Baz Luhrmann's Australia has it all - unfortunately. With four major story lines and more endings than "The Return of the King," this ambitious 165-minute epic is the movie equivalent of an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Revenge is a dish best served with bullets, high explosives and giant rolling flameballs. In Quantum of Solace, James Bond orders the revenge buffet, deluxe.

Darkly hilarious, brilliantly acted.

The bickering and mishaps make for a semi-enjoyable if low-impact film that may appeal to the kind of nostalgics who buy Time-Life collections of '60s songmeisters.

An Irish indie that is well-observed and well-acted - but ultimately, not much more exciting than the love lives of its lead characters.

It would be easy to dismiss House of the Sleeping Beauties as a lewd male fantasy, but that would be ignoring the German film's deeper purpose as - in the words of the director, Vadim Glowna - a meditation on "transition, remembrance, mourning, guilt, loneliness, sex and death, eroticism and dying."

In the course of How About You, much champagne is consumed, pot is smoked, and a good time is had by all, the audience included. Redgrave even sings the title song.

Mostly We Are Wizards is a loving, if flawed, tribute to creativity and artistic freedom.

Four stars simply aren't enough for Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, which just may be the most entertaining movie I've ever labeled a masterpiece in these pages.

Role Models isn't a classic like "Superbad" or as hilarious as this summer's "Step Brothers," but it's excellent fun for males in the mental age bracket of 14 to 22, which is most males.

Combines a sketch-comedy premise with pacing like a philosophy seminar.

The bulk of the movie consists of scene after scene coyly setting up the same ironic juxtaposition, in the exact same way, about innocence vs. Nazism.

Tom Arnold plays the fatherly head of a child-prostitution ring and John Malkovich a sympathetic social worker - two clever casting twists that constitute the main interest in the grueling Gardens of the Night.

A by-the-numbers follow-up to the highly successful 2005 feature that was no great shakes to begin with.

LaBruce devotees will be tickled pink; others will be perplexed and/or disgusted.

Gini Reticker's embracing documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell shows how Taylor got his comeuppance from a coalition of tenacious Christian and Muslim women armed only with matching T-shirts.

There probably aren't enough futuristic Goth rock musicals, but Repo! The Genetic Opera is weak on a couple of things a musical needs: music and lyrics.

If you insist on seeing Soul Men, stick around during the closing credits for the best part of the movie, an interview with Mac.

A gut-wrenching experience.

Mostly The Matador romanticizes a brutal tradition that has no place in the 21st century.

There have been worse horror flicks, but although this one offers a few scares, it doesn't have a lot of imagination.

The funniest movie of Smith's I've seen. It's "When Harry Did Sally."

While sporadically funny, the sophomoric My Name Is Bruce is no "Bubba Ho-Tep," the movie where Campbell unforgettably played Elvis Presley as a nursing home patient battling a mummy with the help of John F. Kennedy. But Campbell's fans can feel free to add a star or two.

A valuable reminder that for nearly three decades, basketball was dominated by Jewish players - and coaches who found the sport an ideal vehicle for assimilation in the United States.

Edward Norton plays Ray, a (possibly) honest cop wearing an unexplained scar positioned just so on his cheek. It looks like it was bought in the markdown aisle of Halloween Mart on Nov. 1.

There is also something surgically sterile. The movie sounds as though it was recorded in a padded chamber instead of a bustling school, and it looks like it came from some alternate world, one that basks in the eternal sunshine of the spotless skin.

Watching the film, I did manage to retain my empathy for the narrator, though: I was as desperate as he was to escape the situation I was in.

Another remarkable addition to Eastwood's directorial canon.