At one point, Black puts out a fire by pissing on it. It's my job as a critic to piss on this dumb excuse for a movie. Consider it done.

This lame-ass chick-flick sampling of "Crazy Heart" is more like country Kryptonite.

The real plague is the movie, a sci-fi hodgepodge of bad history and worse special effects.

Shot hand-held with a poet's eye by Rodrigo Prieto, the film is relentless but as riveting as the world a remarkable actor lets us see through Uxbal's eyes. Bravo, Bardem.

Just watch the magnificent Manville, in a raw and riveting award-class performance that exposes a grieving heart under siege. Her last scene is quietly devastating. So is this intimate miracle of a movie.

Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams give two of the most explosive and emotionally naked performances you will see anywhere. Just know you're in for a workout.

Upchuckingly unfunny.

Wells is a wonder with actors - Cooper and Jones earn top honors - and a filmmaker with an instinct for the emotions that bleed between the lines. This haunting movie hits you hard and right where you live.

As in "Lost in Translation," Coppola keeps an eye out for the broken places. That's when Somewhere is really something.

What makes True Grit a new classic for the Coens is the way the brothers absorb the unfairly unsung Portis into their DNA, like they did with Cormac McCarthy in "No Country for Old Men." True Grit is packed with action and laughs, plus a touching coda with an older Mattie, but it's the dialogue that really sings. Great filmmaking. Great acting. Great movie. Saddle up.

Spacey holds center. He's a bonfire.

Nicole Kidman is just astonishing in Rabbit Hole - subtle, fierce, brutally funny, tender when you least expect it, and battered by the feelings that hit her when she forgets to duck.

Bridges has a fine time playing with himself, so to speak. Add Garrett Hedlund as Flynn's son Sam, the rebel who zaps himself into the server to find his lost dad, and director Joseph Kosinski has a recipe for adventure that should delight gamers. Non-techies are on their own.

Director Tom McGrath keeps the action spinning and trips lightly over the bummer spectacle of watching a bad boy go good.

Recipe for nutso fun: Mix Zach Galifianakis with Robert Downey Jr. Apply the same mold John Hughes used for "Planes, Trains and Automobiles." Have Todd Phillips stir with wack-ass abandon. Don't worry about missing ingredients, like plot. Serve to an audience ready to lap it up.

a bang-up ride that means to wring you out. Mission accomplished.

Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal are hotties with talent. And they maneuver through the daunting maze of shifting tones and intersecting plots of Love and Other Drugs like the pros they are.

It's the work of a filmmaker with a stunning future.

Two men alone create an epic landscape of feeling in one of the very best movies of the year.

In a year of craptaculars, The Tourist deserves burial at the bottom of the 2010 dung heap. It offers talented people trapped in creative inertia. A microscope and a search party could not discover any trace of chemistry between Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie.

I found myself wishing that Taymor would turn off the sound and fury and let The Tempest speak for itself. My wish wasn't granted.

The Fighter, its heart full to bursting, is an emotional powerhouse that comes close to spilling over.

Disney's spirited re-telling of Rapunzel in 3D animation turns out to be a dazzler.

It could have been the 21st-century Showgirls. I wouldn't have missed that for the world. Instead, Burlesque, starring Cher and Christina Aguilera playing drag queen versions of themselves with all the vitality of Madame Tussauds wax dolls, is a bust that lacks the pizzaz and bugfuck nuttiness of Paul Verhoeven's 1995 trash epic.

Part I is more disappointment than disaster. It merely rolls along like something off an assembly line. Untouched by human hands.

Hamilton manifests her vision of what politics can do to individual thinking with subtlety and sophistication. Remember her name. She's a genuine find.

The result is a potent and provocative movie that will keep you up nights.

It's one crazy love story, but Carrey and McGregor make it work by making us buy the romance as the real thing. There's something about these Marys that pulls you in.