When you watch Greenwald's barrage of pirated Fox News footage -- his filmmaking techniques are clearly testing the outer limits of the "fair use" doctrine, and may yet land him in court -- it's an overwhelming experience well beyond the hoot-inducing moments.

It's essentially a mishmash of random ingredients, not very systematically presented and skewed to flatter its audience's presumed enlightenment.

One of the better multiplex options of this legendarily dismal summer.

Too conventional to capture Kaufman's insanity and too haphazard, too shapeless, to recapture Kaufman's energy in any meaningful way.

All the acting in it is flawless, an overflowing handful of polished jewels.

What Chan represents -- the humor and charm and the sheer physical beauty of seeing him in action -- as well as the lazy, ping-pong repartee he achieves with Wilson, is the essence of the casual, deceptively artless art of movies.

It's nicely made, well shot, and reasonably well acted, yet it's enough to filet the life force right out of you. We need stories in order to dream, and to live. But that doesn't mean we have to buy every crappy one that comes down the pike.

As this wry, dry and glittering near-masterpiece proclaims, life is full of wrongness, but also full of mystery and wonder.

Lawless offers a compelling, gruesome and instructive time-travel exercise.

Shot for shot, Sheridan's approach isn't radically different from Bier's. And yet Bier gives us more to read between the lines: In her movie, there's an unspoken moodiness, a crackle of sexual tension, between Tommy and Grace's Danish counterparts. That understated but potent secret ingredient is missing from Sheridan's version, as sensitive and as artful as it is.

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.