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.

Brilliantly playing doomed '50s sex bomb Marilyn Monroe, Michelle Williams gets under the skin of the troubled yet vulnerable icon in a way no one else ever has.

There are several adorable musical numbers that make excellent use of Adams. Segel's dancing is . . . well, he reminded me of a huge star: Big Bird.

Fascinating though it is, the movie is thin on historical materials.

O'Grady is very good, but she can't make the hard-to-watch Rid of Me dramatically credible.

An oddity: an upbeat film about a cemetery.

Good enough to almost overlook a so-so ending.

The generic plot is redeemed by exciting action sequences, good-looking location photography and a hot sex scene involving a femme fatale named Lea (pixie-haired Melanie Thierry).

Even at a supposed celebration, the well-bred and well-off aren't really happy at all. So the title is ironic. Thanks for that profound insight.

True, the stars are very good at what they do, but so what?

"Happy Feet" was one of the greatest and most original animated films, but the sequel can't even decide what it's about for the first 40 minutes.

Still, it was a beautiful wedding.