, as though we were watching a child's toy-box war between plastic figurines. Which makes them perfectly in line with the rest of Petersen's artless approach.

Far from a complete success: It takes too long to get to its central premise and, once there, too often meanders away from it. But Campbell is close to astonishing whenever she's onscreen.

Tyro helmers David Barison and Daniel Ross have sunk their teeth into a heady intellectual stew, and results are invigorating thanks to the filmmakers' inspired linkage of images and ideas and commentaries from three of the world's leading philosophers.

The movie's chief liability, though, is Rose herself, who also co-scripted with first-time director Robert Cary and who registers several notches below Nia Vardalos on the totem of unlikely double-threats.

This is some of the best filmmaking ever done by director Richard Donner, a longtime Hollywood journeyman known more for his proficient deployment of three long-running movie franchises (The Omen, Superman and Lethal Weapon) than for his lyricism.

Rebound is a sports comedy so by-the-numbers that you don't really have to watch it -- you can just check in on it every once in a while between trips to the concession stand and the bathroom.

Above all, it feels like a summation of everything he (Eastwood) represents as a filmmaker and a movie star, and perhaps also a farewell.

Like the abominable "Napoleon Dynamite," director Jared Hess' second feature will doubtless capture the hearts and minds of 12-year-old boys everywhere, even if Nacho Libre sacrifices the earlier film's aggressive mean-spiritedness in favor of gentle slapstick lunacy.

I’d be lying if I said that The Band’s Visit isn’t touching and uplifting and all those other audience-friendly emotions against which film critics are believed to religiously steel themselves. But in a season rife with movies (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Grace Is Gone, The Kite Runner, et al.) that aggressively pry open viewers’ chest cavities and yank on their heartstrings, Kolirin’s film is the only one that plucks at them gently, tickling the funny bone as it goes.

A great sports drama first and a heart-wrenching triumph-over-adversity weepie almost never.

Between them, first-time screenwriter Carl Ellsworth and director Wes Craven don't come up with a single clever way to generate suspense, and the movie's onboard atmosphere is so phony.

Fine new chapter in the long-running franchise should score well with family audiences.

Director Rob Reiner’s atrocious cancer “comedy” marks a new low in Hollywood’s self-flagellating “things to be thankful for” tradition.

Things could be worse. At the end of the day, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is nothing if not consistent -- taking care of business solidly, professionally and without a lick of the genuine wonderment or inspiration that you can find in surplus in Jon Favreau's Spielberg-influenced "Iron Man."

As factoids do-si-do with testimonials from the likes of drinking buddy Sean Penn and fan-boy Bono, the movie all but becomes the very A&E Hagiography for which Bukowski would have had little or no patience.

You'll be begging for mercy well before the end of this self-righteous, thoroughly unsavory "farce" about a lonely gay man who - gosh darn it - can't seem to stop getting mistaken for a pedophile.

I suspect that Death Proof will throw some of its director's admirers for a loop, though it may be the most revealing thing Tarantino has yet done -- a full-throttle expression of a singular artistic temperament disguised, like so many gems of grindhouses yore, as a glittering hunk of trash.

A brilliant portrait of adventure, activism, obsession and potential madness that ranks among helmer Werner Herzog's strongest work.

Swank's character and her performance are good enough to merit a movie of their own, instead of serving as fourth wheel to this lifeless ménage à trois.

Lacks sufficient appeal beyond niche aficionados of its featured performers.

A breathtakingly original nonfiction work by Seattle-based filmmaker Robinson Devor (whose "Police Beat" was among the highlights of Sundance's 2005 dramatic competition).

In fairness, the movie isn't the absolute worst of its kind and there's a certain charm to Butcher's amiable, puppy-eyed performance. But Michael McGowan's direction is as flat as an asphalt road, and his script is gasping for air long before it enters the final stretch.

Core has a touch with actors, too, and there are surprisingly fine performances here.

In his best film to date, Nick Cassavetes directs with ferocious energy, taking scenes past their logical stopping points and pushing his actors (particularly Foster, who can be as terrifying as Edward Norton in "American History X") to, but never over, the precipice of absurdity.

DiCaprio harnesses a terrific, buggy intensity reminiscent of "GoodFellas'" hopped-up Henry Hill (Ray Liotta).

The movie looks like it cost a fortune, with Dean Cundey's glistening widescreen compositions and Bill Brzeski's towering, storybook sets providing the backdrop for seamless visual effects. What's more, it's equally rich in ideas.

Offers a highly engaging immersion into a culture of larger-than-life characters driven by their thrill-seeking instincts.

Playing something of a cipher who reinvents himself as the occasion demands, Wood is unusually well cast, but it's Hunnam, with a psychotic twinkle in his eye, who turns the movie on whenever he's onscreen.

A handsomely produced, deeply passionate, but seriously flawed historical epic whose reach far exceeds its grasp. Somewhere inside this overlong, sometimes engaging, often tedious affair, there may be a solid, 100-minute movie.

It's not that Noya is bad as kid actors go, but a pair of dewy, crossed eyes and a beyond-his-years melancholy do not an entire movie make.

The result is a film marked by eruptions of brutal violence, but also passages of extraordinary tenderness.

As both book and film, The Human Stain comes to vividest life in its extended flashbacks, which offer the most compelling exploration of Roth's perennial themes of self-loathing and reinvention.

Scottish director Andrew Black keeps the pace brisk and the images sunny, while screenwriters Anne Black (his wife), Jason Faller and Katherine Swigert afford lively dialogue that, without pressing the issue, hones in on some insightful parallels between the morals of Austen's society and those of contemporary Mormon culture.

The dancing is dazzling in director Emilio Martínez-Lázaro's The Other Side of the Bed, but the movie itself is a dud.