I can’t deny this is filled with powerfully primal images, but at least one of them--an eviscerated fox that bellows at Dafoe, “Chaos reigns!”­--made me burst out laughing.

Warmly and gently handled, though the central story, detailing the personal politics between him and the six childlike monsters, steadily loses steam.

Whereas the 1987 horror hit The Stepfather was top-notch drive-in fare, this perfunctory retread had a tame, made-for-TV feel.

Generally I don’t mind a little recreational fascism as long as it’s deep-fried in savory violent vengeance, but this overwrought mess gives vigilantism a bad name.

The Maid may turn mostly on issues of housework, but it never feels trivial, because Silva is so skillful in exposing the alliances and levers of power inside the household.

The project is lush and seductive as a whole, though some segments are especially vibrant.

A more helpful title for this date movie would have been Couples, Retreat!

This British drama is handsomely textured and beautifully acted, though the script often feels giddily out of touch with the essential creepiness of the scenario.

With an intelligent, provocative and stylized approach, Bronson (based on a true story) follows the metamorphosis of Mickey Peterson into Britain's most dangerous prisoner, Charles Bronson.

Michael Sheen, who adds to his gallery of public figures (Tony Blair, David Frost) with a sharp performance here as the legendary UK soccer coach Brian Clough.

An exposé of comic proportions that only Chris Rock could pull off.

Writer-director James Mottern has a reasonably good feel for the textures of blue-collar life, but he pounds home the life lessons, underscoring them with poignant country-western songs.

This documentary tells this story reasonably well, though one might question whether director Eric Bricker's jazzy montages, collages, and rapid camera movements are appropriate to the contemplation of still photographs.

This meticulous restoration dazzles with crisp, formally rigorous black-and-white images and a complex sound mix, as its minimalist story of three families of manual laborers unfolds against a harsh, barren peninsula.

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

Writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick wring a surprising amount of juice from the familiar premise, and director Ruben Fleischer heaps on the gore without burying their character-based comedy and surprisingly heartfelt moments. This is worth seeing just for the title sequence.

The romantic plot, involving his unrequited loved for Garner, is soured by her character's unconcealed shallowness: she won't have him because his genes aren't up to snuff.

A surprisingly credible coming-of-age story.

Like the Coens’ protagonist in "The Man Who Wasn’t There," Stuhlbarg is driven to an existential crisis, but in contrast to the earlier movie, with its tired noir moves, this one is earnestly engaged in the question of what constitutes a life well lived.

The film reveals its true colors at the end, with a plug for the New Age dude ranch the entrepreneurial couple has since established in Texas.

The high school is so sanitized that there are no drugs, cutthroat competition, or--inconceivably for a theatrical milieu--no gay students.

The movie is most fascinating when it shows how Chanel communicated her enlightened sense of womanhood through her innovative designs, which in turn helped women feel differently about themselves.

The premise for this sci-fi actioner makes sense for about four seconds, after which you begin to wonder why everyone on the planet would willingly become a shut-in.

The sort of thing that makes you wish you were playing a video game instead.

A substantial performance from Clive Owen rescues what might otherwise have been a fairly gooey fatherhood drama.

This uplifting documentary breaks no new ground stylistically, but the story it tells is urgent and compelling.

By the end, when Moore presents himself as a lone crusader for justice and wraps yellow crime-scene tape around the AIG building, his reasoning is so muddled that he can’t distinguish an economic system (corporate capitalism) from a political one (representative democracy).

With its sappy musical vignettes and encounter-session dialogue, the movie consistently overplays its insights, though all three leads contribute thoughtful and genuine performances.

A lumpy stew of weak characterization, lame gags, ADD-afflicted storytelling, and dazzling visual.

Unfortunately, every laugh is bludgeoned nearly to death by Marvin Hamlisch's jokey score of neo-James Bond riffs and 70s sitcom melodies; I liked the movie quite a bit, but by the end I felt as if I were at a live TV show with a blinking sign ordering me to LAUGH.

The dialogue is often grating, and some of the situations are distastefully cute, although John Carroll Lynch (Fargo) has a strong supporting turn as a grief workshop client.

Overall, though, the flashes of competence just emphasize the extent to which the film has no idea what it's doing.

Soggy stuff from French director Cedric Klapisch (When the Cat’s Away), set in the title city and collecting the routine travails of various urbanites.

The movie eventually begins to wilt under the sober, plodding direction of Steve Jacobs, but the thoughtful screenplay gives Malkovich a complex, increasingly reflective character arc that he plays with great feeling, making the professor’s redemption seem honestly won.

It's a beautiful picture but very quietly so, and definitely not for the ADHD set.

Its great distinction lies in re-creating an age when thoughts and feelings were to be carefully considered and precisely enunciated. The best costumers, set designers, and property masters can’t conjure up the mental and emotional spaces of a simpler era; that requires a filmmaker who knows the virtue of quiet, patience, and attentiveness.

Ehrlich and Goldsmith carve out their own little place in the canon by focusing on the ethical journey of one man who refused to shrug off his own responsibility for the war and atoned for it with a seismic act of civil disobedience.

The boring, humorless pair do nothing to refute the image of eco-worriers as preening, puritanical douchebags addicted to symbolic gesture and allergic to cost-benefit analysis.

Contrived, sentimental, tonally bipolar, and as predictable as clockwork.

Shane Acker has expanded his Oscar-nominated short 9 into a full-length feature whose splendid visuals are dragged down by a tedious story.

There's a trove of movie lore in this absorbing documentary.

Directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor were responsible for the delirious "Crank" and "Crank 2" but left the magic behind when they threw together this tedious mash-up of "Tron," "Rollerball," "The Matrix," etc.

From "Beavis and Butt-Head" to "King of the Hill" to "Office Space," Mike Judge has become our most dogged examiner of middle-American foolishness; no other comedy filmmaker more skillfully exploits that nagging sense that you’re surrounded by idiots.

Packaged as a romantic comedy but devoid of comedy or romance, this baffling train wreck stars Sandra Bullock as a tediously kooky constructor of crossword puzzles for a Sacramento newspaper.

With her large, expressive eyes, abundant warmth, and radiant energy, Faour commands our sympathy, even through some weak dialogue and even weaker plot points.

The movie gets old fast--mostly because it’s bringing up the rear after "Undercover Brother" (2002) And "I’m Gonna Git You Sucka" (1988). But the kung-fu climax at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (“the Honky House”) is nearly worth the wait, and Adrian Younge’s score, with its moody horns, is a perfect snapshot of early 70s soul.

The Rube Goldberg variations are repetitive and devoid of the visual snap that helped distinguish James Wong’s "Final Destination" (2000).

Though the movie isn’t much to look at, he (Siegel) gets a credibly dark and pathetic performance from the typically comic Oswalt.

The September Issue fixates on status and professional one-upmanship; if you want to see a movie that actually treats fashion as personal expression--in other words, art--keep a lookout for Anne Fontaine’s forthcoming biopic "Coco Before Chanel."

A frightening portrait of a man whose technological genius fails to compensate for his gaping emotional deficits.

The quiet exploration of late sexuality is remarkable, but the characters' seniority also makes the triangle doubly painful for the woman's husband of 30 years, who suddenly faces the prospect not only of living alone but of dying that way as well.

This comedy is a bilge pump of tacky jokes, fake sentiment, and hollow performances, accompanied on the soundtrack by lite rock and hokey music cues. It should never have been made, though it's probably guaranteed a long life at bad-film festivals.

The screenplay is sharp and insightful, the period details ring true, and Martin is appealing as a dreamer conflicted about his homosexuality. But once the action shifts from the town to the festival, any momentum gets lost in a psychedelic haze.

Magic vies with technology in this exuberant adventure comedy, which unfolds achronologically in a series of zany, effects-laden vignettes.

Director Vicky Jenson has a sitcom script on her hands and proceeds accordingly.

Tarantino has already caught some flack for daring to use the Holocaust as material for another of his bloody live-action cartoons, but of course the generation that experienced it for real has mostly faded away. In that sense Inglourious Basterds is a social marker as startling as "Easy Rider" was in its day.

An explosive but scrupulously journalistic drama about the radical group that terrorized Germany for nearly 30 years.

A muddled, talky affair, part soap opera, part undercover police procedural.

Those who deem the gentle comedies of Christopher Guest (Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show) cruel to showbiz dreamers should be subjected to this ugliness.

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

The video has a funky, loose-limbed feel, but Van Peebles has been celebrated so much already you have to wonder how many victory laps a man needs.

The full-length feature film uses groundbreaking digital 3D techniques to provide an unprecedented all-access pass to the X Games.

Koreeda was inspired by his guilt over having neglected his own parents, and the story is remarkable for the quiet, seemingly casual way he depicts the fallout of bitterness and grief.

Unfortunately, as in many such big-screen comic books, the backstory beats the hell out of the present-tense plot.

Compared to "My Neighbor Totoro" and "Kiki's Delivery Service," this is one of the anime master's weaker efforts.

Screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin won an Oscar for "Ghost" (1990), a pleasant, moderately thoughtful weepie that this movie closely resembles.

The strain to pull all this together becomes more evident as the movie progresses, and the three-way musical finale, a rickety acoustic run-through of “The Weight,” hardly lives up to the stars’ reputations.

Loud, shiny, and critic-proof, this franchise launcher is basically Transformers minus the humanity. Dennis Quaid provides some ballast as grizzled patriarch to the troop of sexy young lock-and-loaders.

One keeps waiting for the title characters' lives to intersect, but when they finally do--with a reporter asking Powell to comment on Child's disparaging remarks about her--Ephron scurries away from the moment and its implications.

Unbearably twee mockumentary.

Writer-director David Twohy (Pitch Black) serves up mechanical thrills culminating in a bogus twist ending.

Paul Giamatti plays himself in a dark indie comedy that's distinguished by a sci-fi theme and surrealistic touches but ends without a payoff.

Messy but engaging comedy.

As the seconds tick down to midnight, Arkin becomes a reluctant hero trapped by a masked Collector in a maze of lethal invention--the Spanish Inquisition as imagined by Rube Goldberg--while trying to rescue the very family he came to rob.

Directed by Louie Psihoyos, this well-intentioned documentary exposes the harvesting of dolphins by Japanese fishermen, yet its theatrics suggest a cross between reality TV and "Mission: Impossible."

Lorna's sudden change of heart is a pointed example of what the Dardenne brothers' movies are all about. Capitalism may seem at times like a raging river, but every day, all over the world, people try to make it flow in the opposite direction.

As predictable as the alphabet but should hold particular appeal to women whose maternal impulses inflect their mating instincts.

Director Robert Luketic telegraphs every dismal comic beat from Venus and Mars, then reinforces them with a twinkling, leering score.

Screenwriters David Johnson and Alex Mace deliver one of the stupidest "twist endings" in the history of storytelling.

Director Jonas Pate should be run through a wood chipper for daring to quote "Fargo."

Visually witty, flawlessly played romantic comedy.

Director Max Farberbock (Aimee & Jaguar) mainly avoids graphic depictions of sexual assault, but that only increases the tension in this austere, claustrophobic drama.

For what it is, it's fine.

A more accurate title might be "Sub-Bad."

There are some solid, outrageous laughs here--most of them involving anal sex--but don't expect a second lightning strike.

The scenes between husband and wife are spectacularly awkward and arresting, though the movie grows more dubious the nearer the guys get to their shooting session in a local hotel room.

It is only in the sequence about Berg's popular costar Philip Loeb that Aviva Kempner's documentary resonates. Loeb, an ardent union activist who was blacklisted during the McCarthy hearings, comes across as more identifiably human than the workaholic Berg, for all her fictional character's warmth and her many admirers' tributes.

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.

A nauseating, stridently phony rom-com.

Not even 3D can save this third entry in the Fox animation franchise about a motley crew of prehistoric creatures.

Mann excels at staging the chaotic bank jobs and bloody shootouts that were just a day at the office for Dillinger, but even at 140 minutes the movie is so dense with incident that there isn't much room for cultural comment or character development.

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.

Surrounding and ultimately subsuming this ethical struggle is a fair amount of pediatric-cancer horror and mush, though Cassavetes is frequently bailed out by his cast (Diaz is admirably unpleasant as the controlling mother, and Joan Cusack is unusually tough and restrained as the presiding judge).

Such is the extraordinary achievement of The Hurt Locker: it has the perspective of years when those years have yet to pass.

The movie reunites Pfeiffer with director Stephen Frears and screenwriter Christopher Hampton, who did Dangerous Liaisons (1988); this costume drama doesn't have nearly as much bite as that one, though the age reversal of its central romance gives it a certain topicality.

Based on a French true-crime best seller, this gory, ham-fisted hybrid of social-issue picture and horror film exerts a crude but undeniable power.

The special effects are better and the dialogue slightly more humorous than in the first movie, but the anti-Arab subtext is repugnant.

Creatively it's a giant step backwards.