Bale brings intense energy (and a convincing American accent) to the proceedings, and the film manages to make this borderline Travis Bickle into a sympathetic character - with a sweetheart, and a sweeter life, beckoning from south of the border. Strong stuff.

Stranger Than Fiction is slicker than Kaufman's work - and Forster's direction is certainly more studio-ish than Kaufman collaborators Spike Jonze's or Michel Gondry's. But it's a clever idea, and you feel a little smarter watching the thing unfurl.

If the only measure of Fur's achievement was in how well it conjures the fairy-tale mood of Arbus' most memorable photos, then it is a modest success. But as a chronicle of the turning point in an artist's creative life, it falls flat on its viewfinder.

Filled with close-ups of Jesus and his apostles (all the better to hide the absence of elaborate period sets), mixing quotes from the Scripture with flat exposition, this low-budget affair is earnest and, alas, more than a little bit cartoonish.

Baron Cohen brings scary conviction to the performance.

As scatalogical affairs go, Flushed Away shows remarkable buoyancy.

This isn't a movie, it's an animatronic theme-park ride - an artificially processed, easily digestible treat for kids.Ho, ho hum.

Funny as it is fierce, breathtaking as it is life-affirming.

Luke, who had the title role in Denzel Washington's directorial debut, "Antwone Fisher," is that rare actor who can convey profound inner conflict with just a look in his eye; his performance is attuned, astute and remarkable.

The question for moviegoers: Would you rather get your dose of existenz-philosophie from Dostoyevsky or a slasher flick?

I was shaken, but not stirred, by Babel, a globalist melodrama that careens from Morocco to Mexico like a revved-up "Crash."

Winner of a prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the quiet, solemn Climates is a bit like those towering ancient columns that Isa photographs to show his class. The fragmented architecture is beautiful and striking, but also extremely dated.

The film is cannily made.

A gorgeous confection, packed with gargantuan gowns and pornographic displays of pastrystuffs, Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette is also a sharp, smart look at the isolation, ennui and supercilious affairs of the rich, famous and famously pampered.

Alas, something happened on the book-to-screen operating table: Yes, Running With Scissors is rich, twisted, insane, mordant and ridiculous, but it is not funny. Not at all.

In the film, the music, beginning with a muted a cappella ballad, is from Eastwood himself.

If all you ask of a movie is that it have scenic stars and some scenery (here the Sierras of California substitute for the Rockies of Wyoming), then Flicka is adequate. Me, I expected some conflict, some resolution, and a horse that took me on a wild ride. This one really never gets out of the gate.

Jonathan and Christopher Nolan's adaptation of this novel by Christopher Priest offers three acts of exasperating muddle.

The actors, individually fine although they appear to be in different films, tread warily on each other's turf, like Martian and Venusian making adjustments for an alien gravitational field.

Courageous, shattering and exceptional documentary.

"Capote" is serious, deep and unadorned in the manner of the 1967 movie adaptation of the writer's true-crime novel "In Cold Blood." And Infamous boasts the high-gloss frivolity of the 1961 film version of Capote's "Breakfast at Tiffany's."

A mix of "Alice in Wonderland" and William S. Burroughs, "Psycho" and the psychotic. It's pretty much a squirmy experience all around.

Taken for what it is - 'tweenage escapism - Stormbreaker is moderately fun.

During its two hours-plus running time, Field's movie veers from dark comedy to melodrama, not always gracefully. But tonal inconsistencies don't blunt the keenness of its satire, so sharp that I walked out with emotional razor burn.

It's a movie with a pulse. Sometimes, it flies off the chart.

So achingly empty, it's nearly existential.

Shortbus suffers from a vague, ad lib-y script and a cast that, while hardly shy, isn't exactly charismatic.

Piercingly funny and unexpectedly moving account of that odd couple, Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) and HRH Elizabeth II (majestic Helen Mirren) and their back-channels affair.

It's not easy being macho while you're shivering like a frozen puppy, but Kutcher pulls it off.

Despite the appeal of cobra-eyed Thornton and bunny-nosed Heder, Scoundrels trips early, and often.

Great as Whitaker is in this juicy slab of Oscar bait, Macdonald's movie doesn't have much to offer beyond a pair of stunning performances, propulsive editing, fantastic scenery and the heartbeat rhythms of African music.

In essence, a wild soap opera disguised as a political allegory, it's a movie, with its over-the-map performances, that is worth catching only for the inadvertent laugh or two.

Shot like a Disney period piece (prettily, with spiffy props, shiny vintage vehicles, and costumes just back from the cleaners), Flyboys introduces its squadron the old-fashioned way: with character-establishing setups.

The sequel is a dizzying succession of pranks, Candid Camera-like sketches, and, that old crowd-pleaser, the boys actively courting their own grievous harm. This is what you get when a generation grows up watching far too many "Roadrunner" cartoons while sitting on the couch eating bowl after bowl of Lucky Charms.

With the exception of one sequence, this PG-13 movie is so youth-friendly that I thought I might take my 10-year-old. But that sequence, upsetting for those of any age, makes the movie better suited for mature 12-year-olds and older.

Cinematic dynamite.

Unlike Gondry's previous features, Human Nature and Eternal Sunshine, Science lacks the sturdy armature of a Charlie Kaufman screenplay to support its eccentricities. The flood of delight in the film's first 90 minutes slowed to a trickle and, finally, a drip.

The result is something both fluid and stark, cinematic and comic book-y, and incredible.

The film's atmosphere is incendiary. It has style to burn. But for the most part, the performances are all wet.

Great message, so-so movie.

The trouble with The Last Kiss comes down to Paul Haggis' screenplay.

A whimsical tale of serial murder in the English countryside, Keeping Mum benefits immensely from the charm and pitch-perfect gravitas of Kristin Scott Thomas.

A whodunit, a whydunit, and an excuse for Adrien Brody to mug it up like nobody's business.

Harlin, with his customary visual brio, has created a film that is deliriously watchable. It's just not all that interesting. In the end, The Covenant is simply a glossier version of TV's "Charmed."

Get the soundtrack; wait for the movie to come to CMT.

If you can stomach the hard-R rating, this is a smart, sexy and funny sprint.

A vast disappointment.

Hugely entertaining catalog of MPAA follies.

The script is a stupid mix of Teutonic tongue twisters (say hello to Herr Schniedelwichsen), hoary German cliches (from phallic sausages to U-boat spoofs), and bad slapstick.

Idle it is not. Wild it is most assuredly. Set in Prohibition-era Georgia, Idlewild boasts yesterday's style, today's music, and the Harlem Renaissance's romanticism.

Core, a cinematographer who helms both camera and directorial duties here, creates a vivid sense of time and place without letting the period music, clothes or art direction intrude. The performances are likewise understated and unpretentious, especially those of Wahlberg and Kinnear.

Trapped between edgy art flick and exploitation psychothriller, The Quiet manages to be neither, and manages to be pretty awful in the bargain.

This hotly anticipated film delivers on the premise of its celebrated title. But it offers little more in terms of suspense, originality or enjoyment. Mostly, it lays there on the screen like a big lazy boa.

Paradoxically fast-talking and laid back, Long's Bartleby appears to be the illegitimate child of Groucho Marx and Ferris Bueller, one whose schemes are far more impressive than his deeds.

The less said about the twists and turns The Illusionist takes, the better. Suffice to say, Eisenheim's masterful deceptions do not stop when he exits the stage.

Does the world really need another movie about a married guy wandering blindly into an affair, or the married gal who can't decide whether to remain faithful or fool around?

"The Godfather" without Brando, "GoodFellas" without Scorsese, "The Sopranos" without Gandolfini - 10th & Wolf is all that, and less.

It's a performance that will make you cringe - with despair, with empathy - as Gosling's Dan takes one self-destructive step after another.

Sensual, dreamlike, both intimate and epic, The House of Sand is a cinematic tour de force.

The script by Andrea Berloff is stunning in its simplicity and aching details.

Amid this unrelenting ferocity, Marshall gives his characters emotional depth, and elicits terrific performances from the cast.

The fundamental problem with The Night Listener is the manner in which the boy, Pete, is depicted. Rory Culkin gets the tricky job of bringing the role to life, and he does it well, but it's still a trick. Or is it?

The British star of "Ali G" fame plays Ricky Bobby's arch-nemesis. His name: Jean Girard. His provenance: France. His sponsor: Perrier. Speaking through a set of nasty-looking, tightly clenched teeth in the faux-est of faux French accents, Cohen is hilarious.

A merrily macabre things-we-do-for-love yarn.

The film is suffused with the generous, nonjudgmental spirit of Uncle Tomas, whose live-and-let-live attitude warms like the sun and who helps Magdalena and Carlos make the safe passage from adolescence to maturity.

Claustrophobic and overwrought, Jailbait is an unpleasant excursion into gay panic mitigated somewhat by performances that are hard to shake.

Miami Vice, the movie, is an atmospheric muddle, as gorgeous and unintelligible as raven-haired stunner Gong Li.

Cobbled together from memorable parts of Allen's own (not to mention Hitchcock's) classics, Scoop doesn't establish its own identity.

Too cute by half, the high school comedy John Tucker Must Die is just so likable, so, um, cute - in that helpless-bunny-wabbit sort of way - that to diss it would be to admit being a heartless, cynical Bambi-killer.

Take "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids," throw some "Antz" on it, and you have The Ant Bully.

13 Tzameti is cut from the same cloth as the humans-hunted-for-sport classic "The Most Dangerous Game" - and from that early talkie's many subsequent remakes and rip-offs, including John Woo's "Hard Target."

Likable-to-a-point.

Unnerving.

Family. Can't live with 'em, can't kill 'em. Little Miss Sunshine, a stormy quasi-comedy destined to polarize audiences, is a perfect specimen of this unsentimental attitude.

A strident and shocking jumble, Shadowboxer suggests what you might come up with if you decided to inject John Huston's dark 1985 film, "Prizzi's Honor," with Oedipal overtones.

While these individually diverting factors add up to a good time, they don't add up to a good movie.

Lady in the Water boasts an eclectic cast - almost entirely squandered.

Easily the best computer-animated feature to come from Hollywood in a long while, Monster House is also one of the weirdest. A creepy-crawly, freak-show Halloween yarn.

This sophomoric mix of the supernatural and screwball from Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters) is diverting, cheesy fun, with Thurman's G-Girl as a droll combination of Superwoman and Uber Shrew.

An extremely broad and sometimes crude comedy.

Occasionally clicks into full-speed farce mode, but never for long - or for long enough.

This is the slightest and slimmest of sex comedies.

A long, tedious and convoluted follow-up to 2003's rollicking high-seas hit, The Curse of the Black Pearl, this second installment in the promised trilogy lacks the swash and buckle of the original. And then some.

A rambling depiction of a junkie's descent into zombitude.

Boasts another formidable and fine-tuned performance from the great Charlotte Rampling.

Setting her (Streep) face into a mask of composure that suggests Darth Vader by way of a Kabuki actor, the most expressive of American actresses shows how power is expressed in the lack of facial and vocal expression.

A spectacularly satisfying reworking of the legend of Kal-El.

I liked this movie better when it was called "Rock'n'Roll High School" and starred the Ramones and Mary Woronov.

As efficient and zippy as its subject.

Somehow, this rollicking day in the life of a band of skateboarding Latino punk-rockers doesn't exude the voyeuristic smarm of previous Clark forays.

If the moral of Click is a stop-and-smell-the-roses bromide about how family comes first, the real message of this sappy, potty-mouthed seriocomedy is that a steady diet of Drakes and Hostesses will do you no good.

The cast, especially The Game, does a fairly good job with this meager material, but it's like trying to make chateaubriand out of Spam.

Since the film does not include the testimony of U.S. military or neutral human-rights observers, it gives viewers no way to test the subjects' reliability as narrators.

OK, they squeezed one more lap out of this franchise. It's been a fun ride, but it's time to shut things down. If you get my drift.

An enjoyably sudsy romance starring a moody Keanu Reeves, a broody Sandra Bullock, and the titular structure - a jewel box of glass and steel perched on stilts over Lake Michigan.

Black's caped "luchador" grows on you. Like a fun guy.

In segments such as the Reagle and Clinton interviews, where character is revealed via puzzle style, Wordplay succeeds. The film is less successful when it travels to the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.

And did I mention that it's long? It's long.