Gamely tries to capture a vast, twinkling cityscape with not one love story - but 11 little ones, a few of them overlapping.

The Maid would have been worthwhile just as a showcase both for good acting and for the director's virtuosity. But the movie's ultimate virtue is its humanity.

Hornby's humane and humorous screenplay is true to the film's title: In short order, young Jenny finds out important truths about identity, glamour and how adults really think and live.

It stands out as one of the best films of the genre, on the strength of the storytelling and wonderful performances.

Too bad the movie is spoiling the view.

It's an assaultive work about an assaultive fellow.

It's funny, clever and marginally educational.

Something of an elegy to modernism.

Beyond question, the results are overstated, outrageous and wildly juvenile. But they're also a hoot to watch.

The movie is funny, definitely funny. But underlying the humor is a vision so bleak, so despairing and so utterly hopeless as to make "No Country for Old Men" almost look cheerful.

For all the hip checks and bloody noses, it doesn't have a mean bone in its body.

Yet, even at its worst, Zombieland is better than most movies of its kind - disgusting but not too disgusting, and with a few laughs.

Ricky Gervais, instead of resting on formula and on a familiar persona, uses his first opportunity as a big-screen actor-director to make an original comedy that expresses some real thinking and feeling.

The final message is a strong one: Even when the starting forward is one of the best high school players ever, basketball is still a team sport.

The bad news is that the characters and situations are platitudes and the story is so heavy-handed that the film is hard to sit through.

It's a celebration of a shady landmark, but also a lament.

Connoisseurs of straight-to-video mayhem will revel in the latest chapter of the "Universal Soldier" franchise, which manages to strike that delicate balance between over-the-top ridiculousness and well-crafted filmmaking. [28 Feb 2010, p.Q28]

Provides a powerful look at the complex condition of autism and family dedication.

Succeeds in its modest goals of building tension slowly and generating a handful of legitimate scares. A few people in the audience were laughing during the first half of the film. No one was laughing during the long walk out of the theater.

If Max and his "Hell" collaborators feel stymied by the summer hit "The Hangover," they'd be justified to scream to the bromance gods that someone stole their film's concept. But those guys did it the right way, bro.

Coco Chanel is not the most lovable of heroines, but it's a strength of the film that director Anne Fontaine allows Tautou to make Coco as cold and ungiving as she does.

Owen is a magnetic, sensitive presence at the center of a movie that doesn't deserve him and that barely deserves to be seen.

Much of the movie has a structureless, documentary feeling to it, which is good and should have been pushed further.

The Providence Effect" is flawed, but it's still a moving film.

No matter where you stand, there's no denying "Capitalism" is flat-out polemic wizardry.

Much of the action onscreen doesn't ring true. Seasoned independent film director Henry Jaglom doesn't just explore the subject - he smothers the audience with it.

Dull and unilluminating.

Matt Damon's old-fashioned, brilliantly calibrated character turn as a corporate schnook-turned-whistle-blower; and Marvin Hamlisch's retro-groovy score. For the movie's first hour or so, the pair of them together make for four-star entertainment. The last half hour, not so much.

A dead-serious piece of activist filmmaking.

Delivers all the pain, melodrama and redemption that fans of the genre demand.

Enjoy the film for its witty dialogue and fun performances, but know that there isn't a single good scare. An episode of "Murder, She Wrote" has more thrills.

Klapisch's masterstroke was to place at the center of a movie a man, forced by circumstances, to stop and simply observe.

The main drawbacks of The Burning Plain are its intentionally coy narrative and a zero-hour revelation that's ill-thought-out and generates some pretty chintzy psychobabble. It's the wobbliest element in an admirable, complex and frustrating movie.

A peppy, bouncy documentary that is watchable and informative, although Tickell's celebrity name-dropping at times detracts from the serious message.

A fine-boned, luminous tribute to Keats and the sufferings of love.

Hushed minimalism is a rare and appealing quality in the cinema these days, but so little happens in 35 Shots of Rum that I'm hard-pressed to describe the plot. It doesn't exactly have one.

Anyone with any doubt as to the importance, in a functioning democracy, of American newspapers - with working newsrooms full of professional, paid journalists - needs to see this movie.

It may not be the greatest of cinematic exercises, and it often feels contrived, but this documentary somehow is enlightening, ridiculous, foreboding and funny at the same time.

Will wring some laughs out of anyone but the most humor-impaired.

Taking your very small child to this movie is only a slightly better idea than a trip to "The Final Destination." With that warning out of the way, this action adventure is a big treat for more mature animation and science-fiction fans and a triumph for the young director.

No film could convey all the complexities of the case - what Crude does is air the plaintiffs' claims and show the lawyers at work.

The production values are first rate. But you will wait in vain to hear a good reason for this movie's existence.

There's no footing in reality. Nothing about it feels authentic: not the blathering Mary, not the lifeless secondary characters, not the bromide-happy dialogue or the plot that twists less often than it spasms.

Isn't an instant classic, but it bumps along agreeably.

The acting is good, particularly by Faour, who plays the naive, zaftig heroine as warm and appealing despite her troubles. It's also nice to see veteran Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass ("Lemon Tree"), who plays Muna's sister.

There's valuable information here and some human stories that deserve to be heard.

A crisp and entertaining documentary.

Harris saw this brave new world more than a decade ago - and liked what he saw. To watch We Live in Public is to wonder if the world we live in is just a reflection of one man's neurosis - if Harris's mix of emotional distance and rabid self-promotion has simply gone viral.

Sad, funny and painfully honest.

A stark, minimalist drama.

Has all kinds of good intentions, but the comedy is too broad and the pacing is clumsy. And then there's the Andy Griffith sex scene.

This movie isn't horrible, but it seems like a waste for Zombie to keep revisiting someone else's world.

If you've ever wondered what it would be like to be there - to actually be there, man - this movie gets it.

It's not enough to say that Inglourious Basterds is Quentin Tarantino's best movie. It's the first movie of his artistic maturity, the film his talent has been promising for more than 15 years.

After leading the audience into some very inky satire, Goldthwait backs off.

A harmless, aimless, mildly funny and thoroughly predictable comic-romantic piffle.

It's more of a burst pinata than a story, a wild, kinetic jumble of images, ideas and flying-candy-bar product placement that would offend if it weren't so forthright.

For a thoroughly fascinating, true glimpse into the horrors that vanity and self-delusion can wreak, take some time to see The Baader Meinhof Complex.

An imperfect but intensely human movie that ponders the aftershock of violence, could have been an exercise in overacted sappiness. Instead, it's as hard and uncompromising as remorse.

Poorly written, contains too much hero worship and profiles too many events - including one that combines the high jump with motorcycles. But the documentary generates a remarkable amount of goodwill with its stunning visuals, which look breathtaking in 3-D.

There so much entertaining information in Art & Copy, a documentary about modern advertising, that it takes a while to realize we are being sold something

A completely appealing, beautifully preserved memory piece - a grand, colorful coming-of-age story with a candy box color palette and a standout performance by Renée Zellweger. It's a great story and a great crowd-pleaser.

The director has said that, though the story was inspired by the deaths of his parents, he hoped to make a film "brimming with life." He's succeeded.

Martel's vision is so visually rich and complex it borders on the impressionistic, but The Headless Woman would be nowhere without the precise tour de force performance by Onetto.

Every now and then, a film comes along that both defies and compels description. District 9 is one such movie: a science-fiction action vehicle so brilliantly and fully imagined that real life, when it resumes after the credits, arrives with a new sense of dread.

One of Miyazaki's most kid-accessible movies, but still an unnerving film.

It would really help to get into the right frame of mind before seeing The Time Traveler's Wife, because viewed from some angles - maybe most angles - the movie is ridiculous.

The least offensive teen movie in ages.

Feels forgettable, even though, in the moment, it's often very funny.

An empty exercise.

A clever, heart-pounding thriller, and a welcome return to form for the director.

Few movies are as delightful as Julie & Julia.

Only a temporarily compelling conflict for a feature-length film.

It's hard to deny that the first two-thirds of G.I. Joe is an enjoyable film, especially when graded on the curve of lowered expectations. Compared to other big-budget movies out this summer, it's pretty mediocre.

Bujalski has a serious talent for finding resonance in the mundane.

Director Abdullah Oguz gives us lots of nice scenery, but the simplistic story and characters strain credibility. What's more, the climactic plot turn is as hokey as it gets.

A cute movie, a little too cute and a little too aware of its own cuteness.

Funny People is a true brass ring effort, a reach for excellence that takes big risks. It's 146 minutes, with a story that's more European in feeling than American.

The caper-movie touches and cocky self-awareness may wear thin, but you can't discount the importance, or the horror, of that footage.

I'll stick out my neck and say that Park Chan Wook's wildly gruesome Thirst is the most whacked-out version of an Emile Zola novel ever to reach the screen.

Nowhere near as bad as "Coneheads," but still isn't worth your time.

Ultimately, this is not one of the Dardennes' masterpieces. They've made a few of those, but the effect of Lorna's Silence is more modest. It leaves the audience with neither a sense of uplift nor devastation, but, rather, with something more akin to intellectual appreciation.

It's all very foul, and completely entertaining.

Though the material might lend itself to heavy-handedness, director Ole Christian Madsen is steady, and he gets fine performances from the two leads and Stengade.

It's the speed of love, not the speed of light, that occupies Adam, a small, sweet movie about one man's widening cosmos.

The language is brilliant, and the laugh lines come so quickly that you'd probably have to watch the movie twice to get them all.

A two-hour nervous breakdown.

Funny though it is - is it could have been a whole lot funnier.

A lot of resources went into making G-Force - a lot of talent, a lot of money, a lot of marketing - and there's not much to show for it, not even some halfway imaginative 3-D gimmickry.

A perfect example of an Intelligent Bad Movie.

The plot relies heavily on pat betrayal, forced coincidences - and the sort of closure that lands, with a thud, in a tidy package of cliches. Yet some of the humor is delicious.

An irresistible feel-good movie about love gone bad.

A harrowing story about the will to survive amid the most brutal conditions imaginable.

This film is the sharpest since "The Prisoner of Azkaban." It is the most emotionally satisfying, blending spot-on comedy and adenoidal sexual tension, with scenes of gutsy vulnerability.

The bad outweighs the good and the cringes outnumber the laughs in Brüno, a disappointment from Sacha Baron Cohen, whose "Borat" was one of the funniest movies of the decade.

Humpday succeeds, often beautifully, by grounding its risque premise in the awkwardness and humor of real people trying their damnedest to communicate. A lot.

If only the projectionist could be persuaded to play the first 10 minutes over and over for two hours, this might be a satisfying movie. Unfortunately, the middle and the end feature a weak lead character, choppy fight choreography, humorless dialogue and computer-generated effects that look as if they came from the "Ghostbusters II" era.

Isn't a terrible addition to the teen coming-of-age party movie catalog. It just feels dated.