Wesley Morris

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.

Woody Allen's questionable toe-tapping faux-documentary.

Frustratingly, Carnahan barely trusts his storytelling to keep our attention long enough to get through a scene without some grisly cutaway -- a gun to the head, the writhing wounded.

Turns into something like a screwball farce, an intimate, self-aware one.

Fitfully good.

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.

An earnest, alarmist new docu-plea for nuclear disarmament, concludes with an orgy of such destruction. Mushroom clouds. Infernal white light. Obliterating energy blasts. It's all here, and mostly beyond the pale.

At its most profound, Benjamin Button isn't about anything more important than Pitt's very handsomeness, which, for a surprising stretch of time, is a wonderful subject for study.

It's a grand outdoor spectacle (the only real interiors are within tents, and those are hard to come by) and a perfectly juicy melodrama.

What's refreshing about the Danish movie is how direct the girls are.

Fans likely to rave about Living.

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.

While Prisoners of Paradise gives us but an impression of Gerron's state of mind, the film does a powerful job of showing us how deflated, small, and desperate this boisterous man had become.

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.

It's a heart-warmer, a well-meaning movie that sets out to wring a modern message (and preferably some tears) from a famous but largely forgotten moment in history.

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

Gets diagnosably schizo.

Works purely as a series of complex snapshots of the conflict in Iraq.

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.

As easy as this movie is to watch, it's artificially flavored. "Golden Flower" runs on crocodile tears and corn-syrup blood.

This pop-up book of a film is an ideal arrangement between director and star.

The atmosphere is hypo-stylized, vividly generic and worse than real, like a doomy Frederick Wiseman documentary.

Sings in the key of life.

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

The only thing missing from The Hoax might be a couple of songs. It's that breezy and fleet a movie.

A sweetly acted and neatly executed social comedy.

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.

The movie has a jolly, half-remembered quality, as though it were adapted from a particularly rose-colored memoir.