A wildly entertaining fantasy thriller that propels Russian cinema into the 21st century.

The film holds us rapt not through narrative suspense but through the eerie and demanding spectacle of profound moral courage, of a powerless good person in collision with absolute evil.

This flawed drama about a self-destructive young actress and her reclusive novelist father has its rewards, mainly in some good performances.

Douglas does his best acting while watching and reacting to what he sees on screen. If this ends up being his cinematic swan song, it will not have been a bad way to go.

A brilliant and irresistible counterfactual overview of American history.

The film has a little too much of the "new adventures" feel, but it's still fun.

A ridiculous teen horror movie that piles on more than enough dry humor and freshly moistened gore to satisfy its lowbrow audience.

I like it for the thing it is, a reasonably solid B movie, and I like it as one in the continuum of bizarre Ford vehicles that combine high-stakes action with household horror.

A graceless, embarrassing effort.

A film about profound ideas deserved more imagination.

If London were a comedy, it just might work. Instead, it's a dead-serious marathon of angst from cool kids old enough to know they're mouthing cliches.

A snapshot of a fabled career that's of little interest to anyone outside Young's fans.

Entertaining and compelling.

It's a weighty and visually interesting movie that unfortunately doesn't have a strong message beyond its overwhelming bleakness.

Something is wrong with A Good Woman: The lightning never strikes. It's never quite alive.

Even the element of surprise isn't enough to save this film, which has too many slow parts and features an ending that's extremely tepid by 21st century horror movie standards.

Each time Something New touches on something controversial, it quickly retreats to some silliness.

Fascinating and distinctly politically incorrect.

It's reassuring to see Steven Soderbergh return to riveting down-and-dirty filmmaking with Bubble.

A formulaic, predictable and yet reasonably likable picture.

The result is an incredibly disorganized movie with a few funny scenes -- most of which are revealed in the commercials.

Underlying the story is sadness, a sense of mystery and a quality of pain. Enjoy the movie for its surface pleasures, but when it's over, it's those subterranean qualities that will keep it lingering in the mind.

It takes just the first shot to get sucked into Breaking News, the latest bit of destruction from mayhem master Johnnie To, and it's a doozy.

An innocuous, fluffy little nothing of an almost-pleasant movie.

The film is obvious, weak and scattered and seems more like a practical joke than a work of genuine passion. It is without exaggeration one of the most blindingly boring films I've seen in years.

A workmanlike effort -- a precision piece of filmmaking that provides education for children and a refresher course that adults can benefit from as well.

A highly amusing combination period film and mockumentary.

Perhaps the humor has been lost in translation.

A funny and appropriately skewed comedy.

A somber polemic that presents a convincing case against using war as an economic booster -- although, Jarecki argues, that is precisely what the United States has been doing under every president since Truman.

A Christian-themed film about redemption with almost no redeeming qualities as entertainment.

Humorless, confusing and not very fun to watch.

A loose, amiable documentary tracking several decades in the life of this most unusual farmer.

A series of vignettes that are edited in much the same way one might click from one random Craigslist posting to the next, the film is a fun and free-form celebration of the site's communal spirit and only-in-San Francisco ethos.

If you can get past a few swear words, the film's simplicity makes Glory Road a good starting point to get young kids to talk about racism.

This harmless bit of fluff lacks the element of surprise but is not without random charming moments supplied by its incandescent star.

Everything connected with the lovers, who are the point of the movie, is either ordinary or unwittingly funny, and the laughs come early.

The phrase "lesbian comedy" is not exactly an oxymoron, but April's Shower is still a rarity, an expansive, talky and often zany romantic farce, with lesbian characters at its center.

Berlin is still a subject very much worth exploring on film, and his observations as an aged man are even more fascinating than the statements he made as an artist in his prime.

A viewer of the film misses any sense of what distinguishes a great Cartier-Bresson picture from a good one, never mind a bad one. And the photographer himself cannot have been happy with the short shrift the documentary gives to drawing, which occupied him through most of his last decades.

At its exhilarating best, Following Sean is reminiscent of the lauded British documentaries that began with "7 Up.''

An informative and valuable documentary about the past 30 years of messy times in Peru, but it is also frustrating.

Accomplishes the near impossible, bringing a fresh perspective to a horrific subject.

The prologue sets a simpleton tone that, distressingly, continues throughout.

Allen's most satisfying film since "Bullets Over Broadway" (1994) and his most compelling since "Crimes and Misdemeanors" (1989).

What's Christmas Day without a good serial killer movie?

A light film, airy, likable and set in Venice.

The movie has that fatal triptych that is becoming Reiner's romantic-comedy signature: drippy sentiment, zany scenes that trivialize the characters and a horror of adventure.

A masterpiece.

Strives for an airy, merry amorality, but it never quite achieves liftoff, though at times it comes close.

An unlovable movie. It's morally ambiguous, which means there's no real rooting interest. It's episodic, with the same kinds of episodes repeated over and over, so there's little sense of forward motion. It feels philosophically and politically confused, so there's no message to take from it.

In the important things, in all the ways that really count, Caché is a handsome fraud.

The movie's shockingly tasteless setup is also its secret weapon. Despite many scenes in The Ringer that could individually be viewed as politically incorrect, audiences will be laughing with the athletes most of the time.

One of the most visually sumptuous movies you will see this year.

A few amusing moments mixed in with the painful ones.

The new film's social message comes through loud and clear, but something in the comedy seems constrained -- effortful, yet muffled. It might be a matter of the right tone never having been found.

This is Merchant-Ivory's kind of showmanship, the unflashy adult variety of movie magic that they made their hallmark.

Bezucha made something perverse, a feel-bad holiday film about a repellent family, with a milquetoast dad and a smug, devious harpy of a mom.

The film is dreadfully slow without much in the way of rewards.

Most of the bits and performances have a hard time making the transition from stage to screen.

Hoodwinked is a computer-animated, "Shrek"-style satire of "Little Red Riding Hood" that offers a few laughs but overall is pretty tired.

On its own terms, the film is overlong, repetitive and lacks impact. Even if this were the first gorilla-in-love movie ever made, audiences would come away vaguely dissatisfied, suspecting there was an intriguing idea buried somewhere in here, but it didn't quite come off.

Carries a lot of emotional power.

Too labored and cliched to incite passion in an audience.

Has an old-fashioned feel, as if it had been made in the period of its setting. I mean this as a compliment.

A movie of intelligence and power, of beauty, universality and largeness of spirit.

The World's Fastest Indian might be the world's worst title for a charming, slice-of-life biopic.

It's hard to sit all the way through Aeon Flux while fully awake.

Transamerica provides the frame and the occasion for one of the year's best performances, Felicity Huffman's as a woman trapped in a man's body who's passing for female while awaiting a sex-change operation.

Succeeds as both education and amusement.

Well made, but it's a talkfest that wears its stage origins on its sleeve.

Tender but unsparing, heartfelt and unapologetic.

Gripping.

The film is so pitch perfect and realistic, it seems you are there with these people, watching their lives unfold before you as it happens.

The casting, at least, is magical. Plowright shows both her character's strength and her heartbreaking vulnerability, sometimes at once.

What a waste.

May be a good tactical move for the artist's career, but it's a bad movie.

A thoroughly enjoyable three-or four-gimmick comedy.

Columbus' schizoid approach works more often than not.

A turkey.

There is little debauchery to be had in Laurence Dunmore's adaptation of The Libertine. In fact, hedonism has never looked so bleak.

It's hard to get swept away when you're struggling to figure out who's doing what to whom and why.

An uplifting documentary.

Offers a brew of wondrous chimera combined with the wonders of human nature.

A passionate, chronicle of an extraordinary artist, and a love story that can't be beat.

Known for his visual images, Jordan outdoes himself in "Breakfast,'' a feast for the eyes.

By focusing on one family's dilemma, the movie brings home the messy Middle Eastern situation in a way easier to relate to than the headlines and opinion pieces.

Deliriously charming.

Poor casting is compounded by a ludicrous script.

The movie harks back to a time before state-of-the-art technology when writers and directors had to rely mostly on imagination.

The attempt to be clever is transparent.

Can't sustain its narrative for a full 95 minutes.

Funny, original, occasionally poignant and almost all of it too dirty to repeat in a newspaper.

A warmhearted film.

Missing a purpose.

As cluttered as the movie gets before the ending, it's funny throughout, with some 1970s and '80s music thrown in to keep adults happy.

A harsh and thoroughly unromantic examination of the scarring effects of war.

The Dying Gaul has the best kind of story in that it unfolds as a series of surprises, and yet every step, twist and turn seems inevitable in retrospect.