As you’d expect, Ridley Scott’s sweeping, decades-spanning and magnificently filmed epic Napoleon is a stylized and violent interpretation of the life and times of one of the most famous and infamous military commanders and political leaders history has ever known — but it’s also a surprisingly funny indictment of a sniveling brute of a man who is utterly unaware of his shortcomings, so to speak.

It's the film you need to see in order to understand why the ending of "As Good As It Gets" was phony.

The charisma of such actors as Gandolfini, Pitt, Liotta and Jenkins depends largely on their screen presences and our memories of them in better roles.

Damon is in prime everyman mode as Paul, a good guy with a good heart who wouldn’t mind catching a break, a big break, just once. Waltz has a blast playing the party king Dusan, who has some wise observations about the ways of this new world. And Hong Chau is brilliant as the fiery and funny and fantastically blunt Ngoc Lan.

It's pure cinema, spread over several genres. It's a caper movie, a gangster movie, a sex movie and a slapstick comedy.

While elegantly mounted and well acted, the movie is not the equal of the TV production, in part because so much material had to be compressed into such a shorter time. It is also not the equal of the recent film "Atonement," which in an oblique way touches on similar issues.

We veer close to the edge of Precious, Indie-Hipster Cliche so often in Infinitely Polar Bear, but thanks to a gifted filmmaker and two brilliant lead performances, the voice-over narration and the home-movie footage and the flights of fancy aren’t as off-putting as they might have been in lesser hands.

The case involves lots of flaws in the original trial: unreliable eyewitnesses, time discrepancies, conflicts of interest. In other hands, this material might seem familiar, but Woods puts a spin on it, an intensity that makes it feel important - to him, and therefore to us.

Mercifully, at 84 minutes the movie is even shorter than its originally alleged 90-minute running time; how much visual shakiness can we take? And yet, all in all, it is an effective film, deploying its special effects well and never breaking the illusion that it is all happening as we see it.

Cheadle the director, producer and co-writer boldly goes for broke with mixed results in this highly fictionalized version of the Miles Davis legend — and Cheadle the actor gives a brilliant performance worthy of an Oscar nomination.

Pitt is at the top of his game, playing a man who has forgotten whatever he used to be and has wholly embraced his role in this war.

Tamara Drewe is one of those British comedies in which, one way or another, we envy all of the characters.

[Altman] has made a melodrama, almost a soap opera, in which the characters achieve a kind of nobility.

What Almereyda brings to the film is good control of tone (the movie is ironic, and yet sad about its irony) and an interesting visual style.

Edwards and Moore are working at the top of their forms here, and the result is a pure, classic slapstick that makes Micki + Maude a real treasure.

Emily Blunt makes Victoria as irresistible a young woman as Dame Judi Dench made her an older one in "Mrs. Brown" (1997).

The Road evokes the images and the characters of Cormac McCarthy's novel. It is powerful, but for me lacks the same core of emotional feeling.

Wickedly effective thriller.

Director John Madden (“Shakespeare in Love,” the “Exotic Marigold Hotel” movies) expertly juggles the various subplots while never losing his main focus, which is to showcase Jessica Chastain’s nearly infinite palette of acting shades.

The film is elegiac and sad, beautifully mounted, but not as compelling as it should be.

Elegantly, even languorously, photographed by Jose Luis Alcaine, who doesn't punch into things but regards them, so that we are invited to think about them. That doesn't mean the movie is slow; it moves with a compelling intensity toward its conclusion.

What's special about the film is at a deeper level, down where (Tykwer) engages with the souls of his characters.

A lovely film, but maddeningly complacent.

The Chaser is an expert serial-killer film from South Korea and a poster child for what a well-made thriller looked like in the classic days.

Inside Deep Throat, a documentary that premiered at Sundance and is now going into national release, was made not on the fringes but by the very establishment itself.

This is not to say Conan O'Brien is a bad man. In fact, after the movie, I rather admired him. What we are seeing is a man determined to vindicate himself after a public humiliation.

The film, written and directed by Joe Maggio, only has this handful of characters and looks at them carefully. The dialogue is right, the conflicts are simple and sincere, the hopes are touching.

Lacks some of the idiocy of your average teenage rom-com. But it doesn't bring much to the party. It sort of ambles along, with two nice people at the center of a human scavenger hunt. It's not much of a film, but it sort gets you halfway there, like a Yugo.