The tragic victims in "City of God" are played by actors while those in La Sierra are flesh-and-blood real.

The erstwhile crack dealer born Curtis Jackson may be a prot‚g‚ of Eminem, but this shapeless and derivative gangsta saga is no "8 Mile."

It's "Saturday Night Fever," Johannesburg-style.

Heavy on celebrity voices, pop culture references and rock tunes and low on memorable characters or imagination, Chicken Little is on a par with such mediocre but popular CGI films as "Madagascar" and "Shark Tale."

Marines did not play football in full anti-chemical suits in 112-degree weather; men would have been collapsing and perhaps dying because it was so hard to breathe in the gas masks. Do I quibble over details? Details are all the movie offers. There isn't a story.

Fails to dig out the dramatic meat, despite a yeoman performance by Danny Aiello.

The heavily symbolic The Dying Gaul doubtless worked better as a play, but the film is worth seeing for its peerless cast.

The conclusion is that in this bare-chested band of brothers, what really matters is camaraderie. "Having friends," remembers one guy, "that was the best part." As he says this, the décor behind him features a pair of handcuffs.

Cinema vanité.

Wal-Mart's home office in Bentonville, Ark., can rest easy: Greenwald, as usual, is hysterically preaching to the choir.

You don't have to be crazy to sing like Larry "Wild Man" Fischer -- subject of Josh Rubin's reverential documentary Derailroaded -- but it helps.

There'll likely be more Z's in the audience than on the screen.

The sort of movie where all of the best jokes are in the trailer, but these days a romantic comedy with anything worth quoting at all is something of an accomplishment.

Jigsaw is a wickedly fun villain, if you can put aside the implausibility of a guy who likes to saunter away from his deathbed to kidnap younger, stronger people and devise medieval torture chambers.

Meet American Beastly, perhaps the most bitter studio film of the year.

Your baby is near death. Instead of dropping everything to save his life, you make sure the video camera keeps rolling.

Kane was nicknamed "Killer" because of his playing style -- and New York Doll has a killer surprise ending that may leave even hard-core punkers reaching for the Kleenex.

Propaganda is terror's best friend, but Paradise Now is clever enough to make that buddy work for our side for a change.

The three-part anthology opens with its best shot, Hong Kong fruitcake Fruit Chan's "Dumplings," photographed by the great Christopher Doyle.

The documentary traces the fiery history of Ballets Russes -- which for a time consisted of two warring companies.

Basically a deadly dull rehash of "Resident Evil," which in turn was a third-generation clone of "Aliens."

Thebest sports movies aren't really about sports. Dreamer has a few thundering horse races, but its finest moments are beautifully still ones, like the one in which a little girl peeks through a fence to give a lame filly a Popsicle.

Like Truffaut's heaviest work, it's less interested in what brings people together than in what keeps them apart, and it achieves a painful truth you won't find in dating comedies.

A trite, incoherent and pretentious bomb.

One of the season's most delightful surprises.

Exploring the lives of several wrongly convicted men exonerated by DNA evidence, the documentary After Innocence makes a reasonable case that compensation is due them.

Bate is to be congratulated for reminding the world of Leopold's wickedness, even if he does OD on re-enactments.

Ten percent of Ghana's 20 million people are disabled, yet the film makes little attempt to explain why.