A fearless and ambitious piece of work, made with equal parts passion and calculation, an unapologetically entertaining major studio release with compelling real-world relevance, a film that takes numerous risks and thrives on them all.

Even though it is ultimately anything but an endorsement for street racing, the movie stunningly captures its undeniable excitement.

A heart-tugger that, although highly inspirational, has a strongly orchestrated quality.

It's not until Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire that a film has successfully re-created the sense of stirring magical adventure and engaged, edge-of-your-seat excitement that has made the books such an international phenomenon.

The movie is less an uncharted journey than a 2 p.m. bus tour of a music industry legend. But like an expert guide, Mangold shepherds the story with enough grace, energy and skill to make it worthwhile.

Blackmail Boy reaches for tragedy but settles for soap opera.

Perhaps inevitably bleak and grueling, Private is also involving and provocative -- and critical of Israeli treatment of Palestinians in an effectively understated manner.

To come across Classe Tous Risques is like discovering a bottle of marvelous French wine you didn't remember you had, opening it and finding it every bit as delicious as its reputation promised. That's how good this classic fatalistic French gangster film is.

In the end, his (Patrick) disaffection make him a singularly uninvolving character, and his disengagement makes him seem alternately shallow, selfish and perverse.

Suffused with a painterly tenderness and cruelty, the French film Gilles' Wife - based on a 1937 Belgian novel by Madeleine Bourdouxhe - stars the extraordinary actress Emmanuelle Devos.

Written, directed and acted with real compassion and sympathy for the humanity of its characters, no matter who they are or on what side of these multiple issues they turn out to be.

Deliberate silliness is hard to sustain, but Undertaking Betty pretty much succeeds.

With outstanding performances, including a turn by Judi Dench as the evil Lady Catherine de Bourg, Pride & Prejudice is a joy from start to finish.

Derailed seems to want badly to be described as contemporary noir. But it's just pitch-dumb.

The movie has a lot of the elements that might make it thrilling and it's visually arresting, but it's missing the emotional connection necessary to make it interesting.

With the help of clear direction and some excellent acting, especially from Flora Cross in a memorable debut as Eliza, Bee Season is affecting in ways that movies have all but given up trying to be.

Ellie Parker is at once hilarious and harrowing, and in being so, seems right on target.

Sarah Silverman has a bright, toothy smile; a sweet, innocent demeanor; and the most outrageously impious sense of humor of any comedian working today. And I don't just mean she's dirty. (She's filthy.) She makes fun of things other comedians wouldn't acknowledge, let alone mock.

The stories are interlinked effectively, and the film strikes an upbeat note yet does not address racism and discrimination. For all its affection toward its characters, however, the film is too long and too slack.

A motion picture with one foot in artistic expression and one in pulp fiction and commercialized violence. It wants the respect that goes with a quality production, but it can't resist providing the brutality and exploitation the film's core audience expects.

Chicken Little, though it has its moments, mostly just feels anxious and overreaching. It tries to be all things to all people and fails to be anything to anyone.

As much as we intellectually admire Jarhead, it's a cold film that only sporadically makes the kind of emotional connection it's after.

Although The Dying Gaul tries to evoke the pathos of Greek tragedy and the stars strive heroically, there's none of the requisite grandeur in this trio of creeps to make it worth caring what happens to them.

A rich sense of the dawning of gay liberation.

Has its rewards for those up to the challenge of tackling its nonlinear structure and brooding nature.

An engrossing, muckraking documentary about the retail giant that's been called "the world's largest, richest and probably meanest corporation." But if you're expecting an angry diatribe, you're going to be disappointed.

Not as satisfying as the old and unimproved version. In a zealous attempt to broaden its appeal, the Zorro franchise has drifted from the qualities that made the previous film so successful.

Despite the snappy brilliance of the setup, Prime doesn't entirely deliver on its promise -- something about the way it ends feels like a cop-out, and the opportunities for humor aren't exploited quite as well as they could be.

For the most part the film succeeds in producing a frightening Halloween weekend experience.

A surprisingly wry, contemplative movie.

Though it is small in scale and lasts only 78 minutes, New York Doll, like any documentary, goes places we expect it to and places we do not. As journeys go, this is one to treasure.

A powerful, poignant, provocative drama, it gets its strength from its dispassion, from an uncompromising determination to explain rather than justify or condemn, to put a human face on incomprehensible acts.

A fascinating reflection of the era when it was made; but a starker indictment still of what film culture has become. In 1975, The Passenger was a night at the movies.

All three look great and the filmmakers deliver a certain artiness, but their overall triviality and the unpleasantness of the first two make for an extremely distasteful experience.

Black is interested in big themes -- including guilt and redemption -- and is helped by a strong cast capable of carrying the dramatic sequences.

Above all, it's a testament to the will to live and how that spirit can be found in even the smallest of packages.

A captivating film that truly elevates the spirit, Ballets Russes is the most emotionally satisfying documentary since "Mad Hot Ballroom."

Shows less human dimension than the new Wallace and Gromit movie.

The low-key charm of its setting underscores the easygoing performances of a relaxed, well-matched cast. Kristofferson doesn't oversell the grizzled grandpa routine or talk down to the little girl.

It's smart, spare, elegant and understated.

The final twist does more to unravel what's come before than to tie it all together, making what's come before feel like a cosmopolitan goose chase.

Turns into a film that is too ostentatiously pleased with itself, so in love with its own cleverness it doesn't notice it's darn near worn you out.

What emerges from these stories is a picture of the fallibility of the system and the vulnerability of innocent citizens, whom even scientific evidence cannot protect from incompetence, ego and prejudice, and of the courage of the exonerated victims to make meaning of their tragedies.

A comedy so inane and tedious that it buries its premise and its various worthy points under too many arch and improbable shenanigans and endless dialogue, much of it seriously under-inspired.

Full of genuine scares and impressively disturbing effects.

The Optimists is filled with first-person testimony from Jews who were saved and non-Jews who saved them, people like Rubin Dimitrov, a baker who hid Jews in his ovens and says simply, "a true human being is obliged to help." As a rescued Jew says with emotion at the film's conclusion, "to be a Bulgarian is to be a mensch."

The beautifully crafted Naked in Ashes is the third of four documentaries made by Fouce, who for three decades has studied and embraced the religious teachings found in Nepal, India and Tibet. Her family name is familiar to longtime Angelenos; her grandfather Frank Fouce Sr. was a Hollywood film pioneer and a major exhibitor in downtown Los Angeles and elsewhere for decades.

A gently humorous fable about the power of faith and the possibility of change, Ushpizin not only takes place in Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, it was filmed with that media-shy group's cooperation and followed religious law at all times.

With Three of Hearts: A Postmodern Family, documentarian Susan Kaplan has achieved the enviable effect of eavesdropping on her subjects for a meaningful exploration of the possibilities and the limits within any relationship.

So over-plotted that it's borderline incomprehensible.

A mess of a movie -- but a warm, friendly mess that's hard not to like, even when it tests your patience.

The real reason to see it is its style, which sets an otherwise fairly unremarkable whodunit in a seedy, lite-Lynchian wonderland that's enjoyable to hang out in for a while.

To see this overly schematic movie, is to be made to feel -- inaccurately as it turns out -- that the whole thing is a hopelessly exaggerated fabrication. The taint of the melodramatic techniques used in key segments infects the entire movie and makes us question the truth of a significant historical reality.

Mandoki, who with this film returns to the Spanish-speaking cinema after a string of Hollywood films, has brought a sure sense of the visual and taut construction to Innocent Voices, based on a true story. It is filled with wrenching images.

For a film in a naturalistic mode, Loggerheads gets a shade too elliptical at its finish but still leaves a deep impression as to how irrevocable life's choices can be.

That rare episode film that actually accrues a cumulative power and doesn't merely proceed from one segment to the next.

Kreuzpaintner displays a natural gift with actors and a clarity in storytelling that result in a fresh take on what otherwise might have been a familiar coming-of-age story.

An outrageous, savagely comical account of the disastrous circumstances surrounding the assassination of dictatorial South Korean President Park Chung Hee in 1979.

Hampered by an ending that overreaches needlessly, the film is nevertheless worthy and unmistakably the effort of an enduringly distinctive and important filmmaker.

Couldn't be more unlikely, more unfashionable -- or more compelling.

Rousing, affirmative entertainment.

Ultimately, it's too self-conscious of its role in the marketplace and too hamstrung by its source material to risk being honest at the expense of being liked.

Pure, unself-conscious macho camp, but it's not like Pacino and McConaughey don't know it. They're pitching tents and romping around in the grass like Jerry Maguire on steroids.

The filmmaker captures a certain exaggerated verisimilitude, but the comedy is surprisingly flat. The cast sells the occasional one-liner, but a Reynolds smirk can take you only so far.

Commands attention from its very first frame and never lets up right through the fade-out. It is a splendid example of classic screen storytelling with no false steps, and Gansel's understated approach pays off with resounding emotional effect and meaning.

Wickedly funny and subversive.

Acutely observed, faultlessly acted, graced with piercing emotion and unsparing honesty, it will make you laugh because you can't bear to cry.

Most of all, Wallace & Gromit retains the clever, one-of-a-kind sensibility that made its shorter predecessors so delightful. With every studio comedy looking for a formula for success, it's refreshing to find a heroically whimsical film that succeeds by following no formula known to dog or man.

Miller and Futterman avoid the pitfalls of the genre by refusing to mythologize the artist, plunging instead into the soul of the man.

Paxton and Frost lay the schmaltz on thickly, but the deal-breaker is the overuse of special effects, which make the game in question look more like pinball than golf.

This logic-challenged dive-bum thriller directed by John Stockwell, who did the equally silly surf movie "Blue Crush."

A highly entertaining piece of genre-blending fun.

It completes an informal trilogy that treats women's anxieties over food, motherhood and now clothes with humor and affection.

An endearing, affectionately humorous and even lyrical depiction of the dawning of adolescence amid the privileged, yet Jennifer Flackett's script, for all its sheen, is problematic.

The teenager's journey through a nightmarish reverie presents hallucinogenic imagery that simultaneously dulls the senses and hot-wires the imagination, but it never fully engages emotionally.

But it's one thing to write a loving ode to your mother; another to direct an ode to an ode.

Not entirely free from an aura of didacticism or contrivance, but the film by and large functions as a taut thriller. A drastic act late in the film on the part of Duri seems somewhat implausible, but that does not deter The War Within from emerging as a mostly well-wrought and timely tragedy.

Decidedly uneven yet intriguing.

First-time writer-director Renée Chabria's sincerity and commitment to Sueño are so complete they override its sentimental streak and some overly familiar plotting.

A big fast bust.

A slyly observed slice of Americana.

Sachs has pulled off a film of inferences and intimations, thanks largely to the casting of accomplished actors.

A ticking time bomb of a movie, a gripping, incendiary, casually subversive piece of work that marries pulp watchability with larger concerns without skipping a beat.

The movie loses some of its initial atmospheric tension as paranoid thrills give way to Rambo high jinks.

Has plenty of affectionate humor to balance some serious heart-tugging. And as for the roller-skating, it for sure provides a lot of razzle-dazzle action with lots of virtuoso terpsichorean touches.

In the parlance of "The Player," Katrina Holden Bronson's Daltry Calhoun would be pitched as "Because of Winn-Dixie" meets "Napoleon Dynamite," and that is definitely not a good thing.

By the time this astute and entirely distinctive film is over, the folly of America's love affair with guns, past and present, is laid bare with the same inescapable force with which Gregg Araki exposed the horror of child molestation in "Mysterious Skin," a similarly poetic and deceptively affectless film.

It will surely yield nominations for worst picture.

With its moments of comic relief overly exaggerated and at odds with its realistic tone, Dorian Blues is at its best at its most serious.

An unapologetic cheerleader for exploring the final frontier, Hanks wrote and produced (along with director Mark Cowen) this enthralling look at what might be the greatest technological feat of the 20th century.

Has an intimate, personal quality. Rather than showboating for the camera, the soldiers get to a deeper level, conveying a surprisingly reflective and aware sensibility.

Polanski's version, though handsomely realized, is a fairly conventional rendering of the novel that probably won't be counted among his best films.

Schreiber takes Foer's sprawling, multilayered, multigenerational beast and hones it into a post-Glasnost buddy picture; a polished nugget of a road movie, focused mainly on Alex and Jonathan's growing sense of identification with each other and with their origins.

Against considerable odds and despite a shaky start, Proof proves itself in every area.

A hard-charging horror movie with a clever gay twist.

A clever teen thriller with intricate plotting, deft characterizations, sharp ensemble performances and a darkly ironic twist at the end.

There are moments when it is possible, with effort, to forget the plot and its tired premise and enjoy Witherspoon and Ruffalo's chemistry and imagine they are in another movie. But never for long.

Any time you're watching a film in which the statistics in the voice-over have more intrinsic drama than the protagonists' lives, you know you're in trouble.