Prime may have its unlikely moments, but overall its heart is winningly untraditional and in exactly the right place.

The explanation for all this mayhem eludes me, and even a lame last-minute twist isn't enough to cover the fact that Jigsaw ain't as clever as the movie thinks he is.

This is the sort of small, intimate movie that, if it had been made on a low budget by independent actors, would be celebrated to the skies.

Riveting.

Mom (Elisabeth Shue) suffers from the fatal movie ailment of being so underwritten she's practically see-through.

Where the book was preciously and carefully crafted, the movie just feels precious.

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is a movie obsessed more with the act of telling a story than the story itself, which explains why, when the movie's finally over, less than half the audience will have understood the finer points of the mystery.

It's frustrating to watch Levin try to reason with far-gone street-corner evangelicals (whose arguments are preposterous at best) when he might be building a stronger case by other means.

Ushpizin may not turn out to be as popular as Miracle on 34th Street, but if you believe that miracles can happen, it is a perfect outing during the holidays.

It doesn't spoil any of the story's surprising twists to say that Three of Hearts ends up uncovering some poignant truths about the nature of love, the pressures of commitment and the limits to the compromises we are willing to make for the people we care about.

Features one of the more pointless cameos ever when Tom Waits shows up abruptly in the desert to spout mystical nonsense about Domino trading her life for somebody else's. The scene has absolutely no place in this jarring, violent movie; Waits is just another of Scott's distractions.

It's an uncommonly optimistic meditation on death and lament, befitting a filmmaker whose movies (Jerry Maguire, Singles, Say Anything), no matter their subject matter, always double as a celebration of life.

Never before has Egoyan made a picture this egregiously, relentlessly bad.

Despite its serious subject matter, North Country is a crowd-pleaser at heart.

War is hell, and so are bad movies about war.

It's all in the telling, and Loggerheads practically aches with its own heal-the-world earnestness.

None-too-subtly implies Murrow could easily be talking about the present day.

It's an earnest, contemporary drama about adults -- OK, women -- that has no use for irony or cynicism, no room for cutting-edge, clever hipness.

Two for the Money, which was written by Dan Gilroy (Freejack, Chasers), is so badly constructed and illogical that its inanities manage to drown the actor (Pacino) out.

The movie is a clumsy and uninspired mess, which is not to say that it's not funny.

The magic of the movies is never more evident than with stop-motion animation, and nobody does it better than Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park.

Considering its superlative title (second only to George Stevens's New Testament epic, "The Greatest Story Ever Told"), I'm sorry to report that The Greatest Game Ever Played ranks somewhere in the murky middleground of sports movies.

In the thriller Into the Blue, the Bahamian waters dazzle the eye. They are breathtaking and welcoming, possessing mysterious depths. The same cannot be said for the film's stars, Paul Walker and Jessica Alba, who are every bit as gorgeous as the scenery but not quite so profound.

Serenity shows what might have happened if Han Solo had been the focus of the original "Star Wars" instead of whiny Jedi wannabe Luke Skywalker.

The movie implies that despite its thunderous success, the book also destroyed Capote, who crossed a line in his quest for personal glory for which he could never forgive himself -- no matter how many accolades it brought him.

Going Shopping can make a wonderful outing for girlfriends. It's fun.

With its predictable confrontations and tacky fantasy sequences, you feel writer/director Jane Anderson steering the material toward schmaltzy movie-of-the-week territory at every turn.

The War Within is dark and somber, adjectives that describe both the film's look and its message.