Stephen Cole

It's Duvall and Murray who make Get Low a small, wonderful thing.

An uncommonly tender and observant documentary on the phenomenon that is "A Chorus Line."

Chandor's shrewdest bit of business is figuring out how to make an A-list movie with a $3.5-million budget. Solution: buy low, sell high. Hire last decade's A-list – Spacey, Irons and Demi Moore – and give them their best parts in years.

A chilling film best experienced bundled up in a sweater and scarf.

More than anything, the film lacks a rapport with its audience.

The movie's big kick – what makes Enchanted live up to its title – is that the further Giselle progresses in New York, the more we feel like we've tumbled into a timeless Disney Neverland.

Detective Dee is the action flick of the year, a two-hour epic that blows the "Pirates of the Caribbean" to the Bermuda Triangle.

It’s a corny, old fashioned boy-dog love story, as adorable as anything Walt Disney ever signed off on.

After witnessing the wearying parliamentary debates among good and bad senators in recent Star Wars episodes, it's a pleasure to watch a sci-fi movie where more than just the spaceships move quickly.

Think of Sleepover as a girl gang movie with training wheels.

A typically hypnotic, slow-coiling drama from 80-year-old French filmmaker, Jacques Rivette.

Michelle Monaghan's clowning response to her boyfriend's sudden histrionics lends the drama a giddy fizz.

As expected, it has gaping holes where back stories used to be. Still, it's a historical war movie with impressive sweep, strong characterizations and the kind of idiosyncratic flourishes that made Woo such an irresistible storyteller.

Though only 85 minutes, the film captures an entire, bewilderingly extended family and way of life inside a sturdy frame.

Once it becomes clear that the new Diary of a Wimpy Kid is an equal-opportunity offender, and that it is the politically correct modern family that is being picked on, rather than young Greg, the film becomes cheerfully mischievous fun for everyone.

An amused and affectionate look at the writer who formed a crucial link between the New Journalism of the 1960s and today's blogosphere.

By hiring James Earl Jones to narrate, Disney has prepared youngsters to understand that man is equally capable of heroism and villainy.

Good Hair is also about how African-Americans spend $9-billion annually chemically treating and straightening their hair, buying 80 per cent of America's hair products. It's such a fascinating, complex tale that you hope one day some probing filmmaker will make a conclusive documentary on the subject.

If Under the Same Moon is formula melodrama, the film is well acted and its lead character perceptively drawn.

Machete is a drinking man's "The Expendables."

Warrior is a weirdly affecting hybrid, a 100-proof melodrama that's two-thirds Sylvester Stallone and one-third Eugene O'Neill. Think Rocky's "Long Day's Journey into Night."

Dragonslayer documents what happened when California stopped dreaming.

Your Mommy Kills Animals works best as a fast-moving carnival of faces and feature stories. Like most amusement-park rides, it lets you off dizzy and confused, whereas the best documentaries leave you feeling that you've come to a settled perspective on a subject.

A mess of a movie – a sprawling PowerPoint argument that covers too much ground way too fast, dispensing Wikipedia-calibre essays on a variety of subjects, from a blurred bio of J. Robert Oppenheimer, creator of the atom bomb, to an unsatisfying sidebar on A.Q. Khan, the world's first door-to-door nuke salesmen.

As Blank City proves, the all-night, every-night party was fun while it lasted.

Though beautiful to look at and graced with moments of ticklish camp, The Skin I Live In is also sluggish, arbitrarily conceived and, especially in its sagging middle, unaccountably dull.

Noir connoisseurs, however, will receive Moverman's latest like a double-bourbon from heaven. Rampart is the best crime-movie fix from Hollywood since "Gone Baby Gone."

Contagion isn't meant to provide delicious roller-coaster chills. Released two days before the 10th anniversary of 9/11, it's a film meant to scare the bejesus out of us.