Wesley Morris

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 lovely , old-fashioned farm romance quietly doubling as a comment on immigration and American identity.

I don't think I've seen an actor do more with deadpan expressions than Mara does in this movie. Her face doesn't move but, whether she's tasing a man or standing in front of a mirror watching a cigarette dangle from her mouth, we respond to her.

The film itself is also a beautiful work of art, exquisitely framed and precisely envisioned.

Rothemund gives us his sophisticated filmmaking only in the finale, which is devastating in its briskness and fury.

Zahedi's search for fulfillment is depleting, like throwing good sex after bad. The more we learn about the hole in his soul, the more vivid his misogamy becomes.

The filmmaker doesn't exactly let anyone off the hook.

There's something touching about the way Goldfinger obeys his moral compass. He doesn't seem at all happy with that luxury. It's a burden by a more extravagant name.

In Winona Ryder's case, Girl Interrupted is a showcase in which her brittle, angry portrait shows she has graduated from ingenue to actress.

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

The film would be just as powerful, if less likely to saturate suburban megaplexes and flatter its patrons, were its saviors -- I don't know - French.

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.

At its best, Up in the Air invents new realms for old Hollywood sophistication.

An adrenaline-pumping, post-musical musical.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

A meticulously assembled dramatization of a grossly controversial moment in TV history.

Bridesmaids openly, comfortably turns the stress of being girlfriends into comedy. It's really about the single friend backing away from the edge of temporary insanity. This isn't the greatest such movie. That would be Nicole Holofcener's "Walking and Talking" (1996), with Catherine Keener and Anne Heche.

This is the first movie to make me equate coming home from prison with coming home from war.

What Grind lacks in cinematic skill, it makes up for in heart, which is what most dudes-in-arms flicks are missing. Given the option of spending eternity with these gentlemen or the boys of ''American Pie,'' I'd choose the lads of Grind.

Despite its contradictions, the film stayed with me after I left the theater. It's frivolous. But it's also powerfully surreal.

Daybreakers has unexpected flashes of brilliance.

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

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.

Short without feeling scant. That's how big its sense of grief is.