Gondry might have been better off keeping his movie on theoretical/slapstick grounds, because, quite frankly, his attempts at sincerity just don't make it.

The first masterpiece of 2008 -- at least by American release date standards -- the latest film from master French director Jacques Rivette is a masterful, multilayered, sometimes enigmatic work of dark irony, an assured tragicomedy of manners and more.

When Vantage Point is staying with Quaid and Fox as they hunt the suspected assassins (including the arrestingly beautiful Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer) it's a perfectly serviceable thriller with high production values and some better-than-average car chases.

A giddy kick-out-the-jams entertainment. Diary takes a tack that's not exactly new, but is new to Romero, and as one might expect, the director brings a sharp and uncompromising new perspective to it.

These site-shifting extravaganzas sometimes reach an exhilarating level of near-abstraction. So it's too bad that just about everything surrounding the action scenes of the picture is such unmitigated cr--.

Perhaps Highmore could have tried a little harder to make us doubt for a moment that, once again, Good will inevitably overcome Evil.

The reason for all this dull-to-offensive story stuff is, of course, the dancing, which has its moments but overall seems so calculated to impress that it loses all other reason for being.

This finale, which piles one bloody absurd epiphany on top of another almost ad infinitum, is where McDonagh lays all his cards on the table -- and his characters are the ones who have to pay up.

The penetrating musical score, with its memorable shadings of emotional danger, the snappy and confident pacing and the emergence of 33-year-old Labaki as an international talent to watch all combine to make the film satisfying confection.

A tediously noisesome English-language remake of an Asian horror picture that wasn't any great shakes to begin with.

The silver lining in the film is Paul Rudd, who brings some nuance to his character that, given his past work, you can assume was all his doing. Jason Biggs, in his role as Ashley's gay best friend and catering partner, carries out an interesting, if somewhat left-field plot twist.

Rambo is surprisingly effective as an action movie precisely because the villains seem truly dangerous and the "mission" truly a death wish.

A remarkably engrossing and thoughtful picture, beautifully rendered in an artful mode of realism.

Lichtenstein's putative switcheroo on the Vagina Dentata trope is to play it as some kind of token of female empowerment, but it's pretty clear that the writer/director didn't think things through on any counts, contenting himself that the putative outrageousness of the concept could see him through.

Takes a long time to say nothing new, which is a shame because it wastes fine performances across the board (it's a nice reminder that Farrell, can, in fact, act), and, well, a really effective score by Philip Glass.

It's not the life-changing movie experience the intense viral marketing attention would lead you to think it is, but its decision to focus on ground-level humanism rather than epic disaster is what separates it from the pack.

Affable Ted Danson makes few ripples as Bridget's husband Don; while Roger Cross and Adam Rothenberg also glide through the film in their minor "significant other" roles to Nina and Jackie, respectively.

A chick-flick on a sugar high, so giggly-bouncy and nostalgic for the fantasy-girlhood of its audience that the DVD, which should follow relatively quickly, should come packaged in big pink bows and include a coupon for a free pony ride.

With his preferences for static, colorless visuals and exposition-laden dialogue over conversation, director Valette has now set the bar for the worst film of 2008.

The Orphanage's joys come from the experiential: Bayona's cultured technical skills, including some phenomenal sound design, and sustained anxiety. It's about as healthy as junk food gets.

There Will Be Blood is, in fact, not a historical saga; rather, it's an absurdist, blackly comic horror film with a very idiosyncratic satanic figure at its core.

This terminally ill, terminally awful dramedy marks a sad cinematic milestone: The Bucket List is the first film in history to feature a truly wretched Nicholson performance -- and we're not talking about the character he plays.

While The Great Debaters' intentions don't lead it to movie hell, this picture is far more diffuse, commonplace, and predictable than the surprisingly convincing "Fisher."

While avoiding specious bromides about universality, Persepolis insists on communicating with its audience, and insists that communication and empathy are the keys to our survival.

Julia Roberts has never played a dowager before, but heaven knows she makes a good, and funny, one.

The movie does feature a nice, teasing chemistry between veteran actors Voight and Mirren (who clearly relishes the chance to break out of stuffy melodrama), but this shallow, empty puzzle requires more than playful banter to satisfy audiences willing to pay to play.

The result is one of the odder and, certainly the most compelling of the short stream of Broadway-to-Hollywood transplants of recent years. The interweaving of the music and the visuals casts an unusual, restive spell of delight and unease.

So you'll laugh, you'll groan, you'll leave the theater singing "I'm gonna beat off….all my demons/That's what lovin' Jesus is all about" -- and isn't that, ultimately, a good thing? Yes.

At times funny, and even occasionally witty, Alvin and the Chipmunks is a lively, entertaining romp that will certainly bring smiles to the young ones this holiday season.

Overall, I Am Legend is a wasted opportunity -- a rickety, weather-beaten framework around an otherwise strong central performance from Smith.

As a fan and well-wisher of Coppola's, I wanted very much to like this movie, and I'll probably give it another shot once the DVD comes out. But, at first sight, Youth Without Youth's striving for exuberance reveals an almost desperate effort too much of the time.

An inoffensive piece of seasonal movie-muzak.

The settings are handsome, the cinematography accomplished, the performances first-rate.

Ultimately fails as a film in its broad strokes and inadequate scene development.

A picture about tragedy in one American family's life, and it's a convincing and humane one.

If a woman had not in fact certifiably written the picture, I might have thought that Lester Bangs had come back from the dead to pen an account of the teen years of his ideal mate.

You won't see the twist coming, thanks to a clever and precise piece of casting, but that's the best compliment that can be paid to Awake, a plotty and unfocused medical thriller.

Every performer in the international cast -- Seigner, de Bankole, von Sydow (magnificent as Bauby's father), and the late Jean-Pierre Cassel to name but a few -- completely disappears into each of their roles, which I think is as much a testament to Schnabel's talents as to theirs.

I generally resist calling any actor's work "brave" or "fearless" or any such thing, but Bosco's work here made me reconsider that self-imposed ban. It's incredible, harrowing, precise stuff.

Starting Out never builds to the explosive climax it seems to be heading for, which I suppose is a good thing for its overall integrity, but maybe not so good for its motion-picture value.

For those who loved his singing in "Velvet Goldmine," Rhys-Meyers once again proves that he has pipes.

The movie isn't a send-up or a takedown of fairy tales -- it's a fairy tale.

Ultimately Hitman is about bullets, blood, and bombs. For die-hard fans of the videogame, there is much to relish in terms of cobblestone car chases, punishing fistfights, cool weaponry, impossible physical feats, and ear-popping gun battles that rage through exclusive hotels in exotic locations.

Haynes's picture may not be perfect -- hell, I'm not even sure that perfection is a state it even aspires to -- but it's bold and individualistic and accomplished. A reason to take heart for the state of current American moviemaking.

This one aims for bleak and hits it.

I like a good flying, fire-breathing dragon as much as the next fellow. Beowulf's excesses, though, are such that the film ought to carry the subtitle …But This Is Ridiculous.

Margot is a fleet, strangely enjoyable film, animated by the acuity of Baumbach's perceptions and -- this helps a lot -- the frequent laugh-out-loud wit of his dialogue.

For a movie built around a brightly-colored, magical toy store, Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium is surprisingly forgettable. In fact, it's most wondrous feat is just how it manages to waste good actors and fine performances.

The problem here, which vitiates the picture's ingenuity and causes it, finally, to sink like a stone, is in the physical execution of the material.

What doesn't work at all -- saving the worst for last -- is a ship-sinking performance by John Leguizamo as Lorenzo.

There's a lot of "stuff" here, and Kelly's biggest problem -- he's got more than a few -- is that he can't tell his good material from his bad.

Silly, heartwarming, and fun.

Lambs feels five years too late.

As stomach-churning a suspense exercise as the cinema has seen since the salad days of Hitchcock.

The new perspective Scott and Zaillian want to bring to this material never gels convincingly, and despite some effective set pieces, a cast of memorable faces and attitudes, and evocative cinematography by Harris Savides, this would-be epic feels tired and rote.

The result is oddly schizoid, but also so insubstantial that to call it oddly schizoid suggests a weight it doesn't have.

At its best, it throbs with immediacy, just as Strummer did.

Filmed in 2005, the first of two Cusack widower flicks this season (the weepier and more indie "Grace is Gone" hits theaters in December) Martian Child is also a Franken-schmaltz monster of cobbled-together Cusack movie parts.

The action is violent, messy, and threaded through with dark humor. This is a movie for grownups, for sure, but it has a mulish kick that most such pictures consider themselves to tasteful to aspire to.

A smart, sweet, and thoroughly disarming ensemble comedy that isn't afraid to wear its humanism on its sleeve.

Though the series seemed like a great concept three years ago, it's now just a repeated assault on the senses, designed strictly for the gross-out crowd, and disturbs rather than scares.

It's all pulled off with a firm sense of the fun in being scared.

It's been well-publicized that Affleck, going for as authentic a feel as possible, cast many genuine South Bostoners in both extra and speaking roles, and, while that's salutary, in some scenes his strategy backfires, yielding caricatures that are merely more vivid than the ones turned out by Central Casting Hollywood productions.

If it makes anybody feel better, one character in the picture does point out that the whole "extraordinary rendition" concept originated with Clinton. So there's balance for you.

One of those infuriating films that can't allow this already dramatic situation to fester and develop on its own.

The film also has an unexpected and rich vein of humor. John Carroll Lynch -- you might know him as Norm Gunderson of "Fargo" -- is a stitch as a neighbor of the Burkes.

This handsomely mounted film, in its cute ADD way, soon forgets its half-hearted attempt to make History Relevant to What Is Going On in the World Today and morphs into a sort of Classic Comics on acid, or, as a friend so brilliantly put it, "the longest Eurythmics video ever made."

Lars's attraction to Bianca is like an audience's to an actor onscreen -- the object is fake, an approximation, but for some that's better than flesh and blood. Bianca is a work of art. And so is Lars and the Real Girl.

This is a perhaps even more misbegotten remake than the Farrelly Brothers' update of "The Heartbreak Kid."

It's a fascinating portrait, but it's also choppy and rushed and lopsided.

We Own the Night can't sustain itself; as the stakes of the story get higher, Gray paints it in broader and broader strokes until there's almost nothing you can believe in it anymore.

It's also that he's really, honest-to-God, got one of those movie faces that doesn't even come along once every generation. It's astonishing.

It's the sourest and most borderline misogynist picture the Farrellys have yet made.

Michal Clayton shares a number of affinities with Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet's "Network." Wilkinson's got the so-mad-he's-sane Peter Finch position; while Swinton embodies a sexless, neurotic, overstressed variant of Faye Dunaway's character. Which leaves Clooney as the (considerably younger) William Holden of the piece. And, yes, he makes the most of it.

This film should have soared, but doesn't quite get off the ground.

A picture that certain Brits and connoisseurs of British colloquial English might call "a grower" … more moving and funny the more I think about it.

Its climactic highway shootout, and much else in the picture, is rendered in the best Paul Greengrass manner that Hollywood money can buy. But where Greengrass pictures aim to keep one on the edge of one's seat throughout, the tension here, such as it is, is designed to stoke audience bloodlust. If that's your kind of thing, The Kingdom certainly satisfies.

It might have been better to have played it straight — small instead of epic, chronological instead of deconstructed — and to give his characters some explicitness in history instead of the bedroom.

A richly drawn, ambitious character piece both socially relevant and genuinely suspenseful.

If raunch-comedy maestro Judd Apatow had not just an evil, but an evil-and-untalented twin, this grotesque excrescence would be his signature work.

Penn has often said that he dislikes acting and would prefer to direct full time. Into the Wild is impressive enough to give him license to do just that.

Proceeds at a very stately pace, hoping the otherworldly mood of its detailed recreation of the old West might seep into the viewer's bones. This viewer did, as it happens, fall under the film's spell.

Ultimately, The Jane Austen Book Club amounts to little more than a lukewarm collection of half-realized rom-com scenarios not fleshy enough to warrant their own movie.

Director Julie Taymor's gargantuan all-Beatles-songs musical is that rarest of animals, the perfect disaster that fulfills expectations by defying them.

One of Cronenberg's subtlest, most insinuating pictures, and one of the highlights of the year so far.

In my cut of the film, it ends after Jones opens the parcel from his son that's been sitting on his kitchen table since shortly after he left. I recommend viewers leave the theater at that point. You won't be sorry that you did.

The result is enjoyable and frequently affecting. The one weak note is Douglas' performance — he does more than phone it in, but his essential Douglas-ness makes the character less believable than he might have been.

This one's been sitting on shelves for two years -- never good news -- and you can almost see the dollar signs in the cast's eyes.

An intense New York-set thriller that manages to be both commercial and contemplative, kick-ass and quietly, disturbingly insinuating.

In the battle of the leading men, Crowe's character has a slight edge, and the actor really makes the most of it, showing us how boyishly mischievous charm and utter venality can exist without seeming contradiction in the same being. But Bale builds to a pretty impressive boil himself after laying back for about three quarters of the film.

As a bonus, it contains, at least, the best death-by-carrot scene in the history of film.

About the best thing that can be said about The Brothers Solomon is that it's harmless. It's mild, familiar, and as inconsequential as a sitcom episode.

Wan wants to have something both ways, and in the end, he gets almost nothing. As Clint Eastwood said in yet another genre picture: A man’s gotta know his limitations.

Exiled brings To back to lighter ground, and it’s one of his most assured, enjoyable pictures, refreshing fun that’s sure to satisfy anyone’s action jones.

Halloween is a real, classic-style horror movie, not an exercise in gross special effects. Oh, and for those who’ve missed Carpenter’s classic, this will scare the candy corn out of you, but the original is still champion.

It's an overall heady conceit about image and invention, clever and fun with compelling lead performances -- especially Reynolds, who finally gets to show some chops in a career littered with Van Wilder–grade junk.

Ultimately even the strongest characters deliver mixed results.

The problem is the material itself, with its trite observations and shockingly flat writing.