Bitterly funny about divorce, it's even sharper and more original about intellectuals and their discontent.

Like the particular brand of music Dewey espouses, this is a movie more concerned with exploiting rock than understanding it.

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

Making you feel the presence of absences - of the distant and the departed, of dreams that never quite come true - is the key thing that this uneven film gets exactly right.

Howl's Moving Castle is one animated epic that has it all: poetic intensity, potent storytelling, vivid and surprising characters, and intoxicating powers of visual imagination.

There's a subtlety to Crimson Gold that deserves applause.

There is not one word, one scene in the whole thing that doesn't ring the bell of truth, and anyone seeing it should emerge from the theater with a sense of satisfation rare in the movie-going experience. To put it simply, Marty is great. [18 Jun 1955, p.4]

The Prisoner of Azkaban is to Harry Potter what that other No. 3, "Goldfinger," was to James Bond: the movie that takes the invention and gamesmanship of the series to a whole new giddy peak.

La Promesse...presents an unflinching view of the victimization of vulnerable people, but the center of the film is not the immigrant experience. It is the portrayal of a father-son relationship and that turning point where a child must choose between a loved parent and his own sense of morality.

That's the problem of Downfall in a nutshell: It provokes insufficient emotional and intellectual responses to a grotesque and atrocious dictatorship. Instead of the banality of evil, it gives us the banality of banality.

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.

It is, at once, among the most riveting and hard-to-watch documentaries of recent years.

For audiences, two things keep the tension from becoming too excruciating: the presence of the survivors in front of us and the knowledge that in the grip of Macdonald's humane, lucid filmmaking, we're in the best of hands.

As a documentary, The Agronomist, in its excitingly fractured, modern manner, does what Lawrence of Arabia and The Leopard do: It traces the upheaval of a civilization in the profile of a magnificent individual. It's a 90-minute nonfiction film with the impact and the greatness of an epic.

Pawlikowski's heart may be with Mona, but his art is closer to Tamsin. He luxuriates in his sensibility without delivering a movie that pays off in originality or insight.

An unconventional and engrossing French thriller.

Strip away the portentous style and lush views of nature in The Return and all you've got is a slender nightmare of a family gone haywire in an outing that turns into survival camp.

A solid, satisfying movie.

Until the final shot, the movie keeps you wondering how it will turn out.

This audacious hybrid of cinematic styles is pure entertainment.

An absorbing glimpse not only at the phenomenon of punk rock but also at British social history and the rock star mystique.

The triumph of A Mighty Wind is that it makes an audience love the sing-along catchiness of folk and still break up at its banalities. This tiny titan of a movie is a perfect melding of form and content.

The movie's two instincts are at complete odds with each other. The first is to portray with compassion and understanding a young man of great gifts who is twisted by a cruel society into childhood's end. The second is to provide a rousing goose of vigilante justice more appropriate to the Death Wish films. How much better if Yakin had made up his mind; the movie wouldn't feel so split.

The movie has been hailed and marketed as this year's Little Miss Sunshine, but it has none of that movie's empathy and comic surprise. Too much of it is like a subpar episode of Freaks and Geeks, padded out to 92 minutes with pseudo-witty dialogue.

When it comes to the oft-doomed genre of seafaring adventure, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is a spectacular throwback and a great leap forward.

The Station Agent has craft and pace and that far rarer quality, fellow-feeling.

It's the talk...and the extraordinarily expressive faces of those who do the talking, that accounts for its engrossing, enchanting powers.

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.

A first-person documentary with the subterranean pull of a superb confessional novel.

It's not hard to imagine these characters in a straight-faced Hollywood blockbuster. And that's the source of Hot Fuzz's genius, pointing out the thin line that separates convention from farce when Hollywood starts throwing its special effects around.

The movie dazzles with its slick lines, but there's a situational intelligence at play too -- little vignettes involving minor characters are begun at one wedding and then evolve into major events at the next.

It gives you such an intense hit of creativity that afterward you may find yourself trying to jete out of the theater and into the street.

Too bad the bulk of Rowling's humor goes down a black-magic drain.

In its entirety, Hairspray has the funny tilt that only a director-choreographer like Shankman can give to a movie.

But there's a discomfiting side to her comic riffs, because in our all-too-concerned-with-image society, they ring far too true.

Chicago is the zingiest, most inventive movie of its kind since "Cabaret."

When it comes to what's great about King Kong, it's not the harum-scarum. It's the girl.

What's most pleasing about That's Entertainment! III is the numbers themselves. I almost wish they'd done away with the concept of "documentary" and simply offered the snippets as pure cavalcade. [29 Jul 1994]

Chaos, in miring itself in the inequities (not to mention obscenities) of male-dominated culture, is after greater truths.

It's a bad joke that District 9 will be hailed for its "originality."

The movie gets as overblown and masochistic as the worst Joan Crawford vehicle. Its saving grace is that Bernal really does have his own deep-set, smoldering variation on Bette Davis eyes.

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

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

You have to grasp at straws to make even "poetic" sense of the narrative.

One happy surprise after another, even when the content is bittersweet or sad.

Promises may want to unite the audience in humanitarian emotions, but it's more useful as a prod to examine what these children are learning from their schools, their leaders, and their media.

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

As magical as it is realistic.

Beguiling, moving and just plain fun documentary.

The movie may be Nine Queens, but it slakes your thirst for surprises and thrills because of its Nine Jokers.

Casino Royale marks a shrewd relaunching of a franchise. But Campbell and company show too much of their sweat. If these movies continue to follow Fleming's profane pilgrim's progress, the next Bond movies should be more emotional and funny, with a bit of brass-knuckled charm.

Largely devoid of the usual Western histrionics, this 1957 film, thanks to the steady hand of veteran director Delmer Daves, represents one of the more sober depictions of the clash between chaos and order that has always been at the center of the movie Western. [26 Aug 2007, p.3E]

Bergman's creation of family banter that turns irredeemably cruel remains without peer.

An exquisite return to cinema at its most intimate, allusive and humanist. Without a firebomb, muscle-bound star or gunfight in sight, it explodes with the most fragile and combustible substance on earth: human nature.

The movie rides the very thin line between art and trash, between exploitation and illumination. It's true, certainly, that it takes one into a universe of such moral squalor that one feels tainted afterward.

I love Rabbit-Proof Fence as drama, as protest, as moviemaking and as poetry.

Whale Rider is one long, sensitive downer capped by an uplifting finale. A martyr fantasy that turns victorious -- it's a surefire recipe for arthouse crowd-pleasing.

We'll never know what might have been, as eye candy and food for thought replace real thrills in the cool but cold Minority Report.

Like "Hairspray," it's not just a spinoff but a wised-up family comedy that's spirited and inventive. It retains the farcical belligerence of the TV comedy but also heightens the series' oddball warmth and expands on its Hellzapoppin' slapstick.

The risks these guys take seem outlandish, their accomplishments otherworldly.

Few films even try to render the full range of emotions and sensations in female sexuality as the aptly titled Lady Chatterley, directed and co-written by a Frenchwoman, Pascale Ferran.

This movie has a tone, look and mood all its own - it's a joyously bittersweet piece of visual music about isolation, melancholy and everyone's yearning for transcendence, through love, art or both.

It's not another rah-rah football film. Thanks to Nolte, it has its own form of true grit.

You go to Good Night, and Good Luck expecting inspiration, and you get it. It's also unexpectedly subtle, tense, and challenging, complex both in its take on its subject and in its craftsmanship. So the movie brings you to your feet - and, at times, to tears.

A working-class drama that has its heart in the right place but undercuts itself by stacking the deck, letting its main character off too lightly and being overly impressed with its own profundity.

Deep Water is a movie that will connect to anyone whose private fantasies and creative plots have landed them in hot water.

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.

You won't see a brighter, truer affirmation of the All-American messed-up improvisational family than Little Miss Sunshine.

Thanks to the wonderful performances from both Korzun and Considine, there isn't a forced or dishonest moment on-screen.

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

The movie may not be perfect, but it's jam-packed with goodies -- like a breakfast cereal fun-pack with a prize on every box-top.

The movie pays tribute to sexual equality and to each gender's agility and strength of character.

Chilling doesn't begin to describe Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple...But the film never gets behind the chill.

Well-acted, lovingly put together and heartbreakingly honest.

A razzle-dazzle lower-depths melodrama.

Enraging and enthralling.

The movie is, to borrow Rob's phrase, unassailably cool.

The movie dramatizes a social-sexual sea change with an out-of-control blend of cartoon farce and melodrama and clinical, often ludicrous sex scenes.

Kingsley gives the movie a jolt and blows the rest of it to pieces.

Uproarious, moving and thrilling.

It forces you to fill in the blanks, then refuses to judge whether you're right or wrong. It's almost like the audience writes its own script, and everybody appreciates his or her own work.

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.

Flags of Our Fathers fails as fact or legend. It's woefully incompetent as narrative moviemaking.

The movie has been compared, with some reason, to the French New Wave. But it's like "Jules and Jim" or "Band of Outsiders" blended with "A Hard Day's Night."

Look at Me is a virtuoso exercise in domestic tension - with the emphasis on "exercise."

Viewers impressed by the fairly standard martial-arts action of "Crouching Tiger" will really be wowed after seeing this film.

As a writer-director, McCarthy, like the characters and the places that he suffuses with emotion, has poetry in him - and he knows how to let it out. He has a talent for demarcating those spaces in which characters can become whoever they want to be.

Downey and Favreau and the special-effects team transform the trying-out of the armor and its powers into slapstick cadenzas. But equally entertaining is Stark's and Potts' recognition that they share more than a mere working chemistry.

Gripping footage about the controversial Qatar-based Al-Jazeera Satellite Channel, which transmits news to 40 million Arabs. But the movie offers neither lucid analyses of the channel nor probing portraits of its journalists.

A marvelous picture and a highly unusual journey in and around the Holocaust.

Affliction turns the sound on with sudden, crystalline clarity, and echoes with the haunting power of a suppressed truth that has finally been released.

Isn't an act of expiation but a gift of understanding.

You may find Va Savoir pleasant to sit through, but will it stay with you the next morning? Who knows?

Like Brian De Palma's 1981 masterpiece "Blow-Out," this movie contains cutting perceptions of obsession, institutional and professional myopia, misplaced loyalty in experts, misreadings of evidence and the kind of confusion that leads to conspiracy theories. But Fincher's movie falls short of masterpiece status.

May be thin, but it's also sharp, like a stiletto.

Doesn't match the impact of its predecessor, which both revived and reimagined the zombie-film genre.

Nolan pushes the twilight-zone atmosphere so hard that it loses its capacity for mystery. When it's not assaulting us with jolting audiovisual expressions of fatigue, this movie plays like a pedestrian response to David Lynch's effortlessly eerie "Twin Peaks."

Anderson brings real gravitas to the unfortunate Lily Bart, in an Oscar-caliber performance that makes one wonder what Academy voters are looking for.