The movie is best when it just riffs on our compacted memories of the past 18 years of episodes. Fortunately, that's most of the time.

The best reason to see this documentary is for the stunning shots of polar bears and walruses in the Arctic Circle. If the filmmakers had just left it at that, they would have accomplished a lot.

Though much blood is shed, the film is bloodless.

A feel-good musical that, for a change, actually makes you feel good.

Comedy that seems designed to be as bad as it can be.

Too much of Sunshine is like a cross between a middling "Alien" movie and "Solaris" (the woozy Steven Soderbergh version).

The back-and-forth between the performers is tensely choreographed, and Buscemi does a good job opening up the action, which mostly takes place in a Manhattan loft.

Patrice Leconte has directed excellent serious films such as "Monsieur Hire" and "Man on the Train," but when it comes to humor he loses his bearings. His latest attempt at seriocomedy, My Best Friend, is a premise in search of a film.

Whatever brought Greene down was far more complex than this film allows for.

Harry comes through loud and clear as a conflicted, edgy, avid young man. He's turned into EveryTeen.

First-time director and co-writer George Ratliff skirts, but never quite crosses, the line into absurdity.

Although nothing beats seeing and hearing the real story, Herzog has done a fairly compelling job of blending staged action with docudrama authenticity.

Just about everything connected to this movie is a tie-in, except for the popcorn. And even then I'm not too sure.

A sham.

Barring a middle-class revolt, it's extremely unlikely that, whatever its virtues, universal healthcare could ever take hold in America. Still, I'm glad Moore made his film.

As was also true of Pixar's last movie, "Cars," Ratatouille is better at pleasing the eye than the other senses.

The performances, especially by Hugh Dancy as a sexually confused rich kid, are overwrought, and the script, which Michael Cunningham ("The Hours") wrote in collaboration with Minot, is slack.

Easily the best in the series since the first one.

The film is a so-so slog through a torrent of tired jokes.

Stunning.

A pleasantly disposable romantic comedy starring the once and future indie-queen Parker Posey.

The acting is fine -- and so is the moody-blues direction -- but, given the subject matter, the movie should be blacker and more disturbing.

As summer franchise superhero flicks go, it's tolerable.

Emma Roberts is squeaky-clean to a fault and so is the movie.

What rescues Eagle vs. Shark is its focus on Lily. Although Horsley overdoes the winsomeness, she is genuinely appealing. Love erases Lily's geekiness and in its place stands an attractive young woman.

It's all a lot closer to melodrama than drama, but Thalbach is a dynamo.

The most enjoyable thing about the "Ocean's" movies is that nobody involved seems to take them seriously. The star wattage is immense but the stars themselves are refreshingly self-deprecating, almost satirically so.

La Vie en Rose elevates Piaf the archetype over Piaf the artist. Although I question this approach, I'm not sure it could have been done any differently, at least given the facts of Piaf's life. If there is such a way, Duhan didn't find it.

Complexly intriguing documentary about psychedelic rock icon Roky Erickson.

Sweep aside the gross-outs and you've got the family values comedy of the year.

One dramatic ploy that doesn't work is the casting of Demi Moore as Tracy Edward, a homicide detective intent on capturing the Thumbprint Killer. Moore gave a rare good performance as the washed up diva in "Bobby," but her stridency here is grating.

Dan Klores's astonishing film is about a subject so bizarre it could only work as a documentary – as a drama, it would be dismissed as being too far-fetched.

If you have claustrophobia and/or fear insects, the last film you should see is Bug. I'm not sure it's worth a trip even if you don't suffer from those maladies.

Depp and Rush are still in there plugging away. They’re troupers, but the series is all used up. If there is to be another sequel it will have to be called "Pirates of the Caribbean – At Wit's End."

Draggy Italian epic that's big on production values but skimpy on inspiration.

The law of diminishing returns is no more apparent than in the movie world. A sequel, with rare exceptions, is worse than the film it follows, and sequels of sequels fare even worse. Such is the case with Shrek the Third.

Hartley is very adept with actors, though – or at least some of them. Posey, for her part, displays a pert quizzical quality that's very charming and very funny. And Goldblum is tailor-made for Hartley's minimalist patter.

As the gambler who needs his basketball phenom brother to shave points, Whitaker has some expressive scenes, and Roth knows how to make malice gleam. But almost nothing else in this movie does.

The film drags a bit and Irglova's inexperience as an actor sometimes leaves her costars in the lurch. But it's a sweet little film just the same.

The ending is a set-up for yet another sequel: Can "28 Months Later" be very far away?

There's enough family dysfunction here to fill out a dozen soppy soap operas.

Kazi is a bundle of energy, and the film touches on an important and often-overlooked issue: The commercial pressure that is often brought to bear on rappers to be scurrilous and offensive. This project, which was produced by Bruce Willis and Queen Latifah, shows that there is another way.

Following the shows from rehearsals to Tony Awards night, she gets behind the scenes and does a good job conveying the incessant anxieties and glee of the talents involved.

At its best it's refreshingly offhanded. It's a hit-and-miss movie that's worth seeing for the hits.

Given the subject, the movie is too romanticized, and Christie's eyes remain too sharp here to convincingly convey someone whose memory is fast slipping away. Much of it is powerful anyway.

Far from a flop, and I'm sure the Spider-maniacs will eat it up. For me, it's a buffet without much aftertaste.

The best episodes have the emotional resonance of full-length features, and yet I didn't want them to be a moment longer than they are.

The film is laced with lovely moments, from the leads and from Shelly as a waitress friend.

Writer-director Ray Lawrence, well regarded for his two previous films, "Bliss" and "Lantana," expands Carver's work into an indictment of colonialism and an examination of the chasm that supposedly exists between men and women over matters of the heart.

Overall, Diggers is like an Ed Burns movie -- but with fishing gear.

Four university students band together under the obnoxious mentorship of Andre (Thibault Vinçon), who is meant to be brilliant but, to me at least, seemed all too obviously a poseur. His betrayal of his friends deepens the movie.

In addition to the marvelous lead cast, all sorts of funny performers show up in cameo roles, including Steve Coogan, Bill Nighy, and Timothy Dalton.

This ghastly swatch of pulp horror is compelling at the most basic level, but so little is going on in it that you might as well be watching a sadistic lab experiment performed on mice.

The plot's many complications pretty much all add up, which is a rarity these days for a murder mystery. It's possible that audiences don't even care anymore if a film makes sense as long it's entertaining.

Soppy, schematic weepie.

Braugher perhaps overvalues the parallels between Stephanie and Lydie. The scenario is too schematic and diminishes the power of each woman's story. She frames the drama as a cross between a whodunit and a whydunit, and neither strategy is entirely successful.

This is a startlingly funny portrait of Gothic Americana.

Perfect Stranger is far from Hitchcock, and Berry, although she gets an A for effort, can't do much with the half-baked characterizations.

Travolta gives a hangdog performance as the world-weary cop obsessed with rooting out the killers. Hayek and Leto share a few tart black comic moments as the film spirals into a bloodbath.

The conceit of the movie is that everyone is obsessed by something and never really tunes into anybody else.

The bloody wrap-up isn't handled especially well, and I must confess that the most shocking thing about the movie was the casting of Carrie-Anne Moss as a suburban mom. I kept expecting her "Matrix" skills to show up in the final reel.

In all, it's a fun exercise in nostalgia but a three-hour homage to grade Z movies is a long sit. Grunge overload sets in early.

Hallström conveys a bit of the circuslike atmosphere of the times. But he overreaches in trying to turn the film into a commentary on the politically corrupt 1970s.

The action is nonstop and often harrowing and well staged. But van Houten, while a charmer, doesn't adequately convey the disgust (and connivance) that her character would inevitably feel in such a situation.

The timing is slack and the jokes repetitive. But, like most Will Ferrell movies, it has enough riotous moments to carry you through the dull stretches.

Nobody can play stupid better than Daniels – think "Dumb and Dumber" – and, as it turns out, few can play smarter. He's a sharp asset in a sharp movie.

A lyrical, yet intensely rooted, tragic vision.

There is a dearth of good children's films right now, at least of the nonanimated variety, and undoubtedly The Last Mimzy will fill a vacuum for some families. But it's a default choice, not a prime pick.

Whether this is all a case of life imitating art or vice versa matters little. Few of these movies aspire to art. What counts is the trajectory of uplift.

Director Alexandra Lipsitz doesn't do much more than chronicle the noise, but it's intermittently fun stuff.

Color Me Kubrick is a far more modest movie, but in some ways is more successful than "The Hoax" in conveying how deeply people want to believe something is true against all evidence.

The interaction between soldiers and captives becomes a microcosm for an entire culture. It's a wisp of a movie but it has stayed with me longer than much supposedly weightier fare.

At times, Bullock seems as confused by the plot as we are. Even if you cut the writer Bill Kelly and the director Mennan Yapo a lot of slack, there are plot holes galore. May I suggest that it's time to declare a moratorium on movies about time?

Intermittently gripping, but overlong.

Just about everything in this pea-brained epic is overscaled and overwrought – it's a cartoon trying to be a towering triptych.

In some ways the movie's straightforward style is more appropriate to the horror than a more souped-up approach would have been. With material this strong, sometimes the best thing a filmmaker can do is to stay out of the way.

A cross between "Godzilla" and "Jaws," it manages to be both truly scary and truly funny – sometimes all at once.

Scurlock's filmmaking style leans more heavily on woebegone personal testimony than facts and figures, but politicians willing to go up against the credit industry's lobbyists would be well advised to take a look.

The Namesake takes in a lot of territory, and at times is too diffuse, too attenuated. But the actors are so expressive that they provide their own continuity. They transport us to a realm of pure feeling.

Garner is good, and so is Brian Dennehy as a crusty ranch owner; Abigail Breslin, playing a leukemia patient, demonstrates that she was not a one-note wonder in "Little Miss Sunshine."

The subculture of weekend warrior bikers is such rich comic material that the ineptitude of Wild Hogs is doubly offensive.

In Zodiac, working from a script by James Vanderbilt, Fincher has decidedly toned down his act. His straight-ahead, methodical direction isn't as flagrantly unsettling as much of his previous work, but it's more psychologically layered. In this film, for the first time, we feel for his characters when they bleed.

Maybe Jackson should avoid any more movies with "snake" in the title.

Some movies are so flagrantly awful that they achieve classic status. To this rarefied company we must now add The Astronaut Farmer.

[Apted] also has an unfortunate penchant for bland stateliness, and never more so than in Amazing Grace, a well-intentioned piece of historical waxworks.

Graham was good in films such as "Boogie Nights" and "Bowfinger" where her apparent innocence was a smoke screen for her lustful connivance. To be effective in the movies, she needs something to counteract her wholesomeness.

McAvoy succeeds in making the boy's mania for trivia endearing rather than annoying. As his (delayed) love interest, Rebecca Hall, playing a campus radical and the first Jewish person he has ever encountered, is stunning.

Without Cooper's performance, Breach would have been a good, workmanlike thriller. His presence lifts it to a whole new level.

It appears to have been made from the inside, not only of the characters but of the historical situation in which they struggle.

If writer-director Marc Lawrence had stuck with Alex's faded glory, Music and Lyrics could have been terrific. It could have been about something. Instead, he's confected a curdled valentine.

Thomas Harris adapted his own bestseller and Peter Webber, who previously directed "Girl with a Pearl Earring," had the unenviable task of trying to give this glop, which is too gruesome to be campy, a high gloss. It should be called Man With a Severed Head.

I hope Keaton doesn't begin to make a specialty of these roles. They play into what is least attractive in her repertoire – the loosey-goosey, knockabout side of her that all too swiftly devolves into hysterics.

The rap music we hear, which is produced outside Cuba's state-run music industry, is politically audacious and charged with personal expression and uplift. The film was produced by Charlize Theron's socially conscious company, Denver and Delilah films.

Having written a book about being fired, Annabelle Gurwitch has now made a documentary as well, and it's something of a mess.

Seraphim Falls is essentially one long, bleak stalk-and-kill action thriller.

Burton is extraordinary in one of his rare good movie roles and O'Toole is regally madcap and larger than life. No doubt his Oscar-nominated appearance in "Venus" has prompted this rerelease of Becket. They make a fascinating then-and-now combination.

It's a wish-fulfillment fantasy posing as hard-edged realism.

It's a marvelous performance in a marvelous movie, one that sneaks up on you while you're watching it.