The Happening is both too incoherenly weird and too narratively ambitious for its own good.

Five years after Ang Lee attempted a stylistically and narratively daring reimagining of what a comic-book movie could be (an example that tanked disastrously at the box office), the big green gamma-guy returns to the screen in a purer, more unadulterated, vastly more entertaining form.

It closes the film in what I suspect was intended as something of a happy ending, but it’s unnecessary: Thirty happy years should be happy ending enough.

No matter how bad you may have it, you'll feel better about your own lot in life after watching the tumultuous sexual flailings of Marcela and Jarda (Brejchová and Luknár), a way, way, way down on their luck Czech couple.

You get the impression that Herzog believes wholeheartedly the planet will be better off without us. Nosferatu that we have proven ourselves to be, he may be right.

Po (Black) may be an animated panda bear, but make no mistake: Deep down he's really just a nerd with a pop-culture obsession.

Sandler's first collaboration with co-writer and current Hollywood comedy godhead Judd Apatow, is a crazed, delightfully bizarre return to form for Sandler.

By the time the film's abrupt conclusion arrives, you realize you've been watching a love story and not, as some might hope, "The Lord of the Rings: The Asian Edition."

Blends into so much white noise, until all that's left is the lingering sense that the tragic and promising story of Doug and Richard won't be sticking with you past the closing credits.

Full of revelations, all brought to light by Bell's good-natured, Michael Moore-lite dogging of athletes, health experts, government officials, and even his own parents.

By the time Foot Fist limps to its ultimate fighting climax, you'll likely wish you had double-teamed "Game of Death" and "Waiting for Guffman" instead.

You can almost smell the desperation in the twisted psychosexuality of Savage Grace.

In its cinematic incarnation, Sex and the City has lost none of its bawdiness yet gained a more profound sense of soberness. Parker, especially, who in the last season of the show bordered on insufferable in her affected squeaks and shrieks, is allowed to go to very dark places – to be, in fact, quite unfabulous.

Younger viewers who've cut their teeth on the instant horrors of modern "torture porn" may find The Stranger's pace and psychological upsets more slow-going than they might like. Yet a film like this may be just the bracing corrective the modern horror film needs.

Laugh? Cry? I thought I'd die, but then that's the genius of Gordon.

Unfortunately, like so many movies that celebrate a historical hero, Children is plagued by an overblown sense of its own importance.

War, Inc. is neither all that interesting nor all that cool.

Ford's Indy, who doesn't quite hang up his fedora at film's end, is still the only cinematic smartass-cum-bullwhipping scholar of antiquities I'd want by my side when push comes to shove comes to Nazis ("I hate these guys"), Russkies, or, for that matter, Al Quaeda. Go get 'em, Indy, and cue the John Williams while you''e at it.

In The Edge of Heaven, a more tempered Akin seems content to allow the incidental lives of incidental people merging incidentally to pass quietly and at their own paces. Which indicates a much-needed maturation of the "Babel/Crash" formula but also fails to rattle your bones the way those movies did. Pick your poison, I suppose.

Technically, Jihad's images and assemblage seem on par for a first-time filmmaker, though the film's message is a moving plaint.

Adamson's pulled a more morally nuanced rabbit (or badger, actually) out of his directorial hat this time out, and the result is a far more engrossing film than its predecessor.

Post-viewing, I was still coasting on the giddy high of kinetic cinema, only to have the astonishing callousness of its conclusion slowly settle in. It's a better film for it – one only wishes that Reprise on a whole had been of the same mind: a little less cool, a little more cruel. That's where the really good stuff is.

There's more story, heart, and – cutting to the chase, the quick, and the dead – pure, unadulterated fun contained within a scant five minutes of Rockstar Games' new Grand Theft Auto IV video game than there is in the whole of Speed Racer.

The Fall lives and dies on the strength of Pace and Untaru's remarkable performances. It's there that the pulsing heart of this magical-real film beats most true.

A consistently entertaining parody that never once makes you feel like an idiot for laughing out loud at its idiocy.

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.