This is the kind of movie in which every other line of dialogue feels like a metaphor – and from there on, the film seesaws between the uncomfortable extremes of glum and twee: an overwrought dirge keyed to a xylophonic ping.

Deliciously bleak, black political satire from British director Armando Iannucci.

Bottom line: This Orphan is an atmospheric and occasionally vicious little git and an above-average entry into the "cuddly hellspawn" genre, overlong at two-plus hours, but nowhere near as excruciatingly overdone as others of its ilk (Devil Times Five, I'm talking to you).

Taken as a whole, The Ugly Truth is much like its orgasms: phony and unsatisfying.

Vacant and pointless.

A well-chosen cast props up this otherwise shallow story.

A funny, seductive, and surprisingly honest dramatization of the ways we snooker ourselves into incompatible love.

A Woman in Berlin is like a tour through the blast-cratered psyche of two colliding cultures, each with its own nightmarish tales to tell or acts of violence to experience.

It’s always a pleasure to be in the company of Potter, and when looking back at the just-competent first outings – well, baby, you’ve come a long way – but still: Where’s the magic, huh?

The film may have only the best of intentions, but it tries way too hard and ends up being shallow, superficial, and only sporadically funny.

As for that central question: Yep, it’s art, all right. One only wishes they’d gotten down to the business of it sooner.

Ends up as little more than a recursive footnote to the infinitely better up-all-night teen comedies of, you guessed it, John Hughes.

Artfully stitched together sans narration, Soul Power stands alongside "Wattstax" as a critical concert film of the Black Power era.

Best of all, though, is the kinescope footage of the televised version's early episodes, which eerily resemble nothing so much as every other TV sitcom to follow, Seinfeld included.

Equal parts French sex farce, Mai-Decembre romance, middle-aged white male fantasy, and wannabe Hitchcockian intrigue, Fontaine's film can be a chore to sit through, but not for any of the obvious reasons.

Cotillard doesn't look part Native American or sound like a Thirties Chicago moll, but damned if she isn't a sight and sound to behold. Whatever her technical limitations, she rises above them to breathe a flesh, blood, and battered verisimilitude into the part. You can't tear your eyes off her, any more than you can Mann's flawed but still engrossing picture.

Hasn't got a lot more to say than it did last time about the necessity of accepting the nontraditional family in extraordinary times, but what it does have going for it are its well-delineated characters.

The tension is enough to make you slightly sick, and the overall mood of the thing is deeply dispiriting, but then, nobody ever said that war isn't hell.

Anyone who watched (and probably wept his or her way through) the swoony 2004 melodrama "The Notebook" knows Cassavetes is not a man to leave a spot of sap untapped, and in My Sister's Keeper, he pulls out a very big drill indeed.

One of the more surreal docs to come down the pike in some time.

They don't make women, sexy but regal, like Pfeiffer much anymore, and Cheri is quite a monument to her.

A classic case of preaching to the choir, since it’s doubtful the film will reach many of the minds that need changing.

Overstays its welcome by at least a half hour. But, assuming that cute Camaro stays in the picture, I expect we’ll all be back for the planned round three.

Fletcher demonstrates, as with her second film, "27 Dresses," that she can put together a funny, able romantic comedy that is a cut above, but no more. Still, those leads are awfully likable, the Massachusetts-for-Alaska landscape rather picturesque, and if The Proposal doesn't reinvent the wheel, merrily we roll along nonetheless.

The only people who should be peeved enough to raise hell about Year One are the viewers who had to pay to sit through it.

The information it presents is eye-opening for medical consumers and health professionals of any stripe. And the film incidentally makes a great case for health care reform.

Moon doesn't belabor anything, really, so confidently measured and philosophically nuanced it all plays out (aided by a striking, under-the-skin original score by Clint Mansell).

Why wait for 2012? If you're hankering for a taste of the apocalypse, the opening sequence of this eye-opening, stomach-queasing doc has plenty to go on – witness menacing superimpositions on a bleak, blighted landscape – and the hits just keep on coming.