I am not the first to make this joke, but The Trip to Italy may live up to the “Godfather: Part II” analogy, at least insofar as it’s better and tighter than its predecessor.

As good as Harris is, though, it's Harden's performance that sticks with you long after you've seen the movie. She understands what Krasner must have known intuitively. Greatness comes not from cleaning up messes, but from allowing them to be made in the first place.

This is a superb, delicately calibrated comic performance: Carell never allows the character to swerve into excessive cuddliness.

This is a shimmery beaded curtain of a movie, a slight, charming picture that's almost all facade. But what a facade!

Durkin seems to be aiming for a Hitchcock-style thriller that has the unsettling psychological and narrative ambiguity of, say, Michael Haneke's films, with an ending you can read in many different ways. If he doesn't quite get there, it's still a remarkable feature-directing debut.

This is a rip-snorting, barrel-riding adventure movie — perfect for all ages, as they say (though it isn’t for very young kids) — loaded with fast-paced fight scenes, great-looking effects and enjoyable and/or scurrilous supporting characters.

The Deep End doesn't have a knotty message, but it's a much more meaningful picture than "Suture."

It’s probably best to approach Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s intimate, unnerving and entirely addictive drama What Maisie Knew by not leaning too hard on its Henry James source material.

A thoroughly delightful surprise, after a summer full of dim and dreary comedies.

Highly compelling, if overlong and overwrought.

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.

As irritating as Lake Placid sometimes is, it also has an easygoing sense of fun, along with one of the more memorable movie monsters of recent years. The mismatched ingredients blend into a blissfully, stupidly surreal summer cocktail.

The film itself is an admirable and empathetic work that does not romanticize anorexia or the young woman being ground into nothingness by the disease, as some have feared.

Sucker Punch doesn't all work by a long shot, but it confirms my sense that Snyder belongs near the top of a very short list of directors who are trying to reinvent a personal, auteurist vision of cinema at the most commercial, mass-market, attention-disordered end of the spectrum.

It honestly makes no difference if you don't even know the rules of chess and have never visited New York; this is a story about human potential and the lingering possibilities of the American dream.

Weekend is such a smart, prickly, sexy, inventive film that it critiques itself and critiques its viewers, gay or straight, even as it spins an archetypal romantic fable.

Sam Rogers (Spacey) is not an especially enigmatic character, but he is a profoundly wounded one who has given his life to a business and an institution that has relied for years on his unscrupulous conduct and is about to kick him to the curb...It's one of the great performances found in American movies this year.

A guilt-free, no-fat dessert from start to finish.

From the too-good-to-be-true desk comes this loving and hilarious portrait of Spinal Tap-esque Canadian metal band Anvil, who were briefly a hard-rock sensation in the early '80s (mainly for the song "Metal on Metal") and have been struggling along in total obscurity ever since.

This is a teasingly complex political thriller, but it's also a sort-of romance.

One reason Wild Things works so well is that director John McNaughton sustains a darkly comic tone throughout the film without letting it degenerate into farce.

A terrifying and highly effective documentary.

It demands to be experienced on its own terms or not at all, which creates a significant level of resistance in the contemporary media marketplace – but may also be a source of counterintuitive appeal.

Has an irresistible tragic and romantic undertow.

A lovely, warm, unforced film that gives you time to get to know its characters and isn't propelled by any artificial narrative conventions,

It's a gorgeous and resonant work, full of the memorable images and passages of pathos the director's fans expect. It's also a painful, unforgiving film, the kind of thing that sharply divides audiences from critics.

Ballast is an audacious and ambiguous debut from a filmmaker whose motives and aims are not as transparent as they seem.

Offers an introduction to the lean-and-mean, social-realist Romanian storytelling style that's built around a charismatic young actor and a familiar genre.

Dark Shadows offers potent atmosphere and delirious '70s fashions and hilarious gags and some really terrific performances, none better than Pfeiffer's triumphant return to the screen as a pitch-perfect family matriarch.

Compared to, say, your average Adam Sandler movie it's a master class in film comedy. Oh, you will laugh. You may not forgive yourself for it easily, but you will laugh. You may well laugh to the point of pee stains in your underthings, and if you think that's gratuitous you have no idea.

Weisz has never been better: She's joyously expressive and alive, but there's gravity beneath that milkmaid complexion. She's grounded even when she's being flirtatious. And Fiennes has never been more moving.

Make no mistake, this movie is a mess. But, wow, what a mess! It's an exploding piñata, full of low comedy and high drama, deliriously colorful fight scenes and vehicle chases.

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

How close did a simple maintenance mishap come to rendering at least one American state uninhabitable and killing an unknown number of people? And what does that tell us about the security and safety of the deadliest weapons ever built in human history? We don’t know the answer to the first question, and the second one raises extremely troubling issues. I don’t want to spoil the gripping and improbable details of Kenner’s film, but how the Damascus accident started is no big secret.

It's winsome, sentimental and lovely in a minor-key way.

Baghead is a kick in the pants.

Hugely entertaining and extravagantly empathetic.

This is spectacle cinema made with individual flair; maybe someone in Hollywood will notice that it's still possible.

Alone among the works I've seen and read about Iraq in the last three years, Iraq in Fragments captures the tremendous complexity and variability of the country, offering neither facile hope nor fashionable despair.

Tsai Ming-Liang always makes you feel that there's a world of life beyond his movies -- a world populated by ghosts that are as real as we are.

A character who triumphs over a clumsy story line is a very rare creature. It takes a smart director and a sensitive actor to bring him to life, and to keep him breathing all the way through.

It's blissfully, pants-wettingly funny from beginning to end.

I'm recommending that you rush out and see it, but not altogether because I think it's so totally great and completely works. Quite a bit of it is great, and most of it works, and the stuff that clicks is outrageously entertaining and funny, sometimes with surprising depth. But I also want you to see it so we can argue about what works and what doesn't.

Like last year's "American Pie," Road Trip crisply delivers the goods: vaguely rakish heroes, vaguely kinky sex and highly naked nubiles.

Intriguing and often hilarious.

If you stick with Bully through its seemingly endless repetition of themes and its hurl-inducing hand-held camerawork, it does build a crude, indefinable power.

Ewing and Grady could have done a better job filling in each boy's back story, as well as explaining exactly how Baraka started and what its agenda is. But the film is clearly a labor of love, portraying the lives of its subjects with tremendous intimacy and passion.

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.

This is a remarkable work of pure documentary cinema, and a mystical accomplishment on the order of Wagner's "Parsifal" or Tarkovsky's "The Sacrifice." That's hardly anybody's thing these days -- it's not often mine. But the effort, in this case, is worth it.

It's a thrilling and sometimes maddening experience that raises more questions than it can answer. Its legacy and range of influence are enormous, but let's not pretend it's all to the good.

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).

The drawback is that even though The Hurt Locker is extremely effective in places, it ultimately feels unformed and somewhat unfinished.

Often scabrously funny in a post-Lena Dunham, post-Woody Allen New York comedy vein, and finds a star performance in the thoroughly unlikely personage of Jenny Slate.

Catherine Keener, Emily Mortimer and Brenda Blethyn shine in a delicate, loose-limbed and tremendously alive indie about women, family, self-image and survival.

Magic Mike is a fascinating film, one of his (Soderbergh's) best in recent years.

This is one of those movies where you either give yourself up to its rhythms or give up entirely. It took me a few minutes to get used to it, but I found Tony Takitani absorbing and loaded with emotional power.

Florid, passionate, frequently hilarious and loaded with messy emotions that nobody in his or her right mind should even attempt to explain, it's operatic in its nutball intensity.

In To's movies no one is innocent, and the social corruption has reached down to the soul. He orchestrates action scenes with an elegance that suggests Scorsese.

A clanking, old-fashioned period drama infused with almost unbearable grief, Claude Miller's film A Secret has an enormous significance in France that it can never possess elsewhere.

It doesn't sacrifice craftsmanship and elegance at the altar of its strong convictions.

Soberly executed and highly principled documentary filmmaking, tightly focused on the Winfield family’s efforts to navigate the byzantine Army bureaucracy and the ass-covering military justice system. But it’s also a kind of Rorschach test of any viewer’s attitudes about war, the military and the United States’ amorphous 13-year mission in Afghanistan.

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?

Among DiCillo's best, and returns to the central theme of his career: the elusive and destructive nature of fame.

A powerful documentary.

If you're willing to take this voyage with Fiennes into the psychic landscape and working life of one of the world's greatest contemporary artists, it's a trip you'll never forget.

You slip into the movie so easily that by the time it reaches its emotional climax, you're unprepared.

Herzog wants us to see a deluded nobility in this quest. Treadwell's flawed dreams were, in the end, all too human.

While Brown’s complicated trajectory as a cultural and political figure gets short shrift in Get on Up, his music does not – the sequence depicting his legendary “Fever in the Funkhouse” show in Paris in 1971 is an absolute knockout, worth the price of admission all by itself.

A subtle, witty, wise and deeply compassionate American movie.

The brilliance of The SpongeBob Squarepants Movie -- as well as the show -- is that it's cognizant without being self-consciously knowing.

When Craven says "Jump!" we all do it at once, and giggle at how easily we've fallen under the spell. The key is that Craven is laughing with us, not at us.

It's a profoundly optimistic and delightful movie, for balletomanes and neophytes alike. It made me happy for days afterward.

This is a wonderful, horrifying performance: Whitaker doesn't take the easy way out by playing Amin as a killer clown, a treacherous buffoon.

And now in The Straight Story, no director has been so buzzingly alert to the emotional lives of those people or to the beauty of the world they inhabit as David Lynch.

This shouldn't be a competitive sport or anything, but I'm pretty sure that Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern's documentary The Devil Came on Horseback has the most horrifying images I have ever seen in a motion picture.

The movie's climactic battle scene is mildly thrilling -- although it's not nearly as exciting as simply watching Downey and Bridges work together. Bridges makes a great villain precisely because he's such a relaxed, affable presence.

If "Cocaine Cowboys" was an epic, ironic yarn of murder and madness and the building of a boomtown built largely on drug money, Square Groupers is a more rueful tale.

Undeniably pleasant, but British actress Samantha Morton quietly explodes it: Her performance is like nothing I've seen in recent years.

Watching McDormand navigate that transformation is the kind of thing that can keep your hope in movies, and in actors, alive.

Certainly it isn't the greatest of Coppola's pictures, or even of his independent productions, but those are pretty high standards. It has a verve and vitality that's been missing from his pictures for 25 years, and its various and visible flaws all result from too much of that verve rather than too little. I enjoyed it tremendously.

It's a movie on the Hollywood scale that has so much of the Asian spirit. It has drawn the Asian audience back to the movie theater.

What makes "Out of Sight" a grown-up treat is that the mixture of lust and longing is as flawlessly proportioned as the ingredients in a perfect cocktail.

A surprisingly wise and funny meditation on the nature of what it truly means to be a man.

Block has made a sad, delightful and half-accidental movie about his own parents.

Even with its abundant flaws and its willingness to embarrass itself this strange and extraordinary film never lost me and never let me go; it wrapped me in a dreamlike rapture and then in a sense of profound and nearly universal personal tragedy.

This is an immersive and powerful thriller, driven by terrific leading performances. It's mostly really good and then it wears out its welcome.

It's a warm, intelligent and highly contemporary comedy with just the right amount of edge, a terrific ensemble cast and a big, fuzzy golden retriever ready to knock you down and lick you like a giant lollipop.

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

Hellion offers a startling and memorable portrait of adolescent life in downscale East Texas suburbia, along with a white-hot breakthrough performance from teenage actor Josh Wiggins.

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

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.

What keeps the movie going, besides Softley's intelligent direction and Mathieson's inventive cinematography, is the actors' duet between Spacey and Bridges.

A rare and tender delight.

A sweet and sexy celebration of real women's real bodies.

So unapologetically loopy and lush and ridiculous that I found it irresistible.

Like every Swanberg picture I’ve seen, Win It All is a small character drama that, through improvisation, renders relationships impeccably; it’s at once specific and universal.

Might not be as intriguingly odd as the picture that inspired it. But like that earlier picture, it bristles with life and energy. It's a movie made with equal measures of bravado and humility -- the same mix of qualities you need to play Beethoven, Mozart or Bach.

An ingenious construction, much cleverer in psychological and symbolic terms than the story it tells, which mixes a schematic thriller and an on-the-nose fable about the corruption of American politics.