Ty Burr

In Darkness is a disaster movie, and the disaster is the Holocaust. In the space between the two halves of that sentence, you have what works about the film and what's a little creepy.

A scuzzy little cross between a crime movie and a horror freak-out that gets under your skin and stays there, even if you can't understand half of what the characters are saying.

The movie is cruelly frank about the ways damage cascades down to the powerless, but while it's not for the fainthearted (or for animal lovers), rewards are there.

A likable but cliched star-crossed romance set along the post-WWII Havana-New York jazz axis, the Spanish-made film features terrific music, passable artwork, and characters who stubbornly refuse to become more than sketches.

Coriolanus leaves an acrid, unfinished taste. Fiennes, making his directorial debut, gets into the meat of the thing, and he takes advantage of the bluntness of the text; even Shakespeare newcomers will be able to follow along.

At the technical level, The Secret World of Arrietty isn't as ambitious as the studio's finest work, and the animation is stronger on texture than detail.

Something to see and little to remember, an acrid character study undone by narrative implausibilities and its own lack of purpose.

Chronicle will never be mistaken for an artistic breakthrough, but it has a solid gimmick and pieces of it are brilliant.

It's quite watchable date-night cheese - the kind of movie you can simultaneously snort at and enjoy.

W.E., her second effort after 2008's "Filth and Wisdom,'' tries awfully hard. In the end it tries our patience.

His abiding interest is in the ways that human beings work together, his famous fly-on-the-wall shooting style revealing the constant struggle to connect and create. Wiseman's are the movies to show to the aliens when they arrive.

Her chattiness here is unexpected and disarming, and if the film's overindulgent, it puts you in a forgiving mood. How often do we get to hear a lioness speak?

As the title character in Albert Nobbs, Glenn Close skulks through Edwardian-era Dublin like a eunuch on a stealth mission.

What it is is watchable, a thoroughly professional piece of Great Man hackwork that lacks the invention and spirit of its obvious model, "Shakespeare in Love.''

Where Pina excels - where it resembles no previous dance film - is in the staging of several of Bausch's signature works for Wenders's cameras.

Silent Souls is a road movie, a guy movie, a treatise on burial customs in northern Russia. Mostly it's a sigh at the way entire cultures can slip away in the flow of time. It's lovely and slow and melancholic and short - 75 minutes, yet you feel you've been gone for an epoch or two.

The film's an even four-hander, with awful behavior spread evenly among the characters and spellbinding performances by the quartet of co-leads.

Hot gospel singing and earnest family squabbles are all that distinguish Joyful Noise.

Like Jolie's public persona, Blood and Honey is both strong and headstrong, equally invested in grit and glamour with a hazy understanding of the line separating the two.

As documentaries go, it's an able introduction that doesn't make its subject nearly as relevant to our current discontents as it could.

Michael Hazanavicius's love letter to classic cinema isn't perfect but it's close enough to make just about anyone who sees it ridiculously happy - and that includes children and grown-ups who have never come across a silent film.

War Horse is the best film of the year. The year, unfortunately, is 1942.

A sweet-natured, terribly unthreatening drama about redemption and renewal, and it may matter more to the man who made it than the audiences who see it.

Quite simply, The Adventures of Tintin is a model of modern movie craftsmanship. It's also, I'm afraid, rather dull.

It's an enjoyably demented meta-finale, the rivals showing what they could do if they ever bothered to actually do it.

In its attention to detail and awareness of betrayals both political and human, "Tinker Tailor'' is a movie for grown-ups.

The filmmaking is cool, watchful, and ultimately too distanced. Outrage isn't outrageous enough, and it hurts.

The Sitter pushes the envelope with such sloppy gusto that you have to give in occasionally, and its comic timing finds its rhythm about every fifth joke.

If anything, Burke & Hare is a slaphappy mess that recalls Landis's earliest work on 1970s midnight movies like "Schlock'' and "The Kentucky Fried Movie.''

Tomboy is as visually beautiful as its 10-year-old heroine is defiantly plain.

The point of "My Week'' appears to be that Colin is the one person in Monroe's life who isn't using her, but if squeezing two books and a movie out of one brief encounter isn't exploitation, I don't know what is.

An exhilarating tale of magic, machines, memories, and dreams, Martin Scorsese pulls off the neatest trick of all. He marshals the marvels of modern movie technology - up to and including the dreaded 3-D - to create a love letter to the earliest of movies and, by extension, to every movie from then to now.

Little kids, of course, will swallow it whole without thinking twice.

I can't think of another movie this year that made me laugh or weep harder for the whole lumpy business of being - the compromises and connections that get us through the day and somehow add up to entire lives.

Watching Melancholia is like being stuck next to a brilliant depressive at a dinner party. The food is exquisite, the conversation scintillating, and the longer you sit there the more trapped you feel in another man's all-encompassing gloom.

What Herzog almost accidentally captures in his viewfinder is profound and unsettling: an entire American underclass where at least some prison time is the norm and where only luck and the grace of God keep a person from either wrong end of the shotgun.

That J. Edgar never ultimately convinces - that at times it's quite entertainingly bad - can be blamed on both an unfocused script and the project's very bigness. Somewhere in this ambitious, meticulously produced epic is a small love story struggling to get out.

The follow-up, Revenge of the Electric Car, arrives today and it's a lesser animal, more hopeful but also more complex and lacking the focused urgency of the original.

Like Crazy gets the evanescence of young passion right - the way it ultimately has to burn off, leaving us standing in an unfamiliar adult world. But it never convinces us of the fire itself.

Because the "Harold & Kumar'' universe seesaws so delicately between the subversively smart and the ineffably stupid, even the lamest jokes get a witty spin - and even the cleverest ideas can turn into groaners.

This doesn't feel like art, it feels like a cop-out, as though Durkin couldn't decide how to end his movie, so he didn't. He's a mature filmmaker - a natural - but he's still thinking in shorts.

The movie has a devilish wit that works for parent and child alike, and it moves like a bobsled. It's funny and fun, and if it's not up to Pixar level, it still represents the best of what the competition has to offer.

Inventive and enjoyable but ultimately shallow.

The Rum Diary has been retroactively Hunter S. Thompson-ized. And not for the better.

Take Shelter plays Curtis's unraveling at daring length. The film will be too slow and dark for some, and it's definitely overlong.

The Mighty Macs sticks so closely to the underdog-sports-movie playbook that it's practically generic.

Co-directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman cut their teeth on 2010's glib social-media mystery "Catfish,'' and since they're clever boys, they make the most of the series' new toy. Otherwise, Paranormal Activity 3 is almost identical to, and just as eerily effective as, the first two films in its alternation of cheesy "boo!'' tactics and genuine scares.

The Women on the 6th Floor is delicate and sensitive and utter bollocks - a bourgeois wet dream made to soothe the souls and stir the loins of powerful men in midlife crisis. But some of us wish we could see this movie told from the maids' point of view.

I could pile on the cooking metaphors until you cried "uncle," but the fact remains that there's a very good movie in here that its makers have failed to bring off.

Blackthorn is less interested in realism than in elegy, and in bringing this American folk hero in line with the Latin American places and people with whom he ended his days. Given a choice between the legend and the facts, Gil and Barros make up a new legend - and then gild it with light.

If anything, The Big Year plays like Ron Howard's "Parenthood'' with birds instead of children.

A bleakly allusive look at frozen lives, Curling is very much a specialty item - a movie that goes nowhere slowly.

It's a lovely dream that, in the end, feels too dreamlike. The director coaxes an intentionally passive performance from his daughter Marie, so that Nannerl's eventual waking to cold patriarchal reality doesn't sting as it might.

The Way is a good, cheap vacation. At times, you wonder if Estevez isn't creating a cracked therapeutic remake of "The Wizard of Oz.'' He's got the nerve and the heart, all right. I'm less sure about the brains.

The filmmaking is shallow but assured, the star charisma thoughtful but undimmed. As for the character, I'd vote for Mike Morris. Actually, I wish I could.

It's fast, it's funny, and it works.

Machine Gun Preacher is crude and ham-handed from its ridiculous title on down, but it still gets to some interesting places.

A torpidly precious love story about death-obsessed adolescents, the film's becalmed and embalmed in its own sensitive self-pity.

Kendrick gives a truly bad performance here - she's a self-conscious actress playing a self-conscious person and getting her signals all mixed up - and it's unclear whether she has been hung out to dry by her director or if it's just that the character makes no sense whatsoever.

The dolphin is, quite simply, remarkable, and the unstated message of resilience and adaptation ripples easily off the screen to the smallest viewers.

Moneyball is a hilarious and provocative change-up, entertaining without feeling the need to swing for the fences.

The end result's a muddle and a good argument for why actors shouldn't direct themselves first time out. Farmiga's a generous and observant performer, but she lacks a shaping hand, not to mention the ruthlessness that's probably a necessity for any director.

A rhapsodic erotic romance that takes place in a cultural prison, and it pulses with a defiance that would be mischievous if it weren't so rip-roaringly angry.

Hardly a consistent piece of work, but even when it falls apart toward the end in a mess of bad acting and amazingly youthful pretentiousness, you may find it hard to look away. Handmade and helpless, it's nevertheless the real deal, an artful blurt of sensitivity and rage.

The film's a potboiler but a gripping one, and it leaves you chewing on both its nuances and implausibilities.

While there are moments of eldritch atmosphere and a few pro forma jolts, nothing here justifies our attention, let alone the film's inexplicable R rating.

At its best, The Sleeping Beauty reclaims fairy tales as a kind of oral folk REM state, chewing over anxieties about adulthood, behavior, sex, and belonging in potent symbolic form.

A cheerfully rambling documentary that's much more thought-provoking than the sum of its parts.

Leclerc and company manage to raise serious points and deliver intelligent laughs at the same time, which is no small feat.

As for the movie itself, it's tolerable.

A miscast, underwritten, drably directed adaptation of a very popular novel, it's the feel-bad film of the summer and an almost perfect example of how not to turn a book into a movie.

It's a working illustration of what differentiates movie stars from TV stars. When we buy a ticket for a George Clooney movie, it's because we want to see George Clooney (or Emma Stone or Tom Hanks or whomever). The real stars of "Glee," on the other hand, are the characters, not the actors.

What the movie doesn't do, oddly, is leave much of an impression after it's over.

To a Western audience, the movie may at times feel pat, cooked up, wishful beyond realistic measure. But we're not the ones who need to see it.

Halfway into this film, I wanted to smack the mopey bohemian couple played by July and Hamish Linklater; by the end, I realized the director was smacking them for me, and hard. In a case of biting the hand that feeds her, July has made possibly the worst date movie ever for trendy modern couples - a work that traps a pair of passive-aggressive hipsters in a drift of their own making.

The movie is more pure, profane enjoyment than a body should have in the dog days of August.

Rise is very consciously a drama about a Simian Spring, and it's close enough in its details to a recent documentary to be thought of as "Project Nim: The Revenge."

The bottom line: Any movie that gives Jonathan Winters work is doing something right.

Another Earth is being sold as an indie sci-fi drama, but that does both the movie and its proper audience a disservice. This muted story of atonement, forgiveness, and parallel universes is more of an extended metaphor - a work of earnest poetry rather than science.

A hell-for-leather action film with a healthy serving of scares. It really is "Aliens" on the open plains, "Independence Day" for the nation's centennial, and what the movie lacks in originality and stick-to-your-ribs Western authenticity, it makes up for in pell-mell multiplex entertainment.

That it works like a charm - that it mostly keeps its manic energy in check, and that it plays to chick-flick formulas without ever groveling - is due almost entirely to the leads.

The movie struggles to find its shape throughout. Jacobs favors observational moments rather than linear narrative, and that's fine, but you still sense he's drifting toward a point that never quite coheres.

It's a guaranteed good time at the movies.

An engrossing and enraging drama of one chimpanzee and his life's journey across a landscape of human folly.

A fitting, expertly made final chapter, freighted with hard-won emotions, shot through with a sense of farewell, and fully aware of the epic stakes involved.

Writer-director Djo Tunda Wa Munga deplores the corruption, gunplay, and oversexed misogyny plaguing his country - and he's going to show you as much of it as possible before the end credits roll.

As history it's bunk; as inappropriate historical fiction, it's awfully close to comedy.

I say kill off everybody else and bring back Farrell for the sequel.

What Trollhunter isn't is particularly scary, but in its defense, it's not trying to be.

A fond, uncomplicated love letter to two irrepressible good-time Charlottes.

As eye-opening as this movie is, the real story is outside the Times building, in the browser windows and iPads of me and you and everyone we know.

The movie clips are luscious, as you'd expect, and Cardiff's own "home movies," shot on various movie sets with a 16mm camera, catch the gods during downtime.

The man's mythology precedes him, and it's the movie's failing that we don't understand how or whether he uses that mythology because he knows it's good business.

Too much of the show, though, feels like frenetic movement for its own sake, as though Conan were one of those cartoon characters who runs off a cliff and stays in the air through the ceaseless pumping of his legs.

If the director had brought any toughness of perspective - or at least the self-lacerating humor of 2002's "Igby Goes Down,'' still the reigning champ of screwed-up-Manhattan-prepster films - we might be able to digest George's follies without cringing.

Where Mia and the Migoo triumphs is in the art department alone, with rich brown charcoal outlines, majestic pastel washes that give depth to the landscapes, and riotous colors that are more vivid than the story line.

Submarine has its own specific miseries and darkly funny vibe. It makes quirkiness briefly seem like a good thing again.

What on earth is The Trip, besides hugely enjoyable?

The First Beautiful Thing is the kind of movie - that escapes the sick room to cavort at carnivals and eat cotton candy until the inevitable relapse.

There's a thin line, though, between honoring what came before you and replicating it, and Super 8 occasionally wobbles over that line into predictability.

Think of it as "Glee" without music. Without a net, too.

Perfectly fine summer folderol, epic enough on its own terms if not quite big enough to expand beyond its genre and matter to people who find it difficult to care about characters who spit gobs of flaming phlegm. I realize there are fewer and fewer of us, but we're a hardy band and stubborn.

Hopefully the last, of the fake trailer spinoffs of 2007's "Grindhouse." It makes last year's "Machete" look like "The King's Speech."

A sweet-natured trifle, as flavorful and as thin as a crepe.

If not better, a Part II always has to be bigger. In the case of The Hangover Part II, that means raunchier, nastier, darker. It also means much more predictable, which is ruinous.

To press the point, there is absolutely no need for a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean.

A comparison to Carver's original story - called "Why Don't You Dance?," easily Googleable, and all of 1,600 words long - is instructive.

It's a fearsome and giddily unhinged performance in a movie that isn't entirely sure what to do with it.

A mystery, a melodrama, a prison film, and a love story, Incendies is foremost a scream of rage at a society destroyed by religion and by men.

For all the talk, there's not a lot of chess here, and the game remains stubbornly on the level of metaphor. You don't feel rooked, exactly, but by movie's end you're more than ready for the check.

There's nothing out there remotely like Meek's Cutoff, for which some viewers may be thankful. The ending seems calculated to drive the literal-minded screaming out of the theater and yet it's the only possible way out.

Epic in scope, ambition, and execution, it's a classic swords-and-samurai film with postmodern blood and guts, and it's completely satisfying.

For a holding maneuver, Thor itself turns out to be diverting enough - not close to a sharp-edged romp like "Iron Man" but not the B-movie roadshow some of us were expecting.

The carnage is cartoonishly graphic, but the onlookers watching through binoculars from a nearby sandy bluff are impressed.

That Prom plays as pleasantly and inoffensively as it does is due to the performances, particularly McDonell as the rebellious Jesse.

What appears at first to be a Euro variation on David Lynch's patented mind games, though, ultimately settles for more conventional pleasures. The movie makes sense, more's the pity, although you may need to see it twice to figure out how.

Occasionally too pleased with itself, it's also pleasantly unpredictable, and it has a trio of sweet hambone performances at its center.

There's humor in "Le Quattro Volte," and then a deep, abiding sadness, and beyond that a larger, more graceful comedy that extends to the horizons.

An important film, on an important subject, that has had the life beaten out of it by Robert Redford, a man who should know better.

Well-mounted and expertly played, Winter in Wartime is a class act that lacks only focus and originality to raise it above the ordinary.

What the movie utterly fails to resolve is what François Ozon is up to here and where he's going next.

The most painful movie so far in a year that's already scraping the bottom of the barrel, Your Highness is a tedious, dung-colored misfire that sullies the genre of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and "The Princess Bride."

It rockets along entertainingly enough for most of its running time - only that it's made with a self-importance the story itself doesn't warrant.

As powerful as the movie is, it stays on the outside of a culture looking in.

Smart, sick, and subversive, Super gives you what you want only to make you wonder why you want it.

A drably directed yet terrifically affecting drama about family bonds, classic rock, and the human brain. It's sentimental, yet so honest and eccentric that it rises above schmaltz.

This is a slacker detective story, emphasis on the slack, and if you can downshift into its loping rhythms, it's pretty wonderful.

I'm still not sure what "source code" means here. I suspect the actors, the director, and the screenwriter haven't a clue either. But the thing keeps you watching.

It's a surprisingly joyless mash-up of every bit of fanboy flotsam floating around in its maker's cranium.

All the good intentions in the world can't save White Irish Drinkers from playing like the baldest of retreads.

Monogamy sets up a nifty idea that it doesn't follow through.

Confident enough to simply go with the exotica of average middle-class Americans who are well-intentioned, flawed, and dog-paddling like crazy to keep their heads above water. There's nothing at all unusual about them, and that's unusual.

This may not be the greatest movie version of the novel, but it's possibly the truest.

Like the best spiritual movies, of whatever faith, "Of Gods and Men" moves us toward a union with the infinite, and when we come to the monks' last supper, the moment is staggeringly powerful.

Formulaic enough to suggest that franchise would be B level at best, a TV series at worst. But it's also just good enough to make you want to watch it, anyway.

A laughably inept series of adolescent poses trying to pass itself off as a movie.

The Duke is not only name-checked in passing, but Eckhart (who's excellent) even bears a squinty resemblance by the final scenes.

The film is an astonishing visual experience and at times almost profoundly suspenseful.

You can feel the actors tossing energy, one-liners, and limbs off each other with gusto.

Completely unoriginal, sure, but watchable and even likable.

For a passive-depressive Norwegian crime drama with not a lot in the way of plot, A Somewhat Gentle Man has a charmingly fluky sense of humor.

More drama than tract, it's a low-budget Christian indie that just clears the runway on the sincerity of its performances and inclusiveness of its message.

Gorgeously shot (by Lee Hyung Duk) and well worth seeing for Jeon's deceptively simple performance. Unlike its heroine, though, it gets away without a scratch.

A well-made, reasonably diverting night at the multiplex that will seem overly familiar to everyone except teenage girls.

It has its own bizarre charms and a breezy confidence that renders it the very definition of a simple pleasure.

A smart, well-acted two hours at the art house, full of witty observations and fellow feeling. But, really, it has no business being a movie.

A breezily stylized, very enjoyable trot through the writer's life, theme by theme, era by era.

A muscular Australian B-movie down to the thin characters and boilerplate dialogue.

A fascinating shambles of a documentary - fascinating because its subject is so influential and so deranged, a shambles because its filmmaker can't decide which approach to take and so takes all of them.

A handcrafted jewel of a movie, The Illusionist understands the illusions that sustain us in youth and that we have to let slip in the end. It's the rare work of art that cherishes both the magic and the trick.

The movie's primary pleasure is Hopkins, who manages to take the role of Father Lucas seriously without being serious about it at all.

Why revisit Shoah 25 years after it was first released? Because it matters more a quarter century on, just as it will matter even more in a hundred years, and 200, and - if it and we survive - a thousand.

It's earnest and well-acted and sturdily filmed: We're in good hands and we know it.

The result is, like its characters, a good and decent film in a world that rather heartlessly demands more.

The only reason to see Leaving - and it's not a bad reason at all - is for the sight of Kristin Scott Thomas in a rare happy mood.

It's off-putting, rude, misshapen, and more often than not hysterically funny. The second half, sadly, is an ear-splitting train wreck.

Glib, fast-paced entertainment that barely leaves a mark - which, given the subject, is just plain wrong.

In Summer Wars, it's what's old that's made to seem refreshingly new.

Rabbit Hole is a personal project for Kidman - she produced the film after falling in love with the play - and it seems to have revived the quickness in her. That ice-blue gaze has found its focus again, and it looks deep into the one thing none of us want to face.

It's notable for some astounding urban wildlife footage and for the way it unintentionally reflects the giddy narcissism of the primate known as homo sapiens.

Jarecki's not remotely in Scorsese's league yet, but he knows New York and he has seen the dark soul of man. Maybe next time he won't blink.

Is there a statute of limitations for how many good actors can be wasted in a bad movie?

The movie isn't badly done, just overdone - a cozy art-house crowd-pleaser coasting on the expectations of its genre.

A comparison to Baz Luhrmann is useful: Where Taymor self-consciously aestheticizes pop vulgarity, a movie like "Moulin Rouge!" just dives right in.

Picture Timberlake in the booth recording his lines and you have the best joke in the movie. Everything else is actively painful, a frenetic, unfunny mix of action, romance, dud dialogue, and icky things popping out of the screen.

Unstoppable is edited for maximum impact without showboating. The central situation sustains the drama and the way it's filmed, and when that situation is over, so's the movie. More films should be this enjoyably functional.

What sustains the film is its tone of almost hallucinatory foreboding. White Material isn't about the calm before the storm but the seconds before the deluge.

If product proves especially difficult to swallow, take with a grain of salt and three or more alcoholic drinks, or wait until such time as active ingredients Hathaway and Gyllenhaal have been more effectively utilized elsewhere.

Faster is meat-and-potatoes action with a side of crazy.

Monsters is a genuine curio: a moody, low-budget road-movie romance that takes place against a background of alien invasion.

In inviting us along to peek into the life, filmmakers Kerthy Fix and Gail O'Hara don't give us quite enough about the art.

This is first-degree cultural homicide.

Dunham has been justly praised for her determination in getting Tiny Furniture made, but the movie itself has been overpraised as a result.

The Fighter is this close to a triumph: a movie that steeps us in the grit of its time and place - Lowell, Mass., in the 1990s - and electrifyingly dramatizes Ward's battles with the family that almost loved him to death.

A strange and very beautiful documentary about the gray area between obsession and art.

The movie moves, but it doesn't breathe.

Haggis finally finds the movie's groove late in the game, and the escape sequence itself is hectic, suspenseful, and enjoyably ridiculous.

The scene appalls but doesn't offend; it's a "Worst-Case-Scenario Survival Handbook'' nightmare that resonates on the metaphysical level.

Morning Glory is itself a work of extreme fluff, a lightweight bauble about the morning-show wars that floats on the updrafts of character comedy until it charmingly self-destructs in the final act.

Real satire must be savage, and Four Lions, for all its daring, finally doesn't dare enough.

Fair Game takes one of the more shameful sub-chapters in modern US politics - and turns it into a strident, condescending Hollywood melodrama.

All three actors come at this gloomy, borderline-preposterous tale from different directions; that they meet up at all - and they do - is a tribute to sincerity and craft.

Carlos moves like a greyhound out of the gate, fleet and assured and focused on the business at hand. It's a subtle, ultimately staggering portrayal of a bloody-minded ideologue who convinced only himself.

And again things go bump and eventually yarrrragghhh in the night.

A multi-character melodrama about the supernatural that's affecting both in spite of and because of its flaws.

A frolic that keeps tripping over its own gorgeous feet.

So few Hollywood movies go here that this one's oddly welcome, even in its most turgid moments, of which there are many.

All the pieces are in place for an incisive tale of Brit-pop ego and madness, but filmmaker Stephen Woolley -- a celebrated UK producer ("The Crying Game") making his directing debut -- lets the story get away from him.

Jeff Feuerzeig's film is as good a portrait of the artist as a beloved basket case as you'll see, but it's kept from greatness by the questions it refuses to ask itself.

Wonderful characters, these three, and The Hard Word never figures out what to do with them.

If you look fast, you'll see Waters himself in a cameo (as a flasher; what else?), proof the new film is in touch with its dyed roots.

This is at bottom a pulp thriller that strains -- sometimes pretentiously, at other times with gutter magnificence -- to reach the level of basic human truths.

Ghosts is better-than-average McConaughey swill, but not by much - that's its pleasure and its curse.

O'Horten is a precise, deadpan drama of slapstick existentialism - a Bent Hamer movie, in other words.

What a waste.

Lightweight yet alluring.

Even a fan, however, might prefer the excellent, recently released concert DVD "Pixies: Live at the Paradise in Boston" to this tepid behind-the-scenes experience.

Flatters its audience by dividing the grown-up world into mean idiots and nice idiots, which might be interestingly subversive if the movie had anything on its mind. Instead, it's just a Hollywood crash course: Heist Films 101.

The new film lives up to expectations and, indeed, pushes past them into virtually unmapped territory.

The finest scene in Don't Come Knocking is its quietest...The movie could have used a lot more of it.

As B-level suspensers go, though, The Return isn't actively awful -- just slow and cursed with a lead who acts with her t-shirt.

From the opening shot of a burnt-orange GTO cruising a high school parking lot to the strains of Aerosmith's ''Sweet Emotion,'' Richard Linklater's film nails mid-'70s adolescence so precisely that you'll need Clearasil by the end credits.

The movie never goes as deep as the novel (no movie could), but it's a worthy approximation: a Merchant-Ivory movie that turns in on itself with a lucid and painful sigh.

The original Re-Animator was made by an artist working on a wicked, energetic high. Bride of Re-Animator is a smart piece of hack work. In the end, it’s best left standing at the altar.

Any good will the movie generates, though, is grated right back off by Black, whose obnoxiousness has lost whatever charm it once possessed.

Abramoff may be in prison but the mindset that produced him -- and the pay-to-play government it needs to survive -- is triumphant.

Aggressive visual invention is rarely its own reward, and this movie does nothing to better the odds.

A perfectly enjoyable star vehicle that does exactly what it sets out to do. [7 May 1999, p.66]

There are three Poles in The Pianist -- Szpilman, Polanski, and Frederic Chopin. Of the three, fittingly, Chopin speaks the loudest.

The film's slick and entertaining, an obvious must-see for musical hounds.

A damn-near great end-of-the-world zombie movie, terrifying on the basic heebie-jeebie level, respectful toward its B-movie forebears, and all the more unnerving for coming out in this fretful era of SARS and germ warfare.

Sanctimonious claptrap -- an inert pageant of waxen figures that fails completely as drama even as it insults the sensibilities of anyone not clinging to rosy memories of the slave-era South.

If writer-director Tony Vitale ladles on the cliches with extra sauce, Guido still has a hey-Ma-I'm-makin'-a-movie enthusiasm that's more infectious than it has a right to be.

The movie's an uncategorizable mixture of the tacky and profound, and on some weird level, you have to respect it.

As a tale of adolescent sexuality warped by passion, though, Bad Company is less compelling and more exploitative than its makers think.

When it works, W. can take your breath away. When it doesn't, you can feel Stone still working out his feelings toward the man.

The movie is almost willfully dull, for its real subject is everything we never say to our parents, or they to us.

It’s much too easy to call Ajami an Arab-Israeli “Crash,’’ but it’s a pretty good place to start.

A gorgeous, meandering travelogue that only gradually bares its teeth.

Watching Eagle vs Shark is like sitting next to a terminally awkward first date at a restaurant. You cringe and feel protective toward the poor, sweet dweebs at the same time.

Adding to the general air of ''What the hell?'' is Australian pop singer Natalie Imbruglia as Lorna, the beautiful superspy who falls for our hero. With Lorna's help, Johnny discovers that Sauvage is plotting to take over the British throne -- the Battle of Hastings wasn't good enough, it seems.

If you've seen "Paris, je t'aime" or "New York Stories," you know the rate of return on these urban omnibuses is variable, and so it is here. Go in expecting minor pleasures and you'll be fine.

A sizable amount of national pride is on display in Ong-Bak.

It's a smart, provocative idea for a movie. I wish 9 Songs was that movie.

The movie is too blatant a throwback to crass '80s teen fodder to really work.

Turns out to be a sweetly grim lark: a road film through Limbo. It takes the self-pity associated with ending one's life and uses it for the purposes of mordantly aware comic fantasy.

Those who love police overkill, guns, jingoistic race-baiting, guns, macho smugness, and guns will be well served.

Expendables is the closest thing to movie Viagra yet invented. It's reprehensible. It's stoopid violent. It's a lot of unholy fun.

The best American film of the year to date.

You come away impressed, oppressed, provoked, and beaten down, holding on to Ledger's squirrelly incandescence as a beacon in the darkness.

Low budget, self-distributed, awkwardly charming, it's the kind of midrange Hollywood entertainment that's supposed to be extinct in this modern age. It makes you want to support your local vintner and your local moviemaker.

Serves up some caustic laughs before fizzling out.

It’s when Toy Story 3 becomes a jailbreak movie that it comes into its own.

A stricken teen trapped in a polyurethane isolation tent. That’s a potent metaphor for adolescence, which may be why this made-for-TV movie was a rite of passage for an awful lot of us.

"Bad Santa" it's not. Bumptiously entertaining it is.

Meant to be an insider's tale, but it feels like it comes from the cinema of hangers-on.

The result is both a surprisingly lucid portrayal of clinical depression and dramatically a bit stiff.

On the level of craft, the movie's just absurdly enjoyable. Sorkin's dialogue dazzles; the photography is burnished and sleek; the editing confidently sorts out a complex narrative.

Even if you think Cruise has never had a moment of doubt in his life, he makes Nathan's self-loathing palpable, and the character's regeneration has a hoarse, cautious purposefulness that's striking.

''Health Inspector" hopes to do for Larry what ''Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" did for Jim Carrey, who in this context looks like Noel Coward.

Writer-director Cristian Mungiu confirms the Romanian cinema renaissance while creating a paradoxical marvel: a bleak tale of illegal abortion that powerfully affirms one's faith in people.

An absurd mess that's more entertaining than it has any right to be.

The movie balances cardboard comic bad-guys with believable teenagers, has the courage to avoid romance, and unlike most Hollywood films suggests parents can be helpful and loving as well as clueless.

Generic teen dice-and-slice with interior design by way of ''Saw." The movie's tight and reasonably well shot, though, and there are flashes of nasty invention between the ritual guttings.

It's a charming disappointment that retains the elements that make the writer's novels so good without ever bending them into cinematic shape.

Sydney White makes "Mean Girls" look like Shakespeare.

The movie is of this precise moment and you should probably see it now, since it will be dated by next Tuesday.

The period ambience, comforting yet urgent, is the best part of Kit Kittredge - that and Breslin, who never once gets actressy.

Less a documentary than a cry of outrage -- a series of exotic images that slowly turn horrifying.

Unmistaken Child stands as a window on a beautiful and mysterious world. The questions it leaves hanging are for us to untangle.

It flirts intriguingly with the unknowable, what it shows us of the knowable isn't terribly interesting.

Still manages to be a Steve Martin vanity project in ways that are fairly creepy.

Freaky Friday version 2003 is a shinier, snappier animal, partly because young girls now dress like Avril Lavigne, and partly because Jamie Lee Curtis has her best role in years and knows it.

Remains worth seeing as an achingly nostalgic farewell to youthful idealism, tinged with a kind of loving contempt.

Everyone in the film is an uninteresting grotesque.

"Maybe" was watchable and blandly pleasant; "Theory" is a smidgen better than that, if not the cruelly funny farce the movie's best impulses and its own trailer would have you believe.

There are rich issues at play here, about the nature of attraction and whether individual will is or isn't pinned to the wheel of physiology. But Decena hasn't dramatized them; he's used them as talking points set to an indie-film guitar strum, and the result is both earnest and passionless.

Life as We Know It gives bland and predictable a good name.

Chaplin's sentimental politics and peerless comic invention dovetailed more perfectly in this film than in any other he made.

Whenever a band plays in “Persian Cats,’’ the director treats us to a fast, vibrant montage of Iranian faces and street scenes -- as if to say, look, this is who we REALLY are.

A dunderheaded comic melodrama with clothes to die for and dialogue to shrink from. It’s downright depressing.

Brokeback may be too polished for some people, too elegantly dispassionate in its study of choked passion.

The movie wins you over through crack comic timing and an awareness that the point of driving isn't how fast you get there but what you see on the way.

A noble, shipwrecked folly.

As the Friedmans split apart like fissile neutrons, their story becomes five stories, none of which is remotely like the others.

What's largely missing from It's Kind of a Funny Story: genuine emotional pain. Still, the movie's an often charming example of "Cuckoo's Nest'' Lite.

City of Ember lacks the vision and scope of "WALL-E," but it's based on a pretty good kids' book and it makes a pretty good "Twilight Zone" episode, with hope dangling at the end rather than one of Rod Serling's cosmic black jokes.

The Phantom of the Opera was never a brilliant movie, but it remains great, ghoulish fun, with Chaney tiptoeing the line between sympathy and shudders.

There's a thin line between the subtle and the dramatically inert, and Intimate Strangers pitches a tent on it.

The results are -- there’s no other word for it -- a disaster.

It's those noir bones that give this social-realist drama its punch, as if Humphrey Bogart had been recast as a 17-year-old girl and dropped into the poorest corner of America.

The question that should be asked is whether Woody Allen has made a good movie this time out, and the honest answer is "almost."

With a tranquil fearlessness, it goes beyond the death of memory, to see what might be found in the unexplored country beyond. The answer is both frightening and comforting: More love. Unspecified love. Universal love.

A history lesson for a country and a people forced to forget at gunpoint.