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."