The mere phrase "Brad Pitt as Jesse James" makes for a kind of mini-reflection on the evolution of celebrity culture. It's a shame that The Assassination of Jesse James never goes much deeper than that tag line.

David Cronenberg's elegant treatise on the metaphysics of violence.

Owen, Giamatti, and Bellucci--all fine actors at the peak of hireability--must have been coming off a collective coke bender when they agreed to be in this murky, straight-to-video-looking piece of crud.

Feels more like a series of skits than a movie, though it does tie up several plot threads in a lyrical last scene worthy of vintage Woody Allen.

Directorially, Dedication is a bit of a mess, unable to settle on a tone or visual style. But it leaves you wishing the oddball couple well.

A viewing of The Hottest State is likely to conclude with a crosstown sprint of a different kind: As soon as the credits start rolling, you can't wait to get out.

Watching the movie is a nonexperience--like the Upper East Side apartment where most of the action takes place, it's lavishly appointed but joyless.

As lurching, awkward, and dirty-minded as the three horny man-boys at its center--but not, in the end, quite as funny or endearing.

2 Days in Paris doesn't quite meet the "Before Sunset" standard of intricate, subtle dialogue and sharp psychological insight--then again, neither do many movies this side of Eric Rohmer. That this one is even bearable is a surprise; that it's occasionally insightful and hilarious is a treat.

Feels fresher, leaner, and faster than any action movie in years.

Five years from now, this bland and forgettable throwaway will be remembered only for Breslin, who will by then be a poised and gifted 16-year-old actress.

Nearly all of the show's minor supporting characters--Moe Szyslak, Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel, Hans Moleman--get to make at least an appearance, though it would have been nice to see larger speaking roles for favorites like Apu and Mr. Smithers.

This movie-turned-stage-show-turned-movie-again is intermittently tasty, if a little too frantically eager to please.

In moments--the early moments--Sunshine can feel like a new genre classic, albeit one heavily in debt to its predecessors.

The movie is brisk and lively, if not exactly action-packed.

The final scene is pure teen wish fulfillment: Imagine making out with your girlfriend on the hood of your sentient Camaro, as your own personal robot bodyguard looks on fondly (all right, that part's a little creepy).

Though it has its share of voice-over exposition and comic stock footage, the film's real purpose is to aggregate individual health-care horror stories into a portrait of the profit-driven and (literally) inhospitable place our country has become.

Though the movie's at least 20 minutes too long, it's deeply satisfying, full of old-school buddy banter and the kind of action sequences that make you burst out laughing at their sheer audacity.

I really hope Evan Almighty doesn't become a surprise hit with a niche audience (Christian, environmentalist 8-year-olds?). Too much worldly success might tempt Steve Carell away from the righteous path of making movies as dark, weird, and funny as he is himself.

This is one of those roles where casting can't help but trump acting. Like Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, Angelina Jolie IS Mariane Pearl--and that marquee-size "is" gets in the way, not of her performance, but of our ability to suspend disbelief and watch it.

It's miscast, underwritten, muddily shot, and slackly paced, but there's something captivating about its unabashed shittiness.

The Ocean movies aren't about plot, logic, or character development. They're spa experiences, two-hour-long immersions in a warm tub of Vegas (and Vegas-movie) nostalgia.

It's one of those zeitgeist-tapping romantic comedies that feels like a generational marker, a "Tootsie" or "The Graduate" for the 21st century.

Though the subject matter sounds depressing, Crazy Love has an infectious, even bouncy tone.

It's unapologetically theatrical.

Like all abstract art, At World's End is best approached non-narratively, as an experience rather than a story.

One thing is for sure: The über-dream is both gorgeously animated, in Kon's shimmering, hyperreal style, and sickeningly scary.

The first hour of this lean, mean, 95-minute scream machine is so tasty that it redeems the predictable conclusion.

There are plenty of pleasures here: The slow birth of the Sandman from a heap of supercharged sand crystals (or something) is a marvel of digital animation, and the chemistry between Dunst and Maguire feels like the dynamic of a real couple, full of subtle shifts and eloquent silences.

When you watch Waitress, you're also watching a meta-movie about Shelly's brutal end, and the spirit that bursts from every corner of this overcrowded movie is so genuinely warm that trashing it feels like panning a so-so baton-twirling performance at the church talent show.

It would have been easy to focus on the eroticism of horses, who, let's face it, are beautiful creatures to look at even for the nonzoophilically inclined, but Devor shows the animals only sparingly. For him, what's most interesting is what the horses represent to the men who (gulp) love them: the wildness and purity of nature itself.

Really, do we need another dumb action movie to remind us how dumb action movies are?...Yes. We absolutely do.

Anyone who can credibly threaten to steal a movie from Anthony Hopkins has seriously got it going on. Fracture may be remembered as the movie that brought Ryan Gosling into the mainstream.

ATHF can seem brilliantly deconstructive one moment and stupefyingly boring the next--or to provide a more accurate ratio, it can follow five brilliant seconds with five straight minutes of boredom.

It's the most thorough portrait yet of the world according to White.

You don't need to be an exploitation fanboy to appreciate the energy, imagination, and spirit with which Rodriguez and Tarantino pay homage to the cheapo cinema they love.

The TV Set is a little wonder of a movie, as smart and sad and true as any comedy I've seen this year.

No project involving Ferrell is going to be entirely unfunny, and Blades of Glory does have its moments of loopy ingenuity, even if none of them goes quite far enough.

Seeing Killer of Sheep is an experience as simple and indelible as watching Bresson's "Pickpocket" or De Sica's "Bicycle Thieves" for the first time. Despite its aesthetic debt to European art cinema, Burnett's film is quintessentially American in its tone and subject matter. If there's any modern-day equivalent for the movie's matter-of-fact gaze on the ravages of urban poverty, it's the HBO series "The Wire."

Though much of the action in Shooter is beautifully photographed, the movie's force is as a blunt instrument of metaphor. Shooter is a video-game-fantasy version of the 2006 midterm elections, a howl of rage at the hypocrisy of the Bush presidency and the Iraq war.

The most shocking thing about I Think I Love My Wife isn't the language, the sex, or the racial humor. It's the fact that it's not a funny movie. At all.

300 will be talked about as a technical achievement, the next blip on the increasingly blurry line between movies and video games.

The movie pops up out of nowhere, grabs you in its big, messy tentacles, and drags you down into murky depths, where social satire coexists with slapstick, and B-movie clichés mutate into complex metaphors.

It's so courteously deferential to its source that it never really comes alive as a movie...Even so, Nair has a gift for directing actors and a feeling for the immigrant milieu of the novel that make The Namesake a rich, if not completely satisfying, pleasure.

To undertake a thriller of this length and scope with no prospect of a morally satisfying resolution, Fincher must have been a little nuts himself. We'll see whether audiences used to the tidy one-hour cases on "CSI" and "Law & Order" will follow him down Zodiac's murky, twisted, and ultimately dead-end street. It may not sound like it from that description, but it's a hell of a ride.

Black Snake Moan morphs into a wacky intergenerational bonding movie, something closer to "Harold and Maude" or "The Karate Kid" with a dusting of Southern grit.

Grbavica is a surprisingly vibrant, at times even joyous, study of the way life goes on even after the most intolerable suffering.

The problem with Because I Said So isn't that it's formulaic and predictable; fans of romantic comedy can get around those qualities, and even appreciate them. It's that the film keeps missing out on its own opportunities for comic gold.

Smokin' Aces is awash in ammo and carnage, but it chugs to the finish line with a tank full of sludge.

The Italian is an aesthetic gem, but a moral muddle.

Written and directed by Wisit Sasanatieng, a commercial director making his first feature film, Tears of the Black Tiger is a technical and aesthetic marvel.

For a movie about the tumultuous friendships among artists, musicians, and filmmakers during one of the 20th century's periods of creative ferment, Factory Girl is remarkably incurious about cinema, music, and art.

Notes on a Scandal is a wobbly film that never settles on its tone or, perhaps more precisely, its voice. It can't figure out what kind of movie it wants to be: a high-camp melodrama, a realistic psychological portrait of a troubled female friendship, or a vampire-lesbian horror film.

I don't just mean it's one of the best movies of the past six years. Children of Men, based on the 1992 novel by P.D. James, is the movie of the millennium because it's about our millennium, with its fractured, fearful politics and random bursts of violence and terror.

For all its flaws, Dreamgirls is what this holiday season needs. It's a big, fat, luscious movie in which no one is tortured, murdered, or mutilated (honestly, how many recent films can you say that about?).

To paraphrase the novel's famous last lines, it's not often a story comes along that can make for both a great book and a wonderful movie. Charlotte's Web isn't both.

iIt's far less sickly than plenty of yuletide offerings, last year's "The Family Stone" being one shudder-worthy example.

Blood Diamond is a by-the-numbers message picture, to be sure...But the director, Edward Zwick, is craftsman enough that the pace never slackens, the chase scenes thrill, and the battle scenes sicken. And if it makes viewers think twice about buying their sweethearts that hard-won hunk of ice for Christmas, so much the better.

I could go on about the beautifully detailed production design, the fresh performances from unknown and often nonprofessional actors, blabbety blah. But praising the movie's craftsmanship seems less urgent than communicating the overwhelming experience of watching it: the clammy, claustrophobic dread of being trapped in a torture chamber.

The performances are so passionate and the characters (even minor ones) so deftly sketched that it's impossible not to get swept up. You watch the battle scenes from behind your hands, just praying that these guys make it.

Ultimately, Inland Empire left me angry at David Lynch, but it was the kind of intimate anger you feel when disappointed by someone you love. If you can tolerate its lack of narrative cohesion, Lynch's film will continue to reward you with visual and auditory surprises right up till the end.

Fatuous, sappy, and dull.

It's an intricate, ambiguous and deeply satisfying movie, a tautly plotted tale of state surveillance and personal betrayal that ultimately becomes an ode to the transformative power of art.

With The Fountain, Aronofsky has become the hero of "Pi," without the desistance or the humility. He not only wants to ask the big questions, he tries to tie it all up with The Big Answer. And that's worse than bad metaphysics, it's bad filmmaking.

Martin Campbell (who also directed Pierce Brosnan's first outing as Bond in "Goldeneye"), has chosen to give us a Bond who's both metaphorically and literally stripped bare. Let me take this opportunity to thank him for both.

Geoffrey Rush is fine as a gay drug dealer who serves as an enabling Santa Claus to the doomed couple. But in the end, Candy is a little too sweet and not quite harmful enough to the audience's health.

Even if you swear off burgers forever, it won't make Fast Food Nation's characters come to life.

Seems to suffer from low self-esteem. Why can't this movie see that it doesn't need a hulking meta-narrative apparatus to make us care about its story? It had us at hello--or would have, if not for the excess of high-concept trickery.

That's the best thing that can be said about Fur: It feels good when it's over, and if you see it with a smart friend, it's a blast to hash over afterward.

Wildly funny. Its best jokes approach some savage, atavistic core of cultural taboo and make the viewer wonder: Is it really possible to laugh at this? But by the time you formulate that question, it's too late: You're already laughing.

Penélope Cruz, who's been so painful to watch in English-language roles over the past few years, reminds us that she really can act; she just can't act speaking phonetic dialogue. In her native language she's witty, wry, and elegant.

One magnificent piece of agitprop.

Babel has great expectations for itself: It wants to be a movie about big ideas and big emotions at the same time. Aided by gorgeous locations and classy trappings (cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto, theme music by Gustavo Santaolalla), it succeeds for the most part.

Politically noncommittal and dull. But that's exactly the problem with this 90-minute piece of cinematic trompe l'oeil.

You leave The Bridge with a new appreciation for your (relative) mental stability and a vow to make the most of your brief, ephemeral life.

Like licorice, Marie Antoinette is a confection you either love or hate, and both affects seem tied to your feeling about the director herself and her apparent identification with Louis XVI's bride. For my part, I can definitely say that I love licorice and hate Marie Antoinette. But I'm still wrestling with the enigma of Sofia Coppola.

By turns cruel, self-pitying, and mordantly witty, Bening makes living with a delusional psychotic seem like the adventure of a lifetime.

It feels disrespectful to say it, but this kind of war movie, like war itself, is starting to feel sickeningly familiar.

The Prestige is utterly without pretense. It doesn't want to explore epistemological questions about the nature of perception and memory; it just wants to mess with our heads. And as a wily, slightly sadistic chess game of a movie, it succeeds quite nicely.

Not one of your pass-the-popcorn date movies. It's a howl of rage.

All of the actors, most notably Winslet, are superb, but the movie belongs to Jackie Earle Haley, a former child actor.

It's nice to see Scorsese back in the saddle and a treat to find a cops-and-robbers thriller with some energy and wit. But even so, it's a stylish head rush of a movie that flies by, even at two-and-a-half hours, and keeps turning the knife (and your stomach) up to the final scene.

Helen Mirren is a goddess of an actress, and her Queen Elizabeth is maddening, hilarious, and deeply human, galumphing around the Balmoral estate in a tartan raincoat and waders as the Britain she thought she knew crumbles around her.

Like the boys, Montiel's first film is rough and uneven, with more energy than it knows what to do with. But it still manages to feel fresh and authentic, perhaps because it's so deeply autobiographical.

The Last King of Scotland never rises to the standard set by Forest Whitaker's fearless (and fearsome) performance as Idi Amin.

To me, the movie feels like a small but ingeniously crafted gift.

Even when engineering a howler like this, De Palma does it in such high style, with such a confident swagger, that the movie is half over before you realize how little is there.

Wrenching new documentary about returning veterans, may not single-handedly reverse the trend of ignoring Iraq docs in theatrical release, but it should.

In truth, only hard-core martial-arts fans will be able to keep from squirming in their seats with boredom through at least some parts of this 82-minute kablammo-fest.

The final minute of the movie is one of the most bleak, and moving, endings I've seen in years.

If one of the things movies are supposed to do is make you look anew at the world around you, you may never see your doughnut vendor in the same way again.

Peter O'Toole is magisterial, blustering and sublime: His half-deaf duke still has a touch of Lawrence of Arabia's showstopping power.

The movie is both clever and ruthless at exposing the ratings board's inconsistencies and hypocrisy.

Idiocracy is easily the most potent political film of the year, and the most stirring defense of traditional values since Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Idlewild has moments of sticky sentimentality and stretches of dull exposition, but you've got to give it this: It's unpredictable.

Voices pile in asking for nothing more or less than to make themselves clear. When the Levees Broke is a monument of oral history. Without fanfare, Lee orchestrates a multivoiced blues for the common man.

Who knows whether Snakes will have--forgive me--legs, but it's more than awesome enough to assure opening-weekend euphoria.

It's an exquisitely crafted period picture that keeps promising more and more as it goes along--smarter ideas, richer themes, spookier plot twists--and keeps delivering on every promise, right up until the rug-pulling and overly hasty final sequence.