Holdridge is clever enough to keep his characters from slipping into outright narcissism, or when they do, he's familiar enough with the art of mainstream moviemaking to balance the exhausted with the ecstatic.

Hauntingly beautiful film.

They've become deadly dull, these two once-keen buckers of bureaucratic BS, and watching them interact on screen is akin to having your pleasure centers removed by knobby little aliens whose only knowledge of mankind comes from Jack Webb's stoically unvarying television incarnations.

Step Brothers has comic fuel to burn, some of it unashamedly non sequitur and stupid-brilliant, but it still feels like a post-"Talladega" flameout.

Kind of funny and kind of scary, Baghead's central horror motif is merely a structure on which to hang its four-character story about the depth of relationships and the drive to find meaningful work.

The film, a distinctly secular take on Waugh's religiosity, is far more interested in the battle of blind faith vs. rigid unbelief and its devastating effects. Herein, everyone is complicated – by their station, their philosophy, their God – and everyone is complicit.

"They have their Mardi Gras; we have ours," the explanation goes on both sides, but everyone seems to realize it's just a rationalization aimed at covering over Mobile's docile perpetuation of segregation.

At times it's almost like "Lord of the Flies," with the camera serving as the flypaper dipped in the honey of the promised land of celebrity.

The only thing here that feels truly, utterly alive is Ledger's maniacal, muttery Joker. The last laugh is his and his alone. It's enough to make you cry.

I COULD do without "Dancing Queen" stuck in my head, but that will unstick soon enough, and with any luck so too will the memory of Streep noodling on an air guitar.

Who doesn't love an animated, anthropomorphized-chimpanzee-starring, sci-fi romantic comedy?

A dreadfully misguided movie.

With top-notch performances (especially that of Mortimer) and the gray of the Siberian wilderness providing an apt backdrop for the movie's gray zones of morality, Transsiberian is on a great track.

It's not perfect -- thank Satan! -- but Hellboy II: The Golden Army is by far the most splendidly imaginative and creatively uncorked piece of fantastic cinema since the director's "Pan's Labyrinth" netted an Oscar trifecta in 2007.

Provides tepid but fun entertainment.

After his disastrous outing in 200X with "The Adventures of Pluto Nash," there was no direction for Murphy to head but up in terms of another space alien movie. Indeed, Meet Dave is a step up, but that's only in relation to Pluto Nash.

Pearl, in other words, is one of those guys put on earth to make the rest of us feel like we're wasting our lives.

There's a nagging sense throughout Gonzo that, despite his late-life decline into caricature, Thompson was too complex, too self-mythologized, too big, too American to ever fit onscreen – especially in a movie aiming for "objectivity," which was, for Thompson, the worst of all possible words.

Quirky and undisturbed, unaffected and unaffecting.

A crowd-pleasing portrait of boys-who-will-be-men-who-will-be-boys.

Has everything a great personal-paranoia/persecution movie needs.

A godforsaken (possibly literally) mess.

This is Pixar's finest and most emotionally powerful film yet, and it draws on a wealth of cinematic resources that run the gamut from Chaplin's best to Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati, and even Martin and Lewis.

With every bit of sliced flesh and every punctured skull I found myself wondering who exactly this movie is for. Its unflinching violence has earned it an R rating, meaning its desired demographic – teenage boys – is out of contention. That raises the question: Are there really adults who want to sit through this kind of mindless, bullying mayhem?

Will likely warm the cockles of your heart, even though it's hardly the stuff of great romance.

It wouldn't feel out of place on a double bill with "Dangerous Liaisons," given Breillat's unrepentantly nihilistic attitude toward the battle of the sexes in which all are pawns, every knight is errant, and the only queen is Queen Bitch.

The film reunites Carell with his "Little Miss Sunshine" co-star Arkin, who, as always, delivers the goods, as do most of the other supporting players. Too long by at least 15-20 minutes, Get Smart is nevertheless a giggly summer movie.

It recycles gags from earlier and better Myers movies and hopes that the audience won't notice because they're too busy staring at Timberlake's bursting Speedo.

Taken for what it is, Brick Lane is something entirely its own.

Kit Kittredge is a dutiful bore. Still, I couldn't help but wonder if, in the face of all-out market collapse, it might serve a dual purpose as primer for kiddies on economic depression – because food stamps always taste better with a side order of spunk. Or is it pluck?

The Happening is both too incoherenly weird and too narratively ambitious for its own good.

Five years after Ang Lee attempted a stylistically and narratively daring reimagining of what a comic-book movie could be (an example that tanked disastrously at the box office), the big green gamma-guy returns to the screen in a purer, more unadulterated, vastly more entertaining form.

It closes the film in what I suspect was intended as something of a happy ending, but it’s unnecessary: Thirty happy years should be happy ending enough.

No matter how bad you may have it, you'll feel better about your own lot in life after watching the tumultuous sexual flailings of Marcela and Jarda (Brejchová and Luknár), a way, way, way down on their luck Czech couple.

You get the impression that Herzog believes wholeheartedly the planet will be better off without us. Nosferatu that we have proven ourselves to be, he may be right.

Po (Black) may be an animated panda bear, but make no mistake: Deep down he's really just a nerd with a pop-culture obsession.

Sandler's first collaboration with co-writer and current Hollywood comedy godhead Judd Apatow, is a crazed, delightfully bizarre return to form for Sandler.

By the time the film's abrupt conclusion arrives, you realize you've been watching a love story and not, as some might hope, "The Lord of the Rings: The Asian Edition."

Blends into so much white noise, until all that's left is the lingering sense that the tragic and promising story of Doug and Richard won't be sticking with you past the closing credits.

Full of revelations, all brought to light by Bell's good-natured, Michael Moore-lite dogging of athletes, health experts, government officials, and even his own parents.

By the time Foot Fist limps to its ultimate fighting climax, you'll likely wish you had double-teamed "Game of Death" and "Waiting for Guffman" instead.

You can almost smell the desperation in the twisted psychosexuality of Savage Grace.

In its cinematic incarnation, Sex and the City has lost none of its bawdiness yet gained a more profound sense of soberness. Parker, especially, who in the last season of the show bordered on insufferable in her affected squeaks and shrieks, is allowed to go to very dark places – to be, in fact, quite unfabulous.

Younger viewers who've cut their teeth on the instant horrors of modern "torture porn" may find The Stranger's pace and psychological upsets more slow-going than they might like. Yet a film like this may be just the bracing corrective the modern horror film needs.

Laugh? Cry? I thought I'd die, but then that's the genius of Gordon.

Unfortunately, like so many movies that celebrate a historical hero, Children is plagued by an overblown sense of its own importance.

War, Inc. is neither all that interesting nor all that cool.

Ford's Indy, who doesn't quite hang up his fedora at film's end, is still the only cinematic smartass-cum-bullwhipping scholar of antiquities I'd want by my side when push comes to shove comes to Nazis ("I hate these guys"), Russkies, or, for that matter, Al Quaeda. Go get 'em, Indy, and cue the John Williams while you''e at it.

In The Edge of Heaven, a more tempered Akin seems content to allow the incidental lives of incidental people merging incidentally to pass quietly and at their own paces. Which indicates a much-needed maturation of the "Babel/Crash" formula but also fails to rattle your bones the way those movies did. Pick your poison, I suppose.

Technically, Jihad's images and assemblage seem on par for a first-time filmmaker, though the film's message is a moving plaint.

Adamson's pulled a more morally nuanced rabbit (or badger, actually) out of his directorial hat this time out, and the result is a far more engrossing film than its predecessor.

Post-viewing, I was still coasting on the giddy high of kinetic cinema, only to have the astonishing callousness of its conclusion slowly settle in. It's a better film for it – one only wishes that Reprise on a whole had been of the same mind: a little less cool, a little more cruel. That's where the really good stuff is.

There's more story, heart, and – cutting to the chase, the quick, and the dead – pure, unadulterated fun contained within a scant five minutes of Rockstar Games' new Grand Theft Auto IV video game than there is in the whole of Speed Racer.

The Fall lives and dies on the strength of Pace and Untaru's remarkable performances. It's there that the pulsing heart of this magical-real film beats most true.

A consistently entertaining parody that never once makes you feel like an idiot for laughing out loud at its idiocy.

Pray maintains a steadfastly objective viewpoint, and it's a testament to his film's success that it can accommodate the audience's inevitably shifting allegiances from one family member to the next.

If you're gonna hire one of the funniest American comedians working today – Zach Galifianakis – and shove him to the side of the frame, then frankly, you can take what happens in Vegas, keep it in Vegas, and keep the rest of the us out of it.

As an extended metaphor on the perils of imperialism and the colonization of both land and heart, Before the Rains works just fine, but as a love story run afoul of the times, it's a soggy affair.

And Favreau? If you'd told me 12 years ago that Swingers' comic linchpin would end up helming one of the best, most visceral, and downright fun foray of all the comic-book franchises waiting in the CGI wings, I'd have told you to amscray, kid. But what the hell? Turns out irony's good for your blood.

What this really comes down to is the film's central lie. Made of Honor pins its hopes on a character who acts utterly without honor, and on an actor who has only two settings – sensitive or smarmy. The smarm wins.

This film may be Korine's most accessible as a director, featuring characters, images, and situations that are stirring and unforgettable – even if they don't add up to a complete narrative or visual whole.

In the end, Redbelt prevails, just as Terry teaches his students to prevail, but getting there isn't always pretty.

Funny and sweet and guaranteed to flood you with good feeling.

Just like it is in the world of "SNL" that Fey, Poehler, and McCullers sprang from, the choice gets made time and again to aim not for the high road but for the great, big, fat, juicy, unchallenging, uncontroversial middle ground, where everybody’s laughing but nothing is all that funny.

Whether you view it as intellectually dishonest or just plain sloppy, Deception is a movie that more than lives up to its title.

Anyone can come up with jokes about incestuous rednecks or pubic hair that "looks like Osama bin Laden's beard," but it takes guts to make a comedy in which the Indian-American hero accuses an African-American TSA agent of racial profiling, all so he won't get caught smuggling weed onto a plane.

It's contemporary French cinema without a dollop of Besson and Jeunet's beloved CGI theatrics, and all the better for it.

These people manage to convince us that the events at Abu Ghraib were standard operating procedure and not aberrant activities. Therein lies the horror of the movie – and also its banality.

Some may dismiss Then She Found Me as a mere "women's film," but it's really a more honest and mature take on sex and the city.

When the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River began construction in the early Nineties, an estimated 2 million people's lives were impacted. That's a staggering number to contemplate, but Up the Yangtze effectively personalizes that near-meaningless number by putting a face on at least a few of those 2 million.

Attica! Attica! Everyone involved in the creation of this muddled, joyless, and deadly dull serial killer-meets-forensic psychiatrist snoozefest should be forced to spend – at the very least – 88 minutes behind Attica's bars.

The plot is negligible, but that's fine since it's really only a way to get from one set-piece to another.

Segel, scripting himself, injects regular bursts of comic genius into the proceedings.

Perelman eases the transitions between the past and the present with echoing phrases and situations, but they all seem rather pat and contrived. Does he really think that repeated refrains from the Zombies oldie, "She's Not There," won't be a dead (so to speak) giveaway?

So kudos to Spurlock for going into enemy territory and coming back with the message that there really is no enemy territory. It almost – almost – makes up for the fact that Where in the World is marred by one of the worst endings in movie history.

The action can be bloody, but is mostly routine. Ultimately, the film’s most eye-catching special effects are reserved for bikini waxes and implants.

Make Ben Stein some more money (and get a good, mordant chuckle while you're at it) by checking out this loopy, factually befuddled documentary that should manage the not-inconsiderable feat of insulting Christians, Jews, Muslims, and those nutty sci-guys who go in for Darwin by way of bad teeth and Einsteinian hair styles.

Many questions occur to the viewer along the way but are never addressed by the filmmakers.

It’s hard to ask for juicier, or more timely, subject matter than high-pressure academic ambition turning violent, but to map the descent of a genius into madness isn’t a task to be taken lightly.

A nearly bloodless slasher film with fewer surprises than a broken jack-in-the-box.

A solid contemporary crime drama.

Definitely a film that marches to its own drumbeat.

Bra Boys isn't really a documentary at all but a piece of PR propaganda designed to counteract years of bad press. Beautiful, soaring, exhilarating propaganda, no doubt, but propaganda nonetheless.

There much more roiling beneath the surface of these characters and it's a shame we don't come to understand them better. Smart people, dumb choices: it's true for both the characters and the filmmakers.

One of the most affecting and certainly the most intimate of the cinematic arguments against the war in Iraq yet made.

Young@Heart more than subtly suggests that the secret to growing old is to feel young, and – based on what you see in this film – there may be some truth to that platitude.

The balloon will resurface throughout, but far more interesting, and substantial, is the slow reveal of Simon's domestic situation.

When I ask myself what it is that these women in the movie want, I come up with bubkes.

You can’t read one of Clooney’s endless People profiles without hearing the Cary Grant comparison, but here, he’s all Gable – same rakishness and stubble and tanned-leather basso profundo.

Meet Bill is a typical storyline given new life by an overabundance of antic energy.

There are momentary pleasures, to be sure – a corker of a kiss here, an Otis Redding-backed barroom slink there – but frankly, I'm a little weary of Wong wearing "that same old shaggy dress."

Boys adventure stories are a dime (store novel) a dozen, but girls adventure tales are rare things indeed.

As it stands, The Ruins is about as interesting as a pile of old stones and a monkey-dumb yanqui falling prey to the horrors of globalization. And that's pretty dumb.

A self-indulgent, snarky, scattershot mess through and through.

Dedicated to Atlantic Records fountainhead Ahmet Ertegun, whose complications from injuries sustained in a tumble backstage at the Beacon resulted in his death, let the record show that a lifetime of musical innovation concluded with dying not at but FROM a Rolling Stones concert.

This British rom-com is all soft and plodgy, a by-the-numbers redemption tale that careens uncomfortably from sentimentality to stomach-turning sight gags.

Spacey, whose Trigger Street Productions is one of the film's producers, digs into his role as the story's snarky mastermind and lure, yet it's all the kind of stuff we've seen him deliver in so many movies before.

The presence of Lohan – a celebrity whose every move is tracked by the media like an endangered species of hawk – only serves to highlight the point that the truly fascinating story behind the murder of Lennon wasn't Chapman's madness (and certainly not his weight) but the depths of our celebrity mania and the influence we’re willing to concede to personalities larger than our own.