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

Passed my popcorn-movie test. Using the vast, expensive technology of a big studio production, it roused enough cheap energy to drive me to eat a bag of popcorn fit for a circus animal and wash it down with a quart of Diet Coke.

The problem with Doubt is its dramatic certainty.

It's no compliment to say a movie is "all of a piece" if the piece is all worn out. For all its surface harshness, this movie is a star vehicle at once rickety and cozy.

Is there anyone out there who hasn't seen this movie a dozen times before? Maybe even as recently as last week, since it's basically the same story line as the funnier, if less heartfelt, "Four Christmases."

The title and length suggest a biographical epic, but it's neither biographical nor epic. It's as if the director, Steven Soderbergh, wanted to take tissue samples of Ernesto Che Guevara's political life.

The Reader is ponderously self-important and smugly Socratic, brimming with unfinished sentences and pregnant pauses; if a single character would only say what he thinks, the movie would be over in 30 minutes

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

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

Has buoyancy to spare. It's filled with bumps and scratches. But in the manner of a nicked old LP, its gnarly surface and warps-and-all sound evokes real life.

All Alexander proves in Punisher: War Movie is that a martial-arts-trained woman can make a film just as stupid, coarse and numbing as any muscle man.

What makes it all work is that Frank remains a self-made hero.

Four Christmases works because of some genuinely funny setups, a pace that never dwells on one gag (or even one family) too long and a careful mix of slapstick and bawdy humor. But mostly, the film works because of the astonishing acting talent the filmmakers brought together to make it.

It's not a great movie, but it is an enlivening and unusual one: an effervescent political film that also packs a knockout punch.

Bolt proves a refreshing throwback to the animated classics of yore.

The movie is mainly geared to putting new twists on what John Hughes comedies used to call "sucking face." It will satisfy Meyer's devotees.

Uproarious, moving and thrilling.

Luhrmann steals good ideas, fair ideas and terrible ideas - anything that once moved him when he was a little boy. He's turned Australia into a more-than-you-can-eat buffet of colorful kitsch.

Thanks to Daniel Craig, the most Byronic of 007s, who, with scarcely any help from the filmmakers, manages the astonishing task of rooting an outlandish yet sober-sided movie in reality and bringing it an air of wicked amusement, too.

At last, a great contemporary holiday movie that's strictly for grown-ups - a holiday movie that really is a moviegoer's holiday from desultory daily fare.

Slumdog Millionaire dives headfirst into something greater than a subculture - the enormous unchronicled culture of India's mega-slums - and achieves even more sweeping impact.

Role Models has a tart surface and a heart of goo. The movie grows more obvious as it goes along.

I found the movie impossibly basic and sanitized as a "never again" parable of the Final Solution - and simply wrongheaded as a story about children.

The outcomes of all the mini-dramedies are too messy and equivocal to produce morals; that's just as it should be in a farce about confusion. Co-directors Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath are most intent on completing the circle of comedy.

Soul Men isn't much of a movie, but it bubbles along and reaches its percolating high point at the very end.

Smith appears to have poured his creative energy into the cheerful come-on of the title and left nothing in reserve for the movie. He fails to wring any memorable comedy from shoestring porno filmmakers because his own filmmaking is just as amateurish and slovenly.

What's surprising is that the film has genuine laughs and smart-aleck asides that will keep even nonfans happy (although it helps if you at least like the genre).

It overflows with a combustible blend of street sensitivity and testosterone.