Hilarious, deranged, and always alive with possibility.

Born to Be Blue, a less ballyhooed film starring Ethan Hawke as Chet Baker, isn’t as awful as "Miles Ahead" but it’s not as interesting either — mainly because Baker’s story is kind of boring.

While it digs deep into the eerie insularity of mediocre TV, Kelly’s movie is also informed by the understanding that some of the best children’s entertainment is driven by a powerful sense of the uncanny.

As cuddly as this may sound, the documentary is unexpectedly suspenseful, even intense.

Suicidally insecure.

Nearly perfect for what it is.

I laughed all the way through Team America: Scene by scene, it's uproarious.

As it is now, Napoleon plays more like a hastily compiled highlight reel of a life than the full-fledged historical epic its director seems to have intended.

Living Out Loud becomes an ode to openness, to letting in everything that the world throws at you.

The film is ultimately done in by Dominik's bursts of directorial grandiosity.

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.

The remarkable feat of churning out a whole new set of clichés and setting a new level of degradation. That’s Miles Ahead, Don Cheadle’s biopic about Miles Davis.

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.

True Crime gives you sleaze on toast--a heap of tabloid bathos, a dusting of high-mindedness, a dash of gallows humor. It's a bizarre concoction, but it's riveting.

The film has a foggy cast to it--flat and insinuatingly creepy, like the actor. But then it can be lit, in an instant, by searing flash-pots of cruelty and wit. Even when it's slightly opaque, it's transfixing.

Isn't as campy or as unhinged as the delightful Bailey and Barbato Tammy Faye Baker documentary, "The Eyes of Tammy Faye"; it's more like your standard HBO documentary (and HBO co-produced). But it's extremely entertaining.

Exhausting, depressing, slightly nauseating, and unfortunately necessary.

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.

If Mockingjay’s placeholder status is a little too evident in its choppy, shapeless structure, this dark third chapter does have stretches of somber beauty.

The movie is barely sufferable.

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.

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.

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).

The plot of the Downton Abbey movie is brilliant, not so much because it is surprising, but because it allows every member of the cast to do what we expect of them.

It's a rich, impressive comic-book fantasy -- easily the summer's best "blockbuster."

I could quibble with the conventionally romantic ending and a couple of small but not-so-cosmetic alterations, but on the whole, this is just how I'd always imagined one of my favorite comic novels should look and sound.

The script by Steve Faber and Bob Fisher is one of those high-speed, ping-pong-banter marvels in which you're still laughing from the last great line when you're hit by the next.

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.