The picture is outrageously predictable and somewhat poky, but there's also something admirably bold about the way it so adamantly demands we swallow its hokum.

A finely balanced piece of comedic machinery.

That a movie can run on empty and still be so obscenely enjoyable is a pretty slick stunt in itself.

Weisz has never been better: She's joyously expressive and alive, but there's gravity beneath that milkmaid complexion. She's grounded even when she's being flirtatious. And Fiennes has never been more moving.

Almost utterly defeated by its subject's sardonic stonewalling.

Although The Brothers Grimm is partly an inventive fantasy, it's also a cluttered, jangly action picture, and there's too much noise and commotion for Gilliam's subtler ideas to really resonate.

Wonderfully acted and energetically filmed, and in fact it partly echoes a real-life pedophilia scandal that rocked Belgian society to its foundations in the '90s.

An important human and artistic testament -- a calm meditation on something no one can consider calmly.

This is a superb, delicately calibrated comic performance: Carell never allows the character to swerve into excessive cuddliness.

When Craven says "Jump!" we all do it at once, and giggle at how easily we've fallen under the spell. The key is that Craven is laughing with us, not at us.

El Crimen Perfecto is a joyride that leaves you feeling drunk and dizzy and swearing that you haven't touched a drop.

But if the storytelling is murky, the filmmaking is stunning and, more important, the passion for this city -- its people and landscape -- is pure.

A vital documentary in the truest sense.

No director yet has found the best use for Hudson, the role that will tap those terrifying and thrilling reserves that are just lying in wait. But Softley comes closer than anybody has.

Gripping: Even when it wobbles off-track, it has some juice to it.

It's one of the year's signature film experiences.

Herzog wants us to see a deluded nobility in this quest. Treadwell's flawed dreams were, in the end, all too human.

If the resulting film doesn't work equally well at all levels, Wood (who starred in "Thirteen") gives an astonishing performance that pushes it most of the way there.

Cheung is one of the finest actresses working today, an expressive, lustrous beauty capable of plumbing a boundless range of emotional hues. This is the greatest performance she's given to date.

The whole thing seems so perfectly good-natured that you settle in for some harmless, silly fun. But Dukes runs out of gas early on.

Well-meaning but remote picture.

You may feel lost or bewildered at times in 2046 (and I certainly did), and you may feel that Chow is suffering from self-inflicted wounds. But every new adventure with every new girl vibrates with possibility, and the filmmaking is so stunning that you may not care that this is less a movie with a plot and characters than a hermetically sealed universe of romantic regret.

Intelligent, visually rich filmmaking.

Among the most depressing films ever made...It's a stomach-turning tale of globalization at its very worst, though what any of this has to do with Darwin is unclear to me.

It's ostensibly about adults, but there's nothing remotely adult about it.

The picture itself is so ebullient and celebratory that it practically beams with perverted innocence.

This is one of those movies where you either give yourself up to its rhythms or give up entirely. It took me a few minutes to get used to it, but I found Tony Takitani absorbing and loaded with emotional power.

A prodigious, almost spiritual experience, a luminous, challenging art movie out of the Tarkovsky school that happens to be about a real war and its effects on real children.