Wesley Morris

A big, silly party.

The first more-than-halfway-decent movie of a new millennium.

The film is actually a major artistic breakthrough for Araki, a onetime bad boy of independent filmmaking. Its psychological intelligence, attention to emotional currents, and humanity are surprises.

Bully contains some moments of real alarm and, in the school bus, one nightmarish motif.

Even at the movie's most ridiculous (and Mongol is not without its ridiculous moments), this is a picture you laugh with more than laugh at.

Broadway-sized performances.

Turturro tricks you into thinking there's magic realism streaming through this ode to art and commited love - despite there being little magic and not a trace of reality to speak of.

It's so hypnotically breathtaking, you don't realize you're not breathing. By the final shot, you don't realize you're crying either, but there go the tears.

This is territory previously covered in the French film "Ma Vie en Rose," which took a relatively more sophisticated view of both a child's self-expression and adults' discomfort over it.

A triptych whirling on a Lazy Susan of revolving character perspectives.

What remains is Washington's volcanic and contemplative work at the core of a film packed to the rafters with raging bull.

An adrenaline-pumping, post-musical musical.

Exacting but disappointing thriller.

A shrewdly acted, bittersweet comedy.

Zeiger's movie is a timely salute to the risky and brave men and women who had the temerity not only to think for themselves but to speak their minds.

As an up-to-the-minute representation of the specifics of the teen universe, Sleepover lacks authenticity.

Seemingly limitless access is what makes the movie interesting.

Is it a romantic comedy? Is it a chick flick? This is silly, since, in truth, it's neither. It's simply a Julia Roberts movie, often a lovely one.

At its best the film serves as a music appreciation class taught by embattled artists whose cloudy livelihoods grow increasingly uncertain with each bittersweet symphony.

The images in The Song of Sparrows have a poetic grace that's to be desired in storytelling. You feel Majidi's hand much more than you do God's.

As directed by Nobuhiro Yamashita , the sluggish haze between extracurricular activities is exquisitely captured and framed, then patiently edited. Every shot feels like a gift.

Brilliantly, the movie becomes a double coming-of-age story. The parents' political awakening parallels their daughter's.

It's a gas, dude!

A chillingly effective documentary.

A featherweight parlor-room French farce in need of an anchor to keep it from being blown away by the summer blockbuster gales.

Even at 148 minutes (and viewed twice!), you still feel as if you’re watching the longest coming attraction ever for a John Woo movie.

Makes a term like neo-noir seem like a fatuous catch phrase.

Awash in strangeness, a poem that details what it's like to be 13 at the end of a millennium.

It's a parade float atop which Streep can pose and impose. Sometimes her showmanship amounts to shamelessness. She wants us to watch her sack another part.

Nothing here’s overthought or pumped up. To invoke the words of a different beacon of catchiness, “Wham!” is a teenage dream. You could drink it from a coconut.

Through it all, Ozon supplies a sense of pathos that makes fun of its own soullessness, transforming a self-serious suicide note into an existential love letter.

Even by the standards of mental-institution-movie misogyny, what an accidental but predictable creepshow this is.

The voice actors are also excellent, especially Michael-Leon Wooley as a bouncy trumpet-playing alligator and Jim Cummings as a lovelorn Cajun firefly.

While it insists that everyday lives in Araya are full of drudgery and toil, the film fails to produce a single ugly image.

The film spends its first half explaining the song -- famously and vividly about the cycle of Southern lynching. Its better second half-hour unmasks its composer as a compassionate Jewish guy from the Bronx.

It wants, as Kate says about her documentary, to be a "seminal work on beauty and aging." But it wears like a gauzy romantic comedy.

Entertaining.

What begins as unassumingly dull wanders into disarming chaos.

Where most effects-laden extravanganzas aspire to be nothing more than a live-action comic book, The Matrix sees things with the venturesome clarity of a graphic novel.

Gathers a sort of darkness as it comes to its oblique conclusion.

There is no plot in Pen-ek Ratanaruang's exceedingly mellow situation comedy, and that's preferred, frankly.

Watching it is like being lost in somebody's richly moody campfire story -- it's so good, in fact, that only once it's over do you realize you've been holding your marshmallows too close to the flame.

A document of vexing (and vexed) immediacy.

This intriguing story, like many tales of mid-20th-century American art, is fueled by testosterone.

Offers yet another example of how a lot of what we consume is produced at somebody else's expense. In this case, it's sugar.

As ponderous and overwrought as a film hogged by a couple of young hipsters named Roméo and Juliette can be.

At its most effective, the movie is a chastening, sobering, and thorough work of film journalism, however shortsighted.

Like a Sally Field movie by Vittorio De Sica: Zhang wants to affect you with the subtle sting of his politics.

From both sides of the camera, Eastwood works the crowd better than he has in years.

I watched at least a quarter of My Soul to Take, the worst horror movie Wes Craven's made perhaps ever, with the glasses off. It was shot - and is available - in a standard format, and, like many conversions, the 3-D gimmick is like watching a movie through an ashtray.

The cast is strong. Kudrow and Gyllenhaal provide the movie's emotional center.

Loose and funny with verve.

More vulgar than funny.

It's intriguing. To be honest, though, there is less to it all than meets the eye.

Bird also really punches up the ensemble playing. I imagine one of the upsides of being the director of nonhuman beings is that you're trained to respond to characters as much as stars.

A lot of the problem is that the picture's protagonist is both naive and foul.

The director has concocted a tragedy that actually feels tragic.

Beautiful, wandering little love story that wants to break your heart and probably will.

Prince-Bythewood's movie is an occasionally clunky, mostly engaging coming out party for herself.

Thompson - his brilliance, his self-destruction, and the ground he broke - is always at the center, but the film occasionally loses its focus.

Priceless enough to flush "Metro," "Dr. Dolittle" and "Holy Man" from memory.

A lot of the credit for what's right with 'The 40-Year-Old Virgin goes to the screenplay, which Carell and Apatow wrote. They like these characters and, when it matters, they dare to give them feelings, none truer than Andy's.

Crassly funny passages.

Shattered Glass, with its dumb title, is smart about good vs. evil. Incidentally, the good is Lane, who now works at The Washington Post and was a consultant on this picture.

It's an imperfect but ambitious film willing to confront an enormous, complex period in this country.

It’s one of the richer movies you’re likely to see about average Arabs in America.

Its seriousness is welcome. It's also a burden the film can't completely surmount.

It's the videotaped equivalent of a primary research data dump. But to quote Bette Davis by way of Edward Albee: What a dump.

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

In the Land of Women sounds like a piece of cheap science fiction about the last man on earth. If you're the lovelorn mother and daughter in Jonathan Kasdan's first movie, a grating romantic drama, that's painfully close to the truth.

At its core, Quinceañera, a modest but remarkably poignant comedy, is the story of a neighborhood.

In ''Trials,'' Hitchens is almost endearing, stalking Kissinger from one event to the next like a bleary-eyed Michael Moore.

A deep, exhaustive, and moving piece of do-it-yourself detective work.

Moore's roving essay feels even more urgent now than it did when the jury had to make up an award to honor it at the Cannes film festival in May.

If Millennium Mambo is the only chance to see Hou Hsaio-hsien's work at a movie theater, you'd better take it.

At some point we're flashed a junkyard billboard telling us that Collinwood is the ''Beirut of Cleveland'' - yes, but here, it's by way of Looney Tunes.

Dogtooth is slightly less self-congratulatory than the average Dogme movie, a few of which belong to Lars von Trier. This feels, instead, more like an extreme summer at a Dadaist acting camp.

McTiernan's film mines what substance it has from its two stars, but is admittedly about keeping up its own appearances.

There’s a lot of Michael Moore’s ambulatory spirit in this film, which the comedian Jeff Stinson directed. There’s also a lot of the damning comedic commentary that made Rock’s old HBO series so urgent.

Moore can't help but be rotten. She has no grace and little nuance, which is why she's always best as a hard-ass in movies.

Heymann's film was originally a six-part series for Israeli TV. The feature he and his crew have made smoothly truncates those three hours into a rich, discretely damning 85-minute portrait of intolerance.

You aren't likely to see a more ludicrous movie for the rest of the year. But rarely has such ludicrousness been used to pay tribute to a town in need of love. Déjà Vu is generic enough to have been filmed anywhere. But it happens to be set in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Unfortunately, there's never a moment where you can't see Anderson and his co-writer, Will Conroy, yanking on the strings.

Metz is another artist more interested in war's side effects than combat itself, although he and his crew are embedded for battle.

The ballad as it turns out is a duet between a dad and his girl, who'd often rather accentuate the positive than exploit pain, quietly proving that she is her father's daughter.

Plays like a holy, erotic mood piece, steeped in so much subdued jungle fever that it practically runs on photosynthesis.

Like its stunt work, the movie is both ridiculously hyperactive and a muscular feat of absolute confidence. I don't expect to have a more adrenalizing time at the movies this summer.

There's a misery in Fassbender that's spellbinding. I rolled my eyes for most of Shame. But never at him. That face tells the story of addiction: the joylessness of sex.

All the gears, in fact, are shamelessly visible, yet they lock smoothly and resonantly into place. If Akeelah and the Bee is a generic, well-oiled commercial contraption, it is the first to credibly dramatize the plight of a truly gifted, poor black child.

The movie's sense of inspiration is realistic. It never implies a future of glamour, only hard-won success.

An ecstatic sensory experience so overloaded it hardly matters that the narrative has been placed on a back burner.

If there's nothing here for romantics, there's even less for gourmands. Nettelbeck fails to produce a good food metaphor, let alone an impressive, palate-aching preparation montage

The film sends you home moved and in a tuneful mood.

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.

The movie charts its nine-game winning streak and post-season. If there's a problem, it's that there are too few moments like that one with Chavis in the locker room.

The most interesting thing about Smashed is the way Kate, the movie's alcoholic schoolteacher, never looks drunk - at least, not the way drunk people do in the movies.

It doesn't take its ideas or its audience far enough. The result is a humanist potboiler.

Looks and feels like someone else's better-made schlock.