Stephen Holden

Ms. Hamilton’s straightforward documentary skillfully interweaves reminiscences by members of the group with re-enactments of the burglary.

Ms. Zellweger accomplishes the small miracle of making Bridget both entirely endearing and utterly real.

This bright, entertaining movie focuses on Curtis, but it is also a portrait of a scene, whose survivors look back with a mixture of pride and a screwball sense of mischief.

As a cautionary tale Lou Reed’s Berlin is an 85-minute public-service announcement that preaches "Just say no." The force of the music, however, lends this tawdry melodrama a tragic stature.

If Bella (the title doesn’t make sense until the last scene) is a mediocre cup of mush, the response to it suggests how desperate some people are for an urban fairy tale with a happy ending, no matter how ludicrous.

In its jagged style and tone Black Butterflies is as close to an inside-out view of Jonker's tumultuous life as a movie could go without sinking into chaos. Its hues are continuously changing, and the seaside weather around Cape Town reflects her tempestuous emotional life.

With its dearth of substance and its wandering focus, this is a middlebrow bodice-ripper posing as an epic that hasn’t the foggiest idea of what it wants to say.

Though certainly not for the squeamish, the film is by no means the ultimate horror movie it aspires to be. The volume of stagy gore quickly reaches a point of diminishing returns. And rather than trying to sustain a mood of grim suspense, the writer-director Dan O'Bannon has conceived this cinematic cousin of Night of the Living Dead as a mordant punk comedy.

Although Puzzle is a much smaller, less ambitious film without the ominous political subtext of Ms. Martel's masterwork, its story of a woman discovering her special gift and rejoicing in it has implications about sexual inequality in Argentina's middle class.

In their intensity, the actors’ incisive, impeccably coordinated performances are pitched slightly above normal conversation but not so much that “What’s in a Name?” shatters credibility.

Robert is not a Shakespearean figure like Walter White, but the film at least grants him the moral stature of an incorruptible man risking his life in a dangerous job. The Infiltrator is still a good yarn that, when it catches its breath, allows Mr. Cranston to convey the same ambivalence and cunning he brought to “Breaking Bad” and “All the Way."

The film's most weirdly beautiful moments are its excerpts from Bowery's collaborations with the Michael Clark Dance Company.

Quietly inflammatory film.

Ms. Rabe’s beautifully balanced performance reminds you that people never really grow up.

A candy-colored, unabashedly sentimental movie.

In the movie's cheapest, most exploitative gesture - just as it is about to run out of tricks - a snake slithers into the pine box in which Paul awakens bound and gagged, not knowing where he is. With that gimmick, the movie sacrifices its last shred of integrity.

We’re all familiar with the term contact high, but not with its antithesis. Because it is so believable, White Girl is a contact bummer that’s hard to shake.

This is the sort of gallows humor that Hitchcock relished drawing out in cruelly amusing cat-and-mouse games, not to be taken too seriously. The same is true of Married Life. The murder plot is not to be taken any more literally than the lethal games of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”

Evokes the flavor of the era just before the music business exploded into a mass-market juggernaut. The film's pleasures are the same ones offered by a sprawling, lavishly illustrated magazine spread.

Ms. Binoche’s portrayal of Camille is one of the most wrenching performances she has given.

Mr. Cusack demonstrates once again that he is Hollywood’s second-most-reliable nice guy, after Tom Hanks. Devoid of vanity, with no hidden agendas, he never strains to be likable. Good will, integrity and a native common sense ooze out of him.

The film's sobriety and carefully balanced arguments make it an exemplary piece of reporting, although its emotional heat rarely rises to a boil.

A bleak, lyrical meditation on the frontier spirit and American machismo and its torments.

Like "The Sixth Sense," He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not reaches for a crowning final twist, but in this case it falls flat.

Smoothly incorporates archival material, including scenes of Mr. Zinn's public appearances, interviews with Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Berrigan and Alice Walker (his student at Spelman). Matt Damon also reads well-chosen excerpts from Mr. Zinn's writing.

The structure of When Will I Be Loved seems deliberately flimsy, and many of its details don't add up. But as a contemporary fable about getting and spending in the new gilded age, When Will I Be Loved strikes a chord that echoes.

An inspiring demonstration of that old saw about necessity being the mother of (in this case, artistic) invention.

West, for all its intensity, becomes too bogged down in detail to be as strong as it might have been.

With its pointed, cavernous backgrounds and a Gotham City setting that evokes a 1940's-style futurism, "Mask of the Phantasm" looks splendid. But its story is too complicated and the editing too jerky for the movie to achieve narrative coherence. And the resemblance between the movie's hero and its enigmatic arch-villain is so close that audiences are likely to be confused.

For all its softening, The Good Lie, like “Monsieur Lazhar,” has a core of decency, humanity and good will that feels authentic. You won’t curse yourself for occasionally tearing up.

The wonder is that The Great Debaters transcends its own simplifying and manipulative ploys; it radiates nobility of spirit.

Ms. Montenegro's rough-hewn integrity is the one quality that ennobles The Other Side of the Street, an otherwise confused mixture of cat-and-mouse thriller and sentimental old folks' love story that is well below the level of "Central Station."

Puss has his charms, but he is not as memorable a character as Shrek or Shrek's mouthy sidekick, Donkey. Consequently the story, which involves a quest for magic beans and golden eggs, feels improvised and diffuse.

By focusing on musicians who are talented but finally not good or persistent enough to succeed in the big time, Not Fade Away offers a poignant, alternative, antiheroic history of the big beat.

The movie jolts you with the realization that the AIDS epidemic and the public debate about such issues have retreated so far under the news radar as to be half-forgotten.

The gentle, upbeat documentary Throw Down Your Heart chronicles the African pilgrimage of the American banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck in search of the origins of his chosen instrument.

Although crudely acted, with laughably inept action sequences and a story that makes little sense, it has the feverish pulse of a classic B movie, boldly angular cinematography and a blaringly cheesy jazz soundtrack.

Just when it seems as though the language of insult and humiliation couldn’t get any nastier, the movie escalates the barrage.

Mr. Di Gregorio wrote the screenplay with Valerio Attanasio, and this movie is a richer variation of his small, exquisite 2010 film, "Mid-August Lunch."

The nuanced performances of Ms. Smulders and Ms. Bean are flawless. Yet the movie’s calm levelheadedness is a subtle detriment. Everything is a little too easy.

Warm and fuzzy documentary.

A soulful cinematic tone poem.

In a movie that avoids examining Mr. Walker’s personal history, there are hints of a man struggling with chronic depression and problems with alcohol, but they are only hints. No major personal relationships are mentioned or even alluded to. The music speaks for itself.

A Jim Carrey movie all the way: a good one, I might add. With his manic glare, ferociously eager smile, hyperkinetic body language and talent for instant self-transformation, Mr. Carrey has rarely been more charismatic on the screen.

Under Bob Radler's direction, the sequences involving tae-kwan-do, a lethal ballet-styled hybrid of kick boxing, judo and karate, carry very little visceral charge until the last 15 minutes, after which the movie expires in a saccharine slush of blood, sweat and tears.

Despite the humanity and courage exhibited by the members of Exit, the film is inescapably grim.

It is essentially a personal reminiscence of daily life that captures with an astonishing precision exactly what it felt to be a 12-year- old boy growing up in a particular time and place.

Softening that apocalyptic undercurrent is a counter-strain of quiet nobility.

A small gem of bleak, neorealist portraiture.

Despite its deficiencies, Naz & Maalik feels authentic, and Mr. Johnson and Mr. Cook bring their characters completely alive.

Uplifting it may be, but to swallow it whole is to believe in happily ever after.

The movie might as well have been called "An Immersion in Tibetan Buddhism." With minimal explanation, it puts you right in the center.

Like "My Architect," Nathaniel Kahn's film about his father, Louis I. Kahn, this documentary is a son's attempt to forge a posthumous bond with an elusive parent.

Although Maxed Out would like to be this year’s "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," it doesn’t measure up. "Enron" was a stronger film because its focus was specific, the personalities under its microscope were outsize, and its story had a beginning, middle and end. Maxed Out, which has no narrator, gathers facts, opinions and impressions and tosses them into a blender. And its story is still unfinished.

Because The Matador sustains a tone of screwball insouciance and keeps its trump card hidden up its sleeve, it must be counted as a well-made comic thriller. That doesn't mean it has any depth, credibility or artistic value beyond its capacity to divert.

You are left with an overall impression of a movie so full of life that it is almost bursting at the seams.

An uproariously dizzy satire...Hedaya has created the year's funniest film caricature.

Pola X has enough fireworks to keep you in your seat. When it's over, you'll know you've had an experience.

For the most part, Paul Laverty's screenplay and the strong, naturalistic performances lend it a specificity that sets it apart.

Mr. Phillips’s self-deprecating humor is amusing but not funny enough to give him the edge he needs to rise up and conquer.

When it deepens its intellectual focus, Hockney begins to lose coherence, with rushed sequences that cover his stage designs, his landscapes and his experiments with photography.

Like its would-be lovers, Wild Grass chases itself in circles as it scrambles genres, examining seeing, thinking, remembering and imagining with a zany awareness. In Georges's words: "After the cinema nothing surprises you. Everything is possible."

What's really so appealing about the characters is their resemblance to everyday children. They're wildly energetic, competitive and (sometimes dangerously) impulsive. But they also learn from their mistakes, and their instincts are good. More power to them.

Everything that happens in the last half-hour betrays the canny, hardheaded perspective of what came before.

In a year overcrowded with wonderful performances by lead actors, Mr. Murphy's immensely appealing turn ranks among the strongest.

This is the exceedingly rare film that understands how lonely, insecure preadolescent children can become so consumed by their feelings that they lose sight of ordinary boundaries and unconsciously act out their parents' darkest fantasies of passion and revenge.

Overly schematic, not always believable in its crude sexual mechanics and ultimately unsensual. But it lays out the laws of erotic attraction with a brutal directness that is downright scary.

Because it unfolds like a garish hybrid of Simon Birch and What Dreams May Come, with some horror-movie touches thrown in to keep us from nodding off, "The Sixth Sense" appears to have been concocted at exactly the moment Hollywood was betting on supernatural schmaltz.

Find Me Guilty, Mr. Lumet's first feature film in seven years, catches him near the top of his game.

For all its untidiness, Washington Heights teems with life, and its star, Mr. Perez, has charisma to burn. The movie vividly depicts the interdependence and solidarity of people in working-class urban neighborhoods where residents really need one another.

The movie is loaded with heart and the feel for local color and period detail that can only come out of a personal reminiscence.

Not since "Y Tu Mamá También" has a movie so palpably captured the down-to-earth, flesh-and-blood reality of high-spirited people living their lives without self-consciousness.

This warm, robust movie ultimately transcends the formulas with which it flirts to become a far more subtle and honest result than a machine-tooled tear-jerker like “The Theory of Everything.” When the film doesn’t try to build up the usual suspense found in movies about competition, you sigh with relief.

Mr. Thorpe’s explorations of a painful subject are an exercise in healing. His discovery of how many gay men share his anxiety and discomfort leads him to greater self-acceptance.

Begins semirealistically, then veers off course, hurtling into the wild blue yonder of myth and allegory. On the way to a climactic shootout that begins on the set of a Hollywood western and ends on a foggy hillside, it makes several screeching, hairpin turns.

If it all adds up to too much for one film to encompass with ease, Monsieur N, is certainly richer than most of what you'll find on the History Channel.

As crude as many of these works are, they exert an eerie cumulative power.

[An] incisive, queasy-making documentary.

The access to Fassbinder that the relationship provided was a boon to the film, but a disadvantage as well because the close-up view results in a patchy portrait rather than a coherent biography.

The movie, written and directed by Vidi Bilu and Dalia Hager, is really a study of people coping with excruciating boredom and the absurd aspects of military life.

The film is well organized and visually snazzy and keeps enough distance from its subject that you don't feel swamped in a tide of hysterical fandom.

Seems refreshing, even mildly subversive.

Too fixated on 1939 for its own good. Its passionate immersion in a past that only dimly resonates with younger audiences may be a badge of its integrity, but that immersion trumps its vision of the future and leaves us in a land of nostalgia.

A textbook example of seat-of-the-pants guerrilla filmmaking.

The movie’s extreme compression is its biggest failing. The business end is so minimally sketched, you are left wanting to know a lot more.

The film ominously conveys a world of too much information but too little communication, where people have become slaves to glowing hand-held devices that were designed to make life easier but have made it busier and more complicated.

Like most movies that examine specific ailments, this gawky, occasionally touching film has the feel of a dramatized case history whose purpose is to educate as much as it is to tell a story.

Paxton's Dad may be the most terrifying father to appear in a horror film since Jack Nicholson went crazily homicidal in "The Shining."

Dramatically Joe the King feels unglued, as if crucial sequences had been left on the cutting-room floor.

A profound and provocative exploration of cultural inheritance, communications technology and the roots and morality of terrorism, the Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan nimbly wades into an ideological minefield without detonating an explosion.

In celebrating the solidarity of high school girls who refuse to live and die according to the Beverly Hills ideal, the movie raises a hoarse cheer for candor and spunky self-determination.

Clockwatchers gets many of the details of office life eerily right: the arrogant, smarmy male executives who affect a patronizing jocularity with secretaries whose names they can never remember; the iron-fisted boss who huffs windily about everyone in the company being a "family"; the petty tyrant who doles out pencils as though they were gold bullion.

Nastily amusing

As inspiring as it is, Doing Time, Doing Vipassana is too sweet for its own good; it plays like a spiritual infomercial.

Behind the film's brass knuckles are tender fingers. Why else would Goon use music from Puccini's "Turandot" to underscore critical dramatic moments?

The movie, like its subject, refuses to stir up unnecessary melodrama. There are many small conflicts and psychological undercurrents, but the closest thing to a narrative theme is the effect Andrée has on the Renoir household.

Gigantic has the informal tone and structure of an illustrated scrapbook with excerpts from concert and television performances interwoven with lighthearted testimonials by friends, supporters, collaborators and admirers and augmented by witty animated segments.

An indelible and ultimately moving vision of humanity buffeted by the elements and by international political tides.

The chemistry between the two is as old as Abbott and Costello. Harold is the sensible worried one, and Kumar zany and reckless. The movie's funniest moments, set at Princeton University, caricature and then demolish the image of Asian-Americans as nerdy, sexless bookworms incapable of fun.

For all its bleakness, the movie, filmed in nearly a dozen states and in half a dozen countries, is not without a certain beauty. There is comfort to be found in blandness and homogeneity.

You really can't hang a drama on a mathematical theory and expect it to serve as a shortcut for storytelling.

In Mr. Hawke’s extraordinary performance, this glamorous enigma becomes a credible, if pathetic character who lives for only two things: to play the trumpet and to shoot heroin.

An incisive but static and occasionally confusing character study of Lucy Fowler, a disheveled, hard-drinking single woman who has a day job as a contractor and a dissolute night life.

In this sendup of Treasure Island, there are no compelling heroes or villains, and the suspense is minimal. Most of the fun lies in watching the Muppets defuse the swashbuckling tale of its scariness by superimposing their own precociously verbal identities onto their characters.

The movie filmed with nonactors, doesn't try to counteract stereotypes of the Roma people as shiftless, thieving hustlers. But it goes a long way toward explaining the antisocial behavior.

A lean and mean horror comedy classic.

Although it leaves you with a knot in your stomach, its power is undercut by its own head-banging obviousness.

This warm-blooded paean to globalization is just enough in touch with reality to keep your eyes from rolling. For Chinese Puzzle genuinely likes people. It overlooks the faults and misbehavior of its eccentric characters to express a lighthearted optimism that doesn’t feel forced or manipulative. It is in love with life.

At its most provocative, the movie explores the masculine mystique and the myth of the black stud.

Partly because Miss Sloane is more a character study than a coherent political drama, it fumbles the issue it purports to address, and it eventually runs aground in a preposterous ending.

Deeply whimsical beneath its poker face, The Princess and the Warrior has the structure of an elaborate mind-teasing puzzle.

The movie comes alive only when the camera lingers over the actual paintings and allows their power to speak for itself.

Although it is not a comedy, Lion’s Den is suffused with sense of life lived in the present. Even the grimmest moments are not exploited to instill fear and loathing.

If Conan O'Brien Can't Stop is consistently watchable, it isn't especially funny, nor does it give any deeper insight into its star than you might get from seeing his late-night shows.

Where to Invade Next is a sprawling, didactic polemic wittily disguised as a European travelogue.

Best approached as an admiring portrait of a likable, creative powerhouse at midcareer. No disapproving voices interrupt the stream of praise for his politics and his art. Mr. Kushner’s place in the history of American theater and in American culture, in general, is left unexamined. These are subjects well worth exploring in another, deeper film.

It is an appealing, gently comedic prologue to a love story.

Fast, light, frequently funny comedy.

At times The Hedgehog suggests a Gallic "Harold and Maude," with an intellectual gloss as it celebrates the life force passed from an older generation to a younger. But its concept of vitality isn't the popular cliché of kicking up your heels, breathing deeply and gorging on ice cream. It is an aesthete's ideal of pursuing moments of ecstatic perfection in art and companionship.

In Changing Times, Mr. Téchiné, the great French director, is near the peak of his form. Weaving a half dozen subplots, he creates a set of variations on the theme of divided sensibilities tugging one another into states of perpetual unrest and possible happiness.

A fairly tough-minded film until the end, when several commentators who have been critical suddenly turn misty-eyed and suggest that underneath it all, Holmes was really a sweetie.

The Hangover Part III, directed by Todd Phillips from a screenplay he wrote with Craig Mazin, is a dull, lazy walkthrough that along with "The Big Wedding" has a claim to be the year's worst star-driven movie.

The performances of Ms. Lewis and Mr. Weston crackle with authenticity. Like a good punk-rock song, this bracingly honest, tough-minded vignette stays true to itself.

The movie strains to drum up mystery as to the sources of Mr. Crimmins’s rage. When it finally spills the beans, you feel unnecessarily manipulated.

Insurrection is breezily paced, and Michael Piller's screenplay has enough good-natured humor to keep things from bogging down into sentimental pomposity.

A subtle, humorous, illuminating study of politics, power and social mobility.

If the movie has loads of nerve, its ambitious fusion of cartoons and live-action comedy is only fitfully amusing.

Its scrupulous, even-toned gentleness makes " The Butterfly suitable for children, while its clear-eyed intelligence and refusal to condescend should make it appealing to adults.

A movie that knows much better than to try to make sense. It is essentially a strung-together series of gags, most of them thought up by Lloyd, an inveterate practical joker.

This coldly compelling film doesn't try to explain Michael's behavior or analyze his disease. As if doing penance for Michael's sins, it eventually metes out unequivocal punishment, but it is small consolation.

Both in its parts and in the sum of them Tokyo! is playfully and sometimes disorientingly apocalyptic.

Its rich, wide-angle view of Italian politics and society stays with you. The details may vary from nation to nation in the industrialized West, but the big picture is pretty much the same everywhere.

Bluntly, poignantly believable.

Songcatcher is a sweet, lyrical ode to rural America in the early 1900's.

Ms. Lane has the role of her career in Connie, and her indelible (and ultimately sympathetic) performance is both archetypal and minutely detailed.

Scary enough to make the faint of heart decide never to venture into the woods or to lie on the grass again without protective covering.

Mr. Hawke’s anguished performance gives Good Kill a hot emotional center.

Silly, heavy-handed film.

If Nobody Else but You is smart and entertaining, it is a little too clever for its own good.

In this stratum of Middle American society during wartime and hardship, the movie suggests, life is tough and challenging. You admire these characters for their considerable resilience while understanding that even the best-intentioned people can break under the stress.

If The Imperialists Are Still Alive! doesn't go much of anywhere despite its peripatetic characters, that stasis seems intentional.

A smart, sardonic satire.

A wholesome self-help fable about the unlocking of shame and its magical transformation into pleasure and personal liberation.

Leaves a sour aftertaste since it's obvious that the filmmaker's intrusion on these unhappy people, fictional or not, only further worsens their discomfort and their difficulty communicating.

The insensitivity of the news media and law enforcement is an implicit acknowledgment of the gap between men and women on the issue; in the film's view men just don't get it. And the submerged rage that wells up in Nira and Lily is boiling hot. The film is less successful in depicting their personal lives.

A film divided against itself. The more the cat-and-mouse game between prisoner and reporter points it in the direction of "The Silence of the Lambs," the closer it inches toward the sort of exploitation it condemns; for me, that's too close for Crónicas to be taken without a big grain of salt.

The absence of an emotional catharsis in the film, efficiently directed by Mick Jackson (“The Bodyguard,” “Temple Grandin”) from a screenplay by the British playwright David Hare, leaves a frustrating emptiness at its center.

So much care has been taken to build a mood of hushed suspense that the rushed, tragic conclusion, in which too little is shown and too little explained, leaves you deeply unsatisfied.

As gamely as the movie tries to make sense of its title character, there remains a huge gap between the film's creepy, clean-cut Dahmer (Jeremy Renner) and fiendish acts that no amount of earnest textbook psychologizing can bridge.

Mistress abounds with sharp comic performances that never stray into caricature or sentimentality.

"Miramax porn." The term refers to manipulative tearjerkers like Dear Frankie whose sensitive performances, along with a light dusting of grit, allow them to be marketed as art films. This one is clever enough to fool a lot of people.

At the end, Bear Cub does have a brush with sentimentality. But by then, its integrity and low-key truthfulness has been certified in a dozen different ways.

An indelible, gripping documentary portrait.

Observed through emotional gauze, its four likable women are symbolic cheerleaders for personal loyalty and wholesome living.

In its quiet, literate way, the film is almost as subversive as its central character.

The glue holding the film together is Adam Newport-Berra's elegant hand-held cinematography, which captures changing shades of winter and the frightened faces in natural light with an astonishing intensity.

Its upbeat tone, perky visual rhythm and sleek graphics capture the "swinging '60s" aesthetic epitomized by Mr. Sassoon's major invention: the geometric "five-point" haircut.

Reel Paradise is a deliberately untidy, open-ended, thoroughly absorbing chronicle that lets the lives of its characters spill across the screen without editorializing.

The Hunter never declares who is good or bad or right or wrong. And the implications of Martin's decision when the moment of truth finally arrives are left for the viewer to unravel.

Ms. O’Kane’s brusque performance portrays Christina as a woman who acts on her principles and has little time for making nice. She is a compelling embodiment of the adage “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

As informative and packed with cultural lore as it is, The Komediant is dramatically diffuse.

Yes, it's all terribly hokey. But once you accept the premise as a conceit that allows the director, Jean-Jacques Annaud, to offer an intimate, utopian vision of the animal kingdom, Two Brothers succeeds as an inspirational pastorale and passionate moral brief for animal rights and preservation.

Surprisingly Rocky Balboa, is no embarrassment. Like its forerunners it goes the distance almost in spite of itself. It's all heart and no credibility except as a raw-boned fable.

The screenplay is vague not only about politics but also about the history of Jimmy’s unconsummated relationship with his former sweetheart, Oonagh (Simone Kirby), now married, whose wide Susan Sarandon eyes express a wistful sadness.

A larger problem is the film's attempt to piece together a hard-boiled crime drama with a soft-boiled soap opera, ultimately giving precedence to the suds and adding a sickly lemon scent.

Although The Grace Lee Project is ostensibly about a name, it's really about cultural assimilation and a stereotype of virtue and subservience that has deep roots on both sides of the Pacific. As oppressive as her name may be, Ms. Lee also knows full well that there are worse fates than being a 16-year-old Harvard freshman.

King of California may look and feel realistic, but it is really a Don Quixote-like fable about nonconformity and pursuing your impossible dream to the very end.

Enough films about human trafficking have been made in recent years that the outlines of Eden should be painfully familiar. But that familiarity doesn’t cushion this movie’s excruciating vision.

It is all either blood-chilling or hilarious. For those who celebrate Burroughs as one of the darkest and greatest of all comic artists, he is an extreme social satirist of Swiftian stature, whose quasi-pornographic images offer a stark, ghastly/funny photonegative image of the American body politic.

How light is this movie? So buoyant that even an air raid warning, signaling that this whole world is about to crumble under the blitz, can’t dampen its giddy spirits.

As with the 70's films of Terrence Malick, one of Undertow's producers, the more intoxicated it becomes with rural desolation and fecundity, the more deeply in touch it puts you with its characters' souls.

If this version of The Jungle Book makes for a fable that is thinner than it might have been, the film is splendidly picturesque and moves along briskly.

A finely acted expressionistic critique of the suburban baby culture and its joys, fears and fetishes.

An agreeable show business satire with a warm heart.

Although neither Ms. Berry nor Mr. Del Toro can be faulted in their scenery-chewing moments, these star turns make you uncomfortably aware that they are Oscar-conscious auditions for the Big Prize. Their naked ambition subtly contaminates a movie that, despite its fine acting, has the emotional impact of a general anesthetic.

City of Men has a more humane, you might say bleeding-heart, perspective on this anarchic culture than “City of God.”

The downbeat story unfolds in quick, incisive slashes in which the combination of minimal dialogue and gorgeous black-and-white photography lends the movie a chilly documentary realism.

The film offers a concise history of hijras, who used to officiate at births, weddings and other religious rituals.

To realize that you may have the world while still feeling as if you have nothing is to experience a closer encounter with the void than most of us are likely to have.

As thorough an examination of the sport as you could hope to squeeze into 90 taut, well-organized minutes.

Sleeping Dogs Lie doesn't pretend to be more than it is: a blunt, provocative comedy sketch whose visual look is almost as bare as that of an episode of the underappreciated Home Box Office series "Lucky Louie." The acting, especially by Ms. Hamilton, is better than serviceable.

Visually Megamind is immaculately sleek and gracefully enhanced by 3-D. The score by Hans Zimmer and Lorne Balfe is refreshingly subtle for an action comedy.

This much sweetness and light in a movie is all very well. But there's a reason that recipes for cake and cookies call for a pinch of salt. In Miss Potter, there is only a grain or two -- not enough to dilute the sugary overload. The film is the cinematic equivalent of a delicate English tea cake whose substance is buried under too many layers of icing.

Its most intriguing moments evoke the way that memory plays tricks and our visions of the past are actually scrambled composites of impressions and feelings.

Captures the vulnerability and aimlessness of its unfortunate characters with a heart-in-your-throat rawness that recalls some of the more poignant moments of Italian neo-realist cinema.

Ms. MacLaine and Mr. Plummer make an especially compatible match, because his understated portrayal of a despairing misanthrope reins in her scenery-chewing exhibitionism.

For its first two-thirds, the film, written and directed by Thomas Cailley, seems to be groundbreaking. Then it slides into comforting familiarity.

Loses some its bearings once it turns into a caper movie. The movie hardly bothers to explain the mechanics of the jailbreak or of the robberies themselves, which take place in a flurry of disguises and stickups that has a Keystone Kops flavor.

Mr. Burns shuffles this dense material with the dexterity of a card shark. The pace, although swift, is never rushed. The writing and acting give you vivid enough tastes of the characters - there are seven children, two parents, and assorted spouses, lovers and friends - so that each registers as a singular flavor.

So soft-hearted it wouldn't hurt a fly.

A piercingly poignant then-and-now portrait of five friends.

Dreams Rewired is mostly content to entertain. Its explanations of how new inventions work are simplified to the point of superficiality.

This pulpy, sex-drenched wartime epic seems frivolous, quaint and foolishly prurient.

The film's distance from factual reality oddly enhances its bleak underlying vision. It portrays a demoralized American work force fearfully going through the motions of life while waiting without much hope for things to get better.

Beneath the Harvest Sky reaches a dramatic climax that is so rushed and confusing, you are left scratching your head. But for all its missteps, the film feels authentic. Through thick and thin, it stubbornly maintains a thorny integrity.

And as you watch her (Moreau) sink into this semiautobiographical role (she was herself a touring performer in the 1980's), the character emerges as a deep, multilayered woman: kind, gentle and happily partaking of life's simple pleasures much of the time, but when necessary, as tough as her stage character through whom she relishes expressing her residual anger at life's hardships and disappointments.

In the knockabout world of animated movies, Piglet's Big Movie is an oasis of gentleness and wit.

The movie feels like a grown-up version of little boys making whooshing noises and staging collisions while playing with toys on a living room floor. It belongs to the same star-and-his-pals-cutting-up genre as the lesser comedies by Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack.

Not half as exotic or as compelling as Mr. Aïnouz’s 2002 film, “Madame Satã,” which examined the fantastic life of a transvestite prostitute and underground entertainer in 1930s and ’40s Rio de Janeiro. But it shares the earlier film’s deep sympathy with sexual free spirits in a rigid macho society.

Jesus Camp doesn't pretend to be a comprehensive survey of the charismatic-evangelical phenomenon. It offers no history or sociology and only scattered statistics about its growth. It analyzes the political agenda only glancingly, centering on abortion but not on homosexuality or other items.

The film's energy begins to flag after less than an hour, and as its pulse slackens it turns into a quirky allegory, punctuated with brilliant visionary flashes that partially redeem a philosophic ham-handedness.

Mr. Sarsgaard gives the riskiest screen performance of his career. Save perhaps for Sean Penn's outbursts in "Dead Man Walking" and "Mystic River," no actor in a recent American film has delivered as explosive a depiction of a man emotionally blasted apart.

For a film devoted to celebrating intimacy and the breaking down of emotional barriers, Pop and Me is oddly withholding of information about the travelers.

In painting an unabashedly romantic picture of a nation whose songs spring directly from the lives of the people, the movie exalts the Marxian dream of honest working folk, with little to show for their labor, living harmoniously, joined in song.

A small, finely wrought drama.

Newlyweeds, for all its freshness, never really lands. It remains suspended in a haze of secondhand smoke.

The story loses credibility as it goes along, as the body count escalates, and Robinson’s solutions to life-and-death crises grow increasingly far-fetched.

If the central performances in Careful approached the earnest intensity of some of its early-1930's inspirations, the movie would probably be twice as funny.

Rambling, occasionally very funny reflection on the meaning of family in contemporary Japan.

Like a giant balloon painted with Day-Glo colors, however, the whole gaudy mess wouldn't inflate without the force of Mr. Myers's comic genius. It's his baby, baby. And after three editions, it's still flying high.

A movie so profoundly in touch with its own feelings that it transcends its formulaic tics.

If Mr. Hurt gives a meticulously detailed performance, he is still so innately refined that Brett never quite registers as an authentic blue-collar type, either vocally or in his body language. Ultimately, men like Brett are just not in Mr. Hurt’s DNA, and you are left with the impression of observing a silk purse artfully (but only partially) disguised as a sow’s ear.

Why Mr. Foxx, who was so impressive in "Any Given Sunday," chose to make a movie so boring and idiotic that it barely meets minimal standards of lowest- common-denominator entertainment.

Archetypes and symbols solemnly parade through Seraphim Falls, a handsome, old-fashioned western of few words and heavy meanings that unfolds with the sanctimonious grandeur of a biblical allegory.

A good-natured screwball road film.

Two Lives is an absorbing, well-acted, moderately suspenseful mystery, although its time line of events is fuzzy to the point of impenetrability.

The movie, which begins with Mr. Sarkozy's election-night victory in May 2007, only intermittently rises above the tone of an arch, sniping drawing-room comedy peopled with mild caricatures.

For all its subtext about identity and London's social fabric, Dreams of a Life leaves too many blanks and is ultimately more frustrating than rewarding.

About as scary as a ride on a minor roller coaster, it unrolls its amplified butcher-block shock effects within the first five minutes.

Off the Black is so much Mr. Nolte’s movie that it couldn’t exist without him. His character is the latest in a long line of Hemingway-esque ruins, marinated in beer and testosterone, who have become Mr. Nolte’s specialty.

The screenplay by Mike Rich is so far-fetched and riddled with holes that Mr. Van Sant's urban realist touches only underscore the falseness of what's on the screen.

A languorously muted, occasionally magnificent film.

An unpretentious, well-acted ensemble piece that doesn't aspire to be a portentous generational time capsule like "The Big Chill," "American Graffiti" or "Diner." But it has enough markers - a grown-up, married white rapper who break dances; a karaoke bar - to suggest an approximate date.

Delivers its Holocaust-related story with the clunking force of a blunt instrument slammed into the skull.

Once again, the lesson that more is not necessarily better, something rarely learned by blockbuster sequels, is forgotten.

A juicy neo-noir like Bad Turn Worse doesn’t have to make total sense to grab you.

Time slows to a near-standstill as the film peers into humanity’s troubled soul, glimpsed through the individual faces, which sometimes appear to be studying us as intently as we are studying them.

A kind of apocalyptic 21st-century "Ordinary People," Beautiful Boy, directed by Shawn Ku from a screenplay he wrote with Michael Armbruster, is so high-mindedly determined to avoid sensationalism that it sidesteps critical dramatic content and sabotages its own ambitions.

The semi-improvised performances, which seem so natural that it is tempting to confuse the actors with their characters, bring Baghead into the realm of group therapy observed through one-way glass.

If this handsome, faithful, intelligent screen adaptation of the novel doesn't leave you devastated, its ominous sense of a rarefied moral and aesthetic world bending before the accelerating streetcar of history will leave you with a mournful sense of loss.

It is best appreciated as an immersion in a three-dimensional toyland outfitted with enough whimsical gadgetry to fill a thousand playrooms.

Goodbye to All That is very evenhanded in assessing its characters’ flaws, and it never sentimentalizes.

This zippy Disney adventure-comedy, crammed with special effects, asks that age-old rhetorical question, "Is there life after high school?," and answers it with a cheerful "Not really."

This well-acted film captures a generational and occupational sliver of New York life that rings true.

Xenia has been called a farce. But it is much more than that. Both the story and the performances are packed with raw emotion.

It is content to be a chilly, disquieting study of a society in a state of denial until the truth is bared.

The movie is as blunt as its title. It portrays such behavior as "evil" without offering any deep insights or revelations, beyond handing out the plot equivalent of a lollipop at the end of the movie as compensation for the vicarious anguish.

The real message: Life's ultimate pleasure lies in extreme fighting - to the death.

Most of it has to do with the ways younger Indian-Americans keep their culture alive in the United States and the ways they don't.

Although the film, with its home movies and family reminiscences, portrays him as a heroic crusader for justice, it is by no means a hagiography of a man who earned widespread contempt late in his career for defending pariahs.

If it isn't easy being any of the troubled people wandering through the film, Loggerheads makes it easy not only to believe in them, but to care about them as well.

Rolling Family is not a movie of ideas but an emotional and tactile experience of economy-class travel. In surveying a large swath of the Argentine landscape, it could be a companion piece to "The Motorcycle Diaries."

For all the potentially dangerous subjects it glosses, above all the tangled legacies of the Holocaust and the Algerian war, The Names of Love dances away from any uncomfortable provocation. Even when sticking out its tongue, it is finally just an airy comedy riding on one cheeky, incandescent performance.

If the new film doesn't exude quite as much fairy-tale magic as the original, it is still a thoroughly entertaining family romp.

This visually stylish work, with its vintage glamour photos, film and television clips, and snippets from a 1951 B-movie, "Racket Girls," is more of a scrapbook than a coherent history of the sport during its rough-and-tumble infancy.

At heart a Frank Capra-style social fable for the '90s.

What saves Train of Life from sinking into sudsy Holocaust kitsch is its sustained comic buoyancy.

Ultimately, A Silent Love transcends its problem-play situation to ponder how the best laid plans for an arranged marriage are no match against the vicissitudes of passion in a romantically besotted culture.

Until its final moments this almost great movie feels as if it's racing against itself in a neck-and-neck battle between its troubled heart and its egg-shaped head. The heart wins by a nose.

The cosmic and the microscopic are casually — and delicately — juxtaposed in All the Light in the Sky, an evocative, slightly melancholic movie.

Despite the movie's considerable visual splendor, the pacing of Warriors of the Rainbow is clumsy, its battle scenes chaotic and its computer effects (especially of a fire that ravages the Seediq hunting forest) cheesy.

After the painstaking buildup, the revelations are disappointingly predictable.

This leisurely paced two-hour movie is a reasonably tasty banquet for the same Anglophiles who embrace "Downton Abbey."

The movie, adapted from a novel by Carl Sagan, presents one long chain of teasingly open-ended questions about reason versus faith and technology versus religion, and ends up tentatively embracing mysticism over rationality.

Touched With Fire is an actor’s field day, and both Mr. Kirby and Ms. Holmes boldly meet the challenge of playing bright, high-strung artists struggling with depression.

Where most movies portraying sociopathic behavior make some attempt at psychological explanation, Butterfly Kiss offers no background to Eunice's craziness. As she throws herself furiously through a bleak highway landscape of anonymous gas stations and convenience stores, she appears to be a self-created avenging demon radiating a powerful but loopy charisma.

Their eloquent monologues, interspersed with vicious verbal skirmishes, are artfully constructed, occasionally poetic expressions of pain, delivered in well-formed sentences that suggest the movie might have originated as a two-person stage drama.

Doesn't aspire to be more than a broad, sloppy, old-fashioned sitcom with a sexy gimmick. But it is quite funny.

This gentle comedy, the first feature directed by Rob Meyer, is an eye opener for anyone who takes the everyday natural world for granted. It is also a quiet brief for the cultivation of intellectual curiosity and scientific exploration at an age when hormones rule so much behavior.

In its stunted theatrical version, the second half is a sketchy digest of events that leaves you feeling cheated.

This proudly old-fashioned movie will pull any trick in the book to hold your attention. And it needs those tricks: Damien Chazelle’s screenplay is sloppy, ludicrous and ultimately devoid of suspense.

Stuck, while not strictly a horror film, is steeped in gore and carries a seam of mocking gallows humor as relentless as that of "Sweeney Todd."

The biggest weakness in Nina's Tragedies, is the character of Nadav. His shadowy presence leaves the movie without a solid center around which to spin its tales.

An emotionally and politically loaded allegory.

Mr. Macy, a master at playing sticks of human dynamite in mild-mannered camouflage, gives the nerviest screen performance of his career.

The uninitiated viewer can admire it simply for the majesty of its visual poetry.

A movie of extremes, and that goes for its aesthetics. As gory as the scenes of torture and self-mutilation may be, they are pitted against shimmering cinematography that lends the setting the ethereal beauty of an Asian landscape painting.

Blessed by Fire, a bitter remembrance of the Falklands War in 1982, captures battlefield chaos and confusion with a visceral force you won't forget.

The worst flaw of Willard is a clunky tone-deaf screenplay based on Gilbert Ralston's original and updated by the director. Barely a line flies by that doesn't land with a wooden thud.

During this meticulously written and exquisitely acted film, you come to sense the bonds and the wounds binding three generations of Monopolis, who definitely love one another, but with reservations.

The Yes Men Are Revolting, their third film, has a personal poignancy that is missing in the forerunners, “The Yes Men” (2003) and “The Yes Men Fix the World” (2009).

The best way to enjoy The Kings of Summer is to view it as a likable comic fantasy dreamed up by filmmakers (Chris Galletta wrote the screenplay) who are close enough to adolescence to infuse their ramshackle story with a youthful, carefree whimsy.

While enticing you to hate the gang and take delight in everything bad that happens to its members, the film also gives you the vicarious thrill of being one of the gang.

Admirably high-minded and visually gorgeous but fatally anesthetized by its own grandiosity.

Endearing, very funny and utterly unpretentious.

The accumulation of sharp candid flashes adds up to a disturbing vision of Los Angeles as a teeming jungle of dysfunction.

Trucker sometimes feels like a performance in search of a movie.

The screenplay ultimately bears out Alceste’s observations about treachery, selfishness and deceit, but with such charm and zest that their sting tickles more than it hurts.

Agreeable but flagrantly unoriginal.

Stirringly romantic...a gripping period thriller that clicks along without resorting to hyped-up shock effects or gimmicky suspense.

Sustains a lovely balance between enchantment and playfulness.

Visual knockout of a film.

Sparked by the actors' powerful performances, Arnold's moral absolutism and Furtwängler's lofty aestheticism make for a dramatically compelling clash.

The film's spareness and lack of words seem affected and ultimately unrealistic. At such moments, its refusal to put things into words and its crushing sense of gloom turn self-defeating.

Amazingly, Cesc Gay's delicate but unblinking film Nico and Dani succeeds in capturing and sustaining the fragile emotional climate of curiosity, fear, innocence and prurience that surrounds adolescent sexual experimentation.

A deeply silly movie, but it is sumptuous to look at, and it never stands still. Its creators, Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, have given the story a lilting rhythm and glittering surface of the most extravagant jewel-encrusted fairy tale.

Grimly austere barely begins to describe the atmosphere of dread that seeps through Fear X like a toxic mist.

The cinematic equivalent of a visit from a cherished but increasingly dithery maiden aunt.

Like it or not, Paradise: Faith sticks in your head. The fierce, indelible performance of Ms. Hofstätter, a regular in Mr. Seidl’s films, may make you cringe with revulsion, but it is utterly riveting.

Sustains a mood of aimless adolescent angst, and its vision of the road is uncompromisingly bleak.

Reconfirms the filmmaker's talent as an acutely observant chronicler of upscale bohemian subcultures.