Wang's A Thousand Years of Good Prayers gives the impression of a director reborn, or at least a director who has his mojo back.

As director, Harris takes this classical sense of the western too far, though, until it seems that the movie is carefully trying to keep the genre alive.

A lumbering number that takes its identity as a costume drama quite literally.

This is the loopiest star vehicle in ages.

It's intermittently amusing, and Bening actually gives a performance instead of a star turn, but the claws should have been sharper.

In Moving Midway, Cheshire chronicles not only the history of the move but also of the family members, past and present, who occupied the place, and, most pointedly, the slaves who worked its fields, some of whom turn out to be related.

What he (Ball) intends as knife-edge realism instead comes across as another con job.

August Evening is rambling, diffuse, and at times so "sensitive" it makes your teeth hurt. And yet it's also intermittently quite affecting.

He's a mishmash of cultural opposites, and his motormouth swagger is fitfully amusing. So is his backhand.

It's a giddy nightmare. Nothing is quite what it seems in I Served the King of England, and this is poetically appropriate. The world it depicts is too dangerous and too lovely to classify.

Speaking of Tarantino, who should never be allowed to act under any circumstance, he's cast in a key storytelling role, and it's one indication among many that the whole project is little more than a stunt.

Cheadle's innate goodness is the film's main dilemma, since the truth under the story's surface (which we won't reveal here) can be contained for only so long, and with ever-diminishing dramatic returns.

For all her chops as a dramatic actor, she's our new Judy Holliday and Goldie Hawn, only even sharper.

Not infrequently the movie is as mediocre as its target. The great Steve Coogan movie has yet to be made.

A marvelous documentary that brings home the terror and heroism brought forth by the Katrina debacle.

It's this year's "An Inconvenient Truth."

Wilson is pretty much the whole show. With nobody else around to steal from, he ends up stealing scenes from himself.

The animated characters in "Clone Wars" are about as lively as the actors in the live-action movies, so I guess Lucas has achieved his goal of eliminating humans from his movies altogether.

With all this going for it, Vicky Cristina Barcelona should be better than it is. But there's something intriguing going on here. It's a movie about the sacrifices that people make to be happy.

Although the documentary is something of a patchwork affair and lacks the late singer's ineffable smoothness and rhythmic brilliance, it emphatically makes the case that here was one of the four or five all-time great female jazz voices – or "song stylists," as she called herself.

Some touching moments, but too blandly inspirational.

Biting as it tries to be, Tropic Thunder is mostly toothless. Its targets – Hollywood vanity, Hollywood tantrums – are easy hits.

While this may seem like an apologia for randy older men, it doesn't come off that way, and Cruz gives her best performance to date.

Any movie that opens with the killing of a pet dog is definitely going to capture your attention. But where do you go from there?

Goony, so-so comedy.

The only genuine moments of emotion come not from the lead actresses but from that great trouper Blythe Danner.

There is one bit of good news. For all you abominable snowman fans out there, "The Mummy" is filled with yetis. And, boy, are they ever angry.

Dusted off and brought up to date, it's still the same old Capracorn – minus the populist pizzazz he might have provided.

Melissa Leo is startlingly good...You feel like you're watching a life, not a performance.

Billy Connolly, as a scurvy priest who may or may not be a visionary, steals the acting honors.

Reilly is a good foil for Ferrell, but too many of their scenes together have the effect of improv night at the comedy club.

Like much reality TV, sections of American Teen seem patently staged, or coached, for the camera.

It's a great piece of work in a movie that, whatever its failings, deserves to be seen even if you swear undying allegiance to the BBC mini-series.

Petit, by the way, is still very much alive and spry. I saw him at a screening of the film at the Sundance Film Festival where he spoke to the audience afterwards. On his way up to the podium, he tripped.

This comic-book movie is more disturbing, and has more freakish power, than anything else I've seen all year.

Poor Pierce Brosnan. Sport that he is, he does his level best to be a song-and-dance man but it's just not in him. He's touchingly awful. The same could probably be said for the entire movie.

Why would you take your kids to see Space Chimps, an uninspired animated feature about chimp astronauts, when you could take them instead to see "Wall-E"? And if they've already seen "Wall-E," you're really lowering the bar by venturing into this one.

Hellboy II comes across as an original. But being original is not always the same thing as being wonderful.

It has its modicum of suspense, and Brendon Fraser, who stars as intrepid professor Trevor Anderson – who does indeed journey to the center of the Earth – is his usual heroically affable self.

Eddie Murphy is one of the most alarmingly gifted comic actors America has ever produced but he persists in making comedies that are beneath him.

As an anatomy not only of Polanski's psyche but also of the legal system he confronted, it's as baroquely compelling as "The Dark Knight."

We are treated to all manner of worshipy recollections from a stable of Thompson's admirers, including, believe it or not, Patrick Buchanan and James Baker. Who said gonzo politics doesn't make for strange bedfellows?

Kingsley is amusing to watch, however, even though he overdoses on strangeness. He's like a superannuated hippie crossed with the swami he just played in "The Love Guru."

What begins as a pretty good comedy devolves rapidly into a high-flown example of Hollywood messagemongering.

Canet has a good feeling for lowlife atmosphere and he works up a few fine Hitchcockian twirls. Kristin Scott Thomas and Nathalie Baye round out the sleek cast.

The story line for WALL-E is probably too convoluted for small kids, and sometimes it suffers from techie overload, but it's more heartfelt than anything on the screens these days featuring humans.

Violence in the movies, no matter how many CGI effects are utilized, can't help but be far more luridly realistic. And, in the case of Wanted, to what end?

Decorous to a fault, in the manner of middling Eric Rohmer talkfests, it's a film that could use some shaking up.

Family home movies and photos and archival clips round out the film, which holds its hero-worshiping to fairly tolerable levels.

At least we have Alan Arkin playing the head of CONTROL. His drone and deadpan are a perfect complement to Carell's. But please, pretty please, let's not go for a sequel on this one, OK?

What links all these characters is Myers's gift for antic, elfin burlesque. He's like a second-best Peter Sellers.

Preteen girls – and not just those who are already American Girl fanatics – should be entranced. And why not? Not many movies for that audience are as respectful as is this one.

For most of the movie, we feel as trapped as she does, and the lurching narrative seems anything but novelistic.

Jenkins has an admirable feeling for, as the French would say, mise en scène, and a gift for placing actors in naturalistic settings. What he lacks at this point is a strong story sense.

Even in a misfire like The Happening, Shyamalan has a fine feeling for dread. He knows how to creep you out. But he has a tin ear for acting.

Do we really need another Hulk movie? I was one of the few critics who actually liked Ang Lee's 2003 "Hulk," but it didn't exactly ring the cash registers or clamor for a continuation.

If you were a fan of David Cronenberg's "Crash," based on J.G. Ballard's book about people who get sexually excited by auto accidents, you might just be the target audience for Quid Pro Quo, a perverse psychological drama.

A supremely cranky and lyrical feat.

The animation is consistently sporty and there are some choice comic riffs on martial arts movies.

As hig concepts go, You Don't Mess With the Zohan" takes the cake.

Mongol is a throwback to a more respectable tradition. The largeness of its scope arises naturally from the material, not the budget. The movie earns its stature.

The film's parallels between Mohmed's travails and the Iraq war are forced, but overall this is a fascinating odyssey that never plays out in ways you would expect.

The film includes graphic omnisexual and incestuous couplings and has an air of free-floating dread but, especially given its subject matter, it's oddly vacuous – it rarely takes hold emotionally even when its people hit bottom with a resounding thud.

At times, the movie resembled nothing so much as Kabuki with Cosmos.

Sometimes, dear reader, there's no place like home, and that's just where you should be when this gorefest opens at a theater near you.

Rappoport is a powerhouse performer but the movie is an unstable concoction of political melodrama, film noir, and weepie.

It radiates intelligence. Of how many historical epics can that be said these days?

It's a bewildering mix of very smart and very dumb, but the cast, which also features a hilarious Joan Cusack, Ben Kingsley, Marisa Tomei, Dan Aykroyd as the Cheney-esque ex-vice president, and Hilary Duff as a Turaqistan airhead pop star, is tiptop.

Crystal Skull is a fun ride, but if we have to wait 19 years for the next one, that's OK by me.

Intermittently powerful drama explores a cross-cultural estrangement.

Next time out, more dwarfs, more Aslan, and definitely more Reepicheep.

Clear away the annoying avant-gardism and you have a powerful movie about a writer, Phillip, who undergoes a mental breakdown and is pulled halfway back to health by his girlfriend.

So hyperfrenetic that, in the end, you wonder if the Wachowskis aren't trying to pull off an elaborate hoax – a deranged techno fantasia posing as retro-ish family fare.

Some of the set pieces are ravishing, more often they're ravishingly clunky.

The black comedy Noise may be a one-joke movie but it's a resonant one.

It's all a bit like "Girl Interrupted" shattered into a thousand shards, but Page somehow manages to come through with a performance despite the director's distracting technique.

Turn the River becomes a standard fatalistic misfits-on-the-run movie with more than its share of improbabilities. It's as if Eigeman didn't realize how good the best parts of his film were, and so went ahead and trashed them.

What Happens in Vegas is not only annoying, it's also incompetent – a bad mix.

I suppose it's asking too much for a great actor to be matched up with a great director on a project like this. On the other hand, there's always the sequel.

The only surprise to me about this movie is that there no jokes about kilts – a serious omission in an otherwise entirely predictable farce.

David Mamet and jujitsu come together in Redbelt, and the result is a draw.

My only regret is that the film could not somehow take a leap forward to 1988. I would love to have seen what Lee and Will could do with "Die Hard."

Poehler is the life of the party and steals just about every scene, although there's not much to steal.

It exploits post-9/11 anxieties as fodder for goofball gooniness. "Dr. Strangelove" it's not.

Lelouch means to transcend the genre. He doesn't really move much beyond his usual glib panache here, but the plot is intriguing and so are the actors.

At this late date there is little that is factually revelatory about his film, but as a human document of what people are capable of in wartime, it's indispensable.

This business of the 88 minutes ticking away is a pale imitation of the old "High Noon" ploy of playing out suspense in real time. After a while, though, I began to take a perverse pleasure in wallowing in the awfulness of it all.

Ultimately, forgettable, but for most of the way it's a pleasant little vacation of a movie.

Director Vadim Perelman is big on slo-mo lyrical effects and confusing time shifts, making the movie unnecessarily arty and detracting from what could have been a searing psychological study.

Everywhere he goes he asks if anybody knows bin Laden's whereabouts – as if anybody is going to tell him! Why should we accompany him on his self-aggrandizing trip?

Chen Shi-Zheng, well regarded as an opera and theater director, makes his feature film debut.

Quaid and Church are funny, but too much of this film is not half as smart as it thinks it is.

McCarthy is so careful not to take a political stand that his film seems neutered by good intentions. In the spirit of squishy humanism, he soft-pedals a hard-hitting topic.

A tribute to the therapeutic powers of musicmaking and choral camaraderie.

Too much of this film is attenuated and vague, but it has moments of deep melancholy.

It's a pleasant time-killer, nothing more. But nothing less, either.

The Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai has an undeservedly high reputation as a master stylist. He's more like a master window dresser.

Shine A Light is essentially just an expertly made concert film. But what a concert! (And what a camera team.)