It’s redemption through sentimentality, salvation through schmaltz.

Although this version of Beowulf (the script, ricocheting between thrilling, heroic, and hilarious, is by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary) does take some liberties with certain heretofore undreamed of aspects of parentage, it's as faithful to the extant version as it needs to be.

Not surprisingly, it’s better to just read the book.

The next time he (Baumbach) attempts something similar, he might take care to lessen the bile and amplify the heart.

The film’s one saving grace is Bateman, the only actor on set who seems unwilling to give himself over to Magorium’s philosophy that the key to a fulfilling life can only be found in pathological regression. Maybe he just needs more whimsy in his life.

Despite its shortcomings, Redacted is nevertheless a film brimming with spontaneity and fury, and in a season of often-ambiguous films about the war in Iraq, there is a lot to be said for this kind of combustible energy.

True believers make for sloppy documentarians and that What Would Jesus Buy? is stuck in neutral because of its director’s almost total lack of intellectual and psychological curiosity.

It appears that Kelly spent the intervening years (since "Donnie Darko") taking hallucinogenic drugs, reading Philip K. Dick novels upside down, and – most disastrously – believing his own hype.

The adaptation by Joel and Ethan Coen (both co-credited as writer and director) of McCarthy's as-if-written-for-the-screen No Country for Old Men becomes a marvelous meld of narrative faithfulness and pre-established sensibilities.

Fred Claus is sadly just an early lump of coal under the tree.

Despite its flaws, which become more evident as time elapses, Lions for Lambs is worth seeing for no other reason that you’ve never seen anything like it before.

Ultimately, though, and despite an enormously creepy turn from Bentley (American Beauty), the story has nowhere else to go but into the standard (albeit judiciously-used) stalk-and-slash territory.

"It's difficult for people to believe our story," says one kid, succinctly, eloquently, "but if we don't tell you, you won't know."

In Moshe’s new film, Livingston throws himself with defeated gusto into the role of Patrick.

Crowe has rarely been better, and the same goes for director Scott, who parallels and then dovetails Lucas and Roberts' stories with sublime, gritty precision, working up to a magnificent "Godfather III"-style crosscutting sequence that electrifies an already explosive tale.

No nectar of the gods this, but we can still be thankful that Bee Movie is a sweet morsel that's devoid of any jokes about bee farts and poop.

For all the film’s rallying efforts, its meandering structure and absence of a central driving character results in a film about genocide that is, as unbelievable as it sounds, kind of boring.

Like an early Clash number, it's by turns lovely and ugly, loud as bombs and quiet as a revolution's first-thrown stone; it acknowledges the legend while uncovering the truth.

Only in Hollywood can a movie about alien children be boring. Even if the kid isn’t really an alien (no spoilers), there’s still opportunity galore for the wild and the weird.

Truth is, once again, stranger and far more interesting than fiction, but Stewart, whose youthful idealism makes for passionate but uneven filmmaking, should scuttle further oceanic pedantry and focus his lens on Watson's "good pirate" efforts to sabotage the "bad pirates" and save the sea.

While the evil that men do to one another in this film may well be rooted in the Cain-like enabling of original sin from one doomed brother to another, the final familial tragedy feels exactly like classic Lumet.

Bella is, indeed, a beautiful film. The bustling, cab-crowded thoroughfares of New York City have rarely looked as inviting and the coastline as momentously beachy as they do in this film.

All goes according to course, and that's exactly the problem with Dan in Real Life.

Torture, you may recall, used to be an unparsable, unpardonable sin. Now it's porn.

These days, it's dark everywhere. Which makes Slade's wild, often exhilarating neo-Western ride into frostbit vampirism something of a respite, albeit one awash gore.

It’s too bad the filmmakers didn’t have a longer view of film history, though; maybe their jokes would have been more interesting if they’d been aimed at, say, "Somebody Up There Likes Me" or "The Pride of the Yankees."

As a leading man, Casey Affleck has a nebbishy quality and a mumbly speaking voice that I personally find disruptive to a movie's flow.

Intelligent and well-meaning, Rendition is nevertheless an oversimplified and uneven attempt to arouse righteous indignation among its viewers.

Connelly, in particular, soars as the nail-biting mother trying desperately to put on a brave face and keep her family together, while Ruffalo and Phoenix, two of Hollywood’s best brooders, are excellent as wounded young fathers.

In the end this movie belongs to Del Toro. He imbues Jerry with such life, such ambiguity, such unsentimental complexity and depth that you can’t help but feel you’re watching the most intricately mapped depiction of addiction and strained humanity the film world has ever given us.

But absurdity alone won’t get the train into the depot, and no amount of quirky characters floating in their chairs or fish changing colors at random can make up for the film’s lack of real humor or meaning. Which is to say, if you’re going to make a comedy about suicide, you’d better make sure the jokes land. There are people out there who could use a laugh.

There’s something earnest and forthright about the movie, despite its misguided execution.

Despite good performances all around, particularly the ever-brilliant Blanchett, Elizabeth: The Golden Age is a gilded ornament, speculative and uninterested in much besides this queen's matters of heart.

Kind of "Hoosiers": Part 2. But the storytelling is so backassward that it’s impossible to care about any of the characters or really engage in the movie whatsoever.

It takes a village, I've heard it said. It takes a village not only to raise a child but also, in this case, to aid the delusional and help restore good mental health. Or so Lars and the Real Girl would have us believe.

It takes something really special to bring together a Nobel Prize-winning writer, a director renowned for his Shakespeare adaptations, a two-time Oscar-winning actor who also happens to be a knight of the British realm, and the reigning No. 1 British screen heartthrob and still come up with nonsense.

There’s such an overriding sense of soap opera that I kept expecting a commercial break.

Gray's signature long takes and overhead shots are in evidence and add to the film's fatalistic tone, and one rainy car-chase sequence is a real keeper. But, overall, it's impossible to shake the film's gloomy sense of eternal repetition.

The film’s light hand, appealing style, and simple exposition make it an eminently watchable inquiry into the politics of food and public health, accessible to the documentary-shy and wildly appropriate for older kids, who may further respond to its generational emphasis.

Even though we're aware of the tragic trajectory of the singer's life, for a while it almost seems as if reality got it wrong and Curtis might just squeak past the reaper's scythe with no more than a shave and a haircut.

It’s hard to fault a screenwriter for cramming every idea he’s ever had about anything into his first movie for fear there won’t be a second.

This is a Farrelly film for adults, if not the entire family, and its a charmer, honest both to the nature of the loves we choose in haste, and the fear that makes us so hasty so often.

Like Spencer Tracy, Gene Hackman, and others who have made acting on the big screen seem so easy while taking us on a journey that is far from simple, Clooney is the real thing.

My conclusion is that exploitation of a child for the sake of one's career is a shameful act.

None of this made a lick of sense to me, nor did it appear to be all that obvious to either the cast or screenwriter Hodge, whose work here feels as though he'd given up in frustration halfway through before deciding to see how far he could push the vaguely Harry Potter-esque shenanigans before getting sacked.

It’s a hard film to shake, and there’s an awful lot to be said for that.

It points a determined finger (a middle finger, almost) at law enforcement, which cannot or will not recognize kidnapping victims in our midst, especially if they are undocumented and brown-skinned.

There are warm, genuine moments that endear these attractive characters and their experiences to us despite all the falderal. Feast of Love may be enough for some to keep the pangs at bay ’til the real thing comes along.

Like some sentimental fool, I allowed Johnson’s good-hearted buffoonery and Pettis’ overpowering sweetness and Millard and Price’s unwavering belief in the healing power of love to get the better of my senses and travel straight passed my brain to my heart.

If the jingoism that permeates the latter half of The Kingdom does not sufficiently sour the experience of watching it, then the film's closing sentiments about the eternality of vengeance will surely do the trick.

It’s one of the most cautious readings of lust ever put to film.

Its head may be in the sand, but Outsourced is a good-spirited idyll, an escape from reality, naive to a fault, and all but unconcerned with the troubles of the world but almost -- almost -- convincing in its innocence.

The character never really comes alive, and I walked away from Into the Wild feeling that Penn was too in love with the idea of Christopher McCandless the free-spirited hero to excavate the soul of Christopher McCandless the lost man.

It's a strictly date-night-rental affair, and if you still get Ryan Reynolds and Dane Cook confused, this will do little to help sort things out.

Almost all of it has to do with watching the occasionally nude Jovovich look absolutely smashing in duster and sidearms, but sometimes, let's face it, that's not enough.

It’s cheesy and contrived, but even the most watered-down stories retain elements of the original masterpieces.

No one in the movie is entirely right in the head, least of all James, whose rapidly disintegrating sanity provides Pitt with his juiciest role since "Snatch," one he chomps into with all the relish of a guy who’s been playing suave leading men for too long.

Though it’s as estrogenic as dong quai, this amiable adaptation of Karen Joy Fowler’s eponymous bestseller about six friends and their book club is thoughtfully rendered with a certain universality of spirit – in that sense not unlike the books of Jane Austen herself.

Across the Universe will have ardent defenders, but in the long run, it will do nothing to infuse life into the current mini-revival of movie musicals and is as soft-headed as the wishful refrain “All You Need Is Love.” Maybe that works in real life but not in the movies, sister.

Pleasant but pedestrian.

This South Korean pseudo-epic is some of the most ambitious cr-- I've ever seen.

It's Cronenberg's film, but it's the actors who elevate Eastern Promises from mere thriller to some other, more disturbing plane.

So instead of a nice, clean movie about parental regret we’re forced to suffer through an unnecessary biblical metaphor stretched way past its limits of applicability and a bit with an American flag that turns Deerfield from a human being suffering a crisis of conscience into a hollow symbol of a country in a state of political disenchantment.

The story is simple, sometimes to a fault.

Unfortunately, Mr. Woodcock is funny for exactly five minutes, during which time Woodcock is shown throwing basketballs at boys’ heads and mocking them for having dead parents.

A confounding movie on many levels. For all its sophistication and sensitivity, it turns out to be little more than an upscale B-movie about getting even.

More than an appreciation, Pete Seeger: The Power of Song is an inspiration.

This film is an example of a Western that ought to appeal to a healthy-sized contemporary audience, and is also a remake of the 1957 film of the same name, which is a hallmark of the type of psychological Western.

No other film in recent memory has featured such a terrifically retro maniac or revisited the heyday of Eighties gore films with such gleeful, moist abandon.

The story (even more so if you weren't around in July of 1969) is gripping, eloquent, and powerful stuff, the right stuff right down to its pioneering heart, taking manifest destiny to the stars themselves.

As the songs pile up and the plot putters along, Romance & Cigarettes wears thin, like a moral for the titular addiction: Sure, there’s the sweet dream of that first drag, but a whole pack’ll do a body bad.

For the most part, this is strictly kiss kiss, bang bang, yawn yawn.

A syrupy fable about love and family? What happened? Did they lose their nerves? Or did some meddling studio executive pull them back before they went too far out on a limb? The comedy gods hate a coward, so let’s hope it’s the latter.

The strangest part is that half the movie’s arc is missing, but the credits promise its arrival in 2009 as Milarepa Part II: Path to Liberation.

The film is visually bland and hits a few comic dead ends, but there's an element of pathos that allows us to believe in the plight of the fictional James.

One well-staged sequence in a parking garage is the film's only memorable moment

To make an intelligent heist film is difficult work; to shoot an entertaining sociological study is near impossible. To manage both at the same time has got to be some kind of minor miracle.

The Nines is the feature-film-directing debut from screenwriter John August (Go, Big Fish), but it feels much more like some Bizarro World collaboration between Jean-Paul Sartre and Charlie Kaufman, and not in a good way, either.

Zombie continues to have a true, unflinching artist's eye for the sublimely horrific (a woodsy murder sequence is pregnant with disturbing, painterly compositions), that eye is wasted here on an unnecessarily moribund history of sociopathy as it relates to Halloween in Haddonfield, Illinois.

A compelling small-scale drama, and Lapica is a talent to watch.

A mildly entertaining reworking of the Farrelly Brothers' superior micro-sport parody "Kingpin."

It’s hard to imagine a time when the sea bore a sense of adventure close to outer space.

Never transcends its clichés.

If you like the character – his tooty yellow Mini, his busily working beetlebrows, his tendency to point and grunt and eat shellfish whole – then you will be rewarded with 90 minutes of such.

An awful lot of good talent has been squandered in this by-the-numbers film.

Stays on its feet through all the rounds, but it never “floats like a butterfly.”

This is frightening stuff, ably helmed (by writer/director Gorak, art director on the nerve janglers Fight Club and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), viciously acted, and altogether horrific in ways George A. Romero could imagine only through the lens of the darkest sort of fantasy.

Muddled, sloppy, and obfuscating.

The action sequences are shot in close-ups and with such rapid editing, it’s nearly impossible to find a sense of rhythm let alone follow what’s happening.

Eye of the Dolphin is much better than most films of this sort, and if it helps a generation of young girls want to grow up to swim with live dolphins rather than groom My Little Ponys, that's certainly not a bad thing at all.

The film has no script; it goes from moment to moment unhurriedly.

Mostly Superbad is as soulful and funky as its soundtrack.

A comedy that's refreshing in its courage to embrace tradition and just have fun.

While it's a well-constructed doc, full of relevant information and geared toward those people who still might be fence-sitters on the subject, there's something missing from The 11th Hour's lengthy procession of talking heads: a sense of maddened outrage.

It's the pod people's version of a great, contemporaneously resonant cinematic fable, created by apparent committee, and utterly devoid of both meaning and feeling. The tagline warns: "Do not trust anyone. Do not show emotion. Do not fall asleep." Yawn.

Pure, goofy fun.

The Last Legion offers guilty-pleasure fun in a cheesy, very De Laurentiis way (much like 1976's Mandingo rip-off Drum), but, in the end, it's just not a very inspired or well-conceived film, despite Kingsley's strangely endearing turn as the proto-Merlin.

Shapeshifters-lite. Fangs but no fangs.