Wesley Morris

The musician is candid about his own demons and gives the filmmakers access to his wife, two very different daughters, and, for a nicely done montage, his family photographs.

A perversely enjoyable, occasionally harrowing adaptation of José Saramago's 1995 disaster allegory.

Leconte's writing is tight and nimble, and while the tests of the duo's friendship are facile, under the circumstances, they make sense. The bond between Francois and Bruno approximates the real thing; Leconte seems to be arguing that you can grow a flower from fake soil.

It's a startling, speedy, gracefully executed indictment.

Expanded, Major Dundee is still a mess of great scenes sprinkled among some fairly monotonous action.

This is a disarming and, in its own way, delightful vehicle for its star and executive producer, the comedian and actress Mo'Nique. Who could hate this movie?

The Protector is about 84 minutes long, and only four of those minutes are devoted to plot.

The title is Portuguese for "send a bullet" and the clever American tag line is "the rich steal from the poor; the poor steal the rich."

Ripe, ferociously acted comic drama.

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

This is moviemaking that honors the craftsmanship of its subject.

For 75 minutes or so, Air Doll is the lightest of Kore-eda’s movies, which include the superb “Nobody Knows’’ (2004) and “Still Life’’ (2008). Gradually, though, the tender music-box score — by one-man Japanese band world’s end girlfriend — is tinged with foreboding.

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.

As amusing as it is, the comedy here consists mostly of predictable potshots.

The film is often at odds with itself as a sincere work of romantic comedy, as Wilder's sometimes were, too. Nonetheless, it's determined to keep Clooney's considerable comedic skills front and center. He's never been looser, sexier, or more antic.

The director has concocted a tragedy that actually feels tragic.

The movie is always entertaining and frequently smart about the new ground one girl will break to humiliate another.

Ben Stiller is like a guy on the 1919 White Sox. He's rigged to lose. His comedy is the stuff of failure, and sometimes it's pleasurable watching him flit around in funny get-ups, only to have a pretty costar put him down.

Streep is in movie star mode, and she’s irresistible. But Baldwin achieves something not many men have been able to with Streep: You notice him.

Deceptively keen as both a paranoid political thriller and a caveat against the trustworthiness of your friends and neighbors.

Into the Blue is as much a mesmerizing aquatic expedition as it is a reasonably suspenseful action adventure.

What remains of the book's psychological underpinnings -- there are enough here to leave a permanent dent in the couch of any Freud-loving shrink

At the heart of most of these encounters is talk about the nature of relationships -- cousins, twins, and peers. Mostly, though, Jarmusch displays an unexpected interest in the ironies and banalities of fame.

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

Spirited, madly educational docu-quickie.

The film's insistence on the men's innocence is matter of fact. But it's also an urgent corrective to the suspicious eye the movies so often cast on Arabs and Islam.

The movie is corny enough to remind you that boxing rings are square.

Debbie gets away with being such a cauldron of extremes because the airy-voiced Mann is extremely good at playing them. She happens to be Apatow's wife (the kids in the movie are theirs), and with the possible exception of Téa Leoni , it's hard to imagine who else could get away with this combination of needling and affection.

It's as much a satire as a mystery, a film as much about art as it is about faith.

They're not looking to say anything grand. What they do say - and what we see - is smart and true.

Stirs excitement about exploration of all kinds.

The movie is seriously sexy and seriously entertaining.

Seemingly limitless access is what makes the movie interesting.

Busch combines French absurdist theater and American performance art with a drag queen's flamboyant wit.

Demonstrates an idiosyncratic human touch. Kon is unafraid of the unseemly and unsightly. People are captured as they really might be.

Overnight is about all kinds of in-the-moment emotional rawness.

Everyone Else is not about hurricanes and earthquakes and knives in the back. It's about private, emotional phenomena: the tiny tremors and imperceptible shifts that bring a couple closer together or drive them apart, almost without their noticing.

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

Octubre is a quick, quiet movie that distills Lima, Peru, to a downtrodden version of its more dynamic current self.

Korine is finding his way toward artistic greatness by searching his soul. It's possible that the man in the mirror is him.

Where the average Japanese horror flick is petulant and nasty, Pulse is dolorous, shivery, and surreal.

The performance often errs on the side of cartoon, but it's laced with flashes of remorse and chagrin, with sincerity. When Carrey tries to do "dramatic acting'' the life always goes of out him.

The journey is not very exciting, but the destinations are inspired.

For a film about the power of speech, it's the quiet moments of rapture that say everything.

The remake isn't openly nostalgic. In a sense, this is another sexy vampire movie. But Farrell does something special with the sexuality: It's simultaneously omnivorous, dangerous, and a hoot.

If there's true magic to be found in the proceedings, it's in Garai's dexterous performance.

A skillfully managed fairy tale about a mouse, a rat, and fairy tales in general.

Revelatory.

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.

This is a party, and you're either having a good time or wondering when Akin is going to get down to business. But for an hour and a half, fun is the business.

CJ7 is precisely the 80-something minutes of delirium and cheesy special-effects you'd expect from the man responsible for the chaos of "Shaolin Soccer" and the lunacy of "Kung Fu Hustle."

In Robot Stories, technology hasn't colonized human life, it's finding ways to make living (and loving) better.

Anyone looking for a more practical horror film than ''The Fog" should try The Future of Food.

On the one hand, welcome to the music business. On the other, if A Tribe Called Quest can't stay together who can? It's a worry that eventually gets at the eccentricity of both the music and the movie.

Loose and funny with verve.

Not only does the movie look like it's set somewhere, it feels, cinematically, to have arrived from someplace - early John Cassavetes, the French New Wave, Eastern Europe.

The reliable Mike Newell directs Mona Lisa Smile with such assurance that the important moments are never mawkish or dull, and he encourages the women to act with absolute conviction.

A gorgeous sliver of grown-up ambrosia.

It's the most liberated and alive [DeNiro]'s been since his deluded Rupert Pupkin tried to kidnap Jerry Lewis in "King of Comedy."

The movie puts us so close to so much yet keeps its emotional distance -- as if to say, no matter how much we see, we'll never truly know.

A rarity for documentaries. The movie is a full-tilt farce, and were it not completely true, it'd be a piercing satire that Preston Sturges might have polished into a resonant screwball.

The deft, hilarious Notting Hill finds Grant's dour-droll-deprecating affliction at its most dead-on.

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

It has a sense of small-town America that feels special even without great specificity. Some of the music on the soundtrack places it in 2007 or 2008, but, really, the film occurs outside of time, virtually outside of place (it's suburban Detroit), and in a void of cultural chic.

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

Marshall reveals himself to be a terrific showman of chaos and comic savagery. This is Baz Luhrmann's "Mad Max."