There are some funny moments, plus occasional nudity and sex, but the joke quickly wears off. What might have worked as a half-hour TV show doesn't suit itself to a feature-length film.

I understood two words of Youth Without Youth: "The End."

Most of the comedy comes from dull situations like a fat guy trying to put on a fat suit for no reason.

Everyone knows about the Holocaust, but few today have heard about what was infamous as the Rape of Nanking, when 200,000 residents of what was then China's capital were massacred by invading Japanese troops.

The tone is good-natured enough to make a simple movie semi-watchable.

Based on the many delightful samples on the soundtrack, it's an exemplary goal.

What might seem like showing off in another movie is dazzling storytelling here, packing in an hour's worth of human misery.

Five minutes before The Golden Compass started, I was wondering when it was going to start. Forty minutes into it, I was wondering exactly the same thing.

It's a cute idea that a better filmmaker than writer-director Michael Schroeder could have done a lot with.

A barbell of a movie that carries some weight at either end. What's in between is purely utilitarian, though.

Harrelson's charming flamboyance - seen to great effect in "No Country for Old Men" - is a great fit for Carter, who carries no small amount of self-loathing under his carefully coifed toupee.

Good grindhouse fun until a last act that's like a meeting of a psychoanalysts' convention.

Hollywood's Woman of the Year is a pregnant 16-year-old, the incredibly hip, smart-mouthed and totally endearing heroine of the wise and witty Juno.

In her directorial debut, Venditti does her best to keep a distance between herself and her subjects. But you have to wonder how much of the Billy we see on-screen is affected by the presence of Venditti's camera.

You won't have a more viscerally emotional experience at the movies this year.

As a history lesson, Oswald's Ghost is valuable, but don't go expecting any new revelations.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work. None of the talking heads is as interesting as Yu thinks they are; and it's difficult to build sympathy for any of them.

Initially shows promise, but filmmaker Frank Cappello (the early Russell Crowe vehicle "No Way Back") gets bogged down when Slater becomes involved with Elisa Cuthbert, a paraplegic survivor of the shooting who wants him to kill her.

The year's dullest movie has arrived: the deeply silly Badland, which is as dead as winter and twice as long.

Darkly hilarious.

The movie falls into all the usual rhetorical traps.

Taylor also makes an impressive comeback as the conflicted daughter who instinctively distrusts Heather, but Starting Out in the Evening is first and foremost a triumph by Frank Langella.

There are many new Japanese movies that deserve a stateside release. Why this hapless mess beat them out is a question that deserves an answer.

This movie's heart is in the right place, which is one way of saying it's terrible.

This is the sort of movie that requires you not only to suspend disbelief, but to check your sanity at the ticket counter.

The first half hour or so of Enchanted is brilliant.

If someone ran this guy through a scanner, the readout would say: “Mark down and stock in straight-to-video aisle."

Bob Dylan would probably love I'm Not There, which may be all a Dylanist needs to know before seeing it. Non-devotees are in for puzzlement, if not exasperation.

A pretentious left-wing monster movie with about 15 minutes of alarming creatures and a whole lot of bickering, is a pre-9/11 story which Stephen King wrote eons ago. It operates in the post-9/11 era about as well as a Studebaker at the Daytona 500.

So full of solid performances and appealing characters that I wished writer/director/producer Preston Whitmore (“The Walking Dead") had considered the dictum “less is more."

Highly entertaining - but far from classic.

I've had root canals that were more enjoyable than Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach's hugely pretentious, ugly and annoying follow-up to "The Squid and the Whale."

There isn't anything terribly exciting or original on offer in the somewhat poky directing debut of screenwriter Zach Helm.

De Palma is extreme, visceral, usually in bad taste but almost always riveting. De Palma's Redacted, a no-budget fake documentary that imagines the circumstances behind a real rape and murder of a civilian girl committed by US troops in Iraq, is a piece of anti-war propaganda whose aims I don't agree with, but it jolted me nonetheless.

If you've seen "Gone With the Wind," you've seen what Love in the Time of Cholera isn't.

If a more incoherent and self-indulgent movie has been released so far this century, I'm not aware of it.

Not like a lump of coal in your stocking. Coal is useful; you can burn it. This movie is more like a lump of something Blitzen left behind after eating a lot of Mexican food.

A dreary message movie.

Best remembered as the most flamboyant of TV's original "Hollywood Squares" - which is really saying something on a panel that included Paul Lynde.

I went to a wartime thriller, but then a Poli Sci 101 seminar broke out.

The first movie I've seen in a very long while that deserves to be called a masterpiece. It's such a stunning achievement in storytelling.

This is one of those thrillers where the person on-screen is often the only person in the theater who can't guess what'll happen next. Lots of laughable moments provide camp value, though, and Bentley ("American Beauty") makes for a charismatic creep.

How can it be that a movie as beautiful to look at as Saawariya is so . . . boring?

Even in support of the noblest of causes, manipulation is manipulation.

Big-Hearted and often quite funny if crudely made, Fat Girls cleverly subverts the clichés of high school comedies to serve an autobiographical story about an overweight gay teen in a small Texas town.

Denzel Washington dazzles in his best screen performance to date as Frank Lucas.

Dazzling fun. Jerry is master of a new domain.

The documentary Darfur Now proves that - no matter how im portant the subject matter - following various people around with a camera doesn't necessarily make a film.

Compelling viewing, even for people who don't care a bit for the punk scene.

Cusack shows that he can still play the sensitive-but-fun guy until the ladies sigh and the men take notes.

Delivers an important message, and its underwater photography is breathtaking. But Stewart lessens the impact by focusing much too much on himself. Did he really have to go into detail about his own health problems? This should be a movie about sharks, not Stewart.

This flick is fast and ferocious, his (Sidney Lumet) sharpest and best since "Prince of the City" (1980) - and surely one of the year's finest.

Cynics need not apply, but I found Bella a real heart tugger.

The anti-Ben Stiller comedy: There's humiliation aplenty but no mugging, no abuse to the crotch region, no straining to be outrageous.

There isn't enough revealing material in the tedious documentary Jimmy Carter Man From Plains to sustain an 800-word magazine profile, let alone a two-hour film.

It must have sounded great on paper.

The only conceivable reason for Warner Bros. to (barely) release this mush is as a favor to Clint Eastwood, whose daughter Alison directed.

What emerges is a portrait of a complex man - one who had no qualms about murder and drugs but who won a national poetry contest and read "Moby-Dick" while in jail. Go figure.

Since the thing is increasingly impatient to jump forward to the next big torture set piece, there isn't any time to establish anyone's character. Butcher shops are bloody, too, but they're not scary.

At 96 minutes, this vanity/insanity project runs a bit long; five minutes would have been plenty.

So you had no idea what was happening in David Lynch's "Inland Empire." Take comfort in the fact that, judging from the documentary Lynch, the filmmaker was just as puzzled as you.

The movie approaches the final scene with a straight face, but it left the audience giggling spasmodically. This script probably should have gone all the way and thrown in a few quips: If your movie is a joke, at least be intentionally funny.

For all of Affleck's skill, he can't entirely put over a credulity-straining ending that probably worked better on the printed page. At the same time, the deeply disturbing windup of "Gone Baby Gone" is a real talker. And that's not something you can say about many movies these days.

A taut thriller based on the tragedy, which remains the most lethal mass killing in New Zealand history.

Rendition has the depth of a bumper sticker without the brevity.

In the mood for some dead-child entertain ment tonight? Reservation Road has what you're looking for. It's "In the Bedroom" crossed with, um, "Fever Pitch."

Made to win awards, and I'm here to present it with one: the Cliché of the Year honors, otherwise known as the Hackney.

The result is wholly original, sort of like "The Wizard of Oz" as filtered through the sensibilities of Emir Kusturica, the cult filmmaker and musician.

Harden and Pantoliano (especially) can be two of the most over-the-top performers in the business, but they don't strike a false note in Canvas - and neither does this heartbreaking movie.

Expect a fast-paced, beautifully mounted and well-acted soap opera with overripe dialogue that plays fast and loose with history - just like they did in the '30s, '40s and '50s - and you won't come away disappointed.

The film's leisurely pace and abstract format isn't meant for the multiplex crowd, but rather for adventurous moviegoers. It took guts to make Khadak and to give it a theatrical release. It might take even more guts to seek it out.

It's a tribute to the filmmakers and cast that by the end of Lars and the Real Girl, you can almost accept that Bianca is, well, a real girl.

Just when things should be getting exciting and complex, they become repetitive and predictable. Subtext becomes hint becomes statement becomes declaration. For once, Pinter is a little too easy to understand.

Too slow to be a guilty pleasure and too dumb to be an innocent one.

A rock bio minus the fun. The sex is guilt-stricken, the drugs are used to treat epilepsy, and the rock 'n' roll is about isolation and despair.

Harper and the film's director, Jeremy Kagan, try valiantly, but they are unable to bring Meir to life or hold viewers' attentions.

A genially scattershot mockumentary.

The Good Night is at heart a mediocre Sundance variation on the Dudley Moore-Bo Derek alleged classic "10."

So laugh-poor that it shoves all its comedy chips on a bet that you can build a movie around nose gags.

There are more than ample rewards for discerning adults: Some of the best dialogue in a recent movie and a gallery of unforgettable performances.

Struggles to maintain a sober, evenhanded tone about an utterly ridiculous story.

A kid unversed in other name-brand fantasy movies might go for The Seeker, but in 2007 it's redundant, a puttering Potter without wit and whimsy.

If there is anything positive in The Girl Next Door, it is the brave performance by Auffarth, who is in her early 20s. Other than that, there's little reason to see the movie. Unless, of course, you get off on watching the sexual exploitation of underage girls.

A great abortion documentary might leave you guessing which side of the debate the director was on. Lake of Fire is not that film, but it comes somewhat close.

Be advised that this is no ordinary music doc. There are no talking heads and no performance footage of Nirvana. In fact, there's no Nirvana music at all. Instead, Schnack gives us other artists' music that had an effect on the troubled rocker.

A slow train to Dullsville that makes all local stops. You know a film is in trouble if the most interesting thing in it is the luggage.

But improbable situations, heavy reliance on coincidence and an improbable climax nearly tip the film into TV-movie territory.

You can see better stuff on TV any night of the week.

Apart from a heart-tugging plot twist, some lesson learning and more random football talk ("no more buttonhooks in the kitchen"), that's about it. Oh, except for the scene in which Kyra Sedgwick - who plays Joe's agent - farts. Be sure to update your résumé, Kyra.

The opening montage raises expectations of a serious, politically incisive depiction of the region. What we actually get is an offensively pandering, Bruckheimer-esque riff on the real-life Khobar Towers bombing of 1996, a Saudi Hezbollah attack that killed 19 Americans.

Lust, Caution could have done with a lot more lust and a lot less caution.

While the slow buildup won't bowl 'em over at suburban multiplexes, the film should please Fessenden's loyal followers and win him new ones.

Good Luck Chuck, a fungal little sex comedy, doesn't need a review. It needs a tube of ointment and a shot of penicillin.

A gorgeously photographed and less intermittently fascinating 2 1/2-hour film.

Shoot ’em up, run ’em over, blast ’em with flame-throwers, who cares? These creatures are only there to go splat.

Destined to enchant the slumber parties.

A gorgeous snooze, somewhere between imitation Terrence Malick and a feature version of star Brad Pitt's notorious Vanity Fair layout with Angelina Jolie and their faux kids.

Worth watching primarily for Blunt, the delicious scene-stealer from "The Devil Wears Prada."