Philip Seymour Hoffman steals the movie.

A strictly by-the-book sequel: It doesn't cheat series fans but it doesn't offer many thrills or surprises or lingering puzzles, either.

The impact is hypnotic.

For 45 minutes, it zings along on perfectly pitched overstatement.

The credits list a couple of dozen medical and scientific consultants. What this film really needed was a script doctor.

he Kite Runner lives in the galvanic performances of two young Afghan actors, Zekeria Ebrahimi and Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada. They bring home the torment of Afghan life before and after the Taliban and, just as important, the resilience of children everywhere.

This film's playful visual language pulls you in rather than shuts you out; it isn't difficult to decipher, and it enables Coppola and his editor, Walter Murch, to navigate the story's many realms with a directness and dexterity that are refreshing.

Through unexpected and cathartic twists, this movie leaves you with atonement and redemption.

Weitz doesn't manage Pullman's feat of being rational and magical simultaneously. But he rapidly and intelligently opens up Pullman's world.

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.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly provides an ecstatic lift for movielovers, despite the tragic subject.

This movie provides no phony catharsis or closure; it develops a vision of people growing in spurts from their most terrible mistakes.

A rapturous, ruefully funny flight of sympathetic imagination. Featuring the first movie role for Frank Langella that ranks with his best stage parts, it's a rare kind of American movie.

The whole movie swings broadly from slapstick and mock suspense to song. But the film develops a strong amorous undertow; Kelly's script neatly allows for all the potential couples to get the fate or comeuppance they deserve.

Essentially an episode of "24." Which may be a step up from a video game, but it's getting hard to tell.

If any man should be more than the sum of his parts, it's an artist. But Todd Haynes' I'm Not There makes Bob Dylan less than the sum of his parts. It's like a tony art-school parlor game.

The Mist contains nary a dollop of wit and irony. As adapted and directed by Frank Darabont, there's no ambiguity either.

This Christmas is the rare movie about a cozy household at holiday time that's as funny and dramatic and poignant as any seasonal family get-together should be.

Owing more to the sword-and-sex-play fantasies of 12-year-olds than the traditions of Old English poetry, Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf will allow adolescents to have their cheesecake - and beefcake - and eat it, too.

The stripped-down filmmaking preserves the abruptness and surprise of the happy (and unhappy) accidents Reverend Billy finds at every stop along the way, from Manhattan to Anaheim.

Margot at the Wedding is a Christmas gift for high-class depressives: a compendium of malaise fit for an L.L. Bean catalog.

Redacted is a bristling act of protest that obliterates a target it isn't aiming for.

The movie version of Love in the Time of Cholera doesn't have the drive or the dynamism to be an artistic nightmare. It's more like a dead dream, the kind that leaves nothing more behind in the light of day than a sickly cloud.

Is there anything more pathetic than a movie that will do anything for a laugh or a tear that doesn't get any laughs or tears?

The problem with Lions for Lambs isn't its political engagement but its cinematic disengagement. Robert Redford directs and stars in this ambitious talkathon, which would have been more effective as a radio play.

No Country for Old Men is about the kind of amoral madness that can sweep across a country and redefine a landscape. It's so admirably lean and sinewy that it deserves not merely a rave review but a Johnny Cash song about matter-of-fact killings in shady hotels and sun-scoured landscapes.

Has the feeling of something done many times before.

Misplaced hero-worship and glibness get in the way of its amazing true story.

Jerry Seinfeld's foray into feature animation will delight young kids and leave their elders alternately amused and bemused.

The result is not a first-class film noir but a top-grade acting class. You admire it without enjoying it.

With all its cloying, tone-deaf attempts at genuine emotional warmth, all it really deserves is to be avoided.

It's seductive in its buildup but overall as subtle and, alas, as humorless as a hatchet to the brain.

In the strongest scenes, Ben Affleck gets his lead actors to extract the bitter juice from Lehane's wood-alcohol prose. The movie has its horrifying Gothic twists and turns, but it's never better than when it takes these two into places where the underclass goes to forget or be forgotten or get lost.

Painfully boring.

This movie asks us to "accept the good" in life - not a bad message. But to overpraise Things We Lost in the Fire would be to accept the mediocre.

Wristcutters: A Love Story is a lousy title for a lovely-loony picture about an afterlife for suicides. It's an off-road "road movie" about people who off themselves.

As overstated and expository as a historical pageant, from the drippy music to a sputtering, running gag involving funky old jalopies to cliched speeches and teary-eyed deaths and a final voice-over crying out for peace. Why not add a song score and an exclamation mark in the title?

The best you can say about Owen is that no actor has looked better in thigh-high boots and puffed-out britches.

The plotting is so rickety that the action hinges on suspicions roused by a character carrying a cigarette lighter and matches. Is that more rare or suspect than a man wearing a belt and suspenders?

Even if you have no interest in Joy Division, this picture is worth seeing for the unsentimental empathy and passion of the moviemaking.

This Heartbreak Kid makes the mistake of trying to be semi-heartwarming.

Because Bar-Lev fails to go the extra mile either as a filmmaker or a friend, My Kid Could Paint That is at best "documentary silver."

The movie has a lot going for it, including wonderful sets and locations - in Bucharest, Romania! - that create a heightened-reality English hamlet with pub, church, manor and shops (make that shoppes!). And the lead actor, Ludwig, registers the growth spurts of the stripling hero with the sensitivity and precision of an emotional seismograph.

Anderson creates a deluxe train set, for sure. All he neglects is building up an electric current or a head of steam.

The final half-hour is like the not-so-grand finale for a silly-sticky sitcom. It's a college-town “Friends” with an unearned doctorate.

Berg doesn't let up on the tension, even when the action is bloodless.

Tang Wei brings a terrible and awe-inspiring purity to an impure character.

It's stupefying in its dullness and vulgarity.

A genuine odyssey: a journey to self-knowledge.

The result is a charmer that boldly marches where lesser movies - at least since the heyday of John Hughes - fear to tread.

First-time director Swicord brews an atmosphere of geniality and warmth and brings a modicum of momentum to a happily discursive book.

Disarming, discombobulating and disappointing.

Eastern Promises is intensely anti-dramatic.

In the Valley of Elah is too inept and diffuse to be a howl against the war in Iraq. At best, it is a manly whimper.

Borders on poppycock.

The whole thing turns into trash with flash.

With Joan Allen bringing a crisp intelligence to the sharp, unsentimental narration, it's both awful and fascinating to follow Hitler's warped growth from frustrated painter to self-appointed arbiter of Germanic art.

The rousing new Western 3:10 to Yuma has the sweep of an epic and the economy of a stopwatch.

It's both irrefutably concrete and irresistibly uplifting.

The saving grace in an exuberantly graceless movie is Clive Owen. This actor is bulletproof. Even in a sick-joke jamboree like Shoot 'Em Up, he mows down the competition and gets his laughs without losing his composure.

The movie has nothing to offer except titillation.

As disposable as aluminum cans without the promise of a cash return.

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

The movie's one bright spot is Gonzalez, a refreshingly natural young actor who needs to get out of B-movies.

Reading this book and watching this movie, as with "The Devil Wears Prada" a year earlier, I'm convinced that chick-lit books are formula - and chick-lit movies are baby formula.

Jackson creates a searing study in reverse nobility as a character with a battered, street-poetic presence and subtle powers of sympathy that come into play even when he appears to be a rogue.

A ham-fisted cautionary tale of religious fanaticism that would have been hooted out of even 19th-century theaters as melodrama of the most lurid kind.

The movie maintains its comical, rocky equilibrium as long as the screenwriter, Dean Craig, sticks to domestic disasters and a Monty Python parody of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."

The movie is best when everything is up in the air.

Stripped of texture, even the sharpest comments come off as bromides.

There hasn't been so much pea soup spit onscreen since "The Exorcist."

This film about fierce competition among classic video-game players is a comic action epic in documentary form. It captures fear -- and heroism -- in a handful of dusty video games.

The movie doesn't add up to much, but it's an effervescent expression of an odd brute-hummingbird sensibility.

Fresh, funny and unfailingly observant, Rocket Science is a mood-swinging movie about adolescence that lifts audiences' spirits even when its hero is down in the dumps.

It's actually surprising that Chan is as engaging as he is. He's a canny performer in a canned-goods movie.

If you have an ounce of romance in you, you'll sense your own inner Captain Blood emerge when Captain Shakespeare turns him into a dashing figure with a dangerous sword.

Becoming Jane isn't just a soap opera - it's a soft-soap opera.

Few films combine a dense and tingling atmosphere with the headlong pacing and adventure of The Bourne Ultimatum.

"Everybody loved him. One woman understood him," goes the ad line. But the movie makes you wonder how anyone could love this screw-up and why anyone would have a problem understanding him.

The filmmakers lack any visual sense of humor and any talent for sustaining long-form comedy; the stunts have less wallop than a TV bloopers show and the Oedipal family slapstick goes around in circles, in more ways than one.

It's like a breeze so slight it doesn't leave a tickle.

If any movie can rid Americans of "Iraq war fatigue," it's Charles Ferguson's muscular documentary No End in Sight.

Too bad director Scott Hicks and screenwriter Carol Fuchs didn't look more closely at their source material, a 2001 German film called Mostly Martha. That film used the same basic premise but injected real conflict into the mix, in ways sexual, culinary, even ethnic. That film tried to do something, even while it was entertaining us.

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 movie is edited and, worse, narrated in ways that sabotage the magic and even undercut the movie's message.

The film is mostly forced and heavyhanded. Forman first thought of using Goya to tell a story about the Inquisition several decades ago. Yet this movie appears to be as much about American behavior post-Sept. 11 as it is about 18th-century Spain or the Communist Czechoslovakia of Forman's youth.

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

Formulaic 'Chuck & Larry' is a crass, unfulfilling effort.

It's one big miss.

Live-In Maid is a lived-in movie. Its cataclysms may be small in scale, but the movie brings us so far into these women's lives that a shattered cup creates an earthquake.

The movie is full of holes - it lacks the precision and verve of a Francis Veber farce like "The Dinner Game" - but the two actors brew up a sane kind of comedy from their fractious rapport.

Kasi Lemmons' movie is called Talk to Me, but what it really does is sing to you, in the argot and cadences of soul, jazz, rock and rhythm and blues.

The whole film is about innocence and experience, and if it isn't a Blakean song, it is a sturdy and vibrant piece of prose.

Blethyn's performance belongs in another movie, not this bipolar comedy-drama.

The scenes between Dengler and Duane, between a force of nature and a force of reason, are the real heart of the film.

The whole thing is too giddy to be taken seriously and too much of a confection to leave much of a lasting impression. But for 140 minutes, at least, it should give non-fanboys at least an idea of what all the fuss is about.

Nothing in this film -- even Robin Williams, alas -- is funny.

Infuriating and funny, the film forges a disturbing diagram from the avarice and chaos of a slapdash, heartless system.