Wesley Morris

Barely any of it is funny, and if a minute of it is meant in mockery, few of the darts ever find the board.

Is a mellowed Herzog to be believed?

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

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

If there's a granddaddy of breezy situationalism, it's probably Buñuel.

Ferguson's film is a clear-sighted counterpoint to the former secretary of defense's impression. As the title suggests, it's a seemingly infinite mess.

Brüno is what "Borat’" was too well-done to be: a publicity stunt about publicity stunts.

It’s a stagy, half-entertaining, half-tedious acting competition between five excellent Englishmen.

Marks a return to a not-so-distant time when horror movies weren't soul-rotting atrocities but just enjoyably bad.

No-fat filmmaking aided by Berri's muscular formalism that, here, occasionally assumes the gritty focus of a taut, action thriller.

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

The trouble with Quantum of Solace is that the frills are a mess, too. Even the customary opening title sequence, with its writhing silhouettes and screechy theme song by Jack White and Alicia Keys, is a cheesy throwback to the Roger Moore era: Ladies and gentlemen, the Quantum of Solace dancers!

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.

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.

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

Not since ''Mannequin on the Move" has a flamboyant black man brought so much fabulousness to stiff white heterosexuals.

Kurt and Mark's trip to those hot springs is a figurative return to Eden. Anyone who's had a disillusioning reunion with a moony old friend knows what Mark discovers: They're too old to stay that innocent. None of this hit me until after the movie ended. But it hit me hard: You can't go home again.

A sloppily made bowl of reheated chick-flick cliches.

A deep, exhaustive, and moving piece of do-it-yourself detective work.

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.

The arrival of closing credits feels like a trap door. The film is over, and, suddenly, we have to leave these people. The directors make no guarantee for their futures, but the strength of their filmmaking inspires you to hope for the best.

It's that rare movie with a sense of timeliness that is eternal, and a protagonist whose soul-crushed angst, even at its most fatal, speaks to the little boy/girl lost in everyone.

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 movie is so dependant on its source material that it fails to put Carter, Thompson, Penn, and Christy to better use.

Wendy Carroll is a character we rarely see in movies anymore, a woman left alone with her thoughts. That a moviegoer would care what she's thinking testifies to the power in Williams's brand of solitude.

Eckhart, who gets more rugged by the picture, certainly works hard to bring the audience along. But he's a nervous wreck for nothing. This movie isn't talking to us, it's talking to other serial killer movies.

In ''Trials,'' Hitchens is almost endearing, stalking Kissinger from one event to the next like a bleary-eyed Michael Moore.

The platitudes in this gratuitously sentimental movie are taken a lot more seriously than the people.

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.

Fired Up feels like everybody's first time doing anything - writing, acting, directing, cheerleading.

It’s not a good sign when the first few minutes of a movie about singing, dancing, rapping, video-camera-wielding teenagers reminds you of a certain grimy horror franchise.

Leave it to Ron Howard to turn a plaintive Dr. Seuss ditty into a C-grade Tim Burton psychodrama.

A squeaky clean, family-friendly comedy that merely sounds like an unreleased Cheech and Chong romp.

Particularly anticlimactic - the film itself seems sprung from molting yuppie catalogs.

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

You can see Bobby and Peter Farrelly bent over blowing violently into the sails of this toy boat, trying to get it to move.

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

This is not a movie that has great passion for pleasures of the flesh. Its sexiest scenes involve bullets cutting through the air in the slowest motion possible.

Neither hot nor square, it's as simple and earnest as any after-school special and as cameo-laden as any rap video.

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.

Silly little thriller.

Getting to the true root of his evil may necessitate "Saw LX."

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

Miserable as it crawls for two eternal hours toward being "life-affirming."

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

The journey's a kick.

A slick, supercharged popcorn flick of the erstwhile Bruckheimer-Simpson brigade in which the only thing more shameful than the proceedings is a very well-paid male star assigned to make you less aware of that sucking sound.

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

Fills you with a healthy respect for the men and women gladly risking their lives for your entertainment. The film itself works best with its into-the-camera reminiscences and on-the-set mishaps.

Not as desperate, unfunny, and nonsensical as its title. It's worse. Worse than you can imagine. Unless, of course, you've imagined 90-something minutes of bloopers and outtakes that congeal into a story -- much the way a scab is formed.

If there's nothing here for romantics, there's even less for gourmands. Nettelbeck fails to produce a good food metaphor, let alone an impressive, palate-aching preparation montage

On just about every occasion in Meet Dave, Murphy appears to be on the verge of cracking himself up. This is good news. At least someone found him funny.

If we learn nothing else about Krasinski as a filmmaker, it’s that he thinks more is more.

Date Night manages to live down to its store-brand title.

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

Often grating in its presentation.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 laughless outtakes for ''Armed and Fabulous" helpfully remind us that it could have been worse.

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

For the moment, King has restored women to their rightful place in a genre that is nothing without them. But, sadly, that genre isn't romantic comedy. It's the chick flick.

There is no central drama, no surprise, no tension in his comedy. The ads for Along Came Polly make it look so upbeat and simple that you're convinced it must be hiding something, like death or a disease. But the truth is there in the advertising: nothing happens.

It's hard to have sympathy for a movie that tosses in the old shower sneak-up sequence or allows its characters to speak as obviously as possible while standing in a pool of red liquid.

So much of Virgin is bunk masquerading as sexual politics.

As movies about relic sex machines go, this one lacks mojo.

I laughed at the Wayanses' movie, and I don't even hate myself for it.

No one around this beauty-first rendition of these addled artisans and their brief, obsessive affair really understands the attraction, so most people just get out of the way.

The movie is made livelier by its bit players -- King, Murphy, Lupe Ontiveros as Lucia’s bigoted grandma, Anna Maria Horseford as Marcus’s grandmother, Shannyn Sossamon as one of Whitaker’s airhead girlfriends, and, best of all, Anjelah Johnson as Lucia’s car-mechanic sister.

Lila is all come-ons without any charm.

The Great Raid amounts to a noble failure. This is sad news for those of us who remain hopelessly partial to Dahl's mean streak. The failure we can live with. It's the noble part that will never do.

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.

Rush Hour 3 reminds us that Tucker is an utterly strange entertainment phenomenon: He exists only in the world of these movies.

One of those overstaffed, overstuffed "when do we eat?" holiday dramedies. Call it a double-extra-strength episode of "Soul Food."

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

Set in a vivid two-dimensional African village, the animated fable is jerky, odd but redolent somehow of Saturday morning and the night's sleep before.

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

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.

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

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.

The film builds into a lurid and suspenseful thriller.

Determined to try your patience, asking you to fall in love with it.

When Annabel Chong sits in front of Gough Lewis' camera and complains about her need to have one of those normal everyday lives, you want to tell her that having intercourse on camera with more than 200 men is probably not the way to get to normal.

Yes, I've seen Dumb and Dumberer, so you don't have to. As good deeds go, this is about as significant as getting a cat out of a tree, but believe me, you're better off at home, alphabetizing your old comic books, talking to your parents, or watching paint dry.

If Crossing Over is less self-congratulatory than "Crash" about confronting its designated problem, it's just as inept at dramatizing the complex ways that problem unites and divides us. Here every cause is something you can wear around your neck.

Exacting but disappointing thriller.

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 imperfect, but it’s daring, bold, and from a director who isn’t scared of anything.

This is a modest marvel of grace and framing that unfolds with the patience of a cloud and is driven more by wonder than pure emotion. It doesn't have the exuberance of Francois Truffaut 's "Small Change." Instead, it's that movie's antonym, yet just as wondrous.

More altruistic would be if Williams stopped torturing us with weepy endearments so he could look for that complex clown who used to mug just for laughs.

If good intentions were all it took to create a decent movie, Thom Fitzgerald's 3 Needles would be some kind of masterpiece.

This is the first time we've seen Myers in the flesh since he committed assault and battery on Dr. Seuss, and I wish the cat had stayed in the hat.

The thrill of the ridiculousness is gone. So is all the mystery that made Statham so appealing in the first place.

This is not a movie. It's a coming attraction for a theme park.

Like a lot of action-movie directors, Gray lacks the imagination to view the art of cat-and-mouse as more than a chance to play with state-of-the-art war technology.

Gets diagnosably schizo.

There Will Be Blood" is anti-state of the art. It's the work of an analog filmmaker railing against an increasingly digitized world. In that sense, the movie is idiosyncratic, too: vintage visionary stuff.

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.

Takes a dedicated and true snapshot of African-American life. But so little of its presentation is memorable. This is a haircut movie that redefines ''fade.''

American Violet feels less like life and unreasonably more like the movies.

Teeth is the "Incredible Hulk" of sex satires.

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.

The characters are intended to be slightly stupid, but the writing isn’t necessarily smarter.

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.

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

As it is, LaBute has cleverly repurposed his creepy source material. This Wicker Man, which wasn't screened for critics, is a nutty atonement for the gender assaults of his filmmaking and playwriting past, including "In the Company of Men," "Your Friends & Neighbors," and "The Shape of Things."

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

The movie needs Richard Dreyfuss .

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

One Missed Call was originally a so-so Takashi Miike freak-out. Now it's a worse-worse American eyesore.

Wesley Snipes runs around a lot shooting people in plotless film.

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 punch line isn't that funny.

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.

This is a movie from the past that's also eerily of a piece with the film culture of now and tomorrow.

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

The F&F series is the 21st century's beach movie, one for some beachless future world where the kids are crowning 25 and seem capable of living off of hair gel and exhaust fumes.

As demonstrated in his previous film, a plangent snapshot of subsistence called "Waiting for Happiness," Sissako is a poet, and the filmmaking in this new picture is stuff of a deserving laureate.

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.

An arthritic failure, genuine only when the two outcast lovers' eyes dart toward each other, then retreat.

If Keane is a downer, it's a stupendously well-conceived one.

The film has the perverse intelligence of Cronenberg's other movies. It's not his best, but it is certainly his most accessible, least stagy work, obeying the laws of chronology and serving up characters whom we recognize as people.

An enthralling special-effects tour de force with a lover's nook.

It's taken Dreamgirls 25 years and several false starts to get to the screen, so it's a shame to see what a rush job it feels like.

Bruce Almighty would rather go runny and bland, mostly where Aniston's Grace is concerned.

This is a movie about excess. It's excessively long (at least it feels that way), the slo-mo is used in excess (so are the swords), and our heroine, Yuki (Yumiko Shaku), when she does emote, is excessively weepy for a coldblooded assassin.

There is, however, Viola Davis, who might win an Oscar tomorrow for her one scene in "Doubt." Her part here - a minister combing the street for crack-whores to rescue - is about three times as large.

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.

If most boxing movies are about redemption, Resurrecting the Champ is a boxing movie that goes to exasperating lengths to redeem its boxing writer.

At its savviest, Scream 3 is a cheeky conceptual conceit, cheaply executed for the sake of achieving trilogy status. Instead, it's like a carnival that's been in town a week too long.

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

That commendable sense of balance, which Dolgin and Franco use to approach this family reunion, ultimately makes the finished product devastating.

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.

This movie is crazy, but the insanity is electric.

This movie is to sweet as a dog is to a hydrant. But it's little things like that that keep someone like Diaz laughing all the way to the urinal.

Were there such a thing as a low-carb melodrama, Things We Lost in the Fire would be it - all the tears, half the guilt.

When Jamie Lee Curtis ran from a killer in 1980's "Prom Night," she was 22 and had a unique gift for belting out fear. She was the Beverly Sills of slasher flicks. That "Prom Night" was dumb, but it wasn't insulting in the way this remake is.

Fitfully good.

As wonderful as Testud is, her character doesn't make much sense.

As she sashays, mirthlessly, from one thankless confrontation to the next, it's unclear why anyone would find Garner any more deserving of stardom than certain mannequins.

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.

The movie is weak on attempts at survivalist philosophy (anyone bit by a zombie is likely to become one). Even the religious overtones feel tinny and unpronounced.

Walking Tall, which is credited to four different writers, is wanting for a reason to be.

In Sandler's movies, men don't cry; they urinate. So the scene in which the stars empty their bladders and change the color of a swimming pool's water might be the weepiest of the year.

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

While it may be true that in space no one can hear you scream, groaning should be a perfectly audible way of saying the intergalactic alien-buster Wing Commander sucks.

This is territory previously covered in the French film "Ma Vie en Rose," which took a relatively more sophisticated view of both a child's self-expression and adults' discomfort over it.

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.

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

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.

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.

A sequel that makes it clear that the outrageous antics of the first movie had a one-time-only charm.

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.

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.

Highfalutin swill determined to pass itself off as a jazzy caper.

A shrewdly acted, bittersweet comedy.

Somewhere in this movie, amid the ponderous exchanges and unfortunate O. Henry-style coincidences, there's American tragedy.

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

Like laughing into a mirror for 113 minutes.

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

A fluffy piece of Disney nonfiction.

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.

The movie is torn. It wants to honestly explore the natural wear-and-tear of the Grogan marriage. But it also seems OK with being something that could pass as a midseason replacement on ABC.

The finale of this tedious piece of Asian-ish action-schlock based on a popular anime series implies an intention to make more. One was plenty for me.

As an up-to-the-minute representation of the specifics of the teen universe, Sleepover lacks authenticity.

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.

Demonstrates that sadomasochistic streak in von Trier that equates the raw with the experimental.

The comedian's thankful willingness to do anything for Blue Streak...is its redeeming grace.

There is a good chunk of Lady in the Water that is simply too well made and affectingly acted to dismiss as a mere exercise in arrogance.

The camerawork is steady, the editing patient, the choreography playful. It's a zippy and inspired piece of moviemaking. But there's one problem. It's playing under the closing credits.

The director, Martin Weisz , doesn't lean on a lot of noise and editing tricks. He can relax, since all the scares are built into the Cravens' script, which invokes both "Goonies" and last year's instant-classic, chicks-versus-cave-dwelling-vampires flick "The Descent."

You want to make lemonade from this, but even the lemons stink.

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.

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.

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.

The picture's structural intricacy is a smoke screen for its psychological and emotional shallowness.

The explicit encounters and dirty talk in Eating Out suggest a new genre -- call it porncom -- that seeks to amuse and arouse at the same time.

What the movie lacks most is a real sense of adventure.

All the voice work here is excellent, especially Oswalt's. He sounds like Paul Giamatti but with a greater capacity for confidence.

Over Her Dead Body is to romantic comedy what Spam is to meat. But at least with Spam, you get cool packaging.

I was not a fan of Albert Brooks's "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World" (2005), but Brooks, at least, seemed willing to concede before it was over that his movie was a terrible idea. Spurlock seems opportunistically optimistic.

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

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

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 film winds up stranding us in a desperate wilderness of collapse and betrothal.

Watching it is like being lost in somebody's richly moody campfire story -- it's so good, in fact, that only once it's over do you realize you've been holding your marshmallows too close to the flame.

There's no real journalism here, just the sort of appalling revisionism that can turn a bloodbath into a beach party.

A movie that sports more cameos than a "HeeHaw" marathon but not much else.

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 real problem with Harsh Times is Jim himself. Bale goes at the part with his usual intensity, but the character still seems like a psycho without psychology or a soul.

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

Mafioso is the missing link in the mob movie arc.

Probably as tolerable as it can be for a comedy with no obvious creative aim. You can imagine the crew cracking up on some outtake reel, which honestly is what this movie feels like.

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

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

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.

Maddin's movies are easy, too. Point your eyes at the screen; the magic follows.

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.

House of D, is like the kind of sticky greeting card you'd find on CBS some Sunday nights.

A lazy, torpid piece of animated tourism.

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.

Cosmic slop.

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

Its seriousness is welcome. It's also a burden the film can't completely surmount.

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.

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

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.

Crammed with such earnest belief in the power of love - even if it happens in the Chicago Zoo - it almost doesn't matter that O'Connor and Loggia have better chemistry than Duchovny and Driver.

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.

Brown Sugar fails to produce an image of hip-hoppery as fascinating and complex as the moment when Halle Berry set her tongue wagging during a ghetto-fabulous grind with Warren Beatty in ''Bulworth.''

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.

Pan's Labyrinth is a transcendent work of art.

Ethereal.

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.

Deadly funny.

Only in the last 30 minutes does Evan Almighty put his gifts to decent use. Epically hairy and biblically robed, Carell suggests at that point what a bolder, more psychologically serious treatment of religious conviction would have been like.

But what can you do with Hayden Christensen? He's as close as we have to an android actor. It's all a chore for him. He never looks sufficiently scared, impressed, or surprised by any of this.

Blows to the head are delivered with more subtlety than the message of Diary of a Mad Black Woman.

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

Having also starred in "Dude, Where's My Car" and "Just Married," Kutcher is becoming a stoopid-comedy specialist.

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.

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

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

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

It's often a lapsed, under-informed documentary with restagings.

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.

The movie crassly repurposes tragedy to excuse its cliches.

Makes a term like neo-noir seem like a fatuous catch phrase.

Still comic, but bigger isn't better.

The film is conducted in a delirious cinema-verite style; most of what you see has a brutal, you-are-there immediacy. You're not merely watching history, you're engulfed by it.

Merry, filthy, unstoppably hormonal, Serbis feels very much like the sort of movie that happens when no one is minding the store.

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

You put up the cash, the movie clunks.

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

It's handsome filmmaking that doesn't surface until the final 25 minutes during which Stevo and company's sense of marginalization achieves the palpable, emotional import that's more expressive than anything its characters' have to bitch about.

Enigmatic as it is, The Intruder dares us to see movies as visual marvels tethered to humanity.

Guy Maddin is a scholar, poet, prankster, and ferociously devoted classicist who likes to resurrect dead cinemas and deader directors and make them vital all over again.

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

It's the film we leave most movie theaters wishing we'd seen instead.

Eloquent and unapologetically cute.

Green Zone is somewhere between a blockbuster and a tract -- a traction movie. It whizzes and bangs and sizzles as it chases the truth like a dog off its leash.

Ludicrously written and appallingly directed by ex-film critic Rod Lurie, seems to pride itself on the fact that it never (ever) leaves the greasy-spoon milieu in which the president and his staff are trapped by heavy snowfall.

Unofficially, You, Me and Dupree is a companion piece to last summer's "Wedding Crashers," a movie whose lunacy is desperately needed this summer.

Freeman and Hunter are both overqualified for material this ponderous, but she plays along, while he appears to have made a minimal emotional investment in the oncoming avalanche of coincidences and cliches.

Most of American Pimp feels like you've been slipped a Mickey.

Part aerobics workout, part self-styled dreamscape, Sense is a hyperactive piece of performance art that begins as the stripped-down dress rehearsal of a garage band and builds into a mighty, exhausting spectacle that shakes as much ass as it kicks. [Review of re-release]

Ultimately affecting mix 'n' match weeper.

A grubby little redemption comedy that in every way feels like a consignment-shop Jack Black vehicle.

For most of the movie, however, Halle sprints, Halle swims (55 laps!), and Halle screams. It's a two-hour fitness video -- a portrait of the Oscar winner as personal trainer.

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.

There are two reasons to put up with Soul Men, and that's the soul men themselves. Samuel L. Jackson and Bernie Mac appear to be having a good time, and for most of this raunchy, poorly orchestrated buddy comedy, that's enough.

Delgo demonstrates how hard it is to create a memorable, credible-looking piece of animated entertainment.