Wesley Morris

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

On screen something happens that goes beyond Monk's powers of description and Fanning's way of seeming 14 and 44 at the same time.

A movie loaded with strange delights.

At its core, Quinceañera, a modest but remarkably poignant comedy, is the story of a neighborhood.

There is no plot in Pen-ek Ratanaruang's exceedingly mellow situation comedy, and that's preferred, frankly.

A featherweight parlor-room French farce in need of an anchor to keep it from being blown away by the summer blockbuster gales.

Dunst is the realest, rawest thing in the film.

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.''

A sound piece of profiling that has miles of archival footage of the affable, pop-eyed Langlois enthusing.

The finest element in de la Pena's carefully assembled account is how she doesn't simply state the obvious, but lets the meaty facts speak for themselves.

The cast helps enliven what could otherwise come off as a treatise. All four actors played these roles during the play's off-Broadway run.

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.

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

The film Soderbergh's made is about promiscuous stargazing. And you don't need a brain for that, just two eyes and a mammoth appetite for heavenly bodies.

Argo is absurdly suspenseful for both of its hours. I've never been this stressed-out watching people shred documents.

Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey don't simply star in this movie; they tag-team it out of the Freddie Prinze Jr. --Julia Stiles puppy-love ghetto.

Aspires to the boundlessness of a kid's imagination.

The ballad as it turns out is a duet between a dad and his girl, who'd often rather accentuate the positive than exploit pain, quietly proving that she is her father's daughter.

The Signal is like a Romero zombie movie in which the zombies aren't dead, they're just really temperamental. Evil here is technology-born. Maybe our cellphones and satellite dishes are giving us all the crazy.

If this is an unusually sentimental outing for Jia, it’s also characteristically tinged with woe. He’s just added a touch of sweetness to these otherwise sugarless lives.

There's an unstable genius brewing beneath Mary Katherine's scarlet headband. As "SNL" women go, only Gilda Radner seemed as willing to rib so much of herself for our pleasure.

As formulaic, but occasionally outré multiplex-bound behemoths go, Gladiator is a foaming beast.

A sweetly acted and neatly executed social comedy.

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.

Waste Land is just what the film's website says it is: "stirring evidence of the transformative power of art and the alchemy of the human spirit."

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

I've never seen a movie like this. Not on purpose. Daniels isn't saying he's tasteful. He's just saying that his tasteless trash is as deserving of our attention as the tasteful trash we feel like we have to see. The whole thing's a crazy fantasy, like watching a porno dream it can win the Oscar.

A patient, suspenseful exercise in genre craftsmanship

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.

The idea is to share with us that this show happened. But gluttons for these artists and for music festivals in general might wonder, as I have, whether there's any way the filmmakers might share more of the remaining 123 1/2 hours.

The movie shouldn't work, yet it does.

A lot of the credit for what's right with 'The 40-Year-Old Virgin goes to the screenplay, which Carell and Apatow wrote. They like these characters and, when it matters, they dare to give them feelings, none truer than Andy's.

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 endearing and cheeky ensemble works hard, and Ken Scott's script finds ways of wringing irreverence from the apparent good nature of the situation.

What Little Children understands so well, and so poignantly, is a kind of parental existentialism that hits 30- somethings with kids: How does having children make you such a less interesting adult?

This is a movie about the marriage between sound and image, and the sound is wearing the pants in the relationship.

With Dosunmu, African culture thrives in a demographically shifting but historically African-American part of town. If the idea is that Nollywood could work in Manhattan, this is the director who can show us how.

This is an action movie that nods to Hayao Miyazaki and those sleeky dumb European chase thrillers with guys like Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson.

It's also the first apocalypse-minded franchise that's earned its downbeat mood. The action, for starters, is post-Cold War, post-Chernobyl, post-perestroika. Darkness is so much a part of the Russian psyche it must be nice to see a local movie try to put its hand toward the Light.

Fred Claus sells you something you didn't know you wanted: a Vince Vaughn Christmas movie. Vaughn is not the hook. Neither is the holiday. The script, by Dan Fogelman, is smarter than that.

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.

This intimate, warmly made family portrait always feels true. The performances are particularly good.

An ecstatic sensory experience so overloaded it hardly matters that the narrative has been placed on a back burner.

Wattstax is a disorienting and ironic moviegoing experience. It's a film about the curative powers of rhythm-and-blues music that sets out to frustrate your sense of rhythm in its insistence on the blues.

It's also a message movie, about as weighty as Lara Flynn Boyle and twice as absurd. But I'd like to report that I had an excellent time.

The movie's sense of inspiration is realistic. It never implies a future of glamour, only hard-won success.

Harris, Heche make unholy twosome.

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.

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

Exists as a seldom represented American time capsule, and it's all good.

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.

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

Weirdly enthralling film.

Anyone looking for sleek futuristic action and production design should keep walking.

The closer you get to sorting out the truth, the less likely you are to believe it, let alone comprehend it. The latter half of this movie is as outlandish as a Mexican soap opera.

Director Wayne Wang and his screenwriters sometimes ape ''Pretty Woman." But Latifah's obvious forebear is Pearl Bailey, who was just as regal and straight-up.

Renders the juicy bits of the artist's life in two hours of pulsing highlights that suggest a man who never really had any emotional or psychic downtime.

Kennedy doesn't take the character any deeper than a caricature of rich, nonblack fans of hip-hop culture. But as a caricature, he's fantastic.

The surprise here is how thrillingly bad things get.

Where Never Been Kissed succeeds is in its unabashed refusal to stoop to choosing sides in the high-school hipness war.

Told in a serenely observational fashion.

This is a movie that feels in all its vividness, specificity, and honesty - and in its amateurish screenwriting, too - like something found from the early- to mid-1990s, when American independent moviemaking encouraged far more conversations about the sexuality of young, brown girls in movies like "Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.'' and "I Like It Like That.''

Has to be appreciated simply for doing its job, for being the only thriller I've seen recently that made me wonder how my knuckles ended up in my mouth.

In American movies, the iconic question usually is, can men and women be friends without the sex part getting in the way? Here it's, can a husband appreciate his wife as a woman? The movie's success in Italy is partly a matter of frustration: Women need their men to grow up.

The Brown Bunny is certainly about how vain Gallo is. Yet rarely has narcissism produced such a handsome work of cinema.

A film where suspense and exhilaration are incompatible, and a receding plot line is merely the platform for cars to fly through panes of glass.

The rare ecological documentary that doesn’t nag us to run out of the movie theater and change the world.

A big, silly party.

If Millennium Mambo is the only chance to see Hou Hsaio-hsien's work at a movie theater, you'd better take it.

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.

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.

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

You can feel the movie building away from the whiny comedy and toward something more emotionally raw then something sexually weird.

For an anonymous Saturday afternoon, it's the best lump of coal Hollywood can jam in your stocking.

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.

Loaded with priceless encounters that would seem incongruous in any other movie but play here as low-comedy facts of some parts of black life.

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

Slightly more mature and better assembled, Road Trip goes one better on "American Pie" by teasing out the idiosyncrasies in four guys existing in a personality grab bag.

The resulting film is nobly ridiculous and ridiculously noble, doing everything in its power to subvert the dross it's fooling around with.

Thompson adapted the screenplay from Christianna Brand's "Nurse Matilda" books, and she and director Kirk Jones balance the slapstick and levity with darker enchantments. At its most enjoyable the film feels like Roald Dahl's idea of "Mary Poppins."

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.

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.

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.

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

Like a Sally Field movie by Vittorio De Sica: Zhang wants to affect you with the subtle sting of his politics.

Like the great Iranian filmmakers, Rasoulof has no use for the artificiality of heightened drama.

This is the first, smallest, and most essential planet in the Van Sant solar system. The seediness of "Drugstore Cowboy " started here. So did the one-way crushes in "My Own Private Idaho " and the gorgeously epic longueurs of "Last Days. "

The movie, though, is nonsense. At its most credible, the story evokes fond memories of the adult drug narcs hiding among American high schoolers on ''21 Jump Street."

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.

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

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.

A family melodrama with charm.

Nothing has brought me more cheap pleasure at a movie this year than the sight of shampoo and conditioner bottles falling off a rocking wall while comedian Alec Mapa, as a fellow stylist, tries to keep a straight face. He does a much better job than I did.

Hamlet finds in Hawke's greatish performance a Great Dane for this, or any other, modern moment.

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.

An impressively competent "how will male teen star get with female teen star at high school dance?" romance.

Flight is a so-so movie with Denzel Washington as a commercial-airline pilot who crash-lands a plane while drunk, high, hung over, and horny. It doesn't do much that you couldn't anticipate just by seeing the trailer - the trailer is more exciting than the movie itself.

The performances by Plotnick, Leupp, and Roberson comprise a jarring special effect.

What the movie unfolds is how the magazine is inextricable from Wintour’s vision of it.

By its hilarious, grotesquely over-the-top climax, Holy Smoke is ideologically, metaphorically out of control, as if it has risen from the '70s ashes.

Archer isn't necessarily taking us anywhere new, but his movie's rapture is beautiful inside and out.

In 80 minutes, the film accumulates a staggering gravity.

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

McTiernan's film mines what substance it has from its two stars, but is admittedly about keeping up its own appearances.

Quite easily Live-in Maid could have descended into a kind of Joan Crawford-Bette Davis gorgon salute. But everyone here seems way too smart for that, though apparently the movie is being prepped for an English-language version. So beware.

The movie unfolds like something out of E.M. Forster, but Assayas isn't all that interested in family dynamics. Instead, he's made a chronicle of how the children will handle the sale of the house and its treasures.

These people may be really, really dangerous, but they're also really, really polite.

This is much too buoyant a movie for tragedy. But Koreeda's achievement is that he gives us children who might weigh more, emotionally, than their parents, yet they're still these little creatures learning how to wield and bear that weight.

Argento set a standard a lot of moviemakers are desperate to surpass. It's not simply that he's crazy about gore and supernatural hokum. It's that he understands that storytelling is both an art and a craft. His filmmaking carries you along on the illusion of effortlessness; amusement, suspense, a certain elegance follow.

The movie is like a daydream, and it's most infectious when the characters are in motion or misbehaving, which is often.

The film is touchingly firm about leveling with children, drawing a careful, crucial line between fantasy and reality, without patronizing or haranguing them.

The movie's climactic car chase is as absurdly thrilling as it is innovative. Set almost silently in a blue-gray daytime downpour, it has a tough, improvisatory danger that makes the movie. If John Coltrane went in for action sequences, he'd have dug this one.

A surprisingly effective little horror nightmare.

Kline's combination of pratfalls and urbanity is funny, but it rubs against the rest of the movie's effortless rustic charm. He's like Errol Flynn on a hayride.

If Plympton is making pastiche, he's also having a laugh at a universal experience that for a lot of people was probably pretty crummy. Apparently, it was a little crummier for him.

Groovy.

The first half of Moonlight Mile feels like the runaway trailer for a movie that can't wait to jerk your tears. But to quote Joe in a moment of epiphany, there's a ''truth enema'' out there, and, boy, it really brings this movie around.

Slight but fascinating.

It's a half-life better than Martin Lawrence treading similar, simpler water in "Big Momma's House."

Wonderfully deranged.

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.

Documentary filmmaker Liz Garbus spent three years shooting two teenagers living in a Maryland juvenile detention center. The completed film is called Girlhood and it feels as much a work in progress as its two troubled subjects do.

At its most effective, the movie is a chastening, sobering, and thorough work of film journalism, however shortsighted.

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.

Cannon actually is funny -- not to mention funny-looking. Plastic surgery has left her physically absurd, like a vaguely glamorous R. Crumb cartoon.

The film has sprung from the mind of the Frenchman Leos Carax and ought to be seen to be believed, on the largest screen you can find, and probably sober, too, since it becomes its own narcotic.

This intriguing story, like many tales of mid-20th-century American art, is fueled by testosterone.

Priceless.

The actor's (McConaughey) lovable exuberance is exactly what this heartsick movie needs.

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.

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.

The Oceanic Preservation Society doesn't change the world so much as call attention to something so very wrong with it. And in doing so, The Cove culminates with an image of political agitation that might be one of the most oddly effective public service announcements you'll see.

The film spends its first half explaining the song -- famously and vividly about the cycle of Southern lynching. Its better second half-hour unmasks its composer as a compassionate Jewish guy from the Bronx.

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.

Rachel Weisz has become an exquisite camera artist. In a single shot, she can open up a whole movie. The Deep Blue Sea has a scene like that.

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.

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

While most of the scenes in Tony Stone’s peculiar Middle Ages art project look like a homemade educational reenactment, the film is actually more involving than it should be.

Makes the surprising and seemingly inarguable assertion that, if we're not all Brazilian, then, at the very least, Brazil is a state of mind.

A collection of arbitrary sketches, bits and improvs jammed into a locker room-style variety show masquerading as some semblance of a narrative.

The movie feels exhaustive in its loaded 90-something minutes, showing and telling us much while leaving the meaning of the tangles and twists in this family open to interpretation. For once, the tip of the iceberg is enough.

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.

Smoothly made and smart enough. It's not going for too much, but I laughed a lot.

Angry and tragic, Carandiru is finally, in its own way, uplifting.

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.

A screwball comedy that made me wish I were 13 again, because this is precisely the kind of movie I would have gone nuts for in the ninth grade.

The whole thing is as subtle as a watermelon in a bowl of Cheerios but necessary, nonetheless.

In this era of Apatow and Ferrell and Rogen and Wilson, of men monopolizing movie comedy, Baby Mama feels absurdly momentous, and even political. Fey and Poehler aren't just taking back control of their bodies. They're taking back control of their profession.

In Mamet's understanding, straight white maleness is the most powerful weapon such men have. It can also be illusory, which is why the last scenes of Edmond are so touching.

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.

Zeiger's movie is a timely salute to the risky and brave men and women who had the temerity not only to think for themselves but to speak their minds.

The movie's inevitabilities (the humiliating loss, the ebb and flow of camaraderie, the triumphant finale) have deep resonance.

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

As ambitious as this may be, however, the movie's objectives tax its energy even as the girls' plight tears at your heart.

This is a patient, simmering movie. It's contemplative but without his usual smitten indulgences.

Garlin's movie is beautiful in its own way. It also suggests that David's show would still be brilliant without the aggravation. I'm not saying that David should renounce misanthropy. But maybe he could curb less of Garlin's apparent enthusiasm for people.

Assassination reminds you that Penn can be very funny.

The historical scope of this story, as well as Loach's interest in absolute fairness, seems to have drained some of the life from its telling.

A delightful road movie.

Bay's movie is also a confident mega-production that feels it doesn't need to lean on its visual frills if it has Smith and Lawrence -- it's a natural-born buddy flick.

This is one beautifully drawn, frequently lifelike piece of anime.

A dashing fusion of the literary and the cinematic.

The sight of Adams gliding and beaming and chirping in this movie - a self-mocking cartoon that transforms into an inspired live-action musical farce - is just about the happiest time I've had watching an actor do anything all year.

An alt-country paean to libidinal mothers and the little girls who clean up the mess.

Effortlessly entertaining romantic comedy.

What's special about the movie is how totally it believes in itself as a musical. The tunes, co-written by Sandler and a bunch of his pals, take on rock opera and traditional Jewish folk music with boyish exuberance.

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

Like Schumacher, director Gregor Schnitzler is more preoccupied with his characters' looks than their behavior. You might not buy the ideas. But you'll definitely want the T-shirt.

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.

Il Divo is showboat moviemaking, but the opulence is of a piece with the film's damning assessment of the durable Italian elder statesman Giulio Andreotti.

Tokyo Sonata, in so many senses, is about an allergic reaction to the very idea of what it means to be Japanese. The characters misplace their belief in etiquette, politesse, dignity, and propriety - or they struggle to maintain it.

It's been animated by the same company that made "Despicable Me,'' which is to say you don't know whether to watch The Lorax or lick it.

The emphasis here is less on cuteness and romance and more on the "Raiders of the Lost Ark"-style adventure.

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."