In the Loop is clever and lively, but it isn't sharp or nasty enough to cut very deep; at best it's just a peppery trifle.

A feverish, breathtaking tour through Mexico City high and low, an explosive, mosaic-style portrait of our continent's largest city.

Announces the arrival of a director radically out of step with the dominant conventions of American moviemaking, one who blends a social-realist vision and a passion for cinematic poetry.

A modest and tightly focused picture, and its very directness makes it piercingly intimate.

It’s a riveting, man-on-the-run genre movie, almost a combination of “Black Hawk Down” and “After Hours,” rather than an allegory or a historical treatise.

Cowperthwaite builds a portrait of an intelligent but profoundly traumatized animal who was taken from his family in the North Atlantic as an infant, and has been driven to anger, resentment and perhaps psychosis after spending his life in a series of concrete swimming pools.

A lush, modern valentine to old-fashioned sentiment, and to old-fashioned moviemaking, too.

For a big-budget action movie Spider-Man 2 is modest and not assaultive -- it has a boring decency.

When We Were Kings, which was put together by Taylor Hackford and Leon Gast, is a patchy movie that fails to rise to the grace and articulation of its main attraction. But it has Ali, and when he's on-screen, that's enough.

This is one of those moving, tragic and triumphant secret histories of American culture where the biggest surprise is that no one’s told it before.

It is a very expensive-looking, very flashy entertainment, albeit one that groans under the weight of clumsy storytelling in the second half and features some of the most godawful dialogue this side of "Attack of the Clones."

A masterful and often deeply moving portrait of a volatile American genius, a portrait that goes far beyond one man, one family and one rain-sodden small town. It depicts the society that nurtured and fed that genius, and that made his unlikely creative explosion possible, as being the same environment that poisoned him — and suggests that the rise and fall were inextricably connected.

You don't have to know the first thing about modern dance to be transported to an alternate state of consciousness by Pina, which is utterly free of Wenders' cloying sentimentality (perhaps because it's an elegy for a dead friend) and might be the first of his films I've loved all the way through since his 1987 masterpiece, "Wings of Desire."

It's a distinctive, ominous and hypnotic work of cinema.

Instead of sticking with the familiar, Scorsese has followed his impulses into something that feels entirely new but is still distinctively his. He has made a potential holiday classic, an exciting, comic and sentimental melodrama that will satisfy children and adults alike and reward repeat viewings for many years to come.

Fast-paced, often hilarious fun and involves an imaginative and deeply weird use of cutting-edge digital animation.

It isn't likely to drive anybody out of the theater -- although getting people out of the house to see a meticulous, minimalist study of madness and memory may be another story.

Ultimately Gordon's movie becomes both a hilarious story about an unbelievable collection of arrested-teenage morons and, yes, an inspiring fable of persistence and redemption. I haven't mentioned this movie's fabulous addition to the English language yet, so here it is: the verb "to chumpatize."

Unlike so much contemporary horror, it's devoid of sadism and mean-spiritedness. The looseness Raimi allows himself here results in an especially joyous kind of filmmaking, the sort where the filmmaker's delight in scaring us (and making us laugh) becomes part of the movie's fabric.

Bruno Dumont's Hadewijch is one of two small-release art films this season that deliver nuanced and fascinating portraits of faith.

But at his best - and his new movie, The Day He Arrives, is among his very best - Hong offers a strange mixture of magic, mystery, rueful melodrama and dry comedy that's like absolutely nothing else.

It’s so assured and accomplished, so rigorous on both a human and technical level, and so clearly driven by love for this harsh landscape and its hardened people, that I was entirely swept away by its characters and their story.

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.

Comes off not as topical but as opportunist. The picture is brushed with a fine glaze of slickness, a product sealed in a blister pack. It's like airplane air -- it has a packaged freshness that isn't really fresh at all.

I can admire the professional flexibility that leads Van Sant from slow-motion, half-experimental works like "Paranoid Park" or "Last Days" to an inspirational, Oscar-season package like Milk, but I wish he could split the difference between his two modes more effectively.

Not without its own bleak integrity. But the movie wipes you out and leaves you with nothing, not even the feeling of exaltation that can be present in the most tragic works of art.

Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of chop-socky, and Enter the Dragon represents his finest work.

Although Cutie and the Boxer is one of the most unsentimental and unstinting portraits of marriage ever brought to the screen, there’s considerable hopefulness and love in it, and it illustrates the adage that whatever you can survive will ultimately make you stronger.