Is it or is it not stupendously friggin' rad? And the answer is yes. For most of the first hour, a good portion of the second, and even many of the 40 minutes left after that, Avatar is stupendously friggin' rad.

This kind of movie is superfluous yet strangely compelling. We don't need to see Daniel Day-Lewis and Nicole Kidman sing a duet next to a Roman fountain any more than we need to see an elephant pirouette in a tutu, but wouldn't you be crazy to pass up the opportunity to see either?

On first viewing, Crazy Heart seemed like a pretty good movie with one great performance. After a second time through, it's sneaking up on the title of my favorite film of the year.

If The Lovely Bones, at least for this critic, fails, it's certainly not for lack of metaphysical gumption...It's when the movie returns to earthly life, the prosaic world of suburban cul-de-sacs and family relationships, that it falters.

As a non-South African, I can't speak to the accuracy of the movie's racial politics, but they feel insultingly vague.

Portman doesn't overact or underact; she just stands around with whatever the appropriate expression for the scene seems to be on her sweet, pretty, childlike face. If there's something going on behind that face, I neither know nor care what it is, which means that long stretches of Brothers involving her character's interiority struck me as dramatically inert.

Full of clever one-liners, winning performances, and wistful indie music. It's impossible not to like it, which is precisely what's so annoying about it.

For everything the movie gets right--most notably the impressively pared-down script by Joe Penhall and the two truthful and fearless performances from Mortensen and McPhee--there's a corresponding painful blunder, like the overwrought score from Nick Cave.

Represents a course-correction for Disney's multibillion-dollar princess franchise: It attempts to celebrate the virtues of hard work and pluck, even if the movie itself can feel at times like a lesson rather than an enchantment.

Mopey, draggy, and absurdly self-important, the movie nonetheless twangs at some resonant affective chord. This viewer, at least, was catapulted back to that moment of adolescence when being mopey, draggy, and absurdly self-important felt like a passionate act of liberation.

For all The Blind Side's flaws, it's impossible not to get caught up in Michael Oher's life.

This movie is a freaky little swamp thing.

2012 isn't a bad movie that, out of sheer boredom, you might snicker at once or twice; it's a two-and-a-half hour laugh riot that plays on our expectations of the genre by anticipating and exceeding them.

You don't want to watch this movie, you want to climb inside it and play.

The Box plays like "The Pardoner's Tale" as retold by the conspiracy theorist haunting your neighborhood Radio Shack.

In its eagerness to drag us through the lower depths of human experience, Precious leaves no space for the audience to breathe or to draw our own conclusions. For a film about empowerment and self-actualization, it wields an awfully large cudgel.

Nearly every line of dialogue in this adaptation of A Christmas Carol comes directly from the story. What interpolations there are have to do with juicing up the transitions between scenes with unnecessary, but not obnoxiously intrusive, action.

One of the best documents of live performance that I've ever seen, a rehearsal diary that's more intimate and immediate than a traditional concert film.

It's enough to make you wish someone would make a movie about her.

The last 20 minutes are horrifically violent, relentlessly claustrophobic, and irredeemably pointless. Von Trier has us on the hot seat, and he's going to walk us through his most primitive sexual nightmares--not because they'll bring us to a greater understanding of madness or love or grief, but just because he bloody well feels like it.

Oddly enough, it's when the action of Ong Bak 2 stops that this funkadelic freakshow shines. The screen is stuffed with a gallery of grotesques, some of Thailand's best character actors, who spend their time bleeding, bellowing, and slurping up eyeballs.

It's just too bad the end result isn't a better movie.

It's funny--bleakly, blackly so at times, but also tenderly funny with flashes of genuine compassion. The Maid is among the best films I've seen this year.

As she's being put through her Oxford-prep paces, Jenny complains about "ticking off boxes," and at times, this film seems to be doing just that: coming-of-age drama, check. Youthful illusions shattered, check. But as with first love, so with the movies: The right girl makes it all worthwhile.

The result is a pop documentary in the Morgan Spurlock mode, cheeky and smart without being too serious.

These down moments are fleeting, drowned out by the joyous din of zombie slaying and a scattering of subtler touches, such as Woody Harrelson's shotgun-savant Tallahassee painting a "3" on the side of his various commandeered vehicles, presumably a tribute to NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt.

Despite the ambitious scope of its premise, this confounding, disappointing and, in the end, depressing movie is content to devote 80 percent of its screen time to wondering who gets to kiss the girl.

A Serious Man is an exquisitely realized work; the filmmakers' technical mastery of their craft, always impressive, has become absolute. The script reads like a novel, densely allusive, funny, and terse.

It comes by its screams honestly, earning them with incremental, at times agonizing gradations of old-fashioned, what's-that-noise-in-the-hallway suspense.

There's something touching, even a little bit noble, about Moore's eternal willingness to serve as our nation's shame-free populist gadfly.

Soderbergh whiplashes his viewers between two contrasting mental states that are best described as "jaunty" and "wrenching."

A wicked black comedy with unexpected emotional resonance, one of the most purely pleasurable movies of the year so far.

The rare film about the life of an artist that is itself a work of art.

Danny Elfman's swooping orchestral soundtrack only adds to the sense of by-the-numbers familiarity. Elfman's signature sound is so associated with Tim Burton movies that it overwhelms this film's chances of carving out an aesthetic space of its own.

Extract seems destined to do minor business at the box office but achieve a kind of immortality as a cult DVD, to be quoted from at parties and passed around to friends. Which may be just fine by its creator--as Beavis and Butt-head have taught us, snickering with your friends in front of the television can is one of life's great joys.

Feels workmanlike at times.

With its unremittingly bleak humor and eagerness to plumb the depths of fanboy abjection, Big Fan seems destined for a future in the cult canon.

No one's asking for a song-by-song re-enactment of the concert, but Lee's refusal to focus even for a moment on the musical aspect of the festival starts to feel almost perverse, as if he's deliberately frustrating the audience's desire.

Tarantino's radical rewriting of the war's ending is audacious and perversely enthralling. But if Inglorious Basterds were about something more than the cinematic thrill of watching Nazis suffer, it could have been a revelation.

Edel's clear-eyed and exhaustively researched account is unique in its refusal to either romanticize or villainize the terrorists. It's a study in the seductive appeal, and inevitable failure, of the attempt to bomb one's way to a better world.

As an allegory of racial conflict and mass immigration, District 9 never really goes anywhere: The appealing premise fades into the background before 20 minutes have elapsed.

There's something curiously off about The Time Traveler's Wife.

Julie & Julia makes deboning a duck a feminist act and cooking a great meal a creative triumph. The stakes may not be as high as the kill-or-be-killed suspense of a summer action movie, but the sauces are way tastier.

Apatow answers to no one. His worst enemy as a director is his unwillingness to linger in the dark places from which his comedy springs.

Something between a love story and a religious morality tale. The hauntingly ambiguous last scene, in which Lorna finds a place of temporary respite from the economic forces that have determined so much of her life, may be the saddest happy ending I've ever seen.

Britain's diplomatic corps may be as clueless and impotent as In the Loop suggests, but British comedians are fully capable of taking over the world.

It's fun both to watch and to talk about afterward, and it possesses the elusive rom-com sine qua non: two equally appealing leads who bounce wonderfully off each other.

Despite the preponderance of (PG-rated) snogging, there are pleasures to be found along this movie's meandering path.

The humor of Brüno is arguably crueler and more misanthropic than "Borat's."

May not be the single best movie I've seen so far this year--though it's certainly a contender for the title--but it's without doubt the most surprising.

It's like spending an afternoon--a long one--at a beautifully lit wax-museum display inspired by earlier gangster movies.

After The Hurt Locker (which is without question the most exciting and least ideological movie yet made about the war in Iraq), everyone will remember Renner's name.

The reductio ad absurdum of a summer blockbuster. It is loud (boom!), long (two and a half hours!), incoherent (poorly explained intergalactic warfare!), leering (Megan Fox in short shorts!), racist (jive-talkin' robot twins!), and rife with product tie-ins (Chevy! Hasbro!).

I have a certain affection for this movie, if only because of its conceptual simplicity.

Most disheartening of all is that, after shooting four films in a row abroad, Allen seems to have lost his feel for New York locations.

It's easy to imagine why Pelham's producers wouldn't want Scott's professional but dull picture to be compared with the 1974 classic.

This kind of "one crazy night" tale relies on drum-tight structure to work. Without it, The Hangover sputters to a sentimental halt. Still, it's worth staying for the closing credits.

Away We Go is like a disappointing term paper by a promising student.

Land of the Lost is an enjoyable regression to Saturday mornings gone by, as junky and sweet as a strawberry Pop-Tart.

Up is Pixar's most ambitious attempt yet to take animation to higher (and deeper) places than it's been before, and Giacchino's sprightly music keeps the whole thing, impossibly, aloft.

Brilliantly nasty little horror film.

Though the result is thematically slight, it's structurally sophisticated enough to reward a second viewing (or at least, unlike Grey's previous work, to be watched all the way through).

A good summer movie isn't just an uninterrupted crescendo of cacophony. You need stuff IN BETWEEN the fireballs and the cyborgs.

In its last 20 minutes, Angels does attain the status of good bad movie, with a transcendently absurd climax that's great fun to rehash later over burgers.

Like Anderson, Johnson has a fine eye for color, great taste in music, and a knack for painterly compositions, but the world he creates is airless and ultimately empty.

Management remains for the most part as endearing as its leads. Steve Zahn is a wonderful actor who's spent too long in the "hey, it's that guy" best-friend role.

Carlos Cuarón's screenplay is rambling and unstructured but full of vibrant dialogue. As in "Y Tu Mamá También," the insults the two leads hurl at one another are creatively filthy.

Retains the original Star Trek's spirit of optimism, curiosity, and humor.

This beautifully shot and painstakingly constructed film is a self-indulgent bucket of hogwash.

Even by the standard of a fourth-in-a-series summer blockbuster, Wolverine, the first X-Men movie directed by Gavin Hood ( Rendition), is remarkably lame.

It's a handsomely mounted spectacle with moments of bravura acting that nonetheless feels labored and dull.

It's a movie that's thought-provoking without being intelligent and candid without being truthful. The same aesthetic choices that Toback seems convinced will set his documentary apart are also what diminishes its credibility.

After a bracing first hour, State of Play defaults on the most basic promise of the conspiracy thriller. Instead of luring us down an ever-darker and twistier path, it strands us in a tedious and ill-designed maze.

The director, Sacha Gervasi, is a fan first and a documentarian second. If Anvil! has a flaw, it's that it's too enthusiastic, a reverently uncritical valentine to the director's adolescent heroes.

What's meant (I think) to be a "f*** you" to action-movie conventions reads instead as a "f*** you" to the audience. Observe and Report tickets should come with a free breath mint, because however hard you've been laughing, that ending leaves a seriously bad taste in your mouth.

Has the note-perfect melancholy of a classic young adult novel.

The most remarkable thing Sugar does is give American viewers a sense of how our country must seem to a newly arrived immigrant, without caricaturing or condescending to either guest or host.

The richly multilayered picture tends to have a gently immersive effect, akin to a stroll through the world's most expensive diorama.

A film of great intelligence and quiet assurance, Goodbye Solo exhilarates without ever trafficking in easy uplift.

Despite the movie's many flaws, the two leads' genuine rapport is enough to give the audience a solid contact high.

There are so many leaps back and forth in time, so many twists and countertwists and double fake-outs, that we keep losing track of who (including ourselves) is supposed to know what when.

Alan Arkin virtually reprises his Oscar-winning role from "Little Miss Sunshine."

Watchmen fans wondering whether their graphic novel has been ruined will be thrilled to see its key scenes reproduced with storyboardlike fidelity, but those who've never read it will be unlikely to understand what the big deal was in the first place.

Its fancifulness is at times too clunky, its pathos too strained. But Barnz has a secret weapon, one that's 4 feet tall and looks to weigh about 60 pounds: Elle Fanning.

It's not hard to forgive this series its lack of innovation, because it manages, for long stretches at least, to be something few serial-killer dramas ever are: really, really good.

All of its plot threads are equally dreadworthy.

Moment by moment, the film is a font of pleasures, yet there's something about it that keeps the audience at an aesthetic remove. Like Coraline in the doppelgänger world, we swoon over all the neat stuff without ever making ourselves at home.

If you spin out the unintended analogy of Confessions of a Shopaholic to the current financial crisis, the film starts to mutate from a not-that-funny comedy into a tragic allegory.

One of many burdensome tasks required of the viewer of this fish-out-of-water love story. The toughest of all: caring about any of the characters in this smug, check-off-the-boxes comedy.

Like a drunk on a bender, Notorious seems to have given up even trying to moderate its dependence on cliché.

It's a textbook example of a well-crafted movie, beautifully shot, impeccably acted, and structured like an elegant three-act play. So why does the movie feel as pleasantly deadening as the midcentury Connecticut suburb where it takes place?

Pitt's great in character roles, as a comic grotesque or an unrepentant scoundrel. (See Burn After Reading or, for that matter, Fight Club.) But as a passive, introspective leading man like Benjamin, he's just dull.

Once Singer dispenses with the introductory pathos and gets to the nuts and bolts of Stauffenberg's plan, Valkyrie becomes an admirably modest and compact suspense thriller.

This unassuming movie will nail you to your seat.

The Ram is sometimes--often, even--a manipulative, self-pitying man, but Rourke and Aronofsky paint his portrait with a rigorous dignity.

Cinematically, Doubt is something of a dud. But if it remains a play, it's an ingeniously structured one, with smart, thought-provoking words spoken by fabulous actors, and how often do most of us get to see one of those, whether in three dimensions or two?

Eastwood's furthest venture yet into the comic possibilities of his flintier-than-thou persona.

Slow-acting poison. For the first third of the movie, you'll experience a not-unpleasant tingling in the extremities, giving way to an encroaching torpor. An hour in, your pupils will have shrunk to pinholes, and by the time the closing credits roll, you'll be capable only of a dim longing for the defibrillation paddles. Who would have thought a movie about a beautiful, frequently naked female Nazi could be so dull?