Wesley Morris

A terribly self-satisfied lecture about the ubiquity of quantum physics in spiritual life, is dishonest enough to suggest that even its cavalcade of scientists and mystics might not know anything about such topics as reality and the sub-atomic world.

Duplicity so thoroughly equates sex and money that, in a manner apt for a recession, the audience is rewired when it's over. You don't care whether they love each other. You just want to see them paid.

Curran is a talented director, especially where his actors are concerned. His previous movie, "We Don't Live Here Anymore," an adaptation of two Andre Dubus stories, was another literary adultery drama featuring Watts. The Painted Veil doesn't achieve the fire that characterized that film.

The movie turns what could have been a tedious meta-movie exercise into a sincere dour farce.

Stooge-filled farce offers low laughs but lacks a point.

Never has this war been filmed with such ragged glory.

The movie has a lot going for it. In less than 90 minutes, it walks us through sketches of Vreeland's private life and the formulation and decades-long execution of her philosophy in the pages of Harper's Bazaar and Vogue. The energy here is a selling point.

Everyone in this overstaffed showbiz sampler has been better somewhere else. An assortment of talented comedians, character actors, professional athletes, sports commentators, one rapper, and two former sitcom stars sit in this movie like too much food on a buffet cart.

With "Dogtooth," the point was: Don't try this at home. Now, the expanded lesson is: Don't try this anywhere.

Seemingly limitless access is what makes the movie interesting.

You don't need to be a "comic-book person" to find the set pieces exhilarating. But if you are such a person, or a fan of the movies that comic books turn into, The Avengers feels like the moment you've been waiting for.

Groovy.

Joshua is the sort of movie in which nobody does what you would do: like spank or demand an extra-strength time out.

Once the final character has put the last puzzle piece in place, courtesy of an epic explanation, a kind of relief sets in: Someone just needed to spell it all out. It does not entirely help.

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

Revelatory.

Like watching somebody else's flashback and wondering what you were doing then instead.

Boy A comes frustratingly close to succeeding as tragedy.

Clearly, there's a story here. The documentary The Other Dream Team tells it in a smart, lively, if somewhat hectic fashion.

The best thing about Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone is that it really is the story of Fishbone. It's a hearty, thoughtful, smartly assembled, vaguely complete documentary about a rock band that, even by the standards of out-there musical acts, seemed out there both in the mid-1980s and even now.

Works more as an object of pop curiosity than as a work of popular entertainment.

A runny intimate portrait that doesn't trust Tammy Faye Messner and her story to enthrall you. So they've all but spelled it out: k-i-t-s-c-h.

The story is a mess. But On Guard was directed by the reliable Philippe de Broca, who imbues the whole affair with high-calorie silliness.

The movie doesn't hang together as a thriller, and the characters don't hang together as interesting people.

Tom Cruise might have saved his family from apocalypse. But Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn have just saved our summer.

Really just a lurid potboiler.

The movie effectively rids you of any notion that owning a cougar or a python is a good idea.

It's deeply stylized, but there's an accompanying patience and gravity that are hard to shake. They're the architecture of a lingering, unsentimental sadness.

We have lots of terminology for what happens when two male stars appear to have the platonic hots for each other. The genre is called bromance. The feelings are bromantic. The orientation is bromosexuality. What Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum have in 21 Jump Street scrambles, transcends, and explodes all of that.

It takes a while for the movie to build to its wicked possibilities and only a few scenes to squander them.

The worst thing about the first Quentin Tarantino picture in five years is that after 93 minutes of some of the most luscious violence and spellbinding storytelling you're likely to see this year, Kill Bill ends.

It infuriated me. It broke my heart. It convinced me that Caro, who's from New Zealand, is a strong, clear-voiced filmmaker

Roskam appears more interested in trying to combine genres that don't easily cohere. On one hand, the film's a crime-thriller and police procedural. On the other, it's about the lingering trauma of Jacky's personal misfortune. The other hand is much stronger.

Roth, though, is like a sociopathic arsonist, one enthralled with his ability to start little blazes and one who would even call the fire department, but wouldn't stick around to see whether anyone put them out.

This movie could have been a nagging, preachy headache had either man exhibited a tendency for self-righteousness. But both are friendly, almost humble about their mischief.

The movie's patient in the way of "El Bulli: Cooking in Progress" or "Jiro Dreams of Sushi." That's where culinary nonfiction is now - sleepy, observant. And, for the most part, that's OK.

The decadence is obvious. But true to the Valentino prerogative, it's beautiful - sad, too: a dream life moving into the unknown.

I wanted to keep watching. I wanted to leave. In between, I prayed for the piano-accordion soundtrack to silence itself for just one scene (it's like being trapped in a little French restaurant that refuses to close).

Doesn't have what it takes to be truly terrible.

The fun is in watching these robustly generic people trip over and pinball off of each other, seeing them eddy around Carell, who as the straight man here is getting dangerously close to Greg Kinnear's territory - where comedy is too self-serious to laugh at.

By aiming for something more ambitiously, ambiguously philosophical, [Sayles] forgot to include a heart and a soul.

The camera is just everywhere, from the point of view of everything. When I left the movie the other night, people complained of seasickness.

Binoche is the ideal creature for that kind of cosmetic expansion, and, here, her thorough modernity takes on an almost cruddy, Italian sadness.

Hopped up on standard action riffs, most of the film feels like hand-me-downs purchased from the John Woo outlet.

Brims with forboding, but it pulses with candy colors and the hum of neon signs.

The writers don’t write, the director doesn’t really direct, and the actors don’t exactly act. They wait for the movie’s contraptions to impale them.

The film quickly becomes one of the most powerful, carefully researched investigations of the moral-legal side effects of current American military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's terrifying in a way that sneaks up on you.

A richer movie might speculate on McGartland’s life now. How does a local hero survive in an anonymous void?

The movie's afraid of [Stiles], turning Kat from riot grrrrl to Solid Gold dancer in the time it takes to drop one Notorious B.I.G. song at that house party - which is why it's the Spam of processed teen movies.

This is a trenchant emotional thriller that you watch in dread, awe, and amazing aggravation. It's entirely predicated upon the outcome of bad decisions - and it is not a comedy. The situation that unfolds approaches the absurdity of farce but denies the relief and release of humor. It's a tragic farce. No option or choice is to be envied.

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

Indeed, woe be to the child who doesn't mist up at this movie, since it's been made if not with zip, wit, or imagination, then at least with sweetness. But I hope no one will think the film is an adequate replacement for White's book. That would be a crime.

This movie wants to cover every base without thinking very deeply about them. So while a lot of ground is covered in 80 brisk minutes, the information presented is only abstractly useful.

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

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.

A tedious, soapy romp about overlapping lives and destiny.

You might cheer. You might cry. For a minute, you might even wish it were you on that medal stand.

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.

Gibney has too much information, too much material, and too many people to shape a mystery or a drama or even a farce out of it all. His movie has elements of all three without ever sustaining one.

Vigalondo is only partially capable of building suspense (the film's latter stages contain one knot too many); his achievement owes more to his imagination than his pop craftsmanship.

Holofcener writes as well as Albert Brooks at his best, and her finesse with actors is as assured as James L. Brooks's on his TV and film projects from 20 and 30 years ago.

It's scenic, confidently directed and performed, dutiful, faithful, revelatory, informative, and largely involving. Rarely, however, is it any <I>fun</I>.

What is the value of art in times of strife? Should people be sitting in the theater or rioting in the streets? Walter's film reminds us that once there was a man whose work made no distinction between the two.

What the writer and director, Lance Daly, means as some kind of transporting urban adventure for them is a disenchanting slog for us.

A crafty, sometimes craven, but hardly worshipful snapshot of an unlikely candidate for biggest rock act on earth.

The movie doesn't trust that an illuminating comedy of pathetic people can be entertaining for long, so it sprinkles some hormones on the proceedings.

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

It's too cryptic and unfulfilled to serve as a tool for anything beyond its own obfuscation.

More of a sand-and-noodles western set in the Far East.

The movie dreamily conjures up the outlaw's last months, and it's gorgeous, but long, cumbersome, and slightly shallow.

You needn’t actually see Fracture to know that if the charge is acting that winks, these two are guilty.

If anyone is capable of pulling off a deviled screwball with cheeky panache, it's de la Iglesia, who's one of the world's great nutty directors yet to find the American following he so richly deserves.

Is a truly political stoner movie even possible? The entire point of getting high is to take some of the sting out of life. The movie goes after easy targets and goes soft on the harder issues.

Norton is unapologetic and unflappable in his part. Slimy and vaguely nerdy, he's become the thinking man's thug, even if this character's Armani-wear is better tailored than his psychology.

Amazingly, no one seems steeped in the salubrious self-explication of therapy. They just sound like very good storytellers.

Most crucially, Barrymore encourages Page to just let herself go. The sight of her making her way up residential streets in a pair of Barbie roller skates or screaming “Marco’’ in a game of Marco Polo is simply joyful.

The movie doesn't exactly argue anything. It's mostly a collection of scenes and footage, directed by Losier in plumes of abstraction and unified by Megson's voice-over.

Duvauchelle is actually the best thing in the movie.

This is a long, heavy film, in which Scorsese’s aerobic moviemaking turns mannered and uncharacteristically passive.

As formulaic, but occasionally outr&#233; multiplex-bound behemoths go, Gladiator is a foaming beast.

Moon might be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for fans of Sam Rockwell. Will there ever be more of him in one movie than there is here?

I left as frustrated as that band teacher is at the beginning of the movie. Enough with these meek, banal exercises, David Gordon Green. Hit me with the sledgehammer in your heart.

One of Lee's unsung gifts as a filmmaker is his discovery of that place between eye-popping surrealism and wrenching Greek tragedy.

This is not “Death of a Salesman’’ or “Save the Tiger’’ (in the case of the latter, thank God). But how refreshing to see a movie about a mother’s struggles that doesn’t culminate in her lying on her back to make ends meet.

This stuff is clever, in the reflexively satirical, self-aware way that many animated films are. It's not until the dog is accidentally shipped off to New York City that the movie lets you in on an altogether more interesting idea: It doesn't want to be that cool.

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

The movie feels incomplete and uncentered. It's like a grand magazine profile that's all reportage and absolutely no prose.

Only loosely concerned with behind-the-scenes gossip and is squarely focused on the nature of Fellini's insatiability.

Leans so heavily on its stars that their performances are marred by their emptiness.

I can't pretend to know fully what Charlie Kaufman is up to in Synecdoche, New York, with all the doubled characters, dreamy reenactments, comical minutiae, and personal unhappiness. But I got a great deal of pleasure out of watching him mount his fantasia about an artist suffering not simply for his art, but because of it.

Is, in its way, an apolitical comedy about politics. Or at least a naïve one, since those weapons likely eventually made their way into the hands of Al Qaeda.

The whole thing ends with an urgent plea to visit the movie's site, which is partially devoted to The Issues, which involve such topics as "overmedication," "overtreatment," and "reimbursement."

Here's all you really need to know in order to determine whether Julie Delpy's 2 Days in Paris is something you need to experience for yourself: Her blond hair is often all frizz, and she prefers glasses with a big black frame. She's Mia AND Woody.

The movie star Julie Christie turned 62 last month, and anyone under the impression that she merely floated through her prime heedless of the age in which she worked should catch her in A Decade Under the Influence.

It's a portrait of the artist as Mary Poppins.

The pleasure of this small, eccentric movie is the natural way Carano hurts people - by, say, walking partway up a wall and climbing onto a man's back, by sprinting toward the camera and flying into the human target standing in the foreground.

The grown-ups in Lucia Puenzo's XXY are a glum lot.

The art direction is reliably vivid and hyperreal, but director Satoshi Kon and company can't articulate how mentally taxed Mima is without confusing us.

The film, which is as economically made as it is primitively animated, ambles from adventure to adventure, taking nothing seriously, not even itself.

If 'The Flower of Evil' is not vintage Claude Chabrol, it's at least vintage mediocre Claude Chabrol.

A patient, suspenseful exercise in genre craftsmanship

Basically an addiction thriller in which the thirst is for the acquisition and execution of knowledge. So you need an actor who seems surprised by how smart he is but not afraid to be charmingly intelligent. Cooper turns out to be perfect for the part.

The King of Staten Island is one of those 10-block-radius life slices whose smallness and intimacy ought to be a virtue. But the movie seems afraid of itself.

This sounds like a fairly standard debut. But Wong smothers the story with tremendous style. Some directors give you a healthy ratio of mashed potatoes to gravy. Wong seems not at all to care for the potatoes.

Implausibly dainty.

The first-time filmmaker aspires to show us what caused him to leave his neighborhood and stay gone for 20 years. All I can really glean is that the place was too loud.

In the absolutely moving new documentary Watermarks, seven women in their 80s return to the Vienna swimming pool of their youth.

A standard issue, first-movie navel-gaze whose cobwebs Braff meticulously sweeps away by directing the bejesus out of it. The photography makes loveliness out of the film's dank, hung-over atmosphere; the camerawork and editing lend the movie a luscious daydreaminess.

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.

It really only comes alive in its shots of people in the neighborhood sitting around their television sets. What we're really talking about here is a problem in scope. In Hamburger's film, the world is no bigger than a cup.

A distant thematic and artistic cousin of Sofia Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides" and Lucrecia Martel's "The Holy Girl."

Watching the movie made me long for the big , risky ideas and entertainingly fearless filmmaking in David O. Russell's "I Heart Huckabees " and Spike Jonze's "Adaptation ," which Kaufman wrote. Both were similarly conceptual escapades, but they let it all hang out.

Cairo Time is a kind of bourgeois delusion. It's authentically aggravated but bogusly conceived.

These are women who seemed raised on Louisa May Alcott and might have been aspirationally besotted with Jane Austen. But you sense tragedy looming. They're hurtling, inexorably, toward Tennessee Williams.

As films about the young and the horny go, I preferred the smarter approach director Jeffrey Blitz takes in "Rocket Science."

A bizarre film.

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

You have to admire that someone thought it’d be cool to assemble three of the movies’ most fascinating noses for a 90-minute romp.

There is actually an occasional moment of inspiration, but as an experience, the movie doesn't hog much shelf space in the memory.

What Christlieb and Kijak do so well is keeping these folks from not seeming like loons.

The movie is as modestly unpretentious as David O. Russell's "Spanking the Monkey."

Weirdly enthralling film.

It's the rawest, most hot-blooded, provocatively audacious, dangerous movie to come of out Hollywood this year.

Watching Jackson pop, lock, rock, writhe, thrust, and clutch his crotch, even at 50 percent, leaves a feeling of woe: This show really would have been major.

Watching them issue hugs produces an involuntary response. You want to hug them, too.

I can't say why Coppola wanted to spend time with this man. It's like following someone on Twitter who fails to generate many compelling tweets.

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 powerful film of suffering and sacrifice and desperation. But it's vacuous, banal, and, where its mix of sentiment and grisliness is concerned, rather despicable.

Silly little thriller.

The movie is only so-so, borrowing a little from the VH-1 school of popumentary but lacking the snazzy production values.

But that ending is a whopper all the same: a heartless blast of tragedy, exploitation, amusement, and general flagrance.

A fine film of few words and very little motion.

The movie is like an extra-strength episode of MTV's ''Diary,'' which is like ''A&E Biography'' in the first person. Only ''Resurrection'' has a subject who's been dead for six years.

At its core, a perceptive satire of the interpersonal boiling points in buddy-cop pictures.

You can see what this movie is after, something cockeyed but sincere, something in the neighborhood of Paul Mazursky, Elaine May or Alexander Payne. But the writing and filmmaking (Snyder directed) just aren’t quick enough.

Things stay standard-issue French self-analytical from here.

The film is alt-schmaltz, and it'll do.

This third installment is the loudest, dopiest, and least inventive of the three. But what the movie...lacks in intelligence it makes up for in sheer doom.

This is blissful moviemaking. Much of the pleasure we have in watching it comes from seeing Tucci and, obviously, Streep connect.

This is what the ongoing onslaught of comic book movies lacks: stars. Real stars. Robert Downey Jr. is the exception when he should be the rule. It's possible we take these movies for granted because the marketing tells us we should.

Doesn't America's 50-and-fabulous set deserve better than a movie this superficial and pandering?

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

Not a happy time at the movies. It bears the distinction of bringing to the screen a dark nugget of history.

The least opaque of Antonioni's films, unburdened by stylishness and his imagistic inflammations.

For all the blathering, heavy-handed pathos, we might as well be watching the Lifetime cable channel.

As is par for the course in a "Fast and Furious'' movie, the only persuasive physical intimacy is between the men.

In addition to being his filthiest, this is his most free-associative movie. In spite of and because of its homemade look, it's also his funniest.

You put up the cash, the movie clunks.

Like the horror-flick hacks who infest Hollywood like termites, the Pangs don't build suspense, they assault the senses with twitchy photography and Danny's editing.

Carancho is a particularly jaw-dropping example of what this great, cunning city - on film, anyway - is capable of: an exhilarating bummer.

Stardust certainly could have gone somewhere fun. But the magic and zip you need to get a blimp like this off the ground is scarce.

We are treated to the riotous, almost David Lynchian moment in which Ferrell runs around a motorway in his undies screaming that he's on fire. He's not. Actually, come to think of it: He is.

Swift, brutal, lurid, often overheated, and occasionally comical, but it’s also a serious, well acted, and unromantic exploration of the rise and demise of a terrorist gang whose radicalism ultimately reached beyond the young men and women who set it in motion.

To love Wilco is to believe in a certain rustic intelligence about popular music (and about yourself) and to embrace the Tweedy worldview that you need sarcasm and vagueness to cope with the pitfalls of sincerity.

Part Marxist social drama and part Michael Moore corporation-needling, with fed-up residents trying to outsmart the big, bad naive company to keep their lights on for free.

Very much a genre picture, relying on notions of suspense, surprise, and comeuppance. Indeed, at the center of this movie is a question of whether what we're seeing is really to be believed.

You get the sense that the cheap thrill of cheating is like putting a Band-Aid on a broken bone. The movie feels just as inadequate emotionally and psychologically. There's a lot of outward behavior but no inner life.

This is extreme comedy, and it's amazing how director Jeff Tremaine, who along with Spike Jonze has been affiliated with this troupe from its outset, creates an environment where self-inflicted torture is uncontrollably funny without being morally offensive.

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

It's debatable whether watching Huffman get dressed, take hormones, and learn to use a more feminine diction could sustain an entire movie, but the character is certainly a creation more original than a lot of the film itself.

Her face is as much a part of her comedic form as her observations are. It's an amazing slapstick instrument, creating a scrapbook of living mug shots.

The movie is seriously sexy and seriously entertaining.

As an ad for the city's charms, Paris couldn't have asked for a more sweetly jaundiced love letter.

If even half of Olivier Dahan's robust film about Piaf's life is true -- and let's face it, much remains shrouded in myth and mystery -- it's a wonder she could get dressed in the morning, let alone forge a legendary singing career.

The movie begins to run out of gas as it racks up a body count, but even the mad-scientist and I-created-a-monster clichés are contorted satisfyingly enough.

Like a whacked pinata, it spills over with treasures - and one of the best things to fall out is Steve Buscemi, doing a riotously meek variation on the mad-scientist-with-cracked-lenses-and-lab-coat bit.

The movie sets Ferrell's assaultive and juvenile physical comedy in a less-combative playground, and the result might leave the Ferrell-intolerant exiting the theater on a high.

The movie isn't a critique of zoo life. But it's possible we have on our hands, in Nénette's captivity, a microcosm of celebrity star-gazing.

Only theoretically, though, is this exciting. Mostly, it all feels like a lateral move that keeps alive a franchise without breaking new ground.

Shelter is a gay movie like other American gay movies. Boy meets boy. Boy comes out. Boys fight opposition. Opposition caves. If there's life beyond the closet, too few movies know it exists.

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

The college singing-group comedy Pitch Perfect isn't dumb, but Kendrick's participation implies that it might also be smart. And sometimes it is.

It's neither a neat little allegory about faith nor a transcendently entertaining one. I Am Legend is actually about the last man on earth played by one of the last real movie stars on earth. To be honest, Smith was all I was thinking about while I sat through I Am Legend.

If there's a granddaddy of breezy situationalism, it's probably Bu&#241;uel.

It takes almost an hour for The Legend of Leigh Bowery to make a case for Bowery's sort of genius, and in the last third, the movie gives a real sense of what made him him.

It makes a sane, civil, humanist case for marriage for all.

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.

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

All the makers of Texas Chainsaw 3D cared about was getting your $16.

Too smitten with the Eisenhower-era nostalgia.

Buried works better as an evocation of "Twilight Zone'' eeriness. Even then, it's silly and gimmicky.

Before an hour has passed tedium overtakes Black Dynamite - one corny martial-arts sequence turns out to be plenty - and all the good jokes dry up.

Distinguishes itself from the recent glut of mediocre political documentaries by opting for nonpartisanship.

The score is the most effective thing about the film. Sometimes it's a suspicious, mischie-vous distraction from the reality that not enough of this makes sense.

The ideas are generous and inclusive rather than divisive: Zinn wants history to be seen and to be experienced from every possible perspective.

Most atrocious movies build into their badness, as lacks of talent, ideas, self-confidence, or a total hatred of an audience, are revealed. This one gets it out of the way up front and never looks back.

From Marber's fiercely polished writing, Nichols wrings every drop of acid, yet it's a show of the director's goodness that a movie fundamentally preoccupied with interpersonal ugliness is allowed to end on a convincing note of beauty.

Shampoo refuses to be coy. There's a deep, soulful confusion here that isn't careless with frivolity.

Paul Haggis switches from the problem of racism to the problem of Iraq. The war is a better fit. None of the exasperating guilt on display in "Crash" has made it into In the Valley of Elah, a solidly made genre movie: the Army mystery.

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.

Yet despite the retrospective sensationalism, Lovett's 70-minute documentary is a sobering anti-erotic cautionary tale.

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

Lacks the creepy immediacy of even the most misbegotten of the found-footage genre.

This movie is especially egregious since it bundles the civil rights era, garden-variety bigotry, and the achievements of Ernie Davis, the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy.

The End of the Affair's masterfully heartbroken final scene is scarier in its nightmarishly wry suggestion of ill fate than anything that ever happened on Elm Street.

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

The cute little domestic comedy gains a slightly rough edge - maybe Sven isn't meant to be a father or a husband.

Too dumb to realize that the senselessness is viral.

Jolie doesn't seem entirely bored with the routine. She has a laugh or two at her bionic image: Evelyn is a woman who uses a maxi pad as a bandage.

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.

A shockingly eloquent, nearly moving feat of Y2K-trendiness.

It's mesmerizing nonetheless for its flagrant disregard for narrative, character, pacing, performance and good lighting.

Shepard's Matador demonstrates what an Almodovar picture would feel like without his gonzo sensibility. It's Almodovar for heterosexuals.

Madhouse satire manages to disarm the second you realize it's laughing with you - and sometimes harder.

A less confrontational, though positively gushing modernization of "Pierre, or the Ambiguities."

Just fascinating in an empty, trendy sort of way

Wilson has captured Swift at a convincing turning point, ready, perhaps, to say a lot more.

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.

It's hard to blame Telfair for letting his celebrity go to his head. If I were on the cover of Sports Illustrated in the 12th grade, there'd be no living with me either.

Actually the problem with Saving Face as a romantic comedy is that its central romance is a drag.

Ambles along nicely, but feels as if it's never going to end.

Cuesta prizes curiosity and perception over conflict resolution. He likes the way kids take their cues from adults and the ways they revolt against them. Even as the kids do the ugliest things, the film stays cool without ever being cold.

For kids strung out on Anthony Horowitz's 007-lite adventure series, this maiden adaptation is a pleasant enough diversion from having to flip the pages.

There's enough sexual manic depression to justify house calls from Dr. Laura.

Ultimately affecting mix 'n' match weeper.

A family melodrama with charm.

I could have watched this woman rip a piece fabric and turn it into a dress all day. I haven’t seen a lot of that. I have seen movies about a woman caught between two men, as Chanel is here.

The best I can say about his (Diesel)performance is that it's charmingly terrible.

There must be nine or 10 thwacks to the neck throughout Sleepy Hollow, and Burton finds a different way to make the resulting severed noggin fall as though you'd forgotten the last one.

For a studio so clearly willing to take risks with so many of its movies, this particular movie has a whiff of exploitation. Rowling wrote one epic funeral that Warner Bros. requires us to attend twice.

An absorbing piece of investigative journalism.

The movie is swept up in earnest self-importance.

It's got both a soap opera plotline and a Chuck Norris-load of taxpayer-financed gadgets and gear. It also has Reese Witherspoon in another terrible part.

There is a lot to recommend about James' Journey to Jerusalem. Its people are not among them. This searing little parable contains some of the more deplorable folks you're likely to see in a movie about faith.

This movie just seems like a scattered excuse to make political points without saying much of anything. Worse, it also fails to show us, with any vividness, how Mirit and Smadar think and feel as women.

Outrage succeeds as activism, but it excels as a window into certain political psyches.

As art, the movie is neither shallow nor profound, just inconsequential. Yet Coppola is too clever a filmmaker to dismiss the movie out of hand. If her film is mostly surface then she skims with style.

A finely coiffed, cream-cheese "8 1/2" remix with Gere, a Marcello Mastroianni for Oprah Winfrey times.

If their movie doesn't float your boat as a work of science-fiction, action, philosophy, heliocentrism, or staggering visual spectacle (although, it really should), then it certainly succeeds as a parable for cinematic ambition.

Over the course of the film's 88-minutes, Taylor cuts away to what's happening around her subjects (the unexamined life, I suppose). Perhaps she's attempting to make connections the thinkers don't.

Not entirely persuasive, not entirely schmaltzy, "The Tic Code" is one of those well-meant dramatizations... that mysteriously made it all the way to a theater near you.

Even if some of the references are inscrutable, a lot of 8 Women is a riot. Here and there Ozon finds the key to a level of farce that would have amused Bunuel himself.

Incisive, highly entertaining political farce.

This isn't a case of a liberal-minded movie inflicting goodness upon a character but a man radiating goodness because, well, he is good.

A fine afternoon at the megaplex. And it will make a welcome addition your home library when it's released on video.

For too long, this movie asks us to be interested in something that rarely in the history of the service industry has been sustainably entertaining: how dull certain jobs can be.

Where a lesser movie from a lesser director might sink into its own ponderousness, Sokurov uses the ambiguity of the father and son's relationship to craft a sort of erotic puzzle.

Canner is either overwhelmed by so much impressive access to so many alarming business opportunities or lacking the investigative rigor to drive home the moral problems of these drugs and the existential problems of these women.

It's the most touching love story about tragically separated sexy beasts since "Cold Mountain."

As thrillers go, 1408 leaves too much room for fun.

Loach makes a working metaphor of the old ant-and-grasshopper story, but the film's images are what echo the loudest.

Like so much Iranian cinema, Blackboards is a work of lyrical propaganda. But its metaphors are opaque enough to avoid didacticism, and the film succeeds as an emotionally accessible, almost mystical work.

Penn's Kumar could become Jeff Spicoli for the generation of college kids who've never seen "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" but always seem to have a copy of "Dude, Where's My Car?" cued up at a moment's notice.

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.

The labor applied to Che is apparent, but it would be wrong to characterize the movie as laborious the way it was in, say, 2006's "The Good German," where Soderbergh took great pains to re-create 1940s Hollywood wartime glamour.

It's another standard-issue bad star-vehicle action-comedy, this time for Cedric.

Kaboom lets Araki play with carnality as opposed to cautioning against it.

Most of American Psycho just sits there, looking at trouble, rather than looking for it - complacent, overjoyed in fact to exist at all.

It's an exasperating exercise in B-movie hokum and screenwriter's gimmickry.

Stuck between point-blank ridicule and the obligations of a weary plot. Surprisingly, more than an hour of watching marionettes fight, curse, and fornicate turns out to be as dull as watching Michael Dudikoff do the same thing in one of his unremarkable soldier movies.

The film plays fast and loose with the book, until its emotional depths, spiritual conflicts, and Waugh's discreet humor have been wrung out.

This movie can't commit to a genre, let alone a logical sequence or complete idea. But there is a wisdom in its blasé assessments and frivolous air: What's the point; where's the wine?

Plays like a lost Rockford file.

The triptych is a device but never a gimmick: three windows into one fractured soul.

It's an unfocused overview that intersperses choppy interviews and observations with clips from "Deep Throat," including some of its most notorious and explicit scenes.

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 filmmaker invites us to reconsider the author as someone warmer and less intimidating than his body of work. On that count, Wrestling With Angels succeeds.

The film is quick, painless, and more than a little brave: not since John Travolta, Jamie Lee Curtis, and the aerobicizers in "Perfect" has so much Lycra been so abused for our pleasure.

The overall lack of subtlety is a riot - there's even a cautionary production of "Peter and the Wolf" happening in the background during one journalist-politician showdown at a Beltway gala. Still, it's a pleasure watching this cast make the most of the material.

A warmly made, slightly offbeat movie about friendly devotion. It also happens to be a western, and every man in it is grizzled or wizened or both.

Another gorgeous and immensely satisfying reminder that there are few better directors than Téchiné when it comes to capturing the vagaries of the heart.

A mixed bag with the promise of a better sequel.

Disarmingly intelligent if scattered documentary.

This is an inept and unsubtle romantic fantasy about how black people and white people don't mix.

Well-meaning but trying documentary.

I liked the deluge of visual information and personalities. The pictures, footage, biography, news and gossip are the opposite of a Halston dress — unruly, busy, fussed over. But they come at you with an energy that feels substantial. Knowing what to do with all of that material is its own kind of intelligence. Why overthink it? Or: why show us what you’ve overthought?

Isn't as trippy, scary, handmade-looking, or environmentally aware as some of Miyazaki's pictures. But it shares their dreaminess. Even at its most ingenious, not even Pixar does that.

Eastwood risks embarrassment flirting with material this naked in its mawkishness, then jumps right in. He seems to want the world to know: Inside the 72-year-old body of this icon of virility beats the heart of a Mexican woman.

A romantic comedy with film noir shadows.

Like so many of these farm-raised films, this one looks polished, but takes no risks, offers no surprises, and contains a final sequence that's laughable for its lack of courage.

It's cheap the way The Grey wants to be both a Liam Neeson "Quit Taking My Stuff'' movie and an existential thriller about survival.

Fast Food Nation has the dramatic flatness and willful lack of personality of some documentaries -- or at least how Linklater thinks a documentary should be. The movie nonetheless feels like both a work of investigative journalism and an immense human-interest story, veering into muckraking, horror, teen comedy, and what passes for "Twilight Zone" science fiction.

There’s no reason a conspiracy this outlandish should work twice. But it’s so hilariously within the realm of plausibility that it does.

A movie too smart and too urgent to be categorically awful. Clinically insane may be another matter altogether.

It's unbelievably bland.

As much as the director andco-writer, Paolo Virzi, might try, he can't bring any of these people into focus. The movie is shapeless, too.

Despite the Gallic source material, what we truly have in Unfaithful is a tasteful, adult-contemporary ''Fatal Attraction'' redux, right down to the mister's Soho address and the happy family tucked away in the New York hinterlands.

I don’t think the movie is looking for answers; it isn’t asking any questions. But by its very nature, this is both an experiment in ontology (do babies know they’re babies?) and existentialism (are they thinking about who to be?).

Has no intention of taking a more sophisticated path to make its point.

The movie Bonifacio and Famiglietti have made is much better as a bittersweet family portrait. But those in search of a mirror for their own weight issues will find a deluxe one here.

A bonanza of pop uplift. It wraps the up-from-nothing drama of ''Flashdance'' in the sassy, interracial pep rallying of ''Bring It On'' and the military romance of ''An Officer and a Gentleman.''

The Patriot makes the Revolutionary War look like super-produced studio footage of the L.A. riots.

This is a ridiculous movie - a thriller so indifferent to suspense, so above mystery that one character literally stabs another in the front.

The first 30 or so minutes of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story condense the entire Hollywood biopic genre into a sweet chewable tablet. It's the Flintstones vitamin of spoofs.

It looks great and the dancing is the kind of stuff that would upstage the average pop star.

It's done persuasively enough that you wonder how you'd feel under similar circumstances.

"Joshua" is a horror movie that doesn't want to freak you out too much. Vitus freaks you out, but its makers seem to have no idea that it does.

Pedro is what a friend of mine calls a ''macho Iberico," which refers to a certain type of cocky, insensitive Spanish man.

In the intervening years, they've become pretty good actors, too. Now where's the filmmaker who'll give them more to do than pregnancy scares and falls off donkeys?

Sensationalism and doom are not on screen here; Jacquot offers a relatively peaceful moment in Sade's life.

After 2½ hours, the movie's become a bowl of trail mix - you're picking out the nuts you don't like and hoping the next bite doesn't contain any craisins. All the carefully crafted misérables turns into a pile of miz.

As Changeling strains toward its mawkishly optimistic conclusion, the old-fashioned moviemaking that Eastwood settled into doesn't suit either him or his star. It feels like a corny joke.

Devor's sympathy for both the men and the animals is humane, yet his movie is palpably sad. A sense of shame cuts through all the ambiguity. You know less about what you've watched when Zoo is over than you did when it started. And that's what makes the movie so hard to shake.