Leigh and his actors work mysterious magic in Happy-Go-Lucky. This is a movie about hitting the groove of everyday life and, nearly miraculously, getting music out of it.

Nights and Weekends knocked me out when I saw it last March at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas; I wrote at the time that it offered exactly the "prickly, flawed, urgent SXSW experience I'd been waiting for."

Thinking back on watching these performers, I see them mostly as an arrangement of bewildered actors awaiting orders, as if Ritchie hasn't bothered to tell them what he needs them to do. He’d sure make a lousy Mob boss.

His scattershot and ad hominem attacks against many different forms of religious hypocrisy don't add up to a coherent critique, and he's not qualified to provide one.

When Pegg is breaking protocols with his uniquely ballsy aplomb, dancing like a doofus or doing battle with Venetian blinds, the film almost flies.

The movie itself seems to be locked in a kind of adolescence; it never quite blossoms into maturity, into a fully rounded whole.

An extended metaphor for the condition of man, and boy is it extended. In the course of two hours that crawl by like four and a half.

The picture may end a little too breezily, but Demme knows we have to be left with some hope for these wandering souls. Someday, they'll find their way home; it just may not be the same thing as going home.

Ballast is an audacious and ambiguous debut from a filmmaker whose motives and aims are not as transparent as they seem.

LaBeouf shambles through the movie with an endearingly lost quality -- his savoir faire is of the hangdog kind, but it pretty much works. And Monaghan, with that upturned nose and those mischievous eyes, always looks like a woman in search of trouble.

The movie around Lane and Gere is unreal, a tortured construct, but they open a breathing space in its center.

A picture that's dramatically compelling in some places and plodding and didactic in others.

A fantastical sex farce, and a highly amusing one at that, without being the least bit momentous or memorable.

Ghost Town is a rarity, a contemporary romantic comedy that honors the traditions of the genre without checking them off some plasticized list. The picture is breathing, and alive, every minute.

If Appaloosa is something to look at, it's also unnecessarily lethargic. Even an intentionally slow-paced picture needs to have its own internal source of energy, and as a filmmaker, Harris can't quite get that motor running.

tThere's life at the center of The Duchess, in the form of Keira Knightley. She carries the weight of the movie around her effortlessly.

Beneath its movie star clowning, its awful-but-relatable heroine and its lightweight gags, Burn After Reading poses an implicit challenge to its viewers: Can you figure out why this comedy isn't very funny? Could that be because its central proposition is that the people in the theater are just as stupid, just as gullible, just as eager to be deceived as the people on the screen?

The whole vibe is so shrill and frantic that the truly accomplished actresses, like Bening and Bergen, are left to flounder. The less nuanced ones -- that would be you, Debra Messing -- are, to use the idiom of the movie, as pleasant to watch as a bikini wax is to feel.

Despite how easy it would be to write off Righteous Kill as one sorry excuse for lazy filmmaking, there is still something utterly mesmerizing in the palpable chemistry between the two leading men.

This third-act redemption raises Towelhead several notches, but it still ends up feeling like a well-acted and well-intentioned after-school special, a long way from the vividness and texture of Ball's television work.

A clanking, old-fashioned period drama infused with almost unbearable grief, Claude Miller's film A Secret has an enormous significance in France that it can never possess elsewhere.

The heart of the movie is not in its plot but in its characters and atmosphere. Castaneda, a nonprofessional actor who runs a towing company in San Antonio, gives a towering, Robert Duvall-style performance as a granitic man in late middle age whose internal world of pain and love and knowledge occasionally flickers to the surface.

May not be entirely original or entirely successful, but it's definitely fun to watch.

A lovely, warm, unforced film that gives you time to get to know its characters and isn't propelled by any artificial narrative conventions,

If this actually were 1968, the pipe-smoking sophisticates of "Esquire" and "Playboy" would be proclaiming I Served the King of England a nettlesome masterpiece. For whatever good it does this film today, I'll stick my pipe in my mug and agree.

Once you get past the question of why someone would make a movie this artificial in the first place and move on to the answer (purely for the hell of it), Sukiyaki Western Django is a blood-drenched, dynamite, often hilarious and uniquely weird big-screen entertainment.

Pearce may be the other big star in Traitor, and while his performance is serviceable, it doesn't cut deeply. Taghmaoui, as a radical motivated by moral certainty, is the real actor to watch here.

Statham moves with such easy grace that you don't have to work hard to believe him. And if he can stand up to Joan Allen, melting her predatory stare with his own molten gaze, then it's clear he's not just the prettiest guy on the prison block, but also the toughest.