Bracingly honest and ceaselessly compelling documentary.

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

Rebound is determinedly lightweight fare that shamelessly resorts to every crowd-pleasing cliche it can think of to wring sympathy and laughs from its audience. To say it succeeds is not meant as a compliment.

Brilliant, brutally poignant.

Forget what Tom Cruise does outside his movies: What he does inside his movies is more than enough to wreck them.

Forget chemistry: There's no biology to the star casting.

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

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

Anyone who isn't charmed by the idea of a Beetle crossing the finish line first is either chronically churlish or isn't trying.

This movie makes it official: No matter how awful, even the networks and basic cable are now officially hipper than the studios.

Disturbing, maddening, often confusing, but also charming, engaging and challenging in all the best ways.

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.

Batman Begins is obvious from the get-go - and almost no fun.

It's hard to know what these stars are ready for after this fiasco. Maybe a fitness video.

At least The Honeymooners is not one of those remakes that looks bad compared to the original. It's just bad, period.

The movie is a model of multinational incompetence.

As sweet and hopeless and silly as a doting dad framing his second-grader's latest finger-painting and calling it a Matisse.

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 no irony within the film, but there's a whopping irony surrounding it. Just as Star Wars has finally ended, Rocky seems to be starting all over again.

Nearly everything fresh and exciting about the 2002 documentary "Dogtown and Z-Boys" - the story of the Santa Monica-Ocean Park-Venice area misfits who revolutionized skateboarding in the 1970s - becomes studied and secondhand in The Lords of Dogtown.

Deep Blue is pure bliss. This documentary about ocean life in all its forms achieves its own tidal pull with visual marvels that conjure a Darwinian delirium.

This is not a great film by any means, too filled with stock characters in stock situations for such praise. But if offers screen time for some fine young actresses, and addresses its story to an audience of teen girls who deserve something to identify with.

The lack of condescension is the movie's saving grace, if grace is the right word. There's no snobbery to the low-blow humor, or to Reynolds' low-key, genial comeback turn, or to Sandler's more-ingratiating-than-athletic lead performance.

Madagascar doesn't do much, except make you laugh. All hail such a minimalist approach.

An insightful, clear-headed look at relations within a Chinese-American family.

A pop masterpiece.

Too bad the director ties everyone's laces together and they all go down in a jumble.

Jane Fonda coming back to the screen after a decade-and-a-half absence in Monster-in-Law is like Brando returning from the dead to star in a Police Academy movie.