As good as a summer comedy about NASCAR has any right to be, with fine actors tucked into every nook and cranny.

Quinceañera is a rare bird of an indie, a sharp-eyed analysis of class conflict that still manages to leave you as choked up as a proud auntie on her niece's 15th birthday.

The world according to Mann is loud, dangerous, morally ambiguous, and more than a little greasy, but during the hours you spend there, there's nowhere you'd rather be.

The recent film it most recalls is "You Can Count on Me" (2000), another small treasure about a fractured family that managed to be moving without troweling on the sap.

I will hold against him (Shyamalan) that Lady in the Water isn't scary, that its own inner logic breaks down at countless points along the way, and that its ending is disappointingly literal and just plain stupid. Lady in the Water is, however, funny at times, even intentionally so.

Something about Wilson is just so comfortable, so loose, that he can make the most pointless movie seem, by moments, as if it deserves to exist. But even the presence of the Butterscotch Stallion can't sweeten this bland compendium of rom-com clichés.

The effects are breathtaking, and much of the action is choreographed with energy and wit. (A chase sequence on a cliff uses visual gags that defy the laws of physics, Wile E. Coyote-style.) But all of these moments bob on the film's slick surface like so much flotsam. Without a beating heart at its center, this Chest feels empty indeed.

A movie that revels in pleasure: the pleasure of fashion, of luxury, of power and ambition. It's also a tremendous pleasure to watch.

The film's most striking repeated effect, in which the caped hero dangles dejectedly in space as the Earth turns below him, emphasizes the passivity and loneliness of the character: This Superman's version of flight seems almost indistinguishable from a helpless freefall. Fair enough, but what's he got to be so existentially glum about?

Click manages to sneak some surprisingly moving moments in between the gross-out gags and the schmaltzy resolutions.

Exhausting, depressing, slightly nauseating, and unfortunately necessary.

Sputters to an ignominious halt in the first 20 minutes.

Who's this movie for, again? No matter: It's impossible to find more joy in the dark at the moment.

With a theatrical setting, a large ensemble cast, and musical numbers, Altman and his crew are in their own tailored version of heaven.

With this genial bunch, and the occasional good line, there's no reason not to see The Break-Up, but there's also no reason, assuming the date is going well, not to skip it and order dessert.

An uninspired hodgepodge.

Given the silliness of the source material, The Da Vinci Code stood little chance of being a great film, but it could easily have been a fun one. Instead, Howard takes a strangely respectful approach to the overheated mysticism of the novel, turning the film into that most boring of genres: the pious blockbuster.

The movie raises your pulse, it has visual wow. But I suspect that audiences will emerge into the light feeling more battered than entertained.

Misanthropy can be incredibly entertaining, so long as that hatred draws blood. But that extra percentage point of venom has skewed Clowes and Zwigoff's aim.

This is a well-packaged film that arrives like a nicely wrapped Christmas present, full of promise and potential. Then you unwrap it and discover that it's just another electric gravy boat and, worse, it's still got the price tag attached.

United 93, as grueling as it was to sit through, left me feeling curiously unmoved and even slightly resentful.

RV is another disturbing entry in the dark cycle of movies that began for Robin Williams with "One Hour Photo" and "Insomnia" and has continued with "The Night Listener." I look forward with queasy dread to what he'll do in "Mrs. Doubtfire 2."

As a political statement, American Dreamz is overly didactic and liberal in a read-too-many-blogs sort of way.

The screenwriters seem to have meticulously researched the inner workings of the White House by watching DVDs of "The West Wing," but, despite their hard work, casting sinks the film. With Longoria and Sutherland onboard it feels like an uneasy marriage of "24" and "Desperate Housewives."

Jokes from Scary Movie 3 are recycled ad nauseam.

Harron, working from a script she wrote with Guinevere Turner, doesn't solve the inherent problems of that narrative, but she evades them quite elegantly. She's made a poem instead of a biopic, an ode to intuition, iconography, seamed stockings, and star power.

This is not a thinking man's horror movie. I wouldn't be surprised if there were slugs that could find gaping holes in the plot. But there's something winning about this grab bag of orally fixated invertebrates and mucus-covered Noids.

Like the best noirs, Brick is a triumph of attitude, and there's no arguing that its brand of deadpan cool is precisely unique.

The best Spike Lee movie to come along since 1992's "Malcolm X." It's also the first Spike Lee movie since "Malcolm X" to star Denzel Washington, and just as Jimmy Stewart and Alfred Hitchcock brought out the best in each other, Denzel and Spike need each other like vermouth and gin.

To work onscreen, Thank You for Smoking needed to be fast, scruffy, and offhand. But even the good lines here last a self-congratulatory beat too long. Aaron Eckhart is likable, but he's too hangdog and naturalistic for a part that could have used a brisk young Jack Lemmon type.

The dogs learn to fight for themselves and eventually tangle with a (computer-generated) leopard seal in the movie's most thrilling encounter.

For the first hour of Night Watch, a dark, arresting, and unrelentingly weird thrill ride out of post-Soviet Russia, one feels lost. Not bad lost, as with a densely clotted mess like "Underworld: Evolution," whose mythopoetics land in the viewer's lap in concrete chunks; but good lost, exhilarated lost, like what am I watching?

One of the many disappointments of Firewall is how it squanders its own cast. Good character actors, including Robert Forster and Alan Arkin, are wasted--literally, in some cases, as the body count piles up.

This movie leaves us with the stale whiff of fake nostalgia and something even more odoriferous: the smell of money.

There's something endearingly bookish about a movie whose single most frightening shot involves the possibility of an ax being taken to a typewriter.

So brutal a negation of the popcorn aesthetic is liable to be mistaken for artistic courage. A grindingly slow pace, a quarter-baked plot, a semidocumentary focus on the lives of the working poor: It's enough to make you whimper "Matt Damon" in defeat.

Perhaps the saddest thing about Manderlay is how poorly von Trier treats his actors, who are so bludgeoned by the concept and the format they can scarcely breathe.

Never loses sight of its mission to be as silly, bawdy, and entertaining as possible.

For the first half of Looking for Comedy, Brooks' hangdog demeanor performs reliably, and there are plenty of solid laughs.

Beckinsale is an elegant woman—before she was the Emma Peel of the undead, she was Jane Austen's Emma, and before she was Emma, she was passing A levels in German, French, and Russian literature—and all her stalking and seething keep the movie from being totally unwatchable.

Match Point starts out crisply and deliciously, but in the end, it's a chess problem crossed with an ethics exam.

The New World takes a shopworn American myth--and runs it through the Malick-izer, making it feel rich, strange, and new. In so doing, the film takes wild liberties with historical accuracy.

Munich is the most potent, the most vital, the best movie of the year.

The performances are delightful, and the picture comes together.

For a movie about the policing of borders, couldn't this one have policed a firmer one, between credibility and incredibility? Between seriousness and self-seriousness?

There are no real people in The Producers --only actors laboring to dispel whatever magic they once were thought to possess. The director, Susan Stroman, has brought the Broadway smash to the screen (where it began, almost 40 years ago) with cataclysmic results.

A spectacular three-hankie tragic love story--sometimes dumb and often clunky and always pretty cornball, but just about irresistible.

It skips lightly over the surface of its rich material, more preoccupied with making pretty pictures than dipping below the surface so that you can experience the world through the eyes of its traumatized, yet increasingly savvy, heroine.

Brokeback Mountain could use a little more of it--by which I mean more sweat and other bodily fluids. Ang Lee's formalism is so extreme that it's often laughable, and the sex is depicted as a holy union: Gay love has never been so sacred.

An entertaining, emotional, and surprisingly intimate movie--an epic saga of fauns and talking (Cockney) beavers and evil sorceresses and triumphal resurrections and massive, sweeping battles that nonetheless feels … small.

Aeon Flux is not that terrible. It's certainly more fun than a lot of films that get lovingly showcased.

Farce born of sadly irreconcilable impulses: Bravo!

I found it tiresomely undramatic, even saccharine. Not to mention monotonous.

A grim, twisty international conspiracy picture that challenges the audience on every level, political and aesthetic. The aesthetic part is a bit of an obstacle, though. I can't remember a time I had as much trouble--at a movie I admired--just figuring out what the hell was going on.

No, I couldn't be more pleased with what the screenwriter, Steven Kloves, and the director, Mike Newell, have wrought this time.

In spite of its standard biopic gaps and simplifications, Walk the Line gets the big things right.

A more down-to-earth actor would sentimentalize Breakfast on Pluto and make for an awkward fit with its peculiar mix of tones. Murphy's strangeness--his chill estrangement--makes his campy "Kitten" persona more poignant.

This Pride & Prejudice (ampersand and all) a joy to behold.

It has its own explosively twisted originality. It's a geyser of exhilarating tastelessness.

"Three Kings" is fictional, obviously, and Mendes and Broyles were bound by the facts of Swofford's life. But the violence in "Three Kings" was visceral, whereas Jarhead's never penetrates the blood-brain barrier. It's locked away in its narrator's jarhead.

A sour little psychodrama.

Good as it is, The Legend of Zorro would be a hollow feat without leads who are drop-dead-gorgeous movie stars and spectacular clowns.

A fine movie, beautifully acted, but it isn't easy to love--or to watch. It's a parade of miseries, made even more miserable by Gore Verbinski's direction.

What makes this an important film is the way it puts you in that landscape and in those shoes, so that you almost understand how ordinary human beings can be impelled to do inhuman things.

In any case, the best performance is by Bridgette Wilson-Sampras as the conniving but peppy slut at the perfume counter. Her big scene--farcical, filthy, surprising--is also the best in the movie. Otherwise, Shopgirl is sadly vacuous, with a sadly vacuous center.

The comic surface of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is all polished brilliance, with surprisingly few dull patches...The movie doesn't deliver in the kiss-kiss department, though.

Domino seemed to me the end of the world for movies--a glimpse of a future so excruciating that I'd prefer to take my chances with Hitchcock's eye-gouging avians.

For all sort of reasons, I was disappointed that there is barely anything of Bruce McGill as the family's hearty swindler. And there is too much of Sarandon, whose big scene--a speech at her late husband's memorial service, complete with jokes and a tap dance--is the movie's most egregious misfire.

Powerful and then some.

A passionate and rousing piece of filmmaking--a civics lesson with the punch of a good melodrama.

The hole in the film isn't a reflection on Linney's performance. It's as if Baumbach, his hands full of oily whale blubber, didn't want to deal with an exploding sac of squid ink. And who can blame him, really?

An absolutely magical fusion of deadpan Ealing comedy and Gothic horror.

I mean Serenity no disrespect when I say it's enjoyably junky.

Hoffman goes beyond the surface mannerisms and diction. He disappears into Capote.

An honest tear-jerker.

Has a routine finish but up to that point is a more than decent thriller--or, given its taut self-containment, a more than decent Hitchcockian "exercise in suspense."

Over-the-top and shockingly vicious. But what strikes some critics as complexity feels to me like shame--the shame of Cronenberg, an uncompromising director whose bloodshed has always been genuinely horrifying.

The most effective counterweight to Polanski's fatalism is young Barney Clark, whose Oliver--although given to few words--is unshakably alive and responsive, even as he's being buffeted violently by forces beyond his control.

Everything Is Illuminated is not a fiasco, but in some ways I'd have preferred a fiasco—something overreaching and inchoate instead of this self-consciously artistic mood piece.

The movie is so Burtonesque that it verges on self-parody--but it's fun and stunningly beautiful anyway.

The parents are the casualties of Mills' misplaced sincerity, which makes Thumbsucker the quintessential misadapted head-scratcher.

Passable--just.

The acting in this movie is unusually bad--atrocious, even.

Is Fiennes miscast? Perhaps. He's a high-strung, somewhat clammy actor--not the first to spring to mind for this warmly self-effacing plodder. But he's remarkably fine.

Like a lot of Gilliam's movies it's too overloaded--antic, indulgent, overdesigned--to get off the ground for more than a minute or two at a stretch.

Turns out to be semi-enjoyable, semi-tacky retelling/updating of the old Elizabeth Bathory legend.

A gratifyingly slick and fast-moving Flemish thriller, directed by Erik Van Looy, with superb acting.

Too long, too sexist, and too--shall we say--flaccid. But it has its moments.

A minimalist exercise in maximalist suspense.

Given all its World War II references and parodies, the best audience for Valiant would be addled, octogenarian ex-RAF pilots in the old folks' home.

Overlong at nearly two hours but still a sharp and amusing and subtle piece of filmmaking.

McKellen's actions are queerly unpredictable (pun intended), but every plot other twist is portentously foreshadowed.

Makes for quite an emotional roller-coaster ride. You don't know whether to celebrate or mock, to laugh or weep.

A decent-enough rambunctious Southern-drive-in sort of time-waster, missing only the bare boobs that would make it the perfect socially irresponsible sexist entertainment for rednecks and uptight liberal elites who'd like to live the country-boy dream for a few hours. (Howdy, y'all!)

The ending is madly unsatisfying--yet dead perfect. This is a remarkable film.

It's rich, but slow, and children younger than eight (like mine) might get restless. But this big kid was lost in admiration.

It's hugely entertaining, it's spectacularly acted, and it pricks you in all kinds of places. Maybe the best thing is to see it and let it bug you, too.

There is a special kind of pleasure in hearing jokes that have no redeeming social value. I'd like to think that this IS their social value-an invitation to free the mind.