It would be easy to categorize the Lebanese women's picture Caramel as a Levantine combination of "Sex in the City" and "Beauty Shop," but it's actually a lot smarter, sharper and deeper than that.

A stiff of a supernatural comedy.

The film's one original moment comes when Bluto has a conversation with a cow. The rest of it, from the distorting lens used randomly to suggest unreality, to the twist ending lifted verbatim from the superior "High Tension," is about as imaginative as a portobello steak with onions.

How She Move is the latest urban music drama from MTV Films, and it manages to give a familiar story a vivid jolt of character.

A genuinely creepy film, though not in a "No Country for Old Men" kind of way. More in an overzealous-blog-comments kind of way, or a dude-on-the-bus-looking-at-me kind of way. Just ugh.

A grueling and deeply affecting human drama.

Its dazzling blend of rock magic and 3-D technology just may be ushering in a whole new kind of musical theater.

Director Mitchell Lichtenstein finds new ground in the over-tilled suburbia of David Lynch and John Waters.

This 38th Allen film (and third in a row to be set in London) is a drama about two brothers that's so heavy in tone it seems inspired by Greek tragedy and the grimmest '40s film noir.

When the monster shows up, pretty early in the film, everything becomes much more interesting, as it smashes buildings in midtown Manhattan like some sort of Rudy Giuliani, 9/11 nightmare.

The results are moderately entertaining, but the humor is broad and shallow; the film has none of the irony, bite or wit of its predecessor; and the script (by Glenn Gers) seems so calculated to appeal to every conceivable female demographic that it always feels contrived.

It delivers everything you expect on a timetable you can predict to the minute. It's filmmaking as a cross between a carefully choreographed dance and an elaborate pageant.

Journeys into a new heart of darkness, the destination of which lies outside the frontiers of humanity.

John Sayles ventures into August Wilson territory with Honeydripper.

In a genre that has been battered by the cheap grotesqueries of special effects, it is a pleasure to be unsettled by something as simple as an invasive beam of light in the shadows of a haunted house.

An unusual, visually hypnotic, American Gothic historical epic that traces the rise and tragic fall of a Western mining magnate of the Gilded Age.

The most insipidly innocuous film ever made about facing mortality and living it up before passing away, The Bucket List has as much poetry and poise as its clumsy, clunky title.

Not the most thrilling of competition films. There are only two short debate scenes, and each time the team gets to argue (in sound bites of rhetoric) the politically correct side of the issue.

Fascinating memoir of coming of age in Iran.

Predictable but entertaining kid movie.

A witty, literate, wryly sophisticated parable of American politics: just the kind of movie that Hollywood, in its search for the global audience, supposedly doesn't make anymore.

It's an expensive star vehicle that also happens to be a teary, unabashedly sappy, romantic comedy with every element as purely calculated to appeal to a heterosexual woman's romantic fantasies as an episode of "All My Children."

Sometimes jaunty, often dark, and very stylized. In other words, it's a perfect fit for director Tim Burton.

John C. Reilly, with his homely face and mop of curly hair, has been the movies' second banana of choice since his debut in 1989's "Casualties o War." In the comedy, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story," he finally gets a starring role and he rises to the challenge.

Although this is director Mark Obenhaus' first ski movie, it is every bit as exciting as the popular Warren Miller pictures, and boasts an unobstrusive soundtrack in place of the heavy metal racket that fuels most sports documentaries.

The life of a prison guard is dull, no matter who is in the cell. Director Bille August makes what he can of this material, always holding our interest but never fulfilling the promise of a close encounter with one of the 20th century's most controversial leaders.

The movie year's most expensive and ambitious sci-fi spectacular, I Am Legend, is three movies in one: a futuristic effects-o-rama, a zombie thriller and a survivalist parable. Each is better than average, and the experience is fairly gripping.

Only a qualified success. It suffers in its transition from page to film, and my guess is that its devoted fan base will think the adaptation misses the mark by more than a few inches.