Deliciously dumb, reasonably well-made.

If Full Battle Rattle begins as surreal, almost goofball farce, with a bunch of beefy guys playing a fancy-dress version of laser tag in the desert -- aided by a bunch of rented Iraqis who'd rather be watching TV in suburbia -- it ends on an ambiguous and haunting note, much closer to tragedy.

Gibney's immensely funny and sad new motion picture Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson -- the "Dr." was a mail-order divinity degree -- is principally intended to rehabilitate Thompson and introduce his work to a new audience.

Nothing is surprising, that is, except the fact that the film has a big heart, a core of sweetness and tremendous cinematic ambition.

Hancock is just intriguing enough that I kept wishing it were better. But Berg doesn't have the subtle touch that this material needs.

Crisply and competently filmed, Tell No One is an intriguing sample of new-school French cinema at the more commercial end of the spectrum.

The picture feels weirdly, and disappointingly, disjointed, something that starts out as poetry and ends as product.

Fast-moving and bloody, enjoyable even within its unapologetically generic limits. But McAvoy is its real secret weapon: With his X-ray blue eyes and lips that look bitten with anxiety, he has the miraculous ability to fool us into thinking there's really something at stake here.

This explicit movie about a sexually insatiable 19th century courtesan emerges like an erotic dream.

Trumbo is a terrific picture, a blend of interviews and archival footage and readings of Trumbo's letters and speeches.

Get Smart could have been smarter. But like the show that inspired it, it's still smarter than it looks.

Offensive to Hindus. Never mind the Hindus; The Love Guru is offensive to pretty much anyone with a brain.

Roughly speaking, the characters in Kit Kittredge may be stereotypes, but they're stereotypes with soul. And they live in a very real place.

So subtle and subdued that it nearly undercuts itself. I'd describe it, in fact, as a film that doesn't quite work -- but the way it doesn't work is so distinctive and so interesting that it marks Jenkins as an exciting new face on the American indie scene.

The man who showed such promise less than a decade ago has been leaving a diminishing creative footprint ever since.

The Incredible Hulk suggests only that we've bottomed out on special effects: They're not necessarily getting better -- they're just getting bigger. Technically, Leterrier's Hulk is as realistic-looking as a rampaging green giant could be. But that doesn't make him credible.

Like all poetic inward journeys, My Winnipeg is likely to resonate with sympathetic viewers in unexpected ways. In viewing his apparently placid prairie city, and his apparently placid prairie childhood, as an intensely symbolic landscape of mystery and terror, Maddin invites all of us to view our own equally ordinary lives in the same light.

The movie "Munich" should have been. At the very least, it's got to be the first picture to use smelly-feet jokes as a means of parsing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But more than that, it's a mainstream movie that dares to make jokes about the kinds of complex political realities that most of us don't dare bring up at dinner parties.

So unapologetically loopy and lush and ridiculous that I found it irresistible.

Parker IS to blame for the self-consciousness of her performance. She spends much of the movie swanning, not acting: Nearly every movement, every gesture, seems conceived for the benefit of the camera, as opposed to the truth of the character.

It's an exceptionally well-made example of the kind of delirious, semi-Gothic, overcooked melodrama filmmakers from the Boot have long specialized in.

These people can behave well or poorly, but they were already bugs on the windshield of life before their unhappy collision.

It miraculously pulled off the effect of feeling like a surprise: The picture both fulfilled some vague, unexpressed hopes I didn't know I had and also left me with the sense that I'd just seen something I wasn't quite prepared for -- the kind of contradiction that great showmanship can bridge.

Prince Caspian is elaborate filmmaking, all right. It's the magic of the human touch that's missing.

This isn't a picture filled with wonder and a sense of fun; it's so jaded and crass that I almost wonder if it's a highly unscientific experiment designed to gauge how little audiences will settle for these days. Manic and multicolored, Speed Racer is an excess of nothingness.

I'm not big on those Pauline Kael-style encomiums to great actors in mediocre material, but that's exactly what we've got here. Stevenson is so incandescent -- so funny, so vulnerable, so awkwardly sexy.

Director Michel Hazanavicius captures the jet-age atmosphere, form-fitting wardrobes, jazz-ethnic soundtrack and bouffant hairdos of JFK/de Gaulle-era espionage films in perfect detail, but it's Dujardin's performance as the suave, confident and utterly clueless Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath (to Francophones, a name that drips with phony aristocratic pretension) that gives "OSS 117" its edge.

As it is, it's too restrained, too often -- too eager to gallop toward postcard sunsets on the beach when tequila shooters and lap dances are what the moment calls for. You'd think the combination of Diaz, Kutcher and Vegas would be good for at least a little sexy, silly fun. But don't bet on it.