The overfamiliarity of What Doesn't Kill You is redeemed by a full-scale performance from Mark Ruffalo.

Although Steven Soderbergh's two-part Che may have an epic running time of almost 4-1/2 hours, its scope is surprisingly narrow.

Fiennes brings to the role a shimmering subtlety.

Improbably, it's one of the most affecting films of the year, which once again demonstrates that all you need to make a good movie is talent.

Never entirely escapes its theatrical origins, and, by framing the story so pugilistically, the filmmakers don't bring out the full richness in this material.

The film suffers at times from biopic-itis – the narrative unfolds with the requisite heartbreak carefully apportioned – but it's always eye-catching.

Although the film, for the most part, is told from the perspective of the IRA, it does not blithely take its side.

Milk is an agitprop fantasy about the selflessness of sainthood. If anybody but Penn was playing the saint, we'd probably feel as if we were being sold a bill of goods. Instead, he just about pulls it off. Such is the treachery of talent.

There's something both simple and sweet about Bolt, yet epic, that's entirely surprising.

A young and as-yet-unformed actor, Stewart is cast in a role she's simply not ready for, and her effort to work hard – exactly what any actor must hide from the audience – is painfully visible in every scene. By contrast, Pattinson is smooth as glass, a born movie star who only needs to slant his eyes to grab attention.

The astonishingly inept finish could serve as a primer in screenwriting classes on how not to wind up a family drama.

The aura of shock-and-awe surrounding this game is laid on a bit thick, and sometimes you feel like you're just watching an ESPN special. Still, it's fun. The interviewees include Harvard's stone-cold-serious Tommy Lee Jones and Brian Dowling, Yale's wonder-boy quarterback who became the model for B.D. in classmate Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury."

The film also seems to end at least four times, which is three times too many. Better yet, it never should have started.

After all these years of surviving everything that has been thrown at him, James Bond is finally being undone by his own team.

I'd be more inclined to call this French dysfunctional family epic gabby and preeningly self-indulgent – in a word, annoying.

With the mounting number of first-rate, even masterly foreign-language films locked out of movie theaters due to wary distributors, it's worth pondering why such laughable dreck as German actor-writer-director Vadim Glowna's House of the Sleeping Beauties actually made it through.

The entire film has the glibness of a music video. Boyle has managed to make dire poverty seem glossy.

And yet the great conundrum of the Holocaust is that it was perpetrated by human beings, not monsters. Few movies have rendered this puzzle so powerfully.

If this were a fictional Hollywood movie, it would be criticized for being too upbeat. But sometimes truth is not only stranger than fiction, it's also a whole lot better.

Paris Hilton also turns up, still trying to be famous for more than being famous. She has a ways to go.

Directed with deadpan flair by Barry Levinson and based on a memoir by Hollywood producer Art Linson, it's a pitch-perfect sendup of the movie colony with a marvelous cast.

At times, Pride and Glory seems to be about a war between actors, not cops. Nobody comes off well.

Eastwood gets all noirish for us but, like Jolie's performance, there's a rote quality to it all. Even the mournful little ditties that Eastwood composed for the soundtrack seem canned.

It would be easy to overrate I've Loved You So Long, which often dampens its best effects with undue tastefulness, but the image of Scott Thomas, with her despairing resilience, stays with one.

At just over two hours, Stranded is nonstop harrowing. It has cumulative power.

Stone may think he's made a movie about the toxicity of the Bush presidency, but what we have instead is a cautionary tale of a decidedly lower order. As far as I can make out, the real message of W. is: Don't vote for anybody who talks with his mouth full of food.

The honey runs thick in The Secret Life of Bees, and so does the treacle. The cloying dullness sets in early, although not from the first frame.

Like all too many docs these days, it chronicles a contest while caricaturing the contestants.