The movie's onslaught of psychobabble is the annoyance most likely to ruin your evening. Imagine getting stuck on a ski lift with Dr. Phil for nearly two hours.

Has a wicked sense of humor.

A confluence of perfection in every aspect of the film.

By the end, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly achieves a victory over difficult material, but celebrating that fact doesn't preclude recognizing the story is not a natural for movies and remains an uneasy match.

While trying to establish whether a conspiracy took place, the film attempts to solve the enigma that was Lee Harvey Oswald.

At first, the technique seems gimmicky, but finally it's as compelling a perspective as any to understand how these men passed through agony to some sort of peace.

The right mix of humor and horror and with not even a shred of sentimentality.

Wallows in bleakness and settles for sentimental gestures.

Gripping and ultimately poignant thriller.

An inane musical melodrama.

Adams does offer quite a turn: Portraying a version of Disney's Snow White, she owns the character, down to every warble and twirl.

Not a spectacular movie, but the action scenes are well shot, there's no shortage of R-rated gore and the plot moves along quickly enough to mask the fact that the whole endeavor is completely ridiculous.

Anyone can make a bad movie, but it takes a good filmmaker to make one as bad as I'm Not There.

While it's riveting throughout, The Mist is a bit bloated.

It's warm, witty and alive, with a fantastic cast and a belief in its characters that transcends its formulaic tendencies.

A lightweight and sentimental exercise that succeeds at little except maybe inspiring the viewer to go out and find a decent curry.

As for Beowulf itself, it's all about the visuals, which means that as soon as the novelty of 3-D wears off, the experience has been had.

Eventually arrives at a lovely place, but it arrives limping. Small but nagging problems drag it down, such as weird acting choices, bizarre casting and strange aging makeup.

This is Baumbach's best yet.

Helm gets huge bonus points for noticing everything that's annoying about modern children's films and including none of those things in his movie.

It isn't elegiac, but enraged. It doesn't look back with sorrow, but forward in dread. And it's made with a clear intention - to stop the Iraq war.

The character isn't just shtick, though. As Billy, Talen has staged many protests in Times Square and anti-shopping "interventions" at retailers, where the managers, to say nothing of the New York police, often have failed to see the humor - he's been arrested dozens of times.

A mess, and that's really a shame.

Feels positively Greek in its magnitude, a lament about fate, age, time and life.

This is just plain bad - and it's a surprise.

This is responsive, engaged filmmaking, the kind of movie they say Americans don't make.

Standard-issue slasher pic.

Beautifully filmed.

Might have been more effective as a documentary.

Both revealing and evasive.

A terrific documentary about forbidden love in the most heinous of places.

Ridley Scott gives it the grand treatment, 157 minutes worth, but in the end, it doesn't stack up as the portrait of an era (the 1970s, in this case) or an important tale of a criminal mastermind.

Has a few charming moments and a scene or two with legitimate hilarity, but mostly it's just mediocre.

Instructive as a portrait of activism.

One of the most direct and personal music documentaries ever made.

It's off in many directions - false in its details, false in its relationships, false in its emotions - but probably the first and worst thing that needs to be said about it is that it's also overlong and dull.

Its virtues are velocity, energy, innovative storytelling - and something that seems even more the province of young directors: a certain heartlessness and ironic distance in the tone.

A tearjerker that earns its sobs with heartfelt emotions.

Dan in Real Life fires on so many circuits that at times it's actually shocking how good it is.

An intriguing document, and the first significant film ever made about a former U.S. president.

Rarely rises above the level of a TV movie.

Chock-full of holes.

One more small thing: Every other scene in Saw IV starts and ends with a potential victim pressing "play" on a tape recorder, to the point where it's almost funny.

Exhilarating for Lynch diehards.

A well-paced and entertaining horror debut.

A story so good that maybe anybody could have turned out something decent.

A maddening film, maddening in a good way, but maddening nonetheless.

Despite some solid acting, the film is lacking in surprises. For all the suffering that these characters endure, there's very little payoff.

Outstanding in support roles are Alison Lohman, playing a friend of Jerry's, and John Carroll Lynch, playing a neighbor who befriends Jerry.

A quirky but surprisingly lighthearted dark comedy.

Worth the effort.

An enticingly risque saga of the 16th century monarch.

Follows a predictable format.

A gentle comedy, offbeat but never cute, never lewd and never going for shortcut laughs that might diminish character.

Sleuth"is that rare film that would have been better longer. You're not through looking at Caine and Law when the final credits roll.

A complex story.

Things are a little off. The style is gritty 1970s-style crime thriller, but the morals are straight out of 2007, and the movie is set in 1988.

Neatly, and often humorously, summarizes a very unhealthy situation.

An ambitious attempt at cinematic poetry, and how much they have succeeded depends on how well you can sort out its surrealistic meanings.

There's little illumination.

When you finally stop laughing, there is something to think about.

It works well as a film and a lesson about, as one open-minded preacher puts it, what the Bible "reads" about what it supposedly "says" about homosexuality.

It's funny in spots if you can tune out the Farrellys' ultra-crass jokes - along with any memory of the first movie.

Has a slow build and a strong payoff, but George Clooney is the element that holds it together.

No one emerges unpunished.

A mostly entertaining movie with built-in appeal to young audiences. The good news for parents is that it won't put them to sleep.

Never penetrates Cobain's circumstances or character.

A frustrating movie, a work of immaturity from a director who should be past the empty gestures and self-protective distance of his early work.

Trade is a total misfire, a strange attempt at making a buddy movie featuring a morose Kevin Kline and a 17-year-old Mexican boy looking for his kidnapped sister.

The multiple-story-line family drama is too cliche-ridden to be considered a great movie. But it's still a very good one, filled with excellent performances, entertaining writing and a final few scenes that are quite moving - even if you can see most of them coming at the end of the first act.

The two best things about this logic-challenged, predictable and overlong (110 minutes!) film are The Rock's performance - surely he's one of the more likable people in the movies, and here he handles physical sight gags with aplomb; and the parallel disciplines of football and ballet, which provide a way for father and daughter to understand each other.

The opening is spectacular, but the rest is fairly routine.

Stylized and visually arresting, with intense sex scenes that earned the film an NC-17 rating, Ang Lee's Lust, Caution is an immersion into another time, place and mentality.

This documentary has no bells and whistles; Bill Haney, the director and co-writer (with Peter Rhodes), sticks to the facts.

The ending is predictable to anybody who's followed the trajectory of outsourcing. Outsourced humanizes those affected by it - even if the story sounds familiar.

A big leap forward for Penn as a director and deserves to be one of the most talked about films of the season.

The film isn't very interesting because it isn't well made.

That closing-credits sequence is by far the funniest thing in the disappointing movie,

A mediocre college comedy that blends bits of "Revenge of the Nerds," "Mean Girls" and "Legally Blonde" and doesn't have much to show for it.

Ponderous, repetitive and lacking a single rousing action sequence.

An enjoyable if fairly predictable film.

While the songs are recycled, Across the Universe stands out just by existing.

Oversaturated with sweetness and light.

A thoroughly entertaining film by a director at the height of his ability.

For the most part it is an effective, disturbing and - a rarity for Haggis - subtle exploration of the stateside war story.

A similar blend of comedy and a grumbling skepticism about the essential goodness of human beings makes Ira & Abby feel, at times, like one of those great stage comedies of yesteryear transferred to the screen.

Mike Cahill's King of California reminds me of those '70s-era pictures beloved of the counterculture about appealing rebels who go down in flames of moral victory.

Mr. Woodcock may be a nasty tyrant, but he also knows his domain is small. "For Christ's sake," he tells Farley at one point, "it was just a PE class, you fruitcake."

Beautiful but flimsy film.

Jodie Foster and Terrence Howard are incredibly compelling and hold your attention despite Jordan's deliberately slow pacing.

With impressive clarity and sweep, The Rape of Europa recounts the Nazi theft and destruction of European art and architecture.

All the requisite talking heads pop up - Dylan, Springsteen, Baez - but it is Seeger himself who towers over the landscape. The filmmakers treat this aged curmudgeon almost too reverently, but it is hard not to be awed by this gentle, resolute soul because of the ideas he steadfastly and faithfully represented.

Difficult to watch, and the film is sabotaged by an impossibly naive lead character and the repetitive auditions that become gratuitously depressing.

The finest American Westerns have a characteristic that 3:10 to Yuma shares. In a way that's almost mystical, they suggest a truth beyond the specifics of the tale.

Plays like a movie that some teenage boy cooked up in his chemistry lab. There are lots of potent things floating around in it - sexual initiation, drugs, fantasy-land wealth, brute violence, primitive rituals, Diane Lane and Donald Sutherland - but the mix just sits there without producing any notable reactions.

For those of us too young, this will give you an idea of what it meant to watch those baby steps that led to one giant leap.

Attempts something startlingly original by melding light opera with soap opera.

Shoot 'Em Up is not only the title of Hollywood's latest descent into nonsensical mayhem but pretty much sums up the entire inane plot as well.