A disarming Spanish dramedy of late-life love, speaks a universal language.

The film is well shot and edited, backed with a bouncy hip-hop soundtrack and full of pep.

Beautifully composed, The Last Mistress, Breillat's 11th film, deals with the theme she has put forth in such previous work as "Romance" and "Fat Girl": how women deal with sexual desire.

Nothing happens that hasn't been done better in other films, among them Thomas Vinterberg's excellent 1998 "The Celebration."

The misleading documentary Trumbo paints a golden nimbus of holiness around the onetime highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood, Dalton Trumbo, an on-the-record hater of democracy, defender of authoritarian rule and avowed Communist.

Nicely photographed and has impressive sets; too bad there's so little going on that it seems long even at 78 minutes.

Max's even more fabled shoe phone also makes an appearance - and, fortunately for Get Smart, the self-deprecating Carell isn't shoe-phoning in his inspired performance.

The Love Guru is even funnier than "Wayne's World" or "Austin Powers." Not.

They should sell antidepressants along with the popcorn at theaters showing Cecilia Miniucchi's Expired, one of those Sundance "comedies" that make you contemplate slitting your wrists.

One of the 10 best American movies released so far this year, Kit Kittredge: An American Girl is the surprisingly satisfying first theatrical film inspired by a long-running series of historically themed dolls.

Wraps a sari around the kind of suffering-housewife picture that became a cliché 30 years ago.

The film falters only when it eavesdrops briefly on a passionate public discussion of rent control and gentrification. The moment is out of keeping with the carefree nature of the rest of the movie.

A movie that features Wahlberg suggesting everyone try to outrun the wind can barely be watched once.

Like its monstrous hero, The Incredible Hulk gets the job done with minimal artistry and a lot of noise.

Will Marcela (wonderful Ana Geislerova) opt for brains or brawn? The answer might surprise you.

An affecting and beautifully realized documentary.

Guy Maddin's films are always delightful, but his latest, My Winnipeg, has an added treat for film buffs: It features Ann Savage!

This warped masochistic cousin to David Cronenberg's "Crash" - not to be confused with the Oscar winner of the same name - is well worth seeing for Farmiga's stunning performance.

Pepe Danquart's To the Limit from Germany looks great, but it's an altogether different animal.

Encounters may lack the power of, say, the Herzog doc "Grizzly Man," because it has no bigger-than-life character at its nexus, but it does confirm the filmmaker as an iconoclastic master.

Po speaks loudly and carries big shtick. Let the rest of the world cringe at our hyperconfidence, our charisma, our pure awesomeness.

Directed with sledgehammer subtlety by Dennis Dugan ("I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry").

The enchanting voice on the phone, who delightfully shows up in person halfway through, belongs to Zooey Deschanel. In real life, she hooked up with the composer of the lively score, M. Ward, to create the pop duo She & Him.

Mongol really isn't worth leaving your yurt for.

There is, of course, a maximum of blood and gore. Sometimes the director's ideas work; often they don't.

Easily the worst movie I've seen so far this year.

It would seem no easy task conveying the essence of a bigger-than-life figure like Ellison in a 96-minute film. But Nelson, producer of Werner Herzog's "Grizzly Man," makes it look easy.

Operation Filmmaker is eventually about Muthana blackmailing Davenport by withholding access to him as she fruitlessly seeks a happy ending for her film. "Now, I'm just looking for an exit strategy," she finally concludes.

While Bell makes the point that pros account for about 85 percent of total usage, he is more interested in why others - including a guy with the world's biggest biceps, who admits they repulse women - are so driven to be Bigger, Stronger, Faster*.

The movie is so heavily weighted toward the Simmons character that no one else really gets to breathe. And though McBride's shtick is brilliant - he could get rich by playing variations on this character for the next few years, and probably will.

For all its outré set pieces it never rises above the level of pretentious trash.

Feels like it was written and directed by an audience focus group in Omaha?

The bad movie in my head was far better than the one on-screen, which offers no twists at all. A twist? There isn't even a curl or a bend.

Mena Suvari has her best role since "American Beauty" as Brandi, a self-centered nursing home employee distinctly lacking in sympathy for anyone.

Beautiful but boring.

At last: Uwe Boll has made his first intentionally funny film.

The movie has two modes - very loud and extremely loud - and all of the actors are encouraged to mug their hearts out. That even includes Cusack's real-life sister Joan, normally one of the most reliable performers in the business.

Often thrilling, sometimes charming, occasionally clunky family entertainment that perhaps wisely doesn't attempt to scale the heights of "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

All too often, films about interconnected lives stumble under the weight of coincidences. Not The Edge of Heaven.

In their refusal to be up-to-the-moment, the Narnia movies are bound to age beautifully, perhaps much more so than the two Shrek films Adamson directed.

The film could have been improved if it had been less aggressively limp. But the post-adolescent, pre-adult moodiness is spot on: Everyone's favorite author is a bitter recluse, and the soundtrack heaves with the suicide sounds of Joy Division. Trier's intent is to reproduce a sweet, hazy vision of the agony of youth. Ever so elliptically, he succeeds.

Zalla constructs a suspenseful movie with no intention of sugarcoating the daily hardships of New York's underclass.

The dimly lit, exquisitely composed cinematography, by Guillermo Nieto, adds to the draw of this highly recommended movie.

This adventurously awful film is awful in many ways at once.

While this slow-starting update of "Private Lives" has plenty of laughs, the incredibly expressive (and too-seldom seen) Stevenson turns Julia's romantic dilemma into something genuinely moving. She makes A Previous Engagement something special.

I'd call it a depressing soft-core porn flick, but that overstates its titillation factor. Mainly it's just icky.

It's basically a Middle Eastern version of "The Princess Bride" with an assisted-suicide subplot.

The movie has enough big-city wickedness and merry cruelty to keep things skittering unpredictably.

Let the French stick to love stories and leave stupid comedies to Tinseltown.

I have a feeling that this is the last time we'll see a down-and-dirty Ellen Page. Her handlers have too much wrapped up in her mainstream persona to ever again allow her to do anything as daring and out of the loop as The Tracey Fragments. And that's a shame.

Turn the River lacks almost everything Eigeman has as a performer: charisma, wit and snappy delivery.

Laughs are few and far between in the innuendo-laden script attributed to Dana Fox, who's also responsible for the reprehensible "The Wedding Date."

Pity that the direction and narrative lack passion. If there's anything a story of interracial adultery needs, it's passion.

The film is an exposé only of a filmmaker's senseless contempt for the military.

As plodding and pretentious as it is ambitious.

With such smarts and outstanding special effects, I eagerly await a second Iron Man movie, which of course is virtually promised in the final scene.

It's something old, it's something new, it's something borrowed and it's something that blows.

Occasionally there is a striking image or a moment of wounded sweetness, but mainly the film provides ample proof that it's possible to be bizarre and boring at the same time.

This isn't Mamet at his finest, though, which leaves us with a script that is merely three times as smart as the average feature.

An '80s coming-of-age comedy with more energy than ideas.

Ines Efron and Martin Piroyanski give strong performances as Alex and Alvaro, respectively. Debuting director Lucia Puenzo, who co-scripted, tackles a dicey subject with sensitivity and taste.

Surely, if Fey herself had written Baby Mama, this mild cross between "Baby Boom" and "The Odd Couple" would not be so crushingly predictable.

Quickly devolves into a nonprescription alternative to Ambien.

Among the variations of gags from the original are a threesome involving Harold, Kumar and a giant bag of marijuana.

Roman de Gare translates as "station novel," a book you might pick up to read on a train journey and then discard when you arrive at your destination. Lelouch's film is the cinematic equivalent, enjoyable fluff that your mind will discard after the closing credits - but worth seeing nevertheless.

By the end, we wind up pretty much where we were four years ago when the pictures first appeared in the papers: Inexperienced troops did disgusting things, but it's a mystery who else knew.

While there are plenty of laughs, Hunt doesn't play this for farce. Even Midler gives perhaps the most restrained, and arguably the most winning, performance of her screen career.

By far the film's most interesting subject is the king's eldest daughter, 18-year-old Princess Sikhanyiso, who likes to be known as Pashu. She's a self-styled rapper who goes to a Catholic college in California and acts like the spoiled rich kid that she is.

China's public image suffers another blow with Up the Yangtze, a documentary by Chinese-Canadian Yung Chang.

Low-budget triumph.

88 Minutes holds you in a state of acute suspense, keeping you wondering until the very last minute whether this is the worst Al Pacino movie ever made.

A serial-killer flick told like an art lecture, Anamorph manages to be gruesome yet dull.

For anyone with an interest in racing, "First Saturday" is a sure bet.

It's good-natured myth-making cut into kid-size pieces.

This film is so funny it may be beside the point to complain that, as in many Apatow productions, the writing and direction are still in something of a state of arrested development.

An overwrought and patently offensive anti- abortion drama from the director of the accomplished "House of Sand and Fog."

One of my critical brethren opined that this sort of dumbing-down and low comedy may be the only way to sell the public a movie about the Iraq war. If that's true, God help us.

Shot on ugly digital video with Troma-grade special effects, campy humor and frighteningly bad acting, Zombie Strippers should provide many laughs for stoners watching it on video.

It puts a conservative twist on Michael Moore-ism, with campy stock footage, deadpan humor, mocking musical cues and less-than-ingenuous questions.

An unsatisfying drama that premiered at Sundance '07 and was supposedly delayed because of the Virginia Tech shootings.

Page and Church work so brilliantly together as a comic team that it's worth enduring the leads' utter lack of chemistry together - not to mention the fact they're both wildly miscast.

A wet, red chunk of pulp that knows what it is and doesn't care.

Best movie I've seen so far this year? Hands down, it's Tom McCarthy's superb The Visitor, which turns Richard Jenkins, one of the best character actors in the business, into a full-fledged star.

The audience, if any, for Chaos Theory is going to be hit with a little puff of celluloid flatulence. The movie won't linger in the air, but that doesn't make it any less embarrassing.

Leguizamo knocks it out of the park as an armored car driver in The Take.

We keep waiting for a story, or at least some comedy, but none ever materializes. The dialogue makes Algebra II seem fascinating by comparison.

The film is narrated by Russell Crowe, whose star power is probably the only reason it's being released here.

Lazy, shallow and repetitive, Phil Donahue's Body of War is one of the most incompetent documentaries to emerge from the Iraq war.

It's truly inspiring to watch Fred Knittle, 81 and tethered to an oxygen tank, perform a riveting solo of Coldplay's "Fix You" after his singing partner dies shortly before the show.

Fans of Hou know just what to expect from his slow, contemplative films - and they won't be disappointed.

There's enough material here for a miniseries, but the directors keep the proceedings to 78 brisk minutes without making the viewer feel cheated.

Far from a touchdown, but you gotta give points to any movie where a character describes its climactic game as a "muddy snoozefest."

The biggest problem is Wong's decision to cast Norah Jones as Elizabeth, a New Yorker who hits the road after a love affair goes bad. Jones, in her first movie, can't act. (There, I said it!)

Strictly for the 8-and-under crowd.

The movie doesn't do anything with these viney bastards. There's no back story, no satire, no allegory, no implications beyond what's happening on the pyramid.

This film is headed quickly for DVD. In the video store, though, it isn't funny enough to be shelved in the comedy section nor dirty enough to be filed with the smut. It might be useful in propping up a wobbly chair, though.

Martin Scorsese's Rolling Stones "documentary" (i.e. concert film) is a first: the only Scorsese film that does not feature the Stones' "Gimme Shelter." Really. I think the Dalai Lama even hummed the guitar solo in "Kundun."

Has enough material to supply an entire year of a soap opera - in Inner Mongolia, that is.