Murderously unfunny.

A beautifully mopey adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's much-praised novel.

This Santa Claus story is for a midnight movie crowd, not the kiddie matinees.

True Grit is probably the least ironic picture in the Coen Brothers' worthy canon, but that doesn't mean it's devoid of their signature oddities, that it doesn't take a few dark, strange turns.

The million-dollar cast doesn't make the vulgar penny-ante jokes any funnier.

There's a loose, vérité vibe here, and times when both Williams and Gosling root down deep to deliver something resonant and true. But this modern-day kitchen sink drama is ultimately too painful, too labored, to care much about at all.

All Good Things is a "true crime" drama with speculative scenarios and a kind of deliberately murky aura. It's a strange, thrilling tale begrimed by bad memories, by bad deeds.

McGregor, playing his lover, is a perfect foil: gentle, funny, magnetic.

A darkly comic, piercing, and occasionally painful study of a young woman's quest for identity.

Legacy is a two-hour light show with a lot of flash, a little style, and not one byte of narrative originality.

It is a keenly observed movie about loss of identity and finding love, in which Brooks serves up funny-ouch humor with slapstick heartbreak.

Under Hooper's deft direction, it packs the suspense of a thriller.

The Fighter is funny, ferocious, sad, sweet, pulpy, and violent. Sometimes, all in the same minute.

Megamind has momentum and dazzle.

I winced more than laughed at this movie, which has almost as many broken bones as punch lines.

It is at its best when examining alternative sources of energy and how their development has consistently been thwarted by the energy industry.

Scott shoots and edits Unstoppable with roller-coaster momentum and an eye (and ear) on that roaring tonnage of steel.

There's no adroitness, no grace in the handling of the pitching emotions - funny, sad, icky - that such a story presents.

Tillman, who made a splash last year with his hip-hop hit "Notorious," does a nice job of calling into question the assumption, shared by most genre films, that vengeance is the only right course of action.

Monsters, like a serpent eating its own tail, comes back on itself in ways that haunt, and hurt.

Much as I enjoyed this diversion, I couldn't help but think that The Princess and the Frog had better songs and (hand-painted) animation, and that Mulan was a ripping adventure that didn't need tweaking to qualify as an action flick.

Burlesque is a preposterous and intermittently entertaining lesson in how to make a movie musical with a little brains and a lot of talent.

Maybe it's the postproduction 3-D enhancements, but in this effects-laden Odyssey for tweens, sometimes humans and beasts seem more wax-and-paint than flesh-and-blood.

While White Material is very much the story of this one woman, it is also a story of postcolonial Africa, a place where Europeans staked their claim, and where disorder and destruction upended everything. A mournful, frightening, powerful film.

An alarmingly charmless attempt to evoke the elegant romance and jaunty, jet-setting intrigue of the aforementioned titles, The Tourist is notable for the total absence of movie-star heat that movie stars are paid unseemly sums to radiate.

Among the leads, Radcliffe alternates between playing the wet blanket and the dry wit, and Grint strikes a few sparks as his ambivalent protector. It is Watson who catches fire as the strategist and soldier of this penultimate Potter quest. Watson's so good that one wishes Rowling had built her septology around Hermione Potter.

It's not a very good title, Waste Land - this isn't a bleak film, at all - but just about everything else in Lucy Walker's documentary works, and illuminates.

Flat and predictable.