Native Chicagoan Vaughn remains enigmatic, protected from the camera’s more candid intrusion. But you get a sense of his deep values, virtuous instincts and quiet love of ordinary people.

Under normal circumstances, too many comics spoil the show.

The film itself, while charming and gently funny, is entirely unexceptional.

The most vivid aspect of The Eye is its poster image, that of a huge female eye with a human hand gripping the lower lid from the inside. The least vivid aspect is the way Jessica Alba delivers a simple line of expository dialogue.

The slapstick is crudely executed. And the movie never makes up its mind regarding how nasty the ghost of Kate is going to play her revenge tactics.

Trachtman says she made the film to illustrate the plight of disabled Americans who must contend with houses of worship that lack handicapped access, but her documentary itself isn’t always so sensitive.

The Witnesses may be schematic, but it lets each character live and breathe. The film captures a time and place that seems very distant now.

Mainly it’s a very solid dance picture, which is the point.

The latest, Untraceable, owes everything to “Lambs,” and to “Se7en,” and to all the “Lambs” and “Se7en” knockoffs made by directors less talented than Jonathan Demme and David Fincher. In addition to being dull, the Portland, Ore. -set Untraceable is a monster hypocrite, wagging its finger at the mass audience’s appetite for strictly regimented, “creative” torture scenarios.

The result is a mixture of unified atmosphere and lived-in character study, and while Vasiliu’s role is not as indelible as that of her co-stars, Marinca’s Otilia and Ivanov’s steely abortionist are just about perfect.

The neatest effects in U2 3D are simple ones. The wow/coolness of watching a revered superstar tilt his mic stand toward the camera creates a simple but irresistible feeling of being there in the flesh, with a phalanx of expensive digital 3-D cameras.

Teeth is about female exploitation and male castration.

Allen is obsessed with the notion of getting away with murder, mulling over which personalities can shoulder the psychological burden of killing without remorse, while others crumble under the pressure. The problem is, you don’t feel the human sweat and strain in Cassandra’s Dream, despite game work from Farrell and McGregor.

It’s dumb but quick and dirty and effectively brusque, dispensing with niceties such as character.

Diane Keaton--now there’s a trouper for you. She will not be caught giving less than 110 percent, even in a drab little heist comedy.

The first great film of the year. It’s beautiful but so much more—full of subtle feeling, framed by a monstrous, eroding landscape.

The eerily precise Heigl, who provided confident back-court support as the exile in Guyville also known as “Knocked Up,” has no trouble filling a leading lady’s shoes. She’s just snarky enough to be interesting, and she knows how to take a fall.

An invaluable document, both for its hard questions and for the sickeningly unflinching interviews that provide the answers.

The movie’s total lack of focus and its unimpressive script should render it totally unwatchable. Weirdly, that doesn’t quite happen. There’s something endearing about these characters.

While director Eric Valette provides the occasional chill, the disturbing spooks aren't enough to make this boat float. Burns sleepwalks through One Missed Call totally devoid of charisma, and Sossamon muddles along, going through the motions.

Typical of a pretty good Sayles movie. There are few, if any, heroes and villains.

As in “Pan’s Labyrinth,” The Orphanage relies on a risky blend of clinically realistic horrors and poetic suggestions of an alternate world, one that can be visited, but at a price.

Day-Lewis... the role of a lifetime.

A manipulative look at dying with dignity and a lame yarn about as realistic as the fantasy in “The Princess Bride.”

Good story, well told. Interesting concept. I wonder if people will go for it.

Without significantly changing the books’ content, they bring in a wealth of emotional tones--particularly a playful, wry humor.

First, a few things The Water Horse is not: revolutionary, controversial or challenging. What it is: a sweet, familiar story, beautifully filmed and lovingly told.

It is well made as far as it goes. I wish it went beyond its own carefully prescribed limits of the commercially acceptable.

All you want from a movie like this, really, is a little brainless fun, and it keeps holding out on you. Everyone looks fatigued. Even Cage’s toupee seems ambivalent about having signed on for a sequel.

One of the most gifted dramatic actors working in movies today, Swank is stunningly ill suited for romantic comedy (or this one, anyway).

Sweeney Todd may haunt you in ways you’re not used to with a movie musical. At least not since “Mame.”

The tunes are so good, you can’t believe the film itself doesn’t amount to more, especially with the rightness of the casting. Still, a few laughs are better than none.

Steep is one of those rare endeavors able to touch on the human condition without neglecting the film’s true star: big-mountain skiing.

So it’s one of those Hip, Now updates, albeit with jokes riffing on pop-cult artifacts that are already Then. I mean: “Jerry Maguire”? Moratorium!

Smith carries it, even after the story loses its nerve. This film is the opposite of “Transformers”: It’s all about the unsettling silence, not the noise.

While not autobiographical, The Kite Runner feels authentic in its ethnic tensions, even when the narrative itself, with its handily reappearing and easily avenged villain, undermines that authenticity.

The performances feel natural, improvised, and it’s easy to believe this is the world we inhabit. But if Rifkin’s message is pro-privacy, his script, laced throughout with menace, argues against it.

Too much of the film is a muddle, and it feels like work, not play.

Strives to be nothing more than easygoing and heartwarming.

Whatever the numbers, testimony cited in Nanking portrays the episode as a horrifying chapter in man’s renowned inhumanity to man.

Hampton and Wright have been more than sensible when it comes to Atonement. They’ve responded intuitively to a tale that is half art and half potboiler, like so many stories worth telling.

It’s pure introductory adventure, meant to immerse readers in Pullman’s richly complicated fantasy universe.

By salvaging a troubled script with deep, committed, touching portrayals, Plummer and Walsh help prove Schroeder’s points about how Hollywood isn’t just the province of the rich, young and pretty.

It’s a close call, but Grace is Gone is worth seeing for the way John Cusack works with Shelan O’Keefe and Gracie Bednarczyk, two of the least affected and most affecting young actors to hit the screen this year.

Part gambling heist, part graphic novel, part metaphysical mumbo jumbo, Revolver is a mess of many colors, few of them satisfying.

Ellen Page is key to its success, as much as Cody, or director Jason Reitman.

It is wonderful: a rhapsodic adaptation of a memoir, a visual marvel that wraps its subject in screen romanticism without romanticizing his affliction. It left me feeling euphoric.

All four stories are worthwhile, though together they’re an awful lot for one modest doc to cover. Yu’s integration of cinematic and theatrical elements is uneven, and a bit stiff.

A bracingly honest, funny movie about death and family that skillfully sidesteps the usual pitfalls of sentimentality and mawkishness. It’s what you might call an awards season miracle.

Because the characters are richly realized and their dialogue rings true, we stick around, rooting for something like a happy ending.

It’s an unabashed feel-good weeper, and those eager for that type of fare might as well settle for this one. But an equal number will be put off by the bad dialogue, transparent manipulation and saccharine overkill.

Through good scenes and derivative ones, Adams is disarming.

Here’s all you really need to know before the opening credits roll in Hitman: There’s going to be a lot of bloodshed. And that’s a good thing, considering there isn’t much dialogue to carry the film.

I appreciate Haynes’ craft and ambition. I love the Ledger/Gainsbourg scenes, which are sweet and sad and delicately shaded. And Blanchett’s inspired not-quite-impersonation of Dylan is reason enough to tussle with the rest of it.

Good and creepy, The Mist comes from a Stephen King novella and is more the shape, size and quality of the recent “1408,” likewise taken from a King story, than anything in the persistently fashionable charnel house inhabited by the “Saw” and “Hostel” franchises.

Overstuffed, formulaic but very easy to take.

Beowulf is all right as far as it goes, and it goes pretty far for a PG-13 rating: Dismemberment, “300”-style blood globules comin’ atcha, and a digitally futzed and, for all practical purposes, completely naked!!!

It’s a wickedly effective indictment of America’s consumer compulsion, our mindless shopping and the multinational corporations controlling it all.

Baumbach’s achievement stings. It also has the sureness of tone and direction of a Chekhov story.

Twenty or 30 minutes into Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium the urge to flee may rise within you like an oceanic tide. But stick with it. The film is very sweet--in fact it represents the dawn of a new sport, Extreme Whimsy.

Like so many of his movies, Redacted is difficult to watch but queasily fascinating.

Newell has done some fine work in all sorts of genres, from “Four Weddings and a Funeral” to “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” but in “Cholera” he seems to be chronicling a half-century of events, passions and desires as a tourist, not a native.

To be clear: The odds are in favor of you hating it. I hated a lot of it when I saw a barely dry work-in-progress print, 163 minutes long, at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s 19 minutes shorter and better now, though “better” is relative when you’re dealing with a whatzahoozy such as this.

Fred Claus seems a clever installment, not a seasonal classic, a buffet whose many nibbles you sample, move on and quickly forget.

Director Barry Poltermann’s sweet little evocation of a show business career captures Reilly at “the twilight of an extraordinary life,” in Reilly’s words.

This is the sort of film where a character says “Here we are, having a high-minded debate ...” and you wonder if countless moviegoers will be rolling their eyes in unison.

Shot in the same style as “Spinal Tap,” Electric Apricot fails to wow in every way possible, but the music disappoints the most.

As pure craftsmanship, No Country for Old Men is as good as we’ve ever gotten from Joel and Ethan Coen. Only “Fargo” is more satisfying (it’s also a comedy, which this one isn’t).

The lighting is appropriately dim, the music is reasonably clever, and they get in a few nice scares in the beginning. But as the movie wears on and Angela’s desperation grows, any glimmer of fun seeps away. And we’re left watching the same old grim game of cat and mouse.

It’s a big, juicy 1970s period piece, one foot in real life, the other in the movies, the preferred stance of many Hollywood crime sagas.

Much of this wordplay is clever, though there’s something off with the plotting.

This is the kind of film that doesn’t end after the credits roll, and it’s a gold-star example for what a documentary should do: inspire.

Its moving narrative requires little in the way of embellishment, but Temple’s documentary sometimes becomes too clever for its own good.

The film plot about the needy kid who redeems a male loner has been done to death, and on the surface, Martian Child just looks like another entry in the genre, a close follower to “About A Boy.”

Probably ranks as one of the most frightening shark movies ever---but sharks are the victims.

What you’re left with, finally, is the pleasure of a wily director’s company. In much the same way John Huston defied convention and predictability in the third act of his directorial career, with films as odd and fresh as “Wise Blood” and “Prizzi’s Honor,” Lumet is doing the same, right now.

The melodrama and cheap theatrics of the story’s off-center segments drag the whole thing down.

As a director Hedges is smart enough to allow his actors to share the frame and interact and let the material breathe.

Carter comes off as compassionate and intelligent. But the complex issues brought up in his book don’t get much more than a superficial debate.

Starts strong but eventually collapses under its weighty sense of responsibility.

All the astute acting in the world can’t bring such a preposterous story into the station on time and intact.

As interesting, certainly, as “American Gangster,” and operating with a truer street sense of the characters involved.

Bold, experimental, off-the-wall kicky and utterly exasperating.

Nearly two hours long, 30 Days of Night makes you feel the cold (though it was shot in New Zealand) and feel the fangs, but it also makes you feel like 30 days is a pretty long time.

The film is reasonably effective all the same, though Affleck has yet to learn how to conduct each scene like a musical score, paying attention to matters of tempo and dynamics.

In Rendition Gyllenhaal is supposed to be the smartest one in the room, yet he’s essentially just a good-looking plodder. And despite its whirligig story machinations, so is Rendition.

The best efforts of the performers cannot authenticate a plot that no longer feels inevitable. It feels contrived. And the audience stays at a remove instead of entering someone else’s nightmare.

Things We Lost in the Fire finds Bier at an interesting juncture, half-Dogmatic, half traditionalist.

Quite a bit darker than most mainstream romantic comedies. As you might not expect, it’s also quite a bit more inventive and far wittier than most mainstream romantic comedies.

While no doubt a contribution in terms of historical record, the 2003-2004 timeline of the movie makes it feel out of date. This offers perspective on the insurgents then, but leaves the viewer wondering what they would be thinking and saying four years later.

For those who recall those old Classics Illustrated comics of the 1940s and ’50s--and even for those who don’t--there’s an endearing, earnest quality to The Ten Commandments that transcends its star-studded cast and computer-generated animation.

As a pocket history of the battles over Jerusalem in the ’40s, O Jerusalem is serviceable enough. But all the melodrama cheapens the real drama, and turns a war-torn region into a soap-opera stage.

Canvas is a thoughtful, sweet film that handles its difficult topic--schizophrenia--with tact and tenderness.

It is a silly film about serious matters.

Viewers who don’t flee the intrusively uplifting soundtrack and choking sentiment get just what that opening promised: a by-the-numbers, based-in-reality inspirational sports movie, thick with overwhelming pride and nostalgia for small-town farmland America.

It’s slow--make that very slow--and the final half hour or so is mystifying and tedious. But it gorgeously recalls Fellini and “Koyaanisqatsi” and hauntingly pits ancient tradition against science, oppression and industrial rot.

I find Lars and the Real Girl adorable in the worst way, bailed out only by most every member of its excellent cast.

Caine and Law may not be playing human beings, but Pinter’s sense of humor is at least more interesting than Shaffer’s. Caine in particular appears to enjoy honing his cold-eyed stare.