Wesley Morris

Judy Irving's terrific documentary 'The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill is ostensibly about birds, but only in the way that a game of Scrabble is about tiles.

Neither (Bullock/Reynolds) brings out anything good in the other, and watching them try hurts the eyes, the tummy, and the libido.

This is a work of discipline and structure. It’s a situation comedy in the best, classical sense: These people’s ethical problems are sometimes ours. I’ve been Beth. I’ve been Don. And I had to watch half of what they’re dealing with through my fingers.

This isn't a rousing movie as much as a reassurance. The brothers (Coens) prove they can play it straight, but they're preferred, for better and worse, at a sharp angle.

Blair Witch forgoes a literal boogeyman in favor of the unseen, which, in this case, is as scarily bone-chilling as anything they could show you.

An undernourished exercise in pop critique.

As ambitious as this may be, however, the movie's objectives tax its energy even as the girls' plight tears at your heart.

Many of the backgrounds look like watercolors that are either drying or dying.

The Mill and the Cross captures the wish that some of us have had while standing in front of a great painting. What hangs before us is so striking, beautiful, strange, vast, horrifying, ethereal, lifelike - so alive - that we're desperate to enter the other side of the canvas, to be inside the painting.

It would be a stretch to call The Simpsons Movie more than a crisper, livelier-looking episode of the series. The change in mediums changes nothing.

All of that observation in Babylon amounts to something that still feels new. You’re looking at people who, in 1980 England, were, at last, being properly, seriously seen.

Tokyo Sonata, in so many senses, is about an allergic reaction to the very idea of what it means to be Japanese. The characters misplace their belief in etiquette, politesse, dignity, and propriety - or they struggle to maintain it.

At its best when it's hovering around the muted dysfunction between a father and a son, who never understood each other to begin with.

Death doesn't knock in Theo Angelopoulos' Eternity and a Day; it raps softly, sitting patiently in the waiting room of its terminally ill poet's life until he's ready to let it in.

This is an easy movie to spoil. It's rather plotless. But things happen in precisely the way that life happens.

A must-see.

The movie's assemblage of audio interviews poured mostly over astounding race footage is fit for a shrine.

Touching and brisk.

I've never seen a movie so perfectly balanced between unabashed nerdiness and hipness.

Oasis is that rare miraculous whirlwind romance that moves from attempted rape to reverence without kicking up a lot of dust.

Full of action, but no soul.

This is a movie that feels in all its vividness, specificity, and honesty - and in its amateurish screenwriting, too - like something found from the early- to mid-1990s, when American independent moviemaking encouraged far more conversations about the sexuality of young, brown girls in movies like "Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.'' and "I Like It Like That.''

An elegy for a vanishing emblem of what once characterized this country's vitality.

Like laughing into a mirror for 113 minutes.

The movie feels exhaustive in its loaded 90-something minutes, showing and telling us much while leaving the meaning of the tangles and twists in this family open to interpretation. For once, the tip of the iceberg is enough.

Some bad movies can make you feel awful for the people who made them and worse for the audience that shows up. The actors, the script, the camera: There's nowhere good they can go. For Greater Glory is that kind of bad movie: a total embarrassment.

If the second hour or so isn't as strong as the first, it's because the filmmaking fails to rise to the injustice that's befallen its subjects since their exoneration. It can't, really.

A vicious horror flick with an actual beast and someone who just acts like one.

At once a stifling exercise in thwarting emotional dynamics and a heated invitation to engage in the film's discourse on the shortcoming of sexual politics and justice in a media-saturated land.

A marvelous, uncommonly observant, and unexpectedly rousing group portrait.

The movie has you from its nearly wordless opening sequence.

Part of what hooks you to this movie is how Leth outsmarts his taskmaster, and how the two men have divergent, almost incompatible aesthetic ideals.

This is a film of our times - paranoid, heartbroken, disillusioned - and the rare recent American movie whose characters react the way actual people might.

Downey appears to like all this make-believe. Even the clunky dialogue sounds witty out of his mouth. This is not a part that makes great demands on his talent, and his slummy approach to it is amusing.

Rarely is a movie audience asked to put up with so much noise for such a thankless payoff.

"Grin Without a Cat" brilliantly used montage and a wide intellectual scope to speculate about the history of war and revolution. "Grinning Cat" is a more modest achievement, but the director's wisdom remains robust.

It's inspired of Sachs to lean on Russell for a kind of oblique emotional depth. But it's possible to leave this movie mistaking Sachs's soul for Russell's.

If Keane is a downer, it's a stupendously well-conceived one.

Yellow Submarine takes a magical mystery tour through the history of art and spends a splendiferous good time splashing in the pop art of it all.

Zodiac is a kind of corrective remake of "Se7en," a renunciation of that earlier movie's psychotic nihilism. That rejection extends to a neat sight gag. Fincher gives us a shot of a cardboard cutout for "Dirty Harry" that mocks the personal abyss that catching Zodiac becomes.

Suffice it to say that Chris Smith's Home Movie is the most bananas episode of ''Cribs'' ever. The film is Smith's ballad of the wacky homeowner.

A knock-down, haywire ballad of the adrenalinization of love and despair.

Some girls fight over men. Ballerinas fight over parts. But the occasional brilliance of Black Swan is that it's a one-way fight. Nina battles herself.

The finished film, which was completed in about 11 days, has the tidiness and optimism of a fable. But it showcases certain hard facts of life in a war-torn country whose scars have yet to heal.

The movie is a block of paper that, when Tsai's finished with it, becomes a chain of snowflakes. Loneliness doesn't often get such a gorgeously ornate tribute.

Entertaining.

Has to be appreciated simply for doing its job, for being the only thriller I've seen recently that made me wonder how my knuckles ended up in my mouth.

A sound piece of profiling that has miles of archival footage of the affable, pop-eyed Langlois enthusing.

Her (Anderson) performance is a study in the difference between hubris and pride, remarkable for how unshowy but profoundly devastating it is.

A gentle collection of scenes that work and scenes that don't.

The majestic pageant of images - no sylvan landscape has been this indelibly, dimensionally alive - is inextricably welded to the multifold spiritual / ecological questions about the future that Miyazaki is contemplating.

Not about crashing into walls or crashing into other people. It's about crashing into yourself and living to tell the tale.

It's hugely entertaining.

The resulting film is nobly ridiculous and ridiculously noble, doing everything in its power to subvert the dross it's fooling around with.

This movie catalogs a wealth of human ugliness. It’s even been made to look ugly, presumably to underscore the horror movie that is Precious’s life.

A smartly observed, unpretentious, and unconventional comedy of manners -- or more properly, it's a comedy of mannerisms.

This is that rare art flick whose subject goes nuts because his work is not self-indulgent ENOUGH.

The film feels like bare- bones docu-fiction, though, resisting the attendant drama until the bitter, grisly end.

Watching the uncertain and disappointing new apartheid documentary Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony'' is like going to the lecture of an impassioned but really disorganized professor.

Some will find it chicly inspired, recalling blaxploitation's heyday with its grimy urban realism. Some will rightly find it corny, absurd, and an insultingly limited presentation of options for the most disenfranchised African-Americans: I'm still waiting for the movie fantasy about the pimp who wants to get his GED.

The longer the film goes on, the more you crave a vaster history of modern Liberia, originally a colony founded by former slaves from the United States.

The welcome hints at emotional excess are compromised by the blunt force of the movie's political point-making.

The trouble is that despite how earnest and committed Mr. Zahs appears to be, the story of what’s in the collection might be more be more fascinating than the man who’s collected it.

Installment six of the Harry Potter’ series, The Half-Blood Prince, merely gets us one movie closer to the finale, which, apparently is so big (and by big, I mean “$$$$’’) that it’s being split into two parts.

Quite easily Live-in Maid could have descended into a kind of Joan Crawford-Bette Davis gorgon salute. But everyone here seems way too smart for that, though apparently the movie is being prepped for an English-language version. So beware.

Maddin's movies are easy, too. Point your eyes at the screen; the magic follows.

It’s impressive that Alami can put all this across — romance, suspense and, in the moving final act, a kind of tragedy — and maintain the movie’s nimbleness. But he’s a natural storyteller.

A dashing fusion of the literary and the cinematic.

Spellbinding.

Bay's strength as a filmmaker, the reason his superficial yet entertaining productions can never be completely ignored, is that he appears to lack shame. He'll blow anything up and run anybody over. The moral complexities don't matter to him. He just wants to stage spectacles, appreciate very good-looking people, and assert his cowboy aesthetic.

Waste Land is just what the film's website says it is: "stirring evidence of the transformative power of art and the alchemy of the human spirit."

Segues from the merely quirky into the bizarrely unthinkable.

This is a film about small victories, huge defeats and finding the will to keep fighting.

Setting aside some gratuitous jump scares, Eggers has now made a Dracula movie that’s more than an exercise, more than an assertion of talent. There’s a vision at work.

The movie is a work of ambivalence. Is English making fun of these women? Or is she making a pilot for Lifetime?

There's scarcely any dialogue, and the "hukkle" sound is universal enough to make subtitles unnecessary and to please an audience of any age and attention span.

It's one of the great movies on the vicissitudes of love, commitment, and attraction.

Ethereal.

Renders the juicy bits of the artist's life in two hours of pulsing highlights that suggest a man who never really had any emotional or psychic downtime.

The movie is so chilly and fundamentally empty at its core that we're more or less on the outside looking in.

A hip-hop cousin of Prince's ''Purple Rain,'' which had braver fashion sense and better original songs.

Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck's film is a fascinating look at the intersection of commerce, celebrity, and controversy.

The movie gets lost in the gulf between standard, if illuminating, biography and roiling existential crisis.

The scenes between Montgomery and Stone in plainclothes would seem to be tangential to Moverman's movie, but they're very much its point. Only in uniform do these men make sense to themselves.

It's all a treat to behold, and, at least where the turtle and the jellyfish are concerned, it's transcendently beautiful, too. I just wish there was more of it.

It's the tone of the movie's two sides - action and stillness, graphic violence and romantic melodrama - that don't cohere.

Never has a movie so soberingly made the fight to save life and the struggle to hold on to it seem so futile.

Staggering, gorgeously ambiguous.

Nothing has brought me more cheap pleasure at a movie this year than the sight of shampoo and conditioner bottles falling off a rocking wall while comedian Alec Mapa, as a fellow stylist, tries to keep a straight face. He does a much better job than I did.

Really the film is a deft first-person character study with a war zone for a background.

The biggest problem with this movie - not that it's mediocre, dull, or barely written (though it's guilty on all counts). It's that Carrey himself is miscast.

One wishes Incantato was made of something other than musty air. Avati provides no real emotional counterweight for all the whimsy and nonsense, and the movie carries neither the force of morality nor the titillation of trashiness.