The only thing saving Lake City from total ridiculousness is Spacek.

Even if you're familiar with the details of the game, Rafferty's suspenseful editing draws you to the edge of your seat and beyond, back into 1968 itself.

Luhrmann wants it all – comedy and tragedy, bombast and wet-eyed sentimentality. When it works, his kid-in-a-candy-store giddiness is infectious. When it doesn't – when he goes from silly to turgid in 60 seconds flat – he punctures Australia's proportions down from epic to simply overwrought.

It's a grim, dark, and relentlessly violent film throughout; James Bond as Terminator rather than Templar – but it delivers the goods in bloody high style: explosively, sexily, and with 007 shaken (not stirred) to his icy core.

The Vuillards, however fractured, know one another's rhythms and rituals, and Desplechin knows just how to convey them in the subtlest of ways.

Like Mumbai, Slumdog pulses and throbs with raw, unadulterated life and the hope for a better Bombay, today. It's brilliant.

Misanthropy in the movies has a new face. And, surprising to say, it's a handsome one. A matinee-idol face, in fact. Some might even go so far as to call it "dreamy." It's the face of Paul Rudd.

Post-JCVD, we'll never again be able to think of Van Damme as just another kickboxer turned actor. Van Damme is an actor, pure and simple, and proves that he is just as deft and accomplished as the movies in which he appears.

True artists will risk sacrificing audience goodwill for truth and sentimentality for cold historical reality, but Herman doesn't want your respect; he just wants your tears.

Young children will enjoy this piece of sweet cartoon candy.

It's not often you come across a film as unique as this, and while my taste for liver, lights, and sweetbreads isn't what it once was, this is still a fine post-Halloween aperitif, with guts to spare.

Whenever Soul Men is in need of a jolt of energy, these two poets of profanity are always ready with rapid-fire, mean-spirited rants that would make the writers of "Deadwood" blush.

House has a few moments that ring genuinely eerie, but the cluttered, unconvincing dialogue – not to mention Moseley's ongoing penchant for crazed overacting – make it more of a genre curiousity than anything the "Fangoria" gang would likely want to sit through.

The real shocker is how hellishly yawn-inducing this utterly pointless and forgettable Haunting turns out to be. It's enough to make you scream.

You come away from Splinter feeling it would have made a far more effective short than the feature-length drag it is.

Smith gives the appearance of wanting to provoke, but along with his smuttiness, he wears his heart on his sleeve.

A dull, tired mess.

Overlong, overplotted, and pocked with improbabilities.

The real tragedy of What Just Happened isn’t that it succumbs to predictable pseudo-satirical farce but that when it does, it loses sight of the very thing that could have made it a film worth caring about: the story of a man perpetually caught between art and business, between strength and weakness, between adoration and loneliness, between success and failure, between the movies and reality.

Could be summarized as a vampire tween romance, but that cheap and tawdry sum-up does zero justice to the magnificent emotional resonance of this gemlike bloodstone of a film.

Synecdoche is the kind of movie that rewards repeated viewings. But sometimes, as Van Morrison sings, it's just best to "sail into the mystic."

Eastwood's grim handling of even grimmer subject matter could have used some paring down toward its histrionic ending, but Changeling is still one of the director's most assured and engaging historical horror shows.

But let's be honest: Any actress can do melancholy; it takes a special talent to recognize that there's a certain luxuriousness, a certain joy, to be found in longtime self-hatred.

Truly, the greatest torture of all is boredom.

It's a good thing this movie has been sitting on the shelf for a year or more, because, apart from the difference in release dates, there's little to distinguish this new cop drama from last year's cop drama "We Own the Night."

Teenthrob Efron will be missed in future episodes by both adolescent girls and their moms who are only too happy to accompany their daughters to the theatre, but he's a handsome talent who's graduated to bigger projects.

As we find ourselves again immersed in a time of war, Trumbo's ageless story offers a useful corollary.

In our age of 24-hour news coverage, this rehashing of current events doesn't just come off familiar but completely unnecessary. And, worst of all, prosaic.

With Filth and Wisdom, the Material Girl has now spliced the title of film writer and director into her list of accomplishments, but the result is, well, immaterial.

A film that feels far too familiar for the likes of Wahlberg to juice up, hallucinatory valkyries or no.

Generally works like a drone but sometimes provides glimpses of the queens at the center

It's not "Sixteen Candles," but it's not "Road Trip," either. Instead, this comedic car-trip riff on the teen-male libido and the lengths to which it will go to satisfy itself falls somewhere in between part endearing emo love story, part gross-out semen gag-fest, and, very occasionally, a smart, inspired, non-sequitur-laden hoot.

Ftrangely emotionless. There's little offered in the form of rooting interests or compassionate characterizations, making the film ultimately as ephemeral as its title.

Ultimately, it's undone by the overfamiliar nature of Doon and Lina's quest, the outcome of which, while breathlessly paced, is never really in question.

Though The Express may stretch the limits of probability, holding up Davis as an athletic superman incapable of losing, it's also that rare sports film that isn't afraid to dabble in personal and social ambiguity.

That's the film's problem: Leigh's creation is fixed and unchangeable, admirably optimistic as a person but completely unengaging as a movie character.

Quarantine is a one-note nightmare, nicely pitched to the high-C howls of the bitten and the biters but offering considerably less froth than last year's "The Signal," which mined similar nightmares with far more fulsome results.

Dreamlike, disjointed, and possessed of a stunningly complex sensual and narrative poetry that may confound audiences not familiar with Chinese director Wong's defining stylistic tropes, Ashes of Time Redux is, simply, one of the most gorgeous films ever made.

There is much to recommend this earnest and enraged film.

A fast-paced amoral joyride that's more interested in the absurdities of violent criminality (torture by crayfish, anyone?) than the complications of real life.

The upshot to a ticking bomb is that it only explodes the once, but Rachel's sister, Kym (Hathaway), goes off again and again.

Though fashioned as popular entertainment with laughs, light moments, and mostly humorous segments, Religulous is as serious as a disapproving Jehovah about its mission to upend our rote allegiance to blind religious faith.

This time the dog wags the tale and proves, at least to Papi, that love really is a bitch.

It's a rattling, heartrending performance (Moore) in, yes, a long, hard slough of a film – one that is well worth the journey, if not a repeat trip.

Maybe he was a sucker, but it was his belief in the fundamental decency of American institutions that made his struggle for redemption so winning, much more so than the movie that was made to honor it.

Michael Moore has nothing to fear from David Zucker.

Where Young's book was a slap in the face, this movie is a kick on the backside, all hokey humor and quaint lovability.

All I can seem to muster, post-screening, is a modicum of fondness and a probably impermanent relief that the film isn't anywhere near as awful as it might have been in less capable hands.

More than a story about Iraq war veterans, The Lucky Ones is a movie about carefully considering one's options.

Makes for fruitful soul-fishing but lousy drama.

Good, manic fun plus a heavy dose of political intrigue adding up to two hours of clamorous, mind-numbing nonsense.

And for all Lee's ballyhoo about racial stereotyping, one might expect him to adopt a less hackneyed approach to his portrayals of Italians and women.

Mancini's character boils down to a lot of self-loathing and unresolved mommy issues – which is as tedious as it sounds.

May not be best chick flick around, but it's the flick with the best chick by far.

It's like the Sixties never happened, or maybe happened too much.

We've heard tell about the rebirth of the Western at least since Clint Eastwood's vicious, "Unforgiven" 16 years ago, but since the genre never truly died in the first place there's no need to flog that horse here.

It’s a curiously inert, workmanlike production: a whole lot of pomp and incircumstance.

Boilerplate stuff through and through.

But by the time this imperfect little film wends its way to one of the most winning exit lines I've heard in a long time, it's turned into something, well, perfectly lovely.

Pixar this isn't, but neither is it "Mary Shelley's Veggie Tales." If only.

Say what you will about comedian-turned-actor Cook, the man is a force of nature, a tornado of verbal gymnastics and physical contortions who will do anything for a laugh.

Burn After Reading, the new film from the Coen Brothers, won't be mistaken for "Fargo" anytime soon. Or "Barton Fink," or "The Man Who Wasn' There." Those films were black comedy done to perfection.

It's strange thinking of water as a market commodity, and it's hard to comprehend the kind of greed that must go into keeping it from needy mouths, but, fact is, the water business is now the world's third-largest industry, meaning there are a lot of sinister souls out there fiddling with their bank statements while Rome dries up.

The story builds to a feverish pitch and then never reaches a satisfactory conclusion. But while it’s onscreen, the film moves, incites, and jabs, all while reminding us how difficult it is to grow up female and sane in this world.

Contradictions abound in this messy and unfocused drama that purports to believe that family is everything, when all else fails.

There's nothing righteous about this tired and tiresome good cop/bad cop NYPD procedural.

It's not particularly fun, or funny, for starters.

Unlike any coming-of-age movie you've seen before. Equal parts sweet and perverse, this Scottish film is unpredictable in places where it might be twee, and subversively fanciful in others where it might be punishing.

From "Hands on a Hard Body" to an 89-minute ogling of another hard body: It boggles the mind that 11 years after his engrossing documentary about an endurance competition to win a truck in Longview, Texas, filmmaker Bindler has channeled his talents into this regrettable comedy.

I'm beginning to suspect there's some sort of ancient, or at least post-Pearl Harbor, curse in play that stops genre-oriented Asian filmmakers from creating anything of all but the most negligible merit once they hit the California shore.

This quiet, contemplative gem of a film paints a painfully accurate portrait of familial love, loss, and healing-by-degrees among the migrant communities bordering San Antonio.

It's not a great action dust-up by any means.

I Served the King of England, like its hero, is surrounded by and infused with the potential for meaning but feels like a lark: a bit of nothing whistling past the graveyard of 20th century European history without a thing to do but indulge itself.

College, a film so persistently loud and annoying that it single-handedly makes the case for drugging yourself with a roofie.

There's no nice way to say this, so I'll just say it: Writer/directors Friedberg and Seltzer are a scourge.

Lovely to look at, Year of the Fish is an animated feature that pops off the screen like a goldfish leaping free of its bowl.

If you're looking for a few hours of mindless, uncomplicated, air-conditioned escapism to get you through a hot late-summer's evening, I'd recommend you look some place other than Traitor.

Anderson has neutered the original film's outrageously transgressive macadam mayhem and completely stripped the story of its pointedly political social satire, making this Death Race one of the most boring drags of all time.

This empty-headed comedy about a Playmate who finds herself a house mother to a group of misfit sorority sisters is little more than a recycled version of "Legally Blonde" with bunny ears.

Cube is excellent as the doughy, rumpled ex-somebody who finds new life in helping to save somebody else's.

Arquette wander in and out of frame, but like everyone else in this film, they're eclipsed by Coogan's gloriously unhinged performance, which has the lunatic, semi-meta tone of a parody within a parody.

The Roberts are unforgettable figures, and their insiders' perspective and ultimate survival and rebirth provide an exhilarating example of how wondrous things can emerge from the flood.

Wilson is buoyed by a sporadically witty script, and while there are no surprises whatsoever in the story, his goofy, puppylike charm renders what could have been a disaster merely an unfortunate event.

Story is entirely insignificant in The Clone Wars.

Something is terribly amiss when the American actors sound like English is their second language.

Adding to weirdness is a tacked-on, live-action appearance from the real Aldrin, who reassures kids and terrified X-Files fans that there weren't, in fact, any houseflies on board Apollo 11.

An effective sound design enhances several of the film's sudden frights, and Sutherland, who appears in almost every scene, is a predictably solid presence.

All that's missing from the director's new vision of the world is the pipe organ and the choir of angels.

A Girl Cut in Two is Hitchcock sans the whodunit, essentially a long preamble of seduction and spiritual ruin, capped by a crime everyone saw coming (and an eye-dazzling coda that twists the title from metaphor to … something else).

Instead of entering the jungle to find the heart of darkness, Stiller (the director, co-star, and co-writer of Tropic Thunder) goes in to take aim at the Achilles heel of Hollywood: its utter pomposity and self-importance.

Smart and self-deprecating story about love and mortality: It’s merely a winter's tale told with a summer's palette.

The story is a shambles, incoherent throughout, veined with tirelessly wearying flashbacks, hallucinations, and just plain old lousy storytelling.

A film that is at once elegant and sublimely silly.

Stuff the cork back in: This wine movie was sold before its time.

If you had any notions of getting through The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 without having your emotions pushed, prodded, pounded, and kneaded like so much pizza dough, you can forget about them right now.

When embraced on its own terms, the film will provide an ironic bridge for those who want to share a greater closeness with Smith.

Frozen River skates matter-of-factly on thin ice.

May not be grade-A prime, but it ain't chopped liver either.