Like the lovely indie "Weekend," this small-scale story focuses on a couple of days in a possibly blossoming romance. Unlike that movie, it's full of gender stereotypes and all-around bad behavior. There's no one here to root for.

Depravity and addiction can be dramatic and fascinating, or they can be as they are in this week's indie filthathon Cook County.

It really couldn't have been easy for Jason Lee ("Almost Famous") to keep a straight face while saying, "I'm not in this for the money.''

The film also wastes the coiled intensity of Jeremy Renner, as the newest member of the IMF team with a none-too-compelling past. Bird does keep audiences guessing whether Renner is the only leading actor in Hollywood who's even shorter than Cruise.

So moron-friendly they should have called it "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Checkers." The skill level in the script is elementary school, my dear Watson.

The contrived script lacks subtlety, rendering most characters as stereotypes.

Thick-necked, booze-loving and angry men beat each other with their naked fists: so far, so Irish. But the feuding clans in the documentary Knuckle actually think their habits of antagonizing one another can be fixed by just one more problem-solving brawl.

Holland has said that she wanted her harrowing and rewarding epic to run long so it would make viewers feel that they're in the sewers as well. In this, she succeeds.

I still can't believe I Melt With You went there. Over the top, off the hook and just plain bonkers, it makes its mark.

In this pretentious art-house downer version of "The Bad Seed," the only surprise is that the folks didn't ship the little monster off to the looney bin before he reached puberty.

Thanks to his (Oldman) mastery, and Alfredson's, no film this year left me hungrier for a sequel.

It's smart, funny, agreeably perverse and simultaneously abrupt and exhausting.

I have zero reservations about telling you how much I loathed New Year's Eve, a soul-sucking monument to Hollywood greed and saccharine holiday culture.

It also boasts a killer breakout performance by comic Patton Oswalt as a former classmate who becomes Theron's unlikely co-dependent and sometimes co-conspirator.

The editing (by Kitano) and lensing are stylish and guaranteed to keep viewers hooked through the final rubout.

I'm not, finally, sure what Leigh is saying - but she is a filmmaker with a voice.

A little humor would have helped leaven a movie that is frankly often very difficult to watch.

Moreover, in attempting to update the play to a buzzing CNN world, Ralph Fiennes proves that as a director, he makes a fine actor.

A root canal seems a more pleasurable way to pass two hours than this interminable vanity knockoff of "Traffic" about troubled Angelenos.

Despite copious full-frontal female nudity, House of Pleasures isn't mere sexploitation. Rather, it's a gorgeously filmed portrait of a bygone era, with painstaking attention to period detail. On the downside, the movie is overlong.

A documentary hardly anybody has been waiting for.

The political intrigue behind the documentary would make for a great movie of its own.

At its best, Romantics Anonymous is a love letter to everyone who's ever felt hopelessly awkward about being in a relationship, which is just about all of us.

Literally the kind of movie they just don't make anymore, Michel Hazanavicius' French-sponsored charmer The Artist is a gorgeous black-and-white love letter to silent Hollywood with old-fashioned English intertitles and just a single line of audible (English) dialogue.

As the movie drags on, though, it takes on a throbbing, sick monotone. This isn't a concert, it's a bass guitar solo, all thumping blackness.

Gorgeously photographed by Peter Suschitzky, A Dangerous Method presents a vivid portrait of pre-World War I Europe that's at a considerable remove from the types of madness usually seen in Cronenberg's films.

Ho-ho-huh? Arthur Christmas is an animated kiddie comedy that delivers all the wonder you'd expect in a movie about a guy delivering one package. Maybe they should have called it "UPS Man: The Movie."

Young Hugo (Asa Butterfield), a boy who literally lives inside the clocks he manages in a grand Paris train station in the 1930s, embodies one problem that bedeviled even Dickens: He's boringly nice.