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.