Playing Clouseau's exasperated boss, Cleese rams his head into a wall minutes into the action. That's a powerful image, insofar as his headache was mine.

At the very least, a movie like this requires coherence to stay afloat. Barring that, it needs a star to distract us.

This movie has no light to shed on the matter. It is its own contradiction: a film about confessions in which nothing much is confessed.

I can promise you a fairly good thriller with mixed-bag elements: preposterous plot, smartly elegant direction, one of the worst recent performances by a major actress, and a dynamite stick of an action scene that can stand close to the greats (the car chase in "The French Connection," the single-take battle sequence in "Children of Men") and from which the movie never really recovers.

At times, Fanboys is every rowdy low-budget '80s road movie you've ever seen on Cinemax at 2 in the morning. What keeps the movie near, if not actually in, hyperdrive is its love of deep-dish geek culture and a gaggle of cameo appearances.

Taken? You bet.

A brutally inane movie.

You've seen New in Town before, and you've seen it done better. Still, it's a sweet-hearted bit of anemia, pleasant and obvious, and there are a few honest laughs to it.

Merry, filthy, unstoppably hormonal, Serbis feels very much like the sort of movie that happens when no one is minding the store.

A thriller whose title remains printable only because the right people probably don't know that it refers to a violent sex act.

Most of the time it looks like we're on the back lot for a Romanian production of "Lord of the Rings IV."

By taking nonsense seriously Outlander never achieves camp. It's a comic book that's mistaken itself for scripture.

Although Americans may be overwhelmed by the dizzy mix of music, dancing, and kung fu, they should have no trouble appreciating the talent of this extraordinary entertainer.

It's a strained but heartfelt work of muted sentimentality, obvious in its symbolism but grounded in a sense of life's preciousness and brevity. Depending on your mood and indulgence, you may weep or you may be left out in the cold.

Hotel for Dogs is agreeable Saturday afternoon multiplex piffle - friendly, formulaic, completely harmless.

Lussier stages his movie not so much around nail-biting moments as novel ways to fling entrails at his viewers. But if you take pleasure in such mindless gore, there must be worse ways to spend 100 minutes.

After 110 minutes of the "n" word being deployed with abandon, Biggie vows to renounce it. And just like that a deluxe episode of "Behind the Music" turns into an evening at church.

Looks like something stubbed out in an ashtray.

A chick flick that makes its chick characters - and by extension its chick audience - look like hateful, backward toddlers, and there is something wrong with that.

For most of Not Easily Broken, I wondered why the movie wasn't worse. Then I remembered it was directed by the veteran Bill Duke, who applies ample TLC.

The Unborn joins a growing glut of Holocaust- and Nazi-themed material -- "Valkyrie," "Defiance" - that are long on posturing, suppositions, and righteousness, yet short on moral complexity. Nazism and its crimes have lately inspired theme parks more than actual movies. Too many rides on that roller coaster and I feel sick.

A violent, melodramatic, feverishly overplotted tale of midlife crisis and crazy love. It's good, nasty fun until it gets boxed in by its own contrivances toward the end.

Depressingly predictable in its dialogue and dramatic beats, Defiance is most interesting as a study of unlikely leaders.

Maybe it's a cheap shot to call Revolutionary Road "American Beauty" without the laughs, but it gets to the heart of the problem.

Waltz With Bashir not only breathes but it howls - and sobs and curses and croons and, in the end, when sound proves useless in the face of calamity, falls into awful silence.

At its most profound, Benjamin Button isn't about anything more important than Pitt's very handsomeness, which, for a surprising stretch of time, is a wonderful subject for study.

The movie's cleverest idea is to give the Octopus identical clone henchmen with names like Phobos, Logos, and Huevos, all played by Louis Lombardi with a marvelous fat-boy idiot grin.

The appeal of Bedtime Stories belongs entirely to Sandler. As a comedian, he doesn't have to stoop to a kid's level. He's usually already there.

Harvey is so thin it barely registers as a movie, yet these two actors - British apples and American oranges in their respective approaches to character - almost miraculously weave something memorable out of nothing much.

The movie is torn. It wants to honestly explore the natural wear-and-tear of the Grogan marriage. But it also seems OK with being something that could pass as a midseason replacement on ABC.

It's a smooth, compelling, almost suspenseful (more on that in a bit), and slightly hollow Hollywood period piece.

Takes one man, his children, their spouses and babies, his ex-wife, his girlfriend, her daughter, and his friends and turns it all into a masterpiece about the strange power of food - to heal, unite, exasperate.

What is the value of art in times of strife? Should people be sitting in the theater or rioting in the streets? Walter's film reminds us that once there was a man whose work made no distinction between the two.

A skillfully managed fairy tale about a mouse, a rat, and fairy tales in general.

I was much more disheartened leaving the movie the first time I saw it than I was the second. Its richness resides in its apparent objectivity. Without sacrificing a sense of hope, Cantet suggests that the school system is just like a certain vexing grammatical tense: imperfect but still fighting against irrelevance.

I wanted to keep watching. I wanted to leave. In between, I prayed for the piano-accordion soundtrack to silence itself for just one scene (it's like being trapped in a little French restaurant that refuses to close).

I'd like to make a 911 call myself: Lord, please stop this increasingly fine actor (Smith) from climbing onto another cross.

The biggest problem with this movie - not that it's mediocre, dull, or barely written (though it's guilty on all counts). It's that Carrey himself is miscast.

The Wrestler is a character study, no more and no less, yet it's open-ended enough to function as many things.

An endlessly fascinating movie. If only it were a good one.

The labor applied to Che is apparent, but it would be wrong to characterize the movie as laborious the way it was in, say, 2006's "The Good German," where Soderbergh took great pains to re-create 1940s Hollywood wartime glamour.

Vigalondo is only partially capable of building suspense (the film's latter stages contain one knot too many); his achievement owes more to his imagination than his pop craftsmanship.

Something has been lost in the translation, and it's not just the script.

As a consideration of faith and propriety, the movie never managed to boil my blood or break my heart.

Both despite its familiarity and because of it, Nothing Like the Holidays brings it home for Christmas.

Delgo demonstrates how hard it is to create a memorable, credible-looking piece of animated entertainment.

After a sensuous introductory act, The Reader descends into a series of dismaying contradictions regarding the moral toxins of the Holocaust - which still pollute postwar Germany.

Wendy Carroll is a character we rarely see in movies anymore, a woman left alone with her thoughts. That a moviegoer would care what she's thinking testifies to the power in Williams's brand of solitude.

So what is Hunger? Unexpectedly, a visually ravishing tour of hell and a meditation on freedom that at best is wordlessly profound and at worst interestingly obscure.

It's a hell of a story, and Cadillac Records wants to tell it so badly that it threatens to warp the narrative out of recognition.

Guy Ritchie made a name for himself with scuzz, but even his shtick has exceeded its sell-by date. Nobel Son goes further, crossing the contortions of "The Usual Suspects" with the shallowness of certain intellectual family melodramas.

If most December movie releases are epic-length and Oscar-ambitious, then Punisher: War Zone has to be considered Hobbesian counterprogramming: It's nasty, brutish, and short.

Despite a moving, canny incarnation of the man by Frank Langella, despite a slickly entertaining coffee-table production as only Ron Howard knows how, the movie feels cooked up.

Four Christmases is essentially "Meet the Parents" quadrupled.

By nearly every measure, Milk is a beautifully made, far less conventional movie biography than most.

The thrill of the ridiculousness is gone. So is all the mystery that made Statham so appealing in the first place.

Actually, the movie's a better movie than the book was a book, in part because Meyer struggled to put her characters' galloping emotions into print whereas director Catherine Hardwicke just visualizes them in all their inarticulate purpleness.

Self-consciously poetic and shot within a luscious inch of its life, the film's also an engrossing heartbreaker: a family saga that spans continents, political administrations, and decades of travail to arrive at a harder, wiser place.

This stuff is clever, in the reflexively satirical, self-aware way that many animated films are. It's not until the dog is accidentally shipped off to New York City that the movie lets you in on an altogether more interesting idea: It doesn't want to be that cool.

The larger point Harvard Beats Yale makes, perhaps, is about the inevitability of loss. Many of these men, now in their early 60s, look terrific. Others, let us say, do not. Either way, all of them look very different from the helmeted young athletes of 40 years ago. A sense of mortality shadows the documentary. On or off the gridiron, time is the only opponent who always wins. Even at Harvard, even at Yale.

Luhrmann is working a tricky game: He's trying to come to terms with modern Australia's racist legacy while telling a ripping yarn while also making fun of ripping yarns - but not too much.

The trouble with Quantum of Solace is that the frills are a mess, too. Even the customary opening title sequence, with its writhing silhouettes and screechy theme song by Jack White and Alicia Keys, is a cheesy throwback to the Roger Moore era: Ladies and gentlemen, the Quantum of Solace dancers!

With at least nine primary characters and running two and a half hours, it's a big, fat novel of a movie - a domestic epic that fuses bitterness and forgiveness in completely satisfying ways.

Eden is "Once" after two kids and 10 years of marriage have sucked the music out of life.

The documentary sweetly focuses our attention on the way human creativity transforms everything around it. Often in the nuttiest of ways, true. But still, it's a good thing.

It's all terribly sentimental without being truly terrible.

You may even feel like dancing in the aisles yourself. Sure, the real world doesn't always work this way. Have you forgotten that this is one of the reasons why we go to movies in the first place?

Any movie that shows its heroes firing up a joint between stints as high-school anti-drug crusaders is true to its black little heart.

JCVD may not be the first meta-musclehead movie, but it's certainly the most surprising.

Because its gaze is so level and so unyielding, it stands as one of the better dramatic films made on this subject (although it's not nearly as fine as Louis Malle's "Au Revoir les Enfants."

Fails to drum up much excitement.

The longer the film goes on, the more you crave a vaster history of modern Liberia, originally a colony founded by former slaves from the United States.

There are two reasons to put up with Soul Men, and that's the soul men themselves. Samuel L. Jackson and Bernie Mac appear to be having a good time, and for most of this raunchy, poorly orchestrated buddy comedy, that's enough.

Molly Hartley is dull at worst and surprisingly spooky at best.

Rudely silly rather than transgressively shocking, Zack and Miri is the sort of bawdy but fundamentally decent farce you could take Grandma to, provided Grandma were familiar with the oeuvre of Traci Lords.

Perhaps because Campbell is a purist at heart, My Name Is Bruce is as awful as anything he has done - a broadly silly gore comedy in which no gag is too cartoonish to be indulged in at least once and preferably three times.

Watching Granger and Priya chase each other around a hotel like squirrels in a park, you wonder what these two see in each other.

The beauty of Let the Right One In resides in the way the horror remains grounded in a tragic kind of love.

I can't pretend to know fully what Charlie Kaufman is up to in Synecdoche, New York, with all the doubled characters, dreamy reenactments, comical minutiae, and personal unhappiness. But I got a great deal of pleasure out of watching him mount his fantasia about an artist suffering not simply for his art, but because of it.

As Changeling strains toward its mawkishly optimistic conclusion, the old-fashioned moviemaking that Eastwood settled into doesn't suit either him or his star. It feels like a corny joke.

A novelist and screenwriter, Claudel's directing for the first time here, and he leans on melodramatic contrivances more than he needs to. Still, he gives us a lean and observant weepie, and the mystery of Thomas's Juliette pulls you in.

Oh, Jigsaw. Here we go again. You kill. I doze off. Someone at the studio goes "ka-ching!"

Everything in this good-cop/bad-cop action drama is shrouded in gray and attended by wailing. This isn't a feel-good genre, granted, but does it have to feel this bad?

For all its unforgivable blandness, "High School Musical" opens young audiences to the charms of this most transporting of movie genres.

It makes a nicely grim little Halloween appetizer, although you may want to go home and hide under the bed afterward.

Grueling yet ultimately exhilarating.

When it works, W. can take your breath away. When it doesn't, you can feel Stone still working out his feelings toward the man.

Worst of all, the movie's simply not very shocking. Madonna has made a career out of toying with image and ego, but this is a vanity project in the smallest sense possible.

This is not a movie that has great passion for pleasures of the flesh. Its sexiest scenes involve bullets cutting through the air in the slowest motion possible.

A fluffy piece of Disney nonfiction.

On screen something happens that goes beyond Monk's powers of description and Fanning's way of seeming 14 and 44 at the same time.

Three things and three things only keep Sex Drive from being teen-comedy landfill. The first is James Marsden, hilarious as the hero's bully-boy big brother. The second is Seth Green, beyond droll as an Amishman with attitude. The third is the Mexican doughnut costume.

The movie doesn't know what it wants to say about the election or the people who run in it.

It's a genre film - the action is fierce and nonstop - with a brooding undercurrent of unease that aims for the complexities of John le Carre.

This is territory previously covered in the French film "Ma Vie en Rose," which took a relatively more sophisticated view of both a child's self-expression and adults' discomfort over it.

City of Ember lacks the vision and scope of "WALL-E," but it's based on a pretty good kids' book and it makes a pretty good "Twilight Zone" episode, with hope dangling at the end rather than one of Rod Serling's cosmic black jokes.

This movie is especially egregious since it bundles the civil rights era, garden-variety bigotry, and the achievements of Ernie Davis, the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy.

Happy-Go-Lucky isn't one of Leigh's epic social canvases like "Secrets & Lies" or even "Topsy-Turvy"; rather, it's an edgy character study whose message only gradually emerges.