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.