Wesley Morris

A flyweight, humongously entertaining ensemble number.

The happiest news about the third (and final?) X-Men movie is actually quite sad: headstones. Yes, The Last Stand brings the lamentable deaths of several major characters.

A fine film of few words and very little motion.

Spellbinding if ponderous.

Every moment... is a cleverly constructed live-action joke on aloofness: The world is ending, and these people are too self-centered to notice.

For most of Lady Vengeance, Park is playing with us. But the jokey atmosphere dissipates and the fun turns inside out in the movie's last act.

The movie's glee is contagious.

The movies rarely gives us a woman as fascinatingly complex as Lisbeth Salander, and the happiest news about the two sequels is that she’ll be back.

In an eco-horror show that politely masquerades as a documentary, the former vice president effectively warns of man-made cataclysm.

When the film ends, we're haunted. We've been driving with a ghost.

A relentlessly serious action movie, characterized by, of all things, sorrow.

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

Aileen is Broomfield working compassionately. Perhaps it's only because he knows he can't save Wuornos that he can offer her as she might have been: part wounded animal, part self-destructive martyr, and all tragedy.

One of the best things about Nolan as a director is that he’s not self-conscious. His movies unfold and fold in on themselves without the strain of labor or flash. But that lack of self-consciousness is also Nolan’s downside.

It’s both ridiculous and ridiculously romantic, which is an apt description of a work shaped like a heart and structured like a pretzel.

A big, lascivious punch line about America's peculiar, embarrassed, hypocritical relationship with sex.

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.

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

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.

No one here is prodding you to laugh. It just happens.

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

A modest but extremely enjoyable movie.

Comes on like an "After School Special'' psychodrama that's been taken off its medication.

A dinner-from-hell comedy about a pretty Jewish Spaniard who brings a nice Palestinian guy home to her outspoken Madrid family.

It captures a version of our best worst selves.

The movie's queer delight is contagious. You'll exit lip-synching.

The real core of The Core is the beautiful friendship between a highly emotive Eckhart and the sacrificial Karyo. Their bond is the best thing to happen to Franco-American relations since SpaghettiOs.

Entertaining.

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.

Has a novelist's human touch. Were it a book, it would go somewhere on the shelf with Jonathan Safran Foer and early Philip Roth.

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

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

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.

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

By the end, you don't entirely understand either of these people, but you come to understand why they need each other.

Going the Distance earns its R rating, often by daring to say what goes frequently unsaid by women in raunchy comedies. It's not a very good movie. The entire second half is a sitcom.

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 as slickly enjoyable as anything you’d see on VH1.

The good news is that the movie advertises Dolan's delirious visual talent.

The documentary is primarily a work of whimsy.

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.

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.

While the words belong to the storyteller, the story in And Everything Is Going Fine appears to be telling itself.

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.

The opportunity to see what Lollobrigida could do with a crooked smile or a roll of her eyes -- let alone a simple street dress -- is well worth the price of entry.

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

Never has this war been filmed with such ragged glory.

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.

In a summer in which every blockbuster is zealous to be a video game, Rodriguez, with a wink, has produced his own.

Diablo Cody wrote Young Adult, and it's an improvement over "Juno," her first script.

It does manage to put a somewhat complex human face on the domestic troublemakers, if not their exploits.

Crassly funny passages.

Medea works on von Trier's own imagistic terms. There are shots and sequences in this movie that feel unique.

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.

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

The movie's few false notes come from Lumet's script, which can be overly explanatory. Because Demme is opting for present-tense realism, the characters are forced to fill us in on who did what when to whom, why, and how.

Like most films about gay men, Undertow can't envision a normal life of couplehood. But Fuentes-Léon works in a blithe and breezy magic-realist manner that fends off attendant feelings of depression.

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.

It's a resplendently basic, lovey- dovey and inside-out "King Lear."

A fascinating, sometimes profound curiosity.

While the picture isn't brilliant, it is, at its most entertaining, a kicky, surprisingly astute throwback to bygone Hollywood social comedies.

Technically outstanding and the performances are strong.

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

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.

It's as much a portrait of a kind of artist as it is a document of a city's evolving sense of style.

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.

The Skin I Live in is Almodóvar reaching back to his sickest, kinkiest self, and it's nice to see him trying to luxuriate in sleaze again.

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.

A jokey, junky potboiler.

Touching and brisk.

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

A cult classic is born.

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

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.

Delivers chunks of ''Yellow Submarine'' and ''The Phantom Tollbooth'' -- a vividly timeless oddity suitable for many children and most stoners.

A romantic comedy with film noir shadows.

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.

Just as exciting and socially vivid as Bielinsky's. Yet, somehow it's more stressful. The American characters practically sweat desperation.

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.

An edgy, hypnotic entertainment that's like a Club Med production of "Lord of the Flies."

Piercingly co-written and directed by Susanne Bier, the movie dramatizes one man's collapse and the other's surprising maturation.

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.

Sings in the key of life.

Phyllis and Harold is really about Phyllis and how discontent has a way of spilling, then spreading. Kleine never quite says so, but her mother’s life was a tragedy.

The movie's narrative can be taxingly ornate, but there's something beautiful about its metaphorical conflation of politics and glamour, the real and the fictional.

This low-rent, nonsense cop business filled me with a nostalgic twinge. I didn't know I wanted the "Police Academy" series resurrected with a lot more hilarity, but I'm glad somebody did it.

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

Sayles seems to be trying, single-handedly, to correct centuries of First World self-centeredness in Third World contexts.

Raimi, who shares script credit with his brother Ivan and Alvin Sargent, strikes an exquisite balance between pop and woe, drama and whooshing adventure.

A tidy soap opera. But it's a discreet, warmly made one, too. In a show of restraint, the intrigue never rises above mildly juicy.

The bliss of Megamind is the way it pursues solutions for tired problems.

Hot-blooded.

Despite the appearance of numerous free-speaking conservatives, the movie's partisanship leans nakedly to the left.

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.

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.

Dogma' is Kevin Smith's fourth film and it looks like his first but I'm not ready to quit him -- there's a landmark in him. I just wish the crafty, raucous Dogma was it.

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?).

What the cast members lack in sharpened skill they more than make up for in raw gusto and athletic scrappiness (most of the actors have logged a lot of soccer in their pasts). These guys give a sport that is virtually nameless in the movies a good name in this one.

An absorbing piece of investigative journalism.

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.

Peculiarly entertaining exercise in bare-bones, Hollywood-style action heroism.

Broadway-sized performances.

Engrossing, smartly made documentary.

This present-day Paris of Le Divorce is smartly shot and costumed, and the whole affair is breezy and uncharacteristically insouciant, given the reserved nature of the folks responsible for it.

Corny. But it's corny in a way that a Hollywood movie about a boy who just wants to go home ought to be corny. Plus when it's done with this much care, corny works for me.

Breezy humor and a dazzling heist keep 'Ocean' franchise in the money.

The movie brings to mind the more polite parts of "Wedding Crashers." Failure to Launch, while totally exuberant and appealingly made, is not nearly as randy.

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

This is a smart piece of revisionist fluff that dares to question what happens after the royal honeymoon is over.

In its seriousness, Syriana has an absorbing, ominous roundness that plays even better with a second viewing.

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.

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.

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.

Hall Pass is the brothers' 10th movie, and their most gangbusters since "Me, Myself & Irene."

What the movie lacks in technical polish (it's not very handsome-looking) and dramatic perfection, it makes up for in unusual social sophistication.

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

Hooper, the director, doesn’t include lots of amazing football sequences to upstage his star. He just moves everyone out of Sheen’s way. It’s about time.

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

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.

It's a quiet little gag homage both to Boris Karloff and to the set up of shelf-loads of pulp novels and films noir. And Peltola, with his flat, serious face and damp, oil-black hair, happens to look, at times, like Richard Widmark and Kirk Douglas.

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

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.

Week in and week out, horror movies cheat us, so it's wonderfully cathartic to watch a bunch of kids cheat death in what turns out to be the best installment yet in the "Final Destination" franchise.

The movie has a great time playing with ideas of scope and perspective, shifting between microscopic and macroscopic.

"Ashes of Time" was always more a work of philosophy than pure entertainment, and a decade and a half later it still is.

The journey's a kick.

What the movie lacks in ambition, originality, and grit, it makes up for in pure feeling.

The sort of smutty scandalmongering the average moviegoer can really get behind.

Armed with a dinner theater accent and hair that looks like an LP melted on his head, Turturro pockets the picture. As a demonstration of his newly accessed maturity and benevolence, Sandler helps him do it.

The film is faithful to its absurdities, sometimes hilariously so.

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.

Bobby marks a turning point for Colin Farrell, whose vulgarities and inelegance tend to get the better of his range.

The violence in the final 45 minutes of Mr. Vengeance is tough to watch.

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.

As a production, Fados is pretty with its reflected surfaces and many projected images. But at times it hurts for the bite and texture of life outside that studio. For all the dolorous singing about and shots of streets, it'd be nice to hit one.

It's hilarious -- and on purpose, too. This is the first satisfying adult summer comedy set in New England to come out of Hollywood since "The Witches of Eastwick" in 1987.

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

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

It's fun, it's kind of somber and it succeeds in making you think about how you might be squandering middle age.

Mercifully, The Station Agent is not about how these misfits heal one another -- they're not that miserable, for one thing. It's about the unlikely ways proximity, need, and coincidence create friendships.

Working with his brother Ivan, Sam Raimi is laughing with us - and often louder than we are.

The mother-child dynamic here is the fraught stuff of any worthy melodrama.

The film is built to quaver and buckle along with its victims and martyrs. In an almost soulful way, it bespeaks the reality lingering when the final fantasy ends.

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

This movie is basically where some small-screen comedy in the last year has been: "2 Broke Girls," "New Girl," and, their far superior sister, "Girls."

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.

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.

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

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

Hardship and suffering don't drive this movie so much as a romantic's gloss on the two.

Fancher's placid, eerily subdued first directorial feature.

Yes, Younger has made an update of the ''shiksa who changed my life" story in ''Annie Hall." But Prime is missing the psychological acuity and scabrous cultural wit of Woody Allen at his best. These lovers meet standing in line to see Antonioni's ''Blow-Up" and never mention the movie.

The film is profane. But who knew police brutality could play as a laughing matter?

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

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.

Raimi seems more comfortable being his outlandishly jokey, B-movie self, letting entire sequences play on the line between carefree schlock and Hollywood blockbusting.

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

As a filmmaker Soderbergh requires nothing more of us than a willingness to enjoy ourselves. He had fun. Why shouldn't we? With Contagion, the fun begins with a cough.

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.

Walking the line between the movie’s broad strokes and its near-perfect pitch is the art itself, which has been designed and constructed by a team of smart designers.

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.

The directors and distributors can't rely on us. They should be implored to watch their movies in the same theaters we do. It's the only way for them to understand that a crime is being committed.

Witherspoon is a professional, demanding we give ourselves over to her carbonated pluck.

In Every Little Step, the performers bleed, sweat, cry theater - without having to tell us.

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.

Cinema's greatest caveman meets his ancestors. For us, it's a reassurance: The creative process is astonishingly old and its fruits still surprisingly fresh.

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.

Engrossing and provocative.

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

The film elects a storytelling manner that's scarily similar to the beginning of a lot of hip-hop thrillers.

Disarmingly intelligent if scattered documentary.

Mysteries of Lisbon brings us far inside oil-on-canvas in a way that isn't imitative. It's simply, magically a moving picture, what a movie in the 1800s would look like.

The Box is the work of a visionary flirting with commercialism after having so grandly flouted it with “Southland Tales.’’ He doesn’t give in completely. Several trips to the megaplex might be required for The Box to make complete sense.

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.

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.

A must-see.

Wetzel's challenge is to film the experiments so that the process itself is legible. We're made to marvel at slow-cooked, freeze-dried, unappetizingly bagged food, the way some mushrooms, when delicately sliced, evoke fruit and some crustaceans resemble side-sleeping snooze-bar slappers.

Deadly funny.

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

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

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.

Without trivializing the disease, the film challenges AIDS' stigma (albeit for heterosexuals) at a moment when it was still considered a death sentence.

This engrossing and provocative documentary is also about a tragic kind of liberal guilt.

Ultimately affecting mix 'n' match weeper.

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.

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

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

This is a substantial, patiently made, entertaining portrait, with a percussive, rhythmic jazz score by Ramachandra Borcar and some emphatic spoken word courtesy of Umar Bin Hassan of the Last Poets. But eventually, the rich interpretive consideration of Hammons’s essence, philosophy and process starts to vanish.

Fyre needs another layer. You can locate in it this national moment of brashness and effrontery.

Whitney is too funereal to be a party, too sad, strange and dismaying to cheer. Yet, in its grim, guilt-inducing way, the film works, even on the occasions when it’s working against itself.

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.

The more time Khaled’s camera takes to wend its way around Hassane’s suspended body, the more its caresses seem to match all the embracing and caressing Hassane’s friend does. And the more time the movie devotes to the parts of this one man’s body the more that care seems to stand in for a country’s neglected whole.

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.

What ought to be a bittersweet movie about a woman's momentary unraveling feels like a workout class: Cardio melodrama.

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.

With relentless and ruminative deliberateness, Reygadas shows us a Mexico City that seems to be decaying from the inside out.

The Flowers of War is the latest movie focused on the Nanking atrocities. Lu Chuan's "City of Life and Death'' was released in the United States last year and presented a far greater, grimmer, and more punishing re-creation of the sacking.

A movie drunk on its very existence, one that misses more frequently than it hits and couldn't care less.

The movie's primary narrative weakness is that its racism plot points seem ripped from the headlines of a "Geraldo" newsletter and stretched into a string of terribly executed car chases.

The movie will please those looking for easy physical comedy.

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

It's one of the most beautifully unpleasant movies ever made - its reverse charge being that it is no fun at all.

A watchably absurd popcorn flick about a man who can see two minutes into the future.

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

Not so much a documentary as it is a bald-faced party movie.

It's fun to see Tom Wilkinson, for instance, with a massive bald spot virtually eating scenery with a knife and fork.

In a refreshing change of pace, this week's anti-Bush documentary, Bush's Brain, is not really about George W. Bush at all. It's about his senior political adviser, Karl Rove.

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.

Fans likely to rave about Living.

This remake does something less organically fun. It makes kids nostalgic for something they never experienced.

The movie is another of those harmless and politely made dark comedies that the English seem incapable of doing without.

Leaves you longing for the other, better political thrillers it evokes.

The most powerful moment in the film is a tiny one. Anker and his Irvine, Leo Houlding, plan to reenact most of Mallory's climb wearing gabardine and hobnail boots instead of North Face and Gore-Tex.

Directing Annapolis is Justin Lin, whose previous feature was the irresponsible high-school comedy thriller "Better Luck Tomorrow." This second movie is more his speed.

The film doesn't amount to an emotionally palpable experience. Most of the stops it attempts to pull out are rusty. The movie ends with a gigantic lump in its throat, one that would take a tall glass of Barbara Stanwyck to wash down.

Brown lays out his guiding philosophy up front when he says of the Baja, ''This isn't about a race, it's about the human race."

Huppert's character, who's a tornado of demands at work, is almost as obnoxious as Poel-voorde's. She just not as willfully disgusting. He chews up all the scenery with his thick Belgian accent and splaying limbs and general cartoonishness.

Miral feels like gastric bypass moviemaking. It's a miniseries awkwardly stuffed in the body of a two-hour drama about the Palestinians' long struggle against the Israelis.

Regardless of how cheated out of a full-bodied motion picture you feel, you're still left with the year's sickest bathroom humor.

At some point, he finds himself drifting around a swimming pool, and it's tempting to think of Dustin Hoffman sinking to the bottom of the deep end in "The Graduate." But there's a difference. Swanson's pool is empty.

The movie, from South Africa, is charming and its characters' feelings sincere enough. It's just so cluttered.

If the movie weren't so playfully dumb -- did you ever think you'd see Ian McShane throw Andy Samberg through a basement shelving unit? -- this would be exasperating.

The film moves slowly and steadily, but it's never exactly dull, just mild.

A bizarre film.

The film leaves you dissatisfied, as though you'd just spent two hours with a menagerie of plastic white people.

The movie is just a cheesy, preposterous, semi-eroticized way of yelling, "Fight! Fight!," when two people go at it in the school cafeteria.

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.

The idea that self-mockery makes people relax is tricky. One man's disarmament is another's minstrelsy, and the fine line is well worth another documentary.

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

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 Daddy Day Care business model appears to be the 1983 Michael Keaton vehicle ''Mr. Mom,'' put on an unstoppable sugar high.

The movie is church via the planetarium. It's as if Malick set out to paint the Sistine Chapel and settled for a dome at the Museum of Natural History.

As a consideration of faith and propriety, the movie never managed to boil my blood or break my heart.

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

It's entertaining enough, like watching a celebrity workout film with a plot. But never once is it believable.

The movie is too pious for farce and too eager to please to comment persuasively on the racial horrors of the Deep South at that time.

The jokes are as fresh as rotten eggs and the direction stoops to the occasion.

Whatever Evening is saying about life, death, and guilt isn't terribly new or interesting.

Shouting the title never quite prepared me for either how stripping zombies aren't as hot or as funny as I thought they would be or how quickly the movie's eager intelligence collapses on itself.

After 110 minutes of the "n" word being deployed with abandon, Biggie vows to renounce it. And just like that a deluxe episode of "Behind the Music" turns into an evening at church.

The clichés are still clichés. They've just been renovated.

Nicely shot and edited, but the movie is a narrative mess, which wouldn't be so bad if all it were up to was depicting Lucia's ups and downs. But the film takes too many illogical detours to be of much use.

Easily, the best character in the film is Nazneen's tubby husband, who's been angling to take the family back to Bangladesh.

Neeson is much better suited to the loneliness and self-doubt of Martin's crisis than he was for the thuggery of the previous movie.

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.

It's an interesting, if dissatisfying rumination on the working people of industry -- how they labor, how they rest, what they think and feel.

Urban and Bloodgood make the most of their parts, locking eyes and arms, and occasionally using American English as if the snowy 10th century were another way of saying, "Where the après ski?"

As Diesel says, ''I like something fast enough to do something stupid in.'' Mission accomplished.

Invites you not simply to identify with its low IQ but to cheer it on. This is a movie that knows you know it's dumb, and that's enough to make the whole thing worth tolerating.

National Treasure even has a rough time approaching the heart of ''The Amazing Race," a show that manages, in 44 minutes, to make you care about average folks as they follow clues across the globe.

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

As ridiculous German suspense dramas go, you could do worse than Jerichow.

On most levels his performance is as flat as his abs: very early Wahlberg.

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

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

After an hour or so, Ask the Dust seems to have said everything, and the air starts to seep out of its hermetic atmosphere.

Richard Kelly's Southland Tales isn't just a movie. It's an apocalyptic piñata that's been bazooka-ed open.

Street Kings is nonsense, and yet the crooked, racialized world underneath the soulless mayhem is pretty fascinating.

Neither a profile nor a critique, though, the film's only focus is its subject's mild self-regard.

The songs are catchy. The lip-synching, meanwhile, is always a little off, and the dancing is usually average at best.

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

Broad and badly made but sporadically inspired, "Chuck and Larry" is still an amazing improvement over "License to Wed," this month's other wedding comedy.

The Last Mountain is that sort of movie, the sort that sends a Kennedy into the West Virginia wilderness to press for change. It's sincere. It's misguided. It feels like a stunt.

An effortless heartwarmer that manages to be utterly corny but quite likable.

A feel-good but inane Disney production.

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

A movie that seems to have been made mostly on the hard drive of a Power Mac G4. But whatever, we get it: Technology destroys everything.

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?

Bullock’s levelheaded acting frequently saves the movie from emotional garishness.

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.

Half hearted in its mockery of corporate culture and schlock. The filmmakers want to have it both ways -- the funny and the sadistic -- but rarely do so at the same time with any success.