It's a shame when an actor like Sylvester Stallone, who's always at his most appealing when he just hunkers down and lets himself be a big galoot, feels he has to make a bid for respectability.

A moving and profoundly upsetting portrait of life near the bottom of the global power pyramid.

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.

An art-house horror movie, and like most art-house versions of genre films, all the vitality and juice of genre conventions have been sucked right out. The irony of the movie is that it puts you into the same torpor that's supposed to be afflicting the characters.

Just about gets us off the ground on its dreamy, feathery angel wings; it just doesn't have the strength or the stamina to keep us aloft.

There are some yucks in this ludicrous movie, but what was amusingly imbecilic at 20 inches becomes simply simian at 20 feet. To paraphrase SCTV's fishing louts, some things just don't blow up real good.

This is a lovely film directed with delicacy and taste, profoundly alive to the rhythms of its actors and characters, which gives its superlative British cast of stage and screen legends the time and space they deserve.

I really enjoyed watching Prometheus almost the whole way through, and I'm looking forward to seeing it again. It's an enjoyable thrill ride, slicked up with a thin veneer of Asking the Big Questions. But do its so-called heroes really have to be such blithering New Age idiots?

Candela Peña is sensational in the leading role, and the film is big-hearted, poetic, sweet, sad and romantic.

The picture's ending -- which is satisfying, possibly even happy, depending on how you look at it -- is almost inconsequential; it's the texture of everything leading up to it that matters. The Pursuit of Happyness, even within its slickness, gets at intangibles that allegedly grittier movies fail to capture -- like how heavy a wallet can feel when you're down to your last dollar.

Gives no indication that Jean-Luc Godard has anything left to say that is worth hearing, no indication that he has any drive or passion to continue making movies. What's on the screen is habit -- accomplished, rote, empty.

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?

Avenue Montaigne, is a delicious French pastry, tart and sweet, steeped in Parisian glamour.

One night in 1408 stretches out until it ends up feeling more like a routine three-day business trip. The scariest thing in it may be the way the clock radio has a way of turning itself on, loudly, of its own accord. The song is always the Carpenters' "We've Only Just Begun." Now THAT'S horror.

Director Michael Apted does a smooth, competent job, but like almost all his work, Enigma lacks excitement and a vivid personality.

Because the movie never fully engages us, it never quite manages to allay our queasiness about watching the boy's distress.

May have said more about race in America today than any other movie of last year.

Farrell looks like he's having the time of his 400-year-old life.

I was never bored, in four hours-plus. Whether or not it ends up becoming a great film (or films), this is miles and miles beyond anything I thought Soderbergh could create from this material.

It's by far the funniest and warmest movie Araki has ever made, with much less juvenile angst and much more command of his craft.

Lets you indulge your taste for soapy heartache without leaving you feeling that you have to wash the bubbles out of your mouth.

So ingeniously constructed that these meta-noir ingredients feel dizzyingly enjoyable, never hackneyed. In fact, the overheated melodrama of Identity is crucial to its method -- and the key, in some ways, to its narrative secrets.

(Harron) has made a passionless movie about a passionless man, and it's all supposed to add up to make us feel or even just think something, but what?

Team America, for all its outrageousness, is the first work from Parker and Stone that I'd describe as a failure of nerve.

This is a deliberately chilly and nerve-wracking experience, and one of the bleakest portraits of American society seen on-screen in the last several decades.

Schizo is in its way a taut and exciting thriller.