Bridges performance in Crazy Heart, for my money the finest male performance of the year, reels us right back to understanding why: Instead of dressing up words, he sends them out naked. It's everything he subtracts that matters.

A perfect storm of a movie disaster: You've got good actors fighting a poorly conceived script, under the guidance of a director who can no longer make the distinction between imaginativeness and computer-generated effects. The result is an expensive-looking mess that fails to capture the mood, and the poetry, of its source material.

A mildly rousing and reasonably satisfying picture about one man's efforts to mend the rifts among his countrymen.

It doesn't matter if the movie around Firth is a good one or a lousy one: Either way, I wouldn't be able to explain how an actor could come up with a performance as subtle, in both its heartbreak and its magnificence, as this one is.

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.

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.

As crafty and compelling as Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell's Until the Light Takes Us is, it may go too far in its understandable desire to correct the bias and prejudice of mainstream journalism.

This is the kind of work a great actor does when he's not preoccupied with giving a great performance. Its very casualness is its big selling point.

John Hillcoat's The Road is an honorable adaptation of a piece of pulp fiction disguised as high art; it a has more directness and more integrity than its source material, the 2006 novel by Cormac McCarthy.

The sweetest, most sincere romantic comedy to come along in ages, and a luminous love letter to a great American city.

The finest effect in this visceral gouge of a picture is Korean pop star Rain.

A sweet, modest snapshot of a long-lost time when a bold kid with a showbiz dream and a little luck could actually get somewhere, and if he could sing and dance to boot, his chances of success would be even greater. Zac Efron fits right into 1937; in 2009, he's a lost boy.

New Moon, on the other hand, merely follows a dictated formula. It's a cheap, shoddy piece of work, one that banks on moviegoers' anticipation without even bothering to craft a satisfying experience for them. Its pandering is an insult.

Less like a movie than an interpretive-dance piece, with Cage as its lurching, depressed-satyr star.

This really is Cruz's movie: Almodóvar is her North Star -- following his lead, she's always found her surest and most graceful footing as an actress.

It's a movie on the Hollywood scale that has so much of the Asian spirit. It has drawn the Asian audience back to the movie theater.

2012 is totally, certifiably nuts, without being quite as off-the-wall kitschy as Emmerich's last special-effects extravabanzoo, "10,000 BC."

Anderson has pulled off the most elusive of goals: He's made a nonchalant masterpiece, a movie that feels dog-eared and loved before it's even reached our hands.

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.

Kelly is devoted to telling his stories visually -- except when he's not. And the second half of The Box, unfortunately, underscores everything Kelly, as a filmmaker, wants to be and just can't.

The performances are so plainspoken and direct that they manage to push the material beyond the confines of a mere social-problem tract -- as played by the cast, these characters aren't symbols of inner-city hardship, but people.

The 3-D film is flat, the CGI-enhanced characters oddly waxen. In the center of the action is Jim Carrey -- or at least a dead-eyed, doll-like version of Carrey -- playing Scrooge, the ghosts, a younger version of himself, and probably a dozen other parts. As a general rule of thumb, one Jim Carrey is plenty for any movie.

There's no doubt we need more movies for grown-ups, with jokes that don't hit us over the head, but The Men Who Stare at Goats doesn't fit the bill. At best, it might hypnotize you into a stupor.

A clever picture, and something of a novelty -- it's not going to change the face or direction of horror filmmaking in any drastic way. But it's fun to watch something that's so obviously made with love.

Watching it, I saw him from some new angles -- painful as well as celebratory -- and I realized that this isn't it: This, as with Elvis' posthumous career, is only the beginning.

Amelia is a stunted epic, an ambitious and handsome-looking picture that tells its story in the dullest, most confusing way possible.

Disjointed and disorganized, and it meanders when it needs to gallop.

Taken as a whole, Antichrist is a gorgeous, mesmerizing construction, and almost every one of its frames shimmers with demented, imaginary life... It offers more proof, if we need any, that von Trier is one of the most accomplished cinema artists of our time, and also perhaps the most deeply trapped in his own head.