The Golden Compass is a blatant attempt to duplicate the success of the "Harry Potter" franchise. The only thing missing is richly imagined characters, a comprehensible story line, good acting, and satisfying special effects.

At its best, Juno is about the messy things in life that are not so easily summarized.

In a film that overwhelmingly avoids happy-faced pronouncements, this one sticks out.

As thin and jokey as this movie often is, I prefer it to the serioso treatment that usually encrusts this type of material. At its best, The Savages captures the lunacy that comes with coping with sorrow.

Director Andrew Wagner, adapting a novel by Brian Morton, is sometimes understated to a fault, but his work with the actors, who also include Lili Taylor as Leonard's daughter, is impeccable.

Poetic conceits only work if they're poetic.

It may sound like faint praise to say that Enchanted is the movie of the year for smart and spirited 11-year-old girls. But a movie that genuinely respects that audience is not to be belittled.

Zemeckis has converted the epic poem about the warrior who slays the monster Grendel into a species of computer game. He employs the same motion-capture technology that he first used in "The Polar Express," to slightly better effect.

Obviously a movie made by smart and talented people but sometimes you can outsmart yourself.

At its best, the movie makes you feel like a kindred spirit.

He intercuts documentary sequences from a French news crew and also includes Arab website footage of insurgents and YouTube confessions from soldiers who witnessed a barbarous act, which we also see, involving the platoon and a young Iraqi girl. The concept is audacious but the actors are too theatrical.

Few things are more dispiriting than a holiday movie straining to become a perennial. Such is the case with Fred Claus, an insipid Christmas comedy.

Like many a Hollywood political drama, Lions for Lambs carries a full head of steam that is indistinguishable from a lot of hot air.

The movie is true to its own fierce vision and it's the better for it. I haven't seen a stronger or better American movie all year.

The filmmaking style is annoyingly slick, but the testimonies of these children are excruciatingly moving.

Often best around the edges. Without making a big deal about it, Scott reveals how the Mafia, while putting up a businesslike front, deplored the incursion of black gangsters into the drug trade.

Best viewed as an oddball career move rather than as a successful movie.

One of the great American films of the past decade, and the crowning masterpiece of Lumet's long career.

Bad movies invariably stem from bad ideas, and the worst of the several rancid ideas packed inside of Dan in Real Life is that Steve Carell could be the new Alan Alda.

About two-thirds of the way through, Rendition takes a bad turn and sells out most of what made it worth watching in the first place. Witherspoon is given little to do except look weepy, Freeman's change of heart is Q.E.D., and the radical Islamist subplot overwhelms the action, which becomes so confusingly structured that I thought the projectionist had misplaced a reel.

There is no reason why Reservation Road could not have been great. George has co-written some powerful films in the past, including two for Daniel Day-Lewis, "In the Name of the Father" and "The Boxer." He is not wrong to want to mainline intensity here, but the inner lives of these men have not been explored, only displayed.

Blanchett miraculously gives a good performance, even when saddled with lines like this one, to Clive Owen's Sir Walter Raleigh: "In another world, could you have loved me?"

The movie is an idyllic view of life as it ought to be, rather than the way it is.

It's awfully difficult at this point in film history to come up with a car chase that's startlingly new, but Gray pulls it off. It's the best of its kind since "The French Connection."

Even by Farrelly standards, the film is a washout.

Without the steadfast intelligence of Clooney's performance, Michael Clayton wouldn't work half as well as it does.

Amir Bar-Lev's documentary is fascinating on all kinds of levels: as a movie about the nature of art, the lure and pitfalls of celebrity, and the complicated conundrums of parenting.

Anderson can't quite rise above his own quirkiness. It's not that he can't respond to the beauty he places before us – he can – but his jokiness keeps undercutting his own best efforts. The Darjeeling Limited is a transitional film for him: He's outgrown a comic style that can no longer accommodate his deeper feelings.