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.

The bad news, for those looking forward to The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause with anything like enthusiasm, is this: Bernard the Elf is history.

Volver brims with personal and cinematic allusions, but no one hungry for a well-told tale from a master storyteller is required to understand them.

A slick but dull new shoot- ' em-up from Jamaica, doesn't penetrate the mysteries of high-rolling, high-risk thug life.

Unknown is punchy and entertaining. Maybe not the sort of thing you'd want to spend $10 plus a mortgage for popcorn on, but a nifty surprise on DVD several months from now -- or on pay-cable on-demand right now.

The musician is candid about his own demons and gives the filmmakers access to his wife, two very different daughters, and, for a nicely done montage, his family photographs.

Babel is a ziggurat of brilliant pieces built on sand. It's also this season's "Crash," a movie you know is Important because it never stops telling you so.

In Catch a Fire Noyce has caught the holy spirit. The movie is a thriller that wants to lift you up.

Television is a state of mind. And the makers of Saw III have delivered the most despicable episode of "One Life to Live" ever.

It's one of the great movies on the vicissitudes of love, commitment, and attraction.

Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck's film is a fascinating look at the intersection of commerce, celebrity, and controversy.

Turns out to be rather less than the sum of its headlines.

Absolute Wilson may not be original, but Wilson absolutely is. And for the glimmers of that originality that shine through here, the film is worth watching.

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.

There's grace here if the movie were willing to dig for it. Occasionally it does.

You come out of the theater impressed by the scope of Eastwood's reach and frustrated by how little remains in his grasp. As gifted as this filmmaker is, this isn't the sort of thing he does best.

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.

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

If Plympton is making pastiche, he's also having a laugh at a universal experience that for a lot of people was probably pretty crummy. Apparently, it was a little crummier for him.

The most popular facial expression for victims in The Grudge 2 is something I'd like to call "deep befuddlement." This time "deep befuddlement" goes double for paying customers.

One walks out of Man of the Year aching for the squandered opportunities.

What follows is serviceable action set to music you'd find in a video game -- or a military ad.

It isn't often you get to meet the devil in all his glory, but here he is in Deliver Us From Evil, and his name is Father Oliver O'Grady.

Everybody in the movie is so tightly wound that Walters seems a model of actorly limberness. She cuts through the movie with speed and mannish, zany wit.

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

The results are dull, of all things. The movie itself feels like an overstuffed burrito,

For kids strung out on Anthony Horowitz's 007-lite adventure series, this maiden adaptation is a pleasant enough diversion from having to flip the pages.

It is harrowing, heartbreaking, cheering, and unforgettable.

When The Departed roars to life, as it does in so many of its scenes, you feel like nobody understands movies -- the delirious highs, the unforgiving moral depths -- as well as this man does. Welcome back, Marty.

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?

Perhaps Employee of the Month, which was typed then directed by Greg Coolidge, is unfolding in the key of satire. But you'd have to be a dog to hear it.

The new prequel isn't really a slasher movie at all. It's a mess, with too much to say, and an odd genre in which to preach.

No matter their wealth or social status, these people share disappointments and elations and a sense that life, in the end, may be what life is about.

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.

To those filmgoers who wouldn't know Rat Fink from Barton Fink, this reviewer's advice is: Pass. The latest counterculture tribute by Mann, director of 1988's "Comic Book Confidential" and 1999's "Grass," is as proudly silly as it is informative, and it can't help that a critical amount of brand coolness gets lost in the translation.

The result is movie goulash: made with love, impossible to digest.

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

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

The filmmaker invites us to reconsider the author as someone warmer and less intimidating than his body of work. On that count, Wrestling With Angels succeeds.

A subtle, often very funny, ultimately touching tragedy of royal manners and meaning.

The point of all this solemnity may be to pay serious respect to those rescue swimmers, who courageously look after errant kayakers or victims of Hurricane Katrina. But what we get in exchange is a movie that feels too much like a Coast Guard recruitment film. Who wants to pay to see that?

As cartoon rip-offs go, Open Season can be surprisingly entertaining, in a made-for-6-year-olds kind of way.

It achieves something previously thought impossible: It renders Billy Bob Thornton unfunny.

The first-time filmmaker aspires to show us what caused him to leave his neighborhood and stay gone for 20 years. All I can really glean is that the place was too loud.

Even a fan, however, might prefer the excellent, recently released concert DVD "Pixies: Live at the Paradise in Boston" to this tepid behind-the-scenes experience.

The Last King of Scotland joins the ranks of nightmarish innocents-abroad movies, from "Midnight Express" to "Hostel," where the disillusioned hero fights to return to civility.

I'm not the first observer, or even the second, to liken the star's (Penn) portrayal of fictional Louisiana governor Willie Stark to the late John Belushi's impersonation of Joe Cocker.

The movie's straightforward and ingratiating, and as pretty-boy history lessons go, it's a lot less obnoxious than "Pearl Harbor."

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."

If we are in the midst of a culture war, as many people proclaim in Jesus Camp, then the left should be concerned. The right's Christian soldiers appear to be extremely well trained.

A sloppy mosh note to the genre, with its own excesses and oversights. It's like a flier for a band you've never heard of: torn, soaked with beer, itchy with aggression.

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

Stark eye candy of the first order, the film is saddled with the oldest story this side of "Blade Runner." Still, comic-book fanboys and graphic designers with time to kill should feel no shame in checking this one out.

Kurt and Mark's trip to those hot springs is a figurative return to Eden. Anyone who's had a disillusioning reunion with a moony old friend knows what Mark discovers: They're too old to stay that innocent. None of this hit me until after the movie ended. But it hit me hard: You can't go home again.

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

The first thing you notice about this so-so adaptation of James Ellroy's novel is the shoddy acting.

Everyone's Hero is sincere and heartwarming; sometimes it's funny.

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

It very much wants to be "Garden State" five years down the line.

An unremarkable comedy-drama.

A good-natured but terminally mild British mockumentary.

The documentary any American with an opinion on our involvement in Iraq owes it to his or her conscience to see.

Silly little thriller.

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.

The movie is another of those harmless and politely made dark comedies that the English seem incapable of doing without.

Neither a profile nor a critique, though, the film's only focus is its subject's mild self-regard.

Hollywoodland has scraps of old movie glamour. It also has shades of later movies that sullied all that class and refinement with a lurid touch, namely Roman Polanski's "Chinatown." But that's all Hollywoodland is: scraps and shade.

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

The Covenant is dopey, formulaic stuff for the Friday night fright crowd. Worse for them, it's never remotely scary.

You can sense Baye's struggling within the limits imposed on her. In her own way, she can convey the heat of a Penelope Cruz, the power of Mirren, the barely contained madness of Judi Dench -- but not here. They're just not on the beat she's been given.

Think of Red Doors as a promise, and hope that Georgia Lee keeps it.

A gorgeous, meandering travelogue that only gradually bares its teeth.

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.

Earnest and predictable, Crossover deserves more than the horselaughs that will probably greet it in theaters -- but not a lot more. The movie is harmless, which is both its strength and its weakness.

As it is, LaBute has cleverly repurposed his creepy source material. This Wicker Man, which wasn't screened for critics, is a nutty atonement for the gender assaults of his filmmaking and playwriting past, including "In the Company of Men," "Your Friends & Neighbors," and "The Shape of Things."

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

Heymann's film was originally a six-part series for Israeli TV. The feature he and his crew have made smoothly truncates those three hours into a rich, discretely damning 85-minute portrait of intolerance.

Making a comedy that celebrates binge drinking and cretinous behavior isn't a crime against nature. Making one that's as brutally unfunny as Beerfest is.

The camerawork is steady, the editing patient, the choreography playful. It's a zippy and inspired piece of moviemaking. But there's one problem. It's playing under the closing credits.

The movie has a pleasing skinned-knee innocence that makes you wish everything else about it wasn't so shoddy.