Now that Woody Allen is no longer making acceptable Woody Allen movies, it's surprising we're not seeing more comedies like Prime, a slight but well-meaning picture that strives for the same kind of pleasurably neurotic sophistication that Allen, at his best, used to give us.

But it tries to be (many) things -- and fails at them all.

I'm afraid that whoever it was in the New York Film Critics Circle who voted for The Hobbit as best animated film had a point. And so did the people who suspected that this whole thing was a bad idea.

Brings back the characters you may have loved, as I did, in the earlier movies: My particular faves are Antonio Banderas' poon-hound Puss-in-Boots.

Juliette Lewis makes Aurora Borealis into a funnier, richer, more powerful film than it has any reason to be.

The picture is entertaining and brutal (it's a movie about tough convicts fighting, after all), but it can't figure out what kind of movie it would like to be.

The most dispiriting thing about Kiss of the Dragon, is that it's another example of how Western filmmakers fall on their faces when they try to evoke the feel of Hong Kong action films.

I'd appreciate toilet humor more if it weren't so often so unimaginative.

The Myth of Fingerprints is only 90 minutes long, but watching all this tasteful torment, you can't help thinking that if you were watching a Jewish family or an Italian one, the air would be cleared -- and you'd be out of the theater -- a hell of a lot quicker.

A light, smartly turned-out amusement, the sort of thing that's becoming more and more rare on the movie landscape these days.

An exploration of self-absorption that is itself too self-absorbed to be either entertaining or enlightening.

Disney World, in this incoherent but often amazing work of American psychodrama, has a lot in common with the Overlook Hotel of “The Shining,” the Venice of “Death in Venice” and the booze-soaked Cuernavaca of “Under the Volcano.” It’s a zone of existential dread, the place where masculine dreams go to die, the place where the unburied ghosts of civilization rise up like Mouse-eared, three-fingered zombies and bite us in the ass.

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.

Snaps to life too late. But at least there IS life in it. It doesn't hold together as a piece of filmmaking, but there's no doubt it comes from somewhere close to Schreiber's heart.

Gervais doesn't have movie-star good looks; it's his line delivery that has sex appeal.

Hawke gives his all here -- or maybe just half his all -- and it isn't quite enough: He's trying to be soulful, but he really just looks a little tired. The real delight is Willem Dafoe, as the rednecky leader of the survivor humans.

Unsurprisingly, the camerawork in Lila Says is spectacular.

The hit-to-miss gag ratio is atrocious, and we spend most of the movie hanging out with these borderline-agreeable characters, waiting for something to happen.

Director Cook and screenwriter Anthony Frewin were both intimates of the real Kubrick, which I guess counts for something. But for what, exactly? Does it uniquely qualify them to make a mean-spirited, trashy and intermittently funny film about a guy who wasn't Kubrick?

Kate Winslet is a mesmerizing force in her own right, but too much of Holy Smoke turns out to be hot air.

Remains stubbornly one-dimensional. The gags are so resoundingly and innocently pre-adolescent that it's really hard to see how the film managed a PG rating.

A deviously engineered parasite that'll crawl under your skin and live in your nervous system for a while if you give it half a chance.

A light, enjoyable night out. This happens largely because of Charlotte Gainsbourg, who's simply adorable. Attal shoots her with tenderness throughout, a tenderness that comes from familiarity.

The original Ocean's is fun, fun, fun. It was a heist caper that was just an excuse for a bunch of friends (Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., et al) to get together and make whoopee.

If Bond long ago became part of your fantasy life or your pop iconography, then the anticipation of a good Bond movie would probably survive even if The World Is Not Enough were worse than it is.

At the very least, this implausible trifecta displays an abundantly talented new filmmaker who has risked everything, including the prospect that we may get sick of him immediately. If you care about the remaining possibilities of American movies, then this one – well, one of the three, anyway! – is a must-see.

Alternately comic and terrifying, "Woman/Gun/Noodle" is a dazzling act of transliteration that may not require knowledge of the original film.

Let me come clean right now and tell you that I enjoyed The Intouchables quite a bit. If you're looking for a lightweight summer change of pace, with just a smidgen of Continental flair, here it is.

Branagh's completely at home in this kind of inflated family drama, of course, and the three guys yell, sulk and brood in their ridiculous costumes to fine effect.

Perhaps if Jerry were a three-dimensional character, or the movie had focused on one plot instead of trying to do it all, Permanent Midnight might have been engaging. But in the end, all you see is another rich spoiled brat shoving tar up his arm, and at this point it's just too hard to care.

Excessively intricate and extremely dull, the latest example of a filmmaker giving us a disjointed, overlong movie that’s unnecessarily confusing to follow.

This third-act redemption raises Towelhead several notches, but it still ends up feeling like a well-acted and well-intentioned after-school special, a long way from the vividness and texture of Ball's television work.

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.

The kind of self-conscious puzzle picture in which characters behave in ways that serve the plot but in no way resemble things that actual human beings would be likely to do.

It's almost as lame-brained as any Hollywood blockbuster, if prettier and more pretentious.

I was so charmed by the opening scenes of 13 Going on 30, and so entertained by the middle portion of it, that I had high hopes for its ending -- hopes that were cruelly dashed. Like a petulant 13-year-old, I'm still pouting over my disappointment.

A superb mainstream entertainment in the purest sense of the term: It's a picture made to please a wide audience without ever pandering to it.

There’s a freshness and an unjaded quality to almost every scene that makes you want to keep watching.

Finally, at the risk of seeming provincial, why is it OK that some Canadian has made a movie set in Ireland with no Irish people among the principal cast?

A sweet-tempered, mildly entertaining picture.

Unlike most issue-oriented documentaries about the abundant idiocy of the human species and the imminent demise of our planet, Mark S. Hall's Sushi: The Global Catch offers foodies and sushi buffs a refreshing palate-cleanser before the parade of experts and the dire news reports.

Fine actors do their damnedest to make this dumb movie look sharp.

With its intelligence, compassion, human terror and sheer loveliness, Candy is a winner despite the well-worn path it treads.

You have seen this movie before, every morsel of it.

Lavish in its approach -- it attempts some rather extravagant battle scenes -- yet it still seems modest in its goals: It's more interested in being a Saturday-afternoon entertainment than a blockbuster.

García, previously the director of "Mother and Child," "Passengers" and numerous TV episodes (and the son of Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez), never feels entirely comfortable with the period or location, but for all its limitations Albert Nobbs has a puzzling undertow, and gets more involving the longer you stick with it.

It's melodrama that rises to the complexity of art. The Human Stain takes a complex work of literary art and reduces it to tasteful melodrama. Its smallness is simply crushing.

So stylized and slow-moving (even at a spare 75 minutes) that you may have trouble adapting to its hypnotic rhythms -- but if you can, there are sumptuous visual rewards to be found, plus the faintest emotional uptick right at the end.

Southpaw is a tremendous accomplishment of mainstream cinematic craft, a near-perfect match of director, material and star.

May be overly sentimental at times, but at least it's about something.

A very gentle-spirited picture, but it's not a self-consciously precious one.

If you liked "Rocky Balboa" you should be in good shape, since it's exactly the same movie, just aimed at a teeny-tiny-bit younger demographic and with an affectless leading man who avoids hambone acting by not acting at all.

Like so many self-conscious directors, Julie Taymor wrecks Shakespeare's already disastrous play with her own horrific vision.

Tricked up with so many points that there's barely any flow to it.

Hannibal, which is very likely the worst film of this year and quite possibly the next, achieves what no movie I can recall ever even attempting: It somehow manages to be both repugnant and boring.

It's about as phony and manipulative as a movie could be. That Polley seems true every second is maybe the strongest testament yet to her acting. It's exasperating that this movie doesn't have the courage to go places where its actress plainly has the guts to follow.

That rare sequel that builds on the movie that came before it without crushing its attributes to death. "Escape" doesn't feel belabored. Giddy, freewheeling and sweet-natured, it pulls off the effect of seeming spontaneous, a tall task by itself.

Sarin and Sonam also lift the veil on potentially explosive divisions within the Tibetan exile community, which is torn between spiritual and cultural loyalty to the Dalai Lama and a widespread longing for true independence. (The filmmakers clearly belong to the pro-independence camp.)

Yes, yes, yes, Downey is blasé, intelligent and hilarious as Tony Stark -- what do you expect me to say? -- but I'm convinced that sticking with this character much longer won't be good for him.

As The Muse chugs along, it becomes more apparent how tired and pointless it is.

A fun, silly, kid-friendly summer popcorn entertainment.

The picture works because Brevig and his actors -- not to mention his effects -- maintain a sense of humor and lightness. It doesn't hurt that Fraser, a fine actor who's made a name for himself not with his serious performances (which are reliably solid) but for his recurring role in the "Mummy" series.

It almost continuously gets darker, funnier and edgier as it goes along.

I resisted this derivative mishmash of classic fairytale and modern epic fantasy for as long as I could, but ultimately it swept me up into its geeky but manly embrace and carried me away on a white charger.

Coach Carter, its flaws aside, is as interesting for what it doesn't do as for what it does.

This is a movie that offers simple, buouyant pleasures.

This is a brash, lightweight backstage comedy that looks lovely, doesn't insult its audience and uses its stars, both young and old, to terrific effect.

The Last Kiss is more a capable-craftsman film than a work of genuine dramatic insight, but here and there it opens a window onto the terror and wonder of grown-up life, one its characters don't especially want to look through.

Despite the prestigious talents involved, this is strictly "Minor Piece Theatre."

Mick Jagger acts his age, finally, in an entertaining but ultimately disappointing fable.

As inconsequential and virtually indistinguishable sub-Judd Apatow white-boy comedies fueled by prison-rape gags and pants-pissing anxiety around black people go, Horrible Bosses is pretty solid entertainment.

Fundamentally, it's a well-executed formula movie, perfect for first-date couples or miscellaneous group outings.

Shelton has directed Dark Blue in a jacked-up urban thriller style that simply does not play to his gifts. He's a sidewinder, the sort of writer-director who tells his stories through loopy character details and anecdotes.

A marvelously compressed and immaculately constructed work.

Among the least-heralded of the Christmas releases, Casanova is one of the few that's wholly enjoyable.

Not only is War Dogs a surprisingly well-told tale in the classic American rags-to-riches-to-rags mode. It’s also a mordant morality fable with a genuine heart of darkness. (Plus, it has one hell of a soundtrack, matching its moods to an array of classic rock and hip-hop tunes in the Martin Scorsese vein.)

Rubberneck immediately put me in mind of the classic slow burn of vintage thrillers like Fritz Lang’s “M” and Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom,” although Karpovsky and co-writer Garth Donovan have cited all kinds of other things, from “Michael Clayton” to “Caché” to “Fatal Attraction.”

The Equalizer is gripping, mysterious and even sometimes moving, but it’s never pleasant, still less fun. If you decide to go, don’t claim you weren’t warned. If you skip it, you’re missing one of the year’s signal works of superior Hollywood craftsmanship.

Entertaining in a glossy, mindless way.

This is a sweet-spirited movie about a nice bunch of kids having good clean fun.

Whatever it is, it's simultaneously on speed and Quaaludes; I don't know if any movie this profoundly insane has been seen in general release since Antonia Bird's Gold Rush cannibal comedy "Ravenous."

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.

A pleasingly disreputable trifle.

A memorable and outrageous movie, but one more likely to be remembered as a massive folly than a whopping success.

Tamahori's Die Another Day is an imperfect Bond movie. But for every patch where it's dull and lifeless or just plain stupid, there are also sections that are significantly different from anything we've seen before in a Bond movie.

That whole meta-biographical aspect doesn't bug me much because everybody who's ever written or directed a romantic comedy is drawing on their own emotional experience; this one's just a little more obvious about it.

I enjoyed every moment of this densely plotted final chapter, and most other fans will too.

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

Fever Pitch lacks that Farrelly spark, that warm, crazy glint.

Kostic, a Bosnian actor who has done quite a bit of British film and TV, and the Sarajevo-born beauty Marjanovic make a combustible screen couple, and Jolie knows it. Despite the film's generally somber tone, there's more than a hint of "Night Porter"-style perversity to their relationship, which at different times is platonic, therapeutic and highly erotic.

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

Whether he's getting hit in the face with a dildo or cozying up to Martha Stewart, Knoxville is always affable, playful and able coax a laugh out of an audience by doing ridiculous things. He's a jackass all right, but he's a jackass in shining armor.

Works neither as an exuberant rock 'n' roll picture nor as a heroic fable. It will rock you --straight to sleep.

The second movie by "Being John Malkovich" writer Charlie Kaufman is even weirder than his first.

With big Hollywood movies getting glossier and more mechanical, and indie movies increasingly mistaking drabness for seriousness, we need Waters' sub-B-movie aesthetic more now than ever.

Uneven as Capital is, unlike so many films about capitalism it’s never boring and is unafraid of its point of view.

That a movie can run on empty and still be so obscenely enjoyable is a pretty slick stunt in itself.

Million Dollar Arm is not just a Disney film, but a Disney film that could have been made, with minor elisions and different character names, in 1963.