Albeit slumming with style and a fairly sharp scalpel. Married Life delights in peeling back the bright postwar social veneer to expose the characters' hidden agendas, and if this is a mystery movie, the mystery is other people.

It's polished-looking, yet dull.

Slight but fascinating.

I left as frustrated as that band teacher is at the beginning of the movie. Enough with these meek, banal exercises, David Gordon Green. Hit me with the sledgehammer in your heart.

CJ7 is precisely the 80-something minutes of delirium and cheesy special-effects you'd expect from the man responsible for the chaos of "Shaolin Soccer" and the lunacy of "Kung Fu Hustle."

How are girls supposed to behave in a culture that tells them they're Disney princesses for the first 12 years and sex toys after that? Girls Rock! has one answer: Strap on a Fender and rage against the machine.

The movie is about hope and courage and fortitude. It's about beating the odds and defying expectations. But Lucy Walker's movie is also about whether the trip was a good idea in the first place. The answer is compellingly complicated.

The movie has a dramatic thinness, breezy tone, and unconvincing happy-ish ending that make it feel more inconsequential than anything about killers and imperiled children probably should.

The result is Grade-A agitpop, a mixture of archival footage and cheeky, creative animated reconstruction that's funny and frightening in equal measure.

Not good enough to take seriously and, sadly, not bad enough to be any fun.

This story could have gone in a number of more inspiring allegorical directions but winds up your average bedtime story instead.

The problem with Semi-Pro is that it keeps forgetting it's a parody of sports movies; the final scenes are supposed to be uplifting (sort of) but they're not fooling anyone. The film's much better when it just lets the guys gas and sass each other.

The film's case against overdevelopment needs to be, and could be, aggressive, airtight. It should play to the unconverted. Instead, The Unforeseen gives us . . . poetry.

Everything about Chop Shop is modest - the movie's scale, the characters' ambitions. Another director might have tried to nudge the film's grim detours toward tragedy. And that might have worked, too. But Bahrani is a refreshingly deceptive director in that sense.

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

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.

It's refreshing to see Gondry's moviemaking still possessed by the community spirit he caught a few years ago with "Dave Chappelle's Block Party."

Some movies rest on an actor's face, and The Counterfeiters has a great one.

The result is a movie that's both clever and stupid - an interesting feat.

It's mostly harmless dum-dum stuff, though.

The film's a minuet fetishistically repeated until either the audience or the lovers go crazy. I'd say it was a tie.

Horror movie Rule #1: The only way to kill a zombie is to shoot it in the brain. George Romero himself laid this maxim down with his first film, the endlessly influential 1968 gutter classic "Night of the Living Dead." Forty years later, with George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead, the venerable filmmaker has done something almost as startling: He has put brains back into the zombie genre.

It really only comes alive in its shots of people in the neighborhood sitting around their television sets. What we're really talking about here is a problem in scope. In Hamburger's film, the world is no bigger than a cup.

Maybe writer-director Adam Brooks has made a fluffy Woody Allen pastiche here, but it's arguably more pleasing than anything Allen himself has done lately.

But what can you do with Hayden Christensen? He's as close as we have to an android actor. It's all a chore for him. He never looks sufficiently scared, impressed, or surprised by any of this.

It's a good movie for its type, but it rarely stops to let us marvel at the world it creates.

The current, much better Canadian movie "How She Move" has a more realistic grip on the racial politics of hip-hop-dance.

It's a small, profoundly satisfying movie that keeps echoing long after it's over.