Ty Burr

How many bicycling movies are there, let alone ones that know from frame geometry? "Breaking Away" is probably the champ, followed by "American Flyers," the hilariously awful Kevin Bacon bike-messenger movie "Quicksilver," and then we're already into "The Bicycle Thief " and "Pee-wee's Big Adventure." It's a small pack, and The Flying Scotsman rides close to the front by default.

The movie isn't THAT bad -- it's just made-for-TV historical treacle that has somehow found its way to the big screen (and barely that; if you want to be moved or outraged by the film, you'll have to travel to Danvers or Revere).

Doesn't derive its power from the turning wheels of plot suspense but from the simple act of looking and not blinking.

It's a hell of a story, and Cadillac Records wants to tell it so badly that it threatens to warp the narrative out of recognition.

It's a smooth, compelling, almost suspenseful (more on that in a bit), and slightly hollow Hollywood period piece.

Writer Peter Harness has based his screenplay on his own childhood experiences, but personal doesn't necessarily translate to fresh.

If there's a larger theme in Zatoichi, it's that nobody is quite who he or she seems.

The chance to watch a four-star classic the way it was meant to be seen -- fresh print, big screen -- is so rare as to be worth the trip.

By now, we’ve come to expect certain things in movies adapted from Stephen King novels: brooding misanthropy, a pound or two of viscera, and — perhaps most horrifying of all — Hollywood actors delivering their lines with bad Maine accents. Needful Things delivers on said expectations, no more, no less.

The movie's masterstroke is to avoid interviewing the usual anti-globalist suspects and let solid, hard-working middle Americans speak.

A comic put-on of awe-inspiring crudity and death-defying satire and by a long shot the funniest film of the year. It is "Jackass" with a brain and Mark Twain with full frontal male nudity.

The Boss of It All finds the common ground between business and acting -- panicky improvisation -- and wonders whether applause or an executive comp package is the greater reward.

By far the funniest part of Strange Wilderness is the trailer for "Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay" that's running before it.

It’s a work of cruel comic genius, in some ways even crueler than “No Country for Old Men.’’

Sloppy, crude, pursuing the most far-flung tangents in hopes of a laugh, Anchorman still gave me more stupid giggles than I'd care to admit.

Simultaneously overplotted and simplistic, the new barnyard/racecourse comedy from Warner Brothers is predictable every step of the way, and it contains at least three too many poop jokes.

Visually playful and often good fun, it never settles on a convincing narrative shape.

Carpool is affably stupid Saturday-matinee fare -- good for opiating the kids for a few hours -- but let's just say it's no Big Bully.

It's an angry story, but also a strangely hopeful one, in the sense of new life sprouting through a battlefield. Above all, it's personal and specific, and that IS news we can use.

An entertainment to be not just seen but absorbed on a molecular level; it's as close to a full-body experience as we'll get until they invent the holo-suits. Cameron aims for sheer wonderment, and he delivers.

JUST worth your children's time, and hardly worth yours.

Monster House is the first horror comedy made exclusively for fourth-graders.

The feel-bad movie of the summer.

There's a great movie somewhere in The Good German, but it's buried under three tons of run-amok formalism.

It's a worst-case-scenario of bachelor party morning-after, and it is howlingly funny.

Could fairly be described as a Robert Altman ensemble movie without the flab, or "Magnolia" with a mean streak and bigger laughs.

What works best in Shrek 2 are the smaller roles, the pile-driving pop-culture jokes, and the moments of weird, early-Mad-magazine comic invention.

As such things go, it’s not bad: slick and proficient, The Stepfather 2.0 gets the adrenaline pumping, but the original has the brains.

She's like Bob Hope with fake breasts and a wig. Now, that's scary.

Good comfort food for most of its running time, thanks to a cast of attractive, unchallenging pros and Ken Kwapis's smooth direction.

Unfolds with an absolute minimum of dramatic highs and lows, and it's so disaffected that it prompts laughter at the wrong moments.

Smartly filmed (aside from a few distracting editing fripperies), but it's so dazzled by its subject and saddened by his martyrdom that it never moves past the heroic politics of dissent.

The one thing that should have been changed but hasn’t is the title, which makes no sense at all in a movie about kung fu.

At the very least, Agora finally gives Rachel Weisz a role that almost exactly matches her intense, humorless, but undeniable star charisma.

Bewitched presents a phony and cynical look at how Hollywood might make or remake a television show. It's as grating, laughless, and narcissistic (though, to its credit, not as cruel) as that new Lisa Kudrow show-within-a-show-within-a-show, "The Comeback."

It's an altogether satisfying drama -- the sort of movie some people complain they don't make anymore. So here it is; what's your excuse?

So there's a hole at the center of "Pete Seeger" that the movie fills with loving remembrances, testimonials, and new interview footage of the singer at his hand-built cabin in upstate New York.

A weirdly airless disaster, a turkey so insistently DOA that the dialogue serves as its own epitaph.

It's a remarkably laugh-free comedy that takes on a dark subject and skitters along its surface.

Andrew Currie's stylish satire falls into the narrower niche of zombie farce, as pioneered by "Shaun of the Dead ," "Slither," Robert Rodriguez's half of "Grindhouse."

How are girls supposed to behave in a culture that tells them they're Disney princesses for the first 12 years and sex toys after that? Girls Rock! has one answer: Strap on a Fender and rage against the machine.

The movie's cleverest idea is to give the Octopus identical clone henchmen with names like Phobos, Logos, and Huevos, all played by Louis Lombardi with a marvelous fat-boy idiot grin.

Has something many movies don't these days: interesting and attractive people talking to each other.

So, yes, something needs to be done, and if it takes Sting reuniting the Police in-concert to sing “sending out an SOS’’ on behalf of the plaintiffs (among other worthy causes), so be it.

Sure, go ahead and take the kids. But, for pity's sake, read them the book first.

The only question his movie doesn't ask is "What do you want your next car to run on?" That's up to you.

Essential viewing for anyone who wants to know the roots -- and perils -- of modern political dissent.

A compelling and eerily effective little drama.

For smart kids between the ages of 8 and 12, the movie hits the sweet spot with a satisfying cosmic bang. It's a cross between "A Wrinkle in Time" and a middle-school version of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

Pacino, thankfully, is on-screen enough to keep this stew on a solid low boil.

Crazy Love doesn't downplay the awfulness of what happened , but it also knows a good media circus when it sees one.

A pall of disaster, in fact, hangs over everyone in this shapeless, hankie-wringing adaptation of the best-selling Jodi Picoult novel.

For every line of dialogue that's truly, glitteringly acid, though, there are five that are merely clever, and Lee, likable as he is, never really taps into the misery of the teen misfit.

The Take represents the downside of the new documentary renaissance.

A classy unintentional hoot.

Green unquestionably has a rare, intermittent knack for rapture.

Has the distinction of being much dumber and pulpier than the comic book on which it's based -- the ink practically comes off on your fingers as you watch it.

Merely grand old-school fun - a rollicking class reunion that stands as the second best entry in the venerable series.

It serves as testimony to the ghosts that continue to haunt such men as ex-senator Bob Kerrey.

What's most unusual about the original 24 years later, though, is its elegant minimalism.

The result is a state-of-the-art multiplex three-ring circus whose special effects stagger the senses and play like a video game, whose human drama aims for the cosmic and lands waist-deep in the Big Silly.

A much better movie than the one it honors.

An almost fetishistic re-creation of a horror-suspense movie from around 1978.

Everything about the movie feels secondhand, including the wheezy plot about a treasure map and buried gold. The real problem, though, is plain old sequel-itis: Because the first story completed the narrative of these characters, the only reason to make a second film is money.

A Good Woman is pretty to look at and fakes witty elegance passably, so consider it a diversion -- a movie that might have been in the Oscar race if the elements had jelled but has instead been properly hung out to dry in February.

The actor is magnificent -- ravaged, desperate, aware -- and no more so than in a scene toward the end when Bob's cardsharp cool finally breaks. It's a risky scene, the one note of corn, but Nolte brings it home. Too bad the movie doesn't.

It's ''Hannah and Her Sisters'' with all the emotions and half the artistry.

A broad, foursquare piece of populist filmmaking that happens to be tremendously moving.

War of the Worlds pushes some of the right buttons and enough of the wrong ones to make you wish that Spielberg would move on from aliens already and use his unparalleled talents to focus once more on earth.

Stark eye candy of the first order, the film is saddled with the oldest story this side of "Blade Runner." Still, comic-book fanboys and graphic designers with time to kill should feel no shame in checking this one out.

It's a treat, nevertheless, to watch the daughter of Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni in a rare leading role. Chiara Mastroianni has her mother's hair and face with her father's sorrowful eyes stuck smack in the middle, and she moves as if conscious of the weight of her genetic splendor.

It's a good movie for its type, but it rarely stops to let us marvel at the world it creates.

In his masterful and haunting documentary Up the Yangtze, Yung Chang shows the old China drowning helplessly under the weight of the new.

Mother and Child glows for a good 90 minutes before an increasing reliance on contrivance and coincidence makes the lamp flicker and then fizzle out.

It's a bit of a mess but strong stuff nevertheless -- a mournful, often wickedly funny religious satire that suggests what Kafka might have come up with had he been raised Catholic.

Proof is proof that you can drain most of the juice out of a play and still have an enjoyable night at the movies.

It's a handsome, often funny piece of work with a nearly fatal inability to settle on a tone.

Black Book takes the conventions of the WWII epic -- the prison breaks, the interrogation scenes -- and undermines them with craft and muscle and the ripe lack of restraint we've come to expect from this director.

It's to the "Lethal Weapon" movies what left-hand driving on a country lane is to a freeway chase: pokey, more than a little daft, but with a bloody surprise around every hedge.

Story lines don't come any clammier.

I almost wish A Mighty Heart were about the Captain, and I'd bet director Michael Winterbottom does, too. The character contains all the contradictory impulses of this region of the world that the West tries and miserably fails to boil down to black and white.

Darker, leaner, less expansive , and meaner, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is all business, and it casts a spell utterly unlike the first four films.

If you've got some very small fry on your hands and 75 minutes to kill, this is as bright, colorful, and fuzzy as you're going to get.

So clear-eyed and three-dimensional that it makes the recent ''Pearl Harbor'' look like a bunch of kids playing dress up. Aspects of the film have dated, but in the important things it's more mature than anything proposed lately by modern Hollywood.

Referencing the popular song, the movie's title reminds us that "the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat." That, in a rind, is Riklis's deeply frustrated view of his country's stalemate, but you can only take a metaphor so far before it falters in the face of endless geopolitical complexity.

There’s still enough to chew on to recommend the movie, not least the oddly touching sight of two siblings whose very identities have been altered by surgery.

The filmmakers bank against their impulse toward melodrama and deliver a reconciliation that is heartbreakingly understated.

Suffice to say that Shawn Levy, director of the "Cheaper by the Dozen" movies, is no Blake Edwards; for every finely tuned slapstick fillip, there's a ton of messy, family-friendly buffoonery.

An acceptable but uninspired simulacrum: an overly faithful multiplex translation of a very, very popular airport novel.

The movie looks great at least, and the cast includes such stalwarts of Italian cinema as Claudia Gerini and Pierfrancesco Favino.

Where "Nemo" was clever, soulful, and marvelous to look at, "Tale" is manic and surprisingly ugly, with a script that leans on the shallowest aspects of hip-hop street cred while pimping for corporate product placement at every turn.

The Aristocrats -- the movie, not the joke -- is a working demonstration of the pleasures of the profane.

Pleasantly inspirational on its own terms, "Clear" is no one's idea of fresh goods.

The result has the dingy grace of pigeons flying across an urban wasteland.

The new version is a shiny piece of hardware that might as well be called "Sleuth 2.0," and it's exactly what you would expect from Pinter: very clever, extremely cold. Maliciously entertaining, too, until the halfway point, when you suddenly start wondering why anyone should care.

Cloverfield is content to be a creature feature; that's what makes it bearable and what keeps it from greatness. The genre, not the script, does the psychological heavy lifting.

For all its unforgivable blandness, "High School Musical" opens young audiences to the charms of this most transporting of movie genres.

This is a film lover's film, and as if to underscore the point, Bon Voyage opens and closes in a movie theater.

Whatever Works is very minor Woody, querulous, fitfully funny, and removed from any shared reality.

At times you feel Weitz flipping the pages and dog-earing wildly, and that's a shame: This is a movie that needs to be lengthy and discursive, the better to duck into the back alleys of its invention. A visionary is required. This director isn't one.

You may even feel like dancing in the aisles yourself. Sure, the real world doesn't always work this way. Have you forgotten that this is one of the reasons why we go to movies in the first place?

Freeman portrays Mandela not as a saint but as a man who knows he has the political freedom of being seen as one; it’s a majestically two-dimensional performance with glimpses of a third dimension peeking through.

This is no corporate project made to squeeze a few more dollars from a fading cash cow. No one else has been asking for another "Rocky," other than maybe Burt Young . No, this is a rarer beast -- an auteur sequel -- and it's so wrapped up in its maker's personal mythology and psychic needs that it becomes a hall of mirrors to which we're given a slack-jawed ringside seat.

Isn't just lame; it's neutered.

Has John Sayles finally lost his mojo? How anyone could take a subject like the moment the Delta blues went electric and suck the joy and fury out of it is anybody's guess, but the talky, dull "Honeydripper" represents playwriting rather than filmmaking. And didactic playwriting at that.

It spreads the punishment around, from the executive suites of Hollywood to the mean streets of Baghdad. Everyone here comes out smelling bad - that's why the film's so good.

Essential viewing for builders, graphic designers, visual artists, and other optically inclined folk, but it’s a bit of a slog for the uninitiated.

Works more in your head than on the screen.

How deeply silly is The Lake House? As silly as a movie about two letter-writing lovers separated by a wrinkle in time can be. How much sweet, dumb fun is it? More than you might want to admit.

The thread that winds through their stories is love lost and connections found, but only the audience is able to weave it into something to keep.

To appreciate Solaris, the new film by Steven Soderbergh, it helps to downshift your moviegoing metabolism to a level approaching the cryogenically frozen: The movie's that cerebral, that contemplative, that slow.

A honey, but your response to it may depend on where you fall on life's big curve.

A film of singularly boneheaded conceits, Butterfly is populated by, and appears to have been made by, stoned college dudes more hung up on oh-wow twists than the need to make sense.

The performances are deep and rich -- Wood is coming to seem like a smarter Chloe Sevigny, Rory looks to be the Culkin with talent, and Norton's portrayal of Harlan aches with ambiguity.

It's like "The Illusionist" crossed with a really hard Sudoku.

This is music to gorge on, raw ethnic survival in the form of sound.

At its best, Year of the Fish makes a virtue of naivete - its heroine's, its director's, and the fragile fairy-tale belief that everyone deserves a happy ending.

Best taken as a dazzling showcase for Collette, an actress who fits none of Hollywood's ideas of glamour or artistry, yet who grows like a beautiful outback weed with each new role she takes.

Genially terrible, Lost is lazy, sloppy multiplex filler, good for a few solid giggles and not much more.

Turns out to be thoughtful, creative, and generally worthy of its subject, with sins that are more of ambition and miscalculation than of execution.

He (Ray) was, a more complicated man than this film, or perhaps any film, dares allow. Foxx is not at fault here.

There's an evenhanded humanism flowing through The Edukators that may strike doctrinaire viewers on either side of the divide as mushy, but it's tough enough for the rest of us to chew on for a long time.

Completely unnecessary but painless, like dentistry performed by mimes.

Abandon is this CLOSE to being good, juicy, bad-movie fun.

The results are about what you'd expect: friendly, unfocused, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.

Think low-budget ''Moonstruck'' but think again: A regional dish in the most heartwarming sense.

One of the most lazily scripted, poorly structured, smugly stereotyped star vehicles in recent memory. Bizarrely, this seems to be the point.

The Wrestler is a character study, no more and no less, yet it's open-ended enough to function as many things.

A film that goes where many others have gone (yes, this is Scrooge for Ph.D.s) but with a subtlety few have dreamed of?

Its characters come straight from the assembly line of screenwriting archetypes, and too often they act in ways that archetypes, rather than human beings, do. You can feel its creator shuttling them here and there on the grid of greater LA, pausing portentously between each move.

The movie has a pleasing skinned-knee innocence that makes you wish everything else about it wasn't so shoddy.

Parts of it are close to genius; most of it is actively torturous to watch.

In rock, it's about the attitude as much as the music. In some cases, more so. And the Runaways were all attitude.

You can feel her (Bening) drag Being Julia uphill for an hour and a half until the final 15 minutes, when the ground finally levels out and the picture becomes fine, vengeful fun.

Watching the movie is a little like picking up issue #42 of a comic book after you've skipped the first 41: There's an entire back story mythos hovering in the background like a phantom limb.

The problem with the "Alien vs. Predator" series is that the humans keep getting in the way.

Lebanon gives us viscerally violent, intensely distressing glimpses into war's annihilation of people, places, and communities.

Three things and three things only keep Sex Drive from being teen-comedy landfill. The first is James Marsden, hilarious as the hero's bully-boy big brother. The second is Seth Green, beyond droll as an Amishman with attitude. The third is the Mexican doughnut costume.

Jarmusch has come up with a dud.

Vengeance has the odor of court-ordered community service. The jokes never rise above the groin. The trees look plastic, the characters more so.

White Hunter, Black Heart wants to show us a specific heart of darkness — a man who, by striving to kill one of nature’s grandest creatures, hoped to annihilate part of himself — but the theme gets lost in shades of gray.

As Hopkins's Lecter is concerned, it's official: He's Freddy Krueger.

So what is Hunger? Unexpectedly, a visually ravishing tour of hell and a meditation on freedom that at best is wordlessly profound and at worst interestingly obscure.

It pleases me to report, then, that Downey brings his brain, his wit, and his gift for intelligent underplaying, even as he understands he has been hired to play Sherlock Holmes, action hero.

Open Water is a stunt, one you either buy into or not.

Does what an exploitation movie should: It gets in, it scares you silly, and it gets out, all while playing fair by the audience.

A vanity film refreshingly lacking in vanity.

Australian rocker Nick Cave talks of how discovering Cohen during his small-town youth "just changed things." Bono calls the singer "our Shelley, our Byron."

At nearly two hours Lunacy becomes repetitive, at first ingeniously and then with a slowly dulling edge. The meat parade ceases to shock.

Albeit slumming with style and a fairly sharp scalpel. Married Life delights in peeling back the bright postwar social veneer to expose the characters' hidden agendas, and if this is a mystery movie, the mystery is other people.

Everything about the film is a welcome rebuke to the happy-face apocalypse of “2012,’’ a movie that turns mass extinction into the Greatest Show on Earth. In The Road, what has been lost is recognized as infinitely precious; what’s left is bitter and our due.

Screenwriter John Osborne and Richardson (both received Oscars as well) came up with a smart solution to the problem of adapting an 18th-century literary classic: Turn it into bawdy slapstick with generous helpings of then- daring sex and violence.

The film isn't especially deep, but it's mostly delightful.

For some of us, this constitutes a religious event.

Not all of it works - and not all of it works the way the target audience of jacked-up young males might want it to - but the movie is hugely provocative fun, and I'm pretty sure that's on purpose.

You'll come away from Legendary with no sense of what amateur wrestling is about.

The tacky New Jersey cousin with the nauseous cat, the gold-digging sister, the drug-running nephew — these are cruel cartoons, as grating to the viewer as they are to their hosts. Tucked between the pratfalls, though, is some surprisingly deft comedy.

A sweet, splattery bit of in-jokery; if it’s not actually a good movie, on some level you have to admire the chutzpah of a film set in 1850s Ireland but shot on Staten Island.

Days of Being Wild shows Wong discovering his own cinematic language, and he's as astonished as we are.

Despicable Me has enough visual novelty and high spirits to keep the kiddies diverted and just enough wit to placate the parents.

The saddest part is that "Deck" wastes four comic talents ranging from the near-genius (Matthew Broderick, Danny DeVito) to the inspired (Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth ) to the charming (Kristin Davis of "Sex and the City").

If you've seen the Beatles documentary "Let It Be," you know what four men who are heartily sick of one another look like, and in 2001, Metallica had been recording twice as long as the Fab Four.

The reason to see The Merchant of Venice is Al Pacino.

Don't see the movie if you can't handle two rather sexy senior citizens threatening to meet in body and mind.

Part of the shoujo genre of gently fantastic romantic dramas about and for young teenage girls, it's also funny and creative enough to charm parents, brothers, cousins, and anyone else looking for an openhearted fable.

A predictable conspiracy thriller that somehow ends up diminishing the real urgency of the West's humanitarian disconnect from Africa. If it sends audiences home to log on to the Amnesty International website, terrific -- but that still doesn't make it a very good movie.

It's all breezy and predictable.

Private Fears says that life is a smoldering holding pattern, but Resnais is gracious enough to blanket the embers with eternal snow.

It's a little short on coherence and long on comic-book sensationalism -- dig the hokey, climactic Battle of the Minds between the hero and a cadaverous Mr. Big -- but there's no denying the nightmarish pull of the film's aesthetic.

Way oversold in movie theaters, this pleasantly small shaggy-dog comedy seems more at home on the small screen — even if you do forget why it is you’re smiling by the time the tape finishes rewinding.

Ultimately, the problem with An American Carol is the problem with far too much political discourse in this country, left or right: It highlights the worst excesses of the opposition for the sole purpose of discrediting the vast middle.

Blandly noisy and inoffensively average.

Compact, nasty, and altogether wonderful, a tale of brotherly greed and New York comeuppance that shows an old dog dusting off old tricks using new technology.

It’s the best Tyler Perry movie to date - the writer/director/actor/mogul’s most confident and competent mixture of uplifting black middle-class melodrama and low-down comedy.

Takes your angriest thoughts about urban public transportation and magnifies them into a grubby and rousingly antisocial fantasia on post-communist breakdown and bureaucracy.

In the end, the problem with movies like Dark Blue is that they willfully ignore the systemic, historical, cultural, and class causes of racism in favor of pinning it all on a few bad apples. Sure, that's entertainment. It's also a lie.

There isn't much to The Housekeeper, really, but it plumbs depths of male unease that louder and less wise movies strain to reach.

The general consensus on this one: Rats.

A bleakly funny character study of a very particular species of urban fauna - the sports radio call-in fanatic - Big Fan’ is compulsively watchable.

You never know where Mother is going to go next. All you know is that you're in the hands of a master with an appreciably bent sense of humor.

Irene in Time is the initial first-run feature to debut at the Stuart Street Playhouse, Boston’s newest art house cinema. Both the theater and its audiences deserve much better.

It's a performance (Giamatti's) so nuanced and so real in its everyday pain that it doesn't stand a chance of winning an Oscar. But it should.

Written by Preston Sturges and directed by the great Mitchell Leisen, it's both sexy and touching. [19 Dec 2007, p.F6]

It's a soapy, simplistic, but surprisingly affecting ambisexual melodrama that plays a little like Pedro Almodovar without the surreal frills.

After 152 epic minutes, ‘Lake of Fire’ comes down to this: If you’re not living this woman’s life, maybe you shouldn’t tell her what to do.

The result is Grade-A agitpop, a mixture of archival footage and cheeky, creative animated reconstruction that's funny and frightening in equal measure.

Kung Fu Panda goes nowhere surprising even as its images unscroll handsomely before our eyes. The sound could go out in the theater, and you wouldn't ask for your money back.

Sometimes a cute-stalker movie can win the audience's heart. Management only makes you ponder the line between true love and a restraining order.

The accidental comedy sensation of the year to date.

Watching Gus Van Sant's Gerry is the cinematic equivalent of watching paint dry. I mean that as high praise.

Perfume is a pitch-black period epic of squalor and enterprise.

If Woody Allen were a young, attractive gay woman, he might make something like this, or so Maggenti hopes. But it would probably be funnier, and it would definitely cut deeper.

Take the kids at your peril. Mismarketing aside, Step Brothers is crudely funny, which means that sometimes it's crudely hilarious and more often it's just crude.

Three quarters of Cold Mountain consist of some of the most masterful and absorbing filmmaking of the year. The final quarter is Hollywood business as usual.

The film's comic observations are rich, droll, and more than a little sad: Everyone in this isolated community seems beaten down by life.

The film is as spare and unvarnished as a wooden temple floating on a lake, but its reflections run deep, and it can ripple your thoughts for months.

I'm not the first observer, or even the second, to liken the star's (Penn) portrayal of fictional Louisiana governor Willie Stark to the late John Belushi's impersonation of Joe Cocker.

Across the board, the performances testify, often hilariously, to the pain these characters feel and inflict but are incapable of expressing.

The movie’s a dog, but you almost wish for a sequel, if only to do right by these two.

In short, “Imaginarium’’ is a Terry Gilliam movie and it’s a mess, which over the years have come to mean much the same thing. It’s one of his better messes, though, or at least this critic was won over by its ramshackle whimsies.

There are good performances and fleeting moments of exquisite moviemaking, but the experience as a whole is an evolutionary dead end.

There's a funkier and more interesting movie in Maureen, a character played by Juliette Lewis. Maureen is a single mom, a massage therapist, and a dimwit California follower of every new-age theory out there. She's a nasal, needy wreck, and Catch and Release is torn between adoring her and making ruthless fun of her.

A flaky, tedious, intermittently likable fable about being crazy in a crazy world.

Whenever The Girl Who Played With Fire threatens to stall, Lisbeth whips out her Taser and tortures another sleazy, abusive man into vomiting forth his dirty secrets. In Sweden, I believe they call this "light entertainment.''

Wants to claim Bukowski (1920-1994) as a 20th-century West Coast Walt Whitman -- a people's poet of modern degradation. Through a selective presentation of his writing and a reverently crass treatment of his life, it makes a funny, often intensely moving case, and you're having such a good time that you're glad to let it.

The film's biggest miracle is the straight face Nick Nolte maintains in his role as Socrates.

A movie called Snakes on a Plane had better be one of two things: So bad it's good or so good it's great. Darned if it isn't a little bit of both.

It's like an After-School Special version of "Pan's Labyrinth ," and I actually mean that as a compliment.

Consider this the sequel to "Ernest in the Army " that the late Jim Varney never got around to making. It's not very good but at least it's not evil.

Is Dr. Strangelove Kubrick's best movie? Along with ''Paths of Glory," absolutely.

A delightfully deadpan comedy from Germany, is one of those movies where nothing whatsoever seems to happen until you look closely, at which point everything happens.

There are really only two kinds of big-budget action movies: stupid, and good and stupid. Surprisingly, XXX: State of the Union is good and stupid, which makes it an immediate improvement over 2002's meatheaded "XXX."

As female-bonding comfort food goes, ''Sisterhood" is that rare meal both adolescent girls and their mothers will be able to agree on.

Mrs. Henderson Presents is a very old hat, and Judi Dench wears it beautifully.

The Lives of Others has similarities to Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 classic "The Conversation" but with undercurrents that resound across an entire century of European political history.

The Academy accepts submissions only from real countries, and Palestine isn't one. This is as good a joke, and as dark, as anything in the movie.

One of the most hopeful and heart-rending movies I've seen this year.

The Fall is what you'd get if you told a fiendishly gifted graphic illustrator the plot of "The Princess Bride" and sent him off to come up with his own version.

The film is a disquieting and often very funny examination of yuppie unease in the country. The problem is, it's disguised as a dopey suspense thriller.

A bumptious splatter farce that manages to improve from awful to moderately engaging as its cast is winnowed down to the five guys themselves.

The movie's still shameless; the difference is you don't mind.

A mostly lumbering, occasionally rousing epic that walks a bizarre line between historical fact and Hollywood wishful thinking.

The biggest unresolved question here is why we're paying $9.50, plus popcorn, for something we can presumably get at home for free.

It's coherent, well shot, and tartly acted, but it wears you down like a dinner guest showing off his doctorate.

Old story, new beat: That sums up Feel the Noise, an acceptable if resolutely average low-budget drama set in the New York/Puerto Rican musical melting pot known as reggaeton.

Does have the enclosed, slightly overheated feel of a family theatrical.

Music and nostalgia are what fuel all this filmmaker's movies, though, even a half-baked translation like this one.

Shallow and proud of it, an antic cartoon that lacks the comic inspiration to go the distance.

Like many of us who cherish the safe harbor of old movies, Rose and Cary mourn the fact that they don't make 'em like they used to. If they'd paused to ponder why not, they might have a better movie.

Happy-Go-Lucky isn't one of Leigh's epic social canvases like "Secrets & Lies" or even "Topsy-Turvy"; rather, it's an edgy character study whose message only gradually emerges.

Shockingly, the new film turns out to be very good, at times close to brilliant: a darkly detailed marvel of creative visualization that does well by Dickens and right by audiences - when it’s not trying to sell them a theme park ride.

The result is an expertly made, very watchable film that's curiously lacking in impact. By Polanski standards that has to be a disappointment.

Parents will while away the time in moderate boredom until the film unexpectedly springs to life in its midsection, then just as abruptly goes back to sleep.

Leave it to the French to take the joy back out of sex. The high-minded erotic drama Exterminating Angels has heat but little light; it speaks of pleasure while treating it as a dirty word. The cast huffs and puffs but the exercise, sadly, remains academic.

For all the film's flaws, it has a caustic, nondenominational view of apocalypses to come.

It might even work if In the Cut was remotely convincing as a thriller, but Campion can't help wrinkling her nose at genre.

When Shirley MacLaine made this same movie, more or less, as "Madame Sousatzka," there was a whole lot of acting going on. Sharif brings us to Ibrahim with a modesty that oddly reminds you of why the actor is a legend.

What Moreau does with this role is as inscrutably moving as anything Séraphine Louis painted.

Anvil! is one of the sweetest, funniest films I've seen this year. Also the loudest and most foulmouthed.

Antic, cute, scattershot, it's a remarkable-looking but terribly uncertain bit of CGI fluff, with its richest humor off to the sides of the action and a whole lot of average in the middle.

Funnier than any low-rent rip-off of "There's Something About Mary" has a right to be. It's crass, it's unsophisticated, it aims right for the slapsticky pleasure center of the under-30 moviegoer's brain. So sue me, I laughed. A lot.

Low of brow and pure of heart, the movie plays like "Animal House" extra-lite, and as such it's decent indecent fun.

At its worst, Vacancy is merely the kind of taut B-chiller they don't make any more, other than to riff on them in "Grindhouse."

It's a small, profoundly satisfying movie that keeps echoing long after it's over.

Bra Boys uses reenactments to make the case that Jai acted in self-defense, but the tactic comes off cheap and unconvincing. Worse, the director never bothers to talk to anyone outside the tight coterie of insiders. Why should he when his brothers' freedom is at stake?

Hopper peppers the cast with his usual assortment of fringe players (Dean Stockwell, Crispin Glover, Seymour Cassell), but his own cameo as a horny salesman is an embarrassment, and the dreadful script mistakes cuss words for wit every step of the way.

The chief culprits are Townsend's TV-movie characterizations and a very muddled message.

Hampered by a mopey leading man.

Ghost Rider is the kind of movie that's great stupid fun as long as someone else is buying the tickets.

Dans Paris provides a brooding, poetic echo - an after-dinner mint to a lasting meal.

Skips lightly along the sewers of human depravity as if the trip alone was worth the telling.

An overly muted and cautious piece of work. Watching it is like seeing a man ease out onto the limb of a tree, constantly testing its strength.

Mystery Team is a guilty pleasure - a deeply dumb movie made by pretty smart people.

Tarantino and Rodriguez want you to cover your eyes in disbelief and get the unholy giggles at the same time. You do, but in two very different ways, and that's the movie's strength.

As its title implies, This Is England isn't a hyperstylized head-trip a la "Trainspotting" but a straightforward calling to account.

Disappointingly, Pineapple Express is less than the sum of its ingredients, even if it's still a good stupid time at the movies.

At its intermittent best, Troy suggests a primitive pro-wrestling smackdown with epochal consequences. At its worst, it's a throwback to the ham-fisted sword-and-sandal international coproductions of the early 1960s: "The 300 Spartans" with better sets. Barely.

Where Burton and his screenwriter, Linda Woolverton, go astray is turning this new 3-D version - a sequel, really, about a grown Alice returning to the psychic dreamworld of her childhood - into a fantasy adventure that looks like every other CGI epic out there.

This crudely powerful film is a throwback. Unfolding at an elliptical pace that feels like a revelation, or tedium, or both, Japon recalls the glory days of 1970s art-house filmmaking.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment is that The In-Laws was directed by Andrew Fleming, who delivered the fizzy Nixon-era comedy ''Dick'' a few years back and who also had a hand in ''Grosse Pointe,'' the wicked, briefly-lived WB parody of TV teen dramas. The man obviously knows from satire, but not on the evidence of anything here.

A wan, derivative entry in the torture-porn cycle.

Shot with intentionally banal anti-style - minimal soundtrack music, found sound, jitter-cam - the movie achieves a wisdom that's bigger than it seems.

Absolutely not for feminists, lovers of period films, and anyone whose sensibilities are bruised by over-the-top stuntwork, it's a cocktail made up of three parts testosterone to one part brains.