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.