Putting it another way: When spoofs of bad singing and songwriting are the sharpest arrows in your quiver, and your politics are diluted until they hit about as hard as someone sticking their tongue out, your satire has a problem.

We have reached a point in history when an ordinary TV show is often as good as or even better than an ordinary movie. And movies don't come much more ordinary than The Sentinel.

As to claims that the book provides a path to enlightenment, I'm an agnostic. But I can swear on a stack of ancient scrolls that the movie plays like 90-odd minutes of purgatory from which you feel you may never escape.

Chiwetel Ejiofor's performance alone makes it worth giving your "Full Monty" DVD a rest and heading out to Kinky Boots.

Despite the hot-button pedophilic story hook (I'm surprised Jeff and Hayley didn't meet on MySpace.com), Hard Candy ultimately beats with the heart of a stagier, more complicated psychological revenge picture along the lines of Roman Polanski's "Death and the Maiden."

A feature film has to be more than just an interesting theme; it needs something that constitutes drama -- conflict, journey, adventure, what have you. The Notorious Bettie Page is a perfect example of a film that has a subject but no story.

If Look Both Ways has a familiar form, this sort of emphasis on humanity, with which the film refreshingly pulses, is rare.

In all that empty space, the film gets a bit lost.

One of the great things about international cinema is the way it can remind us of our common humanity. For instance, it's good to know that beautiful, rich people are selfish and miserable the world over. That's one of the few positives a viewer can take away from a film such as La Mujer de Mi Hermano.

Never actively unfunny. The cast is far too smart for that. But it never quite pops like it would if it were whittled down to something just a little longer than an "SNL Digital Short."

They almost got it really right with Lucky Number Slevin, but they also almost got it horribly wrong.

Surprisingly charming and well-acted.

It's a movie of charm and insight, well-acted and carefully observed, but it's also one that lacks any real heights to offset the generic competence that characterizes it. There's no real drama to follow, no surprises of sufficient magnitude to enliven the experience.

Mullan makes the journey more than worthwhile, but don't go in expecting profundity.

Free Zone is similar to the car-based films of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami but with a more improvised, less-finished feel.

A few bodies pile up. Surprisingly little sex is had. And given that Catherine's true nature was revealed at the end of the first "Basic," the mystery seems superfluous.

Ultimately, ATL is the same old teenager angst in a mildly novel package.

Brick is kinda brilliant and kinda demented, and you love it for the former far more than you hold the latter against it.

If you're not a Beasties fan, you'll get almost nothing out of this after about two minutes. But if you like the band and want to see them rock hard in front of their oldest fans, it's a tasty treat.

You wouldn't want to be Daniel Johnston, or even know him too well. But see this film and you won't forget him.

You're either on the boat or off the boat with something like this. But for those willing to brave the open water, it's an awe-inspiring ride.

Working with someone else's material and a story outside the mainstream of his (Lee) work, he delivers laughs, puzzles, tension and the immense gift of fine actors at their delicious, familiar best.

The teachers have moxie. The students have courage. Mermin's warm, funny, beautiful and deeply humane documentary certainly honors the latter.

Buscemi shoots with a cloudy, melancholic air that suits the material and does nothing to prettify the setting. But you can't sense any of the surprising energy or subversive wit that characterizes his best performances.

What makes the Dardennes' films so powerful is their refusal to judge, positively or negatively, their characters.

Lumet blatantly, simplistically stacks the decks in favor of the defendants, pitting them against mean, stupid cops and a cartoonishly nasty prosecutor.

V for Vendetta puts its ideological intent first, and happens to provide smashing entertainment only as a vehicle for delivering its message.

It's got a bust-out performance from Eckhart that's worth remembering.

Suffers from the problem that plagues too many romantic comedies: The supporting characters are roughly 1,000 percent more interesting than the main characters.

Miscast, constricted, loose in tone and meandering in intent, it has far fewer moments of inspiration than unintended laughter.

Warm, winning and clever.

By presenting murderers as actors and then filming those actors discussing their sins, the line between performance and soul-searching blurs in unnerving ways.

Has a sweaty, weary, often intimate feel, with the human aspect dominating the mechanistic. Donner can't help but push it over the top now and again, like a bodybuilder flexing his muscles when he spots a potential mate. But he contents himself with aiming for small virtues more often than grand impact.

This is a totally predictable exercise if you're not in the target market.

It's the best kind of complaint. You can see why the $50 million man refers to something he gave away as "the best single day of my career."

Merry Christmas is long and ponderous, but for a few moments, its heavy hand is refreshingly light and agile, and you feel something other than frustration.

With a predictable and borderline manipulative plot, Tsotsi depends on strong performances for its impact, and its cast delivers.

Paul "Surfer Boy" Walker turns in a very credible action performance if you give him a Jersey accent, cover him in grime and beat the ever-loving tar out of him for two hours.

Intriguing, not-terribly-probing documentary.

Freedomland is the worst kind of bad movie: one that thinks it's important.

The film is filled with cool little scenes of fighting and shape-shifting, and gloomy atmosphere. Subtitles themselves have morphed into gimmicks -- sometimes they float, sometimes they dissolve, sometimes they appear in unexpected places in the frame. It's all darned nifty.

Throughout, Sophie exhibits the quality common to all of history's great martyrs, a preternatural calmness that perseveres despite (or perhaps because of) the inevitability of her doom.

Harris gamely attacks his tortured, cliche-ridden character, but Deschanel, so likably offbeat in "All the Real Girls" and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," comes off as just plain annoying and self-centered.

C.S.A. has a love-it-or-hate-it bite that probably will lead to a few passionate post-screening discussions.

The film has a candy-colored look that stands in well for the books' primitive appeal. And the all-star cast of vocal performers -- Will Ferrell as Yellow Hat, Dick Van Dyke as his boss, David Cross as his rival, Drew Barrymore as his sweetie -- aim squarely and appropriately at a 4-year-old audience.

Firewall does more to destroy my desire to see a new Indiana Jones movie than anything the aging process could conjure.

It's pathetic.

Heart of Gold feels like an ample slice of the real America, the one truly worth caring for. And it's such a rare thing in this benighted age that the simple clarity with which it's presented feels like nothing less than a miracle.

An up-close, engaging and ultimately moving look at Telfair's family, his final high-school season and his decision to forsake college for the NBA.

The result is a gripping film which, despite the annoying rugrat, demonstrates how part of leaving childhood behind is learning how and when to lie, and to do it well.

The movie is gorgeous to look at, the script has a killer twist and the cast is competent.

The new footage adds almost nothing and feels like a lame, double-dipping cash-grab.

The cast is almost uniformly spectacular -- particularly Angela Lansbury as a wicked aunt and Raphael Coleman as the sardonic, bespectacled child who delivers hilarious, verbose asides and somehow makes it look effortless.

Beyond the lipstick-lesbian twist, this is a formula flick, but the acting is excellent. It also has genuine laughs.

A misfire, but a misfire from von Trier is still more interesting than a blandly successful Hollywood product.

Coogan makes tremendous sport of himself, taking on a role as an adulterous, vain, anxiety-riddled, alcoholic and truly comic creep. Brydon is exquisitely droll as the straight man to this ugly comedian act.

Eraser-dull.

Why We Fight attempts, somewhat sketchily, to connect the dots between Ike's Cassandra-like warnings and current events.

We've seen documentaries with more daring themes, greater drama, sharper craft and timelier subject matter. But few have been as affecting as The Real Dirt on Farmer John.

Heart and verve in surfeit makes the film rise above its flaws often enough to win you over.

As it progresses it becomes a sloppy mix of modern and antique, and the limits of its lead actors and its script become evident.

With limited means, Westby makes excellent use of Portland locations and cinematic references to make Film Geek a mostly spot-on, sometimes hilarious character study. His greatest asset is Malkasian, who gives Scotty the prototypical geek attributes.

Perhaps Following Sean is as much of a cultural oddity as "Sean" itself turned out to be. But it's a decidedly interesting one nonetheless.

Sumptuous and beautiful and as silly as a sack of nose glasses.

It's a sexy thriller, tautly constructed, deeply acted and heartfelt, despite a cool and knowing tone.

While Wolf Creek has clunky moments, when you want to slap the idiot prey until they wake up, the movie embraces a minimalism that feels refreshingly old-school in a field of slasher films drunk on self-referential wisecracks and narrative tricks. And Jarrat's jolly-creepy performance might place Mick in the pantheon of great movie killers.

The story, as so often in bad farce, treats them all as idiots, so it's almost impossible be engaged by anything other than the pretty rooms, gondolas and costumes.

Sets up a situation so weird, it's almost weirder that Rob Reiner directs it as a cookie-cutter romantic comedy.

Malick is a unique director of extraordinary gifts, of that there can be no doubt. If he ever chooses to shoot a script as fine as his technique, he will surely produce a masterpiece of the medium.

It's a shame The Matador isn't a better movie, because this semi-dark comedy contains one great, cackling, self-loathing performance by Pierce Brosnan.

With its protracted storytelling, its fuzzy philosophizing and its less-than-compelling leading man, it's far less gripping than the subject matter deserves.

One of the most vital and strangely gripping films in recent years, a thriller more opaque, involving and realistic than just about anything that Hollywood is capable of.

The Ringer is appalling.

There's something quietly but unmistakably angry underneath all the slapstick.

For gourmands who appreciate this sort of cinematic comfort food, though, The White Countess is a fitting finale for the producer.

Almost totally emotionally bankrupt. But it's a very specific form of total emotional bankruptcy, one that feels honest and even uplifting at the time, because the actors are great and the direction's well intentioned and just-so.

There are strange variations in the mood of Three Burials that may strike some viewers as flippant. As gritty and real as the business of toting a corpse at gunpoint gets, the tone occasionally veers into farce. But it's never too long before the focus returns to Jones' weathered eyes.

The new film is a nauseatingly unsteady medley of brilliance and foolish nonsense.

It's horrible. It's wretched. It's Limburger pickled in castor oil.

Kong is brilliant in many, many places. But it overwhelms its own best qualities with its sheer, punishing size. It is, literally, too much of a good thing.

There are flashes here of a more involving movie, but, as if living up to the cliches associated with her name, filmmaker Lee is content to sit quietly and let others talk.

Indeed, the film is altogether too much like Sayuri: trying to overwhelm with surface beauty and unspoken emotion, it never hits deeper than the skin.

Beautiful, poetic, mournful, at once rich and spare, Brokeback Mountain takes a daring conceit and creates of it an overwhelming work of art that should speak to anyone capable of love.

A rather schizophrenic comedy that gives respected performers Dame Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins a chance to show they don't take themselves too seriously.

Though it's handsomely made and peppered with seamlessly achieved visual glories, Narnia is ineptly acted, crudely staged and burdened with a score that only a masochist could love.

This gritty take on Grimm's suffers from mannered supporting performances and an inconsistent level of realism.

All the hammy acting and meandering storytelling in the world can't drown the essential appeal of the story.

A perfect example of an ordinary movie made unique by the powerhouse performance of its lead.

Vastly entertaining, slightly overlong.

It does a splendid job not only of introducing newcomers to a vital artist they might have missed, but of reminding rabid fans of Earle's stripe why they were infected to begin with.

The Boys of Baraka leaves you outraged in the way only the best documentaries can.

This isn't a crime comedy, exactly. It's a slightly absurd, minimalist noir, in the ZIP code of "Blood Simple" and "Fargo."

Rent isn't nearly as transporting a film as the Oscar-winning adaptation of "Chicago," but its energies and passions compensate for a lot of its deficiencies.

Unfortunately, the dialogue undermines the movie's promise.

A gripping movie about espionage, loyalty and betrayal.

A mature, tense, frightening and altogether masterful film.

It's frustrating that a movie about a man so deathly serious about music has largely boiled his life down to addiction and adultery.

The question that lies at the heart of the documentary Aristide and the Endless Revolution is whether his exile was his own idea or whether he was pressured, even kidnapped, by the United States.