Look at the performances. They're surprisingly good, and I especially admired the work of Monica Potter and Tony Goldwyn as the parents of one of two girls who go walking in the woods.

I think Dwayne Johnson has a likable screen presence and is a good choice for an innocuous family entertainment like this.

The material might have promise as a black comedy, but its attempt to put on a smiling face is unconvincing.

An honest, on-the-ground documentary about the lives of Americans fighting there. It has no spin. It's not left or right.

Masterson, like many actors, is an assured director even in her debut; working with her brother Pete as cinematographer, she creates a spell and a tenderness and pushes exactly as far as this story should go.

The Perfect Sleep puts me in mind of a flywheel spinning in the void. It is all burnished brass and shining steel, perfectly balanced as it hums in its orbit; yet, because it occupies a void, it satisfies only itself and touches nothing else. Here is a movie that goes about its business without regard for an audience.

No, it doesn't turn into another horror film or a murder-suicide. It simply shows how lives torn apart by financial emergencies can be revealed as being damaged all along.

It's a compelling visceral film -- sound, images and characters combined into a decidedly odd visual experience that evokes the feel of a graphic novel. It seems charged from within by its power as a fable; we sense it’s not interested in a plot so much as with the dilemma of functioning in a world losing hope.

It is a great story of love and hope, told tenderly and without any great striving for effect.

Do these films reflect actual aspects of modern Tokyo? The hikikomori epidemic is apparently real enough, but the other two segments seem more deliberately fantastical. The entertainment value? Medium to high: "Merde." Tokyo? Still standing.

Mikhalkov has made a new film with its own original characters and stories, and after all, it's not how the film ends, but how it gets there.

Red Riding Trilogy is an immersive experience like "The Best of Youth," "Brideshead Revisited" or "Nicholas Nickleby."

Some of these stories are fascinating and some are heartbreaking, but together they seem too contrived.

Here is a movie that will do for cheerleading what "Friday the 13th" did for summer camp.

What an anguished story it tells, of a marriage from hell.

Now Wajda has brought some small measure of rest to their names, to Poland, and to history.

About the best Friday the 13th movie you could hope for. Its technical credits are excellent. It has a lot of scary and gruesome killings. Not a whole lot of acting is required.

Gomorrah looks grimy and sullen, and has no heroes, only victims. That is its power.

The whole movie is so well-cast and performed that we watch it unfolding without any particular awareness of "acting."

This is a gloomy film with weird characters doing nasty things. I've heard of eating chocolate-covered insects, but not when they're alive.

This is a very far from perfect movie, and it ends on an unsatisfactory note.

Peter Sellers was a genius who somehow made Inspector Clouseau seem as if he really were helplessly incapable of functioning in the real world and somehow incapable of knowing that. Steve Martin is a genius, too, but not at being Clouseau. It seems more like an exercise.

Its primary flaw is that it's not critical. It is a celebration of an idiotic lifestyle, and I don't think it knows it.

It glories in its silliness, and the actors are permitted the sort of goofy acting that distinguished screwball comedy. We get double takes, slow burns, pratfalls, exploding clothes wardrobes, dropped trays, tear-away dresses, missing maids of honor, overnight fame, public disgrace and not, amazingly, a single obnoxious cat or dog.

Clive Owen makes a semi-believable hero, not performing too many feats that are physically unlikely. As the plucky DA, Naomi Watts wisely plays up her character's legal smarts and plays down the inevitable possibility that the two of them will fall in love.

Emily Browning's face helps The Uninvited work so well...She makes you fear for her, and that's half the battle. Yet she's so fresh she's ready for a Jane Austen role.

Taken shows Mills as a one-man rescue squad, a master of every skill, a laser-eyed, sharpshooting, pursuit-driving, pocket-picking, impersonating, knife-fighting, torturing, karate-fighting killing machine who can cleverly turn over a petrol tank with one pass in his car and strategically ignite it with another.

Do you like this sort of rom-com? It's a fair example of its type, not good, but competent.