The film reveals its secrets slowly, and Chabrol tightens the screws not according to the rules of Hollywood suspense but with a cool, level gaze.

At its core, Quinceañera, a modest but remarkably poignant comedy, is the story of a neighborhood.

Cannon actually is funny -- not to mention funny-looking. Plastic surgery has left her physically absurd, like a vaguely glamorous R. Crumb cartoon.

The charm of Conversations With Other Women, a gimmicky but oddly moving two-character drama that flies in from who knows where, is its intelligentknowingness.

Alive with infectious rhythm, likable characters, and slick dance moves, Step Up gives clichés a good name.

Illusionist is like an overupholstered wing chair in the corner of a men's club -- you settle in only to be startled by how ridiculously comfy you are.

Crank is an efficient, witty, junkyard dog of an action movie for its first hour. Unfortunately, the script runs out of gas before the hero does. While it's cooking, though, it's violently preposterous fun.

The filmmaker doesn't exactly let anyone off the hook.

The Protector is about 84 minutes long, and only four of those minutes are devoted to plot.

The movie's inevitabilities (the humiliating loss, the ebb and flow of camaraderie, the triumphant finale) have deep resonance.

The primary talking head is Ono, of course, who's serenely protective of Lennon's greater legacy. Her cooperation ties the film's hands, but only to a point.

This is extreme comedy, and it's amazing how director Jeff Tremaine, who along with Spike Jonze has been affiliated with this troupe from its outset, creates an environment where self-inflicted torture is uncontrollably funny without being morally offensive.

Call it "Jet Li's Wushu Retirement Party."

Without trivializing the disease, the film challenges AIDS' stigma (albeit for heterosexuals) at a moment when it was still considered a death sentence.

This pop-up book of a film is an ideal arrangement between director and star.

What Little Children understands so well, and so poignantly, is a kind of parental existentialism that hits 30- somethings with kids: How does having children make you such a less interesting adult?

In Shortbus, the impish writer-director John Cameron Mitchell does the unthinkable: He puts the joy back in movie sex.

You buy "fair - trade" coffee; you assume you're being socially responsible. But now, along comes Black Gold to tell you that all fair-trade coffee is not created equal, and that Ethiopia, the "birthplace of coffee" and home of some of the world's best beans, may be getting the least fair shake of all.

Distinguishes itself from the recent glut of mediocre political documentaries by opting for nonpartisanship.

The pleasure of Infamous is in its gallery of larger-than-life portrayals.

As art, the movie is neither shallow nor profound, just inconsequential. Yet Coppola is too clever a filmmaker to dismiss the movie out of hand. If her film is mostly surface then she skims with style.

The best parts of Flicka are its pinch-me optimism and its old-fashioned-movie flourishes.

It's like "The Illusionist" crossed with a really hard Sudoku.

A lovely , old-fashioned farm romance quietly doubling as a comment on immigration and American identity.

Harrowing and inexorable, the film recaptures the progressive insanity of Jim Jones and the hundreds of worshipers in his thrall, and it certainly gives you willies to last for days.

A shamelessly enjoyable retread, an ode to la belle vie that has been well turned on a factory spindle.

Longley takes us through that country without a map; he's an artful, optimistic empiricist who believes what we see matters infinitely more than what we're told.

Part detective story, part coming of political age saga, and all teenage identity crisis, Captive is the first film written and directed by Gaston Biraben , who has worked steadily as a Hollywood sound editor since the early '90s. That professionalism shows in the polished filmmaking as well as an occasional tendency toward shallower melodrama than the situation deserves.

Despite the appearance of numerous free-speaking conservatives, the movie's partisanship leans nakedly to the left.

The movie's an uncategorizable mixture of the tacky and profound, and on some weird level, you have to respect it.

Told in a serenely observational fashion.

As amusing as it is, the comedy here consists mostly of predictable potshots.

Their film is a fiendishly detailed toy -- the sort found at the back of a forgotten museum -- and while the shadow play it presents is an old and eternal one, you never cease to hear the whirr of the gears.

The Aura is richer and less showy than "Nine Queens," and it lifts off from the gangster genre to contemplate deeper mysteries.

You aren't likely to see a more ludicrous movie for the rest of the year. But rarely has such ludicrousness been used to pay tribute to a town in need of love. Déjà Vu is generic enough to have been filmed anywhere. But it happens to be set in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Off the Black is a small, dry, emotionally loaded short story that has been carried to film like baked fish to a platter.

Stuffed with smart performers doing graciously silly work, and all Levy has to do is manage traffic.

The actor's (McConaughey) lovable exuberance is exactly what this heartsick movie needs.

The movie's a cheeky, low-budget goof on dice-and-slice horror films, but for all the visible seams, it's a lot cleverer than "Scream."

The movie works.

An absorbing piece of investigative journalism.

It's foreign, it's inspiring, it has an adorably resourceful kid; it depicts grinding misery in a land far from West Newton, and it holds out the possibility of clambering over all that misery to attain your dream.

The ‘"unreasonable man" himself is interviewed, too, and he comes across as patient, articulate, and maddeningly uncompromising.

It's like an After-School Special version of "Pan's Labyrinth ," and I actually mean that as a compliment.

This low-rent, nonsense cop business filled me with a nostalgic twinge. I didn't know I wanted the "Police Academy" series resurrected with a lot more hilarity, but I'm glad somebody did it.

Archer isn't necessarily taking us anywhere new, but his movie's rapture is beautiful inside and out.

It takes a special first-time director to stick her neck out, personally as well as professionally. As much as anything else, The Cats of Mirikitani is a testament to good breeding.

The historical scope of this story, as well as Loach's interest in absolute fairness, seems to have drained some of the life from its telling.

For smart kids between the ages of 8 and 12, the movie hits the sweet spot with a satisfying cosmic bang. It's a cross between "A Wrinkle in Time" and a middle-school version of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

It's an angry story, but also a strangely hopeful one, in the sense of new life sprouting through a battlefield. Above all, it's personal and specific, and that IS news we can use.

The film is quick, painless, and more than a little brave: not since John Travolta, Jamie Lee Curtis, and the aerobicizers in "Perfect" has so much Lycra been so abused for our pleasure.

Promises minor pleasures and delivers them. In the process, it's gracious enough to kick in a few extras: a nifty central gimmick, a self-effacing lead performance, and a big slice of ham from supporting actor Jeff Daniels .

Almost as funny as it is hyperactive, the new computer-animated family comedy is luscious to look at and as fizzy as a can of soda popped open in your face.

In After the Wedding Susanne Bier pushes the envelope further, toward operatic passion and the visual symbolism of Ingmar Bergman.

The only thing missing from The Hoax might be a couple of songs. It's that breezy and fleet a movie.

It's to the "Lethal Weapon" movies what left-hand driving on a country lane is to a freeway chase: pokey, more than a little daft, but with a bloody surprise around every hedge.

Waitress isn't a great film, but it is great, deep-dish fun, with a generosity of spirit that extends first to the sisters on the screen and in the audience, then to the rest of humanity.

A fully felt, decently crafted teen B-movie melodrama, plenty preposterous in places but alive to the vibrant miseries of being young and misunderstood.

Devor's sympathy for both the men and the animals is humane, yet his movie is palpably sad. A sense of shame cuts through all the ambiguity. You know less about what you've watched when Zoo is over than you did when it started. And that's what makes the movie so hard to shake.

Mostly Election tracks the shifting of power among men for whom power is all that matters, no matter how much lip service they pay to loyalty. The final sequence is a shocker but it's also completely logical.

As directed by Nobuhiro Yamashita , the sluggish haze between extracurricular activities is exquisitely captured and framed, then patiently edited. Every shot feels like a gift.

The journey is not very exciting, but the destinations are inspired.

Most of the color and zest among the movie's many talking heads comes from the refreshingly irreverent opera director Jonathan Miller.

Breezy humor and a dazzling heist keep 'Ocean' franchise in the money.

Anyone looking for sleek futuristic action and production design should keep walking.

This is the first, smallest, and most essential planet in the Van Sant solar system. The seediness of "Drugstore Cowboy " started here. So did the one-way crushes in "My Own Private Idaho " and the gorgeously epic longueurs of "Last Days. "

The most colorful of the penguin 'toons to date, both figuratively and literally.

If even half of Olivier Dahan's robust film about Piaf's life is true -- and let's face it, much remains shrouded in myth and mystery -- it's a wonder she could get dressed in the morning, let alone forge a legendary singing career.

Andrew Currie's stylish satire falls into the narrower niche of zombie farce, as pioneered by "Shaun of the Dead ," "Slither," Robert Rodriguez's half of "Grindhouse."

It's a predictable but acridly pleasant 12-step bonbon: self-help noir.

Darker, leaner, less expansive , and meaner, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is all business, and it casts a spell utterly unlike the first four films.

Leconte's writing is tight and nimble, and while the tests of the duo's friendship are facile, under the circumstances, they make sense. The bond between Francois and Bruno approximates the real thing; Leconte seems to be arguing that you can grow a flower from fake soil.

Especially wonderful is Taraji P. Henson as Petey's longtime girlfriend Vernell , a vision in Foxy Brown period clothes with a pixie smile, lollipop legs, and a filthy mouth. After "Hustle & Flow ," this is at least the second movie Henson has stolen, and will Hollywood please do something about it?

Arctic Tale has a very precise audience in mind: Young children who aren't yet ready for the graphs and sociopolitical alarm bells of "An Inconvenient Truth."

Quite easily Live-in Maid could have descended into a kind of Joan Crawford-Bette Davis gorgon salute. But everyone here seems way too smart for that, though apparently the movie is being prepped for an English-language version. So beware.

Anne Hathaway's Jane is headstrong and clever, balanced and true.

What the movie lacks in technical polish (it's not very handsome-looking) and dramatic perfection, it makes up for in unusual social sophistication.

When it's not opting for whimsy, Rocket Science makes you cringe, which is what's good about it.

The Signal is like a Romero zombie movie in which the zombies aren't dead, they're just really temperamental. Evil here is technology-born. Maybe our cellphones and satellite dishes are giving us all the crazy.

Shot with intentionally banal anti-style - minimal soundtrack music, found sound, jitter-cam - the movie achieves a wisdom that's bigger than it seems.

Either you'll find the man hilarious -- or he'll seem like one of those awful, tedious comedians who only THINKS he's hilarious.

The title is Portuguese for "send a bullet" and the clever American tag line is "the rich steal from the poor; the poor steal the rich."

It's so simple, so obvious - and a revelation.

A hilarious, touching, and (except for a dip into melodrama near the end) skillful blend of subtle emotional depths and a dazzlingly playful surface.

The Last Winter sounds like a genre-movie platypus - a little bit of this, a little piece of that - but it stops short of laying an egg. In fact, it works eerily well.

Garlin's movie is beautiful in its own way. It also suggests that David's show would still be brilliant without the aggravation. I'm not saying that David should renounce misanthropy. But maybe he could curb less of Garlin's apparent enthusiasm for people.

So there's a hole at the center of "Pete Seeger" that the movie fills with loving remembrances, testimonials, and new interview footage of the singer at his hand-built cabin in upstate New York.

The result is both a surprisingly lucid portrayal of clinical depression and dramatically a bit stiff.

A lovely piece of filmmaking, a gripping, minimalist marriage of sound and image.

Turns out to be a sweetly grim lark: a road film through Limbo. It takes the self-pity associated with ending one's life and uses it for the purposes of mordantly aware comic fantasy.

A documentary that falls somewhere between overlong and compelling as it follows the 39th president on his controversial book tour.

The movie's climactic car chase is as absurdly thrilling as it is innovative. Set almost silently in a blue-gray daytime downpour, it has a tough, improvisatory danger that makes the movie. If John Coltrane went in for action sequences, he'd have dug this one.

The movie's not even close to Pixar standards - the animation is slapdash and the story construction's a mess - but the vibe is loose-limbed and fluky, and the gags have an extra snap that's recognizably Seinfeldian.

Slick, impassioned, and guardedly upbeat, Ted Braun's film is a morale booster aimed at US audiences rather than the 2.5 million displaced Sudanese tribespeople whose villages have been destroyed and families slaughtered. That we need a pick-me-up more than they do is pathetic, but there you are.

Fred Claus sells you something you didn't know you wanted: a Vince Vaughn Christmas movie. Vaughn is not the hook. Neither is the holiday. The script, by Dan Fogelman, is smarter than that.

It's fair to say that a meaner documentary might have packed more punch. But it's hard to imagine Michael Moore turning out anything that feels as pleasantly nourishing.

Not all of it works - and not all of it works the way the target audience of jacked-up young males might want it to - but the movie is hugely provocative fun, and I'm pretty sure that's on purpose.

The sight of Adams gliding and beaming and chirping in this movie - a self-mocking cartoon that transforms into an inspired live-action musical farce - is just about the happiest time I've had watching an actor do anything all year.