The Ghost Writer is the kind of impeccable adult entertainment, able to alternate edge-of-your-seat episodes with bleakly comic moments, that Hitchcock used to specialize in and that Polanski himself realized so successfully in "Chinatown" and "Rosemary's Baby."

Twelve years in the making, Phyllis and Harold has extraordinary breadth and depth and has been made with wit, compassion and imagination, and it reflects the complexity of life itself.

Some concert movies make you feel like you have the best seat in the house; this one plants you squarely in front of the Jumbotron.

Here's the surprise of the new incarnation of The Wolfman, starring Benicio Del Toro -- there isn't one. No bite either, or humor, or camp.

The veteran Marshall has proved a quick study, serving up the pastiche with panache so the stars mostly shine, the story snippets mostly amuse and you'll barely notice all the empty spots where a plot used to be.

This is generic filmmaking at its most banal, a simple-minded simplification of a not overwhelmingly complex book.

A potent, energetic heart-tugger and Khan and Kajol, major Bollywood stars, are highly appealing and equal to the demand of their emotion-charged roles.

A beautiful evocation of a time and place -- Mohawk Valley in upstate New York, spanning from one Halloween to the next -- and a loving but unflinching probing of the lives of Mosher's family in the course of a year.

There's an unavoidable joie de vivre (symbolized by Rancho's meditative mantra "All is well") and a performance charm that make this one of the more naturally gregarious Bollywood imports.

There's no real depth or texture to the characters of any sort, sentimental or otherwise, and I say that as someone who can be brought to tears by a Hallmark commercial.

This time, with Besson scripting / producing and Patrick Alessandrin directing, it amounts to a raucous and colorfully junky helping of seconds.

An earnest gang-warfare melodrama that may make some Chan fans long for "Rush Hour 4."

It's difficult to get into its "What would I do?" vibe, though, through so thick and transparent a barrier of contrivances.

An enjoyably involving mystery-thriller.

The last thing you see in Ajami should be the first thing on your mind about this compelling new film from Israel. That would be the closing credits, written in both Hebrew and Arabic, separate but equal, side by side, mirroring the creative process behind this potent work and the story it has to tell.

The presence of the ever-reliable Steve Buscemi adds a welcome boost to Saint John of Las Vegas, an otherwise unremarkable debut feature from writer-director Hue Rhodes.

This is a film done right by just about every measure. The extremes of the story seep deep into your bones -- the beauty, the allure, the desperation and especially the cold in this world where life literally hangs on rope and what Mother Nature chooses to throw at you.

Legion may traffic in signposts of the apocalypse, but the whole affair mostly indicates that we're in the movie wasteland that is January.

The story is poignant and compelling, but ultimately the film doesn't have the heft it needs to fill out the big screen.

Best known for 1994's "The Wild Reeds," Techine has been a director for more than 30 years, and the fluidity of his polished, intelligent, at times enigmatic works make him someone whose films are always worth watching.

The prospect that this role would officially shift Bettany to a bigger stage, taking him from the character roles that have become his specialty to leading man status, dies a sort of Darwinian death from bad plotting.

Manages to be appealing, poignant and inspiring in ways that are gentle and quite real. This smartly calibrated film also pulls off something rare by presenting religious commitment as something that's not only potentially healing and elevating, but also kind of cool.

Even though Drool rambles and ultimately slides into overly obvious make-believe, Kissam emerges as a fearless risk-taker of promise.

Leung manages to present a barrage of intriguing theories debunking our generally accepted beliefs and misperceptions about how HIV/AIDS is acquired, tested, diagnosed, defined and treated. It's a vital yet thorny approach whose inconclusiveness is bound to sadden or infuriate anyone who's lost a loved one to AIDS.

The 17-year-old so completely captures the innocence, cynicism and rage of a child of poverty and divorce on the edge of adulthood that it feels as if you are spying on Mia, so achingly real, so tangible does her world seem here.

Structurally, 44 Inch Chest resembles "Reservoir Dogs"; but, without the added amusement of Tarantino's skewing of narrative time, it feels very much more like a direct adaptation of a stage play (which apparently it's not). The filmmakers do goose things up by playing with reality in the second half, but it all leads to a payoff that, while perfectly legitimate, feels limp.

Any higher intentions are brought crashing down by predictability, wooden characters, giggle-inducing attempts at scares (shrieking bats, anyone?) and cinematography so gloomy it should be checked for serotonin deficiency.

Serves as an absorbing snapshot of America's highly influential, reportedly 50-million-strong evangelical Christian movement.

Josh Goldin, a longtime screenwriter whose credits include "Darkman" and "Out on a Limb" -- and whose wife is a writer at the L.A. Times -- makes his debut as a writer-director with Wonderful World. The results of Goldin's dual efforts are promising but uneven.

Despite its obsession with décolletage, Bitch Slap is surprisingly puritanical (much teasing, no pleasing), substituting plentiful violence and a howlingly predictable "shock" ending for the payoff it promises.

We don't go to Michael Haneke films for comfort, but to gaze through a glass darkly. That vision -- tense, provocative and unnerving -- is on full display in The White Ribbon, which could be considered a culmination of this difficult director's brilliant career.

Despite Teardrop Diamond's rough edges, the filmmaker, who has spent much of her career acting on stage and screen, succeeds in transporting us back to that other time; capturing the lyricism of the dialogue and the fetid South that Williams so brilliantly envisioned where nearly everything goes to rot.

There's a mystery at the heart of Sherlock Holmes, and it's not the one the great master of detection has been called on to solve. It's how a film that has so many good things going for it has turned out to be solid but not spectacular.

As unusual and idiosyncratic as its one-of-a-kind title. You'd expect no less from Terry Gilliam, and admirers of this singular filmmaker will be pleased to know that "Imaginarium" is one of his most original and accessible works.

The problem with It's Complicated, a romantic comedy about the menopausal crowd starring Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin, is that it's not nearly complicated enough.

Perhaps not since "The Godfather: Part II" have we seen a sequel come along that more than matches the mastery of the film that came before it -- all the pathos, the brio, the epic sweep. . . . the cheese balls.

Police, Adjective may not be the film you're expecting, but it's one that will stay on your mind.

Grant has never been less charming and Parker never less fashionable or more grating than they are as Paul and Meryl Morgan.

Avatar's shock and awe demand to be seen. You've never experienced anything like it, and neither has anyone else.

Because Nine is a musical, it would help if your leading man could sing, and I don't mean carry a tune, but actually flex some vocal muscle. Again, love Daniel Day-Lewis, excellent racing shirtless through the forest, but a song-and-dance man he is not. So what does that leave Nine with? Well not much.

This is a smartly told story, and as fresh as any contemporary romance.

On a par with Bridges' acting, and a sine qua non for Crazy Heart's success, is the excellent music he sings.

To really understand the zany and surreal comic madness of A Town Called Panic, you're going to have to see it for yourself.

Instead of a thriller, war movie or western, the director has turned out a stirring drama about South African leader Nelson Mandela, blending entertainment, social message and history lesson.

By turns warmly sentimental, serial-killer sinister and science-fiction fantastical, The Lovely Bones was an unlikely book to achieve worldwide success. In the film version, those mismatched elements come back to haunt the story, so to speak, making the final product more hit-and-miss than unblemished triumph.

For the most part, Ford has done good by the film, infusing a sad story with warmth and humor to spare. While loss is what makes George's experience universal, heart is what gives him such life.

Featuring a knockout performance by Adam Scott, The Vicious Kind upends the heavily tread dysfunctional family drama in ways that are unique, surprising and memorable.

What is unexpected, however, is that the film manages to be flat and uninteresting, despite the juicy (or, at the very least, lurid) true story from 1979 that serves as this curio's inspiration.

Up in the Air makes it look easy. Not just in its casual and apparently effortless excellence, but in its ability to blend entertainment and insight, comedy and poignancy, even drama and reality, things that are difficult by themselves but a whole lot harder in combination. This film does all that and never seems to break a sweat.

For those who enjoy actors who can play it up without ever overplaying their hands, The Last Station is the destination of choice.

Although the inept filmmaking and tiresome gags give the air of coming from one truly bored misogynist, it took two screenwriters (Patrick Casey, Worm Miller) and two directors (David & Scott Hillenbrand) to create this stake through the heart of film comedy.

Sheridan seems as conflicted as the Cahills about their virtues and failings. The underlying themes -- love, loyalty, decency, duty, honor, betrayal -- that screenwriter David Benioff will use to both bind and break this family seem to bedevil him more than inspire him this time out.

A solid heist flick elevated by its ensemble cast and the visual eye of Hungarian-born director Nimrod Antal ("Kontroll").

As unpretentious as it is perceptive, Gigante is a gem.

As a diverting way to blow 90 minutes, you could do far worse than this gritty, sometimes nasty, mostly absorbing potboiler.

It's been a long time since Ryan has had a romantic comedy that gave her room to move and though the scale is smaller here, the humor blacker and Ryan well beyond the first blush phase, you'll be glad that Serious Moonlight came along.

The film is no more than a tedious, over-long Bollywood soap opera.

There's certainly no energy surge in writer-director Jameel Khan's effort, which is a collection of lazy, look-who's-stupid-or-pathetic vignettes so loosely assembled and laugh-deficient they play as if you're thumbing through a sketch reject pile.

Perched uncomfortably between flat whimsy and Lifetime movie crescendos, the coming-of-middle-age comic drama The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is rough going.

Enjoyable, involving dramedy.

The Road is a road you'll wish hadn't been taken. Not because anything's been badly done, but because there's a serious imbalance in the complicated equation between what the film forces us to endure and what we end up receiving in return.

The dialogue is fresh-prince clever, the themes are ageless, the rhythms are riotous and the return to a primal animation style is beautifully executed.

McKay, a British stage actor who was doing an off-Broadway production about the movie legend when casting started, and Danes, whose acting always seems so effortlessly good, are the best things about the film.

Wisely, Hancock has given the film as much humor as heart.

It's tempting to forget that Cage is not Terence. That would be unfair though, and diminish the sheer ferocity of his performance.

The writer-director is up to his old tricks, creating an onion of an experience -- a movie within a movie within a movie, irony in each layer, poignancy that stings and whimsy that bites.

Constrained by the plot of the novel, the film keeps the two lovers apart for quite a spell, robbing the project of the crazy-in-love energy that made "Twilight," the first entry in the series, such a guilty pleasure.

It's a missed opportunity. The premise is OK enough, even if it is like one of those old "Star Trek" episodes.

Even though Defamation, which is sprinkled with unexpected moments of wry humor, will be inescapably controversial, Yoav Shamir strives admirably to be evenhanded.

The setting, largely confined to the laboratory building and underground bunker of the otherwise bombed-out Imperial Palace, makes for somewhat claustrophobic viewing but effectively enhances the hermetically sealed feeling of Hirohito's royal life.

Despite honoring noir genre conventions, Buschel also draws upon his fertile imagination in dialogue and in storytelling that allows his film gradually to accrue meaning.

Returning to his roots after a stint in Hollywood, Woo has made the most expensive film in mainland Chinese history, a pleasantly traditional picture that marks a new direction for one of the world's premier action maestros.

A pleasantly cerebral experience, exhilarating and fizzy, that goes to your head like too much Champagne.

As far as the new disaster film 2012 is concerned, the world will end with both a bang and a whimper, the bang of undeniably impressive special effects and the whimper of inept writing and characterization. You pays your money, you takes your chances.

The film belongs to Foster. The actor always makes the most of what is handed him, though he's usually required to find his footings around the margins, as he did as the crazed cowboy in "3:10 to Yuma" or the crazed druggie in "Alpha Dog."

Pirate Radio, the new rock-saturated comedy that proves life really is better when it's set to a '60s soundtrack, is, to borrow from the Stones, "a gas! gas! gas!"

The film lacks the comedic charm of "American Pie," but with its dark, hyper-sexualization of teens, it offers an engrossing if not soap opera-esque tale of self-discovery.

Terrific archival footage from a range of seminal civil rights events, as well as affecting narration written by Sarah Kunstler and spoken by Emily Kunstler (who also edited the film), round out this superior documentary.

Filmmaker Peter Rodger does a fairly comprehensive job of traversing the globe in 98 minutes, posing the age-old question, "What is God?"

Spending more observational time with her smart, resilient and stirringly positive subjects -- even seeing less-edited footage of their business plan speeches -- might have helped sell her inspirational story.

The sexual humor is often bawdy, and Gutierrez goes right up to the edge of camp.

Moss brings warmth and dignity to a part that could've easily slid into stereotype, while Camryn Manheim owns her few scenes as Amanda's best friend.

Nothing quite prepares you for the rough-cut diamond that is Precious. A rare blend of pure entertainment and dark social commentary, this shockingly raw, surprisingly irreverent and absolutely unforgettable story.

Still worth watching because it provides a showcase for a group of actors who really appreciate this kind of farcical comedy.

What the plot doesn't decimate, the film's slower-than-a-clogged-drain pacing does. Sadly, this is one box that's just not worth picking up off the porch, much less opening, not even for a million dollars.

They try to get 'real' about strange occurrences. Instead they get ludicrous.

What are in very short supply, though, are the central chords of Dickens' carol: Crachit's generous spirit, Tiny Tim's sad plight, Scrooge's emotional arc as he finds his humanity. Oh, the scenes are there amid the action, but they are fleeting. By the time A Christmas Carol finishes piling its many shiny presents with their many bells and whistles under the tree, there's no room left for tears for Tiny Tim. Bah humbug indeed.

Storm is harrowing, provocative and deeply probing yet quite involving.

A grueling peek at a doomsday prophet's rigorous mind but in a sly way also a compassionate look at the strain Ruppert endures from knowing he has only ever been right.

It's hard to believe, but Hal Holbrook, one of the stage and screen's enduring talents, has never had the solo lead in a feature film. That has been duly rectified with the actor's achingly memorable star performance in the superb That Evening Sun.

An amusing Irish coming-of-age comedy.

Duffy tamps down his best instincts -- occasional wry humor and the appealingly oddball supporting character (Willem Dafoe last time, a bug-eyed Clifton Collins Jr. here as the MacManus' admiring Latino cohort) -- and doubles up on his worst: homophobic gags, tedious '90s-era slo-mo shootouts and overwrought gangster tropes.

Satire aside, what the oddball folks here never feel is real, despite the filmmakers' claims of autobiographical parallels.

The buildup is undeniably effective; for most of the movie, it provides the same kind of thrills as "Paranormal Activity," if somewhat less brilliantly.

Paved with clichés, the apparently well-meaning Looking for Palladin is a long journey with no new places.

Too many of the characters are either good or bad, and that loss of nuance is missed.

Differing greatly from the rough, casual mood of many behind-the-scenes pop docs, this one is instead of a piece with Jackson's body of work: dazzling and strange, blurring the line between fantasy and reality.

Female sexuality has evolved into pure evil here with Von Trier looking ever so much like the Marquis de Sade of filmmaking.