Cameron Diaz, Christina Applegate and Selma Blair are asked to humiliate themselves many times over in The Sweetest Thing, and they do it with such game good spirits that they ought to get the actor’s equivalent of a Purple Heart.

It has the stately, well-crafted anxiety of a Hitchcock movie, except that the protagonist and antagonist are one and the same.

The eroticism in Cuaron's road movie (which broke all box-office records in Mexico) is the real deal: tactile, sexy, psychologically charged.

A clever, pleasingly sentimental tale of prehistoric times.

A powerful and moving experience -- once it overcomes its clunky, badly written and clichéd first act.

Nair’s stereotype-shattering movie -- like the polymorphous culture it illuminates -- borrows from Bollywood, Hollywood and cinema verite, and comes up with something exuberantly its own.

Gets too earnest for its own good. But Billy Ray and Terry George’s screenplay, taken from a John Katzenbach novel, is expertly plotted.

There’s not a whisper of melodrama or sentimentality in the way Moretti tells his tale, guiding us through the stages of grief with calm, devastating lucidity.

Using shadows and strikingly designed sounds, Pellington skillfully creates an atmosphere of otherworldly, invisible menace. Gere and Linney, both solid, dance around the edges of a romance.

Scherfig and her wonderful cast slyly transmute the quotidian into the magical. It’s like watching flowers bloom in a concrete garden.

This wonderful, one-of-a-kind movie hops from Taiwan to France, from tragedy to deadpan comedy and, in its mysterious conclusion, from the worldly to the otherworldly.

As brilliantly shot as it is brutally single-minded, this is a war movie shorn of all its usual accouterments: the battle is the plot.

A fine, well-groomed entertainment, but the road it takes has already been well paved.

I respect it enormously, but it feels like an art film in search of a movie.

Has a quiet sense of community, a wry, unsentimental sweetness, that grows on you. It's a patient movie for impatient times.

Too facile to resonate deeply. Shouldn't a movie celebrating Nash give you some idea what his mathematical work is about? Fishier still is the suggestion that the cure for paranoid schizophrenia is love.

I staggered out of this shameless, interminable movie feeling as if I'd been force-fed a ton of mealy, artificially sweetened baby food.

The Movie Works. It has real passion, real emotion, real terror, and a tactile sense of evil that is missing in that other current movie dealing with wizards, wonders and wickedness.

In the antic, melancholy comedy The Royal Tenenbaums, the singular Wes Anderson (“Rushmore”) abandons his native Texas for a storybook vision of New York.

It has a timely resonance. While it doesn't have that transcendent quality of Majidi's earlier work -- the implied bleakness from across the border puts a slightly darker hue on the proceedings -- it does tell a story worth telling.

This time out the versatile Soderbergh has cast himself as a sleight-of-hand artist. He's made deeper films, but this carefree caper movie is nothing to sneeze at.

The compositions, the editing, the lighting, the sound, the music: everything seems meticulously considered, conjuring up a hushed intimacy that instantly sucks you in.

Entertaining but farfetched, Spy Game might have looked less meretricious a few months back. But the real world has sabotaged its pretense of authenticity. Enjoy it for what it is, a fleet, handsome fantasy of globe-hopping blond demigods.

Columbus's Harry Potter has many delights, but the magical alchemy that the book seemed to achieve so effortlessly eludes it.

A terrific piece of work: smart, inventive and executed with state-of-the-art finesse.

A fanciful, featherweight, mostly charming concoction predicated on the old romantic myth that there is one true soul mate out there for us all.

Slightly soggy.

It’s too bad that at the very end L.I.E. settles for an easy, melodramatic resolution; it flies in the face of everything that makes this perceptive, original movie so special.