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."