Has its lewd funniness, though not often enough to make it worthy of not only "Bad Santa" but, more to the point, "School of Rock."

It's a carefully manicured, almost genteel piece of moviemaking. The film is paradoxically both rousing and lulling.

If Freedomland reminds you of Spike Lee's "Clockers," that's not by accident. Like that film, it's adapted by Richard Price from his novel and is set in the neighboring Northern New Jersey communities of Dempsy, predominantly poor and African-American, and the largely white blue-collar suburb of Gannon.

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.

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.

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."

I wish Mo' Better Blues were a little mo' better than it is, but Spike Lee remains a major filmmaking talent, and even his second-best work has an awful lot going for it.

Radcliffe's fidgety performance is convincing, and he does come across as an adult, though a very young one.

Abbott has a compelling unpredictability, though, and in a couple of his scenes with Lynskey, you can spot the stirrings of a more complex film than the one we finally ended up with.

It's an omnisexual variation on François Truffaut's "Jules and Jim," although stylistically, with its emphases on hipper-than-thou attitudes and moody-blues visuals, it's much closer to the early work of Jean-Luc Godard and Wong Kar-Wai.

If the film had focused on more than the Algiers Motel incident, if, as it starts out to do, it had attempted to convey a comprehensive and incendiary portrait of a city in crisis, it would have rendered far more justice to those times – and our own.

We see him (Brolin) whip up a first-class chili, but his specialty is peach pie, which we watch him prepare so lovingly that I was surprised Reitman didn’t include the recipe in the end credits.

Wilson has a gawky affability here that helps redeem much that might otherwise seem tasteless (as opposed to tasteless-but-funny).

Warrior becomes increasingly shameless until, by the end, with the big fights fought, we are clearly meant to rise as one and applaud the indomitability of the human spirit. But the only indomitable thing about Warrior are its clichés.

July, like Hal Hartley, another overrated art-house luminary, is an acquired taste I have yet to acquire.

Overall this is a film in which, as the end credit documentary footage attests, the real story overwhelms its dramatization.

Fred Schepisi, one of the world's great directors ("The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith," "A Cry in the Dark") is working at half-speed in The Eye of the Storm, a convoluted family drama derived from a Patrick White novel.

This is a movie that cries out for more than the too-cool-for-school Coppola’s trademark hipster anomie. She may be too much a part of the celebrity-mongering world she portrays to do justice to its injustices.

Compared to "Capote," this new film is altogether lighter.

There's something foul about staging the assassination of a sitting president in order to push a political agenda that could just as easily have been put forward without resorting to such sensationalism.

Deft and fast-moving, but shouldn’t a musical have at least a few songs you can hum on your way home?

Syriana falls down at the most basic storytelling level, and this incoherence damages even the good parts.

It's all tease in the first half, and all implausibilities in the second. Still, Thomas is always worth watching, in French or in English, whether her mood be chilly or tropical.

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.

Despite the film’s intentions, Idris and Seun can’t really stand in for anybody but themselves. What they go through, as middle-class kids in a privileged school system, seems far less race-based than the filmmakers would have us believe.

It is a splendidly appropriate project for Otto Preminger, even though he hasn't succeeded at making the most of it.

The filmmakers's attempts to balance out the gung-ho shoot-'em-ups with an overlay of "fairness" are rudimentary. The movie works us into a frenzy of righteous revenge, it makes us cheer each kill by the FBI warriors, and then it tells us that this violence only breeds more violence.

It has weak spots, including bits of mystical mumbo jumbo about a legendary "Indian runner" with a ghostly message. But most of the film is articulate and absorbing.