If, like me, you're both desperate to see new public-works systems in our own country and sensitive to the possible human and ecological damage, Up the Yangtze provides a devastating view of top-down, broad-stroke social programs.

Kung fu purists may scoff, but escapists with a sense of humor should romp through The Forbidden Kingdom.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall lacks snap, tension and bravura...Yet the movie is novel and big-hearted. It often succeeds at substituting a smorgasbord of psychological confusions for comic architecture.

This movie is a case of arthouse bait and switch. Its true subject is one decent Yank's desire to believe that Everyman and Everywoman - Everywhere! - are as warm and amiable as your average American Joe: him, Morgan Spurlock, the regular guy as fearless globetrotter.

A third of the way through Smart People, I channeled Randy Newman's "Short People" and thought, "Smart people got no reason to live."

See it with people who take it for the trash it is, and you can cheer the baroque killings and laugh fondly with Forest Whitaker as he tries too hard to create a domestic sociopath to match his role as "Idi Amin."

As a writer-director, McCarthy, like the characters and the places that he suffuses with emotion, has poetry in him - and he knows how to let it out. He has a talent for demarcating those spaces in which characters can become whoever they want to be.

What gives the film a haunting and sometimes droll poetic unity is the way co-directors Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen trace all their characters moving in a jellyfish-like fashion.

Feisty and good-humored, and if it doesn't have deep characters, it is chock-full of personality.

You begin yearning for more cuteness from the anthropomorphic animals: a pelican, a sea lion and, best of all, a bearded dragon lizard. They're a lot more amusing than Foster, who pours on the angst.

Shine a Light has two maestros, Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger, and once they begin to mesh, around the third or fourth song, they put on a display of showmanship that erases the line between art and entertainment.

Tautou's kind of talent: priceless.

There's little time for nuance in Stop-Loss, and it doesn't deny any of the film's power to wish Peirce would occasionally slow things down enough to let her audience ponder what they're seeing.

If only it had some funny lines, a focused plot and an idea that stretched beyond the initial setup.

The year's big dramatic gambling hit, 21, is all plot, no personality; The Grand, a comedy that follows six contenders into the finals of a poker tournament, is all personality, no plot. I'll take personality.

The shows themselves are extraordinary, especially Japan's Ichigei group, which has the all-out fun and athleticism of a vitaminized Twyla Tharp troupe.

Stays true to the spirit and characters of the book while embellishing it to overflowing.

Reprehensible.

You leave this movie feeling mugged.

It's as if all the digital tools of new millennial filmmaking fell into the hands of men who had less storytelling sense than a campfire bard or a cave painter.

The gritty heist picture The Bank Job has everything adult action fans could want, starting with a grand, fact-inspired gimmick.

The filmmakers capture kids and adolescents who haven't hardened their feelings into attitudes or molded their gestures into poses.

It's an unusual and engaging romantic comedy because it's mostly about how these women ready each other for real love.

Kate Beckinsale is too good for any of the guys in Snow Angels and too good for this movie. Her inventiveness exposes just how puny this movie is.

It's doubly disappointing that all the subplots about Ace and Wallace and their fathers intertwine in increasingly predictable ways.

The movie conveys the drama of the moment but eschews context. The result is an arresting yet frustrating experience.

This rendering of the turbulent second marriage of England's King Henry VIII proves too heavy-footed for the old movie two-step of setting up a morality tale, then exploiting it for heat and titillation.

I found the sight of McAvoy as a piano player in jazzy-seedy duds a lot more disconcerting than Ricci's porcine prosthesis.