Now this is more like it: Flirtatious repartee between glamorous stars in travel-poster international locations; a gratifyingly simple plot with puzzles and sleight-of-hand surprises; and, at regular intervals, outbursts of gaudy, energetic dancing infectiously exploding.

This whole movie is fun, and smart too, a fitting tribute to Jay Ward's original cartoons.

Will get you thinking about wine, and what is and isn't important about it.

A warm, spacious road movie with a stirring sense of the wide-open landscapes of the American West.

The supremely attractive leads, exotic locations (Vietnam, Berlin and Beirut) and fetishized violence imbue the whole intelligence game with undeniable glamour.

The sense of loss aroused by the film is oceanic.

In this tense, lyrical and bone-spare slice-of-death drama by writer-director Jeff Nichols, Shannon gets a role tailored to his lanky Middle American boyishness and the demons peering from behind it.

The movie is basically on one level and Faris on another -- in that exclusive aerie occupied by Judy Holliday, Carole Lombard, Lucille Ball and a few other blissfully original comedy goddesses.

The pace of the film remains fairly brisk, in no small part because what's being said is staggering, especially if you don't know too much about the science of and politics behind vaccines.

Poignant portrait.

What Ratner brings to the proceedings is an awareness that what worked for "Silence" -- namely screenwriter Ted Tally, production designer Kristi Zea and, of course, Anthony Hopkins as Lecter -- will work overtime here, to enhance the project at hand and provide a seamless connection back to Jonathan Demme's multiple-Oscar winner.

Creation's power lies in its layers, in the way it makes distinctions between religion and faith, and the ways it beautifully (save for one clunky bit of overexplanation) lays out the similarities between religion and science.

Far from a complete success: It takes too long to get to its central premise and, once there, too often meanders away from it. But Campbell is close to astonishing whenever she's onscreen.

A triumph of production design...As a character study, though, The Aviator is downright squeamish.

Their access is far broader than any TV network's, and in the end, they transcended the body counts and bland abstractions that characterize most Western reporting on the war.

The temptation for an easy score is one of a handful of shopworn plot elements in Anthony Onah’s debut feature The Price, yet the interaction of t

This heartfelt tale of disintegration and acceptance, seasoned with family devotion, will both raise and soothe the anxieties of those of us who regularly ask ourselves why we came into the kitchen two minutes ago.

The film, like the beleaguered country it depicts, has a raw, neurotic, brawling yet tender vitality.

With its clean narrative lines, easily grasped message and literal kick-line of affable, non-threatening gay characters, the film is carefully calibrated for mass appeal. It leaves no shortcut or pratfall untaken, and it will be all the more popular for it.

You come away from Boiler Room eager to see what Younger will do next.

There’s not really a bogeyman in The Orphanage and not much blood; just insane intensity and a building sense of bad vibes.

Their endless groupings and regroupings, their brief encounters and power struggles are framed by an armory of cinematic devices that will be familiar to any Desplechin devotee.

I’d be lying if I said that The Band’s Visit isn’t touching and uplifting and all those other audience-friendly emotions against which film critics are believed to religiously steel themselves. But in a season rife with movies (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Grace Is Gone, The Kite Runner, et al.) that aggressively pry open viewers’ chest cavities and yank on their heartstrings, Kolirin’s film is the only one that plucks at them gently, tickling the funny bone as it goes.

Seen in the bowl's metaphoric reflection, Nolte's Adam, with his patronizing wish to build a great art museum to "give something back" to the poor laborers who built his fortune, is a complex American monster.

Spins a warm and fuzzy tale about love and happiness in the cutthroat art business.

While I could tell the love story was supposed to be moving, I kept feeling the characters' passion struggling against the virtuosity of Soderbergh's direction, which is so tight, so gorgeously lit, so worked that even when he wants scenes to be emotionally incandescent, they wind up detached, even chilly.

It's a tribute to Robert Gordon's nifty screenplay and Dunne's cheerful way with digression that Addicted to Love, even as it broadens into screwball, also deepens into a character study full of surprising left turns.

Good fun, though not more than up-market situation comedy studded with the usual leaps out of period-speak to swipe at contemporary Hollywood.

The movie is stolen by the gorgeous, droll and hilarious Depp. The movie crackles when he's onscreen and only fitfully sparks when he's not.

Slow and stately.

What counts here aren't the girls, but the boys--and all the sweet and clumsy ways in which they make love to one another without once shedding their clothes.

Core has a touch with actors, too, and there are surprisingly fine performances here.

So oppressive is Peggy's world -- Year of the Dog is the best evocation I've seen of how much worse it is to be depressed in a sunny climate -- that when she finally loses control, it feels more like catharsis than madness.

Quirkily sad, unexpectedly funny -- and just a tad repetitive.

Duck Season is not (yet) the work of a great filmmaker, but it's the kind of movie in which a fledgling director traps his talent in a bottle and saves it for next time.

Entertaining and slight, topical and cannily familiar.

By the time a Bollywood production number segues into the finale from "Grease," the transition not only makes perfect sense, it sparkles.

Playing something of a cipher who reinvents himself as the occasion demands, Wood is unusually well cast, but it's Hunnam, with a psychotic twinkle in his eye, who turns the movie on whenever he's onscreen.

The most indelible moment I took away from Sunshine, in which a tiny figure in a golden space suit floats away from the ship into the gravitational pull of the sun, is one of ecstatic, appalling loneliness.

Captivating coming-of-age story.

While Grizzly Man is never less than a fascinating portrait of a troubled Peter Pan who couldn't function in human society and tried to remake the animal kingdom into his own private Hanna-Barbera cartoon, it fails to establish Treadwell as much more than a serious headcase, let alone a titanic figure.

Whaley successfully balances his scenes on a knife-edge of tenderness and anger that was Truffaut's trademark.

Unlike the object of its scathing attention, Kirby Dick's documentary about the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board is merry and bright and loads of fun.

The 1978 frat-house classic "Animal House," starring the late, great John Belushi, is the model for testosterone-mad comedies such as this, and while it hasn't that film's scope or finesse, Old School does have Ferrell, a man clearly in touch with his inner Belushi.

While it comes on like a flag-waver, it actually delivers something more nuanced. Its underlying skepticism about the Korean War seems to have jibed with the current national mood: The picture was, deservedly, a huge hit.

Both the documentary and the candidate lose their naiveté along the way without abandoning the idealism that inspired the endeavor in the first place.

There are the stories of his racist mom, lobotomized aunt, and a TV exec who told him he’d never find work as a homosexual -- and the more charming tale of his Uta Hagen acting class, which yielded nothing but future A-listers (Steve McQueen, Jason Robards, Jack Lemmon and Anne Meara, to name a few).

A warm, conciliatory entertainment.

Writer-director Levy occasionally relies on cheap gags, but his light tone and breezy visual style are a nice contrast to Go for Zucker's metaphorical subtext about familial - and German - reunification.

A pure font of high-flying kung fu artistry, the likes of which has since transformed the way Hollywood's good guys and bad kick the crap out of one another.

One of those passionately atmospheric movies, like Jane Campion's "The Piano," that sounds idiotic on paper, but whose ambiance, charged with eros, rage, regret and optimism, is strangely moving.

Jeffs' meticulous framing nicely counterpoints all the messy turmoil, and her screenplay flows with the cadences of life -- its awkward eruptions and long, hurtful silences -- but she never pulls you deep enough into her characters.

It's the filmmakers' post-camp comprehension of what made old-time B movies good-bad that makes Eight Legged Freaks a perfectly entertaining summer diversion.

While the filmmakers are not above corset-drama bed-hopping and back-stabbing, it's delicious when the beds and backs belong to Uma Thurman, Tim Roth and Julian Sands.

A Zeitgeist potpourri, strung with late-20th-century fear and anxiety.

Directed in humongous close-up by former dancer Jon M. Chu, Step Up 2 the Streets is suavely choreographed by Jamal Sims, Nadine "Hi Hat" Ruffin and Dave Scott.

American independent movies about awkward adolescence are never in short supply, but this highly assured first feature by commercials and music video director Mike Mills is the first since "Donnie Darko" to view the latter stages of teenagerdom as fodder for a phantasmagorical odyssey of Lewis Carroll–like distortions.

A surprisingly smart satire around the bubble-gum band that first found life in the pages of the Archie comic book series.

The infectious high spirits of the performers help to carry the day.

Stuck for years playing young women who are the idealized object of male desire (Portman and Johansson)-- flaw-free and, in Johansson's case, barely conscious -- they come alive in The Other Boleyn Girl, as if being bound up in costumer Sandy Powell's exquisite gowns has freed them from the tighter constraints of their own beauty.

Like most of the men in the film, we would happily follow her anywhere.

The film is not emotionally subtle, but it is beautifully shot, by cinematographer Declan Quinn, with a grainy, impressionistic eye that mimics a perpetual dance of shards of remembered experience.

Among the pleasures the film evokes, as few films have, is the bliss of conversation.

He's (Carrey) an unruly commodity and, as such, compulsively watchable.

Jodhaa Akbar is clear and solid and absorbing, but not quite exhilarating.

Marebito's ghoulish delight in gore will turn off the squeamish, but tougher souls will recognize that the over-the-top shocks are Shimizu's way of illustrating how terrifying the risk of human connection can be.

The script is so intellectualized that I couldn't help feeling I was witnessing not two complex people locked in struggle, but the opposed souls (and classes) of Germany: Sophie, emblem of the cultured, tolerant and enlightened humanism of the middle classes duking it out with Mohr, resentful member of a disenfranchised proletariat from whose ranks sprang Hitler's most loyal quislings.

Like most television directors, Shergold is good with actors. Jowly, impassive and rigid with righteous dignity, Timothy Spall makes a wonderfully meticulous Pierrepoint.

Thankfully, the film, which skirts that rapidly deteriorating line between fantasy and reality -- Irwin as "himself" as croc expert as suspected international spy -- takes a tongue-in-cheek attitude even as it pushes the Croc Hunter agenda: Mother Nature? Don’t muck with her.

A highly enjoyable programmer about those brave young men and their rickety flying machines.

Absorbing documentary about gay marriage is most persuasive when most specific.

The worthy text of Mad Hot Ballroom is undercut by the real source of its energy, the heat of competition and the pure joy of winning.

A smooth little comedy deserving of more studio support than it got.

Gröning makes us fully feel the rhythms of their lives, but for the same reasons that most of us couldn't or wouldn't last in such a stripped-down environment, the movie, at just shy of three hours, starts to feel oppressive after two.

There’s nothing new in the movie’s sociocultural insights, especially for those of us already interested in how identity is shaped by pop culture, but the breezy tone and obvious fun being had by the cast make Finishing the Game a slight, low-key cool cinematic essay on identity politics.

There's no doubting that Williamson is a man who knows and loves his genre, and all the scary, screaming, sniggering fun continues here.

The movie’s old-school feminism is true to its subject, and Theron proves charismatic enough to stand alone as an emblematic working-class heroine doing what she has to do without benefit of feminist theory. I’m even willing to forgive this rousing drama its coy, flirty ending, if only because its heroine has the grace not to drive her pickup truck off a cliff.

Laurent's work as an actor serves her well as a director, and she allows her performers the freedom to find each moment’s emotional core. Foster and Fanning are excellent, their chemistry intensified by their characters' shared bitterness and loss of what could have been.

This bright farce is spun from interlocking coincidences that only seem far-fetched.

Aniston plays her depressed character with enough conviction to guarantee that practically every scene will be stolen out from under her by minor characters, among them a pricelessly funny Zooey Deschanel as a Retail Rodeo employee who vents her rage and frustration on the customers.

This illuminating, often rousing film fits snugly alongside the various anti-Bush/corporate/globalization documentaries that continue to pack the art houses.

The movie is ridiculous, but since the special effects are really quite impressive, that seems a small point.

Two Girls and a Guy grooves on a provisional spirit that keeps the movie shifting in unexpected directions, tracking the exhilaration and horror of an open-ended game with high stakes to which no current rules apply.

Paula Gray wrote the script (it was her UCLA senior thesis), and if there are gooey spots, there's also nicely turned, lived-in dialogue and a gentle affection for all her characters.

There are a couple of absurdly nonchalant song-and-dance sequences, though mostly, Michel Legrand's sumptuous music swells in anticipation of showstoppers that never happen.

Bell forces us to see characters from the proverbial wrong side of the tracks in a distinctly human light, neither ennobling nor pitying.

As it's been done, with this ingratiating cast, a retro peach-and-turquoise color scheme that makes every shot look like a 1986 fashion layout, and a brace of insanely catchy Vishal Dadlani dance numbers, the movie isn't half bad.

Performance after performance -- by Kim Stanley, Marlon Brando, Laurette Taylor . . . Never heard of her? That’s reason enough not to miss this movie.

Undemanding, unsurprising and really quite charming within conventional limits, Elizabeth Allen’s tween-coming-of-age feature debut is as realist as can be, given that, of the three nice Florida girls who need to grow up in the movie, the eponymous heroine (Sara Paxton) is a high-achieving blond mermaid with vaguely feminist leanings, a twitchy blue tail and the comic timing of an up-and-coming Cameron Diaz.

Best seen as a performance movie, featuring music (by Iris DeMent and Taj Mahal, among others) too wonderful to be overpowered by director Maggie Greenwald's plodding direction and leaden screenplay.

Overall Sheridan keeps both "Oirishry" and sentimentality in check. He captures the book's evenhanded sense.

Formulaic but infectiously happy comedy.

Firth is all panicked reserve in the role of Crowhurst, and Rachel Weisz invests the familiar stay-at-home role with antsy, agonized spirit as the wife of the doomed man, facing the truth that her family’s lives will never be what they once were.

Though I'm not fully convinced that cool and jazzy is the way to go with one of the great civil-rights battles of 20th-century America, George Clooney's elegantly muted take on Edward R. Murrow's fight with Joe McCarthy offers many riches, notably a wicked character study of Murrow and a sexy homage to the pleasures of teamwork when the team is a bunch of smart-ass liberal reporters making common cause against a wannabe dictator.

It's Garrison and Burnam who hold the film's center, however, with a natural magnetism. Newcomers both, they take the same clean approach to their roles that their characters bring to their tags.

With its weary disillusionment, The War Tapes shouldn't be criticized for its seeming lack of outrage. Indeed, from the overwhelming grief and anger it uncovers, the film feels appropriately, uncomfortably numb.

This latest offering from the Jim Henson stable puts a cheerfully broad new spin on the boy-and-his-dog franchise.

If you’re going to have your emotional responses shunted around like a gear stick, it might as well be by someone who writes dialogue as funny as Curtis does.