Stephen Holden

Virginia is a wildly unpredictable piece of work. Playing the kind of role that is often associated with Laura Dern, Ms. Connelly gives a brave, full-tilt performance that is true to the character but can't hold the movie together.

Silly, featherweight comedy.

The shriller its didacticism, the more unhinged it becomes. But even at its most ludicrous - when it is shouting into your ear - its sheer audacity grabs your attention.

Post-Soviet Russia in Andrei Zvyagintsev's somber, gripping film Elena is a moral vacuum where money rules, the haves are contemptuous of the have-nots, and class resentment simmers. The movie, which shuttles between the center of Moscow and its outskirts, is grim enough to suggest that even if you were rich, you wouldn't want to live there.

At heart, this jolly, galumphing crowd-pleaser, which won the audience award at last year's Toronto International Film Festival, is a raucous sitcom about scrappy little boys whose canny mamas conspire to keep them out of trouble.

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

The film skillfully interweaves several strands to tell a true story with a happy ending.

Mr. Goldthwait's screenplay is essentially a comedy act fleshed out with a story he doesn't try to make convincing.

The dialogue in the film, directed by Anne Renton from a screenplay by Claire V. Riley and Paula Goldberg, has the loud, mechanical clicketyclack of a 40-year-old episode of "All in the Family."

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

Whatever it intends, Jesus Henry Christ is not especially funny. There are witticisms galore in both the thematically recurrent imagery and the dialogue, but very few qualify as jokes, and any laughter is hard to come by. Willfully zany would be a more apt description.

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.

Quietly powerful but dispiriting documentary, which compares the world's oldest profession as practiced from place to place.

In case you have forgotten, all women are prostitutes, and all men are johns.

Heartbreaking stories of families who have lost loved ones alternate with the voices of experts from academia, law enforcement and politics who give their views on the causes of the crisis.

Marley is a detailed, finely edited character study whose theme - Marley's bid to reconcile his divided racial legacy - defined his music and his life.

As more characters, including the couple's three children - enter the picture, Late Bloomers loses its narrative thread and becomes so choppy that you have the sense that it was butchered during the editing process. What remains is the skeleton of a story that leads to an abrupt, icky-cute ending.

Here, to its detriment, never builds its ideas into a cohesive vision. The screenplay by Mr. King and Dani Valent too often wanders off into poetic vagueness. But visually, Here, filmed by Lol Crowley, is still a stunner. Flawed as it is, I admire it immensely.

Like no other film about middle school life that I can recall Monsieur Lazhar conveys the intensity and the fragility of these classroom bonds and the mutual trust they require.

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.

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.

This smart, cool-headed film, which has a "Rashomon"-like vision of the case, presents a disturbing picture of courtroom justice and how different people come to opposite conclusions, based on the same testimony.

Long before it ends Dark Tide capsizes and sinks with a sickening glug.

Too lazy and too scared to say anything pertinent about love, society and the human condition, Four Lovers is content to be a pleasant, mildly titillating divertissement with no meaning at all.

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

Nobody in this sweet-natured, low-testosterone trifle is out for blood. Mr. Hall gives an agreeable portrayal of a man-child not unlike David Fisher, his character on "Six Feet Under."

Brake is a full-scale paranoid nightmare with back-to-back double-whammy endings.

In its unassuming way, this tiny, low-budget film is a universal reflection on issues of personal identity and choice for which there are no easy answers.

Aside from Ms. Harris's performance, the main reason to recommend Natural Selection - very conditionally - is that its creator clearly has talent. He simply lacked the resources to make the movie he envisioned.

Performing Shakespeare can save children's lives. That is the persuasive argument of Alex Rotaru's documentary Shakespeare High, an inspiring, if too short and overcrowded, examination of the competition among high schools at the 90th annual Drama Teachers Association of Southern California Shakespeare Festival.

Unlike those in the book, who speak through e-mails, diaries, letters and interviews, the characters here leave the impression of giving harmless nibbles instead of flesh wounds. Defanged and pushed into the background, the satire vanishes, and you are left with an agreeable romantic comedy.

Heist feels rushed. Many of its points could use elaboration. Its final section is a to-do list delivered in the tone of a high school civics teacher.

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."

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.

There is much more to be explored than this noble documentary, made on a tiny budget, has the resources to examine.

Who knows if anything remotely resembling the culture of Hipsters really existed? It's a musical, after all. In any case this movie, which won the 2009 Nika (the Russian Oscar) for best picture, is an endearing curiosity that, at 125 minutes, is as badly in need of a trim as the hair of its comically coiffed dandies.

Half of the time, the movie - based on a novel by Ivica Dikic, who collaborated with Mr. Tanovic on the screenplay - has the tone and pace of a farce. The other half, it plays like an unconvincing melodrama. The film assumes knowledge about the history and politics of the former Yugoslavia and the wars involved in its breakup that most Americans don't possess.

Part character study, part crime thriller, Bullhead is the impressive but deeply flawed first feature written and directed by Michael R. Roskam.

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.

Looks and feels like a fever dream about an alternate universe. Suffused with a sense of wonder, it hovers, dancing inside its own ethereal bubble.

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.

This wisp of a movie doesn't pretend to be more than a series of disconnected vignettes in a moody story that sometimes seems invented on the spot. The boy, for all his eccentricities, is a healing spirit who, without realizing it, gives Rose the fortitude to face her problems and resume her old life, for better or for worse.

The love story doesn't quite work. Mr. McGregor and Ms. Green make an attractive couple. But the movie's notion of two self-centered people ill suited to each other, shedding their defenses and clinging together, feels forced and sentimental.

A preternatural self-confidence and buoyancy infuse every syllable out of Ms. Channing's mouth in this entertaining film.

Rarely has a film exhibited a bigger disconnect between urban realism and utter ludicrousness.

For all its quirks and tangents, Declaration of War feels entirely alive. This story of two people who transform fear into action is inspiring.

A movie that reserves its final sickening wallop for a grueling half-hour that leaves you as emotionally battered as the soldiers are forced to return to hell for one last senseless round.

To say that this live-action comic book lives up to Mr. Lucas's description is not a wholehearted endorsement. Are teenage boys as naïve today as they were 60 or more years ago? And much of the dialogue is groaningly clunky. But so it was back then.

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

A conventional, rather shallow up-by-your-bootstraps drama, but with a difference.

A lower echelon of musical comedy hell (or heaven, if you love the hoariest musical comedy clichés).

The film has the loose narrative structure of a quasi-poetic personal journal that is more a series of reflections than a cohesive story.

Because Kurt Markus's Super 8 camera is the cinematic equivalent of a single microphone, the film's look matches the scratchy quality of its ancient (by rock 'n' roll standards) sound. The crudeness brings out the elemental quality of music that digs deeply into the soil of working-class American life in songs that express the defiance, despair and nobility of people who refuse to go down without a fight.

The clammy chill that pervades The Hunter, the fourth feature film by the Iranian director Rafi Pitts, seeps under your skin as you wait for its grim, taciturn protagonist to detonate.

Although the movie captures the solidarity and the beauty and peril of a rustic mountain town whose residents are necessarily interdependent, its individual subplots don't connect. Despite several solid performances, the characters are too hazily sketched and too loosely linked to form a meaningful chain.

At its heart is an incandescent performance by Ms. Oduye, who captures the jagged mood swings of late adolescence with a wonderfully spontaneous fluency.

Paints an alluring picture of a pan-European cosmopolitan culture whose characters hopscotch from one country to another with hardly a second thought in a lighthearted floating party.

A depressing two-hour infomercial pitching Times Square as the only place in the universe you want to be when the ball drops at midnight on Dec. 31. (Believe me, it's not.)

Rachid Bouchareb's tidy little two-character film, London River, demonstrates how great acting can infuse a banal, politically correct drama with dollops of emotional truth.

When a sheriff's deputy (Carla Gugino) visits the house, I Melt With You turns into a ludicrous, cheap horror thriller that sheds any claims to integrity. By the end, you feel nothing, not even contempt.

The film's most upsetting scenes are its interviews with residents whose livelihood has been decimated and whose health has been compromised.

Throughout the film there is an abundance of sumptuously photographed flesh on view. But House of Pleasures is not an erotic stimulant so much as a slow-moving, increasingly tragic and claustrophobic operatic pageant set almost entirely in the brothel.

The prisoner rather eloquently portrays himself as a victim of human rights abuse.

Romantics Anonymous might vaporize if the director and the actors didn't have such easy command over the tone of this singularly Gallic fairy tale. If you added a dozen songs and brought it to the stage it would be completely at home.

The rainbow connection is a smooth, unbroken arch.

Like its recent forerunners, "Rachel Getting Married" and "Margot at the Wedding," Another Happy Day is both anguished and histrionic and in its strongest moments very, very good. But it is also overpopulated, strident and constitutionally unable to step back and scrutinize itself.

About halfway through, the wheeling and dealing becomes so elaborate and the villains so numerous that the only way to enjoy the movie is to let its preposterous story wash over as you sit back and take in the scenery.

Cultivation and fine manners are nowhere to be found in the foul urban cesspool of William Monahan's London Boulevard. This palpitating mess of a movie certainly doesn't lack for pungent atmosphere.

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.

The carnage, although explicit and frequent, is not grotesquely overdone. But except for Mr. Moura's Nascimento, the movie doesn't have the same richness of characters. Psychologically he is the whole show; the rest are stereotypes.

This is not to say that Charlotte Rampling: The Look is a complete washout. A tease is more like it, an examination of the surface. Ms. Rampling is presented as an endlessly watchable mystery, an aloof but affable sphinx. But we knew that already.

The Son of No One self-destructs in a ludicrous, ineptly directed anticlimactic rooftop showdown in which bodies pile up, and nothing makes a shred of sense.

It feels mostly authentic until a contrived ending that leaves a saccharine taste.

A moldy, post-cold-war spy thriller.

What does it add up to? Nothing much. A tense, paranoid nightmare with a chilly metaphysical overview has been trampled into a blustering, bad cartoon.

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.

The campy new screen adaptation of The Three Musketeers has all the reality and visceral excitement of a $75 million literary theme park dotted with fancy villages heavily patrolled by security.

As the movie glides along, it may not elicit explosive laughter, but it plants a steady smile on your face and doesn't leave you feeling molested. If that's another way of saying Johnny English Reborn is old-fashioned, so be it.

Rona Munro's screenplay for Oranges and Sunshine is unnecessarily flighty. As the story ricochets between Britain and Australia, the film often loses track of time and becomes fragmented as it struggles to integrate too many subplots. What holds it together is Ms. Watson's calm, sturdy performance.

So why? Why would stars of the magnitude of Mr. Cage and Ms. Kidman sign on to a project whose screenplay is so inept that the movie, even if profitable, will stand as a career-impeding setback? Can't they read?

The screenplay, by Mr. Cooper and Jonathan D. Krane, is so sketchy that it feels like a hastily executed first draft.

An underdog drama with clanging metal-on-metal action, Real Steel feels scientifically programmed to claw at your heart while its battling robots, which have a semblance of human personality, drum up your adrenaline. That said, I'm not sure that the movie itself has more than a semblance of a heart.

If nothing else the ramshackle, scatterbrained rom-com What's Your Number? confirms the arrival, heralded by "Bridesmaids," of a new subgenre, the smutty chick flick, into the Hollywood mainstream.

Ms. Bonham Carter's hearty performance makes Mrs. Potter almost lovable. You may laugh at her garishness, but you applaud her pluck and stamina.

A sloppy, exploitative act of star worship created (if that's the right word for cynical hackwork) around Mr. Lautner, the pouty 19-year-old heartthrob of the "Twilight" franchise.

Sets out to puncture the clichéd image of Scandinavians as rosy-cheeked choristers bonded in communal togetherness. But its subversive intentions are ultimately undercut by its lack of nerve, along with a lurking sentimentality.

In this quintessentially Germanic film, Berlin - where they live, work, and create and voraciously consume culture - is as much a character as any person. The collective sensibility on display is determinedly forward looking; you might even say avant-garde.

If Kate's hyperkinetic cheer and shrill self-absorption are Carrie trademarks, 13 years after "Sex and the City" first appeared on television, their appeal has all but evaporated. I Don't Know How She Does It seems stuck in the past.

Its serious intentions notwithstanding, Beware the Gonzo is essentially a comedy with a mean streak; its portrait of the big man on campus is truly venomous.

Throughout We Were Here there is not a hint of mawkishness, self-pity or self-congratulation. The humility, wisdom and cumulative sorrow expressed lend the film a glow of spirituality and infuse it with grace.

A stultifying hybrid of athletic instruction film and Christian sermon.

I'm Glad My Mother Is Alive is anything but the clichéd fantasy of a blissful mother-child reunion. Although there are hints of joy once they reconnect, the wounds are too deep, and the characters too complex.

It's all very sweet and lightly comedic. After it's over, you half expect a statement to appear on the screen promising, "No humans were traumatized during the making of this film."

The strongest tales embrace a strain of barnyard humor that is matched by the robust performances of actors who convey an earthy jocularity. The movie doesn't shy away from comparing these hardy, weather-beaten rustics to their livestock.

A story that should have been a taut poker-faced French farce that pushed its premise to the brink of absurdity stalls, unsure of its balance between comedy and drama. The movie's one reliable constant is Ms. Huppert. You can't take your eyes off her, even when she is misused and misdirected.

The only reason I can think of to watch Vivi Friedman's flat, satirical farce The Family Tree - and it's not a good enough reason - is the opportunity to play a game of spot the semi-star.

By discarding most of the theological debate, the movie is no longer a passion play but a gritty and despairing noir. That's good enough for me.

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.

The movie is a continuous barrage of explosions, sneak attacks, chases, life-and-death face-offs, and amazing rescues that are as far-fetched as they are exhilarating. The cheap thrills are compounded by Mikko Alanne and David Battle's screenplay, a wallow in old-time Hollywood boilerplate, some of which you can't believe is being recycled yet again.

For all the hardship they endure, this intimate dual portrait, directed by Lynn True and Nelson Walker, with Tsering Perlo, suggests that their lives are neither more nor less fulfilled than those of any highly stressed upper-middle-class Americans.

There is a paradox at the heart of the film. It strains to celebrate diversity and individualism, while its processed music exemplifies strict corporate teamwork.

As a personality profile, Senna is sketchy at best. Born into a well-to-do family in São Paulo, Brazil, Senna pursued the sport from a young age with a maniacal zeal. He comes across as a fatalistic daredevil and as a man of the people, his wealthy background aside.

For all its high-mindedness, The Whistleblower has a choppy, fumbling screenplay (by Ms. Kondracki and Eilis Kirwan) that lurches between shrill editorializing and vagueness while sorting through more characters than it can comfortably handle or even readily identify.

The body-swapping premise, which is stale to begin with, isn't explored with any depth, unless you find meaningful Freudian subtext in the movie's relentless anal fixation. But the premise at least sets up a farce that surpasses "The Hangover" in gleeful crudeness and profanity.

Magic Trip is the cinematic equivalent of a yellowed scrapbook whose pictures are accompanied by sketchy captions created after the fact.

The Mouth of the Wolf will haunt you.

It would be comforting to imagine that The Optimists, Goran Paskaljevic's viciously funny gloss of Voltaire's "Candide," was a site-specific satire of this Serbian director's homeland in the post-Milosevic era.

I can't recall another thriller that has maintained this kind of velocity without going kablooey and losing its train of thought.

True Adolescents, like most indie movies related to the mumblecore school, is a delicate piece of machinery. Its truth lies in the tiniest details: the pauses, the stricken looks, the false bravado, the pathetically redundant slang (so many "dudes").

The movie is truly a tree-hugger's delight (I confess to being one such hugger) that makes the most of its metaphors without straining toward supernatural schmaltz.

Ms. Barkin is almost unrecognizable as this bedraggled bundle of rage and disappointment. Exploding from deep within, her devastating performance hijacks the film.

It is a rich, beautifully organized and illustrated modern history of Eastern European Jewry examined through the life and work of the author, born Sholem Rabinovich in Pereyaslav (near Kiev) in 1859.

The Ledge, it should be noted, is not dumb. What undoes it is its mechanical structure: a stale dramatic formula of the sort taught in elementary playwriting classes.

Compelling, finely balanced immigration drama.

Compellingly acted from top to bottom. As the raw passions of its hard-bitten characters seep into you, the songs hammer them even more deeply into your consciousness. The film's only flaw - a big one - is its brevity.

Like Warwick himself, the movie begins to run amok after a taut and tantalizing first act. Not even Mr. Hyde Pierce's best efforts can make sense of a character who by the end of the film seems to be a completely different person with the same name.

A rom-com fairy tale so tepid and well behaved that watching it feels like being stuck in traffic as giddy joy-riders in the opposite lane break the speed limit. You have little choice but to cool your heels and pretend that the parched crabgrass in the median is a field of flowers.

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 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.

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

Starting as a coldly realistic thriller, this film eventually loses its bearings as the director Miguel Ángel Vivas succumbs to a fit of nihilism, transforming Kidnapped into gruesome tit-for-tat torture porn.

Isn't as hellish as the situation behind bars is portrayed in American movies, some of which are so gory they qualify as prison porn. But it is awful enough.

If Mr. Hellman's movie only partly fulfills its promise as a gripping neo-noir mystery, his stylistic hallmarks lend it a singularly haunting atmosphere.

Best enjoyed as a lavish period travelogue whose story is dwarfed by its panoramic overview.

An affable throwback to those guilt-free days when hippie drug dealers radiated the glamorous aura of avant-garde heroes risking prison to spread the doctrine of liberation through cannabis.

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.

Your religion or lack of one doesn't matter. At some point while watching the film, you may feel that music IS God, or if not, a close approximation of divinity.

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.

Adam Reid's smart, poignant trilogy of interwoven vignettes, manages the considerable feat of creating six fully human characters who are quirky enough to transcend the stereotypes found in a typical indie film.

You see, this character, who is given no back story, is Life with a capital L. He is the Forneys' guardian angel who rouses them out of their funk. Given the movie's U-turn into allegory, maybe he's supposed to be a punk Jesus. Not even Mr. Gordon-Levitt's unremittingly savage performance can begin to salvage such hokum.

With its red lighting and Hades-like smoke and fog, the lurid look of The Big Bang suggests a tacky disco inferno. I have a mental picture of the film's creators, stoned out of their minds on who knows what, cackling crazily as they outline a movie that would have more appropriately been titled "The Big Goof."

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.

Daydream Nation hopscotches forward and backward and in and out of the surreal; its abrupt tangents are announced by chapter headings. In the most complicated sequence the film tracks three characters simultaneously. The cinematography is darkly lush in an ominous "Twin Peaks" mode.

Beyond the lugubrious pageantry, there is no sign of emotional or spiritual life in the film, only windy posturing.

You might reasonably assume that any movie starring Mr. Rourke and Mr. Murray would have to have something to recommend it. But aside from a haunting musical interlude, in which Mr. Rourke, with pathetic ineptitude, mimes playing a trumpet, Passion Play is barely palatable.

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.

Mr. Harris's depiction of a saintly, soft-spoken, bow-tie-wearing middle-school teacher lends the movie a moral weight it probably couldn't have summoned had another actor played the role.

These characters may serve an obscure metaphorical agenda, but they make no psychological sense. And as the movie contemplates the rewards and perils of giving and receiving, it winds itself into stomach-turning knots.

If Lebanon, Pa. is a tidy little indie with steady acting, it is too politically self-aware to transcend its well-mannered sense of fairness. But the performances by Ms. Kitson and Ms. Hurt give it spritzes of energy.

Beautiful Darling, James Rasin's touching documentary biography of Candy Darling, the transsexual Andy Warhol "superstar," is a sad, lyrical reflection on the foolish worship of movie stars.

Short-circuits the novel's quirky charms and period atmosphere by its squeamish attitude toward gritty circus life and smothers the drama under James Newton Howard's insufferable wall-to-wall musical soup.

Even more amusing than "Super Size Me," the documentary that put Mr. Spurlock on the moviemaking map in 2004.

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

The best movie of its kind since the French director Guillaume Canet's hit from 2006, "Tell No One."

For all its melodrama To Die Like a Man is a not a tearjerker. Its gaze into the void is as unblinking as that of the H.I.V.-positive 60-year-old hustler in Jacques Nolot's even more hard-headed film, "Before I Forget."

In its mixture of the quirky and the downbeat, Ceremony aspires to be a hybrid of Noah Baumbach's "Margot at the Wedding" and Wes Anderson's "Rushmore" but falls far short.

Super rides on the carefully bent performances of its stars.

An incoherent hybrid of buddy movie, "Girls Gone Wild" episode and James Bond spoof that employs cheap cinematic tricks like multiple split screens for no apparent purpose.

In small but significant ways, Queen to Play defies expectations. It dangles the possibility of an affair between Hélène and Kröger in games that the film likens to courtship rituals in a classic screwball comedy.

Because Mr. Thurston and Mr. Wigdor lack the hard shells necessary to make their characters credible, White Irish Drinkers feels synthetic. Mr. Lang and the older cast members fare better, but they can't save a movie that runs on clichés.

My Perestroika gives you a privileged sense of learning the history of a place not from a book but from the people who lived it. Watching it is a little like attending a party in an unfamiliar city and discovering the place's secrets from the guests.

In many ways Cracks is lurid and rickety. But its gripping ensemble performances lend it an emotional intensity that outweighs its shortcomings.

Winter in Wartime turns into a moderately gripping thriller with predictable plot twists and reversals.

The film's passionate insistence on remembrance lends it a moral as well as a metaphysical weight. Mr. Guzmán's belief in eternal memory is an astounding leap of faith.

Elektra Luxx has some scattered witty notions, but it is not funny.

Mr. Mendelsohn's ability to evoke a child's-eye view of a suburban environment is the most seductive element in a movie whose primary attraction is an atmosphere so heady that you can almost taste it.

The Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami's delicious brain tickler, Certified Copy, is an endless hall of mirrors whose reflections multiply as its story of a middle-aged couple driving through Tuscany carries them into a metaphysical labyrinth.

What keeps the movie, directed by Michael Dowse, on a more or less even keel is its steady pacing and emotional kinship to John Hughes comedies like "Sixteen Candles" and "The Breakfast Club."

It is no wonder that the insufferable romantic comedy Happythankyoumoreplease, set in New York, looks and sounds like a flop pilot for a television sitcom.

This intriguing, sometimes frustrating, in some ways amateurish movie is a work of vaulting artistic ambition.

Monologues delivered by assorted unidentified losers in love who relate their unhappy stories to an unseen listener lend Heartbeats the semblance of a structure. But beyond that, the movie is a gush of gorgeous images and music.

Putty Hill doesn't strive for overt social commentary. It drops you into a world that the director, who grew up in the area, knows firsthand: a suburban fringe of stasis, downward mobility and lowered expectations.

Splendidly panoramic. The scenes of Columbus's arrival and of his imperialist and religious sloganeering, and of the carnage he wreaks, have a grandeur and a force reminiscent of Terrence Malick films. The segments about the chaotic water riots have a documentary immediacy.

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.

There is some fun to be found in this goofy riff on Shakespeare.

I felt tentative stirrings of admiration for an indie movie that so aggressively flouts the hard-shelled conventions of romantic comedy. But more often than not, I felt suffocated by the gaseous sentimentality and lightheadedness of a story that drops in subplots that it can't begin to develop.

The enjoyable, lightweight Troubadours is a musical scrapbook that throws together a bit of this and a bit of that.

Above all How I Ended This Summer is a merciless contemplation of the fragile human psyche under siege.

Dull, pretentiously verbose movie.

Family dynamics examined through the prism of art: The Woodmans, C. Scott Willis's compelling documentary study of an artistic clan whose comfortable life was shattered by the suicide of its youngest member, asks profound questions to which there really are no answers.

One of the most sophisticated dog movies ever created.

Comic mishap, whose satire already feels out of date.

Above all, it loves its characters and the actors who play them. A fearless, talented filmmaking auteur working on a limited budget, Mr. Lipsky insists on doing it his way and letting the chips fall where they may. More power to him.

Very well written and acted, Every Day feels like a glorified television drama softened with comic and surreal trimmings.

The story told by Mr. Bowser's film is complicated and tragic.

If Hadewijch is Mr. Dumont's most overtly religious film, it is not pro-faith in any specific way, although the director clearly respects the religious impulse.

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.

Faster, a turgid, ultraviolent parable of revenge and forgiveness, is as muscle-bound as its monosyllabic antihero.

Make of it what you will: like its subject, Saint Misbehavin' is an unabashed love letter to the world that defies the cynicism of our age.

For all the cinematic crimes against him, there has been no book-to-screen translation of his work quite as atrocious as Hemingway's Garden of Eden.

The movie is realistic enough to make all corporate climbers, but especially men over 50, quake in their boots. If you are what you do, what are you if you're no longer doing it?

Like Mr. Soldini's last film, "Days and Clouds," a calm, very sad examination of the effects of a husband's sudden job loss on an affluent couple's relationship and social life, Come Undone is solidly grounded in mundane reality. If the movie tells an old story, its unvarnished realism lends it poignancy and depth.

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.

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

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.

Disco and Atomic War describes propaganda battles between the Soviet Union and the West, with Estonian Communist officials charged to gain the upper hand, but they were helpless amid the onslaught.

Filmed in Rwanda, Shake Hands With the Devil is certainly panoramic. But the best that can be said of the film is that it is an honorable dud.

As powerful and well made as it is, Outside the Law is too schematic and single-minded to lodge itself in your mind as a fully realized cinematic epic. Its few female characters are sketchy at best. It is all politics, all the time.

Ms. Weber (Mr. Farr's wife) anchors the movie with a gritty, honest performance that has the same to-the-bone quality as Melissa Leo's in "Frozen River." There's not a false note or inflection.

"We are not pickers of garbage; we are pickers of recyclable materials," Tião, an impoverished Brazilian catadore, or trash picker, declares to a talk-show host in Lucy Walker's inspiring documentary Waste Land.

What does it all mean? Less than meets the eye. Amer is a voluptuous wallow in recycled psychosexual kitsch.

Vision offers a hard-headed view of 12th-century religiosity in which church politics and money conflict with the characters' asceticism. It portrays Hildegard as a passionate humanitarian and a lover of nature.

Inhale is a creepy medical thriller in the tradition of "Coma" that amps up the tension and suspense by slicing up time.

For all its seriousness, Kalamity lacks a steady narrative drive; its speeches are too long, and its themes become repetitive.

The harder the movie tries to shock, the shriller it rings.

It leaves you feeling queasy.

As the relentlessly morose movie shows, a corporate hero is not the same thing as a humanitarian; in many ways, he's the antithesis.

The movie is essentially pro-Ecstasy. No matter how much the D.J.'s may claim that their electronic sounds produce the euphoria of a good rave, the movie clearly implies that Ecstasy is the key that unlocks it all.

Strains to be the ne plus ultra of arch, hyper-sophisticated fun, but the laughs are few.

Every truly awful movie epic has a point of no return, a moment when the accumulated bad lines and bogus sentimentality become so cloying that the best defense against a mounting queasiness is an awed amusement. The Postman, offers a new opportunity for levity every few minutes after its first hour.

Ms. Rozema has made a film whose satiric bite is sharper than that of the usual high-toned romantic costume drama.

As it rubs our noses in our own fascination with vanity and the silliest values in life, it's charming enough to make us like it.

Probably serves some useful purpose, despite its ham-fisted preachiness and mediocre acting.

The unabashedly sentimental film is a juicy morsel for the great British actress Dame Joan Plowright, who endows Mrs. Palfrey with stoic charm and decency.

The movie is a giddy triple somersault of a film that makes no sense whatsoever, although in its best moments it is as much fun to watch as a death-defying circus act.

The screenplay never begins to finds a workable balance between wit and adventure. And the performances in several smaller roles are so mechanical that they lend Kill Me Later the tone of a vanity production.

Establishes its mood of playful erotic suspense in the first 10 minutes and sustains its cat-and-mouse game between therapist and patient through variations that are by turns amusing, titillating and mildly scary.

Life at the top has rarely looked or sounded more fabulously elegant.

As Mr. Van Damme fumbles through his part, you are likely to find yourself staring at the big lump on the right side of his forehead and wondering how it got there.

Silly, heavy-handed film.

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.

Its belly laughs leave you feeling liberated and not guilty; I repeat, not guilty.

An empty, farcical blood bath that's virtually shock-free except for one preposterous plot twist.

May seem frustratingly elusive at times, but it's a rewarding film that's beautiful to look at.

Compared to Gray Matters, even a Nora Ephron bonbon has the weight of urban neo-realism.

If the movie is terrific on ambience and street language (the women call one another Dude), much of its melodramatic story involving a rape and payback feels forced.

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.

What "Tales From the Crypt" does best is sustain a look and tone that bring a comic-book's broad strokes into the realm of a live-action movie without seeming too mannered or arty. The film's gooey monsters with their electric green eyes and ferocious voracity are among the more convincing zombie demons to be found in a recent horror film.

One of the movie's dark running jokes is that everyone seems to speak a different language and has trouble communicating. The continual struggle of people to make themselves understood becomes a metaphor for the war itself.

Little more than a loose- jointed succession of goofy "Saturday Night Live"-style sketches and sight gags inspired by an actual event that is nearly half a century behind us.

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

Galiana's quietly monumental performance is one for the ages.

With its freewheeling mixture of gore, surrealism and Freud, it will do almost anything to grab attention. If the movie's metaphors are as obvious and as portentous as the heavy metal music that punctuates the action, Shocker at least has the feel of a movie that was fun to make.

Most disappointingly, the music is tepid, mediocre pop pastiche.

This eerie and indelible documentary about suicide juxtaposes transcendent beauty with personal tragedy.

It all has a ghostly feel, like eerie murmurs during a séance: the static of history heard on a short-wave radio.

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.

The movie is so sloppily written and directed that its bits of bluster never cohere.

Despite its shortcomings, this smart, caustic movie is easily the most incisive and realistic comedy of manners to emerge from Hollywood in quite a while, and that's saying a lot.

A grim, disquieting mood piece.

What balances the movie is Mr. Caine's exceptional portrayal of old age as the accumulation of a lifetime's experience. In his performance the child, the youthful rogue and the forgetful codger all live at once.

It is painful to watch an actor as skillful as Mr. Dorff reduced to delivering flat repetitive dialogue that would make any actor look foolish.

The movie aspires toward a solemnity that Dana Stevens's prosaic psychobabbling screenplay cannot support. The movie is so busy being seriously romantic that it forgets the poetry, the whimsy, the airy mystery, the dreamy what-if of angelic contemplation.

After Life becomes a quiet, extraordinarily moving and sometimes funny meditation on the meaning and value of life. It intimates that whatever happiness we may find in life comes from within and is self-created.

Like all of Mr. von Trier's films, The Boss of It All is a cold, misanthropic work that places no faith in institutions and in humanity itself. But it's also very funny.

This aggressively whimsical fairy tale about a pair of grown-up orphans who rob from the rich to give to the poor (themselves!) and end up living happily ever after darts forward so quickly that several major plot turns are dispensed with in 10 or 15 seconds of babble.

This strident exposé may gladden the hearts of some anti-’60s conservatives, but it is a shapeless mess steeped in prurience. Its grain of truthfulness, however, is just enough to leave you unsettled in the pit of your stomach.

If National Treasure mattered at all, you might call it a national disgrace, but this piece of flotsam is so inconsequential that it amounts to little more than a piece of Hollywood accounting.

This unwieldy amalgam of science fiction and horror, directed by Paul Anderson, douses almost every scene with glitzy special effects in a futile attempt to cover up a paucity of thought.

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.

The film reminds us again and again that Monk was as important a jazz composer as he was a pianist.

Squandered in foolish horseplay and on a story that zigzags so far out of control that it feels as if the screenwriter, Steve Adams, pasted together a bunch of zany notions in a frantic search for confusion.

A conventional underdog sports movie that should have been much more gripping.

The son's search is one of three strands of a story that the movie weaves into a meticulously structured portrait of a complicated man who remains elusive even after key elements of the puzzle have been pieced together.

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

The obvious forerunner of My Wife Maurice, is "La Cage aux Folles," a movie that is several cuts above this frantically overwrought imitator.

A stirring, idealistic documentary that examines the grass-roots cooperative movement in financially devastated Argentina, raises basic questions about economics, government and human nature.

But most of the movie's notes are appallingly right.

Visual knockout of a film.

When put into the mouths of American actors with no feel for Wilde's high-toned repartee, they simply hang in the air and die.

Mr. Levy's cold, streamlined direction gives the movie the feel of a mechanical contraption manipulated by remote control with a nervous finger on the fast-forward button. Many of the jokes barely have time to register before we're on to the next stunt.

The film may be a mess - narratively muddled and crammed with many more vampires, shape-shifters and sorcerers than one movie can handle, but it bursts with a sick, carnivorous glee in its own fiendish games.

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

Feels like a desperate attempt to stretch a flimsy half-hour made-for-cable concept into a feature film.

Wants to be both a realistic family drama and a mythical odyssey but lacks the substance to be much more than a vignette.

Although the film is well acted from top to bottom, its dramatic spark plug is Mr. Doyle's terrifying portrayal of Father Stafford.

With an intensity that few movies have mustered, The Business of Strangers makes you feel the acute loneliness of it all.

Kisses may strike you as either ingeniously magical or insufferably cute, depending on your taste. But more than the story, which circles back on itself, the natural performances of its young stars, Shane Curry and especially Kelly O'Neill, nonprofessional actors, lend the movie a core of integrity.

The movie is powerfully acted. Mr. Lo Verso's passionate, fiery-eyed Giovanni is an incandescent star turn by an actor with world class charisma.

The movie... hasn't the foggiest notion whether it's a soap opera or a horror film, and wanders around in a generic fog.

Watching this handsomely filmed, deftly edited but rather dry movie, you keep imagining the juice that a director like Pedro Almodovar could have squeezed out of the same story.

What Dreams May Come, based on a novel by Richard Matheson and directed by Vincent Ward, the New Zealand filmmaker noted for his skill at creating lavish cinematic dreamscapes, represents the uncomfortable collision of two ideas about filmmaking, one commercial, the other eccentrically, ambitiously dreamy.