It helps that most of Creation is about the relationships - Darwin's with his wife and with his daughter. Even if we resist it, even if we don't want to be dragged in, the story of Annie becomes quite moving, almost unbearable.

Tooth Fairy would be substantially less likable without Johnson's native-born flair for self-abasement.

A dynamic story, sprinkled with some interesting ideas about the preciousness of culture and how societies might rebuild themselves.

Even as it stands, Fish Tank is a valuable movie, though it aspires to a social insight it doesn't attain and a psychological penetration it won't maintain.

A mostly inoffensive nothing of a film with one or two mild chuckles and lots of chop-socky commotion.

It's an interesting spectacle, but not enough to carry a movie.

Hawke is half-assed throughout, showing passion only when he's screaming like a little girl when something scary happens. The visuals have a dingy, unfocused quality, especially in the muddy visual-effects-enhanced backdrops. And some of the plot turns are awful. The vampire "cure" is so stupid, you'll want to walk out of the theater, even if you normally like this kind of movie.

A clever and often riotous burst of cynicism that pushes some pretty questionable ideas.

Virtually every word and plot turn is insincere, manufactured, unfelt and dishonest, and its portrayal of people demonstrates either an ignorance of human behavior or a disdain for truth.

The screenplay packs no particular surprises - some of the plot mechanics positively creak - but the leads bring some wattage and warmth to very modest indie fare.

Bitch Slap is garbage. It's self-aware garbage - garbage that explores and celebrates, in postmodern fashion, precisely what it means to be garbage. But that doesn't make it stink any less.

What makes The White Ribbon a big movie, an important movie, is that Haneke's point extends beyond pre-Nazi Germany.

This film is the closest we're going to get to anything new by Williams, and it's a respectable effort.

Guy Ritchie is the worst screenwriter in the world, but, to be fair, he is not the worst director. He is only the worst director of the people who actually get to make movies.

The film ends up landing in a confused middle category. It's neither a coherent, discrete work nor a zany tribute to the late actor.

The sum is a comedy that starts out slow and talky, picks up speed - and sexiness, and hysterics - somewhere in the middle, then drags to a stop when everyone starts confessing their feeeelings.

First, and perhaps most important, it should be disclosed that my 4-year-old laughed pretty much nonstop throughout Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel. This was his "Citizen Kane."

Director Corneliu Porumboiu ("12:08 East to Bucharest"), with his deadpan style and probing intelligence, is someone to keep an eye on. Using a minimalist style, and possessing the courage to risk alienating his viewers, he has created a movie full of resonance.

Sometimes it's unpleasant, sometimes it's insincere, and for long stretches it's boring.

Vast, beautiful and meticulously detailed.

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.