The movie is neither cathartic nor entertaining. The action scenes (and there are many of them) feel mechanized and calculated.

Over and over again, Hoblit misses opportunities to make an engaging picture, instead giving us a merely pedestrian one.

Despite their terrible ordeal these women are heroes, not victims. As Mungiu makes clear in the casual, brilliant final scene of this amazing movie, heroes persevere.

This is going to be a notorious film that young audiences will be daring themselves to see, but it's actually funnier, darker and more troubling before it turns into a carnival of repeated dismemberment.

Cassandra's Dream, an earnest meditation on greed, desire, murder and class struggle, is one of Woody Allen's funniest movies in years -- except Allen doesn't know it.

It pretends to examine how self-absorbed we are as a culture, only to be consumed by its own self-absorption. It's also badly constructed, humorless and emotionally sadistic .

The picture has no legs, no style, no sense of movement other than the meandering, dawdling kind.

The biggest disappointment of 27 Dresses is that it inhabits a Harlequin romance New York City, one remarkably short on homosexuals and divorce.

First Sunday is simply a case of wasting gifted performers on material that feels slapped together and unshaped.

Dry, wry, difficult-to-capture comedy.

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.

Honeydripper offers a leisurely, atmospheric production with lots of time to appreciate his largely African-American cast, along with rocking musical interludes and just the faintest wash of spirituality.

The Orphanage is a careful, elegant work that looks a little rough around the edges; it was shot largely with natural light and employs minimal special effects.

There are epic impulses everywhere you look in There Will Be Blood; what's missing is character development, focused storytelling and, most significantly (apart from that terrific opening sequence), any sense of raw, intuitive drama.

Any moron can make a bad movie. But it takes a special breed of schemer to make a picture as shameless as The Bucket List.

About midway through Denzel Washington's new film The Great Debaters comes a raw and terrifying scene that exemplifies why the movie's worth seeing, despite its hackneyed and awkward story.

Philip Seymour Hoffman utters one of the year's most refreshing lines in this terrific tale of political wheeling and dealing.

The picture throws off no feeling, not even the misanthropic kind; at best, it manages a dull, throbbing energy, as if Burton were dutifully pushing his way through the material instead of shaping it.

Funniest in its first half, when you're not quite sure where it's going, and drags in the second, by which time you realize it's going nowhere.

I Am Legend is a blockbuster like no other, one that finds its grandness in modesty. It's a star vehicle with a star who knows his place in the universe.

What results is a patchy, uncertain motion picture, full of incidents and images but fundamentally unfocused and superficial.

It's merely nutty, a picture that appears to have been made by an individual who has fallen off the edge of reason. Watching it was misery.

There's almost no such thing as an entertaining holiday trifle anymore -- the kind of casual, cheerful little picture that you might see on a whim and end up enjoying, even beyond the breadth of your modest expectations. The Perfect Holiday is an attempt, at least, to resurrect the idea of the trifle

Nanking both calls attention to a horrifying set of war crimes that remains little known in the West and crafts an impossible-but-true hymn to the power of the individual conscience.

May not hit every note perfectly, but the picture they've come up with is full-bodied and intelligent.

Whatever complex or interesting ideas might have been found in the source material have been watered down, skimmed over, mashed into nonsense or simply ignored.

As lively and entertaining as Juno is, Reitman and Cody have also done the work of shaping the story into something emotionally direct, unsparing and generous.

The picture is so imaginatively made, so attuned to sensual pleasure, so keyed in to the indescribable something that makes life life, that it speaks of something far more elemental than mere filmmaking skill: This is what movies, at their best, can be.

Lee Harvey Oswald's guilt or innocence or accomplices are not the point of the film; Stone is more interested in the fact that much about the Kennedy murder is now so shrouded in myth and mystification as to be permanently unknowable, and that that fact alone has gnawed away at the self-confidence of middle-class white America ever since.

A highly original and at times thrilling use of the documentary medium, and one of the most revealing films about the troubled nature of contemporary manhood I've ever seen.

What makes the movie memorable is the precision of its tone, its finely calibrated combination of bitterness and warmth. Of course the acting is tremendous, and you'd expect nothing less.

It's rare to see a movie adaptation in which a filmmaker has taken so much care in translating the odd little qualities that make a particular novel special, to preserve the complex and fragile threads of feeling between characters that are often much easier to grasp on the page.

One of the most inventive and joyous movies of the year.

Ambitious, overbearing and hollow; it goes overboard to impress, yet it never feels truly inventive or imaginative. At best, it achieves a level of clumsy camp.

Brian De Palma's Redacted doesn't quite work as a movie. But it works as SOMETHING.

Forget the heat of passion: The movie never breaks a sweat.

If it arrives in final form as (still) a total mess, it's such a passionate and ambitious mess -- overcrowded with extraordinary images, incomprehensible ideas, literary and pop-cultural references and colliding subplots -- that it transcends its adolescent awkwardness and approaches being magnificent.

Fred Claus does feature some very nicely groomed reindeer, a far cry from those patchy, depressed-looking creatures you see every holiday season at the petting zoo. They're prancing and dancing as fast as they can, but they can't pull Fred Claus from the rut it's in.

Charles Nelson Reilly is still alive, dammit, and boy does he have a story to tell.

This is a weird movie hybrid, both a tasteful picture and an angry one.

It's the most ambitious and impressive Coen film in at least a decade, featuring the flat, sun-blasted landscapes of west Texas -- spectacularly shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins -- and an eerily memorable performance by Javier Bardem, in a Ringo Starr haircut.

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.

It's the film's reassuring, almost hypnotic visual rhythms, along with its Hollywood-like narrative structure -- which is closer to "Drumline" or "Bring It On" than to most documentaries -- that make it bearable.

Offers only the stingiest platform for its actors, and as a piece of storytelling -- built on the foundation of a great story -- it's an epic that's been sliced and diced into so many little morsels that almost nothing in it has any weight.

Just another ambitious, lavish animated adventure, pretty enough to look at, but ultimately foundering on the weakness of its script.

The most powerful documentary I've seen all year, and one of the two or three best films ever made about an artist or musician.

Before long, the story's conceit -- a loud-and-clear metaphor for the ways in which we all sometimes feel alien when it comes to human relationships -- just becomes wearying.

The evident strengths and laudable intentions of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (and even the appeal of Marisa Tomei in her undies) are overwhelmed by an implausible plot verging on unintentional comedy and a panoply of Noo Yawk dirt-bag supporting characters who might've seemed awkward on a 1993 episode of "NYPD Blue."

There's nothing groundbreaking about Dan in Real Life -- it's a picture that could have been made 10 or 20 years ago -- and yet its easygoing, affable nature is exactly what makes it pleasurable.

I'm still not quite sure why it's so compelling. I think this movie's appeal is overdetermined, as we used to say in sophomore Marxist-theory class, meaning that it derives from so many sources you can't keep track of them all.

The film has moments of goofy delight, some pseudo-David Lynch spookery and a couple of comic supporting turns.

Lynch offers a fascinating view of Lynch's irascible personality (and insatiable appetite for coffee and cigarettes), and captures him discussing his formative years in Idaho and Philadelphia, as well as his 30-year involvement with Transcendental Meditation.

Ben Affleck is smart about setting the scene -- he's even better at it than Clint Eastwood was in another Lehane adaptation, "Mystic River." But he's less adept at defining individual personalities, at making us care about the characters who deserve our sympathy -- or, maybe more important, the ones who don't.

If these new, allegedly topical movies are to make us feel anything -- to move us toward any action or even just toward any fresh realization -- they need to at least seem alive on the screen, instead of just courting our polite, measured applause.

Dour, ponderous picture.

Simultaneously dark and sweet, always a difficult combination to pull off. It views its characters with both archness and affection, and even as it lovingly recalls films of another era it insists that the painful awkwardness of youth is perennial.

Might have been a lavish, silly entertainment. In places it comes close, but no sheaf of tobacco.

Sleuth is well acted, and directed by Branagh with chilly, distant ingenuity. It has a certain edge and daring, or more to the point it pretends to.

An intriguing blend of mainstream audience-pleaser and a more subtle, even intellectual agenda.

Thankfully, this information arrives via a graceful and frequently humorous film that captures the idiosyncrasies of its characters and never hectors.

Lovely and deeply touching picture.

A powerful documentary.

There's a gloomy quality to The Good Night I sort of appreciated -- much of it was shot in London, although it's supposed to occur in New York -- but after the initial acerbic setup fades, Gary becomes less and less likable and the movie evaporates into nothing.

Ben Stiller, the movie's star, pretty much sinks the whole enterprise.

Instead of taking control of the movie in any overt way, Clooney commands our attention by swimming just beneath its surface. He's a disappearing act with staying power.

Lynn Hershman hasn't reached much of an audience, which makes the modest national rollout of her fascinating Strange Culture a noteworthy event.

Highly compelling, if overlong and overwrought.

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.

This tale of filial love and family baggage is Wes Anderson's most heartfelt feature film yet. Its companion short, "Hotel Chevalier," is darn near perfect.

It's still difficult to find accurate information about where and when Bill Haney's profoundly disturbing documentary The Price of Sugar will be opening commercially in the United States. Partly this is because the Vicini family, sugar barons of the Dominican Republic, have hired Patton Boggs, a major Washington law firm, to try to halt the film's release, or at least paint it as slanted and defamatory.

The Kingdom is distasteful in several obvious and irrefutable ways: For one thing, the idea of setting an action-thriller against terrorist activity that's all too close to real-life events is simply opportunistic and creepy.

The sex scenes -- intense, affecting and emotionally raw -- are the best thing about this frustratingly limp movie.

Simply too bright and pleasant to become a huge hit, but it's a confident little genre film with near-classic charm.

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.

If nature -- if life -- is as wild and precious as the movie makes it out to be, Hirsch needs to give us something, someone, to watch on-screen. We need to feel a presence before we can take the measure of an absence.

Represents a breakthrough in the moviegoing experience. It may be the first time we've been asked to watch a book on tape.

Hu, a Chinese-American immigrant who made a mid-career switch from business to filmmaking, approaches these characters with genuine passion and compassion, and her evident talent shines through the timeworn material. Acting by all three principals is tremendous.

A dark and mesmerizing immersion into a distinctive world.

Morally ambiguous, subtly crafted, resolutely free of cliché and made with almost no money, The Great World of Sound is under-the-radar independent filmmaking in the Jarmusch-Cassavetes mode, both noble and ruthless in spirit.

The movie chickens out. In the Valley of Elah could have been really interesting -- and really daring -- if it had focused on Hank's realization that his own child, supposedly a good kid, had perhaps committed the kinds of atrocities that would make any decent human being recoil. The movie (which Haggis also wrote) dances around that territory, but doesn't dare to march straight into its terrifying maw.

There's a lot to admire in The Brave One. It just doesn't cut as deeply as it needs to.

All in all, an exciting and terrifying new perspective on an era you probably thought you understood.

Overall, the picture is accomplished, intelligent and, in places, a little dull. Mangold isn't an economical filmmaker, and parts of 3:10 to Yuma suffer from needless bloat. The new version doesn't use the same kind of blunt, visually arresting shorthand as Daves' original...And yet somehow, maybe just barely, Mangold -- succeeds on his own terms, largely because the actors he's working with here.

May well be the most exciting documentary of the year so far. I guess it took a British director, David Sington, to capture the story of the dozen American men who walked on the moon -- the only human beings in our species history yet to visit another celestial body.

It's the most original picture by an American director I've seen this year, and also the most delightful.

The picture is just a catalog of strained camera moves and preprogrammed gags, with no wit or style.

I'd put To's Exiled -- into the category of Hong Kong movies that even people who think they don't care about Hong Kong movies should see.

The movie never fails to be crisply written and cannily delivered, but it's way too steeped in TV-culture inside jokes for its own good, and August's attempts to suffuse the whole thing with ontological or theological meaning are ultimately pretty dumb.

Intended as nothing more than a here-today, gone-tomorrow zany entertainment, and at the very least, it has a good-natured, slightly raunchy spirit about it. But ultimately, it's a hollow enterprise, all ping and no pong. It doesn't bounce; it splats.

An oddly graceful combination of fairy tale and romantic comedy, set in a forgotten corner of the world.

Beautifully worked out, and the movie's final sight gag, set to Charles Trenet's shimmery seaside masterpiece, "La Mer," is a gracefully orchestrated bit of silliness that's a visual love sonnet to Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton and, yes, Tati.

An adamantly unterrible picture, a reasonably enjoyable diversion.

The film's intimacy never feels fake, it's sporadically and unpredictably funny (I didn't exactly enjoy the cacophonous trumpet duet of the "1812 Overture," but I won't soon forget it), and the nonprofessional cast is surprisingly good.

Gorgeous and terrifying.

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.

Its pleasures and charms lie in its very crudeness, in the way the characters' thoughts begin in their d---s and spill out of their mouths, completely bypassing their brains.

Arguably a more important movie, which more clearly lays out what must be done to save the world, and how we can begin.

The problem with Hirschbiegel's ("Das Experiment," "Downfall") convoluted, car-crash-laden Invasion is that it doesn't know what symbolism it wants to grasp.