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.