Slick, satisfying entertainment, as is the chemistry of Dunst and Bettany.

Director Ian Allen (a longtime playwright and stage director) has lovingly re-created the look and indeed narrative style of silent film -- and he's from Salt Lake City, so if he says Mormons are vampires with hypnotic powers, who am I to argue? I suppose this is a one-note joke, more in the style of '70s avant-garde camp than anything else. But, hey, at least it's a funny joke.

I'm still not quite sure why it's so compelling. I think this movie's appeal is overdetermined, as we used to say in sophomore Marxist-theory class, meaning that it derives from so many sources you can't keep track of them all.

This intelligent, breezy romantic comedy sings a love song to theater. Plus, there's a hunky lug and Mira Sorvino in drag.

Loud, trashy, implausible and exciting, The Fast and the Furious may not have much of a brain, but it's definitely got a pulse.

Amira & Sam came along and swept me off my feet, like Fabio riding a stallion. It largely works thanks to Starr and Shihabi, a pair of likable and restrained actors who build slowly from tangible discomfort toward an unexpected passionate chemistry.

This is a wonderful, passionate, well-nigh unforgettable adaptation of a great novel about the horrors of love, and the wonderful fact that at least some of us live through it and come back for more.

As with any other movie, it’s all a question of what attitude you carry into the theater, and whether you’re prepared to go where Malick wants to take you. All I can tell you is that once I surrendered to the ebb and flow of Lubezki’s images, the elegiac and almost anti-narrative mode, the sweet-sad blend of romance, eroticism and tragedy and the hypnotic score – which mixes contemporary electronic pop with Berlioz, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Henryk Górecki and Arvo Pärt – I really never wanted it to stop.

Smith deserves a better romantic comedy than Hitch, but at least he somehow manages to improve the material around him.

Even though Prize Winner ultimately asks us to swallow that golfball-size happy pill, Anderson and her not-so-secret weapon Moore are actually clawing their way toward something deeper and far more complex than a cheerful, embroidered slogan.

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.

It's as if the whole movie's on Prozac, only in this case the antidepressants are cuteness and romance.

Mendes doesn't care about people -- he's too busy making his art. And with Jarhead he pulls off, effortlessly, what so many pro-and antiwar individuals since Vietnam have tried so conscientiously to avoid: His movie is antiwar and anti-soldier.

May frustrate as many viewers as it delights (if not more) and it is almost relentlessly depressing, but it's also a principled, sharply realistic film that captures a highly convincing vision of Middle America.

Fortunately, Curtis isn't completely tone-deaf, and he does manage to capture the mood, and certainly the sound, of the era. The best parts of Pirate Radio take place in the movie's margins, in the vignettes and asides that don't necessarily have much to do with the plot.

The Reader feels weighty, all right; but it's an unsatisfying kind of weight, and Fiennes' presence, as the grown-up Michael, doesn't help much.

A lovely, faintly sinister travelogue.

The point, I think, is the sheer callous inappropriateness of comedy existing within the physical reality of the camps -- even the imagined reality of a movie.

Stoker, which plays something like a remake of “The Addams Family” mixed with “The Paperboy” — but without the laughs of either – belongs in a special category of movie badness, or perhaps two different but overlapping categories. It’s a visually striking but fundamentally terrible film made by a good or (some would say) great director.

Defiance comes off as plodding and workmanlike -- and even in the midst of Zwick's too-careful machinations, it's a movie that's unsure of what it wants to be.

The new black movies make those of us sitting in the theater watching feel as if we actually count for something. That good feeling can carry you through this movie's silly and dull patches.

I still have unanswered moral questions about the film -- unanswered because unanswerable, I suspect -- but it's a beautiful, wrenching, horrifying work of cinema, unlike anything I have ever seen or will see again.

After an uninspired middle period, the "Shrek" series has, like the revitalized character himself, roared back to form.

When the movie isn't hitting us over the head, it's spooning out the material to us like broth to an invalid, drop by flavorless drop. The excruciating pace mirrors the sluggishness of Morrison's sonorous prose.

Pathos isn't a cheap gimmick when it comes from the soul, and Li knows how to channel it, through his brain, his limbs and his heart.

Although the character of Aladeen seems awfully predictable by Baron Cohen standards, the movie itself veers from one hilarious, absurd and patently offensive setup to the next.

Craig never overreaches, and yet he accomplishes the unthinkable. He's not the Bond we ever asked for or hoped for, yet he's reimagined the character in ways we never could have foreseen. He's Bond with soul.

Happily Ever After is an exhilarating, joyous picture, but it's sometimes terrifying, too. It offers a vision of marriage as an adventure we embark on together, alone. If you didn't cry, you'd laugh.