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.