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).

Even the great Lily Tomlin can't muster a funny reaction to a Polish joke. It's an everything-including-the kitchen-sink comedy -- and the sink has rusty pipes.

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.

The problem with Confessions of a Shopaholic isn't conspicuous consumption. It's ostentatious idiocy.

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

This film isn't an enjoyable martial-arts extravaganza like "District B-13" or the "Transporter" films.

As a comic fable for hard times, New in Town is irredeemably moronic.

Cold, bland and gimmicky - that's how the movie has turned out.

Look, I love dogs. But this film tried my patience almost beyond endurance.

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

The bad guys just seem like a bunch of X-Games rejects, and Blart's ingenuity proves way more effective than it has any right to be.

Bride Wars has possibly the worst comedy idea since "Springtime for Hitler," with almost no room for redeeming camp.

The whole thrust of the movie is to warn black women against emasculating their men.

The movie leaves you in an awful tangle of amazement and disbelief: Amazement that Tuvia Bielski did turn a group of civilians into a nimble fighting force and a commune that could defend itself, but disbelief at his accomplishment's stagey and banal rendering.

Revolutionary Road isn't just a failed literary adaptation. It's a failure of the worst kind: It doesn't even make you want to read Richard Yates' deservedly legendary book.

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.

This movie is genial, forgettable piffle about the perhaps-beginning of a maybe affair. It's a romantic daydream so slim that it barely leaves the requisite sweet aftertaste.

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

Valkyrie's political and military subjects may have sounded like sure-fire thriller material. Wilkinson alone proves that a suspense film thrives on intriguing characters struggling to survive. Nothing in Valkyrie is as compelling as watching tides of calculation crash across Wilkinson's face.

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.

Kids will get antsy, wondering why their favorite characters disappear for long stretches of the film, while adults will wonder just when this scattershot approach to storytelling will congeal into something resembling coherence.

This picture evaporates midway through because the story itself is a one-liner. Yet it also has a cast that gets into the silliness.