Gus Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black pull off something very close to magic. They make a film that's both historically precise and as graceful, unpredictable, and moving as a good fiction film--that is to say, a work of art.

As a life lesson for teenage girls, Twilight (excuse the pun) sucks. As a parable for the dark side of female desire, it's weirdly powerful.

To marvel at the purity of Australia's corniness isn't to imply that the movie functions as so-bad-it's-good camp, or guilty pleasure, or anything else involving aesthetic enjoyment.

Quantum of Solace, the first bona fide sequel in the Bond series, has the poky pace and expository padding of the middle chapter of a trilogy.

A stylish, ingeniously constructed bit of hokum, a sparkling trinket of a movie that's as implausible as it is irresistible.

Role Models may not set its sights very high, but it comes by its emotional payoff honestly. And why isn't Paul Rudd in greater demand as a romantic comedy lead?

This movie could have been an effervescent neo-screwball romance, "Bringing Up Baby" with nut-sack jokes. So there's no blaming the subject matter for the fact that Zack and Miri feels so dispiritingly graceless.

All of Eastwood's rigorous craftsmanship seems wasted on a movie whose message never rises above the bumper-sticker admonition that "mean people suck."

The problem is that the movie's worldview, in the end, isn't expansive enough to justify the (quite literal) stage it takes place on.

Like Tina Fey's Sarah Palin, Stone's George Bush gets his best lines straight from the source.

DiCaprio and Crowe, two supposedly high-wattage movie stars, are remarkably dull to watch together--perhaps because so many of their scenes together take place over the phone.

The trouble is that the movie in which Poppy does, in fact, exist never quite rises to her level.

So slight it's almost diaphanous--an hour after seeing it, what the movie leaves behind is not so much a memory as a mood. Still, it's a fine mood.

Isn't terrible. OK, it's kind of terrible, but it's a talking-dog movie, and anyone who goes to a talking-dog movie without being prepared to step in poop deserves to ruin his shoes.

Hathaway transcends her usual complacency in this role and resists the temptation of using Kym's (and her own) wounded-bird appeal to let the character off the hook.

Quips alone do not a popcorn-movie star make. In this age of post-steroidal leading men, you don't need to be Arnold Schwarzenegger to carry a movie, but you do need to have some presence.

I walked out of Choke feeling hustled, which is appropriate enough, I guess, for a movie that's a portrait of a compulsive hustler.

Boogie Man is nonetheless required viewing for anyone obsessed with the 2008 race.

Once Leoni's Gwen comes on the scene, the movie starts to bubble along nicely. Not just because Leoni is a screwball heroine worth, er, screwballing--at 42, she's more attractive than ever--but because her character is given a weight and texture that's rare in a movie of this type.

It's a clever setup for a spoof of the espionage thriller, but despite the film's intermittent pleasures (Pitt's gum-snapping dolt chief among them), the result is oddly airless.

The 19-year-old actress Summer Bishil captures the terrifying combination of lubricity and innocence that is being 13. Her performance is the truest thing in a movie that, for all its good intentions, feels thoroughly phony and mildly embarrassing.

The movie also has some embarrassing laugh-free stretches, but Faris holds everything together with bubbly intelligence, unexpected line readings, and a few deft pratfalls.

If you go see Tropic Thunder this weekend, don't be late. The four fake ads that open the movie are perhaps the apex of its considerable comic invention.

Laugh for laugh, Pineapple Express is way funnier than "Superbad." It may be the funniest mainstream comedy released so far this year (not that that means much when you've got "The Love Guru" pulling down your average).

So why did I feel such affection for this scruffy, hokey little movie? Maybe it's the same logic that applies to wine-drinking itself: Sure, a great claret would be ideal, but an OK rosé is better than washing down your dinner with water.

Swing Vote isn't exactly a toothless political satire. It's something worse: a satire with dentures.

The problem with the movie's semisupernatural crime plot, though, isn't that the resolution is completely outlandish; it's that the outlandishness is insufficiently grounded in pseudoscience.

They've made a movie about trickery that neatly tricks its viewers into laughing, then screaming, then laughing again.

Man on Wire brings back a time when the towers were still symbols of aspiration and possibility.

Nolan turns the Manichean morality of comic books--pure good vs. pure evil--into a bleak post-9/11 allegory about how terror (and, make no mistake, Heath Ledger's Joker is a terrorist) breaks down those reassuring moral categories.

It makes bursting spontaneously into song seem like a perfectly reasonable--indeed, highly desirable--thing to do, and it leaves the audience wanting to do the same. I see a big uptick in late-summer karaoke parties.

Perlman's Red is hilarious, combining the gritty delivery of a film noir cop with the physiognomy of a horned behemoth. And the script, by del Toro and Mignola, alternates action smackdowns with sweet, goofy moments, like a scene in which Red and the lovelorn Abe drink beer and croon along with a Barry Manilow record.

A minor but satisfying entry in the "what if" historical-fantasy genre.

The Wackness may not have much that's new to say about being 17--it's a fairly standard coming-of-age drama with a couple of noteworthy performances--but it's a definitive compendium of trivia about 1994 (by Levine's lights, the best year ever).

The climax, a multipart showdown in the corridors of a hospital, is unforgivably manipulative. What self-respecting director still cuts away to shots of a heartbeat monitor flat-lining? Hancock isn't the only underachiever on the premises--the talented Berg settles for far less than he should.

Wall-E is an improbable delight, a G-rated crowd-pleaser.

A compendium of bedside erotica. I don't know when I've seen a mainstream movie that so explicitly caters to the S&M niche. And the chemistry of the central couple, which seemed destined to bring the movie down, is instead the hottest thing in this effects-laden but ultimately empty film.

This tale of a guru who brings joy to all who meet him is the most joy-draining 88 minutes I've ever spent outside a hospital waiting room.

The old-school horror tricks (the fake scare followed by a real one, the safe haven that isn't) feel more like cribbing than homage, but they get the job done.

Why remake a crappy movie five years later if it's only going to be marginally less crappy?

It's a loosely bound collection of miscellany filmed at the McMurdo Station, a 1,000-person settlement of researchers in Antarctica, during the five-month "austral summer" of round-the-clock sunlight. Herzog was sent to Antarctica by the National Science Foundation with carte blanche to make whatever movie he wanted--all he could tell them for sure was that it wouldn't involve penguins.

My only problem with Mongol is that--how often in life do you get to write this sentence?---Genghis Khan is a little too nice.

And an attempt to address the series' endemic whiteness by adding a subaltern black character--Jennifer Hudson as Carrie's designer-bag-toting Girl Friday--is a major misfire that only underscores our heroine's oblivious entitlement

Even the most enthusiastic future Indy scholar would have to concede that the movie's habit of quoting from venerable Hollywood antiquities sometimes has the unfortunate effect of reminding the viewer that those movies were better.

They may make for clunky religious parables, but the Narnia books--and so far, the movies based on them--are wonderful as stories about childhood and its loss.

The feature debut of young Norwegian director Joachim Trier, is as crisp and cool as a swig of Champagne.

The state of mind brought on by Speed Racer the movie is more akin to that phenomenon by which young infants, exposed to more stimuli than their systems are equipped to handle, will simply shut down.

Noise is never quite as smart as it tries to be. But as summer and its mouth-breathing blockbusters loom large on the horizon, there's something touching about a movie that even tries.

When it's idling in neutral, and we're watching Stark putter in his workshop or seduce unsuspecting journalists, Iron Man abounds in that rarest of superpowers: charm.

Son of Rambow bristles with the anarchic energy of late childhood and a genuine respect for the life-changing power of movies--even (or especially) the schlocky ones.

Baby Mama is the most disappointing movie of the year so far--which, granted, isn't saying a lot in mid-April.

It betrays the spirit of the stoner comedy, which has traditionally been subversive--when it wasn't detailing the love affair between two marginally functional young men and their stash of sweet, sweet herb.

While Morris isn't interested in exonerating anyone, he clearly sympathizes to some degree with the MPs and deplores the military's fall-guy strategy, which punished these seven soldiers as exemplary "bad apples" while leaving all higher-ranking officers untouched.

Like its hero, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a little soft around the middle, but all the more loveable for that.

With his goofy interview technique and easy laugh, Spurlock has a way of putting his subjects at ease even as he tests the audience's patience.

As tough as Lawrence is to like, Smart People is even harder to hate, mainly because of the sharply observed script by novelist Mark Jude Poirier. Just when you're losing patience with the movie, it sneaks up on you with a poignant detail or a character-defining turn of phrase.

There's something cynical about Ayer's attempt to preserve Ludlow as a hero after scene upon scene meant to show, with heavy irony, how lawlessly he enforced the law. You can't lionize your "Dirty Harry" vigilante and expose his hypocrisy, too.

Better than a finger in your eye. It's a perfectly passable, if instantly forgettable, date movie, lushly shot by Newton Thomas Sigel and with a script intelligently versed in American classics like "His Girl Friday" and "Hail the Conquering Hero."

There's a curious mismatch between the surface of the movie and what lies beneath it. Wong's technique is layered and detailed like a couture gown, but the story it hangs on is as generic as a seamstress's dress form.

Drillbit Taylor is slackly paced and rife with questionable logic.

Many American viewers may take Haneke at his word and walk out midway through this grueling ethics exam of a movie. But much as I may resent the facile polemics of Haneke's shame-the-viewer project, I have to respect the way that he nailed me, trembling, to my seat.

In terms of character development, wit, and simple curiosity, it's dumber than a Neanderthal.

Married Life is a tony, well-upholstered vehicle that glides smoothly toward its destination—but despite an unnecessary and overly sentimental coda, that destination isn't necessarily where you thought you were going all along.

For a movie whose story hinges almost entirely on sex, The Other Boleyn Girl is disappointingly demure.

An unambiguous celebration of the state of preadolescent fixation. The movie is perhaps best understood as a 12-year-old boy: You want to give it a hug and then yell at it to pick up after itself.

Hardly top-drawer Romero. In fact, it may be his worst zombie film yet. But even bad Romero is a far sight more interesting than the coolly sadistic guts-porn that currently passes for mainstream horror.

Jumper not only makes the rules up as it goes along; it neglects to tell us what those rules are, which is both unfair and unfun.

It's a delicate parable, droll rather than funny, wise rather than smart. Eran Kolirin, debuting as a writer-director, has the deadpan sparseness of the Finnish Aki Kaurismaki, but his vision is gentler, less bleak; at moments, the movie is almost sentimental, but the performances save it every time.

A jolly mess of a movie. Overplotted, choppy, and contrived, it nonetheless has a curious vitality that makes you wonder where McDonagh will go next.

Rambo combines an unapologetic return to the grand action-movie tradition of blowing shit up (one explosion is so big, it leaves behind its own miniature mushroom cloud) with a "Saw"-era interest in close-ups of human viscera.

A beautiful and formally compelling work of art.

Cassandra's Dream is not unredeemably bad. MacGregor and Farrell hack away at their implausible dialogue with admirable intensity (though when Terry starts to descend into mental illness, Farrell touches his limits as an actor).

Despite a first reel entirely devoted to establishing characters, Cloverfield is basically a line-'em-up, pick-'em-off horror movie that's effective without being either viscerally frightening or emotionally moving. Watching it is like going through a car wash: You come out of it thoroughly Cloverfield-ized, but essentially unchanged.

It's full of moving (and surprisingly ungross) filmed deliveries, including those by Epstein and Lake themselves. Unfortunately, the movie is also a propagandistic brief on behalf of the home-birth movement that's so selective in its presentation of information that it makes Michael Moore look like a fat lady in a blindfold holding a pair of scales.

For a story that's all about the harnessing of fateful chthonic forces, Paul Thomas Anderson has dug deeper than ever before, and struck black gold.

A completely different kind of animated movie that, even more than "Ratatouille," reimagines what the medium can do.

A funny, sprightly tribute to the American can-do spirit, with a bleak ending that suggests that our plucky protagonist may have just dug his own (or, in this case, his country's) grave.

Burton's overall restraint is a welcome surprise. Shorn of his usual camp trappings, the director evokes a sadness beneath every uneasy smile he draws from the audience.

A big part of the reason for this movie's nose dive around the one-hour mark is that, seen up close, the Infected just aren't that scary.

A vast, lumbering white elephant of a movie--but I sort of love it.

A tepid, jumbled Hollywood fable whose final message seems to amount to little more than "Follow your dreams," or worse, "Stay tuned for the sequel."

With a charismatic lead performance from Page and a plaintive score of indie-rock songs, many of them by Kimya Dawson of the Moldy Peaches, Juno seems poised to be the season's youth-culture hit.

With the help of brilliant French actor Mathieu Amalric, Spielberg's longtime cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, and screenwriter Ronald Harwood (The Pianist), Schnabel has made a marvelous film that uses images with as much grace and flair as Bauby used words.

As the innocent and indomitably chirpy Giselle, Adams gives the great female comic performance of the year so far.

Like the singer's gnomic comments to the press, the movie can be maddeningly slippery; like his music, it's fierce, thrilling, and unapologetically itself.

Could call Zemeckis subtle; but his style Well suits the poem's crude and earthy brawn. Comic-Con geeks and cinephiles alike Will gape at the resplendent imagery (But don ye specs, and see it in 3-D).

It's too bad Baumbach's movie is already shot, edited, and up there on the screen, because after a few rounds with a red pencil, it could really have been something worth watching.

Ought to have been called "Slugs for Snails," so leisurely does it creep toward its predictably bombastic conclusion.

Maybe part of the problem is that black comedy is a tough genre in which to create a masterpiece.

The movie is never quite pop enough to get audiences hooting and hollering and quoting favorite lines, nor smart enough to inspire passionate post-movie debate. Scene by scene, the film is unassailably well-crafted. But there's something oddly dull, even respectable, about Scott's adherence to the rules of gangster-film grammar.

The movie's more than cute, funny, and (at 81 minutes) brisk enough to move families in and out of the multiplex in mass quantities, like the social insects we are.

Offers the rare pleasure of watching a major director return to his own material and rework it 30 years later. This story of a pitiful jewel heist gone so profoundly wrong that it approaches the scope of Greek tragedy isn't quite a remake of "Dog Day Afternoon."

Forget the thin characters and showoffy temporal structure. Rendition's worst flaw is its political deck-stacking.

The kind of movie that moves you to tears even as you resent the manipulative mechanics of the story.

If you go in fully prepared for the cinematic equivalent of a grocery-store novel, this unnecessary sequel to "Elizabeth" (1998) has its pleasures.

Heartfelt but muddled film.

The great strength of Michael Clayton is that it's no "Erin Brockovich." Rather than a populist tale of class-action triumph, the movie is a grim vision of legal and ethical compromise at the top.

The Darjeeling Limited (Fox Searchlight) struggles to open out from the beautiful, stifling world inside Anderson's head. But like in his last movie, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, Anderson makes the mistake of keeping its protagonists trapped for too long aboard a means of conveyance.