Grab some popcorn and make a pit stop, then sit back and enjoy it. You signed up for a movie about giant robots.

It really is a masterpiece--von Trier's first, as it happens.

Director Brad Anderson (Session 9) overtly cribs from everyone from Dostoevsky to Kafka.

The drama aspect is necessary to the story, but it just drags on too long.

For a while, it works, until it suddenly decides to abandon the "what you don't see is scarier than what you do see" for a ridiculous and ultimately insulting explanatory ending.

It may be a crowd-pleasing escapism, but it's that feel-good shmaltz that ultimately plays the film off-key.

Wants to be at any given moment--wrenching, thought-provoking, surprising, heartbreaking--all it ever is is tastefully lifeless. It’s been beaten into a coma by its own scruples.

Angela Bassett is great as his strict, single mother; The soundtrack is great, of course, and the ending features moving archival footage of the streets of Brooklyn after Wallace's murder.

Where Dans Paris truly pops, besides its spot-on leads or the slick curation of its fashions and locales, are in its mood-mixing musical moments.

Ma, who portrayed the stone-faced General in the Coen brothers' comedy "The Lady Killers," once again plays his role largely silent. As the despondent Ed, Ma says more with a few facial expressions & twitches than most performers could hope to with a three-page monologue.

Machete is exactly what you expect. There's ridiculously over-the-top violence, plenty of nudity, and lots of grisly humor. It's mostly enjoyable, but isn't likely to be anyone's top 5 anything.

Simply clicks on every level. From the surprising depth of the story, to the smooth and sometimes brilliant performances, to Hanson’s clear mastery of form.

Everyone involved figured that sentiment trumps sloppiness. Original Soundtrack

Gilbert films Chong as if he's a political prisoner like Nelson Mandela, when he's really just an older comic going to jail over a bad business decision.

Accomplished and well-intentioned to the extent that one wants to accentuate the positive, but the positive isn't the whole, alas; for every moment in the film that evokes classic neo-realism, there's another that's commonplace or overly sentimental.

Surprisingly clever, high-energy adventure (director Peter Berg should be proud).

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.

Playful, poetic, shocking, saddening, and ultimately gratifyingly and honestly big-hearted.

This incarnation of Spider Man seems to forget that its source material was a comic book that wanted to transcend its genre. This is a movie that's content to be pretty good within its genre, with the main distinction of being much bigger than any of its competition.

Home is a difficult film for its viewer, because none of the leads fall into the comfortable categories of film characters played by movie stars.

One of those novelistic independent films more concerned with atmosphere and character than the particularities of narrative, where contemplating the backstory is more satisfying than anything we see.

Although the science fiction element had the potential to drag the story down, it's kept to a minimum and left somewhat buried in techno jargon.

Cocaine Cowboys might work better as a miniseries for television; as it is, the two-hour running time is fatiguing and some of the later material gets lost in the onslaught.

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.

The sweet, furry animals are witty and often funny, and while the physical comedy is simple, the main characters ultimately aren't.

A sweet, sunny, cinematic song of praise to simple '70s pleasures, Roll Bounce isn't any kind of life-changing picture, but it's breezy, good-hearted fun.

An amply entertaining tale of survival terror, fully realizing the epicness of Romero's vision by infecting every wide-angled overhead shot with as many computer-generated cadavers as possible, and bridging tense moments with a laugh-aloud, plucky wit.

Perhaps with an open and willing mind, you'll also see the vast difference between this wily consciousness experiment and, say, Rob Zombie's new box of schlocks.