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.