This film teaches the rewards of patience for directors, for actors and for audiences, too. The compelling reality of Juliette's plight comes from how subtly and gradually she emerges from her carapace.

Most contemporary horror films derive shocks from mere torture. Let the Right One In locates most of its fright-power in the needs and confusions of people who are usually overlooked.

As the movie rambles along with its own brand of quasi-magical surrealism, the links to real experience grow scarcer and more frayed.

The movie plays like a dunk-the-clown game at a carnival. Through intent or ineptitude, he sets up the Bush family and administrations as caricatures.

What kills Max Payne is that the characters think and feel in slow motion. Half the time, mentally, they're just running in place.

Soars on the strength of strong acting and a script that stubbornly refuses to go all sappy and preachy.

Leonardo DiCaprio brings straight-razor reflexes and rooted emotion to the role of a deceptively rugged CIA man.

Many inspirational sports movies provide only junk food for thought; this one contains some authentic reflections of sport in the civil rights era.

It's lumpy, odd and tonally all over the place, but its vision gets to you, and its payoff delivers a tough kid's catharsis.

British director Mike Leigh has made the first great comedy for our new depression.

Watching Guy Ritchie's British-underworld farce, RocknRolla, is like being compelled to pay attention to a nonstop rock station you normally use as background while you're doing chores. The words are catchy and the beat keeps you awake, though all of it quickly fades.

The results are often as surprising as they are funny.

Has been designed to make gentle hearts soar beneath neo-grunge exteriors. It's a mixture of high-SAT humor and high-jinks so crude they're really low-jinks.

It's hard to go wrong with a movie full of talking dogs. But the makers of Beverly Hills Chihuahua sure try.

You get the film's message, that mankind does not react well when challenged by unpleasantness it can't explain away, within the first 15 minutes -- leaving more than 100 minutes to ponderously belabor the point.

It's exhilarating in an authentic, pathos-streaked way to see Kearns, through Greg Kinnear's inspired characterization of a wary obsessive, representing himself during his trial against Ford Motor Co. for stealing his design.

Hathaway carries you on an emotional whirligig that can be horrifying and funny, hopeful and devastating.

It's a frustrating film in that its characters resolutely defy convention, and its story offers no epiphany, no one moment when everything becomes clear.

Eagle Eye has half an idea in its head, but over two hours there's no time to complete or explore it, since the movie isn't just a chase but a combination steeplechase and destruction derby.

The only reason to see Nights in Rodanthe is to check in with Diane Lane.

For all his excesses and wrong turns, Lee has made a grown-up movie with an adult sense of loss and an adult sense of hope. He may be addicted to broad flourishes, but he has the big emotions to back them up.

This movie has its own emotional sorcery. In a raw, humorous way, it grasps how hope and desperation spur magical thinking and, sometimes, real magic.

The astonishingly versatile Kinnear proves note-perfect as a huckster who slowly rids himself of slime.

Starts out mixing social burlesques and melodrama and ends up one more failed thriller about men behaving badly - and stupidly.

Goes down like a single-malt aged for 25 years.

The problem isn't the history that the filmmakers leave in, but how much they leave out.

The script is clever and would be brilliant if it worked.

This Women doesn't take place in reality or even in a glamorous urban fantasyland. It's strictly TV Land.