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.