What may have started out as a comedy devolves into quasi-Stephen King territory.

De Niro, trying his ordinary-guy best not to be mannered, gives one of his most mannered performances.

The Last Station isn’t all that it should be, but whenever these two actors are onscreen, it’s like a great night at the theater.

By turns antic, frantic, and dull, "Pippa Lee" is unconvincing – emotionally, dramatically, filmically.

The novelist Cormac McCarthy was served well by the Coen Brothers' adaptation of his novel "No Country for Old Men" but comes a cropper in The Road, a lugubrious trek through postapocalyptic debris.

One of the sweetest and most heartfelt movies ever made about a life in the theater.

It probably won't make a jot of difference to all the screaming tweeners lining up to see this movie, but The Twilight Saga: New Moon is not wonderful.

Best performance, minute for minute, comes from Adriane Lenox, whose cameo as Michael's drug-addled mother is the film's standout.

The marvel of Cage's performance is that, somehow, it's all of a piece. That's the marvel of the movie, too. This is one fever dream you'll remember whole.

During vast sections of Broken Embraces, I wished I was watching the actual old-time noirs instead of the miasmic concoction that Almodóvar has made from them.

It occurred to me that Emmerich and Co. might be playing this whole thing for laughs. It probably occurred to them, too.

Has its pleasures, foremost being its look – a sophisticated puppet primitivism backdropped by near-psychedelic colorations.

Captures the fear factor in the lives of these men without turning them into the usual home front head cases.

The best of it has the comradely, free-swinging bawdiness of Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H."

It melodramatizes everything and yet its overall effect is something more than melodrama.

Zemeckis tries to juice things up by staging numerous chase scenes up and around London, but do we really need "A Christmas Carol: The Action Picture"?

By bringing the story into Iraq, Grant Heslov courts tastelessness. Gooniness and Gitmo don't mix.

Inherently dramatic but needed a stronger director than Anthony Fabian, who overdoes understatement.

Heartbreaking, exhilarating, baffling. In other words, it expresses the performer's persona in its purest form.

Perhaps Nair believes that heroism in our tabloid era has become degraded. If so, she overcorrected. Amelia is so pure in heart that it slides right off the screen.

Allegorical in the worst ways, Antichrist is about as profound as a slasher movie.

Uma Thurman looks frumpy in Motherhood. This is the only pressing reason to see it.

A lumpy admixture of politics and carnality, but when it all comes together, it has a lingering force.

There are some great, rapturous moments in Where the Wild Things Are. Jonze is humbled before the wonders of a child's imagination, and so are we.

As it is, The Maid is a study of a character who rarely emerges from the opaque end of the spectrum.

Doesn't evoke New York and its vignettes are trite – with one exception, a touching sequence directed by Mira Nair with Natalie Portman as a Hasidic bride and Irrfan Khan as a Jain diamond merchant.

It's the audience for this film that will require therapy.

Bracingly perceptive about the human comedy.

Sheen is startlingly good here, and so is Timothy Spall as Clough's trusted and much abused lieutenant.

Shulman was around so long that he even got to weigh in on Frank Gehry's Disney Hall. He was skeptical once but came to love it.

It's a strange, one-of-a-kind film that was to be Benacarraf's only full-length feature.

What have the Yes Men actually accomplished with their japery? Their film is an inadvertent reminder that activist antics are not the same thing as reform.

The derby sequences are just OK, and the conflict between Bliss and her uncomprehending parents, played by Marcia Gay Harden and (a fine) Daniel Stern, is so predictable that you wish someone had rolled onto the set to whip it into shape.

I wish Fontaine would follow up with a sequel: "Coco After Chanel." Tautou's performance cries out for a second act.

The real love story here is between Moore and his bullhorn.

Damon is an agile comic performer, and Soderbergh knows how to serve him up without losing sight of the ultimate seriousness behind it all.

The new film Paris by writer-director Cédric Klapisch was originally supposed to carry the subtitle "An Ephemeral Portrait of an Eternal City." That kind of sums it up.

As fiercely unsentimental as Disgrace is, it offers by the end a measure of hope, and because that hope is so hard-won, it has the ring of truth.

For a movie so sensuously mounted, it's remarkably grounded.

Ellsberg, his full-scale personal trajectory laid bare, emerges as a more complex man than both the right and the left have generally given him credit for.

It all seems like a stunt, especially since Beaven has also written a just-published book about his experiences, but he and Conlin are an engaging pair who don't let zealotry get in the way of humor.

Judge still comes up with enough laughs to deserve our attention. He is helped more than a little by hilarious work from supporting players Kristen Wiig, David Koechner, J.K. Simmons, and Dustin Milligan.

You could argue, I suppose, that this film, a Sundance hit, is essentially a funny sketch padded out to feature length. And what of it, my man?

Oswalt captures the rabidness of the die-hard fan, the kind you can hear at any moment on the sports talk shows.

Cloud 9 may not be my idea of a great movie, but it doesn't pretend that old folks are, by definition, sexless. In the movie business, this qualifies as a revolution.

Lee has always had an affinity for innocence and an abiding affection for outcasts, and both traits serve him well in Taking Woodstock -- but only up to a point. Beyond that point, where sanctification meets reality, the film floats up, up, and away.

No one else in Inglourious Basterds comes close to Landa for sheer charisma.

It leaves us with a question that may be unanswerable: How does one extinguish terrorism when its causes are myriad?

At around the halfway point the film takes an intriguing swerve, as Kyle is canonized and Lance is unexpectedly launched into celebrityhood. Flashes of deadpan outrageousness occasionally redeem the dourness.

The film pays off in the end when, almost imperceptibly, the rush of emotions it stirs in us rises to a soft crescendo.

The disjointedness of The Headless Woman might be the result of narrative complexity or of directorial ineptitude or (my favorite) of narrative complexity mangled by directorial ineptitude. If the residual fog ever clears, maybe I'll be able to tell you for sure.

The ad campaign for the sci-fi thriller District 9, with mysterious billboards touting aliens among us, is highly creative and amusing. So, in patches, is the movie, which is a thinking man's, or man-boy's, "Transformers."

A marvel.

They miss by a mile – or should I say, a light-year.

Each man has his own distinctive style, and yet when they jam together it sounds like the most natural thing in the world.

Devotees of the "Whole Earth Catalogue" may regard this film as a nostalgia trip, but it's much more comprehensive, more forward-looking than that.

There are many things wrong with Julie and Julia but, if you're looking to get hitched, you won't find a better booster.

It's all kind of silly and amorphous, but the scenes between Yi and Cera, whether or not they were scripted, have a babes-in-the-wood loveliness.

He's (Giamatti) terrific throughout, although the movie, which is more clever than funny, sometimes resembles second-tier Charlie Kaufman stuff.

Not quite funny enough, or serious enough, falls into the muddle middle.

A pretty good example of the kind of movie Hollywood used to turn out by the yard.

By Dardenne standards this plot is pretty pulpy and unconvincing, but I rather enjoyed watching them attempt to twist it into an existentialist pretzel.

What the film is saying, so far as I can tell, is that, if cut, you will bleed. And bleed. As the vampire's kindred Seven Deadly Sinner, wild-haired Kim Ok-vin looks like she's having a high old time.

A highly calculated attempt to recalibrate with raunch the family entertainment template and cash in.

A promising premise and some very good actors are smothered in goo in The Answer Man.

Hands down the funniest movie I've seen all year and also the smartest.

Because we know almost from the get-go that things will turn out bad-to-bittersweet for them, the movie is like one long autopsy of what went wrong, starting with Day No. 488.

Anonyma stands out in A Woman in Berlin not only because of her ragged nobility but also because, alas, Färberböck has surrounded her with a gaggle of Berliners who seem right out of Central Casting.

There's something inherently funny about the romantic predicament of Harry and Ron and Hermione. As if it wasn't bad enough having to deal with the Dark Lord and the Death Eaters and all the rest, now they have to square off against... raging hormones.

Has some smart flashes, and a few of the young performers resemble real people and not the usual prefab teen idols.

There's good bad taste and then there's just plain bad bad, which is what describes most of Brüno.

Levy-Hinte has said that a great deal more concert footage exists. I can't wait for the expanded version DVD.

In Aviva Kempner's affectionate documentary Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, Berg, who once polled second only to Eleanor Roosevelt as one of America's most respected females, is given her due. Or at least her showbiz due.

Sometimes a film is best utilized as a travelogue. Such is the case with the comedy-drama The Girl From Monaco, which isn't much of a movie but offers scrumptious views.

Could have used a lot more grit. Without it, we're left with a crime movie fantasia that slips all too easily into the ether.

The sheer sensuousness of all these bric-a-brac memories is sustaining.

A high-class weepie for adults who disdain the lower forms of four-hankiedom.

Renner gives a full-bore performance of great individuality and industriousness, but essentially his character is as glamorized as any classic Westerner.

Judging from this film, a pop cultural resurgence in Afghanistan seems ultimately unstoppable, even with a resurgent Taliban, if for no other reason than that 60 percent of the population is under 21. Also, this is a country, as we see again and again, that loves to sing.

Plenty of terrible movies know how to work your tear ducts. Here's a weepie that, in Pfeiffer's performance, touches you on the highest levels.

An impossibly, incomprehensibly overlong and cacophonous bore.

The people who made Year One seem to think that all you have to do to make a hit comedy is get a bunch of jokesters together. But where are the jokes?

Monumentally unromantic.

Despite everything, many of us still think of animation as a kid's genre. $9.99, based on stories by Etgar Keret who also co-wrote the script with the director, is an attempt to use the animation medium to express an entirely adult sensibility.

Whereas the original, directed by Joseph Sargent, was essentially a well-oiled B movie, the new incarnation, directed by Tony ("Enemy of the State") Scott, is bristling with high-tech gimcrackery and over-the-top camera flourishes.

It just may be the most boring movie ever made – period.

Although his movie often resembles the kind of promotional video one might find as an extra on a concert DVD, N'Dour in full throttle is a sight, and sound, to behold.

An inchoate mass of half-baked (and sometimes blackened) Oedipal dramaturgy. Coppola has made some of the greatest films ever made in traditional narrative mode, but whenever he goes into his indie-outsider dance, he stumbles badly.

As a laughing-through-tears jokester tourist, Richard Dreyfuss provides the only moments of real acting, as opposed to overacting, mugging, and scenery chomping.

The film's one extraordinary aspect, which makes it well worth seeing despite its carefully coiffed shagginess, is Maya Rudolph's performance.

It's all so resolutely uninspired that even the kids in the audience may want to duck out.

The scene is so emotionally ravishing that it breaks you apart. The peacefulness that finally descends on Séraphine in the film's final moments is more than a balm. It's a benediction.

As a piece of poetic compression, it ranks with the opening of Orson Welles's "The Magnificent Ambersons."

Departures is sappy and wacky – not the best combination.

Being touted as the first film ever shot in the Smithsonian complex. With any luck, it will also be the last. This is not the best use of our landmarks.

Easy Virtue has aspirations to be much more than a comedy. It wants to flay, if only with a penknife, the entire British class system.

A couple of scenes directly reference the Iraq war and the Holocaust (where the humans are herded into cattle cars), and this is taking things much too seriously. This is a big blow-'em-up franchise movie. It should not under any circumstances be confused with a Statement.

An OK action film, but only the humorless will find it heretical – or educational.