The performers breathe real life into the characters, starting with Elizabeth Pena and Alfred Molina.

Benicio Del Toro, one of the film's producers, gives a heroic performance, not least because it's self-effacing.

The crucial decision in The Reader is made by a 24-year-old youth, who has information that might help a woman about to be sentenced to life in prison, but withholds it. He is ashamed to reveal his affair with this woman. By making this decision, he shifts the film's focus from the subject of German guilt about the Holocaust and turns it on the human race in general.

Another illustration of how absorbing a film can be when the plot doesn't stand between us and a character.

Frank Langella and Michael Sheen do not attempt to mimic their characters, but to embody them.

Luke Ford's performance as Charlie is a convincing tour de force. You may recall him as Brendan Fraser's heroic son in "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor." Rhys Wakefield, in his first feature role, is a good casting decision, suggesting inner turmoil without overacting.

Cadillac Records is an account of the Chess story that depends more on music than history, which is perhaps as it should be. The film is a fascinating record of the evolution of a black musical style, and the tangled motives of the white men who had an instinct for it.

Sands' death is shown in a tableaux of increasing bleakness. It is agonizing, yet filmed with a curious painterly purity.

A mercilessly convoluted version of a Twister, that genre in which the plot whacks us as if it's taking batting practice. I will not hint at anything that happens. I will simply observe that it's all entertaining.

It looks great, it hurtles through its paces and is well-acted. The soundtrack is like elevator music if the elevator were in a death plunge. The special effects are state of the art. Its only flaw is that it's disgusting.

A perfectly acceptable brainless action thriller.

We got two gold-record singers and they don't sing? So? We got five Oscar-winning actors, and they don't need to act much.

Sean Penn never tries to show Harvey Milk as a hero, and never needs to. He shows him as an ordinary man, kind, funny, flawed, shrewd, idealistic, yearning for a better world.

Twilight will mesmerize its target audience, 16-year-old girls and their grandmothers. Their mothers know all too much about boys like this.

It is exuberantly old-fashioned, and I mean that as a compliment.

Don't ever let this happen again to James Bond. Quantum of Solace is his 22nd film and he will survive it, but for the 23rd it is necessary to go back to the drawing board and redesign from the ground up. Please understand: James Bond is not an action hero!

For long stretches A Christmas Tale seems to be going nowhere in particular and using a lot of dialogue to do so. These are not boring stretches. The movie is 151 minutes long and doesn't feel especially lengthy. The actors are individually good. They work together to feel like a family.

House of the Sleeping Beauties has missed its ideal release window by about 40 years. It might -- might -- have found an audience in that transitional period between soft- and hard-core.

This is a breathless, exciting story, heartbreaking and exhilarating at the same time.

The kind of comedy where funny people say funny things in funny situations, not the kind of comedy that whacks you with manic shocks to force an audible Pavlovian response.

Van Damme says worse things about himself than critics would dream of saying, and the effect is shockingly truthful.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is not only about Germany during the war, although the story it tells is heartbreaking in more than one way. It is about a value system that survives like a virus.

This is a brighter, more engaging film than the original "Madagascar."

This movie has a lot of good music in it, some on the soundtrack, some on the screen. Jackson and Bernie Mac have enormous fun doing intricate dance moves together.

Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks make a lovable couple; she's pretty and goes one-for-one on the bleep language, and Rogen, how can I say this, is growing on me, the big lug.

If you don't already know who Bruce Campbell is, it will set you searching for other Bruce Campbell films on the theory that they can't all be like this. Start with "Evil Dead II," is my advice. Not to forget "Bubba Ho-Tep." In fact, start with them before My Name Is Bruce, which is low midrange in the Master's oeuvre.

It follows the well-worn pathways of countless police dramas before it.

Jolie, Malkovich and Geoff Pierson, as a lawyer who takes Collins' case before the Police Board, are very good at what they do very well. The film's most riveting performance is by Jason Butler Harner as the murderous Gordon Northcott.