I really don't understand why anybody thinks the wispy, bittersweet tale of long-distance love in Like Crazy is any big deal. Seriously, I liked this movie better last year, when it had Drew Barrymore in it and was called "Going the Distance."

If you're bored by the action scenes or the love story or the dopey domestic comedy, just wait three minutes for something else to come along - and whoever you are, you won't be bored by the musical numbers!

A compelling and unpretentious indie built around two wonderfully layered performances and straightforward storytelling. Give it a listen.

The result is a bombastic, flashback-ridden farrago of skulking villains, scenery-chewing actors, sub-"Ivanhoe"-style dialogue and what seems like a dozen pretty, flaxen-haired men storming in and out of rooms in snits.

The Rum Diary is enjoyable enough, after its digressive, episodic and voyeuristic fashion. But neither Depp nor Robinson seems quite aware that Thompson's story - both in terms of his brief career in Puerto Rico and in terms of his life - was at least as much a story of tragedy and self-immolation as it was of genius.

So, yeah - even if In Time descends from its gripping and thought-provoking premise into a mediocre chase thriller before it's over, it's still pretty damn satisfying to watch in the current climate.

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.

For the right kind of film buff, it's absolutely one of the most enjoyable pictures of the year - and if you've never heard of the guy before, I can't imagine a better place to start.

Paine seems delighted to root for all three companies and essentially declares a three-way tie, which may be fine for the moment.

It's a charming if conspicuously unfinished film, a half-riotous, half-idiotic send-up of the teen horror genre with a vaguely hip political twist.

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.

It's an intriguingly murky B-movie that should satisfy genre buffs.

It's as stylish and kinky as you could want, but compared to his recent female-centric melodramas ("Broken Embraces," "Volver," "All About My Mother"), this is a chilly genre exercise that casts his obsession with gender and sexuality in a harsh new light.

Can someone explain what Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman are doing in a chaotic and sadistic home-invasion thriller, shot in digital colors so radioactive they appear to have leaked out of the Fukushima nuclear plant?

I'm delighted to tell you that the new Thing was made by people who understand what the horror audience wants and don't treat it like a bunch of brain-dead children. Mirabile freakin' dictu.

I found it gorgeous, opaque and disturbing in roughly equal portions, but it was a riveting experience all the way through.

What's really depressing is that some viewers may be deluded into thinking there's something of substance in "Centipede II," when it's more like a DC Comics version of Pier Paolo Pasolini's notorious "Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom," with the sweeping condemnation of Western culture stripped out and the mean-spiritedness cranked to 11. If you want to check this out for a stomach-turning giggle, don't let me stop you. But please, let's not pretend it means more than that.

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.

If The Way is sometimes shaggy and inelegant, and flirts with sentimentality the whole way through, I was finally overcome by its dignity and sincerity, and by the rough, rude, gorgeous magic of its journey.

My Joy has a bleak, grotesque, near-perfect poetry in its soul.

What comes through repeatedly is that questions of law and reason, or guilt and innocence, played no role in the case of Omar Khadr.

What ensues is "Beaches" meets "Pineapple Express." Which, I've got to tell you, is pretty much what living with cancer is like.

A terrifically crafted little movie that bounces off current events and the nation's downbeat mood ingeniously, and that it variously suggests comparisons with the early work of Terrence Malick, Stanley Kubrick and the Coen brothers. Yeah, I think it's that good, but please note that I also said "little."

Rarely has a film with such a great cast and so many moments of terrific writing and such high dramatic goals been so messy and disorganized and fundamentally bad.

It's a generically enjoyable action film with a bit of hardboiled based-on-a-true-story-ness about it, and since it's set in the '80s and feels like an '80s movie, it seems a lot like something you must have seen years ago.

A fourth-rate Hollywood thriller that bungles a lot of thievery from better movies, is entirely bereft of suspense or excitement and features a leading man who absolutely, positively cannot act.

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.

A richly detailed and enjoyable American yarn.