A movie that combines the Cold War intrigue of John Le Carré with the wired buzz of Francis Ford Coppola's "The Conversation" -- one of those rare two-hour-plus pictures that runs long but plays bracingly, excitingly short.

There are a couple of minutes of unscheduled surgery to put this in the sadistic fantasy genre of "Saw" and "Hostel," but mostly the movie plays out like a cheap survivalist copy of the television series "Lost."

A meditation of life, death, reincarnation and biblical symbolism that feels peculiarly like a head-shop poster, blown up to feature-movie size.

Isn't exactly what you'd call fresh. But although it borrows ingredients from many familiar Christmas flicks, it's got a sly twinkle of its own.

Definition of redundant: A formulaic Hollywood pic that calls itself Déjà Vu.

As it exists, Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny is strictly for the tenaciously devoted.

This is a piece engineered to run on the high octane of clever dialogue. It's chatty, it's wordy, but a passion for the well-written word lies at the thematic heart of the thing, and cinematic flourishes would only clog the arteries. Purists can rest assured -- there's no clogging.

The payoff is the revitalization of Bond by making him closer to what Fleming envisaged: a sociopath who, fortunately, is on our side.

It makes "Little Man," "Scary Movie 3" and "Beerfest" look like comic masterpieces.

A frustratingly toothless film whose heart is in the right place even if its head isn't.

The target is way too easy and the tone far too smug. This time, they're shooting fish in a barrel with a bazooka and congratulating themselves on their marksmanship.

Fascinating, even when it's fascinatingly bad.

Its rhythm is deliberate and unhurried, yet the film is rich with detail and with small, meaningful character revelations -- the running time of more than two hours feels just right.

Fans of both Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe should not be too bummed with the mild sedative that is A Good Year.

Harsh Times opens with a deadly nightmare and ends with a vast bloodbath -- in between, things get a little gruesome.

Sarah Michelle Gellar is not faring well as a horror-movie scream queen. Gone are the attitude, wit and verve she used to routinely display in the title role of TV's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

With a track record that stretches from "Monster's Ball" all the way to "Finding Neverland," Forster is clearly a director at ease with a wide range of material. He's found confection-land here, setting his beater on ready-whip and mixing the dough just fine.

Iraq in Fragments already stands up as a classic war documentary, in its unusual poetic form and by its extraordinary access to the lives of ordinary Iraqis.

Fur does what an Arbus photograph never would -- it leaves no room to imagine and removes any reason for doubt.

In the end, F*CK is at most a compendium of opinions and examples, and never feels like a story. Still, great casting and inventive visuals make it an entertaining big-screen experience -- and don't expect to catch it later on network television (otherwise it would have to be retitled BL**P).

Borat at its best is pure satiric genius, the Swiftian kind that has you busting a gut with laughter even while checking your conscience for implicating flaws.

This is a sewer blessedly free of actual sewage, which makes Flushed Away more kid-friendly than, say, the average "South Park" episode.

The Santa Clause 3 is a colourful jumble. (But quite a bit better than Jungle 2 Jungle). Nevertheless, whether parent or elf, You might laugh when you watch it in spite of yourself.

As down-to-earth as a ghost story gets.

Catch a Fire paints the period with a double-sided brush that gives yesterday its due and puts today on notice.

The presence of some genuine feeling distinguishes Saw III from its predecessors. That said, it has plenty of the blood, torture and dismemberment that moviegoers demand from their Halloween weekend entertainment.

Though Babel lacks any tragic sense of inevitability, it almost compensates with a handful of vibrant performances and the palpable physical texture of the settings.

An achingly sincere but often staggeringly inept attempt to introduce Walsch's message to movie audiences.

Both the Chicks and this doc are left to deal with the aftermath as best they can. The film chooses to pad with an occasional over-reliance on cutesy filler -- a pregnant Emily having an ultra-sound, giving birth, recuperating at her beloved ranch away from it all.

A masterly piece of documentary chicanery that kills George W. Bush without once pandering to his legions of ill-wishers.

Here's one thing about Marie Antoinette: It sure is easy to watch. And here's another: It's even easier to forget.

Wears a deep and sophisticated shade of black and is also very, very sad.

Eastwood keeps retracing the same pattern, intercutting from the battlefield to the bond circuit, from the appalling chaos where no one feels heroic to the catered dinners where heroism is the dessert that sweetens the mood and opens the chequebooks. By now, though, the twinned structure seems fragmented, and neither half gets a chance to gather any emotional momentum or to further develop the theme.

Yet -- and this must be said in all fairness -- as things progress, the magic of the story asserts itself over the audience.

[Nolan is] back in the fine engineering business, crafting a story as intricately designed as a magician's lock, tightly packed with tumblers of deception and issuing a fun challenge to any volunteers in the audience: Just try to pick it.

Those ghosts might want to find a new vocation, because their work here is done.

As Dobbs's chain-smoking and hard-eyed enabler, a quietly spooky Christopher Walken manages to straddle the genres more effectively, gently toying with the stereotype of the rough-edged showbiz manager.

Another angry, searching document about pedophile priests, Deliver Us from Evil makes for unexpectedly gripping drama.

For all its treacly excesses of the post- "Full Monty" era, British comedy hasn't entirely lost its teeth yet.

Flashy, fun, shallow, easy-going and without a hope of brilliance.

Tideland is the easiest of Gilliam's films to follow, yet the most disturbing to watch.

A British flick based on the first novel in a popular teenage spy-thriller series by Anthony Horowitz, looks promising but, unfortunately, doesn't measure up.

To these disappointed eyes, Little Children seems a frustrating mess.

Rarely has a star's look-at-me turn so completely torpedoed a project. Whenever the picture threatens to gain some momentum, up pops Jack to stop it dead in its tracks. The loyal few may be laughing with him, but the rest of us are definitely laughing at him.

How bad does a film have to be to get the death doughnut? Disgracefully bad.

Mann (Comic Book Confidential) plays with archive, animation and music (hot soundtrack by the Sadies), illuminating another worthy counter-culture corner. Pure fun, fun, fun.

For all the carnality on offer here, Mitchell and his cast seem ambivalent about sex.

Succeeding where most docudramas fail, it turns a slice of recent history into a revealingly intelligent entertainment, without being didactic at one extreme or sentimental at the other.

With high seas and crashing waves created by Canadian special-effects company Fusion CIS, there's nothing wrong with the nail-biting side of the equation featuring a sequence of distinct maritime accidents; it's the rest of the plot that is taking on water.

The film wraps mindless cartoon violence and a few fart jokes around life lessons about friendship and responsibility. Kids should like it; parents won't mind it.

School for Scoundrels suffers from an old-fashioned identity crisis. The poor thing is awfully confused, and so are we. Is it a black comedy that isn't dark enough? Or a dumb comedy that isn't stupid enough, or a gross-out comedy that isn't yucky enough? Or is it really just a romance comedy that isn't sweet enough? Don't have a clue, but this much is certain: It's definitely a failed comedy that isn't funny enough.

As it dips in and out of the boys' lives, and occasionally wanders back to the contemporary Dito surveying the old neighbourhood, Saints never really integrates its two time periods.

Unfortunately, despite a committed and lively performance, McAvoy's Scottish doctor is fictional, an amalgam of Amin's "white monkeys."

Some performances carry a picture, this one bench-presses it. Sean Penn's work here is so mesmerizing, so intense, so guaranteed to put him front and centre when Oscar reads out the nominees, as to almost obscure the multiple failings of the misguided movie around it.

The creators of Flyboys know no image too clichéd, no narrative convention too exhausted and no psychological motivation too pat that it can't do service.

Rallies in the last reel.

In a better work, the filmmaker would talk to hardcore punks about their parents, affairs, regrets, dreams and day jobs in an effort to explore the fledgling movement. Here, however, we get little more than a marathon MTV rap session, as Rachman drives about North America, yakking with aging punk heroes about the good ol' bad ol' days.

It's this edge that saves The Science of Sleep from its own whimsy.

A precise, subtle and emotionally affecting portrait of the fraying friendship between two men, director Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy is an increasingly rare sort of American independent film: It aspires to be something other than a Hollywood movie with less money.

Film noir is a style, but self-conscious film noir is just a stylistic tic, less a genre than an ailment. And The Black Dahlia has got a really bad case -- this thing is so mannered it convulses.

Some films, like "Shrek," "The Incredibles" and "Finding Nemo," manage to strike the right balance. Others, like Everyone's Hero -- opening today -- do not.

If you like your sports movies, especially your football movies, larded with more clichés than a politician's stump speech, Gridiron Gang begs to be seen.

Actor-turned-director Tony Goldwyn elicits solid performances from the cast, then undercuts them by resorting to a trite montage or a clunky set-piece, inevitably scored with an obtrusive rock tune telling us what to feel and when to feel it.

With barely a laugh to be found, Confetti takes the "mock" right out of the mockumentary, and you can guess what's left. Yep, a Umentary, a brand new genre best defined by what it's not -- not real like a doc, not funny like a mock, not this thing or that thing or much of anything.

Speaking as one of the mourners, did I mention how pleasant it is to revisit footage of John Lennon? And to listen to his music which, in this case, comes either in taped performances or laid onto the soundtrack, no fewer than 40 songs drawn almost exclusively from the post-Beatle, pro-Ono phase of his career.

Black comedy often asks viewers, in exchange for the hilarity, to suspend their moral objections along with their disbelief...Here, we keep our part of the bargain only to be cheated of our payoff.

This summer has given us two Supermen to choose from in our own distemperate times: "Superman Returns" was for the starry-eyed idealists, Hollywoodland is for the bleary-eyed cynics.

The movie is a series of ever more elaborate fight sequences and increasingly more and larger opponents.

So blatantly contrived it could be called The Fast and the Spurious, Crank has the small saving grace of being intentionally ridiculous. The action sequences are more notable for their outrageousness than their visceral power.

The Wicker Man is one of those "what were they thinking?" movies.

What's so fresh about Mutual Appreciation is how acutely it represents the social rituals of today's post-collegiate types.

My mood kept fluctuating, as did my reaction when the end credits rolled: This is seriously lovely; this is fluff; this is seriously lovely fluff.

Gets under your skin as another thought-provoking wake-up call about the power of studios and the corporations that back them.

Beerfest is safety-by-numbers comedy. A troupe, as opposed to a single comic star like Adam Sandler, shares the comic load and, well, at least the film is funnier than "Click."

Artistic originality is not so common a commodity that you can afford to get too fussy about the details.

How to Eat Fried Worms arrives just in time to placate preteen boys who resent being unable to see the frankly more adult though equally immature "Snakes on a Plane."

Despite its title, the movie admirably sticks to its game plan of ennobling the everyman as opposed to turning Papale into some kind of Superman.

Characters already too wicked to be credible start doing stuff simply too stupid to be believed, with no help from a cast way too overmatched to be useful.

The same didactic instincts that sometimes mar Lee's fictional filmmaking serve him well as a documentarian and eulogist, both with Four Little Girls and this film, a record of the worst natural disaster in American history.

There is also a capable, wisecracking stewardess (Julianna Margulies) and, what a surprise, a steward who appears to be doing a Paul Lynde impersonation.

The humour in Accepted is maddeningly safe.

For a film meant to float on a gossamer veil of mystery, The Illusionist falls -- make that flops -- with quite the heavy thud. It's an intended piece of magic that plays like a ponderous slab of melodrama, sleight of hand gone ham-handed.

Embracing such depths, Bukowski somehow made his art. Simulating them, Factotum just makes us queasy.

A botched adult romantic comedy that strands its leading player, and its audience, in a wearying, sitcom-slight battle of the sexes.

For once, the gimmick is a perfect reflection of the characters.

Tedious, baffling and ultimately laughable.

Until the movie stumbles under the weight of its noble intentions and its tediously formulaic story, it delivers a few lively, well-shot dance sequences and some winning moments.

A family-friendly adventure.

This is a grown-up film that puts liberalism under the microscope and finds it tired -- not a dirty word, as neo-cons believe, and not a panacea, as sentimentalists wish, but just tired and longing for rejuvenation.

Whatever The House of Sand may lack in curb appeal, that view from the roof will have you gasping in wonderment.

Despite the best efforts of the cast (Cage is especially evocative in a literally confined role), Stone can't disguise the fact that his movie, like his heroes, has come to a kinetic halt, stuck between a narrative rock and an emotional hard place.

For those who like their horror served straight up with no ironic chaser, The Descent is a tasty cup of torment.

The disturbing thing in this preposterous piece of family fluff from writer-director Steve Oedekerk (Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, the Oscar-nominated Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius) is the sight of bulls with udders.

It should be a better, more authentic movie, considering that screenwriters Maupin and his ex-partner, Terry Anderson, are retelling parts of their own story here.

Mainly, though, it's the performers who are having the last laugh.

It's all such a throwback, and yet there's something rather sweet about the way this pot boils.

Sensual and scary, the movie is so visually textured you feel as though you're brushing against the screen.

The differences between the two movies are, first, that Scoop is a comedy and, second, unlike "Match Point," it's not very good, as Allen also returns to pre-Match Point mediocre form.