A great story - and a true one, more or less - Bottle Shock nonetheless fails to deliver much in the way of entertainment.

The resulting drama is more deeply felt than it is deep. But I can't think of another film so frankly dealing with what we expect from friendship, so tenderly showing how friends can fail in one area, yet be there in another.

The movie bogs down in tiresome good guys vs. bad guys action cliches.

Swing Vote is messy and its targets are relatively safe. But its aim is true. And Costner's performance hits the bull's-eye.

With a moody overlay of songs supplied by Okkervil River and Shearwater, In Search of a Midnight Kiss also serves as a millennial's answer to Woody Allen's "Manhattan."

There is nothing sentimental or picturesque about the performances or imagery. The word that best describes both is elemental.

Anderson, who's turned Brit in a number of TV series and films, including "Bleak House" and "The Last King of Scotland," is compelling in her white lab coat and surgical scrubs, and she brings some real tenderness to her tete-a-tetes with Mulder.

While Ferrell and Reilly are great together, hatching harebrained schemes that have no basis in reality, part of the unexpected treat of Step Brothers is watching Jenkins and Steenburgen sink to such blithely immature levels of rude and crude comedy.

So authentic are the subjects, so raw their emotions.

The film is plush and passionate and graced with elegant performances. Best is that of Emma Thompson as Brideshead's matriarch, Lady Marchmain, who resembles a cross between Helen Mirren's Queen Elizabeth II and Pope Benedict.

He had the fearlessness of a 104-story man and something more than a daredevil's brass.

Shakespearean but overlong, The Dark Knight is two hours of heady, involving action that devolves into a mind-numbing 32-minute epilogue.

By turns entertaining and excruciating.

Manages to pull off a couple of startling surprises.

Goes somewhere the first "Hellboy" never ventured: into the Realms of Tedium.

Cheesy, cheesy, cheesy but fun, fun, fun.

Meet Dave isn't great, but it's good enough. And it proves once again that Murphy can do anything - even a PG comedy in which he isn't a donkey.

Johnny Depp, who portrayed Thompson's alter-ego in Gilliam's film, provides the narration. If there's hagiography here, it's counterbalanced by biographical truth.

A smart comedy that serves as both bittersweet coming-of-age tale and '90s nostalgia piece, The Wackness has the feel of authenticity about it, even if some of its details (the ice cream cart, and the therapist's bong, for two) seem a bit much.

A rollicking tale of rehabilitation and redemption, rife with cool special effects, Hancock is smart and surprisingly raunchy.

A terrific mystery, equal parts haunting love story and nimble thriller.

Finding Amanda isn't bad, and there is some smart, jagged humor.

With rich, detailed, cinematic animation and terrific sound effects, WALLE pulls this unlikely love story off.

Wanted is head-spinning stuff, and it's easy to get caught up in its masterfully manipulated mayhem. Visually, and viscerally, it's pretty awesome.

Lush. Debauched. Ravishing. And did I mention sexy?

Trumbo, a rousing documentary as ornery, orotund and captivating as its subject (1905-1976), is an anatomy of irony.

All that's missing is the spirit and the anarchic humor of the sitcom created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry. The result is an overdressed, carefully stitched scarecrow of a comedy.

Piles dumb gag upon dumb gag - it's like benign pummeling. Occasionally, you just have to laugh.

While the film starring Abigail Breslin as a resourceful 10-year-old is faithful to the Kit books, it's pokey where it should be perky.

While the film pivots around Nazneen, perhaps at the expense of other characters, it doesn't sell her short. This is a rich, revealing and elegant portrait, and one well worth spending time with.

As for The Happening, his throwback horror flick that plays like "The Birds" meets "The Blob," it's beyond good and evil. It's dumbfounding.

Don't run off before the credits start to roll, though: The Incredible Hulk ends with a jokey cameo by a certain movie star with his own newfound superhero franchise.

Beauty in Trouble offers a meditation on the legacies of communism and the lure of capitalism, but also on the human need for love, connection and family.

In part, the documentary answers the question of why some couples flourish and others flounder.

Ann Savage, the femme fatale from a slew of old Hollywood noirs, is savagely funny as Maddin's beauty-parlor proprietress mom.

Through Herzog's eyes it is a desolate, strangely beautiful frozen Edenish hell where the planet, having shaken out its pockets, lets the loners, fanatics and cosmologist-crackpots fall to bottom.

Thanks to a witty script and the recognizably goofy but absolutely earnest delivery of Black, Kung Fu Panda has a human soul, too.

Less like "The Waterboy" and more like "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry," only funny.

Mongol is great cinema, great fun.

A gloriously tacky horror movie with an inclination toward the occult, The Mother of Tears hails from the Italian schlockmeister Dario Argento, who photographs his Euro movie star daughter, Asia Argento, with something more than paternal pride.

It's totally down-to-earth, as real as a trip to the supermarket.

A deadpan, dead-on comedy.

The four women couldn't be better - or better matched. As always, Parker is the standout, cracking your heart and cracking you up with equal ease.

No one is getting at anything in The Strangers, except the cheapest, ugliest kind of sadistic titillation.

Rea, with his hangdog looks and Jimmy Stewart line readings, spends a good deal of his time writhing in fake blood and broken shards - not what you'd call glamorous work, but he does it with conviction.

While the production values are top-notch, and the action artfully choreographed, in the end - and quite well before the end - a sense of tedium sets in.

The movie is near-perfect, suspenseful, heart-breaking, profound.

An elaborately presented feast that will taste familiar to the 'tween and teen audience for whom it is served. The four courses are love, war, faith and humor, served in no canonical order, and sometimes, simultaneously.

Speed Racer offers a crazy, turbo-charged mix of cartoon kitsch, gamer action, and a wild new way to think of - and look at - movies.

Dazzling and delirious, The Fall is a celebration of cinema, of old-fashioned storytelling and globe-hopping spectacle.

A satisfyingly screwy New York story.

Pray has a great story here, but it's much more than just "The Brady Bunch's Endless Summer."

Their chemistry goes like this: He cleans up real nice; she dirties down with gusto.

As scripted by Cathy Rabin and directed by Santosh Sivan, Before the Rains is never less than compelling, but never more than adequately realized.

Lacking in subtlety and nuance, Broomfield's nerve-jangling movie nonetheless succeeds in showing the war from various vantage points. And from wherever one's standing, the view is profoundly disturbing.

The romanticized image of the tortured artist - never mind how warranted his or her angst might be - is the stuff of stereotype unless it's leavened with humor, or limned in art. In Fugitive Pieces, neither element appears in sufficient quantity.

Until a final conflict that more resembles a monster-truck jam than a superhero showdown, Iron Man is solid gold.

The film is just middling. A clever line here and there, a debonair Dempsey wink, a cute Monaghan nod, and another Bill and Monica reference to tie things all together.

Decidedly loopy and nonlinear, Mister Lonely is precious and artsy, but there are moments when Korine's, er, unique vision brings something bold and beautiful to the table.

One of the problems with the way Mamet resolves Mike's predicament is that it's ridiculously implausible - even in the context of a far-fetched fight story.

As is the case with many English comedies, some of the film's slang is hard to understand. But Jennings' sprightly films proves that although England and America are countries divided by the same language, they are united by slapstick comedy.

Best when skewering New Age entrepreneurs for what might be called Compassionate Capitalism. Steve Martin is sublime as Kate's boss, Barry, purveyor of organic food and Zen koans.

It's not exactly high art, but it's certainly high.

The structure of Lelouch's pedal-to-the-metal story commands attention and suspense. The three principals are enormously engaging, and Gérard de Battista's succulent cinematography creates the sense of actually being there.

In presenting their testimony to the jury of public opinion, Morris would seem to be building a case for absolving some of them of mistreatment charges and implicitly asking for an investigation of those who were not charged.

The material is so charged that it threatens to electrocute any who would touch it. Yet from the moment that Bette Midler, as Bernice the bio-Mom, appears, she becomes the instrument of its emotional release, catharsis teetering on high heels.

88 Minutes proves itself to be a maddeningly mediocre, ineptly manipulative "real-time" thriller.

The special effects are effective, though not terribly special. While director Minkoff pays homage to past masters of the genre, the past masters were better at this game than he.

Like "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Knocked Up," Sarah Marshall has all the ingredients of the Apatow brand. Alas, it's beginning to feel generic.

The best thing about The Life Before Her Eyes, a somber meditation on fate and friendship, is the way it captures the close relationship between two teenage girls.

Spurlock's intermittently entertaining travelogue ultimately reveals that people in disparate countries of different religions and wildly divergent ideologies are more alike than not.

At first glance Walter isn't a guy you want to spend two hours with. But by the end of the film, you don't want to see him go. Jenkins is like that: He sneaks up on you and steals your heart with light-fingered skill.

The parade of senators parroting the rationale for invasion - what we now know was misinformation - does not undermine Young's story. Given the private's eloquence, the flashbacks to 2002 are superfluous.

Vibrant and vivacious documentary.

A meditation on art, life, loneliness and the links between friends and strangers, the movie has a grace and humor that's wonderfully inviting.

A beautifully strange movie.

A larky throwback to the breakneck screwballs of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges. Problem is, it isn't breakneck enough.

Breslin, so memorable in "Little Miss Sunshine," suffers the most. Skilled and reactive with humans, she doesn't quite muster the same engagement with her finned and flippered costars here.

Despite Scorsese's efforts to pump up some drama - the director, with his signature glasses and Groucho brows, gets huffy about not receiving a set list - drama is sorely lacking. This is just a concert film.

The filmmakers' narrative device of framing Quinn's tale as a feature-length flashback doesn't pay off - we get a goody-two-shoes moral lesson at the end, and a look at movie studio aging makeup gone wild.

21 makes for some slick escapist fantasy. Even if, and because, the fantasy has its roots in something real.

Judah Friedlander and Lindsay Lohan are striking, respectively, as a Lennon paparazzo and a fan creeped out by Chapman.

Moviegoers of a certain age may feel as though they are watching a lost Bertolucci film.

Stop-Loss carries the emotional force and propulsive drama of the quintessential soldier's story.

Alexandra never depicts the soldiers in combat, but Sokurov nonetheless shows how war can break down the social structure, break down family, break the human soul.

There are winning scenes between Wilson and the three teens as they train in various martial arts (like Mexican Judo - "as in Ju-don't know who you're messing with!") and get tips from clips of "Fight Club" and "The Untouchables."

The playwright, actor, director and drag queen (yes, his bewigged and be wild Madea makes a brief and totally gratuitous appearance in his new film) knows how to give human dimension, and a dimension of humor, to the cliches and stereotypes.

How do you say "tearjerker" in Spanish?

One caveat: The film has more blood-splatter than a dozen zombie movies. If you can handle that, Doomsday's drunken mash-up of futuristic and feudal is surprisingly satisfying.

For its intended audience, Horton's agenda is overt: Listen, be a friend, and most important - have fun!

A bummer.

Watts, who is one of the film's executive producers, brings a taut intelligence to the proceedings, but her character, like Roth's, is more archetype than actual person.

Tedious, ludicrous and harmless glimpse of the dawn of civilization.

Feels both absolutely of the 1970s and absolutely fresh.

The whole project is a cloying, artificial mess. The slapstick comedy doesn't bite, and the formulaic sentimentality doesn't grip.

None of these elements quite come together, and while the clothes and props look authentic, the acting doesn't.

A jubilee for McDormand and jolly good fun for most everyone else.

The fluid film cinematography of Christopher Doyle and Rain Kathy Li, intercut with grainy Super-8 shots of park regulars, tracks the skaters in their free-flying, free-styling and free-falling grace. In these privileged moments, the film is close to transcendence, defying time, space and gravity.