The result is visually inventive, narratively edgy, and unlike anything else.

The Hangover pushes the boundaries of good taste, good sense, and good will toward man. And you'll feel good about it all.

Summery and scenic, Ruins is this season's "Mamma Mia!," a diversion that dispenses the wisdom: Let go, let live, and let love. Not bad advice, and not a bad movie, exactly.

The unassuming performances by Krasinski and Rudolph help make this the first Mendes movie that feels lived-in rather than staged.

Not exactly a hundred million dollars' worth of classic comedy.

The rare movie that manages to convey the inner soul of an artist.

Tennessee is drenched in melancholy, a trip through a tunnel of pain illuminated by a lone ray of light at the end.

The exhilarating film pays tribute to Buster Keaton's "The Balloonatic" by way of its slapstick, and to Hayao Miyazaki's "Howl's Moving Castle" by way of its watercolor palette and traveling domicile.

A Raimi-esque mix of gross-out madness and sick laughs.

Yojiro Takita's movie simultaneously tickles tears of mourning as it wrings laughs about the meaning of life.

A heart-grabbing, awe-inspiring work that needs no embellishment.

The more pertinent question: Can the audience stick with this flick that showed most of its funny bits in the trailer? For the most part, yeah.

A deadpan delight.

The problem with NATM:BOTS is that Stiller, Adams, and company seem to be pretending that they're having fun, too.

Moderately compelling and clinical. This isn't "Breakfast at Tiffany's"; this isn't even "Klute."

Full of forced jocularity and drawing-room hissy fits, with its cast parading around in vintage threads and antique cars, Easy Virtue is a close-to-insufferable souffle based on the 1925 Noel Coward play.

A dark-and-stormy sci-fi shoot-'em-up directed by McG, T4 has enough hardware and havoc to satisfy the crowd of action junkies and gamers who sped to "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" on opening weekend. (Terminator Salvation is a couple of liquid metal drops' more satisfying, but only a couple.)

A far sight nimbler than its plodding predecessor, where the Holy Grail turns out to be a Holy Girl. The sequel is a little like CSI: Vatican City.

Rian Johnson's film is a scam wrapped in a sham.

A taut, German-made thriller, Jerichow adds a bit of European xenophobia to the pulp traditions of passion and betrayal.

Aniston and Zahn are sweet together - their respective characters have built up psychic armor to keep the outside world at bay, and each breaks down the other's in revealing ways.

Quietly and keenly observed, Summer Hours nods to Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" (a country estate, a family reunion, an impending sale). Assayas displays a lucid sense of how personal history and family identity are inextricably linked to a physical place - here, to a house that is still busy accumulating its memories.

Adoration, Egoyan's most affecting film since "The Sweet Hereafter."

The Spanish actress Marina Gatell is exotic and engaging as a young writer drawn to Lorca and puzzled why he is not drawn to her in return.

Despite its title, Outrage is calm, riveting, and provocative.

That the fantasy comes crashing back to earth seems all but inevitable. That Rudo y Cursi doesn't crash in the process - that's muy bien.

The result is more exciting than the last four ST pictures put together, more fun than a barrel of Tribbles, and the most satisfying action-adventure since last year's "Iron Man."

In terms of character, McConaughey is the toxin and Garner the antitoxin. It's not exactly chemistry, but as pharmacology it's effective.

Almost absurdly quiet and observant, The Limits of Control is about the space between the action, the steps along the way.

A sly and surprisingly sublime little noir romance.

A slow-burning, character-rich study in desperation, grief, vengeance, loyalty, and love. It's the sort of arthouse entry - in German, mostly - that gets you thinking about an English-language remake.

There's little of the seen-it-all, wise-guy acerbity that made his character in the X-Men trilogy stand apart from his fellow mutants. Here, he just glowers.

All in all, this phenomenal film illustrates Alexis de Tocqueville's observation that "The people get the government they deserve." In both meanings of the word, Il Divo is sensational.

Another tale of Tinseltown drugs, sex and excess - has transferred itself to the screen with mind-boggling, laugh-inciting horribleness.

The tone of The Soloist is wildly uneven. Though unsparing and unsentimental when framing the principals, Wright is hyperbolic when depicting the agitation of the mentally ill and the soothing rapture of music.

A wide-screen wildlife documentary in which the cycles of birth and death, migrations and seasons, are captured in stunning - absolutely stunning - ways.

Acting-wise, the showstopper is Jason Bateman, with a diabolically entertaining turn as a smarmy PR man remarkably free with confidential information.

While the movie feels shelf-worn, Efron's performance is fresh.

A torn-from-the-headlines tale of institutional racism and injustice in the Lone Star State of not-so-long-ago, American Violet might not be subtle, but it's certainly powerful.

Do you need to have seen A Chorus Line to understand or enjoy Every Little Step? I think not. This companion piece to one of America's most beloved musicals is about human longings and shortfalls.

Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis' Lemon Tree is a lively deadpan comedy which, like his prior film "The Syrian Bride," satirizes Israel's bureaucrats while remaining sympathetic to citizens who live within and adjacent to Israel's disputed borders.

For Kudlow, for whom "music lives forever" - it's never over. And the opportunity to seize the day continues to present itself in this deeply human documentary.

Handles the strained daddy/daughter bond with sufficient lightness and laughs so that fathers won't mind accompanying their spawn.

As funny as it is sick (and it's plenty of both).

Succeeds because the action is supercharged in a style that recalls Mel Gibson's apocalyptic classic, "The Road Warrior." The characters are more than cartoonish, and the plot grips the road. But it's Diesel who provides the nitro injection

Mixes the intimate, indie vibe of "Daytrippers" with the absurdist screwball streak of "Superbad," to winning effect.

A campy homage to those days of malt shops, drive-ins, and saucer-shaped UFOs - you know, the ones that go crashing into nearby buttes, unleashing terrible terrors from another galaxy.

The nicest that can be said of this unapologetically schmaltzy, and not unenjoyable, affair is that it is the best 1936 musical made in 2009.

A baseball movie, a stranger-in-a-strange-land movie, a movie about real people facing real challenges in the real world, Sugar is all that and more.

This sparrow's flight lifts the heart.

Full disclosure: I saw Monsters vs. Aliens in 2-D. No dorky plastic glasses, no alien ooze flying at my head. More full disclosure: I liked it.

A quietly soulful study of two very different men.

A tepid PG-13 iteration of the already lame 1979 genre classic "The Amityville Horror."

Impossibly charming and impossibly French.

ILYM is the comedy that Rudd lovers have been waiting for since he first charmed us silly in "Clueless." It explores both the dweeby and heartthrobby sides of this guy whose crooked smile fails to mask his social anxiety.

Duplicity zips from one elaborate piece of hugger-mugger to the next. But at a certain point (for me, it was Rome), boredom sets in.

Knowing has about a half-dozen screenwriter credits, which may explain why scenes crash up against one another - smart, stupid, far-fetched, compelling. And the trouble is that Cage walks (or runs) through them all, treating each with the same level of intensely goofy seriousness.

Like Mickey Rourke in "The Wrestler," Malkovich plays a star long past his glory days in The Great Buck Howard, but continuing to do the only thing he knows. The tone of the two films couldn't be less alike, but the story arc of the central characters graphs the same.

Forceful, heart-wrenching stuff.

The best in the latest crop of slasher remakes. Admittedly, that is faint praise.

Curiously, despite Johnson's imposing physique, it's the kids who do most of the smashing and grabbing, right up until the climax, when it's all-hands-on-neck.

Kudos to Clifton Collins Jr., who appears as a dispenser of cleaning products and common sense.

A stagy, arty, and uncompelling account of the Welsh writer and his menage-y relations.

An extraordinary work in three movements about the Sasakis, a seemingly ordinary family. In this unpredictable work, the clan implodes, explodes, and glues itself back together.

This movie will shake your windows and rattle your walls.

So realistic are Phoebe's quicksilver emotions that at first it doesn't seem Fanning is acting at all. That helps to ground the film, which swings seamlessly from the world of grown-up expectations to that of childhood reverie and rebellion.

A movie like Everlasting Moments comes along maybe once in a decade.

There's a lot of rambling and shambling going on in these overlapping stories, often to the point where Explicit Ills no longer feels like it has a point.

Tokyo! is a must-see for the Gondry segment, and a strange, diverting pleasure for the rest.

Harrison Ford - in his best role in years - and Cliff Curtis are the main reasons to see the film.

The 3D effects are of a gimmicky 1956 vintage, with hands thrusting from the screen to give the illusion of reaching out and touching the audience.

Nispel is no Rob Zombie - who achieved something akin to brilliance with his 2007 Halloween remake. What's more, as influential as it's been, Friday the 13th was never that great.

A frightening portrait of corruption, cynicism, intimidation, greed and violence, Gomorrah is tough stuff.

A throwback in style, pace, and storytelling to the 1970s and the downbeat mood pieces of directors like Bob Rafelson.

The footage is spectacular, the colors electric, the life aquatic trippier than anything you'll see in even the most wildly imaginative animated fare.

A macabre mystery for children and a cautionary tale for their folks, Coraline is a yarn - twisty, knotty, taut - about a perennially bored girl whose parents are too preoccupied with work to pay her much mind.

The result is Woody Allen lite, with some deft observations about how the social media designed to bring singles together are actually coming between them.

Level of humor: subteen.

Push has a cool, sinewy style, energy to burn.

For its amusing premise, Fanboys is scarily flat.

The film's recycled nature is most evident in director P.J. Hogan's attempt to marry the farcical hijinks of an "I Love Lucy" episode to an addiction scenario that would not be out of place in "The Lost Weekend."

Where "Run Lola Run" was like a perpetual-motion machine, The International seems to forever be stopping in its own tracks. Tykwer takes coffee breaks to explain the convoluted and dicey plot.

With visual nods to Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" and a fairly faithful adherence to the tenor and tone of the Korean scare genre, The Uninvited doesn't startle and shock so much as it lulls you into a series of unsettling, hallucinogenic set pieces.

There's a xenophobic element to Taken's premise, to be sure - the idea that travel, even to Western Europe, isn't safe for Americans, and that foreigners (Albanians, Arabs) are by nature shifty and sinister.

The first Hollywood feature from Danish filmmaker Jonas Elmer, New in Town is so choppy that it would seem to have been edited with a pickax.

Offers a gripping mix of sexual heat and nasty menace. It's "Dead Calm" meets "Very Bad Things," with English accents.

An enjoyably goofy hybrid of extraterrestrial sci-fi and Iron Age action, Outlander boasts a super-serious Jim Caviezel in the title role

Entertainingly goofy for about 30 minutes. And then, for the next two hours-plus, it's agony.

Both austere and garish, simultaneously dry and sentimental, tightly repressed and extravagantly expressive, bourgeois and bohemian. It's a seesaw, but Dorrie finds the balance.

At its best, the movie is a catalog of doggy stunts.

It's an engaging enough story, crisply told, and the lip-synced music scenes in the studio and on stage are brought off in high style.

The film is completely forgettable, frequently funny and weirdly satisfying in a Jersey Loser Gets Respect kind of way.

Like moussed hair and inverted-pyramid shoulder pads, this sloppy, sloppy slapstick is an artifact from the 1980s.

Here, Jews are not victims of genocide, but victors in the organized resistance against it.

When the tobacco is extinguished what comes between April and Frank Wheeler is bigger, colder and more formidable than the iceberg that sundered Kate and Leo in "Titanic": shattered hope.

Maybe if there was something going with the dialogue - snappy Chandlerisms, say, or even just sentences that made sense - the fussy digital artifice of The Spirit wouldn't seem so, well, dispiriting.

Question: Is life still like a box of chocolates if you're going in reverse? The answer, in the case of the curiously Gumpian The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, is a gooey yes.

Bedtime Stories does have a comic buoyancy, even as its plot trots on a predictable course. Perhaps the different accents and sensibilities have something to do with that.