Wince-worthy as Guttenberg is, he cannot be accused of being worse than the amateurish direction and the trite script (both by Allie Dvorin) stuffed with insufferable romcom banter and putrid dirty jokes. Some films go straight to video; this one should have bypassed that step and headed for the incinerator.

The magical mystery that is Paul McCartney may never be solved, but for fans (the line forms behind me), the new documentary The Love We Make includes some memorable displays of his world-conquering charm.

The film opens with a disclaimer: "Although based on real events and people, this is a work of fiction." There should be another warning: Unless you're up to date on French politics, a lot of Googling is needed to follow the players.

A crackling musical score and eye-popping cinematography add to the nonstop ferocity, and Wagner Moura is charismatic as the head of the titular police unit.

Bright spots in The Greening of Whitney Brown are Bob the horse, a Gypsy Vanner who teaches Whitney about friendship and her rancher grandpa (Kris Kristofferson), who gets the Philly princess mucking out stalls.

Take a stroll down London Boulevard if you enjoy surly, smart, hard-edged British crime movies like "Sexy Beast" and "Croupier."

Werner Herzog looks at the death penalty in Into the Abyss, and as is almost always the case, to look through his eyes is to marvel.

Nutty Danish provocateur Lars von Trier -- long one of the most annoying filmmakers on the planet -- turns out one of the year's most emotionally resonant art movies.

If it's violence ye seek, and violently confused storytelling, look ye no further.

It's pretty sad if you're a comic and Al Pacino is the funniest thing in your movie.

DiCaprio may well receive a Best Actor Oscar for his tour de force as the conflicted FBI director -- greatly abetted by Hammer (who played the Winklevoss twins in "The Social Network'') in his first major role as the flamboyant but frustrated Tolson.

It has a pleasing smallness -- it's cinematic chamber music -- that almost makes you overlook its inability to really explain its subject.

Young Goethe looks great, and the cast is appealing. But the story is riddled with clichés and fabrications.

Ineptly written and directed, the nihilistic The Son of No One flaunts an attitude best summed up by a cynical Pacino -- "A man has to live with s--t.'' Maybe so, Al, but audiences have the option of skipping this bomb.

Says Rampling: "If you're going to do a story like this, it's not going to be all flowers and roses and smell nice."

Veteran character actor Dennis Farina gives one of the best performances of the year in a rare lead part as an aging, down-on-his luck small-time hood in The Last Rites of Joe May.

Killing Bono begs to be remade with A-list stars but, given Neil's history of near-misses, probably won't be.

There are moments of brilliance, like a claymation sequence that manages to simultaneously send up '60s holiday cartoons and "Ghostbusters'' (with Frosty the Snowman instead of Marshmallow Man).

This movie doesn't get huffy, it gets laughs.

While the original was an art-house success, this English-language redo, now getting a one-week run after sitting on the shelf for a year and a half, doesn't measure up.

The indie road movie Janie Jones is billed as "inspired by the true story" of its writer-director, David M. Rosenthal. Impossible. No one's life is this boring.

Putting it as kindly as possible, this pitiful romantic comedy directed by Scott Marshall (dad Garry did "Pretty Woman'') peaks with its animated opening credits.

It's sort of like last year's "Blue Valentine" on Prozac -- the giddy highs and the despairing lows are muted, and a well-known side effect of that antidepressant pops up, too: Palpable lust is all but nonexistent.

Where Anonymous has it all over "Shakespeare in Love'' is its detailed evocation of London from four centuries ago. The rowdy audience for Shakespeare's first works at the Globe Theatre is especially colorful.

Michael Brandt's soporific thriller is making a token stop in theaters before its January DVD debut. Miss it if you can.

This future looks awfully passé: The stimulus didn't work out. Neither did 1917 Russia.

Relentlessly mediocre cartoon.

The legend of Thompson is immortal, though, and it'll fall to each generation to jam him into its own mold. Depp and Robinson's view is that Thompson was like a mullet: a party in the back but all business upfront.

There's a winning emotional truth in the father-son scenes in this Spokane-shot sleeper, directed with skill and sensitivity by Jonathan Segal.

This time the execs are lobbying us, yet the public grows increasingly furious as our tax dollars fund corporate welfare, bailouts and dumb ideas like the $41,000 golf cart that is the Chevy Volt.

This small movie carries great allegorical weight as it echoes the Manson Family, the long list of failed utopian communes that culminated in Bolshevism and the one-child policy that in China has prevented the births of untold numbers of girls.

Le Havre is warm-hearted and uplifting, without being schmaltzy or preachy. And, with its illegal-alien theme, it's dead-on timely.

Johnny English Reborn sounds like a reboot, but it's actually a tired recycling of something that wasn't exactly fresh to begin with.

This Muppet virtuoso is so visibly thrilled to work in Henson's weird and wonderful world, and so good at bringing joy to little kids, you'd have to be a true Grouch not to be moved.

Everything plays out exactly as you'd expect in a cheerful, well-meaning movie in the style of something made for the Disney channel.

Making a true story of social injustice into a gripping narrative requires more imagination than is contained in this well-intentioned but uninspired effort.

The shtick movie Paranormal Activity 3 is the horror equivalent of vaudeville comedy: a little patter, a little pie in the face, repeat.

Spacey does his best work since "American Beauty'' as a tired middle-aged corporate warrior whose greatest compassion, in the end, is reserved for an ailing dog he has to put to sleep.

Yearning for an exciting African adventure? Oka! isn't it.

Much lip service is given to the global village in Connected: An Autoblogography About Love, Death and Technology, yet it constantly drifts back into a Shlain family slideshow.

The Woman is disturbing, lurid and perverse, but that isn't necessarily bad: Horror buffs, especially fans of Ketchum, will be overcome with joy and excitement.

Cage and director Joel Schumacher, who has fallen so far from the A-list that he provokes a demand for new letters of the alphabet after Z, have each found their cinematic soulmates.

A dispiriting rehash of dysfunctional family clichés that seems to last longer than Thanksgiving Day dinner.

Make no mistake, Father of Invention is the hilarious Spacey's show all the way.

Basically "csi: East Texas,'' the debut feature of Ami Canaan Mann is long on style and short on coherent storytelling, not unlike numerous efforts by her director dad, Michael, who serves as a producer here.

Spanish master filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar offers up a grisly Halloween trick-and-treat in his first full-out horror movie, an eye-popping and genuinely shocking gender-bending twist on Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo.''

Yet despite the efforts of an excellent cast headed by three top comedy names -- Owen Wilson, Steve Martin and Jack Black -- and tons of beautiful scenery (mostly British Columbia and the Canadian Yukon), this movie stubbornly refuses to take flight, or generate more than a few chuckles.

Misshapen, malodorous and firing its grubby tentacles across the room in a feeding frenzy, The Thing reminded me of a roomful of journalists immediately after someone announces Open Bar. The movie's victims disappear like cocktail peanuts and without a whole lot more significance.

Footloose won me over early, with a sequence in which the hero gets all heavy metal while restoring his badass ... VW Bug.

Sorry, but if your sensibility is pure trashy camp, don't expect anyone not to laugh when you try to be earnest.

Sick, disgusting and vile. It's also demonically funny, stylish and ingenious.

The Sons of Tennessee Williams, which offers touching interviews with many older gay men, somewhat awkwardly connects this history with the efforts of a gay Mardi Gras crew to keep going in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Has a few things going for it -- a winning performance by Luchini and a small role by Pedro Almodóvar favorite Carmen Maura. But these talented folks can't compensate for a plot that strains credulity and lacks badly needed social bite. Wait for the DVD.

There's nothing startlingly original about Estevez's screenplay, yet it has a modesty you seldom see when Hollywood tackles spiritual subjects.

Sweeping, if exhausting, historical epic set at the turn of the 20th century.

With Paul Newman gone, you couldn't ask for a better senior-citizen representation of Butch Cassidy than Shepard. In his best performance since "The Right Stuff'' turned him into a reluctant movie star, Shepard makes Blackthorn worth seeing.

Real Steel is to action what the Anthony Weiner habit was to sex: It's so virtual, so distant from the thrill, that you wonder what the point is. Do you really want to pay to watch an actor playing a kid who in turn plays what amounts to a video game?

It's not up to the high standard of the Clooney-Heslov script for "Good Night, and Good Luck,'' or what you'd imagine that, say, Aaron Sorkin could have done with this premise (for starters, sharper dialogue). Or what Elaine May did with the similarly themed "Primary Colors" 13 years ago.

This film is narratively inert (we spend a lot of time listening to the same questions being asked over and over) and, like virtually all docs in its genre, less than vigorous in its pursuit of truth.

Fast, furious and often funny. But no blood is truly shed (except literally in a playground fight during the opening credits).

This is essentially a student film offering nothing but absurdly contrived coincidence.

Extremely cool-looking in the manner of "Sin City,'' but clumsily staged, slackly acted and mind-numbingly dull, Israeli director Guy Moshe's English-language fantasy is set in a future when guns, and apparently coherent conversations, have been outlawed.

Recalling the lesson about bringing a knife to a gun fight, a British documentary filmmaker brings a spoon to a hatchet job in the film Sarah Palin: You Betcha!

It succeeds mostly thanks to stellar work by the wonderful Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who capably handles the dramatic heavy lifting, and Seth Rogen, who delivers big laughs as his raunchy bud.

No matter how charmingly loopy she is, Faris can't transcend the stale gender clichés and rehashed rom-com set pieces.

For a 90-minute movie, Margaret has a thin story. So it's unfortunate that it runs 2 1/2 hours.

It would be possible to appreciate Shannon's fabulous work in Take Shelter far better if the filmmaker lost a quarter of the two-hour running time -- there are many overlong scenes that make this a needlessly tough sit.

A protegé of Gus Van Sant, Archer -- who also makes short films and music videos -- has a wild imagination he has trouble harnessing. He doesn't know the meaning of "too much." But Barkin, in short, blond hair, is superb, as usual, and Aaron Platt's cinematography is stunning. Here's hoping Archer gets his s - - t together in feature No. 3.

Weekend is a gay riff on "Before Sunrise" (1995), in which a man (Ethan Hawke) and woman (Julie Delpy) meet and fall in love in one night, before going their separate ways in the morning for what could be forever.

Based on a memoir by Nigel Slater, a British celebrity chef who makes a cameo appearance, Toast also charts the budding chef's growing interest in hunky, scantily clad guys. Be warned: Some of the regional British accents would benefit from subtitles.

While the Kassen brothers do an impressive job for newcomers -- the film looks great and performances are uniformly solid -- there's some overly blunt dialogue and dead-end subplots that would have been pruned by more experienced filmmakers.

At its most entertaining when the parrot does the talking.

In Machine Gun Preacher, Gerard Butler says, "I've done a lot of things I'm not proud of that hurt a lot of people." But enough about "The Bounty Hunter," "The Ugly Truth" and "P.S. I Love You."

Even if Corben hadn't photographed Gatien with lighting that makes him look like a horror-movie villain, he'd hardly come off as innocent.

It's a shame that, after nearly 40 years of writing about rock, Cameron Crowe is receptive to the clichés of the genre.

A reasonably uplifting kids movie if you don't think about it too much. I get paid to think about things too much, and effective as the movie is, it nevertheless left me slightly put off.

A snarly Euro-thriller with crust under its fingernails and bad breath. It doesn't care if you like it, which is why I kind of do.

Actual abduction may be preferable to the movie of the same name, but only if your kidnappers don't torture you by forcing you to watch it.

A crowd-pleasing baseball movie for people - like me - who don't like baseball movies...Probably the finest baseball movie since "Bull Durham".

At a little over an hour, Silent Souls is hardly long, yet the camera's repeated focus on the wintry, gray country road they're traveling can feel somewhat ponderous -- like life itself, as one of the guys in the film might wryly point out.

The film achieves near-poignancy in its final act, when we finally meet one of the two elderly tipplers, plus a friend who occasionally stayed at their apartment and endured their shouting matches.

Tykwer exhibits a fondness for split screens and other eye candy but no interest in formalities like character and plot development. By the time we reach the kitchy final scene, we've had our fill of visual tricks.

Unlike Van Sant's grittier, less sentimental recent small films, it's twee enough to make your teeth ache. It's the director's biggest miscalculation since "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" 18 years ago.

Jane's Journey is an exceedingly graceful and dignified sleep aid.

Depardieu's days as a leading man might be over, but he has a bright future in quirky roles like Germain.

The main reason to see it is for the hilariously nasty uses it devises for a bear trap, nail gun, etc.

The good news about I Don't Know How She Does It is that it's so bad that it's another ovary-punch to the formula chick flick. Bring on more films like "Bridesmaids."

It's fun, but the script, credited to Hossein Amini ("The Wings of the Dove"), is short on characterization and long on plot twists and wisecracks.

No description can do justice to The Mill and the Cross, which must be seen to be fully appreciated.

Coming on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary, this snapshot of middle America is a worthwhile addition to the cultural conversation.

A thoroughly amateurish effort at capturing clued-in and smartass teens.

Love in Space is just what movie fans have been waiting for: a romantic comedy from Communist China.

All of the actors are enjoying themselves, and the movie is stuffed with history, atmosphere and vivid characters. What's in short supply, though, is laughter.

The latter is played by Parker Posey, who looks baffled throughout. As well she should.

This new movie features stylishly filmed and choreographed battles. But in between the set pieces is a lot of sentimental blather that slows down the film. More action, less talk should be the order of the day, but it isn't.

A great-looking but wearyingly cliched and confusing vanity production.

Arriving two days before the 10th anniversary of 9/11, Steven Soderbergh's Contagion is a serious all-star thriller about the rapid worldwide spread of a killer virus that's easily the scariest of the disaster films that have followed the attack.

A cheap exploitation picture wrapped in miles and miles of stale would-be Oscar scenes.