The elusive musician is in the spotlight, even if he's not that fond of it, and Kijak manages to keep him at a reverent distance, the film padded with gushing interviews from musician fans.

Eastwood finds the humorous aspects of the character as well, no more so than when the appetite of the widower who lives on beef jerky and Pabst Blue Ribbon becomes the center of attention among the Hmong women cooks.

Timecrimes is a tremendously entertaining bit of Kafka that whirlpools down into "The Twilight Zone."

Dull, unnecessary film.

Unfortunately, the actors don't all behave as though they're performing in the same movie.

This overly sentimental family Christmas drama, featuring a veritable checklist of prominent Hispanic actors, falls victim to the shortcoming so prevalent in similarly ethnic-themed movies with similar casts – everything and everyone is so damn serious.

Let no one ever say that Dark Streets doesn't have the perfect title. It may not be much more than a stylized regurgitation of creaky film-noir clichés and crime-fiction conventions … but its streets are undeniably dark.

Delgo is a dud.

There is a sense of ambiguity at the core of The Reader that makes it all the more brutal, all the more honest in its deflowering of love and what one imagines love ought to be instead of what it too often is.

Because Wendy and Lucy is so lean on plot and dialogue, there are long spaces to contemplate Wendy and her situation, and the logistics are mind-boggling.

Cadillac Records bobs and weaves, strides and duckwalks, samples and smiles on the sounds that made urban Chicago such a blues melting pot.

Even the dependable Rickman can't find his footing here. As he lamely hams it up, you can see him trying to rally himself and then deciding it's not worth the effort.

The blood and gore quotients of Punisher: War Zone are extremely high and are sure to sop the appetites of the series' fans and virtual bloodlusters.

Ultimately, Frost/Nixon may be stuck in time – but, oh, what a time it was.

Funny and fierce and deeply moving.

This year's entry in this lowly subgenre is Four Christmases, a D-list comedy with A-list actors.

The deeply heartfelt Milk is more of a surface skim: a fairly standard biopic – if a very fine one, indeed – but never the transcendent work one would have hoped from the filmmaker or his subject.

Transporter 3 is so far over the top that it more than once spills into outright cartoonishness.

I've had mosquito bites that were more passionate than this undead, unrequited, and altogether unfun pseudo-romantic riff on Romeo and Juliet.

This is a Disney film, so there's never any real question regarding Bolt and his friends' ultimate success or failure, but the writing team of Dan Fogelman (Cars) and co-director Williams (Mulan) have concocted one of the most witty and often hilarious Disney outings in years.

The only thing saving Lake City from total ridiculousness is Spacek.

Even if you're familiar with the details of the game, Rafferty's suspenseful editing draws you to the edge of your seat and beyond, back into 1968 itself.

Luhrmann wants it all – comedy and tragedy, bombast and wet-eyed sentimentality. When it works, his kid-in-a-candy-store giddiness is infectious. When it doesn't – when he goes from silly to turgid in 60 seconds flat – he punctures Australia's proportions down from epic to simply overwrought.

It's a grim, dark, and relentlessly violent film throughout; James Bond as Terminator rather than Templar – but it delivers the goods in bloody high style: explosively, sexily, and with 007 shaken (not stirred) to his icy core.

The Vuillards, however fractured, know one another's rhythms and rituals, and Desplechin knows just how to convey them in the subtlest of ways.

Like Mumbai, Slumdog pulses and throbs with raw, unadulterated life and the hope for a better Bombay, today. It's brilliant.

Misanthropy in the movies has a new face. And, surprising to say, it's a handsome one. A matinee-idol face, in fact. Some might even go so far as to call it "dreamy." It's the face of Paul Rudd.

Post-JCVD, we'll never again be able to think of Van Damme as just another kickboxer turned actor. Van Damme is an actor, pure and simple, and proves that he is just as deft and accomplished as the movies in which he appears.