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.