Watchable in spite of Greengrass as much as because of him. The story is good enough to make viewers want to ignore the photography.

An alluring piece of work, an artful whodunit that melds shrewd plotting with resourceful camera work and sympathetic characters that are fascinatingly, morbidly off.

Not a bad film. I'm going to stick my neck out and call it a good one - a small, dense chamber study of unhappy people looking for hope in the darkness, often literally.

Its single biggest failing - an affront to Lewis Carroll and the charms of nonsense literature - is that it makes sense.

A melodrama about three cliches in search of a bloodbath.

In its small, stubborn way, the film is a love letter to traditions that have endured since cave dwellers painted the walls at Lascaux.

Represents his (Smith) first act of cinematic cynicism, his first crime against his own talent. With this action comedy, he has given us 110 worthless minutes, a bad formula movie like every other bad formula movie.

If his two previous films suggested a director dipping a few toes in dark waters, Un Prophete marks the moment when Audiard took the plunge.

Eisner has almost nothing on his mind, no political rumblings, nothing behind the urge to upgrade vintage trash.

This is an unabashedly pro-democracy message movie. Judged strictly as drama, it's pretty routine.

Harrowing and unforgettable film.

Scorsese stuffs the film with heavy-handed art direction and piles on a ludicrously ominous soundtrack. The soundtrack is a constant reminder of the movie's importance and only highlights its unimportance.

Take the worst things about independent movies - the wallowing in an unpleasantness, the narrative unsteadiness, the next-to-no story. Then combine those with a hefty dose of light comedy. The result: the big, fat tonal mess that is Happy Tears, a charmless film about two sisters who come together to care for their demented father.

Here's another thought: This old man who can't leave the house has just made the first important film of 2010.

The movie's best special effect hands down is Anthony Hopkins as Talbot the Elder, who flounces around in a tiger stole and utters his lines with such a delicious madman twinkle you might want to snack on him yourself (ahhh-ROOooh).

There are lots of cameos, as well, too many to count. However, it is worth mentioning that singer Taylor Swift shows up in a couple of scenes, playing a vapid Valley girl, and she's very funny.

A whole lot of plot ensues - an entertaining mix of buddy movie, road trip, "Clash of the Titans," archetypal quest and a coming-of-age tale about misfits making their way despite, or because of, absent parents.

Holes in the script, overwrought camera work, dialogue that's embarrassing, and a plot device that's obvious 10 minutes into the movie - all these are major problems.

You promised only a slim plot, tidy morals and lovers with quaking loins. It was fun while it lasted.

Awesome, awesome action. Skimpy, skimpy plot.

It may not sound funny, but there's a bleakly comic air about the story, and a bit of surrealism, suggesting the most caustic side of the Coen brothers.

At its best, Ajami shows you things you never would have considered or imagined.

I don't see Edge of Darkness as a great movie, or a particularly exalted one, but I do see it as one made by people who know where the buttons are - and who know how to press them. Hard.

It boasts only loose ties to the 1954 romance "Three Coins in the Fountain." And it's best not to even think of "Roman Holiday," the gold standard for hanging, and driving, and doing as Romans do. Rent that instead.

Saint John of Las Vegas was a bad script that somehow got made into a bad movie with good people in it.

A straightforward, wickedly suspenseful man-versus-nature saga of the type that rarely gets made anymore.

At times, the script gets too dense with technicalities and boardroom arguments for lay folk to comprehend. But at its best, it humanizes the plight of families who cope day-to-day with disabling illness

What it's really about - and this sounds so boring, and so nothing, when in fact it's really rather wonderful - is people. Just regular people, a mother and daughter, whose lives are observed with economy and precision, and with an eye for the telling detail and the tense, revealing moment.

It helps that most of Creation is about the relationships - Darwin's with his wife and with his daughter. Even if we resist it, even if we don't want to be dragged in, the story of Annie becomes quite moving, almost unbearable.

Tooth Fairy would be substantially less likable without Johnson's native-born flair for self-abasement.

A dynamic story, sprinkled with some interesting ideas about the preciousness of culture and how societies might rebuild themselves.

Even as it stands, Fish Tank is a valuable movie, though it aspires to a social insight it doesn't attain and a psychological penetration it won't maintain.

A mostly inoffensive nothing of a film with one or two mild chuckles and lots of chop-socky commotion.

It's an interesting spectacle, but not enough to carry a movie.

Hawke is half-assed throughout, showing passion only when he's screaming like a little girl when something scary happens. The visuals have a dingy, unfocused quality, especially in the muddy visual-effects-enhanced backdrops. And some of the plot turns are awful. The vampire "cure" is so stupid, you'll want to walk out of the theater, even if you normally like this kind of movie.

A clever and often riotous burst of cynicism that pushes some pretty questionable ideas.

Virtually every word and plot turn is insincere, manufactured, unfelt and dishonest, and its portrayal of people demonstrates either an ignorance of human behavior or a disdain for truth.

The screenplay packs no particular surprises - some of the plot mechanics positively creak - but the leads bring some wattage and warmth to very modest indie fare.

Bitch Slap is garbage. It's self-aware garbage - garbage that explores and celebrates, in postmodern fashion, precisely what it means to be garbage. But that doesn't make it stink any less.

What makes The White Ribbon a big movie, an important movie, is that Haneke's point extends beyond pre-Nazi Germany.

This film is the closest we're going to get to anything new by Williams, and it's a respectable effort.

Guy Ritchie is the worst screenwriter in the world, but, to be fair, he is not the worst director. He is only the worst director of the people who actually get to make movies.

The film ends up landing in a confused middle category. It's neither a coherent, discrete work nor a zany tribute to the late actor.

The sum is a comedy that starts out slow and talky, picks up speed - and sexiness, and hysterics - somewhere in the middle, then drags to a stop when everyone starts confessing their feeeelings.

First, and perhaps most important, it should be disclosed that my 4-year-old laughed pretty much nonstop throughout Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel. This was his "Citizen Kane."

Director Corneliu Porumboiu ("12:08 East to Bucharest"), with his deadpan style and probing intelligence, is someone to keep an eye on. Using a minimalist style, and possessing the courage to risk alienating his viewers, he has created a movie full of resonance.

Sometimes it's unpleasant, sometimes it's insincere, and for long stretches it's boring.

Vast, beautiful and meticulously detailed.

John Lennon once said, "There's a great woman behind every idiot." This time, I'm counting seven of them.

If you like this sort of movie - and actually, cards on the table, I like this kind of movie - you will not be sorry you saw it. But you will not come away from the experience feeling that you've seen Victoria, young or otherwise.

Perhaps the idea of watching Jeff Bridges as a drunken, broken-down, down-on-his luck country music singer in Crazy Heart doesn't automatically sound appealing. But think this: "The Wrestler." With good songs.

Aimed directly at your inner 8-year-old, and it strikes home.

It's never less than worthy and entertaining, but the importance of Invictus doesn't broaden as it goes along. It narrows.

The Lovely Bones is difficult viewing, a meticulously crafted experiment that, it turns out, wasn't worth it.

It's hard to sell people on a movie about grief, but A Single Man deserves recognition for being about something real that usually goes unexplored: The grief from which there really can be no return.

Flawed, flaky and exasperating, it's held together by two powerful eccentrics.

Crisply funny and fleetly paced, it's in its quiet way one of the saddest things in the theaters all year.

Tells the story of Leo Tolstoy's last year from a refreshing new perspective.

Brothers has the careful observation, measured pace and lived-in feeling of a good European film.

A rule of thumb for characters in heist movies: If the idiots hatching the scheme swear it's "foolproof," it isn't. If they say they've got a rock-solid alibi, they don't. If they're convinced nothing could possibly go wrong, something will.

Now comes this American version, which turns out to be the exception, an American remake that's better than the European original.

Serious Moonlight is a tonal disaster, distasteful and sentimental by turns. It was probably a mistake to have Hines try to walk that same delicate line that took Shelly her entire career to master.

Strel is one strange duck, and you can only wonder that Werner Herzog, with his fondness for captivating weirdos, didn't get to him first.

It almost works. We almost care about her. A whopper of a plot twist late in the game explains Pippa's transformation as some kind of self-flagellatory penance, but by that point it feels like an afterthought.

The latest in a year filled with Armageddon movies such as "Terminator Salvation" and "2012," and it won't be the last, but it's the most chilling so far.

The animation, sparkling and graceful, also ranks as the studio's best traditional work in ages.

This is the weird thing, Old Dogs is not that bad.

It's a gorefest, a borefest and a snorefest.

Christian McKay who, as Orson Welles in Me and Orson Welles"gives what I believe is the most exact and uncanny screen portrayal of an historical figure, ever.

Never dull, but it's rarely more than gently entertaining.

It's that constant weirdness, coupled with Nicolas Cage's best performance in pretty much forever, that makes this depraved, sexually charged, over-the-top drama so much fun to watch.

It all adds up to an entertaining combination of suspense and melodrama, a movie that doesn't cohere too well - and veers toward the silly in its more-obvious plot mechanics.

Let's just say it: It's great there's a movie that makes teenage girls scream. Half the movies Hollywood makes are designed to make teenage boys scream, and those boy movies are just as ridiculous and a lot nastier than New Moon.

The movie as a whole isn't exactly ground-breaking, and some of the humor tanks. But it has enough action, laughs and candy-hued visuals to satisfy the target audience without plunging grown-ups into despair.

Defamation tries to give all sides a full airing, but it's not hard to guess the director's own feeling. At the end, he says, "Putting too much emphasis on the past, as horrific as it has been, is holding us back."

Anyone who enjoys stylized hyper-violence should be enthralled by this long, sweeping, murderously vivid dramatization of ancient Chinese warfare, circa A.D. 208.

Anderson injects such charm and wit, such personality and nostalgia - evident in the old-school animation, storybook settings and pitch-perfect use of Burl Ives - that it's easy to forgive his self-conscious touches.

There's something to be said for a formula picture done almost to perfection. In 2012, Emmerich gives you everything you expect, but gives it to you bigger.

A privileged glimpse into people's private pain, a drama shot with the simplicity and immediacy of a documentary.

If you want to know years in advance what old-age nostalgia is going to look like for Baby Boomers, look no further than Pirate Radio, in which the sun always shines, the music is great and the sex is available, guilt-free and glorious.

Both a memoir and a history lesson, the film looks back on their late father - a crusading civil rights lawyer who later defended a host of unsavory characters - with a combination of love, admiration and bafflement for the man he was and the career he forged.

Some of the talking heads say entertaining or thoughtful things and some of the locations are quite exotic. But does this justify 98 minutes of screen time?

The sum here is less than the parts, which have problems of their own.

A movie about an obese Harlem teenager who's raped by her father and abused by her mother. It's depressing, devastating, harrowing and repulsive. But there are lyric flights of hope interspersed among that raw naturalism, and that's what makes this movie amazing.

What's impressive about Clooney in The Men Who Stare at Goats is how he marries his goofy, comic side with his dramatic side.

As it stands,The Fourth Kind boasts a creepy kind of joke - and a confusing kind of horror.

If some of the animation overdoes it, a lot of it is downright gorgeous. Few images this year have followed me home like the Ghost of Christmas Past, here imagined as a bright-flamed candle with the face of a child. It flickers. It whispers. It flies.

Setting out to make a cult movie is almost as strange as setting out to make a camp movie. Or setting out to make a movie that's so bad it's good. If you know you're doing it, you're not really doing it.

This isn't just a good throwback satanic thriller - it looks as if it was made during the era of satanist paranoia.

Director Anthony Fabian lets the story sell itself, and it does so partly on the strength of the lead performance by Sophie Okonedo.

Those who stuck with the troubled pop icon after his universe shifted from the charts to the tabloids probably will find equal measures of inspiration and heartbreak in the documentary. For everyone else, it's a strange offering.

For 70 minutes, Antichrist is a rare exploration of pain, featuring two actors collaborating with each other in agonizing and intimate ways. It also contains some of the best work Gainsbourg has ever done on screen. And then - if I put it more gently I wouldn't really be saying it - director Lars von Trier loses his mind.

The film's basic material, that is the history, is not without interest. And it must be admitted that every so often - for about 10 seconds every 10 minutes - we get a hint of the movie they wanted to make and hoped they were making: One about the thrill of early aviation and the promise of a young century.

Purists should have a field day enumerating the differences between the original "Astro Boy" and this high-gloss reimagining. Someone has to.

The movie is occasionally clever, but still inferior to last year's "Twilight" film, mostly because the story is so muddled.

Those willing to meet (Untitled) even part way will discover a comedy of intelligence and wit, with some strong performances.

The movie's narrative tension hinges on, well, nothing.

Not only a step back in time - to 1431 - but a step back in this martial artist's international film career.