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.