A privileged glimpse into people's private pain, a drama shot with the simplicity and immediacy of a documentary.

If you want to know years in advance what old-age nostalgia is going to look like for Baby Boomers, look no further than Pirate Radio, in which the sun always shines, the music is great and the sex is available, guilt-free and glorious.

Both a memoir and a history lesson, the film looks back on their late father - a crusading civil rights lawyer who later defended a host of unsavory characters - with a combination of love, admiration and bafflement for the man he was and the career he forged.

Some of the talking heads say entertaining or thoughtful things and some of the locations are quite exotic. But does this justify 98 minutes of screen time?

The sum here is less than the parts, which have problems of their own.

A movie about an obese Harlem teenager who's raped by her father and abused by her mother. It's depressing, devastating, harrowing and repulsive. But there are lyric flights of hope interspersed among that raw naturalism, and that's what makes this movie amazing.

What's impressive about Clooney in The Men Who Stare at Goats is how he marries his goofy, comic side with his dramatic side.

As it stands,The Fourth Kind boasts a creepy kind of joke - and a confusing kind of horror.

If some of the animation overdoes it, a lot of it is downright gorgeous. Few images this year have followed me home like the Ghost of Christmas Past, here imagined as a bright-flamed candle with the face of a child. It flickers. It whispers. It flies.

Setting out to make a cult movie is almost as strange as setting out to make a camp movie. Or setting out to make a movie that's so bad it's good. If you know you're doing it, you're not really doing it.

This isn't just a good throwback satanic thriller - it looks as if it was made during the era of satanist paranoia.

Director Anthony Fabian lets the story sell itself, and it does so partly on the strength of the lead performance by Sophie Okonedo.

Those who stuck with the troubled pop icon after his universe shifted from the charts to the tabloids probably will find equal measures of inspiration and heartbreak in the documentary. For everyone else, it's a strange offering.

For 70 minutes, Antichrist is a rare exploration of pain, featuring two actors collaborating with each other in agonizing and intimate ways. It also contains some of the best work Gainsbourg has ever done on screen. And then - if I put it more gently I wouldn't really be saying it - director Lars von Trier loses his mind.

The film's basic material, that is the history, is not without interest. And it must be admitted that every so often - for about 10 seconds every 10 minutes - we get a hint of the movie they wanted to make and hoped they were making: One about the thrill of early aviation and the promise of a young century.

Purists should have a field day enumerating the differences between the original "Astro Boy" and this high-gloss reimagining. Someone has to.

The movie is occasionally clever, but still inferior to last year's "Twilight" film, mostly because the story is so muddled.

Those willing to meet (Untitled) even part way will discover a comedy of intelligence and wit, with some strong performances.

The movie's narrative tension hinges on, well, nothing.

Not only a step back in time - to 1431 - but a step back in this martial artist's international film career.

The most daring thing that Jonze and Eggers have done is make a children's film that might not really be for kids.

Vigilante movies hold a firm place in cinematic history, but for them to work, the vigilante needs to be a sympathetic anti-hero.

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.