Fantasy, not honesty, is the point of The Kid Stays in the Picture.

By the end, Hamer's crisp, prickly compositions go soft.

Spielberg's inchoate attempts at cultural observation stretch the movie out and dilute the giddiness instead of adding a pleasurable spike. When the movie doesn't feel inflated, it feels soggy.

A down-home-exquisite musical dramedy.

Baadasssss is about feeling pain and frustration, about having a sense of purpose that overwhelms everything else, about great cost and great risk, the pain of isolation and the intoxicating effect of fighting against the odds.

It's hard to stomp on a movie that pulls together a rich lay-about, hippies, a punk girl and an Amnesty International worker in a sort of Peaceable Kingdom, but About a Boy shows the limits of affability.

Without proclaiming itself a wake-up call for the West, In This World cries out for some new method of achieving international trust.

Guerrilla provides one huge compensation: the getting of historical wisdom.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated performs a great service, though not especially well.

Generally, Orlando is too busy having witty fun to turn into a cautionary tale against one sex in favor of the other. It's more like an extremely vivid drawing-room comedy imposed on the background of a historical epic.

Unsparing and uplifting - a wickedly difficult combination to pull off, but one that gives the film an emotional weight that's impossible to dismiss.

The movie is an inspired comedy-drama about artistic temperament.

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

Falls victim to flimsy characters and a love story that strains reality.

Black Hawk Down, in the end, is a docudrama. But it's sensationally well done, and it opens up a battlefield that needed to be documented.

It's the pushiest film around - "in your face" is still in-your-face, even if the dancers are in white-face.

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

The Sea Inside brings us outside and inside ourselves, and takes us to brave new aesthetic depths.

The best sections of Flushed Away, those featuring a nefarious French operative known as Le Frog (a hilarious Jean Reno), are also the most peculiarly British; no one lampoons the French with a better mixture of hard-earned loathing and grudging respect than the Brits.

Avoids pretension by never trying to be more than it is -- an acknowledgment that things frequently are not as bad as they seem. That's a concept that deserves a little spreading.

Almost everything that happens - and almost everything happens within Flama's apartment - is food for dry humor and very recognizable humanity.

Serenity may be short on exposition, but it's smart and fun.

Jumping off from the brilliant novel by Giles Foden and changing a key character entirely, it dramatizes and wrings humor from the way a white Western renegade can view a self-made Third World despot like Amin as a superman blowing fresh air into a fetid atmosphere.

It's a startling physical transformation, as Noland goes from flabby desk jockey to lean, mean fishing machine. But even more remarkable is the mental transformation Hanks effects.

As Laura, Rueda hits sublime notes of confusion, grief and wrath. She's sympathetic enough to make you root for her and complex enough to get you arguing afterward about whether Laura did anything to deserve all this.

As they've proven before and doubtless will prove again, Soderbergh and his cast are capable of better, weightier, more substantial stuff. But for now, slumming has rarely seemed more appealing.

With a wistful look at the wages of ambition and the failure of promise, Wonder Boys finally celebrates self-awareness, ending on a muted, quietly moving note of triumph.

Munich is so broad-stroke it cuts itself at every turn. It's also a thoroughly lifeless movie.