A routine, stereotype-stuffed sitcom with pretensions.

See The War Tapes. Maybe this picture can be worth a thousand lives.

It's a fast and enjoyable B-movie, though, and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine brings some good stormy drama to the proceedings.

It's not a particularly complex (or pleasant) film, but along the way you get a glimpse of the kinds of neighborhoods that give birth to anti-Western fanatics.

One of the most realistic documentaries I've ever seen--and, dry as it is, one of the most devastating in its implications.

Stagedoor features unremarkable rehearsal footage (exhibitionists make poor subjects for vérité documentaries) and thoughtful but unsurprising interviews with camp counselors and parents.

If there's anything to be learned from this dud, it's that when you decide to adapt an explosive property like The Da Vinci Code, playing it safe isn't safe: Either swallow hard and make the damnable thing or give it to someone with more guts and/or less to lose. Here is a saga that bombards the very foundations of Western religion. But onscreen, there seems to be absolutely nothing at stake.

Has William Hurt ever been this perfectly cast? He uses his groggy self-importance to make the pastor the victim of evil and the very fount of it.

The movie is, in all senses, a big downer.

In the world of bloated movie-star vehicles, it's not unusual to see an ego trip of these dimensions. What’s rare is when one hits its marks so smoothly.

Zwigoff doesn't get the tone right, and the picture goes from reasonably amusing (if crude) to puzzling to boring to (when a campus strangler enters the picture) hateful.

The best thing about Down in the Valley is that you hope it's not going where you have an inkling it's going. The purity of Norton's madness is a wonder.

Brilliant, tightly focused, and momentous.

This Romanian movie defies categorization--it's halfway between a black comedy and a Fred Wiseman documentary. And it haunts you like the ghost of any dead person you've ever ignored.

To keep his satirist’s street cred, Weitz chases the sentimentality with sour slaps at the audience. But for all its supposed outrageousness, American Dreamz has a soft center.

Little turns out well in Rebecca Dreyfus's Stolen, a haunting and expansive documentary.

Its tone is semi-parodic, with lurid black-and-white cinematography and brassy, tongue-in-cheek music. But Harron stops well short of camp.

Even when it spreads itself too thin, Look Both Ways enlarges your perception of the here-and-now--and what movies can do to transcend it.

The pretzeled syntax is fun for a while. But as the holes are filled in, the film stands revealed as just another vacuous revenge picture. It shrinks your perception of what movies can do.

Friends With Money doesn't quite snap into focus. It just floats along-an agreeable comedy of manners with actors you like to hang out with.

James Toback seems oddly nice in Nicholas Jarecki's delicious cult-of-personality documentary The Outsider.

Stupefyingly lackluster.

Writer-director Rian Johnson gives the usual teen angst an entertaining kick. But the joke wears off, and what's left is as convoluted and monotonous as any conventional hard-boiled mystery.

Surprisingly diverting as a case study: not only of a talented misfit sublimating like mad to keep his loneliness from consuming him but also of a fringe artistic community (which includes the makers of this film) that rallies to give him the reinforcement he craves.

I found myself savoring a thriller (as well as a Spike Lee “joint”) that wasn't, for a change, in my face.

The Dardennes' most accessible film. Their handheld camera catches tiny flickers of emotion that few filmmakers come near; you feel as if you're watching the movements of a soul.

It's the perfect moment for the ridiculous but riotously enjoyable revolutionary comic-book thriller V for Vendetta-which will doubtless outrage conservatives and unnerve fuddy-duddys but liberate the rest of us with its magisterial irresponsibility.

Something is missing, though. The themes are all there, but the movie doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier and rev you up.