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.

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

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.

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.

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.

A solid contemporary crime drama.

Definitely a film that marches to its own drumbeat.