Michael Jackson's This Is It looks beyond the reconstructed face and spindly body of the late King of Pop and basks in his meteoric light.

There are tiny glints of humor and intelligence at work, and the action and animation rockets along slickly and stylishly. But unlike the protagonists of almost any and all of the Pixar titles, Astro Boy's namesake lacks even an iota of soul.

Swank is no mere impersonator. Her Amelia, like Maggie in "Million Dollar Baby," is unwavering in her gaze, ambition, and drive... In Nair's evocatively art-directed (and sensationally costumed) film, Earhart comes alive.

The film veers between cutting parody and cliche, threatening to become interesting at any moment, but never quite doing so.

I'm ripping up my Lars Von Trier fan club card.

A must-see for genre fans. Jaa in action is poetry - even in a disappointing film. Let's just hope he regains his senses for Ong Bak 3.

A satisfyingly moody, melancholy, madcap live-action romp.

That the film, directed in swift strokes by F. Gary Gray from a screenplay credited to Kurt Wimmer, doesn't really work - unrelentingly grim, unintentionally funny - is almost beside the point. It's a wild concept.

All in all, a resonant theme, poorly played.

Silva expertly maintains the tension, asking the audience to interpret Raquel's bizarro behavior. His diagnosis is a pleasant surprise.

The film is an omnibus ride through Brighton Beach, Central Park, the West Village, and Tribeca.

The story and the humor get progressively skimpier than an Ipanema bikini.

Disarming and unexpectedly poignant, An Education contrasts the knowledge learned in school with that learned from life.

The tone is surreal, at once visceral and clinical, making Bronson an unsettling experience: savage, disturbing, and yet somehow fascinating.

A pitch-perfect portrait of a man full of inspiration and ambition - and full of himself.

Although its tone is generally genial and jovial, Good Hair touches on some tricky issues, at times complicitly.

Shulman photographed buildings as if they were movie stars: He found their best angles and immortalized them.

It also boasts one of the funniest, loopiest Woody Harrelson turns in years.

Invention - a mash-up of two Jim Carrey comedies, "Liar Liar" and "Bruce Almighty" - flirts with being a one-gag pony. Shocking sincerity loses its comic impact after a while.

Whip It (which takes its name from a play in which skaters hold hands and form a human whip to propel the last skater forward) is heaven on wheels.

This unsettling, shaggy, surrealistic pillow of a movie - a mixed bag more funny-strange than ha-ha.

So little time is devoted to developing characters that it's hard to share their hopes and fears.

Maybe it's just the subtitles, but it would seem that Fontaine has a keener eye for the elements that made Chanel's style than she has an ear for dialogue. But she gets a splendid performance from Tautou.

Surrogates, which borrows tone and content freely from "I, Robot," is all windup and no pitch.

Relationships - between men and women, fathers and sons - are more complicated in real life, and The Boys Are Back deftly acknowledges that fact.

What this arid and arty exercise offers is the opportunity for a bunch of actors, many of them tethered to TV series, to deliver theatrical monologues pulsing with misogyny and narcissism. It's like second-rate Neil Labute.

An impressive, not entirely successful exercise in minimalist filmmaking.

With mixed results, Moore singles out those who profit from the misery of American workers.

Bakula is the ideal surrogate for a perplexed audience. Similarly, Whitacre's exasperated wife, played by Melanie Lynskey, is drily funny.

Love Happens announces itself as a romantic comedy but doesn't speak the language of love. Instead, it trades in the slogans of self-help procedural.

As a horror movie, Jennifer's Body doesn't fully deliver. But as a comic allegory of what it's like to be an adolescent girl who comes into sexual and social power that she doesn't know what the heck to do with, it is a minor classic.

For a film that strives so hard to show the sheer messiness of real people's lives, Burning Plain does have an impossibly neat ending.

35 Shots of Rum is visual poetry, but poetry that examines the human condition with insight and illumination.

Intimate as a whisper, immediate as a blush, and universal as first love, the PG-rated film positively palpitates with the sensual and spiritual.

Suffers from several goofily tacky animated reenactments and a music score that unnecessarily underlines the significance of key events, but for those who lived through the turmoil of Vietnam, and for the generations that have come since, the film is an important document in its own right.

At once noble and naive, earnest and a tad obnoxious.

A double shot of Saturday-night lowdown chased by a cheery chug of Sunday-morning uplift.

In 50 years, film lovers will look back on 9 as the debut feature of an original talent.

What's less clear, and more maddening, is how several generations of Ecuadorans have been left to live on toxic land, their health and livelihoods compromised, while lawyers file motions and counter-motions and blame is passed around.

A mix of coolheaded cultural satire and anxiety-inducing workplace and marital shenanigans, Extract is an odd project. It's smarter than most of the comedies out there right now, but that doesn't necessarily make it funnier.

Struggles mightily to find its loony essence. But Bullock's apple-cheeked larkishness is all flailing limbs and bug-eyed reaction shots - there's no there there. Cooper's character is woefully underwritten, Church's is yet another vain anchorman-wannabe cartoon.

Filmmaker Dabis based Amreeka on her own family's experiences in the rural Midwest during the first Gulf War. Although the drama heads on a predictable course, Faour brings intelligence and humor to her performance and Muallem, as the smart adolescent turned surly and scared, is likewise sharp.

It's a scary tale.

Siegel, in his debut as director, shot the low-budget Big Fan on a digital camera and achieves an appropriately grimy, gritty look. He has an eye for the telling detail and for the comedy in tragedy.

Compulsively entertaining documentary.

Alas, the conceit of a double-dating Grandson and Gramps does not produce a great many laughs in this cringeworthy film.

Lee distills the flavor of this transforming event and hints at how it transformed some who were there. His movie is a contact high.

Like "Jumanji," Shorts runs out of momentum before it's half over. That leaves it treading slapstick and killing time until its strained and preposterous big finish.

Ostensibly a comedy, and a feeble and innocuous one at that, Post Grad is one of those what-were-they-thinking?

Less a Holocaust retribution fantasy than a messy homage to war movies, and to movies, period.

If Edel's Oscar-nominated film drags in its final 40 minutes, it's a function of the director's fidelity to the facts - and the fact that the founding trio (and the film's stars) have become prisoners of the state, confined and confused.

Faced with the script's weak humor and feeble stabs at irony, Schwartzman and Stiller turn it way up, setting the dial at "hammy."

It is diverting but insubstantial.

For a comedy about autoerotic asphyxiation, epic deception, and shameless exploitation, World's Greatest Dad is a surprisingly sweet and tender affair.

Pitch-perfect and profoundly moving.

There is a lot of shield-your-eyes ickiness in District 9, a lot of violence and gore. What there is not a lot of, however, is humanity - even in the film's depiction of the inhumanity humans are capable of.

You watch a Miyazaki film with the pie-eyed, gape-mouthed awe of a child being read the most fantastic story and suddenly transported to places previously beyond the limits of imagination. It's quite a trip.

A syrupy and extraordinarily ridiculous adaptation.

Although Will Ferrell materializes for a goofball cameo, The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard lacks a key element that his "Talladega Nights" and "Anchor Man" both had - that is, somebody to like.

With varying degrees of success, the filmmaker gets each musician to talk about the personal and musical roots that blossomed into his technique.

The late John Hughes would have liked Bandslam, an upbeat high school musical that plays like a garage-band cover of "The Breakfast Club."

A brazen, earsplitting, eye-popping, oddly satisfying action extravaganza, though it veers wildly off-target in its second hour.

Even if you don't give a shiitake mushroom about food, there's much to savor in this lively comedy with dramatic aftertastes.

Cold Souls entertains on its own terms, delivering irony and suspense as Giamatti discovers that his soulless self is a terrible, terrible actor.

Funny People turns out to be fairly predictable, and not so rough. In a thoroughly satisfying way.

An eco-mentary that's as passionate and persuasive an argument for change as "An Inconvenient Truth."

With its moody, noir lighting and poetic voice-over, Flame rehearses virtually every element of the classic genre piece: violence, sex and romance, gunplay, spies, betrayals, a femme fatale, and a murderous Gestapo officer.

On a deeper level, the Dardennes' film offers a portrait of a fragile yet determined woman set on making a home for herself in the world, even as that world unravels before her eyes.

Do you dig the current vampire craze? Do you love "Twilight" so much you'd die for it? Then skip South Korean writer-director Park Chan-wook's violent, bloody Thirst, a genre-bending - if not genre-destroying - foray into the vampire myth.

It can be argued that Adam uses Asperger's as a kind of metaphor for the barriers that people erect to fend off strangers, to guard against intimacy. It can also be argued that writer/director Mayer is shamelessly manipulative.

Screenwriters Nicole Eastman and the "Blonde" team of Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith provide dialogue that has the propriety of the locker room.

Just about the only folks likely to find this humdrum hybrid of "Mission: Impossible" and "The Wind in the Willows" worthy for consideration are non-discriminating pip-squeaks.

Orphan, with a perverse plot twist at the end, will keep you on tenterhooks from its nightmarish opening scene to its chilling last frame.

Though his film is a tad choppy and a lot chatty, Hindman elicits sympathetic performances from leads who demonstrate a deep understanding of movie physics.

A scabrously funny look at the cutthroat game of statecraft.

A pity-party of Hollywood narcissism.

Deschanel does what she does seemingly without effort, managing to convey Summer's mixed-up messed-upness.

Slower and talkier than the five Potters that came before - but not necessarily in a bad way - Half-Blood Prince is a bubbling cauldron of hormonal angst, rife with romance and heartbreak, jealousy and longing.

The film quickly turns unintentionally, and unrelentingly, awkward.

A crude, cringe-worthy, and intermittently funny affair that triggers the gag reflex. I sincerely can't tell you whether I was choking with laughter or keeping from choking.

While at times the improvisational dialogue sounds like audio filler, the three leads are poignant and perceptive.

Explosively exciting film.

In Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, Kempner gives us a balance of artist and alter ego, introducing us to a woman we'd like to know even better.

At best diverting, at worst an almost self-parodic compendium of French film cliches.

Though there are chases galore and stampeding dinos aplenty, Dawn of the Dinosaurs is a nicely rendered travelogue without storytelling. There is little to bring an audience along for the ride.

Ultimately, the movie's a bust.

A captivating cine-memoir, impressionistic and surrealistic, surveying Varda's formidable career as a still photographer, filmmaker, documentarian, and life force.

Diaz gets her own voice-over monologue, as does Patric - the different points of view functioning like stanza refrains, born in shared familial anguish.

Fused with paranoia and almost unbearable suspense, The Hurt Locker is powerful stuff.

What is lacking in this version, with its hasty third act and abrupt denouement, is the surprise that their union may be the deepest love either will ever know.

Roughly an hour in, Transformers 2 morphs from teen adventure into lumbering war movie. Bay and his screenwriters squander their human capital in order to show us scenes of 20-ton toys crushing 10-ton toys.

Dopey but resourceful yukfest.

Hilarious fun.

A wise, wistful study of hope and dread.

What's a fish-lover to do? For starters, know where your fish comes from. Don't consume endangered species. After watching this film, you may never want to eat fish again.

Easily one of the loosest, most satisfying comedies to hail from the prolific writer/director in a while.

Washington offers another of his rock-steady performances, playing a career civil servant with a couple of secrets of his own, but confident, diligent, ready to go the distance for the city he loves.

It's not a pretty picture. But Food, Inc. is an essential one.