Linklater gets great performances from his young cast, and you'll find yourself thinking about the characters and their travails well after the movie's finish.

Beneath its movie star clowning, its awful-but-relatable heroine and its lightweight gags, Burn After Reading poses an implicit challenge to its viewers: Can you figure out why this comedy isn't very funny? Could that be because its central proposition is that the people in the theater are just as stupid, just as gullible, just as eager to be deceived as the people on the screen?

The movie is straightforward in a way that makes it feel less manipulative than it might.

Made with confidence that borders on bravado, and sometimes it shows more conviction than it does grace.

Scorsese is pushing, I guess, for something that combines a '40s horror-thriller with a contemporary psychological tragedy. What he ends up with is more like a Hardy Boys mystery directed by David Lynch.

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.

Along the way, it even gives the adorable manchild Michael Cera the chance to reinvent himself as a possible sex symbol -- in other words, it allows him to be a man.

It's entirely sincere and genuinely not terrible. Burns knows the milieu of his suburbanized New York Irish-American characters at a bone-deep level (enough to induce powerful flashbacks in someone of my background), and the tone of regretful, tragicomic, low-key melodrama he strikes is just right.

Isn't profound, but it is perceptive...it's a pile of fun.

So full of winning performances and so disarmingly uncynical in its affection for its characters, it manages to leave you with a Texas-size grin on your face anyway.

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.

Prince Caspian is elaborate filmmaking, all right. It's the magic of the human touch that's missing.

As far as bored and cynical, playing-out-the-string comic-book action sequels go – hey, Iron Man 3 is a pretty good one!

Weaver obviously relishes playing this feral, sarcastic new Ripley, and her pleasure is infectious.

Even though Brody works hard -- and he's got those magnificent drooping eyes, which suggest both innocence and a seen-it-all-before weariness -- his scenes don't spark, and the movie drags around them.

Another way of reading a movie like this is that it channels our ancient hatred of nature while recognizing that it’s essentially nostalgic, and that the occasional hungry ursine cannot compete with the animal we really have reason to fear.

Kevin Smith's comic-religious fantasy turns out to be the sweetest hot-potato movie imaginable.

If Jackie Brown lost 45 minutes, it might have been a snazzy entertainment. As it is, it wears out its welcome well before the end.

Wonderful...It's funny and offbeat, sometimes raucous, but it still manages to come at you in gentle layers.

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 a movie of tremendous visual daring, magnificent special-effects work and surprising moral gravity.

It's a glimpse into a world most secular, metropolitan liberals never see, and it's likely to induce howls of both terror and hilarity from big-city audiences.

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.

Friedkin's still got it - the "it" being his ability to infuse every frame of the film with powerful ambiguity and doubt, and also his ability to attract terrific actors and propel them in unexpected directions.

Lord of War skims along like a dance routine. Political morality doesn't usually get such fleet choreography in the movies.

Jolly good fun.

So subtle and subdued that it nearly undercuts itself. I'd describe it, in fact, as a film that doesn't quite work -- but the way it doesn't work is so distinctive and so interesting that it marks Jenkins as an exciting new face on the American indie scene.

This film is never less than pleasant to spend time with, and that’s not a minor consideration when it comes to summer moviegoing.

There's so little sexual chemistry between the actors in this film that it seems like a kind of accomplishment. I've seen shows on C-SPAN that were hotter than this.

Catch a Fire just doesn't spark.

It's a breezy and entertaining little charmer.

Fans of "Swingers" may be disappointed. Made doesn't give us as many jazzy catchphrases to latch onto, or figuratively hoist us aloft on a giant martini glass of prolonged adolescence. But then that's precisely why it's the better movie.

Ocean's Thirteen has a pleasingly casual, raffish quality -- it's enjoyable to watch, particularly if you've got nothing better to do.

I’m saying that King has fearlessly forged into unexplored territory — that being the African-American stoner comedy, with an adult audience in view – and the results are profoundly hilarious, occasionally heartbreaking, often brilliant and entirely devoid of political piety.

tThere's life at the center of The Duchess, in the form of Keira Knightley. She carries the weight of the movie around her effortlessly.

This delicious little period piece from Spanish writer-director Pablo Berger is like one of those really expensive chocolates, where you start out expecting a brief sugar buzz and end up surprised by the sophistication and delicacy of the flavor.

If you've ever sat in a jet waiting on the runway, feeling it lumbering along in place and then bucking and shaking when it's cleared for take-off, you know what it's like to sit through Air Force One.

Director Michel Hazanavicius captures the jet-age atmosphere, form-fitting wardrobes, jazz-ethnic soundtrack and bouffant hairdos of JFK/de Gaulle-era espionage films in perfect detail, but it's Dujardin's performance as the suave, confident and utterly clueless Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath (to Francophones, a name that drips with phony aristocratic pretension) that gives "OSS 117" its edge.

If you love actors, it's the sort of thing you might be tempted to see a second time, even after you've found out whodunit, just to examine more carefully the way the performers -- particularly the mesmerizing Cate Blanchett -- weave shining silken threads around what's essentially a pretty uninvolving narrative.

There's nothing in either the conception or execution to lift it above a TV-movie tear-jerker.

It's a mess, and a ridiculous golden shower of toilet humor. But Mike Myers' superspy spoof still provides the summer's purest movie delight.

I found the film powerfully erotic, although it has minimal nudity and no explicit sex.

If Land of Plenty isn't always elegant, it has the inexpressible aura of mystery and wonder that exemplifies his best work. Fans will feel echoes of both "Paris, Texas" and "The State of Things" here. Like those movies, this one is less an angry critique than a sad meditation on the American dream, something Wim Wenders understands well and has never been able to resist.

Sweet, modest and quietly classy, it's the perfect late-summer entertainment -- and it also happens to feature the most relaxed and nuanced performance Renée Zellweger has given in years.

One of those rare literary adaptations that finds its fidelity in freedom, that stands as both a fitting version of its source material and as its own creation.

A farrago, with a few morsels of deft social observation and likable performances floating around in a conventional stew of overblown, bogus emotion and rigged catharsis.

As it ticks by, laboriously, it leaves you feeling that you should be enjoying it more than you are.

I think the movie is so restrained, and holds back so much on conventional plot and characterization, that its emotional impact is severely blunted. Nolte is excellent, I suppose, but we've seen this damaged-American-dude shtick from him before.

Captures the awful intimacy and the grimy, second-rate quality of the Northern Ireland conflict in resonant fashion.

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.

A fever dream about an aging, grasping, neurotic artist who brings his disastrous personal life, thinly veiled, into his work and ends up as a grotesque caricature of himself, alienating everyone who ever loved him.

This hot-button picture isn't especially well thought-out, but it might be crafty and manipulative enough to rile up audiences.

May not be entirely original or entirely successful, but it's definitely fun to watch.

I found The Matrix Reloaded so exhilarating. It's a sadder, wiser, more grown-up movie than its predecessor. It was made, one might almost say, for a sadder, wiser, more grown-up world.

There's something to be said for watching an animated movie not with the eyes of a child, but with those of a turned-on grownup.

In a universe of Hollywood comedies that seem determined to insult the audience and pander to the basest form of post-adolescent fantasy, Ted feels almost sophisticated.

Any thriller from first-time directors that starts out with a couple of teenagers in a Texas diner talking about legendary pulp novelist Jim Thompson has a super-steep hill to climb. Here’s what I can say for Bad Turn Worse... It may not make it all the way up that steep slope, but the effort is pretty doggone entertaining.

Baghead is a kick in the pants.

May be the shoddiest and most incoherent piece of big-budget action moviemaking since "Armageddon."

The reality is that it's neither hip nor funny: Instead, it's excessively broad one minute and unctuously instructional the next.

As flawed as it is, Major Dundee maintains its dignity in the face of the injustices that were done to it. Ripped-up and ragtag, it still holds its head high.

In the end I respected 5x2 more than I loved it. As we move backward in time, the distance between audience and characters inevitably widens -- we know what's going to happen and they don't -- and I found the effect a little astringent.

It would be destined for the trash heap of Shakespeare adaptations, if not for its female lead, and its heart, 17-year-old Claire Danes.

Something of a gigantic goof, perpetrated by Penn and Herzog -- and the goofees included much of the entertainment media, people in the film business, the Scottish authorities and (I think) even some of the film's cast.

Centurion has its moments of manly cornpone camaraderie and certainly isn't blazingly original, but it offers riveting storytelling, gorgeous cinematography and scenery, loads of gore, and a politically complicated history lesson.

The Help definitely worked on me as a consummate tear-jerker with a terrific cast, and it's pretty much the summer's only decent Hollywood drama.

It's a friendly, unpretentious little thing -- at times it's a bit too muted and indistinct, but then, you have to at least give the Farrellys credit for not making the mistake of trying too hard.

Thoroughly wonderful.

Mostly smart enough to stick to pure farce and let its animals take care of their own rights. It's a charming diversion, and it treads lightly even when it has something weightier on its mind.

A humorless picture, a somber, arty exercise in deep denial of its exploitation roots. The dialogue is stiff and mechanical and the performances are too.

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.

Destroyer may position itself as a kind of redemption tale, but Kusama’s film is decidedly not feel-good. The music by Theodore Shapiro is deliberately set to jangle one’s nerves — it is definitely trying too hard — but like most of the film’s elements, it is just effective enough to create an impression.

Features one of the rare complex portraits of a therapist.

For its perilous ambitions, Unbreakable has to be admired, but any ending that succeeds only in pulling the rug out from under a credulous, trusting audience has to be laughed at and called out for the extravagant nonsense that it is.

As Tolstoy observed, all sappy ethnic family comedies are the same. None is sappy in its own way.

Overburdened with knowingly charming touches. It's waterlogged with whimsy.

Inevitably a little patchier and less startlingly original than its predecessor -- S2 is an ingenious, often hilarious, movie that does nothing to diminish the well-deserved cult reputation of its director.

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

Matsumoto isn't the first Japanese director to go all meta on the superhero tradition (consider also Takashi Miike's 2004 "Zebraman"), but this work of improbable lunacy may well max out the genre.

The Interpreter is so intent on reminding us that it's a QUALITY piece of work that it forgets to give us the very thing we thought we came in for: a story.

Despite his reliance on visual cliché, Trajkov mines a rich vein of morbid Slavic comedy, and his young characters have an appetite for adventure that's thoroughly unfake.

Utterly delightful.

The Negotiator slogs on for two hours and 20 minutes, and there's hardly a real laugh or a genuine thrill in it.

Faithful to Sagan's brand of popularized science, the film never reaches beyond Hollywood spectacle and sentimentality.

What emerges in the end actually is surprisingly consistent and coherent, if you pay close attention to the most important passages of Kirk’s self-serving narrative and steer through all the denials and reversals and irrelevant tangents.

There are a number of terrific production numbers in Lucy, basically violent action scenes that border on slapstick, and as long as we agree in advance that the “science” in this movie goes beyond pseudo into total B.S., I believe you will leave satisfied.

Probably supposed to be half fashion fantasy, half satire of the fashion world. What a drag that it's not enough of either.

If it's too subtle (and too similar to several other low-key indie romcoms) to make a big splash, it's got lovely performances and really builds strength as it goes along.

As Eunice, Plummer gets a rare chance to stretch, and she doesn't disappoint. Her performance is a cocktail of despair, charm, self-hatred, bitterness, religious ecstasy, coquetry and homicidal rage. She's genuinely frightening after the fashion of early Robert De Niro, with all the hair-trigger potential violence of the truly mad.

What redeems the movie, and then some, is the soulful weariness of Clooney's performance, which is in some ways an earthier and less glib version of the go-go axeman from "Up In The Air."

It's to Stiller's credit that he can sustain the joke for the length of the movie, but just barely. Ten more minutes of Zoolander would have been 10 minutes too many.

A filmmaker's personal connection to the material doesn't necessarily mean that the resulting picture will be any good, and Stop-Loss is so dramatically tedious that it feels remote instead of resonant.

Even after losing its sexiest, tawdriest moments, this teen romance is still hotter, smarter and more fearless than its Hollywood contemporaries.

Here's a real mystery: How can John Cusack, Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman, acting in a John Grisham thriller, be so dull?

The Good Shepherd, soft when it needs to be sharp, is all cloak with very little dagger.

Lots of movies about the Middle Ages can do the mud and blood -- though we sure see a lot of both here -- but in this movie it's like Refn has ripped you out of time and dropped you there.

Rarely has a film with such a great cast and so many moments of terrific writing and such high dramatic goals been so messy and disorganized and fundamentally bad.

I simultaneously want to endorse its ambition and nerve and report that it's a very mixed bag.