This question, which will instinctively occur to many viewers, is never quite dealt with in the film. The photographers sometimes drive into the middle of violent situations, hold up a camera, and say "press!" - as if that will solve everything.

The movie is quick and cheerful, and Spurlock is engaging.

In an age of prefabricated special effects and obviously phony spectacle, it's sort of old-fashioned (and a pleasure) to see a movie made of real people and plausible sets.

There are two strong stories here, in Africa and Denmark. Either could have made a film. Intercut in this way, they seem too much like self-conscious parables.

There's little effort at psychological depth, and the characters float along on the requirements of comedy. But it's sweet comedy, knowing about human nature, and Deneuve and Depardieu, who bring so much history to the screen, seem to create it by their very natures.

Putty Hill makes no statement. It looks. It looks with as much perception and sympathy as it is possible for a film to look. It is surprisingly effective.

If you are open, even in fancy, to the idea of ghosts who visit the living, this film is likely to be a curious but rather bemusing experience.

Redford considers this material in an unusually literate and thoughtful historical film, working from years of research by his screenwriter, James Solomon. I found it absorbing and relevant today.

Now I am faced with this movie, the most anticlimactic non-event since Geraldo Rivera broke into Al Capone's vault.

All through the movie, Scream 4 lets us know that it knows exactly what it's up to - and then goes right ahead and gets up to it.

I'm all for movies that create unease, but I prefer them to appear to know why they're doing that. Super is a film ending in narrative anarchy, exercising a destructive impulse to no greater purpose than to mess with us.

I feel something is missing. There had to be dark nights of the soul. Times of grief and rage. The temptation of nihilism. The lure of despair. Can a 13-year-old girl lose an arm and keep right on smiling?

Your Highness is a juvenile excrescence that feels like the work of 11-year-old boys in love with dungeons, dragons, warrior women, pot, boobs and four-letter words.

A fairly close remake of the great 1981 Dudley Moore movie, with pleasures of its own.

Here we have an odd cross between a fairy tale and a high-tech action movie. It could have been a fairly strained attempt at either, but director Joe Wright ("Atonement") combines his two genres into a stylish exercise that perversely includes some sentiment and insight.

Desert Flower tells a rags-to-riches story, but it plays like two stories in conflict. Everything involving Waris in Africa or in London before her success feels true and heartfelt. Many later details are badly handled.

This one is not terrifically good, but moviegoers will get what they're expecting.

David Schwimmer has made one of the year's best films: Powerfully emotional, yes, but also very perceptive.

An ingenious thriller that comes billed as science fiction, although its science is preposterous.

I'm happy I saw Win Win. It would have been possible to be happier.

I like movies about smart guys who are wise asses, and think their way out of tangles with criminals. I like courtroom scenes. I like big old cars. I like The Lincoln Lawyer because it involves all three.

Here's a movie that teeters on the edge of being really pretty good and loses its way.

The movie is not terrifically good, but the premise is intriguing.

For me, it is too clever by half, creating full-bodied characters but inserting them into a story that is thin soup.

There must be more. We will not discover it here.

He's (Fukunaga) a director with a sure visual sense, here expressed in voluptuous visuals and ambitious art direction.

I found myself resisting the film's pull of easy emotion. There are fundamental questions here, and the film doesn't engage them. I believe Christian should have had the humility to lead his monks away from the path of self-sacrifice.

Good in so many subtle ways, I despair of doing them justice.

Has the added inconvenience of being dreadfully serious about a plot so preposterous, it demands to be filmed by Monty Python.

I Will Follow doesn't tell a story so much as try to understand a woman. Through her, we can find insights into the ways we deal with death.

Here's a science-fiction film that's an insult to the words "science" and "fiction," and the hyphen in between them. You want to cut it up to clean under your fingernails.

A reminder of the pleasure of classic martial-arts films in which skilled athletes performed many of their own stunts.

Take Me Home Tonight must have been made with people who had a great deal of nostalgia for the 1980s, a relatively unsung decade. More power to them. The movie unfortunately gives them no dialogue expanding them into recognizable human beings.

A smart and good movie that could have been a great one if it had a little more daring.

Rango is some kind of a miracle: An animated comedy for smart moviegoers, wonderfully made, great to look at, wickedly satirical, and (gasp!) filmed in glorious 2-D.

Here is an exercise in deliberate vulgarity, gross excess, and the pornography of violence, not to forget garden variety pornography. You get your money's worth.

The movie is brave to raise the questions it does, although at the end I looked in vain for a credit saying, "No extras were underpaid in the making of this film."

Lee doesn't make exploitation films, and he doesn't find conventional answers. He is puzzled by the mysteries of inexplicable behavior.

The plot of the movie is meh.

The result is not merely a bad film, but a waste of an opportunity. As he approaches 85, Winters is still active, funny, enthusiastically involved in painting and could have been the subject of a good film. This isn't it.

The movie has been cast, designed, clothed, scored and edited to the bleeding edge of hip, but it hasn't exactly been written.

What we have here is a witless attempt to merge the "Twilight" formula with the Michael Bay formula.

I confess I felt involved in Unknown until it pulled one too many rabbits out of its hat. At some point, a thriller has to play fair.

The people in this movie are dumber than a box of Tinkertoys.

Cedar Rapids has something of the same spirit of "Fargo" in its approach to the earnest natures of its small-towners.

A rip-snorting adventure tale of the sort made before CGI, 3-D and alphabet soup in general took the fun out of moviegoing.

Chabrol as always shows a tenderness toward the lives of people who are exceptional only because crime touches them.

It is miserable work, even after they grow accustomed to the smell. But it is useful work, and I have been thinking much about the happiness to be found by work that is honest and valuable.

This story is told by writer-director Im Sang-soo with cool, elegant cinematography and sinuous visual movements. The dominant mood is gothic, with the persistent sadomasochistic undertones that seem inescapable in so much Korean cinema.

Sanctum tells the story of a terrifying adventure in an incompetent way. Some of it is exciting, the ending is involving, and all of it is a poster child for the horrors of 3-D used badly.

Strongman is a tantalizing example of the kind of documentary I find engrossing: A film about an unusual person that invites us into the mystery of a human life.

Surely few actors have faces that project sorrow more completely than Bardem.

I admire The Rite because while it delivers what I suppose should be called horror, it is atmospheric, its cinematography is eerie and evocative, and the actors enrich it.

An intriguing plot is established, a new character is brought on with a complex set of problems, and then all the groundwork disintegrates into the usual hash of preposterous action sequences.

Giamatti's performance is one of those achievements. He is making a career of playing unremarkable but memorable men.

There is an irony here. The film exhibits an admirable determination to do justice to a real story, but the story's not real.

Although the actors are convincing and the film well-crafted, The Company Men delivers few satisfactory character portraits because the movie isn't really about characters, it's about economic units.

The movie is rated R, but it's the most watery R I've seen. It's more of a PG-13 playing dress-up.

It is told from and by an adult sensibility that understands loneliness, gratitude and the intense curiosity we feel for other lives, man and beast.

However much it conceals the real-life events that inspired it, it lives and breathes on its own, and as an extension of the mysterious whimsy of Tati.

Leigh's Another Year is like a long, purifying soak in empathy.

An almost unendurable demonstration of a movie with nothing to be about.

You know I am a fan of Nic Cage and Ron Perlman. Here, like cows, they devour the scenery, regurgitate it to a second stomach found only in actors and chew it as cud. It is a noble effort, but I prefer them in their straight-through Human Centipede mode.

Country Strong is a throwback, a pure, heartfelt exercise in '50s social melodrama.

Derek Cianfrance, the film's writer and director, observes with great exactitude the birth and decay of a relationship. This film is alive in its details.

Casino Jack is so forthright, it is stunning.

A rather brilliant lump of coal for your stocking hung by the fireside with care. How else to explain an R-rated Santa Claus origin story crossed with "The Thing"?

The key to the film is in the character of David. One can imagine a scenario in which an overbearing father drives the son to rebellion, but what happens here is more complex and sinister.

Entertaining and surprisingly amusing, under the circumstances. The film is in a better state of mind than its characters. Its humor comes, as the best humor does, from an acute observation of human nature.

You may be imagining this is an animated film, and that Jack Black is voicing Lemuel Gulliver. Not at all. This is live action, and despite the 3-D, it's sorta old-fashioned, not that that's a bad thing.

Coppola is a fascinating director. She sees, and we see exactly what she sees. There is little attempt here to observe a plot. All the attention is on the handful of characters, on Johnny.

This is a film by the Coen Brothers, and this is the first straight genre exercise in their career. It's a loving one. Their craftsmanship is a wonder. Their casting is always inspired and exact. The cinematography by Roger Deakins reminds us of the glory that was, and can still be, the Western.

The weakness of the film is the weakness of the leading role. That's not a criticism of Mark Wahlberg, who has a quite capable range, but of how he and Russell see the character.

She (Taymor) doesn't capture Shakespeare's tone (or his meaning, I believe), but she certainly has boldness in her reinvention.

What we have here is a superior historical drama and a powerful personal one.

Nothing heats up. The movie doesn't lead us, it simply stays in step.

Megamind is an amusing family entertainment and gains some energy from clever dialogue and the fun Will Ferrell has with his character.

Tron: Legacy, a sequel made 28 years after the original but with the same actor, is true to the first film: It also can't be understood, but looks great. Both films, made so many years apart, can fairly lay claim to being state of the art. This time that includes the use of 3-D.

So the movie probably contains enough laughs to satisfy the weekend audience. Where it falls short is in the characters and relationships.

The photography and sound here are very effective in establishing that a train is an enormously heavy thing, and once in motion wants to continue. We knew that. But Scott all but crushes us with the weight of the juggernaut. We are spellbound.

This is a beautiful, puzzling film. The enigmatic quality of Huppert's performance draws us in.

The director is Edward Zwick, a considerable filmmaker. He obtains a warm, lovable performance from Anne Hathaway and dimensions from Gyllenhaal that grow from comedy to the serious.

A pure thriller, all blood, no frills, in which a lot of people get shot, mostly in the head.

Monsters holds our attention ever more deeply as we realize it's not a casual exploitation picture.

Burlesque shows Cher and Christina Aguilera being all that they can be, and that's more than enough.

It's hard enough for a director to work with actors, but if you're working with your own family in your own house and depicting passive aggression, selfishness and discontent and you produce a film this good, you can direct just about anybody in just about anything.

The film leads to no showy conclusion, no spectacular climax. It is about movement possible within the soul even in difficult times.

This is a rip-snorting adventure fantasy for families, especially the younger members who are not insistent on continuity. Director Michael Apted may be too good for this material, but he attacks with gusto.

Carrey makes the role seem effortless; he deceives as spontaneously as others breathe.

There's a way to make a movie like The Tourist, but Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck doesn't find that way.

A handsome and sometimes harrowing film, and will be completely unintelligible for anyone coming to the series for the first time.

A full-bore melodrama, told with passionate intensity, gloriously and darkly absurd. It centers on a performance by Natalie Portman that is nothing short of heroic.

From what dark night of the soul emerged the wretched idea for The Nutcracker in 3D? Who considered it even remotely a plausible idea for a movie?

The unexpected thing about Made in Dagenham is how entertaining it is.

At the very least a superior action film, in which the action sequences are plausible and grounded in reality.

As a movie, Today's Special is only just OK. What saves it, as it saves so very many things, is the garam masala.

The movie is a competent thriller, but maybe could have been more.

Four Lions is impossible to categorize. It's an exceedingly dark comedy, a wicked satire, a thriller where the thrills center on the incompetence of the villains.