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.

In its voluble mix of accident trauma and infidelity, this 2007 Danish feature by Ole Bornedal is highly reminiscent of Susanne Bier's superb "Open Hearts."

Depardieu, a great actor who in recent years has delivered several overblown performances, is here measured and naturalistic, a sympathetic match for Ardant's icy obsessive, and Beart is suitably mysterious as a spy in the house of love.

Gyllenhaal turns the young ex-con into an enormously sympathetic figure, but by the end there's no denying that her need for the girl is as selfish as her addiction.

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.

As with most Thalberg projects (the director of record was Frank Lloyd, but he barely matters), it's tainted by a fair amount of middlebrow stuffiness, but it's a fleet piece of storytelling and serves to enshrine one of the great ham performances of all time, Charles Laughton's Captain Bligh.

Most of what transpires is low-key, affectionate comedy and a fair amount of fun.

Neatly scripted by Tim Firth and Geoff Deane, this sticks to the "Full Monty" formula of starchy working-class types learning to loosen up about sex, but Julian Jarrold's sincere, low-key direction erases any sense of artifice.

If you're wondering how Steve Anderson managed to make a 93-minute documentary about the ultimate four-letter word, which uses the epithet over 800 times, you're underestimating his capacity to entertain and educate in roughly equal doses.

Lessons about family loyalty, tolerance, ingenuity, and sacrifice add depth to the screenplay by Etan Cohen and directors Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath, but thankfully don't detract from the lunatic maneuvers of a delusional lemur king (Sacha Baron Cohen) and those wily spheniscidae.

The revelation that Winslet’s character is a war criminal is the centerpiece of The Reader, but surrounding the Holocaust morality play is another story that’s more modestly scaled and, in this age of unashamed romance between older women and younger men, more contemporary.

N’dour’s concert numbers and family visits are captivating, but Vasarhelyi is so uncritical toward the singer that she inadvertently makes him look as though he’s running for sainthood.

Bier's film succeeded on the merits of its actors, and this one offers fine performances by Portman and Gyllenhaal, but Maguire doesn't cut the mustard as the anguished military man.

Douglas Sirk's famous 1959 remake was pure metaphysics; this version emphasizes the social content, particularly in its Depression-era attention to class nuances.

This quirky 2004 documentary ends with the Shopsins' forced relocation after 32 years, an uprooting made all the more poignant by Eve's death during filming.

While Richard Sarafian's direction of this action thriller and drive-in favorite isn't especially distinguished, the script by Cuban author Guillermo Cabrera Infante takes full advantage of the subject's existential and mythical undertones without being pretentious, and you certainly get a run for your money, along with a lot of rock music.

Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore make an appealing couple in this silly but very likable 1998 romantic comedy set in 1985.

Even if you find Franken hard to bear, as I do, the movie's take on how he functions in the world is both authoritative and compelling, and the movie steadily grows in stature.

Some of the eggs fail to hatch and some of the chicks die, and the parents' cries are painful to hear, though what they're really crying for is the future of their species.

But as a neo-Dickensian Disney exercise in old-fashioned sentiment this has a certain charm and a sense of human decency that tended to win me over.

A thoughtful and admirably nuanced moral drama.

The three parts add up to a rather lumpy narrative, and the characters are perceived through a kind of affectionate recollection that tends to idealize them, but they're so beautifully realized that they linger like cherished friends.

This is one of those movies whose empty-headed premise is so pure it's witty: with his insatiable need for excitement, the hero is a perfect stand-in for the fanboys in the audience.

Subtlety is not his strong suit--all the characters here are either adorable or loathsome--yet Perry has toned down the pandering materialism, evangelism, and black empowerment of "Madea's Family Reunion" and "Diary of a Mad Black Woman," letting his heart-tugging story tell itself.

Some of the verbal jousts are hot, and a Laurel and Hardy routine involving a stolen ATM is fitfully hilarious, but this reminds me of a pilot for a cable sitcom.

As in other Ivory-Jhabvala adaptations, ritzy consumerism is very much on display, but what makes this better than most is Johnson's amused admiration for nearly all her characters, regardless of nationality.

Neither character is especially well defined, particularly if one discounts the strident overdefinition of their respective milieus, but as an old-fashioned Hollywood romance in which anything can happen, this is reasonably watchable, and at times mildly funny.

In the films of Swedish director Jan Troell (The Emigrants, The New Land), ordinary lives assume epic dimensions, and this drama, based on the experiences of his wife's protofeminist grandmother, doesn't sugarcoat the hardships of the early 1900s.

The concert footage is generally quite good, and Joplin is astonishing, but with so many hours of footage you'd think there would be more unexpected moments.

This farce eventually runs out of steam, devolving into a protracted docudrama about actor Steve Coogan (who plays the title hero as well as his father), but until then this is a pretty clever piece of jive.

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

Bale admirably shoulders the burden of Western identification figure, but the heart of the story is the ongoing tension between the schoolgirls and the hookers, who see in each other aspects of womanhood that are out of their respective reach.

Milk is steeped in the street-level details of acquiring and applying power, and a few early episodes show how clearly Milk understood the economic component.

It's a bad sign when you can't name or differentiate any of the Lost Boys.

Director Benny Boom and screenwriter Blair Cobbs pull off the tough trick of investing profoundly stupid characters with humanity, while cinematographer David Armstrong plays gleefully with the grime-o-vision palette of '70s blaxploitation flicks.

A surprisingly credible coming-of-age story.

This movie will hardly set the world on fire, but it's a worthy vehicle for the two old troopers; Smith has the stiffest upper lip in the business, and Dench is heartrending as the naive, lovelorn sister.

Quietly unsettling in its vision of modern-day isolation.

Gordon Hessler directed this 1974 British feature, whose main raison d'etre is some first-rate “Dynamation” special effects from Ray Harryhausen, including a ship's figurehead that springs to life and Sinbad crossing swords with a six-armed statue.

This pungent neo-noir can be sleazy and over-familiar, but like the protagonist, it's so smart and crafty that you may forgive its flaws.

Griffin's stand-up material is consistently upstaged by sequences of him interacting with old friends and family members.

In contrast to the clueless media cliches about suicide bombers, this offers a comprehensive and comprehending portrait of what helps to produce them.

This gorgeous expressionist drama makes the comparisons so effectively at the outset that by the end they seem belabored.

Compared to the crucifixion, the nativity doesn't offer as much inherent drama for secular viewers, but screenwriter Mike Rich (The Rookie) generates a fair amount of suspense by framing the action with Herod's slaughter of the innocents, and the journey of the Three Wise Men supplies a warm comedic subplot.

He resisted commodification by continuously reediting his other films and reworking his live performances--a dazzling legacy that influenced everyone from Warhol to Fellini to John Waters. In some ways Smith's art became commodified only after he died and his estranged sister gained control over his work, though that did lead to this documentary, a fascinating introduction to his special world.

Intelligent thriller.

This is sentimental but dramatically solid, its placid themes fortified by De Niro.

Subplots involving the heroine's resentful husband and rebellious teenage daughter never amount to much, though the story builds toward a satisfactory, if formulaic, climax when the woman dares to compete in a tournament against a succession of smug bourgeois men.

Before this turns to total mush, it's a quirky, fitfully effective fantasy periodically enlivened by the cast.

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.

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

Unexpectedly witty and affecting exposé of the American beauty industry.

Perceptive, faith-based romantic comedy.

The depictions of novelist Harper Lee (Catherine Keener) and editor William Shawn (Bob Balaban) aren't convincing, but Miller is mainly interested in Capote's identification and duplicitous relationship with Perry Smith, one of the murderers he was writing about, and that story rings true.

Reminiscent of the TV series "Northern Exposure," this 2001 indie comedy by writer-director Kate Montgomery smoothly transplants 30s-style screwball comedy to an Apache-run ski resort.

Heart-wrenching documentary.

The period details are so exact they're occasionally distracting, the use of gospel music at the end is questionable, and director Randall Wallace (We Were Soldiers) shows a surer hand in the track sequences than the domestic scenes. Still, there's no denying this movie has heart.

North Face also deals with actual events, offering plenty of thrills and spectacular vistas.

Possibly the touchy-feeliest cowboy movie ever made.

Not quite up to "Airplane!" or "Top Secret!," but there are still laughs aplenty.

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.

An eye-opening tale of how part of our population lives, and as an authentic image of material suffering it makes something like Lars von Trier's "Dancer in the Dark" seem even more dubious.

If he'd (Shepard) gone a few notches darker and deeper he might have had a formidable post-cold war thriller. Still, there's much to enjoy in Brosnan's enthusiastic scruffing up of his Bond/Steele image and in Shepard's energetic, if lightweight, direction.

The landscapes--which come close to outshining the worthy actors in the opening and closing stretches--are beautiful, and the plot, which is basically a grim coming-of-age story, holds one's interest throughout.

For the sake of more irony--the movie is lousy with it--the precocious characters have an infantile response to the discovery that their parents are missing: all want their mommies after a night of junk-food excess.

In this comedy by David Koepp, Gervais handles the big, crowd-pleasing gags with aplomb.

Entrancingly lurid live-action fantasy.

The CGI characters seem less like artwork than humans wearing animal suits, but despite the overall ugliness and sitcom timing, this has enough action, violence, and invention to keep kids amused.

The Big Lebowski is packed with show-offy filmmaking and as a result is pretty entertaining.

The inventive performances -- keep this story interesting in spite of its puritanical framework.

There's not much story here, but the characters are substantial: a single mother (nicely played by Juliette Binoche) who runs a local avant-garde puppet theater and is preoccupied with such matters as a downstairs tenant who refuses to pay rent or leave, her neglected but mainly cheerful son, and his Taiwanese nanny, a filmmaker in her spare time.

Constrained by formula but executed with heart and humor.

A caustic satire masquerading as an action-adventure. Or maybe it's Hollywood escapism masquerading as satire.

This is intelligent, committed, and politically provocative, though its narrative puzzle box may prompt you to throw up your hands and let Exxon go on running the world.

Effective advocacy film about the genocide in Darfur.

Stylistic excess, comedy, and romance often help make extremes of cruelty and horror function as cathartic metaphor, and all three figure, not always successfully, in this sequel.

Fast-paced and intelligent documentary.

This documentary on the history of gospel music can't measure up to George T. Nierenberg's colorful "Say Amen, Somebody" (1982), but it's so jammed with great archival performances, most of them included in their entirety, that it's worth seeing.

You won't come out of it indifferent, and even if it winds up enraging you (I could have done without most of the ending myself), it nonetheless commands attention.

The opening half-hour--the burglary of a jewelry store, filmed in meticulous detail--is as good as its inspiration in The Asphalt Jungle, but the film turns moralistic and sour in the last half, when the thieves fall out.

Isabelle Huppert gets a respite from her usual ice queen roles with this shattering psychological drama about the danger of children staying too long in the nest.

A corny but sincere weeper written by Jonathan Marc Feldman, directed by Thomas Carter, and shot mainly in Prague.

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

It certainly fulfills all the conventions of the genre: sci-fi premise, noir stylings, martial arts, snarky dialogue.

Actor John Turturro follows his charming and colorful travel documentary "Rehearsal for a Sicilian Tragedy" (2009) with this assured and freewheeling look at the music of Naples (2010).

After a sluggish half hour, this well-crafted adventure kicks into high gear and never lets up.

Dramatically objectifies the unfair trade practices that help keep Africa mired in poverty.

The social criticism is as unforced as the humor (and the references to "The Conversation") in this 1998 conspiracy thriller, whose spirited action is balanced by an almost contemplative attitude toward surveillance phobias and the movie cliches they've spawned.

It reminded me of "Pump Up the Volume" in many ways.

This is jammed with cliches but completely engrossing, in the manner of a movie ardently in love with its own bullshit.

Perry benefits from the fire, heft, velocity, and lyricism of the language, but he also updates the material and makes it work onscreen, eliciting powerhouse performances from an ensemble of actresses.

With his delicate mix of sick humor and compassion, Goldthwait is that rare comic writer who can legitimately be compared to Lenny Bruce.

The movie's realism is unimpeachable, though American cops might be stunned by the idea of a half-dozen detectives being assigned to the murder of an anonymous floater.

This is affecting and thematically pointed but much more pat than the situation that precedes it, in which two different realities must coexist uneasily on the same screen.

This elliptical, poetic movie is filled with yearning, humor, and warmth.

What might have been a routine coming-out story is enriched by Wright's accomplished and honest performance, Markowitz's straightforward dialogue, and Joseph White's cinematography of the majestic surf and melancholy sunsets off Malibu.

First-time director Chen Shi-Zheng shows great sensitivity to the pressure and isolation felt by Chinese brains at American universities, and the relationship between Liu and Quinn provides a rare look at the intellectual serfdom of graduate study.

The Scandinavian moodiness of the first half gives way to a series of jolting set pieces in the second.