In this mess of a picture, Timberlake may be the rookie actor, but he's also the one to watch, the movie's North Star. The rest may as well be pinholes in a box.

Abduction sheds light onto one of the strangest episodes in recent Asian history, but the murk that hangs over North Korea is still too deep for much light to penetrate.

This is an important film. It's amazing that it exists, and the events it recounts are still more amazing. Everybody should see it.

This is a scrapbook, a happy jumble, of many of the things we instinctively respond to in movies: color, shape, sound and movement, all intensified by heightened emotion.

A very gentle-spirited picture, but it's not a self-consciously precious one.

This is a true fairy tale, and one of the finest fantasy pictures ever made, but please do not take your young children to see it unless you want them to be scarred for life.

A memorable and outrageous movie, but one more likely to be remembered as a massive folly than a whopping success.

The universe of The Dead Girl is an almost uniformly dreary one, whose women are all either dowdy or whorish.

If the filmmaking is in some ways awkward and elementary, Hickenlooper's attitude toward his subject is more complex, and more admirable.

A winsome, charming and irresistibly romantic picture, and also a profoundly self-involved one that has nothing whatever to do with Iraq or war or much of anything else besides the butterfly-like spirit of Roberto Benigni. But I guess that combination makes it a great holiday selection choice for certain disheveled, liberal family groups. Mine, for instance.

A solemn, haunting picture, but it's also a thrilling one, partly because of the sheer bravado with which it's made. It left me feeling more fortified than drained. Cuarón, the most openhearted of directors, prefers to give rather than take away.

The Good Shepherd, soft when it needs to be sharp, is all cloak with very little dagger.

There are so many emotions in We Are Marshall that there's hardly any room for football -- and when we finally get some, even THAT'S clogged with excess feeling.

Venus belongs to O'Toole. This is, hands down, my favorite performance of the year, largely because I love the way O'Toole (and the filmmakers) refuse to yield to the all-too-pervasive idea that it's "icky" for old people to even think about sex.

Another remarkable chapter in the career of Asia's most important living filmmaker. After "Pan's Labyrinth," this is the movie to see this season.

Eastwood is so busy humanizing Japanese soldiers that he ends up rewriting history.

Curran, his actors and screenwriter Ron Nyswaner have made an old-fashioned melodramatic epic that, as steeped as it is in the language and tradition of old movies, is never less than thrummingly alive.

Even as Sylvester Stallone's long goodbye to the heroic underdog who made him famous descends from pathos into silliness, and from fairy tale into hallucination, you can't help liking the big galoot.

There's so little love to be found in Dreamgirls. It's a product that promises magic, and yet gives us nothing to live on.

With The Good German, Soderbergh -- generally a terrific and creative filmmaker -- apes a style, and a way of seeing, that he clearly doesn't understand. It feels like a hit to the stomach.

Breaking and Entering is so bloodless that even Minghella's best ideas come off as wan and pale.

Best of all may be the narration, by Sam Shepard: His voice, the kind of voice God might have if he'd ever smoked Camels, frames this gentle but potent little story with good-natured authority, making it feel modern and ageless at once.

The picture's ending -- which is satisfying, possibly even happy, depending on how you look at it -- is almost inconsequential; it's the texture of everything leading up to it that matters. The Pursuit of Happyness, even within its slickness, gets at intangibles that allegedly grittier movies fail to capture -- like how heavy a wallet can feel when you're down to your last dollar.

Home of the Brave isn't exactly a subtle or a delicate picture -- it's an old-fashioned Hollywood movie, at least in tone, that's being released like an indie -- but it has some terrific acting and comes straight from the heart.

A tantalizing and beautiful picture made with tremendous integrity, and anchored by two marvelous performances, Isabel Coixet's The Secret Life of Words still, somehow, doesn't quite work.

The Holiday drags on for more than two hours, long enough for even the most ardent suitor to lose interest. The premise, so delectable at the start, quickly begins to feel tired and oversold.

Preachy infotainment that wants to offer thrills, too -- an uneasy hybrid.

A relentlessly gruesome, visually impressive and ultimately not very interesting movie with some pretensions to seriousness.