Morning Glory had the capacity to be a smarter, tarter picture, though it's not bad as is: well-acted and ingratiating, with at least one howlingly funny sequence.

Though he has stepped up his game, Perry's plainspoken, unsubtle aesthetic is an uncomfortable match for the fragility of Shonge's speeches, and scenes abruptly switch between the language of Perry's scripted continuity sequences and sudden poetic soliloquies.

If Red Hill isn't quite a classic, it surely is a work of genuine passion for a genre that's unmistakable, and unkillable.

This is provocative stuff, to be sure, in which the stakes are so high that a pratfall concludes with exploding limbs and the anguished effect of its final minutes is a quiet shock to the system. A comedy of errors and terrors? Who woulda thunk it?

Still, this is recent and public history, and Fair Game, which both fascinates and infuriates, comes across as little more than a footnote in an ever-lengthening list (thanks, Wikileaks!) of the Bush White House's sordid, potentially treasonous actions leading up to and beyond the invasion of Iraq.

Mostly this is a tense, portentous, and provocative piece.

Try as they might, the Jackass gang can't quite snatch the year's ultimate 3D gross-out from the pricking jaws of "Pirahna 3-D."

Hereafter is a consistently identifiable Clint Eastwood movie only in the sense that the prolific filmmaker shows that he still has the ability to confound our expectations of him.

What's most fascinating is that there's no self-indulgence on Medak's behalf. It's a filmmaker coming to terms with a deep bruise in his life, and the realization that time may heal all wounds, but will still leave a scar.

While neither as outlandish as its sequel, Police Story III: Supercop, nor as emotionally turbo-charged as the series opener, this second Ka-Kui adventure rests comfortably in-between the others, overflowing with Chan's patented stuntwork and comic high jinks, and as such, it's a fine introduction to the Jackie Chan phenomenon.

The person I most connected with for most of Mr. Fish: Cartooning From the Deep End was not the artist, railing against the man, but his wife, Diana Day, sweating their debt, working the job that gets them and their twin daughters health insurance, doing the dirty work that enables him to stand on his principles.

Filmed in luscious black and white, Mustang Island is a millennial comedy of manners that also doubles as a superlative acting showcase for real-life couple Macon Blair and Lee Eddy.

There's no denying the kick you get from seeing Borgnine (forever lovelorn Marty to me, when he's not tooling around my head as Cabbie, from John Carpenter's Escape From New York) and company kick ass, take names, and go batshit crazy one last time.

A conventional story, conventionally told.

Boden and Fleck's unabashedly warmhearted film is a sensitively wrought but also very funny portrait of the way we respond to pressure.

It's the best date-night movie to hit the screens in a while, which, considering the competition, is very faint praise.

Nowhere Boy reveals the magnitude of the good women behind the grand icon.

This utterly mediocre forget-me-now could've been crafted by any faceless serial director at all. The shame of it is that the man behind the camera is Wes Craven when, by all rights, it should have been Alan Smithee.

Neither so awful as to be enjoyable nor eerily artful enough to be anything other than a snoozy also-ran in the perpetually poor plotting machine that is the demon-child cinematic subgenre.

Blisteringly entertaining.

Let Me In is by far one of the best-looking films of the year, genre or no genre. It's a nightmare, sure, but what childhood isn't?

Lots of ideas are tossed around in Freakonomics, and it often feels as though one is trapped in some kind of pop centrifuge. None of the authors' arguments is contested in any way, and the zippiness of the film paints everything with a Teflon sheen.

LaBeouf plays Jacob as no naif – he can be as slippery and savage as the next suit – but there's also real tenderness in his scenes with Mulligan and Langella (in a small but significant role as Jacob's mentor).

A lot of gunk: dance-offs, sing-alongs, awkward exes, and a dirty-talking White blasting through, I'm afraid, the last bits of her novelty. That again?

The sketchy visual traits that differentiate the many characters in this avian universe will leave viewers crying, "Who, who" along with the owls.

You've got to hand it to Reynolds, director Cortés, and screenwriter Chris Sparling; they milk every single frisson of nail-ripping anxiety from a stunningly simple – yet universally recognized and dreaded – conceit and then cap it with a payoff of molar-pulverizing intensity.

Ultimately, it may be the case that Guggenheim is a better instigator than filmmaker, as the debate about our educational system appears to be on the upswing at present. For this, rather than all the specifics of its argument and what it leaves out, Waiting for 'Superman' is essential viewing.

In practice, and played as farce, the characters are one-dimensional cutouts kept at a dogged remove. Their miseries are a bore – maybe to Allen, too, who abruptly ends the film, after so much inaction, when it finally catches some dramatic traction.

Ultimately, though, Jack Goes Boating is too much of a banal thing. Jack's a good guy, and you root for him all the way to the end, but, wistfully, that doesn't make him an any more interesting everyday Joe than he is.

A surprisingly warmhearted examination of hypocrisy and social insecurity, unlikely camaraderie and stutter-stepped formation of adult identity.

The 3-D angle is the only one I can identify to justify Alpha and Omega not going straight to DVD.

In the end, Devil feels like an ingenious short film pumped up for theatrical release. Shyamalan's story is sound, but the execution dragged me to hell and left me there wondering if his much-rumored sequel to "Unbreakable" was ever going to arrive.

Once the rodeo's over, where do the sweethearts go? Beesley, thankfully, doesn't end the film with the end of the rodeo, but there's a potentially more interesting follow-up doc ghosting right behind this one.

There are good guys we don't care much about and bad guys that we do and even badder guys we're supposed to hate. But on the sliding scale of culpability, everybody's just a few clicks away from the next guy.

The film is never less than absorbing to watch. However, in the end, I think Catfish lives up to its namesake's reputation as a bottom-feeder.

The subdued characters I can abide, intellectually speaking, but subdued filmmaking with material this fundamentally gut-punching is a lot less easy to swallow.

The Virginity Hit is repugnant.

It's hard not to feel punk'd and trapped amid the company of jerks.

It pains me to say it, but Afterlife, the latest installment in this seemingly eternal zombie apocalypse franchise, is considerably more entertaining than George A. Romero's most recent exhumation.

Going the Distance has a tin ear and sullied eye: Nothing sounds or looks very good.

In the end, Machete may not be all that original, but it is fresh – fresh as a steel blade to the gut.

Has little of the wit, surprise, or memorable characterizations of the original.

Aided by a strong soundtrack by Corbijn's friend Herbert Grönemeyer, The American nevertheless seems more like a concept in search of a movie.

It runs the stopwatch on a chase sequence to a comical extreme and takes way, way too long to take its final bow, in the process burning off any residual goodwill.

The shock ending isn't all that shocking if you're a fan of genre films, but it's nonetheless effective despite the fact that it sidesteps several key questions. Never mind: It's hellishly fun.

Gratuitous in every sense of the word, this second remake of 1978's Joe Dante-directed/Roger Corman-produced "Jaws" knockoff is ridiculous summertime drive-in fun.

Lottery Ticket is ultimately no "Friday," but that 15-year-old film's communal vibe is clearly the model Lottery Ticket is chasing.

While this is hardly "Breaker Morant," it's nowhere near as mawkish or cloying as it could have been.

For American children, Nanny McPhee Returns may seem something like a foreign film, but the movie has enough spoonfuls of sugar to make the Britishisms go down.

Amiable fluff that takes its time learning how to walk, talk, and generally act like the kid-centric rom-com that it is.

Though the story played out in the national media, this documentary makes effective use of commentary by Tillman's survivors, who resent the way the military lied to them and exploited the memory of their loved one to serve an ulterior purpose.

You want vampiric satire with actual laughs? Try Mel Brooks' "Dracula: Dead and Loving It," "Love at First Bite," or even Roman Polanski's "The Fearless Vampire Killers." Anything is better than Friedberg and Seltzer's endless, bargain-basement, sub-Cracked magazine un-comedy.

Roberts, wearing that beatific half-smile of hers that suggests inner peace and wisdom before she's even begun her journey, is too open-faced with her emotions to signal the complexities of Gilbert's distress – over her divorce, her control issues, her rootlessness, and inability to live in the moment.

It's big, it's loud, it's dumb, and all things considered, it's not completely un-fun.

Wright takes the tools of a bloodless medium, the video game, and crafts an action-comedy with a true-blue beating heart.

In many ways, Animal Kingdom could have become a stylish but routine cops-and-robbers tale. Instead, Michôd shapes this film into a memorable character study about uncaged beasts.

Sure, it's nifty enough to see dust particles swirling or hands swooshing at you, but mostly the 3-D muddles the invention and exquisiteness of the film's raison d'être: the dancing.

Opens strongly and front-loads its best gags into the first third of the film. After that, the jokes begin to repeat themselves, and the plot becomes mired in unintelligible details of the white-collar crime.

Cairo Time may be your ticket if you're in the mood for love, but the excursion is a cut-rate journey.

Far more interesting than Juli and Bryce's banal budding love is Reiner and co-scripter Andrew Scheinman's sensitive exploration of how parents shape their children.

Zealously nasty fun which, surprisingly, ends on something of a note of upbeat grace and familial redemption, Middle Men is more entertaining than 99% of 37% of the Internet.

The film is delicious, welcome, and entirely satisfying and, as an added bonus, far and away the best genre-fan date movie of the year.

There's no getting around how dreadful Twelve is – how tone deaf it is to its young protagonists and how vapid its ersatz production design seems.

The scoped camerawork is a shrewd tactic; only occasionally does its flat, proscenium effect make the action feel overly staged.

There are inspired gags, to be sure, but they're few and far between.

Though the soundtrack comes on kind of heavy, the cinematography (by Enrique Chediak) has a beautiful clarity. Yorick's skull or not, Charlie St. Cloud is no Shakespearean drama, but the film should prove to be another solid stepping stone for Efron on his way to a long adult career.

Although it's great fun for the under-8 set and for those of us monitoring the chaos theory that is Nolte's career of late, this film is otherwise mediocre and features some of the most uninvolving 3-D CGI since "Clash of the Titans" earlier this year.

A strong first film, and with a better-honed script, Williams should prove to be a director to watch.

You need only see Get Low for absolute proof that, while Hollywood may be in decline even as bad actors' salaries climb ever higher, there remain at least three very exemplary reasons – Duvall, Spacek, and Murray – to switch off your home theatre and get out into a real one.

It's nail-biting good fun, sporting some très haute couture nails.

Refreshingly anti-princess and sweet without degrading into sugary, Ramona and Beezus animates Ramona's frequent flights of fancy with DIY-like sequences that literalize, quite charmingly, how a kid colors the world.

Recounting the history of nukes, mankind's seeming inability to render them obsolete, and the many nightmare scenarios that are cropping up with almost daily frequency in this grim new age of terror-on-demand,Countdown to Zero is less a documentary in the traditional sense than a scathing piece of advocacy journalism.

If taken merely as a vaguely historical spy thriller, Farewell is a dandy tale.

Call it the aesthetic of un-Happiness.

Nolan’s end-act pacing has always felt ponderous – but it’s not enough to ruin what is surely the most intellectually and viscerally engaging action film in years. The soul doesn’t stir, no, but everything else is wildly somersaulting.

If there were any brooms in Disney's new Sorcerer's Apprentice they would have to be used to sweep this tired dreck to the curb.

The Kids are All Right, a grin-cracking great portrait of a modern American family in minor and then major crises.

Summer was made for this kind of film, and Predators is almost exactly what you need to fix this otherwise busted summer cinema season.

Everyone knows that the villains are usually the most interesting characters in any movie. So the makers of Despicable Me were wise to cut to the chase and make the megalomaniacal Gru (voiced by Carell) the central character in this animated film.

The Girl Who Played With Fire's chief frustration is in how removed Salander and Blomkvist are from each other.

Cast aside any preconceived expectations you might have regarding this documentary and remember simply this: Winnebago Man is one of the best films you're going to see all year.

With a surprising lack of verve, humor, and narrative tension, Shyamalan's live-action foundation film is unlikely to woo new fans to the tale.

The supposedly epic battle the entire film builds toward – the single action set-piece – is a ho-hummer. Fire and ice, turns out, was an oversell: Think tepid tap water instead.

Grown Ups is exactly, beat for beat, what the previews would have you believe: a depressingly predictable, two-chuckle deconstruction of what Sandler sees as the modern American male.

Restrepo is an example of photojournalism at its finest.

Who, exactly, is stalking whom, and for what reason? I'm still not entirely sure, but Resnais' funky, frothy bonbon of a film is nevertheless a breathtaking sight to see.

Frankly, I don't like to be bullied, and bullying is exactly what Knight and Day – overly cute and overconvinced of its own cool – does best.

The resulting film makes Sam Raimi's "The Quick and the Dead" look like a stone cold neo-Western thoroughbred.

Cyrus is very funny, and Keener's supporting work as John's divorced ex also amuses. A pat conclusion nevertheless negates the strength of the restive narrative that precedes it.

A fearless sort of melodramaticism that might have seemed silly if it weren't for the impeccable EVERYTHING on display here, from the lush, sexy camerawork of director of photography Yorick Le Saux (Swimming Pool) to the throbbing, atavistic score by John Adams. It's not silly or, at least, rarely so, and Swinton's nuanced, aching performance is downright revelatory.

I laughed more (sincerely, full-throatedly) at Toy Story 3’s smart comedy than at any other film of the still-young summer movie slate.

Certainly there are filmgoers who enjoy this kind of noncommittal metaphysical quest. I am not one of them. It makes me think that the filmmaker is more interested in showing us his vacation slides instead of sharing any real insights.

A winning update of a classic piece of Eighties' filmmaking, and that in itself is something of a coup.

The cast seems to have been assembled primarily for its blinking resemblance to the stars of the original Eighties TV series about a renegade group of former Army Rangers now for hire.

An entirely sympathetic portrait of the artist at an advancing age. That's right, artist – and to a generation that knows Rivers only as a screeching red-carpet provocateur or as an overknifed monstrosity, that revelation alone is worth the cost of admission.

The costume design, however, is the film's most enthralling aspect; replicas of actual Chanel designs were created for the film, and a fresh costume graces nearly every sequence. Alas, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky unfolds on a screen instead of a catwalk.

Winter's Bone never hits a false note.

Splice is a twisted little genetic updating that's not half as electrifying as Shelley's novel twist on the whole man/God/creation situation (and the perils thereof).