The sheer nastiness of the jealous one-upmanship and angry sabotage puts a damper on the yuletide comedy. You're much better off watching a DVD of "Bad Santa."

Unlike the last Scott-Washington matchup, "Man on Fire," Deja Vu boasts a muscular, fast-forward story that won't be overwhelmed by Scott's need for speed in the form of rapid cuts and all that visual fusion that have become his stylistic trademark. Here, the approach is perfectly suited to the picture's time-shifting, multitasking structure.

Sticks to formula but delivers some seriously dumb laughs.

A fanciful wisp of a film that feels slight at times. It's based on the slender novella "Pobby and Dingan," by Ben Rice, who also co-wrote the screenplay. Yet it winds up making some keen observations on the power of imagination.

If you liked the play and the compelling ideas Bennett kicks around, the movie makes for an intellectually invigorating couple of hours.

What a relief to escape the series' increasing bondage to high-tech gimmicks in favor of intrigue and suspense featuring richly nuanced characters and women who think the body's sexiest organ is the brain.

This animated all-penguin musical is terrific fun.

Let's Go to Prison ultimately feels as long as a stint in the big house.

As the characters' lives fall apart, Ledger fails to bring the necessary gravitas to the role, and he looks a bit too healthy throughout.

Following up on Morgan Spurlock's wildly successful indie film "Super Size Me," critics of fast food were hoping that a one-two punch would further raise consciousness among consumers and purveyors alike. Alas, Fast Food Nation is punchless.

The outrageously hilarious For Your Consideration was well worth the wait. Again delivered with comic precision by Guest's crack repertory company, his patented brand of parody takes affectionate but deadly aim at its awards buzz mania target and the results aren't just funny, they're face-hurting funny.

The film is about vanity and pride, and the caging of beauty. Its elaborate fabrication has an intoxicating quality that captures the imagination like all good horror stories.

Whether or not Bobby Kennedy was the man his supporters believed him to be, the film makes a persuasive case that something important in America was silenced when he was gunned down.

Bielinsky is a most expressive director, achieving considerable nuances and depths of emotion with characters' looks, gestures, body language and silences.

What starts out seeming like a poor man's Woody Allen morphs into something closer to an American version of "Scenes From a Marriage."

Fascinatingly ambiguous tale and bizarre cast of characters make it one of the more entertaining documentaries in recent memory.

You sense in every frame the strain to be lighthearted. Consequently, A Good Year is at times downright clumsy. You know what the filmmakers are trying to achieve and see the labor going into the attempt, but for them to fall so short is unsettling.

The film's unrelenting bleakness and misanthropic tone is likely to be a turnoff to mainstream performances, but it provides its lead actor with another opportunity to display his riveting intensity.

While Adam Sussman's screenplay can be admired for its emphasis on subtle atmospherics rather than cheap scares, it is a gimmicky slog of an affair that lacks narrative coherence or strong focus.

In practice, "Fiction" isn't nearly that unusual. Less like "Adaptation" than a smarter version of "Click," the picture pleases while remaining unchallenging to a broad audience.

Fur is a misfire by the talented people who four years ago gave us "Secretary," whose tongue-in-cheek approach might have served this film better, taking the edge off much of its pretensions.

A simple story yet told with such conviction, delicacy and instinct for truth that it carries keen emotional power. This is the first film from actress Joey Lauren Adams, so one can only hope she has more stories inside her for she has genuine storytelling talent.

The film offers fascinating glimpses of a hardworking but unhurried way of life, though it doesn't have the powerful dramatic hook of "The Story of the Weeping Camel."

The picture never successfully comes off the written page.

A lively and often enlightening documentary.

The weapon wielded by Cohen and Charles is crudeness. People today, especially those in public life, can disguise prejudice in coded language and soft tones. Bigotry is ever so polite now. So the filmmakers mean to drag the beast out into the sunlight of brilliant satire and let everyone see the rotting, stinking, foul thing for what it is. When you laugh at something that is bad, it loses much of its power.

Delicious slapstick, droll wit and terrific characters make Aardman's first venture in CG cartooning a great success.

To borrow a cliche from another medium, Santa might have jumped the shark.