For all of its laughs and a star-making performance by Hawkins, Happy-Go-Lucky represents a serious philosophical inquiry by Leigh, who has illustrated a consistently pessimistic view of humankind in his semi-improvised movies.

This movie belongs to its stars, who also wrote and produced. You can't say their acting is good or bad because they are not really acting. They're just being themselves, pubic hair and all.

A sharp comedy as well as a punk-pulp spree. Don't go if you can't handle Brit slang. ("Grass" = informer.)

Maher's sense of humor deserts him in the end, though, when in an apocalyptic montage of fire and hate (bin Laden, Pat Robertson), he suggests all religions are equally bent on destruction of the Earth. It's fatuous to suggest that the Iraq war was launched because of religion or that belief in the Book of Revelation is the same as organizing terrorist attacks.

Someone describes his writing as "snarky, bitter, witless." The last part pretty well sums up this movie.

It has a dogged all-night charm and a sense of who its audience is.

Even if it weren't three years too late to parody Moore (ineptly played by Kevin Farley), Moore's ridiculous tribute to Cuban health care in "Sicko" is far funnier than anything in this desperately laughless farce from David Zucker ("Scary Movie 3").

Allah made me funny - not.

The film is Beverly Hills Chihuahua. The audience is the fire hydrant.

I kept hoping the meaning would click into place, but it never quite did.

The flaws of Flash of Genius are worth putting up with for Kinnear's committed performance.

As Kym, Hathaway runs an astonishing gamut of emotions, from anger to fragility and from hurt to regret - without ever seeming actress-y, like Nicole Kidman. Start clearing that mantelpiece, Anne.

Hammer, whose blunt name belies the movie's many subtle touches, has his own distinct style. He also has an enormous trust in the audience to sort out this wounded family's miseries without the assistance of narration or even a musical score.

With its array of chases and shootouts and a sinister political plot, the movie at least holds your attention and keeps things brisk-ish. But every scene still bears the tags of the place from which it was stolen.

Aims straight for the tear ducts as well, but this weepie is a dry well.

Lee's framing device - which ends with a head-scratching fantasy - doesn't work. At. All.

CHOKE tries to be dirty but manages merely to be dingy.

Cheap, ignorant, tone-deaf and condescending, but what's strangest about it is that it actually thinks it's pro-soldier even as it portrays vets home on leave as foolish (Rachel McAdams), desperate (Tim Robbins) and dishonorable (Michael Pena) while playing all three situations for laughs.

If the script serves any purpose at all, it is to allow jocks to show off their buff bodies. They're hot, but not worth 12 bucks at the box office.

The entire script, which boils down to a hopelessly embarrassing lesson about "this beautiful place that can make people live again," seems to have been written within arm's reach of a bong.

Compelling.

Starts out as a thriller inspired by that city's 2005 Tube and bus bombings but gets bogged down in a family soap opera.

It's very sad to watch Keaton here. In the most excruciating scene, she gets drunk in a bar, staggers up to a microphone and starts to sing, or rather squawk. For those of us who still revere Annie Hall and her blissfully unaffected rendition of "Seems Like Old Times," this is sacrilege.

A documentary that uses against Atwater images of lynch mobs, decades-old racist comments of his onetime boss Strom Thurmond, and a clip of Bryant Gumbel calling him "the architect of the evil campaign."

It boggles the mind to think that Elite Squad won the top prize at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival in February.

The twists are executed superbly, right up to a climax that fits the David Mamet definition of what makes for a perfect ending: It is both surprising and inevitable.

Molly Shannon is dementedly charming as Eva.

Lakeview Terrace holds your interest, though the bad faith on all sides makes it something of an endurance test.