There's enough adrenaline pulsating throughout this bang-up Marvel Comics adaptation to erase 2003's Hulk from memory (Ang who?).

The potential for moral confusion in a liberal-minded family -- unpacked so ruthlessly in Noah Baumbach's "The Squid and the Whale" -- is scrutinized with more ambiguity in this good-natured comic subversion of the holiday get-together.

Jensen's dramatic structure is so visible this sometimes seems like a late Rod Serling teleplay, but Bier has proved highly adept at merging conventional drama with the immediacy of the Dogma 95 movement.

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.

This 2006 drama is refreshing not only for its gentle comic touches but for director Wang Quanan's refusal to sentimentalize China's vanishing nomadic culture: life is harsh and no one's a saint, including his outspoken heroine.

The period detail is more vibrant than the minimal story.

This is both melodramatic and overly tidy in its plotting, but its odd personal relationships are utterly believable.

Though marred by Spielberg's usual carelessness with narrative points, the film alternates sweetness and sarcasm with enough rhetorical sophistication to be fairly irresistible.

An Inconvenient Truth may not save the planet, but it's already gone a long way toward rescuing Gore's public profile.

Enjoyable action comedy from the Clint Eastwood mold, though the comic elements are more fun than the action.

The main reason I enjoyed this high-powered action flick and its 2001 predecessor is their willingness to poke fun at the premise of crime-fighting dolls, even though it now has more currency than ever.

The directors exercise their stylistic flourishes mainly in the imaginative sequences depicting the young daughter's trancelike state while she conjures up the correct orthography in the spelling bees her father's determined she must win, and while the film observes the same heartbreaking obsessiveness as the popular "Spellbound," it has none of that documentary's cuteness.

One of Claude Chabrol's most satisfyingly astringent films in years.

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.

By the time the fighting between clones and their originals turned to fraternal bonding, I was quite moved, even blissed out.

French filmmaker Agnes Varda returns to the guiding metaphor of "The Gleaners and I "(2000), her documentary about scavengers, though in this visually witty 2008 memoir she's poring over her own past and its artifacts--some of them people.

At once a light comedy and a reasonably serious meditation on the perils of fame.

Director Todd Phillips has become Hollywood's go-to guy for collegiate humor, and though this isn't as funny as his "Road Trip," "Old School," or "Starsky & Hutch," there are some choice sequences of the devious Thornton schooling his milquetoast students.

This is obviously a sincere undertaking, and there's a certain homemade charm to the special effects used in the combat scenes.

The most interesting moments, however, belong not to the chef but to those who labor in his shadow. "Jiro's ghost will always be watching," observes one interview subject as he imagines Jiro's eventual passing and its probable effect on his 50-ish son, who follows in his father's footsteps but will never be considered his equal.

Divided into sections bracketed by the arrival of each new DJ and is enlivened by the edgy yet trendy environment.

The scenes of family squalor are memorably persuasive, but any filmmaker ending her movie with the heroine throwing a crumpled poem into the ocean needs a few more writing courses.

This engaging, mostly improvised no-budget feature is based in part on Mandt's experiences, its loose narrative structure developing by chance as the duo encounter an assortment of characters on the road.

The underlying rhythms of repression and release are reflected in the film's visual line, with cool, controlled images suddenly giving way to aggressive flashes of liberating camera movement. The plot creaks a bit, and the character relations aren't exactly fresh, but all things considered it's a reasonably satisfying effort.

A fairly enjoyable piece of junk from Oliver Stone.

Chiwetel Ejiofor (Dirty Pretty Things) is the sinister operative dispatched to retrieve the ship's psychic passenger, who as played by Summer Glau kickboxes better than Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi combined.

This tender and funny feature benefits from an appealing cast--in particular Stadlober, who brings depth and honesty to what could have been a formulaic coming-out chronicle.

It's also about pain, which both tempers and complicates the eroticism.

Compared to their first movie, "The Yes Men" (2003), this one focuses on many fewer hoaxes, but they're more elaborate and potent.

Friedkin isn't nearly in enough control of his material for the film to qualify as an artwork, yet it's one of his few films with a real emotional current.

Singh is much more skilled as a visual artist than a storyteller, and his artistic fortunes seem to rise and fall with the inspiration of his screenwriters. In this case he's lucked out with Mellissa Wallack and Jason Keller, whose witty script retells the story of Snow White from the perspective of the wicked queen.

[Farrellys'] great achievement is forcing those of us addicted to eye candy to see we have a problem.

Even as the SF cliches fall fast and heavy, this is great to look at, thanks to the sumptuous MGM sets and the fine animation and matte work by Walt Disney Studios.

Sylvester Stallone's follow-up to his runaway success of 1976 is a little more threadbare in spots than the original, but it still has some conviction and spunk.

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

A funny, offbeat superhero flick.

Funny, suspenseful, and well paced, this is definitely the summer's best time waster.

The results may seem overripe and dated in spots, but she coaxes a fine performance out of Nolte, and the other actors (herself included) acquit themselves honorably.

The film is absorbing enough as an intimate family portrait, complete with friction.

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.

Masterfully charted and adeptly played, but also rather minimalist.

Amiable screwball comedy.

This film doesn't really clear the bar, but it's handsomely mounted and proves that heartless manipulation of the weak and gullible never goes out of style.

Glen's style...goes for the measured and elegant over the flashy and excessive.

The survival drama is genuinely exciting, and the players, both human and canine, put this across with spirit.

The thriller plot, while serviceable, registers as somewhat gratuitous, but the Buenos Aires locations are nicely used.

Apart from some softening of the extreme violence (through manipulations on the sound track) and some fancy intercutting, this is every bit as unpleasant as Olmos can make it, but occasionally edifying as well.

This is good, solid work that never achieves either the art or poignance of Van Sant's earlier and more personal projects.

They're all instructive and interesting in one way or another, and they're indispensable viewing for residents of isolationist, or at least isolated, countries such as this one.

Visually commanding, conceptually beguiling, but dramatically inert.

The documentary begins to lose its shape as Siegel ponders the spiritual and cultural impact of the honeybee, but it does succeed in flagging a potentially critical problem.

If the plot seems overly familiar, Lasse Hallstrom at least directs the action with conviction and style, and his drama is greatly abetted by the scenic big sky locales.

Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa, The Secret Garden) directs with obvious feeling rather than cynicism, and I was swept away by it despite the story's anachronisms.

This 1956 feature, a casual yet meticulously detailed reconstruction of Japan’s routinized white-collar milieu, was Yasujiro Ozu’s first film after the exquisite Tokyo Story, as well as one of his longest works.

The film never transcends the racist, sexist, neofascist implications of its base material, but it works entertainingly within them, and even manages a bit of auto-analysis in John Candy's ironic, adolescent narration of the "Den" episode. Better than it had to be, for which some honor is due.

Definitely worth checking out.

This may not be a solid biography, but it feels true.

The cruel imperialism of the war is just the sort of thing that stokes Sayles's liberal ire, which is one reason the movie so often recalls his proletarian masterpiece Matewan (1987).

The storytelling is so masterful that Hattendorf doesn't have to spell out the striking parallels between the persecution of Japanese after Pearl Harbor and the harassment of Muslims after 9/11.

I wasn't bored at all by this, and Angela Bassett's action-hero charisma often blew me away, but fans of Bigelow at her best (e.g., Near Dark) may be put off by the movie's calculation, which doesn't always fit with its intellectual pretensions.

Truly compelling, however, is the material about Gould's innovative studio recordings and radio documentaries.

Coppola does a fair job of capturing the fish-tank ambience of nocturnal, upscale Tokyo and showing how it feels to be a stranger in that world, and an excellent job of getting the most from her lead actors. Unfortunately, I'm not sure she accomplishes anything else.

Caviezel (The Passion of the Christ) gives a quietly focused performance in the title role, ably assisted by Brett Rice as Jones's father, Jeremy Northam as golf rival Walter Hagen, and Malcolm McDowell as sportswriter O.D. Keeler.

Here his (Bale's) physicality is repellent, yet he carries the occasionally creaky plot of Scott Kosar's unsettling screenplay to a resonant finish.

Rudely funny splatter comedy.

Butler deftly intercuts real footage with CGI, heightening the drama, and the film becomes especially compelling once the robots are launched into space.

An odd cross between "Mad Max" and "Dragonheart," this movie is all borrowed ideas, but it's still trashy fun.

Director David Barker creates tension by crosscutting between shots of the sun-drenched landscape and charged close-ups of the cloistered characters before delivering a bloody climax.

Combines a delayed-gratification romance and rumblings of war.

The shocking, ambiguous ending might have been better served by the film's original, ambiguous title, "To My Sister."

The story has its corny aspects, but thanks to Scott's skill as an image maker and as a storyteller--proceeding from the very blue and very abstract water seen behind the credits to the climactic, extended storm--this is superior to both "Dead Poets Society" (as a tale about a boys' school and its charismatic teacher) and "Apollo 13" (as a true-life action adventure).

In a nation that's stripped arts instruction from the public schools, the Hip Hop Project seems like a godsend.

The movie manages to push buttons without seeming formulaic.

The gags come fast and furious, and though some are a little stale, Rock and cowriter Ali LeRoi strive for wit over crudity.

Cattaneo proceeds gamely, though without much spark, through this familiar fare, but at least Nesbitt, with his sly, oddball charm, is fun to watch.

This narrative feature debut by Emmanuel Carrere, based on his own novel, is deliberately open-ended, but however one interprets the outcome, the film reminds us how fragile intimacy is.

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

Extraordinary.

Given recent similar incidents of young con artists posing as journalists, this is a timely and compelling film, but I wish the filmmakers had widened their focus to address the kinds of journalistic corruption that go beyond simple fibbing.

Less suspenseful than the original but more ethically nuanced, politically pointed, and violent.

"Bill & Ted's Aurora Adventures" might almost serve as the subtitle for this very silly but enjoyable 1992 comedy, developed from characters introduced on Saturday Night Live--heavy-metal fans (Mike Myers and Dana Carvey) with a cable access show in Aurora, Illinois.

Dazat coscripted, felicitously blending elements of documentary and travelogue much as he did in Himalaya. The resulting portrait sidesteps ethnography yet conveys the essence of a magnificent people.

It's a classic fight movie, with Chiwetel Ejiofor as an honorable martial arts instructor...But nesting inside is a sour little 70s-style David Mamet play about the lies, calculations, and ice-cold politics of Hollywood, as the fighter is befriended and then discarded by a callow movie star.

Julianne Moore proves game for anything in this pitch-black true-crime reconstruction.

A modest success that makes one wish Soderbergh could find some happy middle ground between funky experiments and "Ocean's Eleven."

An elaboration of the concept of Annie Get Your Gun—not to mention Doris Day’s tomboy image in On Moonlight Bay—this 1953 western musical is perhaps best remembered for its Oscar-winning tune “Secret Love”; otherwise there’s Howard Keel as Wild Bill Hickok, direction by David Butler, and all that kinky cross-dressing.

Better than it might have been, given the limitations of this kind of brand-name filmmaking. Hodges doesn't shirk his duties, and though the film lapses too often into easy facetiousness, much of it feels surprisingly substantial. The action moves smoothly and logically, finding a rhythm that engages your attention despite the patent lack of inspiration and genuine commitment.

Comes closer to deification than dramatization--a shame, since the film offers some powerful set pieces and jaw-dropping spectacle.

What gives it the Cronenberg feel, in spite of the complete absence of his standard themes, is his manner of filming the dragsters: they become, like the horrible growths that usually dominate his movies, the physical projection of the characters' hostile energies, weapons they use to act out the psychological conflicts that torture them off the track.

The murder trial and the possibility of a real attack on the attorney nicely offset the sexual gamesmanship, though the movie is badly compromised by a final left turn into serious drama and plot machination. Up until that point, it's an uncommonly shrewd and funny farce.

It's a lot more interesting than its source, thanks to the special effects and Jack Arnold's taut, no-nonsense direction.

Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, a documentary maker directing her first fiction film, demonstrates a sure sense of tone, and Bergsholm is memorable as the misfit teen.

An evil twin to "The War Room" (1993).

The intimate performance footage ranges from more traditional sounds to Turkish iterations of global styles like rock, hip-hop, and electronica, delivering commentary on the nation's conflicted status as a bridge between Europe and Asia that's even more poignant than the passionate and informative interviews.

Its giddy stylistics include extravagant use of color and rapid montage, which are said to be a direct homage to legendary Thai independent Ratana Pestonji.

Set in the blue gray gloom of industrial China, this cunning noir focuses on two ruthless coal miners.

The hero's psychological transference is so blatant that even the characters begin commenting on it after a while, yet this modest three-hander is capably acted and genuinely touching.