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.