It's a sensitive, slow-moving 19th century samurai drama that will appeal to that tiny cadre of filmgoers who savor the classic Japanese films of Mizoguchi and Inagaki.

At the risk of retreating into Waffle House aesthetic relativism, I think the unsettling power of Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross' film stems from its contradictions.

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

The problem with contemporary Hollywood isn't that so many of the movies it's churning out are based on formula; it's that so many directors take perfectly good formulas and wreck them with bad filmmaking.

The Lake House is an example of the way bad movies can sometimes be more interesting than merely mediocre, workmanlike ones, and of the way they sometimes compel us even against our better judgment.

Despite the lurid content, this is a beautifully made film that reaches for moral seriousness and resists facile judgments.

A movie that is never elegant but is often hysterically funny, and maintains a rabbit-on-speed pace that Hollywood comedy long ago abandoned.

At its best when Creadon is burrowing deep into the world of the puzzles themselves, particularly when he sits down with puzzle constructor extraordinaire Merl Reagle.

This is a small film, but it moved me and made me angry. Both reactions, in this context, are worthwhile.

Cars is an elaborate concoction all right. But it feels soldered together from a scrap heap of tired ideas.

It's by no means the greatest Altman, and not even a great Altman. And yet, even though it was written and conceived by Garrison Keillor -- as a fanciful fiction that draws on elements of his popular radio show -- it is somehow pure Altman.

Roehler mixes cheap sex humor, existential darkness, buffoonish satire and profound tenderness in almost classic proportions. Maybe this is too uneven to be a masterpiece, but it's somewhere close.

Autumn is actually pretty damn good. It's a defiantly odd work, a movie-movie set more in the crime-film Paris of Jean-Pierre Melville or Jacques Becker or early Godard than in the real 21st century city.

Whatever you think you know about Turkey, Crossing the Bridge will change your mind. With a dynamite album of music from the film in simultaneous release, I smell a "Buena Vista"-style crossover hit.

The Break-Up doesn't know whether it wants to be a facile, enjoyable date movie or an unnerving examination of the dark, pockmarked underbelly of everything we expect out of romantic relationships, and it settles for a deeply unsatisfying nowheresville.

While it would be accurate to call the film a comedy, the Duplasses are trying to wrestle something closer to Chekhov than to farce out of the lives of these semi-likable, highly recognizable people.

Only half a mess -- and even with all its flaws, it's an enjoyable diversion that shows both respect and affection for the formidable legacy of the "X-Men" comics.

Disappointingly tame.

An acceptably entertaining picture. At just 100 minutes long, it feels tight and trim, and unlike so many contemporary action pictures, it boasts only one ending, instead of three false ones. What's more, it's just as dumb as the original.

While Keating's agenda is clearly hostile, and Giuliani's political committee is eagerly trying to do counter-propaganda, this isn't a campaign of character assassination or innuendo, but rather a dutifully constructed biographical film about a tremendously skilled prosecutor and politician.

As long as Klapisch keeps his characters pinballing each other from one Euro-capital to the next, Russian Dolls remains fun and charming, without ever seeming remotely serious or meaningful.

Clearly designed to be an action thriller with emotional underpinnings. But you can't get blood from a stone, no matter how hard you squeeze. And so Cruise, a huge box-office star, is the single bright, blinking emblem of the failure of Mission: Impossible III.

While Jacobson navigates the first half of Down in the Valley deftly, he loses his way in the second.

It's the kind of movie we don't often encounter these days, and actually never did: A dramatically dense and morally complicated work, it's also a highly pictorial wide-screen entertainment with a dynamite cast, channeling the legacy of John Ford and Sam Peckinpah (and maybe Joseph Conrad too).

It's an expertly made picture that I wish I could stamp out of my mind. What's the value of artistry that sucks the life out of you?

Dense with pathos, poetry and humor, this is Park's finest work to date. His stomach-churning climax -- which depicts gruesome bloodshed without directly showing it -- simultaneously gratifies and indicts our most primitive instincts.

Not just one of the great films of the '60s but one of the great films, period -- and the chance to discover it at the beginning of the 21st century, in an era when we think we've seen it all, is an unquantifiable privilege.

Almost as exhilarating as it is depressing. Puiu's filmmaking technique is remarkable, and all the more so because it's almost invisible.

In these three potent miniatures, Hou Hsiao-hsien suggests that time passes differently when you're deeply in love. He captures the mystical quality of that time on film, making us feel as if we're living in it, rather than simply watching it.

The jokes in American Dreamz whiz by with speed and grace, and Weitz maintains control of the material every minute.

I'm sure some people will be driven mad by the deliberate ambiguities of Somersault, and by its characters' near-total inability to understand themselves or express themselves. But to me, that makes it uncannily true to life.

A sweet-tempered, mildly entertaining picture.

A picture that's fully open to some pretty rough truths. But it's also a joyful, heartfelt movie, one that speaks to the openness and vitality we see in Bettie's pictures.

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.

This is a story of real heroism that will leave you weeping, laughing and singing.

With its wiry twists and turns, ends up buckling under the weight of its own cleverness.

Its considerable charm lies in the way it fulfills, rather than bucks, our expectations.

This is a dense and sophisticated work about mortality, materialism, madness, jealousy and pity.

It's another blast of vibrant, vicious, gloomy electricity from the always-surprising Russian film scene, and the beginning of an important career.

Gitai's experimental technique in Free Zone is dizzying, sometimes thrilling.

It will change your understanding of the Vietnam era, even if you were alive then.

This film is an inevitable product of our age, and enjoyable, right up to whatever your ickiness threshold is.

If you're trying to reinvigorate the art of the stylish thriller, the movie you come up with needs to be stylish and it needs to be thrilling. Basic Instinct 2, is neither.

Brick doesn't work 100 percent of the time, but it's a striking achievement, beautifully shot, often hilarious and occasionally moving.

After this movie, the Beasties and their fans, camera-totin' or not, are left drenched, exhausted, delighted.

As its title suggests, the picture is something of a ballad, an ode to an elusive character who's both quintessentially human and so outlandish he almost seems unreal.

Conveys an intense sculptural loveliness with something moving beneath it, maybe a sense of menace. And it's leavened, like once per hour, with a teeny dash of humor. This isn't nearly as immediately likable or showy as "Cremaster 3," but in a quiet way just as spectacular.

Perhaps understandably, these artifacts of a vastly different ideological and economic era -- have become kitsch objects, the focus of a half-horrified nostalgia, in the midst of the feverish Chinese boom.

It's Foster who rules the movie like an ice queen.

A spiny, puzzling and highly entertaining film, and whatever you go into it thinking, you're likely to come out thinking something else.

One of the greatest films of recent years.

What we really need from Stoned, the very thing that it fails to give us, is a sense of Jones as a human being.

Both oversimplifies and overcomplicates Moore's and Lloyd's vision, but it never cuts to the bone. It's a movie drawn with big, bold strokes and very little feeling -- a tracing-paper exercise masquerading as a masterpiece.

The chief problem with Thank You for Smoking, isn't that it's over the top; it's that it fits so neatly UNDER the top.

Deschanel may not be as brilliant as the great comedian Gracie Allen (and, at any rate, it's too soon to tell). But her Rube Goldberg timing (which only seems indirect) and blissfully zonked demeanor suggest the spirit of Allen. She's the only actor in Failure to Launch who isn't earthbound; she leaves everyone else in the dust simply by hanging back.

Duck Season is something quite different, capable of gratifying film snobs and regular viewers alike.

The movie is terrible, but made with verve and sincerity, all of it pointed in the wrong direction.

A modest but agreeable, and often very funny, movie.

This is a sturdy little cop thriller, and even when it stretches the bounds of plausibility, you go with it, partly because you believe -- almost against your better judgment -- in what the characters are doing.

At a time when our country feels divided to the point of cracking, Dave Chappelle's Block Party feels like a salve. It's a defiant act of optimistic patriotism.

It's a profoundly moving story of -- yes! -- the human spirit rising above horrible circumstances, and simultaneously a work of nostalgia for the gentlemen's war that marked the end, or the beginning of the end, of Christian Europe's world domination.

What makes Boynton's film stand out amid the current crop of political documentaries is its rigorous reportorial fairness, and its refusal to simplify material in order to score facile ideological points.

A well-acted little thriller of the sort sometimes called a "twisty" -- I wouldn't call it a great movie, but it'll keep you guessing about its characters and it has an intriguing mean streak.

An explosive wide-screen vision of the street life of Soweto, bursting with music, danger and vitality, and the extraordinary story of a ruthless young criminal known only as Tsotsi.

It's lower on the food chain than a mere exploitation picture because it clings so desperately to the notion that it's a serious movie about violence; it doesn't even have enough integrity to serve up cheap, sick thrills for their own sake.

It's an electrifying, suspenseful film, full of street-level political drama.

This is one of those lazy, lukewarm pictures that's even more disappointing than a purely bad one, and for one glaring reason: How could Marshall, his writers, and even his actors have let these dogs down so badly?

Freedomland, overall, could have been so much better. But Moore, even in a performance as patchy as this one, is something to watch. She's an echo of the movie that might have been.

Reygadas is an undeniably important artist hewing his own path, but who is also self-consciously playing to the tastes of a tiny elite audience that craves obscurantism, confrontation and heavy-handed symbolism. Still, I really want you to see this. Then I'll have somebody to talk about it with.

It's a crisply made, absorbing human drama that frames its moral confrontation between good and evil in universal terms.

Deschanel is great, with her feral eyes and Joey Ramone shag haircut, and Ferrell is fantastic. This one's worth the effort to find.

Of course, the very existence of someone like Willmott -- a black university professor who can make an angry, ruthless satire about American racism with impunity -- suggests that we're still a long way from living in the CSA.

There's just not enough of Forster, who has a small role as Ford's work colleague and confidant. ..Sometimes star quality shines out from the corners of a movie, and not from the center.

Heart of Gold is a sweet, gentle picture, if not a particularly exhilarating one.

This is a fine example of British commercial filmmaking at its highest level of craftsmanship.

This is one of those movies destined to be watched by family groups who can't agree on what to see: You'll all get a few chuckles, and then it's home for dessert.

Something New is the perfect date movie, not only because it explores a range of suitably romantic sentiments, but because it's so canny sociologically, as well as being delightfully good-natured.

Isn't exactly bad and isn't exactly good. It's raw in some places and overcooked in others.

I'd have no problem with the element of rampant, half-wacky speculation at the outer edges of physics in these movies if they came labeled as such.

I'd rate Bubble at no better than a C-plus for artistic achievement and a D-minus for audience appeal. In one sense, it accomplishes its goals efficiently by making you feel, in less than 80 minutes, as if you've gotten permanently trapped in the dead-end, trailer-park lives of its working-class characters. I've never been so grateful to get out of a theater, turn my cellphone back on and plug myself into a $4 Starbucks latte.

Like so many disappointing movies, it's peopled by performers who do their damnedest to make the whole thing work.

There's nothing offhand or spontaneous-feeling about Nanny McPhee; it's a highly mechanical piece of work, and its potentially delightful details are wasted.

To state the obvious, Manderlay is often patently offensive in its racial politics, and it surely isn't for everyone. It is, however, very funny, very dark and very skillfully played.

A comedy embedded with secret tips for better, more enjoyable living.

The movie has a perversely unifying effect: Muslims, Christians and Jews may not be able to agree on exactly who the heck Jesus is, but they're fully capable of bonding in boredom.

A film that stands out for its passion, ambition and clarion-call sincerity, even amid the contemporary onslaught of political documentaries.

The plot is so convoluted that missing even five minutes at a stretch won't make any difference in your comprehension of the story.

The kind of little indie you'll either hate or find impossible to resist. I fall into the latter camp, but can appreciate opposing views.

A loving tribute to one of the strangest and most enjoyable figures to emerge from American pop culture in its entire history.

It's a fascinating, haunting, unintentionally gruesome spectacle with, as Perry has said, echoes of Shakespearean tragedy.

When a movie plays every card, it's bound to win a hand or two. You can't exactly call that approach craftsmanship. But in the case of the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced inspirational sports drama Glory Road, it at least amounts to a kind of blunt effectiveness.

Watching Last Holiday, I kept waiting for the moment I could decree the movie truly terrible, the instant I could comfortably put my pen and notebook away and give it up for lost. But that moment never came, partly because I never fail to take pleasure in Latifah, and partly because I couldn't shake the eerie feeling that the movie I was watching was something of a ghost from another time.

A delightfully off-kilter love story. I don't want to oversell this winsome little movie, but if you want a bittersweet but cheerful pick-me-up on a cold winter evening, it's just the ticket.

This is an ambling, relaxed talking-head docu in the grand European style.

One of the most remarkable explorations of recent history ever conducted.

One of the greatest of all Holocaust films.

I admired the humor, the tremendous craftsmanship and even the shock value of Hostel, but found the Grand Guignol torture scenes excessive. (Unless you're a hardcore fan of Italian, Spanish and Japanese gore flicks, you've never seen anything like this.)

Match Point is a fatally neat exercise in detached craftsmanship, and maybe that's the best we can expect from Allen at this point.