Mühe's performance is brilliant, communicating more turmoil and pain with the droop of a lip and a flicker of the eye across an otherwise intently passive face than all the emotional storms of the cast.

The result of this blender mash of exotic horror isn't much of anything at all, neither suspenseful, terrifying or inventively gory: Turistas is dead on arrival.

It's messy and painful, eased only the admirable modesty of Stockman's writing and direction.

It's as much conceptual art as dispassionate survey of the bloodless assembly line nature of the modern food industry, all process and work, automation and repetition.

While the film is intriguing as it's transpiring, it has very little impact. It's more intellectual than emotional, its message doesn't come through without a struggle and it was completely out of my mind five minutes after seeing it.

It is so contrived and utterly stupid in every way that it surely must be the nadir of the genre.

It's an ingratiating star vehicle and elegant entertainment.

It's colorful and determinedly kooky, with "Kung Fu" references and an H.R. Pufnstuf interlude between performances.

And despite Kellyanne, at times, coming off as more annoying than sympathetic, the film succeeds because of the great lengths to which Ashmol goes to bring her peace of mind.

With the original stage cast, the film is doggedly faithful to the play but has failed to translate it into much of a film.

Flat-out one of the best Bonds ever.

Unfortunately, once the "be yourself" story line is resolved (singing and dancing go together, who would have guessed?), the film is only half over.

Ledger mumbles his entire performance (some of it barely legible) as a fuzzy, friendly, happily passive heroin addict and sometime poet, as if he's too blissed out to even open his mouth as he simply drifts along with his addiction.

It's a bold proposition, and the resulting film has some powerful moments and strong performances, but it fails to be an involving or satisfying drama, and it's not half as effective as the book in creating outrage over what junk food is doing to us.

A rare flub for the usually spot-on director and cast.

For all its unevenness, Bobby is a powerful, poignant movie and its ending -- played over a long excerpt of one of RFK's most compassionate speeches, voiced with none of the cliches of political rhetoric -- was, for me, the movie year's single most devastating sequence.

It's less a deconstruction of the heist film than an ambitious contemplation of our fascination with the genre, directed with a dispassionate eye at a ruminative pace and centered by a queasily emotionless figure wading through a swamp of moral ambiguity.

In what essentially is a two-character play, Kirk and Nicholson behave more like acting partners than real people. Their lack of appetite for each other is particularly awkward in the frequent scenes requiring casual nudity and sexual activity.

It's an art-house genre piece, very much in the tradition of "Enchanted April," "Shirley Valentine" and "Under the Tuscan Sun." But, a few charming scenes aside, A Good Year is in the hands of the wrong star and wrong director.

Well-intentioned but not very well directed, it makes for a better psychological profile than a film.

The bad news is that Ferrell's modestly likable performance is the ONLY good thing about this misguided comedy that's so tiresomely written, badly acted by a stellar cast and ploddingly directed (by art-house whiz Marc Forster) that it just never quite gets off the ground.

Oregon-born and Seattle-based director James Longley profiles three lives in his impressionistic portrait of Iraq's Sunni, Shia and Kurd communities.

Kidman brings her character to life with a fey, moth-to-the-flame enthrallment that's both touching and fascinating.

Yellow Dog shows Davaa's growing refinement as a filmmaker, and that the success of "Weeping Camel" -- her master's thesis for film school in Munich that became an Oscar nominee -- was fully deserved.

Has one knockout sequence: the deaf maestro conducting his Ninth Symphony as Anna coaches from the wings. It goes on for what seems a whole reel, but it's so sublime it seems too short and, by itself, could stand as one of the greatest classic music videos ever.

The most dishonest thing about this ranting montage of a movie is its technique of panning between opposing viewpoints to simulate debate, when in fact each of the more than 35 celebrities was separately interviewed.

Where you might expect either overheated teen melodrama or cartoonish farce, Nobuhiro creates a lively, engaging, character-driven piece with flourishes of offbeat humor dancing around the dynamics of the foursome as they pull together in rehearsals.

The movie itself cannot begin to match its delicious high concept. It's offensively funny in places but it can't sustain itself for a feature length running time and it's not nearly as clever or as fun as it should be.

It's filled to overflowing with mischievous gags for kids and adults alike, tickling the periphery of the story and crammed into every frame with playful abandon. It gives potty humor a good name.

Cruz is tough and sexy as the no-nonsense Raimunda and she's being deservedly talked up for an Oscar nomination in a tight best actress year.

Does a solid job of dealing with the problem but with enough originality that it's not an exact duplication of the Gore film.

Unknown seems fairly stale and unoriginal, mainly because it's yet another movie with the short-term memory loss premise ("Memento," "Fifty First Dates," etc.), and it comes so late in the cycle that it feels like a dying gasp.

The movie is flawed and doesn't completely come off as a convincing biography, but its heart is in the right place, it has moments of poignancy and power, and it makes a pleasant change of pace for a genre that essentially has become a cry of despair.

All told, the movie also is a tremendous downer. The script goes for a vaguely upbeat conclusion, but it has no spiritual dimension that the viewer feels with any emotion, and it conveys a hopeless, pessimistic future for the interconnected world that it portrays.

It's more admirable than enjoyable, beautifully crafted and artfully unpleasant.

If, like me, you haven't read this book, the movie makes little sense, and has zero inspirational kick. It's just a depressing parable about a fellow who sinks lower and lower in life until he figures out a nebulous new way to sell God to the masses.

An inspiring story of pluck, but its politics fall flat.

It's more than simply a well-crafted piece of fake history.

Katharina Otto-Bernstein's oral history of Wilson's life and work, narrated by Wilson, with a handful of sycophants joining in on the choruses, is monstrously one-sided. It does, however, offer insights into the director's methods and motivations.

The cast is uniformly non-French, and restrained to the point of rigor mortis. Dunst is the movie's strongest and weakest element. Her natural charm carries us through the scenery, at the same time her distinct Americanness rings false in every scene.

In the end, there's also something distinctly distasteful about a movie in which the central figure casts himself as noble martyr while character-assassinating his parents.

The movie offers one authentically terrific performance: Beach as Hayes. He's so painfully sympathetic in the role that he absolutely breaks your heart, and he looks like the front-runner in the best-supporting actor Oscar race.

It is purely and fearlessly a girl-and-her-horse movie that isn't trying to be all things for all audiences.

If you can forgive some woeful casting and a plot that is as creakingly thin as an old staircase, you can enjoy director Christopher Nolan's The Prestige.

Stanley Nelson's documentary shows how a religion becomes a cult, and how people are deceived by an ideal.

First-time director Ali Selim does an exceptional job throughout, his movie has the balance, uncluttered leanness and emotional impact of a Willa Cather short story, and it's no surprise that it has been nominated for Best First Feature in the 2007 Independent Spirit Awards.

51 Birch Street, like the best of the recent wave of personal documentaries, is both a compelling story and an eye-opening bit of social history.

When Plympton's freak flag flies, Hair High delivers the same whacked-out weirdness of his shorts. The rest of the film simply stretches out the simple premise and marks time between his ideas.

The movie offers several moments in which Williams comes alive, but they're few and far between.

A heartbreaking look at broken trust.

Driving Lessons was written by director Jeremy Brock as a vehicle for Grint and Walters, who appeared together in the Harry Potter movies. They make a terrific screen couple. Walters is alternately zany and poignant, with Grint the perfect foil, a bemused, confused innocent who only wants to do good.

The only difference between the two films is that this one chronicles Capote's New York environment in more detail (and with humorous interludes), and it's a tad lighter in tone and perhaps a bit less high-horse condemning of its subject's literary ethics.

A coming-of-age movie in which nobody comes of age.

When the little girl tells her decapititated doll, "It's not just a bad dream," she is right. It's just a bad movie.

A bland Bond.

It's as absorbing as a train wreck, and its brand of heavy drama is so rare in movies these days that everything about it seems amazingly fresh.

Whatever it is, the film is the first major release of the fall worth talking about: a fast-paced, visually slick, psychologically fascinating Boston-set cops-and-crooks saga.

It's an agreeable comedy that makes its priorities clear: It wants to be funny at the expense of almost everything else.

Because the subjects are all mellowing into grandparenthood and their abrasive, wilder days are behind them, this particular "scrapbook" isn't as heavy hitting and hard-edged as its predecessors.

There are shocking facts and supportive images, but the film lacks investigative spirit.

The colorful cultural history lesson in an idiosyncratic key is entertaining and informative, if a little indulgent in its adoration of Roth and his counter-car culture.

So magnificent in so many ways that, for the first time, it seems to raise the docudrama to high art.

The film's grueling training sequences have a perverse fascination, and, though he's nothing special here, Kutcher is probably the most appealing he has been in a big-screen role.

It's a tired rehash of animation cliches that distinguishes itself only by the extent to which it's crammed full of scatology and gleeful violence to animals, and otherwise panders to the worst instincts of its audience.

Ben Stiller provides a jolt of personality as a past victim who rouses himself from exile, but otherwise Todd Phillips' fitfully funny script never delivers the crude creativity or the raw energy that feeds this genre of proudly crass male-centric comedies.

Like too many films of faith, it mixes its message, proclaiming that a life given over to God is a reward unto itself, and then handing over victories to its faithful like some overtime bonus.

One of the American cinema's rare excursions into pure autobiography: the movie is Montiel's own coming-of-age story, with little or nothing disguised as fiction.

The concert footage, which is exceptionally well photographed and recorded, offers clips of varying lengths from a wealth of songs. The rest of the film glimpses the stress disorders that can develop when average people with problems become popular celebrities.

The movie is an extraordinary personal adventure that views everything through the eyes of its hero as it carries him from one apocalyptic situation to another.

The new production is handsome and offers a few riveting moments, but it's basically a botched job that misses all the impact of both the original movie and the 1946 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Robert Penn Warren that inspired it.

As imaginatively as some of them are staged, the action scenes are never authentically gripping. This seems to be the hidden handicap of our new digital filmmaking era in which all big action sequences are generated in the computer and look vaguely like cartoons.

There is a point, however, at which the movie becomes simply sickening. Between the electric shocks and hot-iron branding, feats of grossness are accomplished that are so vile even the hardiest among the cast cannot suppress the upchuck.

As the very traditional hero, Li keeps us riveted through the fisticuffs, and he also carries off the film's heavier dramatic moments well enough -- though, as always, his lack of a strong personality prevents the movie from ever genuinely catching fire.

It makes an unsettling case that America is fast becoming the thing it professes to hate.

Hardcore remains, in the words of Minor Threat's Ian MacKaye, the voice of "kids who refuse to be slotted into generic kids roles," so fans of current groups such as Disturbed may feel shortchanged by allegations that it was all over by 1986.

The actors, all unprofessional with the exception of Kim Chan as the Zen master, step on each other's clipped lines so regularly that it becomes a stylistic affectation, like Mamet directing Beckett.

This scruffy, unkempt tale lacks the narrative satisfaction of Kaufman's dramatic design, but between the chaotic zigs and creative jags, it proclaims its own kind of messy authenticity and a bittersweet beauty.

A fumbling attempt to create the European equivalent of a Japanese manga thriller in the conspiratorial mold of "Akira" and "Ghost in the Shell" has a stunning look.

For all the ephemeral pleasure of the company of old friends, there is a chasm between them and the dynamics shift from moment to moment. The beauty of the film is how director Kelly Reichardt brilliantly captures those moments with lucid simplicity.

The Black Dahlia, looks so terrific and is filled with so many imaginatively showy sequences and masterful directorial touches that you almost don't notice that, in every other way, it's just not a very good movie.

Grown-ups, depending on how in touch they are with their inner child, will be split during most of this, inspired to either smile or roll their eyes.

Ultimately, the script lacks the ambiguity, irony and heartfelt emotion that would make the conversion of a dozen hardened criminals very credible, and -- despite its obvious good intentions -- the movie seems pat, simplistic and slightly phony.

An exceptional Italian film becomes an average American one in this bland remake of Gabriele Muccino's "L' Ultimo Bacio."

The script offers neither character revelations nor plot twists. It unfolds by the numbers, like the product of an amateur screenwriter's salon. Its second-hand ideas originate in movies ranging from 1960's "The Apartment" to 1997's "The Ice Storm."

The humor is sweet-spirited, the dialogue (all improvised by the cast) is acerbic and witty, the celebration of unbridled tackiness is often hilarious.

Anyone who claims to support the troops owes it to them to see the film and hear their stories.

Welcome to the tawdry end of paradise, where no melodrama is too obvious and no conflict too contrived.

What is ultimately so special about this film is its handling of the relationship between Lennon and wife, Yoko Ono.

The script (by Richard Russo) is solid, the performances are witty and fun, and the movie is a most agreeable way to spend an hour and a half.

It packs surprising punch as a biopic.

A furiously choreographed martial-arts spectacle wrapped in a fumbling narrative.

There is a lot of history to be learned here, but the teaching is so slow paced that the most alert student may fall into a stupor by the end of class.

This latest remake goes back to the spirit and letter of Eric Knight's 1940 novel.

Bujalski's gift for capturing the awkwardness of social relationships and the messy, unkempt details of everyday life is revealing.

Zhang is a master of detail and spectacle. There is also plenty of comedy, particularly in the scenes with linguistically challenged translators.

Funny, muckraking documentary.

The guys of the Broken Lizard comedy troupe (of "Super Troopers" fame) are neither subtle nor especially ingenious. But in the age of gross-out gags and high-concept gimmicks, they throw themselves into the raucous, rude style of '70s film comedy with shameless glee.

The most ridiculous period film since rappers took on the Old West in "Posse."