Wild Target is the sort of farce where nothing, essentially, is at stake, even as cars crash (including an original Mini Cooper), bullets rip, and knives get hurled with deadly velocity.

The Next Three Days is genre fare - no pretensions, no nonsense.

Client 9 speaks plenty of truth - about politics, power, human nature - even if you don't buy into the hit-job hypothesis.

In rhythm, humor and performance, Morning Glory is, at best, sporadic.

When it works - and it doesn't half the time - it's as if Monty Python were back, putting its merrily imbecilic stamp on the dark world of terrorism.

At its best, Shange's work is a lyric journey through the storm to the rainbow. At its worst, Perry's movie is a relentless dance between the victimizer and his victim. Shange's poetic flow gets choked by Perry's stilted prose.

Watts gives a deep and Oscar-worthy performance here, displaying the steely composure that made Plame a valued NOC (non-official cover operative).

It is a damning indictment of the individuals and institutions who made money while customers lost their shirts.

Mostly, Doremus' movie rings true, as some truly jerky behavior ensues.

Mostly The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest belongs to Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), the tall and intrepid magazine journalist who is determined to clear Lisbeth's name, and who goes about doing so - and making espresso and checking his e-mail - with zeal.

It's a coming-of-age story - blunt, mythic, gut-wrenching.

I was with the movie until its head-scratcher of an ending, too oblique for its own good.

Eastwood and Morgan's movie, with its epic natural disasters (and a terrifying, man-made one) is optimistic. Hokey, even. But it's beautiful, too.

It's a noble enterprise, and a remarkable story, but it's not a movie that will set you free.

From the street corner to the boardroom to the White House, the same paradigms are in play, Brown argues.

Air Doll covers some of the same ground as that other postmodern Pinocchio story, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, while avoiding its facile sentimentality.

Too long, too busy, too loud, and too reliant on slam-bang stunt work, Red's glib dialogue and sinister government scenarios begin to wear.

The result, if occasionally forced, is also irresistible.

If there's a psych ward for motion pictures, It's Kind of a Funny Story should check itself in. Boden and Fleck's film suffers from bipolar disorder: manic and silly one minute, moody and muted the next.

With pratfalls and teardrops, the film swings from sitcom to sit-dram.

Taylor-Wood stresses the universals rather than the specifics of John's youth. So don't go expecting a Fab Four origin story. The word Beatles is never uttered. But do go.

Most of all, it is the improbably entertaining story of how new media are altering the very nature of courtship and friendship.

Freakonomics is uneven, and even a little cloying, but its sum effect isn't bad.

It's a heartbreaker of a coming-of-age tale, even if there's a string of exsanguinated corpses to be accounted for.

The film whipsaws between hyperbolic character study and preachy account of the recent financial meltdown. The two story lines are not well-integrated.

An unlikable and excruciatingly unfunny comedy.

The movie is beautiful but, for one unfamiliar with the source material, confusing. I needed an owl scorecard.

Enter the Void inspires ambivalence. Aside from its technical brilliance, it is an experience equally sublime and infuriating, revelatory and painful, ecstatic and terrifying.