One of Hot Tub Time Machine’s only genuinely nifty moves is getting John Cusack, Dobler himself, to topline the film.

Green Zone is an exercise in commercial cowardice masquerading as a thriller about political bravery.

Leyser has done his job with this, his first feature, burnishing Burroughs' legend and making manifest the enormous shadow he still casts over writers and artists of all stripe.

Rio is the biggest and brightest animated triumph since "Toy Story 3."

Akin to a stroll through a gallery, L'amour Fou is meditative and magically eye-opening.

In a family market that's been woefully weak of late, Megamind should not only rescue Metro City but the box office, too.

Shutter Island is a bear hug to cinema while it’s also an occasionally tart valentine to genre.

An uplifting, high energy documentary.

A complex political statement, Amigo is epic in scale but trades the schmaltz of the traditional war film for a more resolute treatment of subject.

Payne's book is more epic and shameless than Gustin Nash's tidy adaptation.

The central notion in After the Cup is not the obvious; we can all live and work together to our greater achievement no matter where we are from or who we are. Rather, the question here is-will we-even when we lose the football game? It's a much smarter and more interesting question.

Killer Joe isn't as outlandish in premise as it is in execution, which is saying something.

Moving and more ambitious than a CW serial drama or the long-ago ABC After School Specials because its honesty outweighs its occasionally trite dialogue and sometimes false scenes.

With the stranger in a strange land motif, the movie plays a little bit like the 2007 Israeli dramedy "The Band's Visit" and Liev Shreiber's "Everything Is Illuminated" rolled into one.

Bridged by rude comedy familiar to veteran viewers of Hong Kong martial arts cinema, True Legend is refreshingly unpretentious in comparison to the pompous nationalism of recent Chinese war spectacles like "The Warring States."

A conventional portrait of an endearingly unconventional sister act-with roots in music halls and the dairy farm on which they were raised (and became expert yodelers)-The Topp Twins is a piece of hagiography.

The romantic drama earns solid marks for atmosphere, moving shots of post-Katrina New Orleans and acting.

Bolly-Holly-Tele-Novella heaven, in three languages.

Movies don't get much funnier than Ted.

Beautiful Boy is a discerning film lover's off-season tonic, regardless of where, when or how it's seen. What matters most is simply that it be seen.

A credible suspense story with a surprisingly bold ending, The Woman In Black is a solid step away from Harry Potter for star Daniel Radcliffe - while it, too, is British and fantastical, the tone is sinister, adult and bleak.

It's the sheer lack of investment one feels for the couple that truly sabotages the film.

Like "Amelie," Micmacs is visually dazzling, the ravishing images coming courtesy of "La Vie en Rose" cinematographer, Tetsuo Nagata.

To say that Marshall's technique is so low-brow it may as well be a moustache is being kind--at best this is the sort of lazy, ambitionless hackery that can lead both filmmakers and audiences to write off a genre for dead--or at least until a more skilled storyteller is able to do it right.

A chick flick for do-gooders, The Help suffers from a malady common to the discrimination drama: its treatment of inequality is more condescending than the prejudice it aims to remedy.

As uninhibited as its heroine, this film is full of clever surprises.

Italian audiences are bound to like it and the broadness of plot and appeal suggests casual fans of foreign film should, too.

It's by the book advocacy docmaking at its best.