This has loads of swagger, but for stylistic audacity I prefer Anderson's more scattershot "Magnolia."

I don't know if Rob Reiner is the one to blame for this atrocity, but he directed and coproduced.

Conceived like a sports movie, this delivers passion, nuance, and historical insight along with unnecessary hokum.

If "Ratatouille" taught the world that rats have feelings too, Persepolis teaches the same thing about the people of Iran, who in the current political climate are probably in greater danger of being eradicated.

Like many fairy tales, this handsome family film concerns a child coming to terms with his fears and the death of a parent.

As creator and head writer of "The West Wing," Aaron Sorkin had a gift for making policy debate seem sexy, but what worked in the context of that liberal fantasy founders badly amid the realpolitik of this cold war drama.

Leave it to coproducer Jerry Bruckheimer to revive the Indiana Jones cycle without the period setting, the camp elements, or Spielberg's efficiency; director Jon Turteltaub just plods along, and the script by Marianne and Cormac Wibberley is equally poker-faced.

"B.S. I Love You" would be a more accurate title.

Well-crafted if relatively impersonal adaptation.

Apatow and director Jake Kasdan deliver a fair number of laughs, though nearly every good idea is pressed into service as a running gag. The biggest disappointment is their survey of rock history, which has all the depth of a Time-Life book.

A tedious movie about excitement.

The suspicion and contempt the band encounters along the way symbolize the Kurds' historical sufferings, but the movie has many comic moments courtesy of the eager bus driver, who keeps putting his foot in his mouth. The nonprofessional cast is highly persuasive under the sure hand of director Bahman Ghobadi (A Time for Drunken Horses).

Live-action stars take a backseat to CGI chipmunks in this uneven family comedy.

The popcorn elements are well handled, but what lingers is the sense of urban despair: watching old videotapes of the Today show, carrying on friendships with mannequins, Smith turns out to be no legend at all, just another New Yorker slowly dying of loneliness.

I'd recommend this, but only if you liked "The English Patient."

I'm all for bold screwiness, but this provocation seems labored despite the striking images.

Wretched yuletide comedy.

Individually these elements are powerful, but they fail to mesh or collide with one another in any satisfying way, and the movie's score only exacerbates the problem.

Atonement is that rare combo: a good movie based on a good book.

An innocuous, passably entertaining effects extravaganza.

Valerie Minetto's intelligent first feature deals with a lesbian couple, but the same-sex angle is refreshingly incidental to the story line.

This indie drama spends a lot of time mooning over classical Hollywood cinema, but its own visual style tends toward the pointless flash of music videos.

His (John Cusack) quickness and intelligence make him a poor choice to play the flat-footed main character, a rigidly conservative family man who can't work up the nerve to tell his two daughters their soldier mother has been killed in action.

The main compensation is Harrelson's well-judged and finely shaded performance; the secondary ones are the ladies he hangs out with -- Lauren Bacall, Lily Tomlin, and Kristin Scott Thomas. But the rest of this mainly drifts.

This 2005 feature offered me my first taste of Guy Ritchie's macho-centric artiness, and I hope it's my last.

Jason Reitman follows his pitch-perfect satire "Thank You for Smoking" with another adventurous comedy, though here the cleverness can be grating; the movie is distinctive for its complicated emotions.

he Diving Bell and the Butterfly fuses experimental techniques with a highly accessible and sometimes humorous narrative; it’s deeply personal yet universal in its humanism.

Pretentious and overconceived, the movie purports to celebrate self-determination yet squashes it at every turn.

Disappointment, delusion, dementia, death--did I mention this is a comedy?

Part of Morton's achievement is to present all four people through the viewpoints of the other three; Wagner can't do that, but the performances are so nuanced that the characters remain multilayered, and they're not the sort of people we're accustomed to finding in commercial films.

If you can tolerate 79 minutes of joggling images you’ll probably find this entertaining, though writer-directors Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza overplay their hand with a late-breaking back story that rips off one movie too many.

Williams's overacting, Russell's pinched melancholy, and Highmore's unflagging chirpiness would be trying enough on their own, but the convoluted story, with its pileup of obstacles and coincidences, makes this sophomore effort by director Kirsten Sheridan (Disco Pigs) an exercise in dissonance.

Disney goes meta in this witty, exuberant musical comedy whose parody and nostalgia serve a sweet and affecting romance.

In the finest tradition of adolescent identification figures, he's not only ruthless, dispatching numerous baddies with hair-trigger shots to the head, but profoundly desexualized, brushing off the insistent come-ons of a slinky prostitute (Olga Kurylenko) he's taken under his wing.

What emerges is a speculative, critical essay about the 60s, weighted down in spots by political correctness and a conflicted desire to mock Dylan's denseness while catering to his hardcore fans, but otherwise lively, fluid, and watchable.

Darabont doesn't match the sly cultural commentary of "The Host," a recent Korean import that also revamped the giant-monster genre, but his grocery-store survival drama, dominated by Marcia Gay Harden as a shrill fundamentalist, serves as a crude but effective allegory for post-9/11 America.

This carefully observed film has lots of heart.

The bolder stroke comes from screenwriters Roger Avary (Pulp Fiction) and Neil Gaiman (the graphic novel Sandman), who’ve turned the arthritic legend into sort of an Arthur Miller play in chain mail.

Hysterically hyperbolic and unpleasant if still witty dissection of family traumas.

Credit production designer Therese DePrez and set decorator Clive Thomasson for the marvelous setting, a charmed building with a life of its own.

It shows rare courage in protesting the widespread abuse of innocent Iraqis, but its pseudodocumentary form is full of awkward misfires (such as a protracted use of theme music from Barry Lyndon) and its acting is often terrible.

This romantic drama by director Mike Newell preserves the odd playfulness of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's international best seller but sacrifices its eroticism and intricate nonlinear plotting.

You can't be both political and incoherent, and even though Kelly's models are "Kiss Me Deadly" and "Blade Runner," this vision of the near-future suggests a random blend of "Dr. No" and "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"

Like so many secular, big-studio Christmas comedies, this isn't naughty enough to be funny or nice enough to be uplifting; it's just an ugly sweater from a distant relative, thoughtlessly sent and destined to be thrown away.

It's a funny and frequently affecting reminiscence from a man whose TV antics obscured a long, respectable career as a stage actor and director.

The movie is compelling now but unlikely to survive its moment.

A very well-made genre exercise, but I can’t understand why it’s been accorded so much importance, unless it’s because it strokes some ideological impulse.

Although their love is undeniably a blessing, I was disconcerted watching the elderly couple smile and chuckle today as they recall their daily letters and secret meetings in the midst of such wide-scale death.

Once the competition arrives, the premise begins to suggest a marketing hook--it's "Spellbound" meets "The Devil Came on Horseback"!--but by then it's already served its purpose, imposing some structure around memories that would drive anyone mad.

With one of these two alpha males anchoring nearly every scene, Scott really can't go wrong, but the lead characters are pretty thin, a fact highlighted by generic subplots.

The whole thing's pretty cute and breezy, but don't expect logic or coherence.

Effective advocacy film about the genocide in Darfur.

By focusing on Strummer and giving a fair amount of screen time to his years in the wilderness before and after the Clash, Temple arrives at a more poignant and mature statement of what this committed band was all about.

The two characters' pasts are so sketchy here that the drama lacks any serious emotional underpinning.

Even though it's scripted by a woman (Kelly Masterson), this tale of buried family resentments rising to the surface as the brothers plot to rob their parents' jewelry store is concerned only with the guys, and it's marred by an uncharacteristically mannered performance by Albert Finney as the father.

May have more heart than head, but it's also just as interesting for what it leaves out of its romantic story as for what it retains.

The setup of this comedy by director-cowriter Peter Hedges (Pieces of April) and some subsequent twists may be contrived, and the laughs aren't very plentiful, but much of the behavior seems real, and the able cast makes the most of it.

The portrait of Carter has been described as hagiography, but it isn't a stretch to view his quiet integrity as saintly next to the track records of his successors.

Steven Sawalich directed with invention and heart.

Alison Eastwood, whose good looks and last name have served her well as a Hollywood actress, makes her directing debut with this mediocre cancer drama.

Machiavelli epigrams and 70s soul classics embellish this slice of thug life, which succumbs to the usual hypocrisy of condemning Barnes while grooving on his cars, clothes, and jewels.

Not so much ill conceived and misdirected as unconceived and undirected, this is folly on a grand scale.

Forget about a stake through the heart: sheriff Josh Hartnett discovers that decapitation is the best way to stop the bloodsuckers, who suggest feral, steroid-crazed gymnasts as they scale buildings and leap onto moving vehicles.

Someone should tell these guys you can't score a touchdown throwing lateral passes.

Ben Affleck directed and cowrote the script; his biggest gamble was casting his irksome little brother as a pistol-whipping tough guy, but the picture is so superbly executed in every other respect that Casey seems more quirky than miscast.

Occasionally a movie's subject outweighs any aesthetic flaws, as it does in this unsettling thriller about the extraordinary rendition of terror suspects.

A powerful Christian parable, painful but illuminating, about crime and redemption.

Bier is one of the cinema's most acute observers of intimate relations, her Scandinavian reserve muting the inherent melodrama of her material, and she draws piercing, modestly scaled performances from Duchovny, Del Toro, Alison Lohman, and John Carroll Lynch.

Like some laid-back distant cousin of Tim Burton, writer-director Goran Dukic manages to balance the ghoulishness with whimsy and melancholy, at least for a while. But the strain is obvious in the story's last third, as the filmmaker struggles toward a resolution that fits the logic of the hero's netherworld.

It provides a more detailed and perhaps more reliable picture of the early movement's motives and practices than anything I've seen in the mainstream media.

The panoramic backgrounds have a silky beauty, but the characters are cheaply rendered with doll faces, enlarged musculature, tiny joints, and clunky movement. It's like watching Max Headroom lead his people out of Egypt.

This bloated 2006 historical epic flatlines early and never regains a pulse.

Cate Blanchett returns to the role that made her a star, and though this sequel to "Elizabeth" (1998) is less defensible as history, as florid costume drama it's just as entertaining.

This takes place in the same sort of pathologically sports-obsessed hamlet as "Friday Night Lights," though in contrast to that movie's grim honesty there's enough heartland schmaltz here to embarrass John Mellencamp. Remarkably, the movie rights itself once the actual season begins, focusing on game strategy more than the usual heart-stopping pep talks.

This is well staged and photographed, with stirring aerial images and balletic pans and dolly shots, but the story is muddled by the arrival of a free-spirited girl and her musician pals, 60s-style longhairs battling a government conspiracy.

Both hilarious and poignant, with a Capraesque humanity that caught me completely off guard.

Director Kenneth Branagh has mercifully pared the action down to 88 minutes (the first movie dragged on for 138), but the final act, with its obscure homosexual flirtation, still seems to go on forever.

Perry hasn't lost his touch for stroking his loyal audience of Oprah women; his enforced happy endings are the car keys taped under your seat.

The story takes place in 1988 in the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Coney Island, but I could never figure out why; with its pitiless gangsters and virtuous boys in blue, it could have been set anywhere.

In this 2006 entry the insights are worthwhile.

Sam Riley is fascinating as Curtis, a hypersensitive young man hobbled by his incurable disease, and Samantha Morton is poignant as his put-upon wife.

The ethnic humor that gave May's movie its charge is replaced by crass mean-spiritedness. If I were in movie hell, I'd rather see "Good Luck Chuck" again than return to this atrocity.

Like "The Verdict," this is a big, crowd-pleasing Hollywood redemption drama in which the lonely hero not only thwarts the corporate villains in the end but silences them with a killer riposte.

The mystery has never been resolved, but to his credit Bar-Lev acknowledges that he himself has become part of the story, torn between sympathy and suspicion.

With a score by the Residents, cartoon art by Warren Heise and Timothy Stock, and scenes of the actors commenting on and interacting with the real-life Kurtz, this 2006 advocacy video brings a jumpy energy to its Orwellian tale.

You may not leave the theater having switched sides, but you'll probably respect the other side more, and that in itself would be a victory for human life.

Only loosely connected to the story, the visuals quickly grow monotonous, and as the chronicle arrives at Cobain's late years of curdled fame and fortune, his bitterness and cynicism make even the narration hard to take.

What this movie has going for itself in spite of its cloying pleas for indulgence is a playful and interesting narrative structure that precludes much development and comes to the fore only toward the end. The whole thing may drive you batty, but as with "Rushmore," the melancholy aftertaste lingers.

Kline gives an interesting performance playing against type, but with its action plotting and sensationalistic scenes of women being brutalized, the movie often seems to be exploiting as much as illuminating the problem.

This heart-warmer by Robert Benton has some of the tender wisdom and humor of his other features (e.g., Nobody's Fool).

Almost every note in this insipid comedy is strident or false, from the child's prodigious talent for deception to the jock's chaperoning her and her classmates at a Corolle doll boutique.

At its core this is just another piece of big-studio nothingness. The characters are so underwritten they barely qualify as types, and the movie is badly paced, bookended by high-ordnance action sequences but painfully static in the middle.

The bursts of sex and violence that earned this picture an NC-17 rating offer only temporary respite from the encroaching dullness.

It was like a Farrelly brothers gross-out without the laughs.

A murky screenplay leaves most of the humans ciphers, save for Hal Holbrook in an exquisitely calibrated performance as the avuncular desert retiree whose advice McCandless should have heeded.

While the film's premise is shamelessly hokey and Joe Nussbaum's direction is at best pedestrian, props are due the young cast, especially Bynes, whose can-do optimism seems genuine if ultimately overdone.

This revisionist western by writer-director Andrew Dominik makes a wan attempt to present the Jesse James legend as the dawn of celebrity culture in America.

Being male, I can't relate to this at all; on the other hand, I don't need Midol either, but I'm glad it's on the market.