You'll want to catch this clever movie before Hollywood ruins everything with a dumb remake.

While there are some giggles in the film-within-the-film (also called "Road to Nowhere"), the artsy-fartsy direction and flat-as-a-pancake acting (including a cameo by Variety columnist Peter Bart as himself) invites invidious comparisons to "Mulholland Drive."

The kind of lush, epic romantic weepie that Hollywood used to deliver on a regular basis for packed matinees at Radio City Music Hall.

The loose feel and sense for random comedy (as when a bore suddenly starts lecturing Coogan about the geological details of the cliff he is standing on) are spiffy.

The mystery is why the filmmakers thought third-graders or anyone else would be willing to pay for this master class in tedium.

It's an enjoyable, well-acted, old-school geekfest pitting a group of middle-school students against an escaped monster from outer space.

While I have no argument with Leeson's political views, her presentation -- mostly a succession of talking heads -- is dry and uninspired. These women deserve better.

Appalachian mountains get blown up to extract coal in the documentary The Last Mountain, a film in which activists are at least as hot as the TNT.

Only rarely does the film present a genuine insight, such as the observation that many black people loved to dress up in their finest for church because, during the week, they were so often dressed as servants and manual laborers.

You would be hard-pressed to use the word "accessible" to describe Film Socialisme, and that's exactly the way the master wants it.

Except for Brolin as an unlikely born-again Jew, nobody fares well under Mulroney's ham-fisted direction.

You don't have to be stoned to watch Mr. Nice, but it might help to be in the same state of mind as its real-life anti-hero, drug kingpin Howard Marks.

The excruciating and the hilarious mingle nearly to perfection in this marvelously visualized and deeply felt British film.

Beautiful Boy ends up being an endurance test.

This superbly acted and ultimately disarming dual coming-out comedy-drama -- which turns out to be semi-autobiographical -- certainly grows on you, despite all of the twee touches.

Director Matthew Vaughn, who did last year's delightful "Kick-Ass," doesn't do witty this time around, but he does keep up a spiffing pace while making the action blaze.

If Ed Wood had directed "The Silence of the Lambs," it might have been as unintentionally hilarious as the goofball would-be thriller The Abduction of Zack Butterfield.

A chaotic mess.

If the plot of the Argentine soaper Puzzle seems familiar, that's because it's nearly identical to the story in the French movie "Queen To Play."

Camp often means a lack of feeling and generalized disdain; not so in Spork, which has as much heart as "Sixteen Candles."

A raw mix of documentary and fiction, directed by Koji Wakamatsu, a veteran of soft-core porn ("Go, Go Second Time Virgin") whose anti-war stunner "Caterpillar" just played here.

It wouldn't be right to say that, half an hour after Kung Fu Panda 2 ended, I was starving for laughs again. In truth, I was starving pretty much all the way through.

First-time writer-director Adam Reid has a lightly endearing touch as he allows the actors plenty of space to be warm without being cute.

For all its flaws, The Tree of Life is a stunning exception to the rule that you can safely check your brain at the popcorn counter until after Labor Day. That's enough to place it among the year's best movies, or at least most-talked-about ones.

They breathe originality into an oft-told story.

I found this more elaborate, play-it-safe sequel far less fresh or funny.

When disaster struck, the documentary says, the powerful corps went to extraordinary lengths to silence, discredit and punish whistleblowers, many of whose allegations were supported by congressional investigators.

Call it the rape of Carnegie Hall.