A throwback to all those guilty pleasure action movies.

The spellbinding power of this almost certain Oscar nominee for best documentary comes from its chilling subject matter.

With the aid of a charmingly offbeat story and a jolly good dialect coach, the stars leave you thinking, well done. Their spirited performances help cover up glaring holes in the plot.

Watch Infamous on its own. It's a worthy film in its own right, with its own virtues.

Immediately shoots to the top of the list of the year's worst movies.

While it's filled with quality actors, this James Bond tale for tweens feels like something you should be getting for free on television.

There's no attempt at greatness here, just a fabulously successful attempt at a good crime movie. The Oscar-bait self-consciousness of "Gangs of New York" and "The Aviator" is gone. In its place is a buoyancy, an impish delight in telling a harsh urban story in the most effective terms possible.

Perrotta and Field succeed, not by guessing, but by knowing this world. They understand it enough to see it with cold precision -- and to approach it, at times, with disarming warmth. The characters aren't types, but people.

This will never be the movie of the month, but you could do a lot worse at the multiplex.

A lot more enjoyable if you can leave your cognitive skills at the door.

Taken as a whole, these films constitute one of the greatest uses of cinema a documentary filmmaker has ever devised. Like the other films in the series, 49 Up is alternately touching and mundane, part soap opera, part reality show and part anthropological study.

A film of stark and galling contrasts.

Mitchell may be another Russ Meyer -- a dubious honor -- but he's no Tony Kushner.

A canny piece of filmmaking, sure to absorb both audiences familiar with Kushner's plays and those who know little or nothing about him.

An absolute delight, combining the cheap thrills of a biopic with the gentler, but more lasting, pleasures of a brilliant character study.

When Costner is good, as he is here, his acting has a purity to it, an unspoken moral dimension. Underneath the sensitive, stoic facade is a loquacious, intellectually alert actor with an encyclopedic understanding of the film tradition he occupies: the rugged, humble movie hero, embodied by the likes of Gary Cooper and Henry Fonda.

This is the animated children's film equivalent of "Another 48 Hours."

It would require a near-lethal injection of nitrous oxide to induce laughter.

Compelling.

Fortunately, there are many concert sequences to keep the film from being more than one awkward silence after another, and onstage the Pixies still sound great. But watching the movie is not as much fun as listening to the old records.

A 2-hour, 20-minute bore-de-force of virtually dialogue-free angst.

Unlike Sean Penn's demagogue in "All the King's Men," you're able to forget that Whitaker is acting. He embodies the role. When clips of the real Amin are shown at the end, it's almost shocking to realize the extent to which Whitaker has become him.

Recalling the earthiness Broderick Crawford brought to the original, I couldn't help thinking Gandolfini should have been cast as Willie.

This is the "Godfather II" of tasteless prank films.

The movie is an enjoyable but flawed attempt at an epic story, with too much of the best action concentrated in the beginning.

Kind of a bore.

At heart, all documentaries aim to be important films. Few actually pull it off. Minor flaws and all, Jesus Camp is among the year's most important films, if only because it forces us to learn about an America we seldom see and seldom want to see.

There's a lot of interesting material here, but Rachman doesn't offer any real analysis of his own, and the film suffers from a lack of narrative focus.