Without restraint or subtlety, but with a lot of heart and energy, this movie tells a real-life tall tale.

It's cathartic and exhilarating.

A refreshingly unpredictable and fizzy comic fantasy. It tickles the fancy even when it strains credibility.

Jonze lets the magic ebb away in a sorry mesh of strained relationships.

The cascade of ideas proves to be both pleasurable and frustrating. As the movie retreats into a happy-ever-after ending, even its outrageous lies seem more like little white ones.

The movie ended just in time. Any more of it, and I'd have been crying uncle. Or maybe, given the grrrl-power of it all, crying aunt. This is one supposedly contrarian film that rouses the counter-contrarian in you.

The symmetry doesn't work. Capitalism is an economic system; democracy, a political system. Perhaps Moore should have come out and said what he really wants to see us adopt: a democratic socialism.

It wouldn't stick in the memory were it not for Matt Damon's audacious, baggy-pants portrayal of corporate whistle-blower Mark Whitacre, the antihero of this reality-based farce.

It pulls together diverse residents of the city, from produce vendors to academics, and trains a loving eye on their unique environments and the urban landscapes they all share.

Bright Star delivers a prismatic depiction - tart, funny and piercing - of the romance between poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne in the three years before he died, in 1821, at age 25.

Not a perfect 10, but its imperfection is what makes it gripping and bewitching.

Extract is an exuberant original...like no other and one of the best comedies of the year.

It's a nightmare that starts like a normal daytime drive and ends in a vortex-like sinkhole.

Siegel takes us to the brink of operatic melodrama, then lands us in a tragicomic spot: a psychological landscape of alternate life and make-believe death.

A love letter to the time, and the period, and the legend that has grown around both. Maybe it's all too wonderful to be true, but that's OK. If Taking Woodstock is a fantasy, then it's a most benevolent one, and more power to it.

The result is an exciting, infuriating, combative experience.

It's affable entertainment -- a road movie with a smart map and characters who are unpredictable human beings, not just billboard attractions.

Best of all, Ponyo never ceases to be a genuine odyssey in short pants.

You'll never see a more tactile expression of the intimacy between artists and their instruments than in Davis Guggenheim's elating It Might Get Loud.

In Julie and Julia, Ephron, like her heroines, has finally found what suits her: a surprising comic and romantic realism.

Paul Giamatti - that huddle of broiling instincts, out-of-control impulses and aggravated ardor epitomized in "Sideways" - you feel his soul's absence as dearly as its presence.

It's got a smattering of hearty laughs and a career-high performance from Sandler.

The climax and epilogue are the juiciest, most tough-minded bits in the movie. Too bad Mayer didn't work his way backward from the end.

The whole movie aspires to set an Annie Hall vibe, especially when Tom keeps trying to re-create, first with her and then with someone else.

It flows like fast-moving lava to a climax filled with pyrotechnics. And for once in a summer blockbuster, the fireworks are both emotional and physical. The movie leaves you sated, yet wanting more -- just what you want from a series with two entries left to go.

Humpday mixes hilarity with upset as the irresistible force of male pride meets the immovable object of sexual identity.

For a documentary about a music festival, Soul Power doesn't include nearly enough music.

Without ever telling viewers what to think or how to feel, it raises more questions about the corruption of crime and crime fighting than any expose or thesis.

The Hurt Locker redefines war-film electricity.

At best it's a bit like Mel Brooks' "The History of the World Part I" (except Ramis stops somewhere in Genesis); at worst it's like a Scary Movie-type parody of John Huston's "The Bible."

This compelling account of the explosive growth of Lyme disease grows to encompass all the peculiar politics, corruption and inertia of American medicine.

A scary movie that's also funny, touching and good for you.

Superior family fare.

Kevin Spacey delivers his least-mannered, most effective big-screen performance in years as the voice of the nearly omniscient computer-robot, GERTY, whose silky ambiguity resembles HAL's in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey."

A delirious surprise .

Maya Rudolph's subtle, lyrical portrait of a patient wife and expectant mother enlivens and elevates Away We Go, an erratic couple-on-a-quest film.

Scrambled space-time comedy that's as light and silly as it is erratic.

Everything about Up is an up, in the most visceral and poetic ways.

Quick and lowdown-delightful. It's also a graveyard or two up in class from the torture films that, in recent years, have redefined horror for the worse.

The fascination, humor and poignancy of Departures, this year's winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, rests in the Japanese ceremony of preparing bodies for their caskets.

Takes a great idea -- what if the inhabitants of a museum came to life at night? -- and milks it for every drop of fun it's worth.

What makes this movie ultra-contemporary is the way Abrams has re-imagined Spock and Kirk as a team of rivals.

Foxx is magnificent, taking a role that could be exorbitantly showy (actors playing the mentally disabled tend to forget the word "restraint") and turning in a performance that's controlled and mesmerizing.

What emerges is a fallen warrior's tale: the inside story of a man bloodied and bowed.

Whereas the TV series rarely flinched when it came to showing the animal world as it is, Earth always pulls back at the last second. It shows a cheetah pulling down a gazelle, but not the feast that follows.

Nothing is as it seems in State of Play, a crackerjack political thriller in which no individual, profession or institution gets away clean.

The sensuousness of Lemon Tree is its glory.

I hope the producers bring Lin back for the fifth film and strip it down even more. They can lose all the human characters except Brian and Mia and simply call it F&F.

A bittersweet joy. Its humor and romance are refreshing because the writer-director, Greg Mottola, realizes that maturity is a two-steps-forward, one-step-backward process.

Sugar is a near-great movie with qualities more unusual than some all-time classics. It resists cliche at every turn and puts something solid in its place: raw yet controlled observation that gives the film the form of a flexing muscle.

It's intelligent and emotional, not studied or sappy.

A sensational date movie.

This comedy of stereotypes pokes fun at poker buddies and coffee klatches only to make room for variations on more recent stereotypes. Some of the boldest 'types provide the funniest bits, such as Jon Favreau's embodiment of an upscale Stanley Kowalski who treats all-male card games as clan rites.

It's an odd duck: a labor-intensive piece of light entertainment.

Light, engaging documentary.

May not make adults feel as if they're 10 again, but it will awaken their memories of Saturday matinees that upped children's adrenaline without blinding them with Day-Glo colors or insulting their intelligence.

Amy Adams beguiled audiences in "Junebug" and "Enchanted" and breathed humanity into the histrionic "Doubt." In the eccentric comedy-drama Sunshine Cleaning, set in the least picturesque parts of Albuquerque, N.M., she tops her own proven talent for epiphany.

As magical as it is realistic.

For Americans, Gomorrah will play like every other Mafia epic - and no other Mafia epic.

The movie is supremely nonjudgmental and balanced.

The combination of 3-D photography and puppet-animation - centered on actual figures designed by hand and manipulated frame by frame - creates a world that's dense, active and fluid: a sensory Jacuzzi.

With an all-star cast maintaining an amiable tone throughout, the result is a movie in which everyone should see themselves for at least a few minutes (and wish they were that young, that beautiful and that well-off).

The most appealing aspect of the movie is that the guys and gal at the center of it don't just love the Star Wars saga for its own sake. They love the way they feel about each other when they're escaping into its universe and sharing all the wonder and the trivia.

Overall, though, the movie lacks the dash, wit, authority and character to become a first-class thinking-man's thriller.

What gives Notorious its staying power is what happens before AND after its hero's death.

Should make comic modern-day fanboys happy, what with its dark undertones, its beat-it-to-a-pulp action and its sly winks at comic greats past and present. Everyone else, including fans of Will Eisner's original Spirit, may find themselves wondering what all the fuss is about.

Brad Pitt's sensitive performance helps make 'Benjamin Button' a timeless masterpiece.

Wilson, who has never made the film in which he convincingly played sincere, turns out to be a wise choice to play John Grogan.

Views war from the inside out and the outside in. It carries the shock of full disclosure.

The movie is a parable of patriarchal pride as well as a paradigm of how immigrant groups can accomplish goals without any help from their host culture.

The Class ranks with the very best films ever made about teaching, and it's unlike any English or American film about teaching ever made.

This movie has an aura of forced tragedy, like a fourth-generation version of "Requiem for a Heavyweight."

Passed my popcorn-movie test. Using the vast, expensive technology of a big studio production, it roused enough cheap energy to drive me to eat a bag of popcorn fit for a circus animal and wash it down with a quart of Diet Coke.

Too often when actors portray complicated or enigmatic characters, they seem to be flirting with the audience, playing hard to get. Not Williams.

Ron Howard has made his best movie with Frost/Nixon, an electric political drama with a skin-prickling immediacy.

Has buoyancy to spare. It's filled with bumps and scratches. But in the manner of a nicked old LP, its gnarly surface and warps-and-all sound evokes real life.

What makes it all work is that Frank remains a self-made hero.

Four Christmases works because of some genuinely funny setups, a pace that never dwells on one gag (or even one family) too long and a careful mix of slapstick and bawdy humor. But mostly, the film works because of the astonishing acting talent the filmmakers brought together to make it.

It's not a great movie, but it is an enlivening and unusual one: an effervescent political film that also packs a knockout punch.

Bolt proves a refreshing throwback to the animated classics of yore.

Uproarious, moving and thrilling.

Thanks to Daniel Craig, the most Byronic of 007s, who, with scarcely any help from the filmmakers, manages the astonishing task of rooting an outlandish yet sober-sided movie in reality and bringing it an air of wicked amusement, too.

At last, a great contemporary holiday movie that's strictly for grown-ups - a holiday movie that really is a moviegoer's holiday from desultory daily fare.

Slumdog Millionaire dives headfirst into something greater than a subculture - the enormous unchronicled culture of India's mega-slums - and achieves even more sweeping impact.

Role Models has a tart surface and a heart of goo. The movie grows more obvious as it goes along.

The outcomes of all the mini-dramedies are too messy and equivocal to produce morals; that's just as it should be in a farce about confusion. Co-directors Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath are most intent on completing the circle of comedy.

Soul Men isn't much of a movie, but it bubbles along and reaches its percolating high point at the very end.

What's surprising is that the film has genuine laughs and smart-aleck asides that will keep even nonfans happy (although it helps if you at least like the genre).

It overflows with a combustible blend of street sensitivity and testosterone.

This film teaches the rewards of patience for directors, for actors and for audiences, too. The compelling reality of Juliette's plight comes from how subtly and gradually she emerges from her carapace.

Most contemporary horror films derive shocks from mere torture. Let the Right One In locates most of its fright-power in the needs and confusions of people who are usually overlooked.

Soars on the strength of strong acting and a script that stubbornly refuses to go all sappy and preachy.

Leonardo DiCaprio brings straight-razor reflexes and rooted emotion to the role of a deceptively rugged CIA man.

Many inspirational sports movies provide only junk food for thought; this one contains some authentic reflections of sport in the civil rights era.

It's lumpy, odd and tonally all over the place, but its vision gets to you, and its payoff delivers a tough kid's catharsis.

British director Mike Leigh has made the first great comedy for our new depression.

Watching Guy Ritchie's British-underworld farce, RocknRolla, is like being compelled to pay attention to a nonstop rock station you normally use as background while you're doing chores. The words are catchy and the beat keeps you awake, though all of it quickly fades.

The results are often as surprising as they are funny.