Watching a movie about the late trash-TV pioneer turns out to be fascinating, even when his story is told as messily as it is here.

This is a scrapbook, a happy jumble, of many of the things we instinctively respond to in movies: color, shape, sound and movement, all intensified by heightened emotion.

Unwieldy, long-winded, self-indulgently nutso and, in places, very, very boring. It also caps off its two-and-a-half-hour run time with an extended finale – partially orchestrated to David Bowie's "Cat People" theme song, no less – that I could watch again and again with pleasure

Director Mark Romanek captures the slightly seedy and rundown reality of '70s and '80s British life in astonishing and even tragic detail; this is more like a period piece than a science-fiction movie.

I hate to criticize anybody for artistic ambition, but the problem with Babel isn't that it's a bad movie. It's a good movie, or, more accurately, it's several pieces of good movie, chopped up in service of a pretentious, portentous and slightly silly artistic vision.

Less like a movie than an interpretive-dance piece, with Cage as its lurching, depressed-satyr star.

If a movie can be both exciting and boring at the same time, that movie would be Unstoppable an adrenaline-infused runaway-train flick that perfectly distills director Tony Scott's talents and limitations.

Moms and girls everywhere deserve this movie, absolutely, and I hope they have a great time. But they also deserve much more, and much better.

A joyful mix of high and low humor, pulled off with style and an eye for glamour (Danielle Hollowell deserves special praise for her costumes; she's the high priestess of fitted snakeskin).

This is a movie about two people in pain; the last thing they need is for Mendes to turn his cool camera on them. But that's all Mendes knows how to do. He's a clinical director, and whatever feeling he puts into a movie is measured out in careful quarter-teaspoon increments.

Willis' John McClane, with that sly, sideways smile, is like an old acquaintance you don't mind running into. He may be older and balder, but he's none the worse for the wear. And he can still take a punch.

A delicate tapestry of suburban gothic, romance and realism, with a surprising sweetness at its core and a wonderful star performance from Emma Roberts.

Behind the gloss of Vogue, a revealing look at work, creativity and two strong women

This warm, graceful and fundamentally optimistic movie snuck up on me, in the best possible way.

Cinderella Man is ostensibly the kind of old-fashioned drama that sends audiences home with a satisfied glow. But like so many of Howard's movies, there's something canned and phony about it -- it left me feeling cooked and dehydrated, as if I'd fallen asleep on a tanning bed.

The heart of The Cooler is in the performances, and in the way Kramer shapes the interplay between the characters with the right amounts of ease and tension.

Talky but fascinating period drama.

The structure of Duplicity is its own worst enemy.

Curran, his actors and screenwriter Ron Nyswaner have made an old-fashioned melodramatic epic that, as steeped as it is in the language and tradition of old movies, is never less than thrummingly alive.

Black Gold is more an Al Gore-style message of hope than a total downer.

Works precisely because its ambitions are somewhat mellow; this isn't a relentlessly high-strung picture. Barthes and Giamatti do more with less, turning the idea of excessive navel-gazing into a kind of game.

You could call Just Another Love Story nothing more than an exercise in style, but A) Bornedal's got style to burn and B) that's not quite fair. Beneath all the dazzling cinematography, propulsive score and overcommitted acting, I found this movie an affecting, mordant comedy about male midlife crisis in its most extreme form.

Donald Rumsfeld, then, is almost the perfect foil or adversary to Morris, and part of the absurd magic of Morris’ extended interviews with Rumsfeld is that they almost never feel adversarial.

Handled more delicately, Monster's Ball could have been a fine little movie about human beings' capacity for growth and change. As it is, it's less than half a fine movie. The great surprise is that its actors come through in the clutch.

Ang Lee's dark and sober fable might be the most interesting and least dogmatic view of the Civil War to wend its way into the multiplexes.

The latest from Woody Allen is an enjoyable trifle -- but Tracey Ullman and Elaine May walk off with the picture.

What I see in The Avengers, unfortunately, is a diminished film despite its huge scale, and kind of a bore.

LaBute is some kind of find: an auteur for people who don't like movies.

Some of American Hardcore is amusing -- many of the aging punks Rachman and Blush track down have turned into highly ordinary middle-aged Americans -- and some is profoundly disturbing.

The type of comedy the Farrellys love requires dizzy, pell-mell pacing. If There's Something About Mary were tightened up by about 20 minutes, it would be much funnier.

Only viewers with some appreciation for the odd, bloodless character of moneyed family life in New York will really understand how hilarious and deadly accurate this movie is. But then again, New York parents are the last people who will want to see it.

Undone by simply trying too hard.

Despite its slick packaging and overtly facetious premise, director Matthew Cooke and producer Adrian Grenier’s faux-educational documentary How to Make Money Selling Drugs packs a wallop.

The hectic, sprawling Fanfan la Tulipe eventually feels like too much -- too many goofy asides, too much Comédie Française hambone acting, too much gallantry and villainy, too much forced good cheer.

Kubrick's much-anticipated final film boils down to the most elaborate monogamy lecture ever.

Absolute Wilson changed my views of Wilson as a person tremendously, and at least gave me some useful context for his art.

Gruesome and terrifying things happen in The Last Winter, but there's no gratuitous gore or torture, and the film's real power comes from its building sense that something really, really bad is ABOUT to happen.

A delight from top to bottom, packed with romance, adventure, beautifully executed swordplay and a sumptuous period look.

Sodden and glum, even in those moments where it's supposed to feel funny and light. It makes you feel trapped and flailing as the minutes tick by. If it encapsulates anything, it's the experience of drowning, not waving.

From moment to moment, O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a pleasure. But when the Coens are really cooking, when the acting and the conception and the music all come together, it's something more -- Dogpatch rapture.

Solitary Man is funny and absorbing, and it features a lead performance by Michael Douglas that's both hugely entertaining in itself, and fascinating for the way it illuminates the actor's long, colorful career.

Entertaining and subtle at once, it doesn't just dazzle us with the hows and whys of a particularly wily brand of thievery; it transports us to a specific time and place that often seems to fall between significant eras. The Bank Job is set in a country that's in transition, an extended metaphor for the way its characters are in transition, too.

Jane Horrocks saves the annoyingly noisy Little Voice.

Nathalie becomes a complicated three-handed game, far more concerned with the narcissistic, pornographic and mutually manipulative relationship between Catherine and Nathalie than with the latter's purported affair with Bernard. If you live in New York, run, don't walk to see this on the big screen, because it won't be there long.

An imperfect picture that's alive every minute, a movie that perfectly captures the vibe of a person, a place, a time and a way of being, and even gets, indirectly and without a whiff of sanctimoniousness, to the heart of what being an American ought to mean.

Almost utterly defeated by its subject's sardonic stonewalling.

There have been dozens of Holocaust documentaries, and one could well argue that the world doesn't need another. But Michèle Ohayon's Steal a Pencil for Me offers a simple human story of dignity, levity and romance.

A rare and tender delight.

Live Flesh isn't terrible. It's accomplished and watchable.

Of course Spike Lee has the right to transcend movies about race. He also has the talent to do better than this plodding moral fable.

This is a tragicomic fable about an all-too-real social predicament rather a wish-fulfillment fantasy, and the tragic result may be that hardly anyone notices how good it is, or the sickest, weirdest, most triumphant performance of Wiig’s career.

Mamet's trademark artificial, mutual-incomprehension dialogue and con-game plotting are ineptly matched to the action genre (and feel stale in any case), while the jiu-jitsu scenes are so incoherently shot and edited you can't tell if the fight choreography is any good or not.

Riveting jigsaw-puzzle documentary.

It's a strange and murky movie, at times a frustrating one, but I also found it profoundly moving in a way no regular thriller ever is.

I found this dark odyssey through an amoral dream Brooklyn curiously invigorating; it’s a masterful construction that held me rapt from first shot to last, that builds intense electrical energy and then releases it.

A lot of this is compelling, after its didactic and heavily thematic fashion, but if you strip most of it away, along with Roger Deakins' handsome cinematography, you're left with the conflict between Jack and Bobby and something like "Shop Class as Soulcraft: The Movie."

In its best moments, and they are considerable, Chicago 10 makes you see 1968, that near-apocalyptic year, with fresh eyes, as an extraordinary turning point in history now at least partly set free from boomer nostalgia and regret.

As visually arresting as Kill Bill often is, there's a stultifying blankness about it. Despite Tarantino's obvious enthusiasms, he comes off jaded and cynical: He's seen plenty of movies, and this is his proof.

Highly entertaining, from minute to minute, and its semi-mythical portrayal of Torontonian life is entirely charming. If you can stand massive doses of cute and clever, it's a fine use for your summer-movie dollar (whether or not that dollar has a funny old lady on it).

This film really is Moore’s tour de force — a forceful, moving, and compelling call to action. A number of Michael Moore’s films have made history. This time he’s asking his audience to be the ones to do it.

Formally, Klores film is a standard-issue documentary, combining period footage with talking-head interviews. But his talking heads are a hoot -- leathery, leisure-suited, foul-mouthed, larger-than-life characters, straight out of the Bronx by way of Palm Beach -- and their story is a Gothic yarn of obsession, crime and forgiveness.

No single film or book can dispel the cloud of enigma surrounding Kurt Cobain, but simply sitting in the dark and hearing him talk to you for 90 minutes, while the dreary gray-green beauty of his home state moves through your eyeballs and into your brain, goes a pretty long way.

Despite some solid acting and cinematography -- mistakenly turns what should have been a fast-paced thriller into a cerebral sermon about the slippery slope of corporate law.

The film may not go boldly, but it’s a welcome homecoming for the beloved series.

Primo Levi's Journey is a profound meditation on the unevenness of history, reminding us -- as Faulkner once remarked -- that the past not only isn't dead, it isn't really past at all.

The problem with Seitzman's script is how predictable almost all of it feels.

Lake and Epstein are not in fact trying to stigmatize other women's choices about how and where to give birth. Instead, they're trying to introduce an entire universe of history and information that should inform those choices, and that the medical establishment has virtually erased from American memory.

I really don't understand why anybody thinks the wispy, bittersweet tale of long-distance love in Like Crazy is any big deal. Seriously, I liked this movie better last year, when it had Drew Barrymore in it and was called "Going the Distance."

The Hunger Games has some cool moments here and there, and is never entirely dreadful. Lawrence is both radiant and triumphant. They haven't screwed it up badly enough to kill it, although they've tried.

A pitch-perfect blend of darkness and sweetness, built around a masterful performance by a great actor.

Applause may present as gritty European realism, but the struggle inside Thea is almost theological in scale, and worthy of Milton or Kierkegaard.

The heart of the movie is not in its plot but in its characters and atmosphere. Castaneda, a nonprofessional actor who runs a towing company in San Antonio, gives a towering, Robert Duvall-style performance as a granitic man in late middle age whose internal world of pain and love and knowledge occasionally flickers to the surface.

Highly entertaining and skillful documentary.

Richer and more enjoyable than the other lame-stream comedies Hollywood has churned out this summer, even though it doesn't know what kind of movie it wants to be when it grows up.

The first half of the film leisurely examines the deterioration and possible salvation of the soul in a once-glorious, rapidly disintegrating landscape. (His Alaska is full of closed factories, wandering tourists and strip mines.) The second half, with its contrived setup and its individual journeys of self-discovery (harvesting kelp and building fires), is artificial and sadly undermines all that's gone before.

Mythic, thrilling and brilliantly made motion picture.

A relentlessly gruesome, visually impressive and ultimately not very interesting movie with some pretensions to seriousness.

It's a cynical way to pass time, the cynicism that comes from being presented with something you've seen a hundred times before.

It isn't an entirely successful or satisfying film, but it's far from dismissible.

Although I personally still find the rubber-faced, pseudo-human figures produced by this technique unsettling, the work done by Spielberg and Jackson's animation teams here is exquisite.

As a ninth-generation descendant of Abigail Faulkner, a convicted Salem witch who only escaped execution because she was pregnant at the time, I call down a terrible malediction upon the people who made this entertaining but indefensible movie.

Jones, as always, knows what he’s doing. In only his second feature as a director, the laconic 68-year-old star has made a wrenching, relentless and anti-heroic western that stands among the year’s most powerful American films. Not everyone will like The Homesman, but if you see it you won’t soon forget it.

There are so many great things happening on almost every level of this movie, from Swinton's haunting, magnetic and tremendously vulnerable performance, which is absolutely free of condescension to the suburban American wife-ness of her character, to the many unsettling individual moments.

This is Lunson's debut picture and she's smart enough to keep the whole affair very simple.

It’s more that the filmmakers close out this oddly inspiring yarn of apocalypse and paranoia with a note of false reassurance. Yes, the world is fundamentally screwed and most people are apathetic or paralyzed. So start ringing doorbells!

Dancing, like being in love, sometimes means making a mess of things. Born Romantic makes glorious sense of that mess, trampled toes and all.

They've created far and away the most complex, appealing female character in a summer of soldiers, sword fighters and asteroid blasters.

An engaging entertainment that packages its thought-provoking ideas in a combination of political thriller, comic adventure and romantic triangle.

I hope viewers don’t come away from this essential documentary with the belief that Western AIDS activists in general turned their backs on poor black people just as soon as they got medicine that worked. That isn’t remotely fair. Blame for the African AIDS holocaust falls on the Big Pharma companies who put patents and profits ahead of human life, and on all of us who let them get away with it.

My personal view is that Quentin Tarantino is now permanently high on his own supply, but you could just as well say that he has succeeded in reinventing the art film. Is it worth it to put yourself through the brutal and incoherent three-hour ordeal of The Hateful Eight for its moments of brilliance and its ultimate catharsis? Jesus, don’t look at me.

So beautiful to look at that it practically feels like a drug.

Its characters and its nowheresville setting are uncannily realized... It's not a cartoon in any sense, but an honest-to-God movie with some fine, understated acting and a human heart.

Best of all may be the narration, by Sam Shepard: His voice, the kind of voice God might have if he'd ever smoked Camels, frames this gentle but potent little story with good-natured authority, making it feel modern and ageless at once.

So few filmmakers even know how to make an entertaining trifle these days, and For Your Consideration is that, at least.

In a world of movies that try far too hard to move, entertain and dazzle us, the artistry of Hustle & Flow lies in the way it waits for us to come to it. We can walk as slowly as we want, but sooner or later, it's going to get us.

Millions of people read Harr's gripping bestseller, but Steven Zaillian may be the only one who didn't understand it.

Tykwer's actors seem completely clued in to his intentions. Both Blanchett and Ribisi give performances so restrained they're almost subliminal.

Entertaining, handsome and gripping, The Bourne Identity is something of an anomaly among big-budget summer blockbusters: a thriller with some brains and feeling behind it, more attuned to story and character than to spectacle.