Hit the B-movie sweet spot just right, as Jason Eisener mostly does in his gleefully gory Hobo with a Shotgun, and you could find yourself living the dream.

Despite heavy-handed characterizations, Devine and Bassett make their stake in the union felt, and it's anything but superficial.

As horrific as Something Borrowed is, it's compelling in its own sick way.

Foster's performance is crisp and forthright and surprisingly moving. There's something affecting about watching this disciplined, no-nonsense actress deliver her lines to a hand puppet - she's always game, if not exactly relaxed.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is compelling, sometimes in a hypnotic, sleepy-bye way.

The picture does, in places, feel like an unspoken homage to Kurosawa, though it's certainly its own distinct creation. But I wonder if it more closely resembles another end-of-an-era picture, Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch."

It's either genius or madness to put Diesel and Johnson in the same movie, or the same scene. They're both enormously appealing performers.

Prom has sweetness, nonthreatening conflict, and enough personality to distance it from the chilling anodyne of Disney's television vehicles.

As an insult comic, Madea has gone the way of her low-hanging bosom. There's little pleasure in watching her go off, and Perry's direction is reliably drab: Sitcom setups dominate, with strange blown-out lighting occasionally swapped in for the flat tones of a WB soundstage.

Unfortunately, Silver's movie doesn't cut deep enough: It glosses over some thorny questions and hammers too fixedly on others.

One of those big, extravagant-looking romances that you might automatically deem "conventional" - except for the fact that almost nobody makes big, extravagant-looking romances anymore.

The subject of Spurlock's movie is Spurlock, and while he may be reasonably affable, and sometimes extremely goofy, it's a stretch to call him controversial.

Mostly, though, African Cats is extremely tactful about the truly harsh stuff that goes down in the world of nature.

Armadillo tells us lots of things we shouldn't be so naïve as to think we don't already know. Maybe we need to see these things again and again, just so we don't lose sight of the costs and risks of the wars in which American and European soldiers are currently engaged.

If nothing else, Rio is unabashedly jubilant.

To say too much about what actually happens would be to rob you of the film's risks and narrative ripostes. What should be noted is that Capotondi makes ambitious use of an unreliable narrator in a way that is rarely seen in modern films.

The bad news is that The Conspirator - doesn't have enough crackle.

It would have a very good shot at being entertaining were it not so outwardly concerned with being important.

Thus ends one of the most understated shark-attack sequences, ever; it's almost Bressonian, except it's not boring.

Wright applies an artful eye to carnage; he and production designer Sarah Greenwood exhaustively deploy their love for finding colors that mirror the characters' psychological states.

The puffy high tones of medieval fantasy punctured by the flatly vulgar and colloquial - is the film's central comic vein, one McBride taps it like it's never been tapped before.

You can't help but feel that the ambition of Henry's Crime was determined by the near anonymity of its title - the movie seems to be ensconcing itself into the Witness Relocation Program.

Step over to the liquor cabinet and mix yourself a good, stiff drink - if you plan on seeing this godforsaken thing, you'll need it.

Meek's Cutoff is an ambitious feat of visual storytelling that's alive to both its landscape and the actors who people it.

Though the film concerns events contained within the roughly 50 square blocks of the East Village, it suffers from the narrative equivalent of urban sprawl.

Bier appears to have a delicate touch with actors: In a Better World is loaded - perhaps overloaded - with nuance, and her performers never overdo a thing.

One of the most chilling things about Trust is how well it lays out the grooming strategies used by expert predators.

Somewhere under all that bloat is the greatest short subject of all time.

There's nothing in it to inspire excitement or even a mild glimmer of delight; it's almost offensive in its dullness.

A concerted effort to make a scary movie without spilling a drop of blood, Insidious is earnest to the point of suffocation about scaring you silly.

Rubber could have been a modest horror novelty, a wicked, malevolent version of "The Red Balloon."

Ultimately the movie ridicules the culture that compels what Cedric the Entertainer calls grown-ass men to dress up like comic-book characters, as well as the Christian attempts to co-opt that culture.

The chief reason to see Potiche - maybe the only reason - is Deneuve.

So much of Abbas' dialogue consists of stiff platitudes (the script is by journalist Rula Jebreal, based on her novel of the same name); the character she's playing has been reduced to a dull, saintly figure, and not even Abbas can find a way out of that miniature prison.

Punch manages to cram more slow motion into its first few minutes than a season of NFL highlights, all of "Inception" and every one of those NBC promos where the casts of whatever failing police procedural walk menacingly towards the camera.

Peep World barely seems like a movie. Withered and shrunken, it feels even too small for TV.

As you might have guessed from its title, Drinkers is as full of cheap sentimentality and predictable behavior as a Hell's Kitchen bar would have been in the 1970s.

Even the gags we've all seen before are handled so deftly you almost forget how ancient they are.

Warmly observed and solicitous of its audience to the point of caress, Win Win is as comfortable an experience at the movies as you might have this year.

Fortunately, the movie is studded with performances that demonstrate the cast's skills, such as Kristen Wiig's soggy white-bread delusional Christian Ruth.

How, I'm wondering more and more often, do studios put movies like this one in front of audiences and assume they'll just buy it? The secret to making a great, or even just a good, thriller these days seems to have been lost.

Furman keeps the drama taut when it needs to be, and loosens the reins easily when it's time to kick back - he has good control over the movie's rhythms.

What Press comes up with in the end isn't just a portrait of individual eccentricity. Its larger subject is the way one man, just by being alive to what's around him, has created a vast, detailed anthropological record of how New Yorkers present, and feel, about themselves.

Aside from a few arresting visuals, Red Riding Hood is just a slog through the woods.

Sex is threatening, as Brontë knew, and Wasikowska and Fassbender make this particular dance look exceedingly dangerous.

There's an enchanting, and very Western, musicality in Certified Copy, a mash-up that charms; Mad Decent - master masher, dj and producer Diplo's label - aptly describes it. (Diplo and Buñuel would've loved each other).

It really is just sensory bombardment, and in two dimensions you have even less of a grasp of what's happening and of what you're looking at than the poor bastards on-screen.

The picture is rambunctiously affectionate; Guiterrez may go for the broad joke, but never the cheap one.

Radnor is an overprotective first-time director, and the final effect is like watching a film with elbow pads, a helmet and training wheels.

I salute the effort to go somewhere strange in Mars Needs Moms; if only a fully realized idea - and not the same, barely concealed right-wing rap, different planet - had been the destination.

Take Me Home Tonight isn't nearly as much fun as the '80s actually were. Even worse, it's less fun than most '80s comedies were - and that's bad.

Beastly manages to show you all the ways it might have worked by missing every available mark, sometimes by the gaping expanse between Alex Pettyfer's ears, sometimes only by the feline curl of Vanessa Hudgens' smile.

Maddeningly repetitious.

To paraphrase something Quentin Tarantino once said about Sergio Corbucci, Verbinski loves the uglies. They return the favor by looking almost beautiful.

If anything, Joe's sense of dream logic is more naturalistic than Lynch's, more grounded in the knowable world - as much, that is, as we can know about nature - and the luminous Uncle Boonmee is no exception.

There's even a shootout sequence that plays out, from start to finish, while our hero is in flagrante. That's something I don't believe I've ever seen in a movie.

The normally sly Wilson - who was once in the running to play James Bond - was directed by Beauvois to surrender ego. Wilson accomplishes this with a minimum of fuss.

There's a lot that works in Heartbeats - so much that its flaws stand out in disappointingly sharp relief.

The Comedy of Emasculation that Judd Apatow and his disciples have made into a separate economy was invented by the Farrelly brothers.

If you've ever wondered how a bunch of blockheaded white boys would handle a bullet wound, you're in for a treat.

The very woozy nature of the story itself works.

It goes down like a canned but genial '80s comedy: Without fanfare or much nutrition; part of your balanced breakfast.

It's tailored more to a gamer's eyes and expectations than a moviegoer's. On the whole the scenes play like levels, with one connecting in only the most basic way to the next.

That's eventually what Unknown is - violent, impersonal and comforting.

Carancho moves into heist mode in its final act, and the lovingly balanced, placid frames give way to thrilling turbulence.

Just Go With It attempts to merge farce and romantic comedy with the Sandler sensibility, and the result is a story that evades where it should engage and a whiplash tone that dispirits when it should delight.

It's got a great subject - the extraordinarily voluble comedian Jonathan Winters, whose constant rush of words can be like a blizzard: beautiful, maddening, exhausting and finally beautiful again. But it's not a great film.

What he's missing in The Eagle is that spark of the insane - the slightly lunatic fever that makes us unable to keep our eyes off him (Channing Tatum).

What a dud of a story! You know what it needs to dress it up? Garden gnomes.

It's a movie that needs to look down its nose for its laughs, which generally isn't the best place to find them.

The Roommate has notched an unbelievable achievement; it makes the second rate "One Tree Hill" seems like it was about something.

Cold Weather is partly a movie with an actual plot, not just a portrait of young twentysomethings adrift in unfulfilling circumstances.

The supposition, maybe, is that in an alleged thrill ride of a movie like this one, the words aren't supposed to matter.

Roos works from the edge of a precipice as well, distending the melodrama in his films until it finally tumbles in subtle, observant satire; Kudrow, who etches each pause in acid, was born to speak his dialogue.

It takes too long for the story to come around to the fact that Will is just plain nuts - and even then, he gets over it in a heartbeat.

It's all goofy stuff, played for laughs, but it's clear we've been catapulted into a world where things are not quite right.

Hopkins is having a blast, and he's fun to watch.

Mostly, The Mechanic creaks and groans as it goes through the motions, and not even its lavish violence - which includes much smashing of heads and a nasty screwdriver stabbing - is particularly electrifying.

A small movie with modest ambitions, and accordingly, it packs only a modest emotional punch.

Rao's ultimate achievements - including a balanced, doleful tone and moments of city symphony elegance - are undercut by the arrangement of her characters into narrative castes that cross paths but can't quite connect.

It's all just too cute for words, and more's the pity. Because in the end, No Strings Attached is more meaningful for what it does rather than for what it says along the way.

This is a household in which the rules are very formal, and they're matched by the formality of the filmmaking.

Weir's artisan's sureness grants a bewitching calm - his trademark ambience - to this harrowing tale.

It's a low-blood-pressure version of the kind of thing James M. Cain used to do in his sleep, and its filmmaking accomplishment is as minimalist as its narrative ambition is minimal.

An adaptation that wholly and faithfully captures the spirit and mood of the book it's based on, and an example of computer animation - the 2-D sort - that shows the human touch in every frame.

The Dilemma is bad in a way that seems to parody all the ways in which a film like, say, "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" was good.

Disappointingly ordinary film.

While this latest Rogen-penned iteration is a game try, it feels a bit like he's trying to make a volume out of a footnote.

Season of the Witch is barely even a Nicolas Cage movie. He wanders through the picture, zombified.

Country Strong rides pretty high in the saddle, confident in the remarkably realized world Feste has created for her characters.

The faces of these performers - particularly Williams' - are the key to Blue Valentine.

Nothing says "Awards Season" like feel-bad cinema, and with Biutiful, Iñárritu hauls out the big guns. He also, maddeningly, has one hell of a weapon in his star, Javier Bardem.

It's as subversive and penetrating a treatment of the British character as we get on the big screen, and it's why I don't mind that Leigh keeps them coming 'round with the reliability of the cocktail hour.

It's all sweet and very, very silly. I was surprised by the subtleties - both comedic and thematic.

Mattie is a no-nonsense mite with a forthright manner and a mean head for figures; she wears her hair in two sturdy braids whose tips have never seen the inside of any inkwell, believe you me.

Coppola is a filmmaker who fills up a big canvas with small moments: That's the opposite of working in miniature, even though she's attuned to the tiniest details.

The animation itself is technically gorgeous, a class act all the way. But there's so little to be found in the faces of the characters, or even in the way their limbs move (much of it adopted, cleverly enough, from Tati's own physical style), that it's not clear what we're supposed to feel for them.

This latest is grim stuff: Little Fockers hardly bothers with finding a reason to exist, although one might assume a focus on the abiding hilarity of life with small children. That assumption would be wrong.