This psycho-thriller, a Golden Globe winner and presumptive favorite for the foreign-film Oscar, itself is revelatory.

The tiny, intrepid rodent is so cute it's impossible not to ooh and aww, just looking at him. Which is a good thing, because you'll need something to get you through the long stretches of fairytale pastiche that make up this overwrought yarn.

Like many previous Carrey vehicles, the point of this one directed by Peyton Reed is that one should not live at the extremes, but should achieve a balance between low and high, no and yes.

French movies are not so neatly resolved. In fact, the point of many French movies, such as this provocative one from director Laurent Cantet, is that some problems don't have satisfying solutions - or resolutions.

Seven Pounds is one part jigsaw puzzle, one part "The Giving Tree" and both parts marinated in melancholy.

It's a haunting, scary, funny, sad portrayal from Rourke.

An entertaining rethink of the 1951 classic.

The truth is left for the audience to decide. And while the conclusion isn't necessarily clear, it is unsettling.

For those who gripe that America doesn't make cars or movies like it used to, Clint Eastwood has two words for you: Gran Torino.

This unassuming and unexpectedly moving picture set in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood is a sugarplum-and-sofrito affair centering on the Rodriguez household.

What this slow-moving but fascinating two-part portrait does do is hunker down in the jungles and mountains of Cuba and (in the second part) Bolivia, capturing in keen, almost Zen-like detail the trudging and trekking, the recruiting and strategizing, the fighting and the philosophizing.

With this film Daldry, previously the director of "Billy Elliot" and "The Hours," proves himself the screen's reigning master at showing passion thwarted or repressed.

Wendy and Lucy is modest, minimalist. But it nonetheless reverberates like a sonic boom.

Frost/Nixon is not the epic gladiatorial face-off, the ricocheting verbal shoot-out that writer Morgan and filmmaker Howard imagined.

Brody plays Chess as a slightly crooked but well-meaning musical cheerleader without fully emerging as a character.

Hunger is daunting and powerful work.

A smart aleck-y kidnapping caper that whooshes around to a thumping electronic beat.

The acting is better than the script deserves and Lexi Alexander's cut-to-the-hearse direction lends the film considerable kick.

At one point, Statham chases down a sports car while pedaling madly on a kids' bike. Pathétique!

A generic oven-stuffer that wants to be a stocking-stuffer, is a turkey, despite the foil wrapping and some artfully deployed tinsel.

For its mesmerizing first two-thirds, Van Sant keeps the film tightly focused on his subject, superbly played by Penn and intimately shot, home-movie style, by Harris Savides. But when the director pulls back to detail Harvey Milk's fight against gay backlash, Milk gets derailed. And - dare I say it? - didactic.

While this charmer about a canine James Bond does not pack the emotional punch of "WALL-E," it's frisky fun to see the white shepherd get a new leash on life.

Twilight - directed with savvy humor by Catherine Hardwicke - turns vampirism into a metaphor for teen lust.

Not just a great sports movie, Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 captures a pivotal moment in recent history.

Epic piffle.

Never less than engaging.

Roiling with laughter, tears, drunken confessions, revelatory soliloquies, pain, sorrow, hospital visits, and various kinds of love, A Christmas Tale is a smart, sprawling, and sublimely entertaining feast.

Although its low-key realism is admirable, Eden doesn't really work: the long silences, the aching stares, the telling props, Breda's quivering blues, Billy's drunkenness, his distraction. There might as well be a sign stuck to the Farrells' front door: Dysfunctional family lives here.

It doesn't happen often, but when it does, look out: a movie that rocks and rolls, that transports, startles, delights, shocks, seduces. A movie that is, quite simply, great.

It's pretty formulaic stuff, and earns its R rating with profanity and unapologetically gratuitous female nudity, but somehow has a winning knuckleheaded charm.

JCVD juggles humor with whomping martial-arts moves and a kind of melancholy star turn from the melancholy, muscular star.

In key ways, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is like Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth": a child, caught in the waking nightmare of one of history's ugliest times, confronting the horrors of a grown-up world, and dealing with them as best he, or she, can.

Take the flat tire that was "Madagascar." Retread it with "The Lion King" storyline. Pump it up with air. Now you have Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa.

Pray the Devil Back to Hell is at once inspiring and horrific.

Jackson gets by mostly on bluster, but that doesn't matter because he serves mostly as a foil to Mac's popeyed shake-and-bake antics.

By the halfway mark, Rogen's performance, like his voice, is less cuddly than grating, and the carbonated giggle that is Elizabeth Banks grows flat. This one's for the Smith cultists.

Gritty, jumpy and rife with cliches.

For the most part, the film's musical numbers are dynamic, propelling the story forward. The same cannot be said about Peter Barsocchini's colorless screenplay.

While components of Eastwood's film are excellent, in particular Kelly's quietly tenacious performance and the evocative period details, Changeling is a film of parts, not a unified whole.

This is a picture of quiet observation, contained emotion, the hush before the cathartic scream.

Funny, fear-inducing, with periods of voyeuristic gore and an undercurrent of anxiety and dread, Let the Right One In is up there with the bloodsucking classics.

In Synecdoche, Kaufman the screenwriter is not well-served by Kaufman the filmmaker. As a director, his propensity for heavyosity leadens rather than leavens this affair.

Fear(s) of the Dark, a French production, interweaves the shorts, linking the segments together thematically, and narratively.

A tale of horror, heroism, unimaginable physical challenges, and, yes, cannibalism, Stranded offers the kind of real-life drama that can't help but bring up notions of God, fate, and nature's imposing will.

Unlike the filmmaker's previous stabs at presidential biopic-ing and conspiracy theorizing - "JFK" and "Nixon" - this one doesn't have the luxury of historical perspective.

Impossibly arty and, at times, narratively incoherent, Filth and Wisdom still has its goofy charms.

An OK sports doc that owes as much to reality TV competitions as it does to the genre of nautical cinema.

The filmmakers give Latifah and Fanning room to create characters that breathe in the sweet smell of clover and breathe out the contented sigh of independence.

A testosterone-fueled road movie that displays the same Apatow-ian obsessions, and raunch, as "Pineapple Express," "Superbad," and "The 40-Year-Old Virgin."

Sure, it's a skewed view through adolescent eyes, but it's one that still speaks to the aspirations, agendas, image-making and spin control behind a real, grown-up political election.

Fascinating and flawed spy thriller.

The Express eventually reaches its triumph-of-the-human-spirit climax, but it yanks too hard on the heart strings during the long journey there.

Windblown, with a sage and playful Zen vibe, Wong Kar Wai's Ashes of Time Redux is a color-saturated, slo-mo martial arts piece about time, memory, love, regret, betrayal.

All the running, the hiding, the escaping (from giant moles, from giant Murray) are decidedly less exciting, and compelling, than City of Ember wants to be.

At its best, the film is undeniably tender. Sweet, even.

Stays with you like great movies tend to do. It asks you to examine the inner mechanisms of human beings, cheerful and miserable alike. It's not about looking at a glass half empty or a glass half full. It's about drinking down what's in that glass and letting it fill your soul.

If only RocknRolla's characters were at all believable - even in the context of its own cartoon universe.

While even believers can support Maher's skepticism, when he denounces the faithful in sweeping absolutes at film's end, he sounds as absolutely certain as those he has mocked for the previous 100 minutes.

An embarassingly unfunny, stumblebum adaptation of Toby Young's memoir.

Some movies skate by fast on slick action. Others snap with crisp dialogue. Nick and Norah springs high on the bounce of its hugely likable leads, Michael Cera and Kat Dennings.

About as not-funny as a comedy can get.

Graced with unusually expressive and seamless voice work by Drew Barrymore and George Lopez, the best of its kind since "Babe."

Murky and grainy, and showing human beings at their grimmest - thievery, rape, betrayal, murder - Blindness is no barrel of laughs. But it IS a barrel of pretentious metaphorical musings.

Kinnear does what he's done in the past: You underestimate the guy's acting chops, and suddenly, strikingly, he floors you.

Jonathan Demme's superb rule-bending, heartrending and family-mending drama - ends with a wedding, it resists conventions as brazenly as does the bride's sister.

What this unclassifiable story may lack in decibels, it has in emotional depth. At once a mystery, a family drama, a snapshot of children at risk, Ballast is an unusually perceptive character study more eloquent in action than in dialogue.

What Eagle Eye wants to do is show us technology's dark side: all the stuff that's there to make our lives easier - ATMs, PDAs, iPods, GPS, cell phones, PCs, "smart" houses - turned against us in a vast conspiracy.

Rodanthe is a reliably steamy stormy sultry story.

Man, oh, man, much of the dialogue is so heavy, and heavy-handed, that you can see fine actors such as Derek Luke and Michael Ealy buckle under the weight. Clearly, Lee fell in love with McBride's words and couldn't bear to cut them, even when the visuals made those words redundant.

While Choke, adapted for the screen and directed by Clark Gregg, is by no means a disaster, it is disappointing - and oddly dull.

This is more than the story of soldiers grappling with stress and doubt as they reenter the "normal" flow of domestic life. It's about strangers bonding, about friendship and discovery, about the comedy and tragedy of the human experience.

Feels downright ancient.

Lakeview Terrace's pretense at exploring racial intolerance has been exposed for what it really is: a B-movie copout.

First and last, Appaloosa is the slow-but-sure story of the friendship between Virgil and Everett, one a man of action surprised by emotion, the other a man of emotion surprised by action.

While I much liked The Duchess, this portrait feels unfinished.

A goofy screwball romp that affords a gaggle of A-listers the chance to hambone around in antic style.

English wrangles her talent like a virtuoso. Best is Murphy Brown herself, Candice Bergen.

A twisty, turny and ultimately silly thriller from "Inside Man's" Russell Gewirtz.

The result is a movie about the many forms of social and sexual abuse that does not make the abusee a victim but victor.

Was it just three years ago that Perry made his feature debut with "Diary of a Mad Black Woman?" Then his filmmaking was strictly amateur; now his sweeping pans and portentous closeups approach those of Pedro Almódovar.

As a cinematic experience, it's like being locked in a coffin for an hour and a half.

Full of clunky humor, battle-of-the-sexes musings and spicy accordion music, Everybody Wants to Be Italian is relentless - but not necessarily relentless fun.

What's admirable about Save Me is that it grounds its religious and cultural debate not in vilifying one side but in sympathizing with both.

Delicious confection about the resilient Czech character, tastes like a bittersweet chocolate souffle, it's much more substantial than dessert.

Don Cheadle, wiry and wired, delivers an electrifying performance in Traitor.

Despite a winning performance by Anna Faris, the cutest thing in platform shoes since Goldie Hawn, the film falls on its keister so many times that before long the perky pinkness turns bruising black-and-blue.

Only in its aggressively imaginative profanity is the film consistent.

Insightful and involving.

There's no quick fix for a culture "addicted to debt," as one wag puts it in the film. But watching I.O.U.S.A. is a good place to start.

The Rocker can be amusingly dopey, with its "Spinal Tap"-ish lampooning of rock idioms - and idiots.

The best that can be said about the movie is that it's harmless and mostly charmless. The Clone Wars is to Star Wars what karaoke is to pop music.

Smoking, shouting, practically shooting off sparks, Cruz spreads a wildfire sexuality across Allen's sunny tableau of Catalan country picnics and scenic Barcelona ramblings.

A kind of deadpan soap opera - but one that, despite its high melodrama and wicked humor, delivers a real emotional wallop.

There's real joy in O'Day's eyes - and larynx - as she bobs and weaves through an amazing songbook.

Handsomely photographed by Eric Schmidt and nicely underplayed by the actors, the film relies too much on its jukebox soundtrack to convey mood.

The script appears to have been designed, created and produced entirely in 1-D: a mishmash of kidcentric antics, follow-your-dream cliches, and innocuously icky humor.

Raunchy, raucous and riotously funny.

If Coixet's film is substantially more restrained than its explicit source material (Nicholas Meyer, himself a fine novelist and director of the second and best Star Trek film, adapted), it is no less provocative as a poetic meditation on love, sex and death.