Joyful Noise is an ungainly assembly of parts that don't fit, and the strange thing is that it makes no particular effort to please its target audience, which would seem to be lovers of gospel choirs.

You have to be very talented to work with Meryl Streep. It also helps to know how to use her. The Iron Lady fails in both of these categories.

This is not a particularly memorable film, but Polanski brings a great deal of skill to its staging, and it looks as if the actors enjoy themselves.

Contraband is based on an Icelandic thriller named "Reykjavik-Rotterdam," which leads you to suspect that neither New Orleans nor Panama City is particularly essential to the plot. That film starred Baltasar Kormakur, who is the director of this one, perhaps as a demonstration that many stars believe they could direct this crap themselves if they ever had the chance.

Filled with abundant evidence of Goodman as a public intellectual, assembled by its director Jonathan Lee, who believes the time is here for a rediscovery of his ideas.

The result at times approaches screwball comedy. But no, this isn't deliberate comedy. It's essentially realistic. It's simply that the real lives of these figures are funny.

It is also a film of controlled visual style; Kitano's compositions are like arrangements of bodies in space and time. That said, and with all due respect, I expected a better time.

I found In the Land of Blood and Honey to be moving and involving, but somehow reduced by its melodrama to a minor key. The scale of the ages-old evil and religious hatred in the region seemed to make the fates of these particular characters a matter of dramatic convenience.

So what we're seeing here is the emergence of a promising writer-director, an actor and a cinematographer who are all exciting, and have cared to make a film that seeks helpful truths.

The movie is probably ideal for those proverbial young girls who adore cats, and young boys, too. I can't recommend it for adults attending on their own, unless they really, really love cats.

The result is too much formula and not enough human interest.

War Horse is bold, not afraid of sentiment and lets out all the stops in magnificently staged action sequences. Its characters are clearly defined and strongly played by charismatic actors. Its message is a universal one.

Here is one of the most entertaining films in many a moon, a film that charms because of its story, its performances and because of the sly way it plays with being silent and black and white.

It evokes Saturday afternoon serials in an age when most of the audience will never have seen one. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed myself.

Under the direction of David Fincher and with a screenplay by Steven Zaillian. I don't know if it's better or worse. It has a different air.

I enjoyed the film's look and feel, the perfectly modulated performances, and the whole tawdry world of spy and counterspy, which must be among the world's most dispiriting occupations. But I became increasingly aware that I didn't always follow all the allusions and connections. On that level, "Tinker Tailor" didn't work for me.

Using a dialogue-heavy approach that's unusual for Cronenberg, his film is skilled at the way it weaves theory with the inner lives of its characters. We are learning, yet never feel we're being taught.

The film's value is in its portrait of Ruth, and her independence as a solo outsider in a vast, uncaring city.

A terrific thriller with action sequences that function as a kind of action poetry.

Set aside your memories of the Conan Doyle stories, save them to savor on a night this winter and enjoy this movie as a high-caliber entertainment.

Edmon Roch's Garbo the Spy is an engrossing documentary that is itself largely a work of the director's imagination.

A delight on its own terms, even if it has little to do with the real Goethe; here is a randy young man not a million miles apart from Tom Jones.

This profound and immensely touching film in only 75 perfect minutes achieves the profundity of an epic.

I am so very, very tired of movies like this. Does the story line strike you as original? It sounds to me like another slice off the cheesecake of dreck.

New Year's Eve is a dreary plod through the sands of time until finally the last grain has trickled through the hourglass of cinematic sludge. How is it possible to assemble more than two dozen stars in a movie and find nothing interesting for any of them to do?

Patton Oswalt is, in a way, the key to the film's success. Theron is flawless at playing a cringe-inducing monster and Wilson touching as a nice guy who hates to offend her, but the audience needs a point of entry, a character we can identify with, and Oswalt's Matt is human, realistic, sardonic and self-deprecating. He speaks truth to Mavis.

This isn't the kind of movie that even has hope enough to contain a message. There is no message, only the reality of these wounded personalities.

The interlocking stories are theoretically about people whose lives are associated; that worked in "Crash." Here the connections seem less immediate and significant, and so the movie sometimes seems based on a group of separate short stories.