The personal triumphs in Happy-Go-Lucky may be small-scale but its embrace is all-encompassing. It's a wonderfully humane movie.

Was Maher afraid he might muddy his clownish jape if he actually brought into the mix a learned theologian?

The conceit here is that if a boy and a girl love the same music, that means they're in love. Who am I to argue with such poetic whimsy?

After a powerful opening, when we see the first victim suddenly go blind while driving in traffic, the film devolves into a dystopian freak show and wastes many wonderful performers, including Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore.

With a minimum of actorly fuss, Winger shows us the rage and hurt inside this overcontrolled woman. It's a great piece of acting – high drama at the service of the highest talent.

Ballast lacks ballast. Much praised by aficionados of minimalist indie cinema – hey, who needs a plot when you've got mood? – it's a wearying slog through anomie in a Mississippi Delta township.

Clocking in at 160 minutes, this interminable movie comes across like a rough cut. Perhaps Lee believed its length would give it gravitas. The opposite is true.

About the only thing I like about this movie is its shaggy, relatively apolitical stance. Instead of setting itself up as a brief for or against the Iraq war, it just moseys along without much on its mind except how to connect the dots in the plot.

Director Stefan Forbes interviews a slew of victims and beneficiaries of the Atwater attack machine and, in the process, gives us an even-handed portrait of a man who, as much as anybody, bears responsibility for the toxicity of high stakes political campaigning on both sides of the aisle.

Pokes and prods the viewer to watch the brutal, indiscriminate methods of Rio's SWAT-like cops and then demands only one conclusion: That cops in Rio's drug-infested slums must do what they do and if that means rampant point-blank executions, so be it.

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.