Ty Burr

If you prefer your domestic clashes sunnier and more strenuously poetic, Respiro may be your respite. If nothing else, it's a reminder of how severely underutilized Valeria Golino is as both actress and cinematic glory.

How's the movie? Technologically incredible, aesthetically pretty hideous, and narratively lumpy: Kids who aren't cynics (i.e., 9 and under) will roll with it.

Sweet, indulgent, and surprisingly soft in the center; the most minor entry in the brainiac-doc genre to date, it's nevertheless a perfectly entertaining hour and a half for crossword adepts.

The pleasure of Infamous is in its gallery of larger-than-life portrayals.

Turns out to be rather less than the sum of its headlines.

This is the first time, though, his (Mortensen)performance seemed so much bigger than the film surrounding it. That he manages the feat with so few wasted gestures puts him in line with the greats.

Cool, carnal, and lethal, The Last Mistress is a period drama with a difference.

At its best, The Time Traveler’s Wife does suggest the preciousness of a life that’s too often beyond our control. At its worst, it’s more than a little nuts.

Flattens you with concussive detail and the awfulness of war; it plays like "Saving Private Ryan" as remade by a Continental mathematician flipping out on Ecstasy.

RV has teeth -- more teeth than the last few Steve Martin films, anyway -- but it's terrified to bite down, knowing that the paying audience would feel it more than anyone.

It's Lopez who's the proper focus of this dream. So intent has she been on becoming a superstar in the past few years that many people have forgotten that, given decent material, she can act.

In the end, the movie's just the kind of enjoyably empty-headed fluff it celebrates and mocks. It sits up, it begs, eventually it plays dead, and still you want to pat it on the head. It's a good dog.

How inept is Serving Sara? It makes even Elizabeth Hurley seem graceless and ugly.

Disappointing not for what it is but what it could have been.

The film that many consider the finest of its decade, Raging Bull, has aged well, and not just because it was filmed in black and white.

Deeply, proudly average..."Mean Girls" it's not; a plastic butter knife has more edge. But sometimes it's nice to know your kids won't cut their fingers.

The movie has a curious and cumulative power.

Lord of War is advocacy entertainment -- an act of mainstream provocation -- and, for the most part, it works unusually well.

May be the most successful forgery in the history of hate.

While the Nightmare on Elm Street movies possess a sick yet clever surrealism, and the first Halloween was at least well crafted, the Friday the 13th series has always been the cut-rate horror franchise, offering barely functional sex-and-slash pitched straight at the moron brigade. Jason Goes to Hell varies the formula a bit, with ideas swiped from The Terminator, The Hidden, and Alien, but after nine installments the impalements and dismemberments all look the same. So go to hell already, Jason — and take Sean Cunningham, the ”brains” behind this dreck, with you.

Stuffed with smart performers doing graciously silly work, and all Levy has to do is manage traffic.

A dull little PG-rated spook story for tweener girls.

One hell of a party, and it doesn't let anything get in the way of that.

Turns out to be a grade-A B-movie that grounds its thrills in particulars of time, place, and character, so that when the time comes to make the leap into the wholly preposterous, we do so willingly. This is a movie that earns our trust -- and then happily abuses it.

A blood-smeared and almost completely scurrilous love letter to anyone who ever appeared in the junk movies of the '60s through '80s.

Bubble is a stunt in search of a movie, and it almost finds one.

I don't want to sell Like Mike as something it's not. It's a cash-in, all right - just better written, more tightly edited, sharply performed, and a little more heartfelt than most.

Someone once said about W.C. Fields that he had the rare ability to despise amusingly. I can imagine no greater compliment than to say that Ricky Gervais seems, at his best, like a young Fields.

House of the Dead, sadly, is so bad it's bad.

Noah Baumbach makes nature documentaries disguised as indie comedy-dramas.

Hollywood political thrillers have absorbed this movie's you-are-there filmmaking grammar. Rarely have they re-created its fire.

A broad, bawdy, silly French farce set on the Riviera in high season, it's a diversion at best and a strained souffle at worst, but it rings enough Gallic changes on the old family-summer-gone-horribly-wrong genre to deliver some unexpectedly sharp laughs.

Slick, impassioned, and guardedly upbeat, Ted Braun's film is a morale booster aimed at US audiences rather than the 2.5 million displaced Sudanese tribespeople whose villages have been destroyed and families slaughtered. That we need a pick-me-up more than they do is pathetic, but there you are.

Deeper, darker currents move through Momma's Man, eddying around fears of letting go on both sides of the generational divide.

Revolutions, the final installment in the trilogy, parcels things more neatly. You get 45 minutes of the Wachowskis' patented theosophical bong water, followed by an hour of the most muscular, hard-core special-effects rama-lama yet to hit the screen. Only then does Jesus show up.

It’s a lot of fun before it wears you out, and it wears you out sooner than it should.

Moves like hot mercury, and it draws a viewer so thoroughly into its world that real life can seem thick and dull when the lights come up.

May not be the best movie ever made about the perils of family life, but it is among the most ruthlessly comic.

Disappointingly, the movie runs along the track of many earlier coming-of-age dramas, with appointed station stops at Cynicism, Puppy Love, Puppy Sex, Puppy Heartbreak, and Greater Wisdom.

The movie's fodder for tweener girls with indiscriminate Nick TV addictions, but there's just enough wit on display to make you realize it could have been worse.

I'm of two minds about this. A movie that held on to all the breathless tearjerkery of the novel would probably have to star Bette Davis as Amir, but as amended by Forster the story is now touching and somewhat dull.

If you have to see Monsters vs. Aliens - and if you're a parent, you will have to - make sure it's the 3-D version.

Unfolds with the serenity of a fable but underneath it draws intelligent, deeply troubled connections between the personal, political, and spiritual.

It’s like Sinatra said: If you can make (do without) it there, you can make (do without) it anywhere. The movie leaves it up to you.

Writer-director Richard Curtis (“Love Actually’’) has made a party, not a movie, and if the party goes on much too long, at least the guests are great company and the host’s taste in music is impeccable.

A pleasant, thin, hammerlocked movie about the pleasures of breaking free - it's the Cliff Notes version of anarchic classics like ''Bringing Up Baby'' or ''What's Up, Doc?'' Should you want to take the graduate course, you'll find those films at your video store.

How often are psychosexual lunacy and classic cinema combined so fiendishly well?

So who am I to carp that the film trades in the amiable realism of the show for just another watered-down pop star fantasy? Heck, it beats the Olsen twins. But not by much.

Maybe writer-director Adam Brooks has made a fluffy Woody Allen pastiche here, but it's arguably more pleasing than anything Allen himself has done lately.

All Peter Pan lacks is a Peter Pan with any discernible personality, no matter that Jeremy Sumpter is the first actual, genetic boy to play the role on film.

A pleasant puff-pastry throwback to Sandra Dee movies, ''Bye Bye Birdie,'' and other pre-Beatles effluvia.

Quiet, observant, and intensely moving whenever Heiskanen is on screen, and it has a valedictory sweep that feels like a summing up.

Terrifically compelling and, more than that, unexpectedly moving.

Pure bangers-and-mash realism: a spotty yet ingratiating working-class farce that suggests a Mike Leigh movie with opera buffa tendencies.

Everything about Couples Retreat feels plastic, though: the jokes, the trees, the extras, the attitudes. It’s dumbed-down entertainment aimed at a dumbed-down audience - the comedy equivalent of a McMansion.

The film’s so formulaic your 6-year-old will be ticking off the plot points as they lope by.

The immediate problem with making a movie based on Potter's life is that it doesn't seem to have been very interesting.

The film reveals its secrets slowly, and Chabrol tightens the screws not according to the rules of Hollywood suspense but with a cool, level gaze.

At one point in ''Praise,'' Godard mentions that the Bois de Boulogne, the Parisian park, is all that's left of the French forests from the time of the Roman conquest. In Praise of Love, glowing like an ember, is all that's left of genius.

The premise of Agent Cody Banks is more than a little bizarre.

The latest installment in the venerable sci-fi action franchise turns out to be a straight-up war film, grim and muscular and thundering and joyless. It's the color of cement, and it weighs as much, too.

If you've ever staggered out of IKEA oppressed by the clean, inhuman lines of a thousand affordable dinette sets, you may get a kick out of Bent Hamer's comedy Kitchen Stories.

Haneke has become known as a dour modern master of cinematic pain, and in this movie he scrubs civilization down to the root level.

It's a tale powerfully told, nevertheless, with an unusual vantage point in its upper-class young hero.

The movie's overlong and there are lumps in the batter, but this is a ''Charlie" that the author would recognize as upholding his playfully dyspeptic tradition.

Gosling may be the soul of Half Nelson, but Epps is the film's heart.

The question remains: Why would Herzog want to dramatize what he has already captured as nonfiction? To better control the material, I think, and to bring it in line with his own obsessions.

The movie is decent and heartfelt, and it eventually settles into some sharp diamond action, but the small-town homilies are dropped like an anvil. If you thought 1993's "Rudy" was too spare and unsentimental, Final Season is for you.

The final act of Dark Matter is grim but unconvincing, and the shortfall leaves an ugly, exploitive taste in your mouth.

Morlang is a repressed creep whose worst crime, as far as the audience is concerned, is dullness.

The latest and most creatively unhinged film from director Takashi Miike.

Handsomely shot and edited, The Bank benefits greatly from the brutal ministrations of LaPaglia,

Mostly Election tracks the shifting of power among men for whom power is all that matters, no matter how much lip service they pay to loyalty. The final sequence is a shocker but it's also completely logical.

Harvey is so thin it barely registers as a movie, yet these two actors - British apples and American oranges in their respective approaches to character - almost miraculously weave something memorable out of nothing much.

The film is at its most quietly powerful, though, when telling the story of a group of African-American high school kids who took their discontent to the highest court in the land.

King Arthur does to this legend what "Troy" did to Homer, with one important difference: It's a better movie.

A shamelessly enjoyable retread, an ode to la belle vie that has been well turned on a factory spindle.

It's foreign, it's inspiring, it has an adorably resourceful kid; it depicts grinding misery in a land far from West Newton, and it holds out the possibility of clambering over all that misery to attain your dream.

The subject is the privileged state of childhood itself - how we're all lucky to have had it and how it so easily floats away from our grasp.

As a credible love story, though, the film never leaves the runway. If you're a fan of these actors, you may want to look up Jet Lag when it comes out on video, or catch it on an Air France flight while flirting with the passenger in the next seat.

Ball's trying to be honest about adolescent coming of age, but since he's dishonest about everything else, the movie collapses in on itself.

It’s a harsh experience, at times engrossing, at other times stiff and unconvincing, but it asks a necessary question: What happens to the country’s whites after white rule is gone?

What this dystopia doesn't do is shock. In truth, Code 46 traffics in notions of speculative social fiction that are so familiar by now as to feel disconcertingly normal.

That smart, hip, human comedy you've been waiting for all year.

A patient, slightly stiff, often intensely moving portrait of a girl who believes her choices are literally black and white.

An earnest, simplistic, affecting slice of low-watt indie filmmaking that goes where few American movies bother: below the poverty line.

It can’t be easy to turn the story of Hawaii’s last royal into a waxworks parade, but writer-director Marc Forby has pulled it off.

You may not like the terms Tarantino sets, but you have to admit he succeeds on them.

Youth recedes, the body decays, life is a compromised thing: These are truths. But they're not fresh truths, and Moss's riverdogs are hardly the first to have discovered them.

The film's no masterpiece, but at least you're in the hands of people who know what they're doing.

Kang balances the uproariously comic with the profoundly sad, and the two tones amplify each other with subtlety.

The Messengers is textbook, and the course it's teaching is HSL: Horror as a Second Language.

A very good drama about the difficulties of being young, black, and gay. With a bigger budget and a sharper focus, it might have been a great one.

Like a meal prepared by an extreme chef, ''Hustle" is more than a bit of a mess. It still tastes like nothing you've ever had before.

Handsomely shot and with a likable lead in Kuno Becker, it also suffers from a script so outrageously generic you could buy it at Costco.

Holes functions as a film, but just barely: Readers familiar with the book may negotiate the film's antic crosscutting, but newbies will need to pop a Dramamine before the lights dim.

Horror movie Rule #1: The only way to kill a zombie is to shoot it in the brain. George Romero himself laid this maxim down with his first film, the endlessly influential 1968 gutter classic "Night of the Living Dead." Forty years later, with George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead, the venerable filmmaker has done something almost as startling: He has put brains back into the zombie genre.

A tremendous human drama, with each stage of its characters' journey a white-knuckle thriller in miniature.

Dolls is an art film, and a languid, inexplicably haunting one at that.

Exhilaratingly slow, which for many will simply mean SLOW... Those who can downshift appropriately, however, stand to be enraptured.

As a coherent, well-judged alternative history, the movie's a mess. As a thought-provoking and frequently hilarious jeremiad, it scores again and again.

Zwigoff's overdue for a turkey, in other words. Art School Confidential is it.

The movie works.

This is the kind of tastefully poignant drama that asks its audience to confront taboos and then pats them on the back for doing so.

The result is a curious hash: warmly funny in the comic scenes and shamelessly sentimental during the sad bits, of which there are many.

An overstuffed turkey that's entertaining for all the wrong reasons.

The women of Perry's army will come out feeling they've been well-served, and for the rest of us there's Bassett, getting her groove back after a spate of less than worthy roles. Perry's getting his groove, too - I give him two more films and an A-list cameraman.

In Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris does something inconceivable and, at first glance, ill-advised. He gives the US soldiers of Abu Ghraib back their humanity.

A Perfect Getaway may not play fair by the audience but at least it cheats honestly. These days that's something.

The real deal, an often awkward but nonetheless terrifically compelling high-stakes human drama.

A fully felt, decently crafted teen B-movie melodrama, plenty preposterous in places but alive to the vibrant miseries of being young and misunderstood.

When Lambert is onscreen, Fortress is just an effective action cheapie. Whenever Smith is the focus, it approaches junk poetry.

The best armchair holiday going - the cast is lovely to behold and the plot dips in and out of the arrondissements with panache. You almost don’t mind that none of it adds up to terribly much.

Ang Lee's film of the Jane Austen novel slavishly follows the gospel according to Merchant Ivory, swooning over characters declaiming modestly while surrounded by topiary.

The only entertainment value is in imagining Turner's apoplexy when he watched Spader having sex with Rosanna Arquette's leg wound.

Eventually the energy of the original short runs out and the movie coasts on fumes, but it remains surprisingly enjoyable for all that.

The film version of Memoirs of a Geisha is very like a geisha itself: a thing of exquisitely refined surfaces beneath which beats an ordinary heart.

Buried somewhere within the bipolar extravaganza that is The Invasion is an awfully good movie that got away.

Sweet little crowd-pleaser.

Reprise is exceptionally smart about the crushing expectations brought to the table by those who love us.

The triumph of this fond, uncontainable documentary is that it lets you hear that voice again loud and clear.

The movie's strength is its refusal to offer easy answers.

Family, sadly, is a plate of leftovers: a bland, baldly written melodrama about two longtime best friends and their messed-up families.

What could have been an effervescent 90-minute experience is so in love with the sound of its own voice that it develops genre trouble and piddles on for two-plus hours.

Pakula insists that The Pelican Brief is haute cuisine, and the seriousness nearly wrecks it.

You sense River Phoenix would rather be elsewhere, and whether he’s responding to the movie or to something larger is not ours to say. But the feeling persists. It’s like watching a premature ghost.

The improvisations are a mixed bag -- Reed and Fox are surprisingly hilarious, while Roseanne is a shrieking horror show -- but the air of gentle play and a wistful sense that Brooklyn is some kind of lost Eden put this one up on the more structured "Smoke."

Where most documentaries offer us facts to hold on to, his (McElwee's) are obsessed with the mystery of things we don't know and never will.

Tarantino may have nicked the title first, but this is the real ''Pulp Fiction," with all the drama and the dead ends that implies.

It would have been nice if someone had included a script, too.

Shirin Neshat's film, a magical-realist cry from the heart, is as up-to-date as last year's pro-democracy protests.

Eloquent, bloody, and daringly simple.

One such paradox, which Into the Wild doesn't note, is that those who flee civilization more often than not bring it with them. The bus in which Christopher McCandless died is now a tourist destination.

Stitched together from so many other movies that it plays like an attack of multiple déjà vu. Stray bits of “Star Wars,’’ “Pirates of the Caribbean,’’ “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,’’ and “Robin Hood’’ pass by like flotsam, and the overwhelming tone is good-natured but alarmingly generic.

Movies like The Kids Are All Right -- beautifully written, impeccably played, funny and randy and true -- don't come along very often.

Rodriguez makes the same mistake as other first-time auteurs: The world of this movie exists only in relation to other movies, particularly the Sergio Leone-Clint Eastwood spaghetti Westerns of the early '60s.

The storytelling here is at times as awkward as its hero, and since it is a Gray film Two Lovers takes itself dreadfully seriously. Yet it's one of the few movies I've seen recently that improves on a second viewing, in part because Phoenix does such remarkably subtle work.

A rigorous and bracingly charming movie about moviemaking.

It's a perfect example of how far production design and editing WON'T take you when the story's not there.

The filmmakers are smart to cut between their primary interview and later footage of Junge watching that interview and offering further commentary -- living footnotes, as it were.

Gorgeously stoic art film.

Just rent the kid ''National Velvet" when you get home. That movie's proof you don't need a true story to be inspired.

It's a doughty movie, stuck halfway between Masterpiece Theatre and Classics Illustrated, but, to his credit, gifted journeyman director Michael Apted understands he's playing the long game.

The film was conceived as a youthful tour of all that's wrong with the two-party system, with the likably shambling actor Philip Seymour Hoffman as host, but the breadth of subjects covered precludes any response other than nebulous discontent.

Beware of stoner rock stars talking politics. No matter where you stand on the spectrum, the ecological/anticorporate idealism of Greendale is so vague as to be insulting to anyone past the backpack-and-Birkenstocks stage of life.

In its unhurried fashion, Sugar can take its place with the best baseball movies. Where most focus on the grand slam, this one's about the life that surrounds the game and everything that comes after.

Slightly better than it should be. For Tucker Max, this possibly represents a triumph.

If Ten9Eight brings NFTE to the attention of you, your child, or your school administrator, that’s probably all that matters.

It’s a muddled but plush experience overall, and if you’re a royalist completist or a historical romantic, you’ll probably have a decent time.

Fish Tank should be seen for what it does well and for what it hints may come, if Andrea Arnold and her audiences are lucky.

Cheerful and easy to watch but surprisingly inept in the telling.

If you miss the old cliches, consider whether, after 21 Bond films and countless parodies, your response is simply Pavlovian.

At this late date, the rules of the adolescent slice-‘n’-dice genre have codified into ritual (teens + sex = death), suggesting that those who rent this may have bigger problems than just bad taste.

To see Au Hasard Balthazar is to understand the limits of religious literalism in movies -- the limits, even, of movies themselves. Bresson pares everything away until all that's left are the things we do and the hole left by the things we could have done but didn't.

It's a strained but heartfelt work of muted sentimentality, obvious in its symbolism but grounded in a sense of life's preciousness and brevity. Depending on your mood and indulgence, you may weep or you may be left out in the cold.

Rudo y Cursi is a grave and calculated affront to the men of Mexico, and that's the source of its roistering charm.

Does what too many independent American movies only pretend to do: Takes you to an unnoticed corner of our country and shows what it's like to actually live there.

Teenage boys will be in heaven. All others: Check, please.

If it doesn't quite represent the new, improved Adam Sandler, it shows him almost desperately trying to figure out who that might be.

A film noir? A backstage musical? A whodunit? A comedy? In truth, it's all of the above -- plus a kinky love story, an absorbing melodrama, and a mordantly jaded snapshot of postwar Paris -- and all of them are wonderful.

It's a unique trip that flirts with hokeyness at the surface but that grows more compelling, awe-inspiring, and tragic the deeper you go.

The movie also rather sweetly suggests that the apartment being shared is Europe itself. There's a reason this warm, stylish human comedy was a big hit all across the Continent: It conveys a new generation's conviction that borders no longer matter.

Explicit yet consistently unerotic. It's also intensely sad, capturing everything about these people except the high they ceaselessly chase.

Waitress isn't a great film, but it is great, deep-dish fun, with a generosity of spirit that extends first to the sisters on the screen and in the audience, then to the rest of humanity.

One of the smarter, more unexpectedly touching documentaries of the year, and I recommend it to you whether you love Rivers or loathe the very thought of her.

You come out of the theater impressed by the scope of Eastwood's reach and frustrated by how little remains in his grasp. As gifted as this filmmaker is, this isn't the sort of thing he does best.

Essentially, an act of terrorism against entertainment. It's inconsequential, potty - mouthed, extremely silly, and -- the worst sin of all -- dead boring.

The people who've made White Oleander appear to have spent a lot of time worrying about the audience. They should have told the story and let us take care of ourselves.

The movie's pleasant and light, though, and its emotional crises are the crust on an acceptably edible crème brulee.

This isn't a movie -- it's an author in love with the sound of her own voice.

Trumbo never wavered in his belief that his persecution was only a horrible symptom. He understood the real victim of blacklist America was America itself.

As sagas of endurance in the face of ridiculous odds go, this story is up there with Shackleton and ''Into Thin Air.''

"The Corpse Bride" with teeth, Bruno Bettelheim retooled for the multiplex, a nightmare of daft and creative consequence. I really liked it.

An American Haunting sets the bar at a new low: It makes ''The Blair Witch Project" look like a masterpiece of world cinema.

Bloody and bloody funny, and Jackson and Carlyle make the best salt-and-pepper team since Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte knocked heads in ''48 HRS., '' but ultimately the movie can't find a way out of its own dead end.

There’s sorrow here to fill a thousand Hollywood movies—and in the end, it swamps the boundaries of movie convention.

I don't usually make recommendations of this kind, but if you or your kids have gone to a burger joint in the last few weeks, you really do need to see this movie.

By forgoing actual human beings, the director has made his most charming, least annoyingly fey film - a thing of lovely comic wisdom.

A stylish, watchable, very familiar future-cop action thriller. What was once original is now almost completely derivative.

Eric begins this story as a sad-eyed cipher and ends it as a whole man, and maybe that’s structure enough, and reason enough, for one film.

Susan Stroman directed the show on Broadway and what she has done here is photograph that show -- no more, no less. This is good news for anyone who couldn't afford a trip to New York and $100 tickets, but it's a fairly odd approach to cinema.

In spite of the entropy, Jellyfish is close to a comedy, with a gentle sense of absurdism and a welcome generosity toward its characters.

If it were any more real - if it were Imax, say -- the audience would be molting.

A movie like Armored has been done better in the past. But it has also been done much, much worse, and Antal knows enough not to mess with the sturdy bones of the thing.

Who on earth is this embarrassment -- easily the worst film of the year to date -- aimed at?

Still: The Hours is a book about people writing, reading, and living another book, and that literariness makes the movie resist itself.

Jennifer’s Body falls into the dispiriting category of dumb movies made by smart people, in this case a glibly clever writer and a talented director who think a few wisecracks are enough to subvert the teen horror genre.

Beautiful to look at and acted with full and tempestuous conviction, it still seems to be taking place in an apartment far across the way.

As it is, the movie only shudders to life when Dickie Pilager's onscreen.

Rambles without apparent purpose, and yet it blooms in emotional impact as it goes.

The movie has more style than depth and it's sometimes in danger of confusing the two.

The primary talking head is Ono, of course, who's serenely protective of Lennon's greater legacy. Her cooperation ties the film's hands, but only to a point.

A tale of narrow talent destroyed by pop hubris, raging insecurity, substance abuse, and murder.

That’s already more laughs than a month of Saturday Night Lives.

The original 1989 dead-guy farce maybe had a few laughs if you caught it on cable at one in the morning. Blind drunk. Weekend At Bernie’s II not quite that good.

It's a genre film - the action is fierce and nonstop - with a brooding undercurrent of unease that aims for the complexities of John le Carre.

Think of Red Doors as a promise, and hope that Georgia Lee keeps it.

Ideally, it would give you a sense of an entire people knocking the planet off its axis with a shake of their hips. If only El Cantante were that movie. Instead, it's a curiously sludgy cross between a Doomed Star biopic and a J. Lo vanity project.

An inspired dead-end stunt that keeps delivering snarky laughs far longer than it has any right to.

Everything Is Illuminated hasn't been adapted so much as gutted, stuffed, and mounted.

Reasonably painless if you've never seen a comedy about the travails of newlyweds.

Despite exotic locations, epic cinematography, and much spectacular crash and bang, this "Mummy" feels like a threadbare toss-off.

Robert Altman's gossamer, tension-free meditation on the ballet life, never quite recovers from a performance scene that arrives about 20 minutes in.

A sumptuous two-and-a-quarter-hour emotional epic built on one lachrymose climax after another. What little plot there is exists only to set up the next Big Cry.

The anti-"Kill Bill." This is an old man's movie in all the good ways: gentle, humanistic, rich with observation, quietly aware of all that can't be solved by the sword.

Paul and Mary Bland stop at nothing to open a restaurant in Paul Bartel’s scabrous black comedy.

Hard Candy is the rare movie that may be worthiest for the arguments you'll have after it's over.

The RKO Swiss Family Robinson isn't considered a lost classic — a lost pretty-good-movie is more like it — but the fact that Disney is finally releasing a movie they bought specifically to sit on is unexpected and welcome. [20 Oct 2019, p.N1]

10 Items or Less is nearly an acting class exercise, except for the fact that these two have long since graduated.

A comedy, and for all its cliches and clumsiness, close to a great one.

Most useful and enlightening as a historical tour through the major crises of the Kennedy administration.

Harmless in the extreme and it'll mute your kids for nearly 80 minutes, but why not just treat the little yard apes to the real deal and take them to ''Spirited Away''?

The film is depressive, slow, darkly funny, unyielding in its formal rigor, and unsettlingly beautiful. It's obviously not for everyone, but only because not everyone can meet its stare.

The last time I felt the sort of outrageously kinetic action-movie high District 9 delivers, it was 1981 and George Miller, Mel Gibson, and "Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior" had just come roaring out of Australia.

The result is a revenge thriller that's too taken with its own ambience to actually thrill.

Movies that are entertainingly nuts don't come around very often, and when they do they need to be given their due.

Predictable, square, and honorable all at once.

Far from perfect but completely unique, the film could best be described as a paranoid South American metaphysical political thriller -- you heard me -- and whatever its failures, they're not ones of nerve or imagination.

The dialogue is brightly self-conscious, and sometimes it clicks. Just as often it curdles into an entitled whining.

There are about 15 minutes of genuine, bust-a-gut comedy in Bringing Down the House, and, surprisingly, they belong to Steve Martin, who hasn't been funny on film in years.

Downey’s deftness is so miraculous, in fact, that it’s a shame Heart and Souls never really lets him cut loose.

Depressingly predictable in its dialogue and dramatic beats, Defiance is most interesting as a study of unlikely leaders.

The film, dazzling and poignant and five years in the making, retells the ancient Indian epic "The Ramayana" from a gentle but insistent feminist perspective.

It's a B-flick all the way, but it has no pretensions to the contrary, and that's some kind of refreshing.

For a movie to pretend, in the face of the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children directly or indirectly caused by our presence there, that we can wage war without anyone really getting hurt isn't naive, or wishful thinking, or a jim-dandy way to spend a Saturday night at the movies. It's an obscenity.

Speaking as both a parent and a critic, I do believe I'd rather drive rusty railroad spikes through my eyes than have to sit through one more computer generated family film about talking animals. The bad news for Hollywood is that after seeing Barnyard my kids feel the same way.

It's a Tibetan film -- a rare thing -- made by Tibetans, starring Tibetans, and set in the increasingly desperate exile community of Dharamsala .

Lust, Caution is a disappointment coming from director Ang Lee, but it's a watchable one, and it rattles around in your head for a long time after you've seen it, as much for what it does right as for where it goes wrong.

To answer your first question: like a cross between Shrek, the Frankenstein monster, and a Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robot.

The movie demands you be a glutton for sensation and then has the nerve to ask why you're not hungrier.

The movie’s a chocolate box of nougaty performances, from Christopher Plummer’s delightful depiction of Tolstoy as a ribald old naïf to Paul Giamatti twirling his waxed mustache and playing to the gallery as Vladimir Chertkov.

The movie’s never less than entertaining, but you often feel like arguing with the screen, and not in a good way.

If there's one thing Avary gets right, it's the brutal use-or-be-used approach to interpersonal relations that Ellis laid out with numbing detail, and James Van Der Beek is down to the challenge as Sean Bateman: horndog, cokehead, ceramics major, and all-around jerk.

A rambunctious joy.

It all feels studiously artless - some people huffily insist that Bujalski’s movies aren’t movies at all - but the more you contemplate his landscapes, the more his control over their various elements is revealed. He’s the real deal: a maturing artist obsessed with how and why - and if - his generation will mature.

The result isn’t art but it is an improvement: a scurrilous, lowdown, sub-Tarantino action comedy that, unlike the original, doesn’t make you want to claw your eyes out. How’s that for praise?

The movie’s not all glorious noise.

A movie like this needs a suave, amoral villain, so here's Paul Bettany.

Seems to be exactly the movie Mel Gibson wanted to make as an abiding profession of his traditionalist Catholic faith. On that score it is a success.

When Spartan is good, it's surprisingly gripping and fresh, and when it's bad, it's just another overcooked Hollywood paranoid thriller.

About the search for common ground, among journalists on all sides of the conflict and, through them, between viewers in America and the Arab world. Only within that common ground, Noujaim believes, can something like a workable, personal truth be found.

As a ranking cabinet minister in the brutally funny political satire In the Loop, actor Peter Capaldi unfurls dazzling verbal ribbons of the foulest language imaginable, thunderbolts of vulgarity that carry the force of precision carpet-bombing.

The acting makes the difference, and in Jacket it rises above the needs of the material.

Bacon makes an appropriately detestable villain; unfortunately, he's the most interesting character here. As for Love, well, this puts her one career rung closer to ''Hollywood Squares.''

Lynch (one) may be the documentary David Lynch wants, but I'm not sure it's the one he or we deserve.

Shane Carruth's extraordinary work of shoestring speculation throws you into a deep ocean of techno-jargon and lets you dog-paddle or sink like a stone.

The Last Airbender' is dreadful, an incomprehensible fantasy-action epic that makes the 2007 film "The Golden Compass,'' a similarly botched adaptation of a beloved property from another medium, look like a four-star classic.

A charming, damning portrait that has been stinging audiences in the Czech Republic since its 2006 release. In any language, what the movie says about surviving fascism by rolling with it speaks loud and clear.

Mao had it wrong; in ''Revolution,'' political power comes out of the barrel of a TV tube.

What’s best about Funny People, actually, is Sandler, who takes the weird, resentful anger that has always coursed beneath his comedy and puts it right on the surface.

Easily the worst movie of the week, month, year, and Bullock’s entire career. It is to comedy what leprosy once was to the island of Molokai: a plague best contemplated from many miles away.

And that dog -- or, rather, that digitally enhanced replicant -- is just plain creepy.

One soggy slab of sentimental uplift, but it doesn't pretend to be anything else, and there's some honor in that.

Alec Baldwin is on camera for barely eight minutes in Glengarry Glen Ross, the tightly wound — and actually very fine — film adaptation of David Mamet’s play. But his big speech, whipping up the assembled real estate salesmen with reptilian gung ho, could stand as a compressed version of what makes Baldwin, when bad, so good.

Hotel for Dogs is agreeable Saturday afternoon multiplex piffle - friendly, formulaic, completely harmless.

It's a quietly wrenching eye-opener.

The result is movie goulash: made with love, impossible to digest.

Barrels along on a diverting enough sugar high, but in the hangover that follows you may wonder where the wonder was.

The Unknown White Male that Murray has made asks profound questions. They're just not necessarily the right ones.

The results are dull, of all things. The movie itself feels like an overstuffed burrito,

As with most rock festivals, you had to be there, and if you're British you probably were, one year or another. In that case, Glastonbury is a pointed but essentially nostalgic tour of one country's more noble pop impulses. Otherwise, it's as muddy as Yasgur's farm back in the day.

The film is low budget but puffed with self-importance, and it offers proof that Hollywood filmmakers should probably steer clear of topics that actually matter.

At its best, the movie's crazy in unexpected and poetic ways; at its worst, merely preposterous.

Doesn't have the gonzo wit of ''Re-Animator'' or ''Evil Dead 2,'' nor is it flat-out terrifying like ''The Texas Chainsaw Massacre'' or even a zombie-come-lately like this year's ''28 Days Later.''

The question that has to be asked is: Why? The original six-part BBC ''Singing Detective'' remains one of the signal achievements in the history of television -- really -- and its release on DVD this past spring puts it easily within reach of the curious.