There is a place for whimsy and magic realism, and that place may not be on a cow farm in New Zealand.

An astonishingly bad movie, and the most astonishing thing about it comes in the credits: Written by Elaine May, Warren Beatty, Chris Rock, Lance Crouther, Ali LeRoi and Louis CK. These are credits that deserve a place in the Writers Hall of Fame.

It's an arch, awkward, ill-timed, forced political comedy set in 1959 and seemingly stranded there.

It's fast-footed and fun. "Rugrats in Paris" had charms for grownups, however, Recess: School's Out seems aimed more directly at grade-schoolers.

Passes off pathological behavior as romantic bliss. It's about two sick and twisted people playing mind games and calling it love.

One of the delights of The Taste of Others is that it is so smart and wears its intelligence lightly. Films about taste are not often made by Hollywood, perhaps because it would so severely limit the box office to require the audience to have any.

As a drama about the ravages of mental illness, the movie works; too bad most of the critics read it only as a romantic soap opera in which the hero is an obsessive sap. They read the signs but miss the diagnosis.

So bad in so many different ways that perhaps you should see it, as an example of the lowest slopes of the bell-shaped curve.

A carnival geek show elevated in the direction of art. It never quite gets there, but it tries with every fiber of its craft to redeem its pulp origins, and we must give it credit for the courage of its depravity.

The most ingenious device in the story is the way Chow and Su play-act imaginary scenes between their cheating spouses.

When flashbacks tease us with bits of information, it has to be done well, or we feel toyed with. Here the mystery is solved by stomping in thick-soled narrative boots through the squishy marsh of contrivance.

American teenage movies tidy things up by pairing off the right couples at the end. In Europe they know that summers end and life goes on.

Opens with 15 funny minutes and then goes dead in the water.

It's is not a great high school movie like "Election," but it's alive and risky and saucy.

Intriguing in the way it dances in and out of the shadow of Bergman's autobiography.

A plot like this is so hopeless that only acting can redeem it. Lopez pulls her share of the load, looking geuninely smitten by this guy and convincingly crushed when his secret is revealed. But McConaughey is not the right actor for this material.

Penn and Nicholson take risks with the material and elevate the movie to another, unanticipated, haunting level.

The movie should be praying to St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes. Maybe he could perform a miracle and turn this into a cable offering, so no one has to buy a ticket to see it.

Follows the "Lock, Stock" formula so slavishly it could be like a new arrangement of the same song.

Seeps with melancholy, old wounds, repressed anger, lust. That it is also caustically funny and heartwarming is miraculous.

I realized there was no hope for the movie because the plot and characters had alienated me beyond repair. If an audience is going to be entertained by a film, first they have to be able to stand it.

Above all, this is a movie where the characters ask the same questions we do: They're as smart about themselves as we are.

They might have been able to make a nice little thriller out of Antitrust if they'd kept one eye on the Goofy Meter.

Parsimonious with its plot, which is revealed on a need-to-know basis. At first, we're not even sure who is who; dialogue is half-heard, references are unclear, the townspeople know things we discover only gradually.

"Willem Dafoe is Max Schreck." I put quotes around that because it's not just a line for a movie ad but the truth: He embodies the Schreck of "Nosferatu" so uncannily that when real scenes from the silent classic are slipped into the frame, we don't notice a difference.

Soderbergh's story, from a screenplay by Stephen Gaghan, cuts between these characters so smoothly that even a fairly complex scenario remains clear and charged with tension.

There is noting quite so awkward as a film that is one thing while it pretends to be another.

I call the movie a thriller, even though the outcome is known, because it plays like one: We may know that the world doesn't end, but the players in this drama don't, and it is easy to identify with them.