The only recommendable thing about Norbit is that he's not as bad as every other person in this movie.

Hits far more marks than it misses. And no work has brought viewers deeper inside the psychology of war. [06 Apr 2007, p.D10]

A sloppily made bowl of reheated chick-flick cliches.

The Messengers is textbook, and the course it's teaching is HSL: Horror as a Second Language.

Overall the concept is strong and expertly fleshed out; it's just a pity that Hollywood tropes are allowed to invade.

If Woody Allen were a young, attractive gay woman, he might make something like this, or so Maggenti hopes. But it would probably be funnier, and it would definitely cut deeper.

It's an interesting, if dissatisfying rumination on the working people of industry -- how they labor, how they rest, what they think and feel.

A rousing, sometimes funny, frequently depressing documentary.

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

Entertaining in a B-movie sort of way, and you can't help admiring its earnestness about the philosophical issues it invokes.

There's a funkier and more interesting movie in Maureen, a character played by Juliette Lewis. Maureen is a single mom, a massage therapist, and a dimwit California follower of every new-age theory out there. She's a nasal, needy wreck, and Catch and Release is torn between adoring her and making ruthless fun of her.

The willful sloppiness and retrograde gags make Epic Movie, which was not shown to critics, an inevitable byproduct of our Internet video era. It seems downloaded and projected onto the screen, a failing online-film-school project paid for and put out by a Hollywood movie studio. That said, very little on YouTube is this unentertaining.

Sadly, more than an hour of this movie is given over to talking. And not the wink-wink Quentin Tarantino kind, either.

The one thing going for Becket is actually two things: Burton and O'Toole.

A poignant, all-too-common tale of casual abuse in a workplace that is candidly labeled "better than most."

If you boil off dialogue, performance, narrative logic and grind a movie down to the nub of genre, will there be any suspense left? The answer is yes, but only in a Pavlovian sense. You react to this dull shockathon like a wired lab rat who's seen it all before. And guess what? You have.

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.

Mafioso is the missing link in the mob movie arc.

As it escalates to a nasty conclusion, Alpha Dog doesn't have the moral or emotional weight of tragedy. These aren't the psychologically exploded youths of "Rebel Without a Cause," or even "The Outsiders." They're characters in a long, violent, unbleeped episode of MTV's "Cribs."

Primeval is a hoot if you're in the mood, though, and it gets points for trying to stuff a little globo-think into the minds of Friday night mayhem fans (who will probably rebel, since only one skull pops like a grape).

For his part, Short, another pop choreographer, sounds like Vin Diesel, but he moves like a bee. When he dances, he makes sure every girl in the theater goes home stung.

Seesawing between despair and soul-affirming inspiration, God Grew Tired of Us is a documentary to make you proud of what America offers to the rest of the world and worried that it can't keep its promises.

A parody of and winking homage to the history of Thai melodrama, Wisit Sasanatieng's uproarious filmmaking debut exuberantly combines pop and kitsch with a wholesome belief in the thrills of bad art.

This movie can't commit to a genre, let alone a logical sequence or complete idea. But there is a wisdom in its blasé assessments and frivolous air: What's the point; where's the wine?

A pallidly "hip" revision of classic fairy tales that would be better told straight up if anyone had the nerve. It will divert small children, but so will a brightly colored object if you twirl it.

The movie works.

It's another standard-issue bad star-vehicle action-comedy, this time for Cedric.

Pan's Labyrinth is a transcendent work of art.

Perfume is a pitch-black period epic of squalor and enterprise.

The immediate problem with making a movie based on Potter's life is that it doesn't seem to have been very interesting.

Factory Girl is not, strictly speaking, a bad movie. It's something worse: an irredeemably banal drama about some of the most protean, contradictory creative forces of the 1960s.

How many bicycling movies are there, let alone ones that know from frame geometry? "Breaking Away" is probably the champ, followed by "American Flyers," the hilariously awful Kevin Bacon bike-messenger movie "Quicksilver," and then we're already into "The Bicycle Thief " and "Pee-wee's Big Adventure." It's a small pack, and The Flying Scotsman rides close to the front by default.

Watching Arthur and the Invisibles is like sticking your head in a Gallic pinball machine: It's hectic, technically impressive, and your skull starts to pound after a while.

Notes on a Scandal is a nice mug of poisoned eggnog for the holiday season -- a movie so smart and entertaining you almost don't feel its chill sicken your bones.

This is an extraordinary artistic breakthrough from a Mexican director who was already fearlessly good to begin with.

Silly, obvious, clumsy, and just gruesome enough to keep jaded genre fans from angrily throwing popcorn at the screen.

Leaves you longing for the other, better political thrillers it evokes.

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.

Venus is rollickingly funny at times -- but there's an undercurrent of extraordinarily clear-eyed sadness.

As easy as this movie is to watch, it's artificially flavored. "Golden Flower" runs on crocodile tears and corn-syrup blood.

Eloquent, bloody, and daringly simple.

Curran is a talented director, especially where his actors are concerned. His previous movie, "We Don't Live Here Anymore," an adaptation of two Andre Dubus stories, was another literary adultery drama featuring Watts. The Painted Veil doesn't achieve the fire that characterized that film.

This is no corporate project made to squeeze a few more dollars from a fading cash cow. No one else has been asking for another "Rocky," other than maybe Burt Young . No, this is a rarer beast -- an auteur sequel -- and it's so wrapped up in its maker's personal mythology and psychic needs that it becomes a hall of mirrors to which we're given a slack-jawed ringside seat.

"Grin Without a Cat" brilliantly used montage and a wide intellectual scope to speculate about the history of war and revolution. "Grinning Cat" is a more modest achievement, but the director's wisdom remains robust.

As blandly lucid as Barney's is wildly and perplexingly imaginative.

It's taken Dreamgirls 25 years and several false starts to get to the screen, so it's a shame to see what a rush job it feels like.

There's a great movie somewhere in The Good German, but it's buried under three tons of run-amok formalism.

Breaking and Entering is a bourgeois movie full of bourgeois problems presented bourgeoisly.

Indeed, woe be to the child who doesn't mist up at this movie, since it's been made if not with zip, wit, or imagination, then at least with sweetness. But I hope no one will think the film is an adequate replacement for White's book. That would be a crime.

The mess that's been made with all this money is maddening. This isn't economical moviemaking. It's a deluxe trailer for "Eragon 2."

I don't think I've seen a mainstream movie get fatherhood so right since "Kramer vs . Kramer": the fear, the indulgence, the snappishness, the pre-occupied "uh-huhs" as a child natters about his day, the steamrolling waves of love.

Say what you will about Gibson, but he's a genuine filmmaker, and Apocalypto gallops along the thin line between the deluded and the inspired with such conviction that you're yanked into its wake.

As an entry in the advocacy-entertainment genre, in which glamorous movie stars bring our attention to the plight of the less fortunate, Blood Diamond is superior to 2003's ridiculous "Beyond Borders" while looking strident and obvious next to last year's "The Constant Gardener."

A lark, with pretensions to be more.

Crashes the slapstick of "Home Alone" into the youthful angst of "The Breakfast Club."

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

This film has provocations to spare; it just hasn't been made provocatively. It's a mess, actually.

It's a deceptively small film, one whose observations may continue to detonate quietly in your mind after the lights have come up.

Inland Empire may be the most aggressively surreal feature film ever released to movie theaters in this country, and it's possibly close to the movie David Lynch carries around in his head.

A movingly acted, terrifically old-fashioned World War II picture rethought as a post-colonial rebuke.

The Lives of Others has similarities to Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 classic "The Conversation" but with undercurrents that resound across an entire century of European political history.

In a real sense, Nativity Story is the female other to Gibson's "Passion": Dedicated to life rather than death, it's suffused with a sense of the womanly divine.

The Rise of Taj is relatively pointless in the scheme of things, but refreshing in what it (mostly) doesn't resort to for laughs.

If good intentions were all it took to create a decent movie, Thom Fitzgerald's 3 Needles would be some kind of masterpiece.

10 Items or Less is nearly an acting class exercise, except for the fact that these two have long since graduated.

Perhaps urban-planning solutions are too much to expect from a Friday night at the movies, but in a film this ambitious, the evident lack of thought put into the problem is disappointing. As any architect knows, it's easier to tear down than to build up.

Turistas is not a slasher film -- not conventionally. Released by Fox's new teen division, it's the latest aquatic titillation from John Stockwell, the man who also brought us "Blue Crush" and the shockingly good "Into the Blue."

Creaky, earnest melodrama.

If you're young, the film may intoxicate you. If you're older, it may make you relieved you're no longer young.

This sequel, with the return of the first movie's insatiably slutty Los Angeles collegians, is as vulgar as its predecessor and just as almost-smart.

A noble, shipwrecked folly.

The saddest part is that "Deck" wastes four comic talents ranging from the near-genius (Matthew Broderick, Danny DeVito) to the inspired (Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth ) to the charming (Kristin Davis of "Sex and the City").

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.

As a movie, it’s a mess — and lazy, too.

The film squeezes out its feel-good messages like toothpaste from a tube.

A shrewdly acted, bittersweet comedy.

If you miss the old cliches, consider whether, after 21 Bond films and countless parodies, your response is simply Pavlovian.

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

It's a remarkably laugh-free comedy that takes on a dark subject and skitters along its surface.

Told in a serenely observational fashion.

Fast Food Nation has the dramatic flatness and willful lack of personality of some documentaries -- or at least how Linklater thinks a documentary should be. The movie nonetheless feels like both a work of investigative journalism and an immense human-interest story, veering into muckraking, horror, teen comedy, and what passes for "Twilight Zone" science fiction.

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.

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

The real problem with Harsh Times is Jim himself. Bale goes at the part with his usual intensity, but the character still seems like a psycho without psychology or a soul.

As B-level suspensers go, though, The Return isn't actively awful -- just slow and cursed with a lead who acts with her t-shirt.

Watching the movie made me long for the big , risky ideas and entertainingly fearless filmmaking in David O. Russell's "I Heart Huckabees " and Spike Jonze's "Adaptation ," which Kaufman wrote. Both were similarly conceptual escapades, but they let it all hang out.

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.

In theory, there's nothing wrong with this unorthodox approach to Arbus -- attempting to explain her from the inside out. (In its way, Harmony Korine's freakfest "Gummo" is a better Arbus movie.) The trouble is that Shainberg and Wilson don't connect their conceit to anything artistically enlightening, erotic, or truly deviant.

Like an old college wrestler, Harris saunters through this toasty little piece of biographical fiction in love with the part's fixins'.

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.

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.

A comic put-on of awe-inspiring crudity and death-defying satire and by a long shot the funniest film of the year. It is "Jackass" with a brain and Mark Twain with full frontal male nudity.

Parents will while away the time in moderate boredom until the film unexpectedly springs to life in its midsection, then just as abruptly goes back to sleep.