The film is primarily interested in the music that accompanied this turmoil, which is a bit like covering the American Revolution with the focus on the wigs Washington and Jefferson wore.

Produced with the best of intentions by a California church and directed without distinction by first-timer Brian Baugh, To Save a Life would be bland and boring even as a half-hour after-school special.

Charmless and underdeveloped knockoff of "The Santa Clause."

The film’s cool-looking desaturated look (not unlike “The Road”), plentiful action and Washington’s charismatic gravitas as the taciturn hero make it relatively easy to overlook the pretensions and implausibilities in the script.

The makers of The Spy Next Door should give 50 percent of their profits to James Cameron for ripping off "True Lies." Let's see, what's 50 percent of nothing?

Even a great British cast and obscenity-laden gangland dialogue aren't enough to make what amounts to an extended acting exercise into much of a movie.

Fish Tank is grim, to be sure, but it leaves us with a feeling of hopefulness.

Possibly the least sexy vampire flick ever to crawl out of the crypt (it never occurs to anyone that biting someone's neck is kinda intimate; the act is strictly utilitarian), but it's unusually detailed in its imagining.

Rent "Enchanted" with Adams, and watch Goode as Colin Firth's boyfriend in his other current movie, "A Single Man."

An improbable but hilarious combine of losin’-it comedies and the rarefied, Europhile air of the Cinema du Twee.

The recent trend in political documentaries is for filmmakers to heap ridicule and sarcasm on people they don't agree with, a la Michael Moore. Waiting for Armageddon (which has nothing to do with the 1998 Michael Bay movie) demonstrates that sometimes it's far more devastating to simply point the camera at your subjects and let them talk.

Matthew Broderick graduates from "boyish" and lurches straight into "curmudgeonly" in the would-be indie heartwarmer Wonderful World.

In the words of Al Gore, "Garbage Dreams makes a compelling case that modernization does not always equal progress."

The White Ribbon is one of the finest films that ever repelled me, a holiday in the abyss.

Seems almost like a self-parody of Williams' earlier work.

Sherlock Holmes dumbs down a century-old synonym for intelligence with S&M gags, witless sarcasm, murky bombast and twirling action-hero moves that belong in a ninja flick.

It's Complicated is basically "Avatar" for women of a certain age, with blond highlights replacing blue skin.

The Depp sequence is especially poignant, apparently rewritten with references to other celebrities who died before their time -- Rudolph Valentino, James Dean and Princess Di -- and who will remain "forever young" in our imaginations.

Among cutesy pop musical trios aimed at nondiscerning audiences, I'll take Alvin and Co. over the Jonas Brothers any day.

As for Grant, who hasn't been this sharp since "Love Actually" six years ago, he is once again the prime minister of cute comedy.

Rarely less than absorbing and never boring over its nearly three-hour length.

In the clumsy hands of director Rob Marshall, this tacky, all-star botch more closely resembles a video catalog for Victoria’s Secret.

The Young Victoria achieves a fine balance. I guess that's what you get when a film is produced by both Martin Scorsese and Sarah Ferguson.

An animated feature that revels in its low-tech wackiness.

Can’t possibly deserve your close attention. Yet it does, with distilled honky-tonk poetry and generous good humor. It’s one of the year’s best, most deeply felt films.

In this season of self-important filmmaking, it's nice to watch a movie that entertains while refusing to take itself too seriously.

It's all a gorgeous error, a bonfire of overreach.

This movie depicts an unlikely intersection of sports and leadership in ways that manage to be inspiring and insightful without ever becoming schmaltzy or preachy.

Truth be told, Firth's transcendent performance in A Single Man renders that stylistic gimmick utterly unnecessary -- Firth provides all the emotional color this movie needs, and then some.

As nutty as you'd expect when two of our most eccentric auteurs join forces.

Funny more often than not. Worth checking out on video.

Giving Mrs. Tiger Woods a run for her money as the most humiliated celebrity of the month, Russell Crowe accepts a third-banana role in the laughable weepie Tenderness.

Having seen the trailer for Brothers and now the finished film, I feel as though I just watched the trailer twice.

One of the year's best films and so tapped into the zeitgeist that it's positively scary.

A shrill farce that strains credibility even by the standards of black comedy.

Essentially amounts to an extended interview with a psycho, fleshed out with background material that, while suitably shocking, is not always illuminating or even frank. The film is curiously shy about calling Varg what he is: a Nazi.

After seeing Everybody's Fine, Paul McCartney offered to write a song that plays over the closing credits. That may be because the whole movie is like a celluloid McCartney tune: warm and playful and sweetly earnest, but lightly funny, too, and crafted with consummate skill.

Helen Mirren outdoes even her Oscar-winning performance in "The Queen" with her tour de force as Countess Sofya Tolstoy in Michael Hoffman's delightful The Last Station.

Brain-dead film.

A wink of self-awareness might have made this a guilty pleasure; instead it's a howler along the lines of this fall's "Law Abiding Citizen."

Strel's 2007 adventures on and in the Amazon are detailed in John Maringouin's fun documentary Big River Man.

Camandule gives a strong performance as the lovesick guard, but Svarcas gets little chance to show her skills. There's minimal dialogue and camera movement -- but lots of charm.

Less an adventure yarn than a character study of two old guys with fading memories and improbable dreams.

In this season of Hollywood blockbusters, small movies can get lost in the hype. Don't let that happen to Home.

Miller never really fleshes out all of these colorful characters in her emotionally facile script, leaving the heavy lifting to the actors. Fortunately for The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, Wright is more than up to the challenge.

Doesn't offer plot or an inquiry into the evil in men's hearts. It simply wallows in the filth and inhumanity that surround a father and his pre-adolescent son as they march across the shattered remains of this country.

Overall, the film is not quite up to "Aladdin" and "The Little Mermaid" from the same directing team of Ron Clements and John Musker, not to mention the recent string of masterpieces from Pixar.

Despite the pace, though -- pedal, have you met my friend metal? -- Ninja Assassin still has some of its best stuff left at the end, when the master returns to demonstrate his extra-special, super-most-deadliest technique.

Old Dogs does to the screen what old dogs do to the carpet. It's unfortunate that only the latter can be taken out and shot.

Me and Orson Welles is, in effect, a sequel to Tim Robbins' star-filled, self-important film about "Cradle," but it's far lighter on its feet.

Yet the moral at the end is that we should all be more tolerant of different cultures. Is that really true, though, if the culture you're trying to tolerate is trying to open your skull with a circular saw?

New Moon is supposed to be an exciting love story plus monster action. So where’s the excitement? Where’s the action?

What makes The Blind Side a Thanksgiving treat is director Hancock's subtle touch and admirable refusal to yield to sports movie clichés, something he did previously with "The Rookie" and "Remember the Titans."

There can only ever be one Bad Lieutenant: Harvey Keitel. In Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Nicolas Cage, pretend tough guy (Malibu accent, long floppy coiffure, nervous smile), is more like the Bad Used-Car Salesman.

That still makes Broken Embraces superior to at least 99 percent of the movies released in 2009. Run, don't walk.

This overlong drama is the first (mostly) English-language film from the talented Swedish filmmaker Moodysson (“Lilya 4-Ever”). Any semblance of subtlety was unfortunately lost in translation.

While he takes an evenhanded approach, the filmmaker appears on camera far too often and goes off point as frequently as Moore.

Aheroin-stuffed hipster buys a dog, eats Vietnamese food and sells drugs to pay for rehab in Fix, the latest piece of cine-junk stamped out by the indie fakedocumentary factory.

Rising star Michael Shannon makes a riveting shamus hired to chase a runaway husband in the quiet but resonant little noir The Missing Person.

Fives us behind-the-scene looks at Hirohito, the man and the ruler. The diminutive leader comes off sympathetically, as a man concerned with the welfare of his people.

A scrumptious war movie.

As you might suspect, the 2012 dialogue is pure Velveeta.

A gorgeous and witty piece of stop-motion animation.

A high school coming-of-age film that dares to push the envelope. It doesn't always succeed, but that's not for lack of trying.

The similar Kevin Bacon HBO movie "Taking Chance" got there first. Worse news: The earlier movie was sober, meticulous and quietly convincing, not a shouty, shoddy bore like this piece of flummery.

Hearing snoring from behind me at a screening the other day, I looked around and noticed four people had dozed off during the prettily photographed, boring vanity project that is Oh My God?

For its wicked innocence, this is the finest rock movie since "Almost Famous."

Dicey entertainment, indeed.

It is said that everyone either loved or hated radical defense lawyer William Kunstler. A documentary by his daughters asks, "Why choose 'or' instead of 'both'?"

Delivers plenty of smart dialogue and devises a number of excellent reasons to photograph his cast in situations that suggest the working title for the film might have been "Women in Underwear."

After a slightly promising start, this great-looking but ultimately deeply confusing and unscary sci-fi/horror opus turns into a quite boring rehash of M. Night Shyamalan's post-"Signs" films.

To its credit, this remarkable film does not contrive a happy ending. Under the circumstances, even a mildly hopeful one seems like a triumph of the highest order.

The Fourth Kind has a clever gimmick and nothing more.

Unless the director was aiming for a Victorian "Black Christmas," though, he overshot his mark

At the end, as I stumbled back onto the street as disoriented and grateful as a released POW, I thought I'd need a calendar to calculate the length of time I'd been away.

Boring.

Splinterheads might suffice some late night on cable, but that's about it.

There are a lot of grace notes in That Evening Sun, including Barry Corbin's hilarious work as Abner's neighbor, a vivid sense of landscape and a visually arresting climax.

Following the start of the war crimes trial of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic in The Hague, the release here of the political thriller Storm couldn't be more timely.

Fitfully amusing.

The direction is never more than conventional, with a tear-inducing finale better suited to a TV soap opera.

You wouldn't call The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day a taut thriller. More like a fleshy, messy, jangled frenzy of shootouts and much discussion about the mechanics of romantic entanglements that bloom between prison inmates.

Although the payoff is creepy, it takes a little too long to arrive -- and when it does, it's about as worn-out as the movie's title.

Has a split personality. It starts as a comedy but morphs into an icky family melodrama. It should have stuck with the yuks.

Neither a concert film nor a documentary but a ghoulish “event” offered just in time for Halloween, This is It is sadly -- and reprehensively, if you ask me -- the movie equivalent to the National Enquirer’s infamous post-mortem shot of Elvis Presley.

A sweet and endearing movie. Attention, kids: It's also packed with action!

A lazy coffee-table book of a movie,

Calls to mind Grandpa taking out his dentures and trying to put on a comedy monster show for little kids at Halloween: When he tries to be scary, he's goofy, but when he tries to be goofy, he's scary.

The movie (Untitled) is a tinny satire destined to go "(Unwatched)" because it is "(Uninteresting)."

Very few actors would have the courage to allow von Trier to put them through what Dafoe and Gainsbourg experienced in the name of art.

If Carrie Bradshaw ever trades her Manolos for sneakers and starts blogging about raising children, I pray she wouldn't be as tiresome as the heroine of Katherine Dieckmann's insufferable comedy Motherhood.

A plot? Tony Jaa don't need no stinking plot.

The performances by neophite actresses Olympe Borval and Lizzie Brochere make the film special.

Unlike the modern glamour-vamps of "True Blood" and "Twilight," this group of smitten and bitten men are no fun at all. That is, unless you like heavy breathing, underwear sniffing, cringe-inducing blood sucking, murder by stabbing or hanging, plus grainy, underexposed cinematography and stilted acting.

In their overly earnest attempt to flesh Sendak’s story out to 100 minutes, Jonze and his co-screenwriter, novelist Dave Eggers, have laboriously spelled out motivations (divorce is bad!), elaborated back stories -- and added reams of less-than-inspired dialogue.

At last, the missing link be tween "Phantom of the Opera" and "Saw." Welcome to the gonzo revenge saga Law Abiding Citizen.

If anything is frightening here, it's the scenes of the small children being indoctrinated into an organic lifestyle and being made to sing, at least three times, a song about the evils supposedly lurking in the environment around them.

Alfred Molina gives a warm and engaging performance as an occupying British soldier.