flat and disappointing.

Reaches truly terrifying heights as it becomes clear how possible the worst outcome can be. Like "Pan's Labyrinth," this is a movie about children made very much for adults.

It's first-rank filmmaking, through and through, even if it struggles to find closure.

Freeman and Nicholson mostly stand in front of special-effects green screens and have the locales projected, like they're in a "Road" picture.

If I had to pick one word to describe The Great Debaters, it would be "nutritious."

You can learn about the grand shifts of history from Persepolis, but you learn about a handful of lives as well.

You don't often hear critics gripe that a movie isn't long or explicit enough, but Sorkin and Nichols could have gone the extra lap or so to show that Wilson's saga is more than just a story of a good ol' boy accidentally pulling off a remarkable coup; it's a sobering account of the geopolitical hijinks that gave shape to our current world.

On a week when many people just want a good reason to put down their packages and smile for a couple of hours, P.S. I Love You arrives -- signed, sealed and delivered just on time.

They've made a movie-movie of Sweeney Todd, and if you've got the stomach and ear for it, you'll be grateful.

It should be noted that Walk Hard is aimed at a fairly specific sort of movie subgenre -- it's practically an extended "SNL" sketch -- and it doesn't produce belly laughs so much as steady smiles of recognition over how accurately it's nailing its target. But it really nails that target.

A surprisingly fatalistic, way-above-average ski documentary that lays out a 35-year history of the "extreme" end of the sport.

I Am Legend has one undeniably cool thing about it, namely the vision of Manhattan as a semi-feral wasteland.

In the main, this is powerful and comely filmmaking, and the decision to shoot it with virtually unknown actors and a variety of unfamiliar tongues is commendable.

Tt is a comeback, and if it leads the director to better work, it can be forgiven as a warm-up.

This moronic yuletide time-waster might work as a way to grab a few winks at the mall during last-minute shopping, but it's not going to end up as a highlight on the resume of anyone involved.

All this star power goes for naught in Traeger's film, which tries to blend bucolic sweetness with juvenile let's-make-a-porno jokes.

A handsome film, an earnest film, a film with taste in music and photography and a real sense of intelligence. But too often it feels like an exercise. And even when you're impressed by it, you know you're being played.

While it's hard to dismiss his intention or effort, Harrelson's one-note performance sinks the film.

Although it contains crime and absurdity, it's not thrilling or funny and the title doesn't refer to a gun.

A funny and sincere indie about what happens when an acerbic teen finds herself "in a fat suit I can't take off."

Mathieu Amalric, best known as an arms dealer in "Munich." In a role that strips him entirely of vanity and denies him virtually every expressive tool, Amalric makes a genuinely touching impression.

The film has a dreary, worn quality; much of it is set in winter in Buffalo, N.Y., after all. You know before long that the best you can hope for is that these folks won't kill each other or themselves.

Fact is, Starting Out is pretty dry stuff as a movie, even as it's enlivened by vivid acting.

The dialogue is dippy. And there's no real suspense: The filmmakers are so deadly earnest about the power of music and love and all that stuff, you just twiddle your thumbs waiting for the inevitable.

Seeing Hitman isn't like playing a video game or even like watching someone else play a video game. It's like watching someone stupid play a bad video game.

This film insists on being taken on its own terms -- the sort of demand, in other words, that defines the best art.

In the parlance of the kids today, the movie totally goes there.

For the record, it's truly puzzling that this film has been rated PG-13; it's much stronger than that. The monsters of "Beowulf" have haunted human imagination for more than a millennium; the ones in this film will easily provoke a few nightmares.

The overall effect of the movie is to make you wish there were a statute of limitations on how long maladjusted adults are allowed to blame their parents before it's OK to holler, "Get over it, people!"

Kids will enjoy the experience overall: It's a little messy and undercooked, but still vastly more imaginative and entertaining than junk like "Fred Claus."

As a manipulator of images and emotions, De Palma has few equals, and this is his most gripping film in at least a decade. Viewed simply as cinema and not as political rhetoric, it's often a kick in the guts -- even when it makes you roll your eyes.

When characters are required to grow old over the course of a decades-spanning story, as in Love in the Time of Cholera, it's still a hit-or-miss proposition whether the combination of makeup and performance skills will convince us that a character is 40 years older than the actor.

A fairly good movie about an evil subject.

Talky, didactic and essentially free of any real narrative, it views Iraq through the lens of Vietnam, which is fair enough, but ends up making the whole polemic seem like a condescending effort from aging baby boomers to get the younger generation to step up to the plate.

In the main this is a muscular, exact and thrillingly cool movie.

Isn't meant to be a depressing experience, as each of these unfortunate souls recovers a sense of pride in themselves and their tribe through music.

This impressive film feels more like a display, if an often dazzling one, than a genuine experience.

If an animated movie isn't competing with Pixar to dazzle the eye, it had darn well better hit the heart or the funny bone. With its wee little stinger, Bee Movie misses both.

If the presence of Cheadle and his handsome pal George Clooney can entice otherwise resistant viewers to learn about the ongoing travesty in western Sudan, then Darfur Now has done its job.

That rarest of movie biographies: a warts-and-all exploration of the life and times of its subject.

At the end of Martian Child, we're told the movie is "inspired by actual events." But the movie isn't even fully inspired by David Gerrold's source novel that was inspired by actual events.

Emotionally brutal, ferociously acted, crafted with unflagging expertise and relentlessly locked in its vision of human darkness, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is as grim and despairing as any tragedy by Sophocles or Shakespeare.

I could see people enjoying Dan in Real Life, I guess -- the scenery is nice and the people are pretty and the songs are cute little emotion substitutes. But Dan? Buddy? It's not all about you.

It's a remarkably intimate look at the man and his thinking, and you wish for more history to flesh out the biographical aspects of his life.

It gives me no pleasure to report that the Pimentel biopic Music Within plays like a well-intentioned TV movie.

It's not perfect or "Shining"-level inspired, but it's solid.

It's a fine debut, far more grounded, plausible and engrossing than most Hollywood thrillers.

Overheated claptrap that takes an issue of vital national importance and turns it into an inept cartoon that emboldens the worst instincts in our national character.

Serious Acting Opportunities abound! Unfortunately, sharp dialogue and characters who keep you riveted do not.

The result is a film that's more credible in its building blocks than in its whole.

The film has a spry quality, but the jokes are neither funny nor dark enough, the quirky roadside episodes aren't sufficiently outlandish or imaginative, the romantic sparks don't convince and the plotting becomes increasingly silly and tedious. Dukic conjures an air of play and naughtiness, but that's about as deep as he cuts.

It says a lot about this movie that the most arresting character in it is Mary, whom Morton unsurprisingly endows with a fanatical combination of narcissism and rage.

Gosling is excellent playing a character who's fundamentally unknowable.

It's not a disaster: Branagh is an actor's director, and there are biting moments throughout and solid performances from Caine and Law.

This is a perfectly serviceable thriller. It's just not the New York family crime saga it clearly wants to be.

The film always teaches and entertains in equal, ample measure. It's a treat -- and it's good for you.

Can a movie about such a fellow and such a fate be lovely? And can it uplift? Control is and, in its artfulness, does.

In this involving if slightly unfocused documentary, director Daniel Karslake takes a two-pronged approach in examining how religion has been interpreted -- some would say twisted -- into, at its worst, monomaniacal homophobia.

The results are not endearing. Eddie comes off not as a beleaguered Everyman but a heedless, dishonest knob trying to undo a deal that gave him exactly what he deserved. The real surprise is Carlos Mencia, playing an exuberant clerk at the resort hotel. But when Carlos Mencia is the funniest thing in your movie, you've got serious problems.

At once spare and dense, chilly and thrilling, literate and visceral, it feeds in gray areas, teasing ambiguities and conundrums out of shadows and making strengths of inconclusiveness and uncertainty.

The result is a true conundrum: You can't say for sure if a scam is in play or if a genuine genius is being smeared. And the brilliance of the film is that it doesn't let you feel secure in choosing either side.

It's trying to fill some perceived market void created by the end of "Harry Potter."

The longer it goes on, the less your mind settles. You may not believe in a hell in which a lake of fire rages, but we live in a nation and at a time when many people have little lakes of fire in their heads and hearts. Kaye is determined that we never forget that truth or its price.

By now, you know exactly what to expect, which is both good and bad. To my mind, Anderson reached the acme of this formula in the first go, in "Tenenbaums," and has now replicated it twice, evoking smaller pleasures each time.

You end up with a movie that takes that real problem and makes it feel like an exploitation contrivance.

Feast is set and was shot in Portland, and if nothing else it makes the case that we live in one gorgeous city.

Kyra Sedgwick is turned into a caricature of a sports agent. "NYPD Blue" grad Gordon Clapp gets one line of dialogue. And Morris Chestnut is pushed out to make room for one more "ain't she cute" moment.

Wants to be both a hot-button, ripped-from-the-headlines statement movie and a crowd-pleasing, rip-roaring action thriller. It ends up meeting each goal about halfway.

The film is never less than beautiful, but it's never truly absorbing.

Feels like a lost film from the '60s in the very best way: unstructured and intrepid and free. As a result, it's sometimes a little indulgent and overlong. But, like its hero, it's never less than sincere in its search for truth and beauty, even as it stares death in the eye.

14-year-old girls will dig its amiable energy.

Mournful and moody, crepuscular and poetic, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford turns one of cinema's most rehearsed tales into a dreamy inquiry into the nature of sadism, hero-worship and betrayal.

The domestic and romantic turmoil all gets resolved a bit too neatly to seem realistic, but realism isn't the goal; this is comfort food, plain and simple, and achieves its modest goals in nearly effortless fashion.

It's a funny thing: On the one hand, you fault Taymor for going out of her way to create some of the more disposable sequences. On the other, you can forgive her: Who wouldn't get carried away given the opportunity she has been given here to play with one of the world's greatest song catalogs?

The film sort of loses its touch when it gets "dramatic" toward the end -- it's the type of flick where the sky gets overcast when everyone is sad -- but it's hard to argue with the movie's general good spirits.

Cronenberg has, as Guillermo del Toro did in "Pan's Labyrinth," crafted both a drama and a fairy tale -- and he's done it in an entertainment as cracking as you could wish for.

Transcends politics and forces us to consider just what it is we ask of young people who answer the call to duty.

There are two solid sight gags and funny supporting work by Amy Poehler as a boozy publicist.

As the film builds toward a ludicrous finale, it poses a question: Foster is a far better actor than Charles Bronson, and Jordan a much better director than Michael Winner, so why is The Brave One so much less satisfying than "Death Wish"?

The film is somewhat scattered in construction, but it's an eye-opener.

Like a picture postcard vision of his life and work: absolutely accurate as far as it goes but not too keen on looking too close for fear of uncovering anything untoward.

A fine and sturdy picture, capable of standing alongside the many such films made when Westerns were one of our chief entertainments.

It ends on a random note, making an awkward plea for better ecological stewardship of the Earth, which looked so small and frail to the astronauts regarding it from the moon. But otherwise it's a satisfying and heartening reminder of what a glorious thing a small group of men once contrived to do.

This is a movie that, off-putting as it can be at times, deserves to be seen and heard in a theater, if only to observe the reactions of others to the hilarious gutter talk coming out of Winslet's mouth.

The characters are flat, too: Richard Gere plays your typical desperate, embittered war reporter; Terrence Howard is your typical cameraman/sidekick/narrator; and Jesse Eisenberg rounds out the standard-issue trio as your typical nervous rookie, in over his head.

It's a cartoon that thinks it isn't one.

Funny and weird and surprising and action-packed and genuinely beautiful.

As it stands, the film is more often self-absorbed than self-aware.

The shtick grows a bit repetitive, so by the end of the story you may be checking the time rather than rooting for Randy.

Dedication would've been better if it had stuck to its disreputable guns instead of going all mushy and predictable, and slathering an emo soundtrack over everything.

This was a story that made front pages in its day but has been largely lost to history, and now is brought bracingly and compellingly back to life.

To quote Dennis Hopper from the film "Search and Destroy": "Just because it happened to you doesn't make it interesting."

While Mr. Bean's Holiday is hardly a memorable vacation, Atkinson proves an agreeably silly tour guide.

Clumsiness follows clumsiness -- the acting, the staging, the details of the plot -- until you reach the point of cool indifference. There's a lot more wrong here than can be corrected in a small space in the newspaper.

The characters devolve into boring narcissists. And the movie devolves into a broad-brush dark satire of emergency bureaucracy that feels a lot sillier than the post-9/11 panic attack of the first half-hour.

Modest in every sense but one: Its cast is huge.

Filled with nasty, nasty stuff.

Well-intentioned but overblown environmental agitprop.