The humanistic approach makes Eastwood's movie a war story for the ages.

Acted with such venomous restraint that it hurts to watch.

Like the character of Rocky, it's got heart to spare, and is by turns one of the sweetest of the sweet-science pictures as well as one of the most doleful. Fighters fight, it's what they do. And Balboa, god bless him, fights on.

Even when it feels packaged like a holiday entertainment that aims to please, watching Dreamgirls is like being on cloud nine.

What Charlotte's Web has always had going for it, and what I imagine kids will always cling to (regardless of technological advances), is a sweet, simple, and timeless story about the power of friendship and the acceptance of loss, a story that's told faithfully here. And that ending is still a doozy.

Dear George Lucas: What gives with this Eragon jazz? I mean, gee whiz, did you seriously think that we wouldn't recognize you, the Great Man, as the guiding, um, FORCE behind this dull retelling of "Star Wars"?

Though pretty to look at (with camerawork by Phedon Papamichael) and inspiring to contemplate, this story of human triumph needs a lot more of the human for an audience to actually experience the triumph.

Apocalypto is a dazzling achievement. Not only does it showcase a civilization little seen on the silver screen, the film (which opens with a quote from Will Duant) also advances larger questions about the natural and unnatural life cycles of civilizations.

While the film never quite reaches the emotional peaks it so obviously seeks to scale, Zwick's film is still potent enough to save you three months salary.

His (Law's) is the standout performance, probably because it's quiet and reflective and nuanced amidst the flurries of relationship talk.

Unaccompanied Minors isn't likely to become a frequent flyer but it could strike a chord among children of divorce for many holiday seasons to come.

Like all great screen performances, Mühe's magic comes out most in its tiniest moments: a raised eyebrow here, a slight upturn of the lips there. It's a triumph of muted grandeur; it's like watching someone being born.

The story is good, but the execution favors the safe over the challenging. Personally, I'd rather just read the Bible.

Granted, the state of the indie hipster and/or Big-Man-on-the-Quad aesthetic has probably skewed a bit since I was a frosh, but good lord, man, it can't be this pale an imitation of campus life. I implore you: Go rent "National Lampoon's Animal House" and leave this flaccid wanker alone.

A movie designed without a proper foundation -- it feels as though it might crumble at any minute.

With Turistas, Stockwell dives head-first into a veritable riptide of churning, vicious exploitation cinema, and the result is surprisingly effective.

It's got a good creative pedigree and confident execution – as well as nifty design, down to its Hammond-organ Photek soundtrack and desert chic – but this ensemble piece set in a rural mobile-home park steps off the trail into melodrama from time to time.

Aronofsky's reach far exceeds his grasp with this film, and the muddle he concocts makes one wonder if there was ever a solid foundation for The Fountain. Hope may spring eternal, but this fountain is a dry hole.

What's interesting about typical Hollywood Christmas movies is that regardless of how crass, vulgar, or mean-spirited they may be, by the last scene they will inevitably try to wrap viewers in a blanket of warm seasonal cheer.

Déjà Vu has enough style and forward (or is it backward) momentum to viewers aroused. It's only after you leave the theatre that your head starts to throb.

It's stoner comedy of the most absurd kind, part fryboy mental drizzle, part wink-wink audience baiting, and wholly, utterly funny.

Clearly, the filmmakers did manage to capture some measure of lightning in a bottle.

The good news is Craig, who was riveting as a London pharmaceutical salesman in the recent Brit import "Layer Cake," is equally mesmerizing here.

The constant singing and dancing throughout is charmingly presented, and the CGI recreations of Antarctica are stunning.

The real crime here is that Let's Go to Prison made a daring escape from direct-to-video stir into the relative freedom of your neighborhood multiplex. Consider this one disarmed and extremely pointless.

It's neither utterly real nor utterly romantic (heroin, like alcohol, manages to be awfully and unremittingly both).

As a character-driven narrative, it's a hollow beast, too often pedantic, that smacks of good-guy agitprop, shrill when it should be subtle and shrieking when a whisper would be far more unnerving.

The real problem with For Your Consideration is that it's just not funny.

Like a dream, this film is wispy and ethereal; like a nightmare, it lodges in your hindbrain and gnaws away with gleeful abandon.

The movie isn't about Kennedy; rather, Kennedy is the sun around which all the other planets of the film revolve. And like some epic Louis B. Mayer picture from the Thirties, Bobby has a thousand stars in its galaxy, some of them great (Fishburne, Rodríguez), some of them not (Wood, Hunt), and one of them brilliant (Hopkins).

The film is a sure winner for arthouse audiences enamored of the new Argentine cinema, but it has crossover appeal for venturesome viewers in search of a good mystery, as well.

Delving beneath skin level and examining the mind of an 18-next-week boy, Dance Party is challenging, gritty, and true.

If nothing else, this adaptation of Peter Mayle's umpteenth ode to livin' la vie en Provence will make you wonder about Ridley Scott and the directorial aging process.

Rodríguez is excellent as Mike.

A welcome antidote to most of the crap that for passes today for horror and other supernaturally themed movies.

A good movie but not a great one, Stranger Than Fiction is reminiscent of the films of Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) but lacks that writer's conceptual rigor and imaginative power.

Offers more questions than answers. Even the Kurds, who seem the closest thing to a success story, long for a unified Iraq.

Fur dares the viewer to look into the eyes of Kidman and Downey Jr. and not see a whimpering housewife with a crush on Chewbacca.

A remarkable movie: touching, honest, and unassuming, without a hint of irony or false motive.

F*ck manages to strip some of the mystique from the forbidden word, and in the end, despite some road bumps, is a satisfying f*lm.

This feature-length expansion of Cohen's deliciously ridiculous character accomplishes what decades of Soviet propaganda failed to do: It points out and underscores issues of race, religious intolerance, classism, and all manner of very American social ills by giving the culprits just enough rope to hang themselves by their own petards (and then some).

Flushed Away has a wicked, smart, and subtle sense of humor.

It boggles the mind that Saddam Hussein and assorted cohorts have finally won their rightful place in the global noose while various and sundry villains associated with this third entry in the Santa Claus franchise of flaccidly feel-good, winter nostrums will no doubt be allowed to walk the Earth with nary a qualm nor backward glance.

Raimunda believes that dirty linen should be washed at home: Thank goodness Almodóvar hangs some of it up on the screen to dry.

It's a masterful film, the kind you itch to see twice or more, as elliptical as a dream and as direct as the short sharp shock of lead kissing flesh.

It's always odd to see Robbins, a political activist in his own right, playing at villainy, but here he descends into the role so thoroughly that the lopsided smile becomes less a notation of cockeyed boyishness than a treacherous Cheshire smirk.

Pop psychology has never been as visceral as it is in Saw III.

Corny and harmless, Conversations With God is a humanistic little movie with a real belief in the power of redemption and a positive enough message: “Love is the answer.” Or: “Go to your Godspace.” Whichever speaks more clearly to you.

Though the advertising plays up the film's Bush-bashing angle, it gives a false impression. This is really more of a backstage drama.

By the end, there's nothing to admire except Range's technical virtuosity.

Before the cocaine economy, Miami was a sleepy seaside hamlet, a "virgin city" with a permeable border and largely unprotected coastline.

The results are striking: an emotional and aesthetic whirlpool of horror, fascination, beauty (it's hard not to feel a bit guilty – even morbid - enjoying such beauty), and resignation that would probably drown lesser movies but that gives The Bridge an eerie power.

In casting an all-American Jersey girl and surrounding her with Manolo Blahniks and the Strokes, Coppola draws a connection between her audience (domestically, at least) and the doomed dauphine, who is likewise insulated and distracted from her country's pointless involvement in a disastrous foreign war that is bankrupting its government and starving its people – and all the while she spends, spends, spends.

I'm not entirely sure, but near as I can tell, this adaptation of Augusten Burroughs' memoir of family dysfunction finally and irrevocably lost me right about where the cat ended up in the stew pot, stirred with maniacally morose glee by Paltrow.

Maybe we won't fully understand Eastwood's film until we see the second part of this project, "Letters From Iwo Jima," his companion film seen from the Japanese viewpoint expected in 2007. On its own, however, Flags of Our Fathers merely flags.

No doubt the most devoted horse lovers in the tween set will get their fill, but parents should sneak out for a very long popcorn break.

Truth itself is little more than a word in The Prestige, a film that both celebrates the wonder of being fooled and the foolishness of wanting just that.

Americans are befuddled by the inexplicable, and they demand explanations. With The Grudge 2 Shimizu delivers them and thus defangs the horror, leaving us in a well-lit room, pining for the shadows.

But instead of being the hippest kid on the block, this plays like some ranty, paranoid comic thriller. It'd be more fun watching Jimmy Stewart get the beat-down from Claude Rains on the Senate floor; when Mr. Williams goes to Washington, the result is a total snooze.

Patrick leaves no scenery unchewed, and, in doing so, he gives life to an otherwise by-the-book script and proves once again that in Hollywood, it’s usually the bad guys who turn out to be the best characters.

Because screenwriter-director Brock fails to create a moving relationship between its mentor and student in life's lessons, the film hardly resonates five minutes after it's over.

Infamous successfully captures a sense of the loneliness of a writer's life.

When they’re used to tell a story as dreary, unfocused, and exhausting as Tideland, the director’s trademark dreamscapes and disorienting camera angles feel like so much artless window dressing.

The performances are all solid, although the screenplay frequently bogs down with the complexity of palace intrigues and plots that could have been rendered more consumer-friendly.

This is a dream cast for both Scorsese and the viewer, and everyone is working at the peak of their craft. Nicholson's flawless performance as the increasingly unhinged crime boss is a marvel of manic, paranoid ruination.

It's Winslet who is the heart and soul of Little Children, and when she makes a desperate, final bid to reclaim her soul, it's both horrifying and heart-rending.

Co-writers Don Calame and Chris Conroy utterly fail to notice the wealth of black-comedy gold inherent in the very notion of sprawling supercenters and instead go for the dumbest gags they can find.

Only good old Leatherface literally mirrors the festering cultural and political corruption of the era, and to the film's vast discredit, this hideous echo is never even noted.

What the series means in the long run is anybody's guess; I just know I sleep better at night knowing it's out there.

Tales of the Rat Fink is an ebullient survey of Roth's life that revs along with the zest a souped-up hot rod.

The quest for sexual happiness is a radical notion in these repressive times, as well as a legitimate basis for storytelling, but Shortbus doesn't quite delve as deeply as it ought into its characters' emotions.

The Queen is palace intrigue at its finest.

A surprisingly engaging character-driven picture: not quite Ingmar Bergman, of course, but not Michael Bay either.

Little more than paint-by-numbers filmmaking, and it fails in the most important charge of any children's movie: to transport its young and impressionable audience to a world where anything is possible, rather than to one where everything’s been thought of already.

School for Scoundrels varies between taking itself seriously and not, leaving the viewer alternately confused and disappointed.

Bottomless sermonizing would have played better in Sunday school than on the big screen.

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is inchoate, but it demonstrates that instincts and brio can compensate for a lot.

Apparently fit and reasonably trim, Deal's honesty touches a nerve that the band's music only gnawed on back in the day.

This veteran actor is always great, and it's just a little bit sad that he has to play a big, scary demon for us to sit up and finally take notice.

Despite an A-list cast and director, it's astonishing how bad this movie is.

While director Bill nails the sheer spectacle of squads of SPADs dovetailing in flames into the wide blue yonder, the earthbound action (much as it was in another sputtering epic, Michael Bay's "Pearl Harbor") is strictly laissez faire.

Just the kind of vicarious excitement for which the movies were invented.

Billed as Li's final martial arts epic (would that Jackie Chan be so thoughtful), Fearless is fittingly peripatetic, finding the Hong Kong superstar ricocheting across the screen.

It's a call to arms, a call to pick sides in the deepening cultural, political, and spiritual schism between the two Americas of the 21st century.

American Hardcore encapsulates a largely forgotten (by the mainstream, that is) moment in maximum rock & roll history.

Great movies can make you believe in a life beyond the frame; Zen Noir can't even convince you that what you're seeing onscreen is actually happening.

I think it's a mess, but - and this is a major caveat - an endearing, beautiful, hopelessly honest mess that's supported by a pair of performances so unnaturally natural that they draw you in and clutch you, struggling, to their flipping, flopping hearts.

Old Joy is an accurately observed slice of that moment between postadolescence and parenthood, when friends cling or scatter, and circumstances force buried feelings to the fore.

Forty-five minutes in, I was already glancing at my watch and wondering why the only lively actress in this film was playing the dead girl. Go figure.

For anyone over the age of nine, Yankee's journey is ultimately a dull one paved with good intentions.

The film is a pleasant surprise.

Thanks to Haggis and the cast, who are convincing, often bitingly so, in their willingness to dive into the dark and unknowable depths of the modern American romantic relationship, The Last Kiss mirrors reality with remarkable faithfulness.

The film veers toward sheer silliness at times, losing the sweetness that defines its strongest moments.

Foulkrod's film instead airs some of the hard-won truths learned by American soldiers from experience.

Lacking purpose or thoughtful complexity, Flowers' film is an overly ambitious mess.

A refresher course in the perils of celebrity and activism, but its syllabus and insights are purely remedial.

Smith is excellent as the potty Grace, with both Atkinson and Thomas equally fine in their roles. But the fact is plainly seen: The Ealing of yore is gone.

Neither as adroitly funny as Franken's comic routines, nor as notable as his conversion to the fine art of politics, this is a 90-minute "What If?" with no discernible answer.