As always, Freeman is a one-man charm offensive.

A Single Man is like a big coffee table book on grief, loneliness, and loss - and mid-20th-century home design.

You would think any movie with the word "salmon" in the title would have to be funny. Think again.

A heartbreaking film that speaks to the lifelong aftershocks of war, and to the powerful bonds of family and of love.

Ryan may not be admirable, but Clooney makes him relatable. It's his deepest and nakedest performance.

More strident than funny, the film illustrates that old French proverb, "Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get out."

De Niro's minimalist performance has maximum emotional impact and succeeds in unifying the episodic film.

Set exactly a century ago, The Last Station is a droll tragicomedy starring those battling Tolstoys, whose family is unhappy in its own way.

The Road isn't a masterpiece...But I cannot think of another film this year that has stayed with me, its images of dread and fear - and yes, perhaps hope - kicking around like such a terrible dream.

The film billed as the first Disney animation to boast an African American "princess" is really about a resourceful bootstrapper in New Orleans, a young woman allergic to the fairy-tale pap spoon-fed to young girls.

It runs a fast 88 minutes, is broad as the waistlines of its stars, and is remarkably family-friendly if you don't mind bathroom humor.

Linklater's film adaptation succeeds in bringing the flamboyant Welles to life.

An uninspired computer-animated feature that may satisfy undiscriminating pipsqueaks and nearly no one else, Planet 51 is a low-IQ E.T. in reverse.

Given this swoon-inducer, Summit Entertainment would be well-advised to set up fainting couches in the multiplex lobby and provide smelling salts to those who need them.

An engaging if transparent tearjerker of the first water.

A one-of-a-kind experience that boasts a twice-in-a-lifetime performance from Nicolas Cage. The actor has not gone this deep into the abyss since "Vampire's Kiss" (1989).

A melodrama painted in the saffron-and-turmeric hues of a Bollywood musical, Broken Embraces is the Spanish filmmaker's homage to Hitchcock's "Vertigo," that moody account of obsessional love and double lives.

This is magnificent filmmaking, and a magnificent film.

This film that imagines the end of the world not as a whimper but as an implosion is a preposterously diverting, instantly forgettable, big-screen video game.

Witty and wonderful, Fantastic Mr. Fox is the perfect Thanksgiving entertainment.

Think of the film from director Adam Salky and screenwriter David Brind as "Pretty in Pink" crossed with "Cruel Intentions."

For all the film's gritty verisimilitude, The Messenger is not the great Iraq War movie that Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" is.

Awash in nostalgia and amped-up male camaraderie, Richard Curtis' Pirate Radio takes a great story - the hugely popular offshore radio stations that illegally broadcast pop and rock in 1960s Britain - and turns it into an aggressively irritating floating frat-party romp.

It's a view filtered through a prism of memory and emotion, but one well worth investigating.

You go to a Daniels movie not to be entertained, but edified. While not everyone goes to the movies for self-improvement, you will leave this one having witnessed phenomenal acting.

A mildly scary, totally meaningless excursion into the realms of psychological horror and alien-abduction conspiracies.

Visually immersive but emotionally uninvolving.

Has a glorious good time satirizing the extravagant lengths to which the military and intelligence establishments will go if they think there's a payoff at the other end.