It's quite a celebration.

Smartly acted, achingly simple love story.

If it were a landscape painting, Gerry would deserve a place in the National Gallery. But as a movie...deserves its own wing in The Old Curiosity Shop.

Brought to the screen with a mix of jaunty humor and jagged violence that should have worked more effectively than it does.

An interesting choice for a Valentine's Day outing, He Loves Me is a weird, bubbly cocktail -- effervescent charm and troubling pathology, shaken together.

The film's recurring image is that of a butterfly fluttering around a flower, a lovely symbol of the reader drawn to a novel's nectar.

There are three action sequences here so delightful, so hilariously deploying an old tool for a new use, that they prompt smiles long after I saw the film.

Lightweight, likable buppie romantic comedy.

There is no shape or pacing to Daniel Petrie's movie. It's like a bottle of soda left uncapped. So thus a story that promised effervescence ends up being flat.

Wildly sad, funny and terrific documentary.

This startlingly lame tale about a young upstart challenging a veteran leader of the pack doesn't update the genre, it simply recasts it.

Probably better than anyone else working today, Donaldson knows how to knit a thriller. Each time you think this taut yarn is about to unravel, that's when he pulls the wool over your eyes.

Riveting and heartstoppingly fine documentary.

Stephen King without the snap, David Lynch without the kink, teen horror without the teen hormones, Darkness Falls falls apart in a crescendo of creepy-crawly hoo-ha. It's more like Darkness Kerplunks.

Never going to be remembered as a tying-the-knot screwball classic (it probably won't be remembered past March), but one could do worse.

This salt-and-pepper buddy movie set in the scenic environs of downtown Brooklyn and the Australian bush is a crowd-pleaser -- for the elementary-school set.

An epic docudrama - electric and raw.

A slo-mo gem of gangster cool, of vintage Hollywood noir reimagined by a French new waver in love with American cars, American jazz, and the kind of trench-coated tough-guys embodied by Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum.

This mostly vulgar, but never explicit, comedy resolves itself surprisingly, revealing depth just when you think it's going to continue its skip across the shallows. In other words, Just Married might not be good, but it's just good enough.

All about the wacky borderlands where reality and invention intersect. But there are no safe demarcations -- no demilitarized zone, no Berlin Wall -- to cue us to which side we're operating in, or that Barris is operating in.

Because the movie is about addictive behavior dulling the pain of grief rather than in the larger drama of dealing with grief, the movie reduces the scope of Hoffman's performance.

Throw bouquets at Marshall, who instead of dissecting it to death, neatly resurrects the Hollywood musical.

To the extent that movies bear the residue of their filmmakers' autobiographies, I found The Pianist particularly compelling.

This film is a philosophical musing -- a humanitarian speculation, not a drama about real people, historical figures or not, who seem fully formed.

Though Daldry elicits brilliant performances, particularly from Meryl Streep and Claire Danes, on balance The Hours is more pretentious than penetrating about existential despair.

In the end (and it's a happy end, to be sure), Catch Me if You Can is as crisp and trim as a new suit. Well, a new old suit - say, circa the 1960s.

A clever feature-length cartoon just as entertaining as the hit Nickelodeon series on which it is based.

A gossamer tale about a heavy subject -- a passive creature who slowly emerges as the active author of her own life.