From its first minutes, Mid-August Lunch establishes a special tone and quality that could only be Italian. It's a mixture of warmth and gentle farce, tender observation and absurdity.

About as close to pure mall fodder as you'll see.

Watchable in spite of Greengrass as much as because of him. The story is good enough to make viewers want to ignore the photography.

An alluring piece of work, an artful whodunit that melds shrewd plotting with resourceful camera work and sympathetic characters that are fascinatingly, morbidly off.

Not a bad film. I'm going to stick my neck out and call it a good one - a small, dense chamber study of unhappy people looking for hope in the darkness, often literally.

Its single biggest failing - an affront to Lewis Carroll and the charms of nonsense literature - is that it makes sense.

A melodrama about three cliches in search of a bloodbath.

In its small, stubborn way, the film is a love letter to traditions that have endured since cave dwellers painted the walls at Lascaux.

Represents his (Smith) first act of cinematic cynicism, his first crime against his own talent. With this action comedy, he has given us 110 worthless minutes, a bad formula movie like every other bad formula movie.

If his two previous films suggested a director dipping a few toes in dark waters, Un Prophete marks the moment when Audiard took the plunge.

Eisner has almost nothing on his mind, no political rumblings, nothing behind the urge to upgrade vintage trash.

This is an unabashedly pro-democracy message movie. Judged strictly as drama, it's pretty routine.

Harrowing and unforgettable film.

Scorsese stuffs the film with heavy-handed art direction and piles on a ludicrously ominous soundtrack. The soundtrack is a constant reminder of the movie's importance and only highlights its unimportance.

Take the worst things about independent movies - the wallowing in an unpleasantness, the narrative unsteadiness, the next-to-no story. Then combine those with a hefty dose of light comedy. The result: the big, fat tonal mess that is Happy Tears, a charmless film about two sisters who come together to care for their demented father.

Here's another thought: This old man who can't leave the house has just made the first important film of 2010.

The movie's best special effect hands down is Anthony Hopkins as Talbot the Elder, who flounces around in a tiger stole and utters his lines with such a delicious madman twinkle you might want to snack on him yourself (ahhh-ROOooh).

There are lots of cameos, as well, too many to count. However, it is worth mentioning that singer Taylor Swift shows up in a couple of scenes, playing a vapid Valley girl, and she's very funny.

A whole lot of plot ensues - an entertaining mix of buddy movie, road trip, "Clash of the Titans," archetypal quest and a coming-of-age tale about misfits making their way despite, or because of, absent parents.

Holes in the script, overwrought camera work, dialogue that's embarrassing, and a plot device that's obvious 10 minutes into the movie - all these are major problems.

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.