Cronenberg's follow-up to "A History of Violence" -- starring the same lead, Viggo Mortensen, in a very different part -- lacks the theoretical dimension of its predecessor, but it's no less masterful in its fluid storytelling and shocking choreography of violence.

Searing drama that uses the police procedural to explore the moral and psychological devastation of the Iraq war for U.S. soldiers (and, incidentally, for Iraqi citizens).

Not only delightfully funny but unaffectedly romantic.

After a 40-year career playing jut-jawed a__holes, Michael Douglas must relish the occasional oddball role: he gave a winning performance as the pot-addled professor in "Wonder Boys," and he seems to be having a ball in this funny debut feature by Mike Cahill.

There aren't that many laugh-out-loud jokes in this comedy, yet Billy Bob Thornton's portrayal of ass-kicking gym coach Mr. Woodcock is almost worth the price of admission.

A visually arresting period piece.

What might have been a serious drama about coming to terms with violence and loss turns into a crowd-pleasing and increasingly far-fetched remake of "Death Wish."

Filmmakers Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen, and Nicole Newhman do a superb job of telling this neglected story in vivid detail.

This engaging documentary traces the life of folk icon Pete Seeger, emphasizing his lifelong belief in the power of music as both a social and a political force.

Period westerns are so unfashionable and costly that they usually require a top-drawer script to get off the ground -- and this one, adapted from an Elmore Leonard story and its 1957 movie version, travels with an arrow's clean arc.

Never recovers from a jarring and improbable act of ritualized violence that occurs halfway through the film.

The astronaut interviews are fun and occasionally moving, but the real reason to see this is the remastered archival footage, some of it previously unseen and all of it spectacular.

This singing-along-to-the-radio effect has a dingy charm that honors the blue-collar Italian setting, yet Turturro spoils it by turning the movie into a hip star party, with a cast of indie-acting royalty.

One can certainly be amused and entertained by writer-director Michael Davis's hyperbolic action frolics--I was--but not without feeling pretty low and stupid.

The stoy makes no sense, and the two lead characters are repulsive, but I must confess I laughed immoderately at this clever piece of junk.

Sweet tempered but occasionally simplistic youth picture about three young, progressive Israelis who share a flat in a chic section of Tel Aviv.

The action plot is lousy with cliched suspense scenes of back-road executions halted at the last possible instant.

The story ultimately lands in incoherence; but the cameos and local details, and even some of the gags, keep it perky.

This graphically violent film suffers from cursorily developed characters whose primary function is to advance the creaky plot.

An entertaining product that presents a powerful artistic vision.

This schizoid college comedy veers between gross-out humor and earnest coming-of-age drama.

The set-up is tediously slow, while the later murders are packed so tightly it's like watching a blender on high speed.

The formula works just fine on a more modest scale, without having to carry all the glittering casino sets and A-list movie stars.

The scenes of his incarceration and escape from the place are gripping, thanks mainly to Michael Bowen as the hard-ass staffer who wants to break him. But the movie slides toward melodrama with some stale business about the hero spreading his late father's ashes.

This is pretty thin soup, but the players are spirited and the jokes generally offbeat.

Actor Justin Theroux makes an impressive directorial debut, aided by David Bromberg's mordantly funny dialogue.

An exquisitely structured drama.

Hawke’s script is admirably light-handed in showing how the hero’s unreasoning passion is fueled by his parents’ painful divorce, and despite the story’s date-movie aspects, its most penetrating observations come not from the kids but from the young man’s estranged father and mother (Hawke and Laura Linney, both superb).

Pistol-packing De Jesus evokes Pam Grier in spots but certainly holds her own.

Director Steve Bendelack and writer-producer Simon McBurney aim for the comedy of Chaplin, Keaton, and Tati, relying heavily on sight gags and their star's pratfalls and facial contortions, but they vititate the comic payoffs by allowing scenes to run too long.

The characters are instantly reversible--the bratty kid turns out to be a sweetie pie, the mother just needs to be told off. Only Giamatti, as the cliched businessman husband, is irredeemable.

Treacle takes over in the last act, but most of this fact-based story by screenwriters Michael Bortman and Allison Burnett takes the inspirational sports drama into unexpected and morally complex territory.

This doomsday scenario takes up the first third of the movie, after which the tension dissipates badly and the husband and wife, now separated by plastic sheeting, wait for help to arrive.

The villainous turns by Jon Voight (as a hard-hearted Mormon bishop) and Terence Stamp (as a bloodthirsty Brigham Young) would have been more fun if they weren't part of such a clumsy campaign to lay this tragedy at the church's doorstep.

Routine crime thriller.

Eschewing special effects, Moreau and Palud reinvigorate the classic haunted house premise by paring the plot down to its essentials.

If your taste runs in this direction, you're bound to be amused.

Scenes of harvested frogs provide an apt metaphor for Brazil's miserable have-nots, so apt that Kohn can't resist beating it to death.

The movie loses credibility with the arrival of Rogen and Bill Hader as two uniformed patrolmen who are drunker and crazier than any high schooler could ever get, but the variety of complications thrown at the three pubescent heroes raises this a cut above most raunchy comedies.

Though the filmmaking isn't everything it might have been (the opening montage is especially clumsy), their argument is compelling, absorbing, and urgent.

The third remake of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956) may not be a patch on the original, but it does have a few things the other versions lack.

Purports to give us the lowdown on Manhattan celebrity life, yet it depends so consistently on plot contrivances and other movies (The King of Comedy, Midnight Cowboy, even All About Eve) that it often comes across as wannabe muckraking.

Unfortunately the movie's more interesting and challenging social aspects, which imply more than one "British-Chinese gay experience," are often overtaken by its smarminess--including an aggressively banal score and the way some actors have apparently been encouraged to overwork their eyebrows.

Among the many offhand virtues of Julie Delpy's first feature as solo writer-director is the fact that she's as attentive to French foibles as American ones.

Quietly written and convincingly played, this coming-of-age story mines its rueful laughs from a thick vein of performance anxiety, in both senses of the term.

Chan shows he still has the chops during a showdown at the Eiffel Tower, but you'd think the movie's reported budget of $140 million might have bought Tucker at least one side-splitting gag.

I'm a sucker for fantasies, but this one is so undistinguished and arbitrary that it left few traces in my consciousness, apart from the impression that the filmmakers resort to cruelty whenever they run out of ideas, which is often.

Like its methane-filled outhouse that explodes right on cue, this sequel to "Daddy Day Care" (2003) smells.

Christophe Honoré collaborated with Anne-Sophie Birot on the script of her excellent "Girls Can't Swim," but left to his own devices, he seems like a relatively dull cousin of Arnaud Desplechin (My Sex Life . . . or How I Got Into an Argument).

Wain and Marino try to tie all this together with a framing narrative about an unfaithful husband (Paul Rudd), which turns into a clever parody of Woody Allen movies.

This never rises above a date movie, but it's functionally literate.

The young heroine is rather humorless, but Gavras's intelligence and skillful touch are evident throughout.

This adaptation of Robert Ludlum's third and last Bourne thriller doesn't have much story left, so director Paul Greengrass has to keep it moving all the time.

This atrocious comedy doesn't have an idea in its head but still screams at the top of its lungs.

Samberg can't carry this, though director Akiva Schaffer supplies some hilarious, "Jackass"-style wipeouts and there are nice supporting turns from Isla Fisher (Wedding Crashers) as Rod's love interest and Bill Hader as one of his goofball friends.

The TV show was mildly subversive, with humor that children and adults could enjoy on different levels, but the movie strives for a blander, family-oriented middle ground.

The video lapses into self-congratulation near the end, as many of the principals reunite for a 2002 retrospective, but for the most part this is a powerful tale of conscience, betrayal, and forgiveness.

The troubled star writhes her way through a red-lit pole dance in the opening credits and shrieks her way through a prolonged torture-porn sequence; after those lurid turns the movie settles into an indifferent mystery plot as the cops pressure the girl to help them find the culprit.

The approach isn’t new--the film’s already been dubbed “Molière in Love”--but the result is a wry look at the nature of acting and the power of comedy.

Ferguson is admirably tenacious in assigning blame for the boneheaded mistakes that have doomed Iraqi reconstruction. Paul Bremer, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, is hung out to dry.

I don't believe in fixing things that aren't broken. Sandra Nettelbeck's wholly accessible "Mostly Martha" (2001) is one of the most delightful comedies of recent years, so the idea of a remake with English instead of German dialogue is already pretty dubious, an insult to the capacities of both audiences and the original filmmakers.

The show has been the gold standard for satirical TV ever since it debuted in 1989. This long-awaited movie adaptation has plenty of laughs, plus an assortment of milestones for fans.

Masterfully charted and acted.

The players appear to be having a good time, though the situation is too sitcom-familiar to be funny.

Watching these endangered species evolve new approaches to hunting and shelter is fascinating, but the movie is seriously marred by a cloying screenplay and such kid-pleasing touches as shots of walruses belching and farting.

Steidle had virtually unrestricted access to settlements that were under siege from the Janjaweed, Arabic mercenaries of the Sudanese government, and became the first person to photograph the annihilation.

Best known as a still photographer, Ellis has a powerful motif in the idea of stopping time, yet he can't seem to move his characters along.

With its wisecracking screenplay, period-perfect pop score, and Shankman's splashy choreography, this may be the funniest, dancingest screen musical since "Singin' in the Rain."

More than anything Chuck and Larry shows just how flaccid American movie comedy has become now that "Saturday Night Live" has replaced vaudeville as our comedy college.

Sunshine does for sci-fi what "28 Days Later" . . . did for the zombie movie -- its tale about a manned space mission to the sun preys on our growing fear of obliteration as we confront global warming.

It's not scary because not one second is believable.

The good direction and performances seem wasted on limited material; despite a few interesting twists and ambiguities, the main revelation--that the reporter is an insufferable snob--doesn't seem worth the 84 minutes devoted to spelling it out.

By the time director Patrice Leconte arrives at his predictable climax and conventional moral, this lethargic French comedy may not have any friends either.

The early scenes of Greene misbehaving on the air are pretty funny, thanks mainly to Martin Sheen as the apoplectic station manager. But I was bummed out by the movie's trite VH1 cartoon of the black power era--especially coming from Kasi Lemmons, who made her directing debut with the hauntingly ambiguous "Eve's Bayou."

Less magic also means less fun and discovery, as Harry battles depression and a hostile press; this is the bleakest Potter installment to date, and under David Yates's choppy direction, Maggie Smith, Emma Thompson, Brendan Gleeson, and David Thewlis have little more than walk-ons.

Ratliff fails to deliver on any of these ideas and the ending falters badly, but as horror flicks go this is both smart and suspenseful.

Director Cherie Nowlan steers the comedy to a feel-good ending.

But like much of Herzog's work, it's essentially apolitical, focusing on a man at war with his environment -- and no one plunges into the foliage like he does.

Not a movie, just one gigantic commercial for Hasbro.

Director Ken Kwapis (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants) gives this script by many hands a certain gloss it doesn't deserve.

There are fewer jokes this time around, and Moore makes a point of not even appearing on-screen for a good 40 minutes, putting more emphasis on his arguments and less on his comic persona.

Superbly rendered CGI animation.

Despite the show-offy cast, it took me a while to warm to these people and their self-consciously idyllic settings--as well as to the slick direction of former cinematographer Lajos Koltai--but I was eventually won over.

Celebratory, family-friendly fable.

The physical stunts by Maggie Q as a lethal martial arts expert and Cyril Raffaelli as a Eurotrash sniper who rappels buildings are more thrilling than the over-the-top chase sequences, so contrived as to verge on self-parody.

Kim keeps dialogue to a minimum and provides the barest of story arcs, using a handheld camera to probe subtle shifts of emotion in her nonprofessional actors.

Adapted from a Stephen King story, this trite but watchable chiller plays like a scaled-down version of "The Shining," with Cusack driven over the edge by hallucinations of his abusive father and dead daughter.

Freeman's God is a mix of Old and New Testament, with a dash of both sexism and sitcom; Carell's Noah is a political fool, but that only proves he's honest and sincere. This is idiotic, but it's so good-natured I didn't mind.

Functions primarily as a suspense film, and it manages to be gripping even though the outcome is already known.

Stunning vistas of New Zealand's rolling countryside aren't enough to carry this lame 2006 horror spoof.

How Posey's neurotic, self-destructive heroine finds her way to healing is the core of this generous film, whose moral is that happiness can't begin unless you're open to its possibility.

A masterful 168-minute piece of storytelling that never ceases to be gripping in spite of its measured pace.

Few recent films have left me feeling more conflicted than Valeska Grisebach's second feature (2006), which is sensitive, moving, accomplished in its extraordinary direction of nonprofessional actors but also a little bogus.

Even if you can't accept all the movie's left curves, you might still be amused.

The same virtue doesn't apply to his commentary, which is too general to rise above the pedestrian; the movie works best traveling from the eye straight to the conscience.

This sequel to "Fantastic Four" (2005) drags in the Silver Surfer, who looks like a gigantic hood ornament and, given voice by Laurence Fishburne, has about as much personality.

The postmodernist evocations of the past (roughly the 50s through the 80s) are a charming mishmash, delivered with wit and style.

The movie's idea of funny is giving the two lovers identical moles bordering their upper lips.