It is a chronicle of courage and sacrifice, of danger and solidarity, of heroism and futility, told with power, grace and feeling and brought alive by first-rate acting. A damn good war movie.

A perceptive and beautifully acted drama.

The easy, complacent distance that informs much historical filmmaking is almost entirely absent from this supremely intelligent, unfailingly honest movie.

At its best, The Nativity Story shares with "Hail Mary" an interest in finding a kernel of realism in the old story of a pregnant teenager in hard times. Buried in the pageantry, in other words, is an interesting movie.

National Lampoon’s Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj harnesses smut and silliness to an oddly innocent tale of true love.

Had it taken a more hard-headed approach, 3 Needles, might have been to the AIDS epidemic what "Traffic" was to the drug trade.

This is a picture with nothing to prove, and not all that much to say, but its modesty and good humor make it hard to resist.

Deteriorates from a potentially enlightening exploration of urban development and class conflict into a preposterous melodrama.

A grubby, lethally dull bid to cash in on the new extreme horror, the film turns on a conceit as frayed as Freddy Krueger’s shtick.

Two Weeks gets into serious trouble in its clumsy attempts to offset the sadness and anxiety with humor. This pursuit of sitcom levity contaminates a movie that might have been an American answer to the hardheaded Romanian masterpiece "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu."

This innovative chronicle of a truly modern romance also conveys, in a painful, darkly humorous way, a variety of ultra-identifiable truths, including the loneliness often suffered by big-city inhabitants and the complexities of sexual intimacy.

Nine years in the making and timeless in its observations, Highway Courtesans is an intimate look at some of the youngest practitioners of the world’s oldest profession.

A moody thriller with more emphasis on mood than thrills.

It does have some sweet touches and a droll sense of humor.

A Rubik’s Cube of shifting sexual orientation and elaborate sex fantasies, “Sloppy Seconds” gathers all the accouterments of soft pornography -- cheesy music, low-rent acting and attractively framed genitals -- into a plot of stunning imbecility.

John Waters is darned entertaining as he delivers a monologue that annotates his scandalous movies and encompasses assorted other subjects that interest or annoy him.

Nikolaus Geyrhalter's superb documentary is an unblinking, often disturbing look at industrial food production from field to factory.

The problem, though, is that its techniques run too far beyond its ideas, which are blurry and banal, rather than mysterious and resonant. The Fountain is something to see, but it is also much less, finally, than meets the eye.

Mr. Broderick and Mr. DeVito look tired and out of sorts, and you can hardly blame them, given the picture's inept, curdled mixture of sappiness and crude humor.

The joke of it is, for all the pricey bangs and booms, the whiplash cinematography and the editing that turns film space into cubistic tableaux, a Bruckheimer-and-Scott partnership is only as good as its screenplay, and this one is a mess.

As it wobbles from one episode to the next, The Pick of Destiny is a garish mess, and some of it feels padded. But it has enough jokes to keep you smiling, and the spirit Mr. Black brings to it is a fervent (and touching) affection for the music he spoofs but obviously adores.

As long as it focuses on its feverishly needy central characters, neither of whom you would ever want to have as a friend, it remains true to itself.

A warning to parents everywhere about the dangers of indulging irrational behavior, Opal Dream is a sickly sweet tale of deep dysfunction masquerading as family solidarity.

When a movie aspires to be gay pornography but can't even manage that, well, you know you've got a bad movie.

The current of intellectual energy snapping through the ferociously engaging screen adaptation of Alan Bennett’s Tony Award-winning play feels like electrical brain stimulation.

The latest James Bond vehicle -- call him Bond, Bond 6.0 -- finds the British spy leaner, meaner and a whole lot darker.

While compromised by the uplift and affirmation that mainstream animation regurgitates like a mommy penguin, it also shows a remarkable persistence of vision. Even in a story about singing-and-dancing fat and feather, Mr. Miller can’t help but go dark and deep.

It takes a while to realize that this is actually a sly, very funny comedy, one that stays admirably deadpan every time you think it’s about to veer into gross-out territory.

Doesn’t add anything substantively new, though it has been nicely directed by Neil Armfield, known in his country for his theater work, and features striking performances from Heath Ledger and Geoffrey Rush.

It's a mirror and a portrait, and a movie as necessary and nourishing as your next meal.

Funny? Yes. Revealing? No. By and large, the movie is content to offer amusing caricatures and leave it at that.

Flaunting elements of "Phantom of the Opera" and "The Island of Lost Souls," the movie, with its haunting, claustrophobic environment, allows the living and the merely lifelike to interact with an eerie beauty.

When you hear his (Robert Kennedy's) patient, meditative speeches, from which every note of demagoguery or pandering has been purged, you glimpse the film Mr. Estevez set out to make -- the one you may wish you were watching.

Mr. Bielinsky, in what would sadly be his last film, demonstrates a mastery of the form that is downright scary.

It isn't often that you see a film about Israelis and Palestinians that can be called hopeful, but Ronit Avni's assured, thoughtful and clear-eyed documentary certainly qualifies.

Mr. Lipsky’s screenplay, a messy collection of fragments arranged chronologically, adds up to one of the most intimate screen portraits of a relationship ever attempted.

Directed with extraordinary empathy by Aaron Katz (who also wrote the story), Dance Party, USA is an admittedly slight movie, but one that is given heft by a yearning tone and a camera fascinated by the emotional shifts and shadows on a young person's face.

As this smart, hard-bitten woman with an eighth-grade education pursues her quest, the documentary portrays the debate between connoisseurship and science as a culture war.

A Good Year is a three-P movie: pleasant, pretty and predictable. One might add piddling.

Mr. Bales's spectacular technical performance of a toxic bad boy on the fast track to hell somehow lacks an inner core.

You may see scarier movies this year, but none so redolent of decomposition.

While Stranger Than Fiction traffics in a bit of darkly funny existential anxiety, it also finds room for romantic fantasy and sentimental uplift.

From 300 hours of material, Mr. Longley has created a collage of images, sounds and characters, an intimate, partial portrait of an unraveling nation -- a portrait that gains power partly by virtue of its incompleteness.

Fur is a folly, though not a dishonorable one.

An incisive but static and occasionally confusing character study of Lucy Fowler, a disheveled, hard-drinking single woman who has a day job as a contractor and a dissolute night life.

Though the film's final, disturbing image forces race to the forefront and belatedly raises wider issues of persecution, its most controversial suggestion is not that Jesus might have been black but that he might have been a really terrible actor.

The dog is cute, the children are adorable, and the earth and the sky seem to stretch on without limit in The Cave of the Yellow Dog. Unfortunately, so does the slight story.

Topped with that messy salt-and-pepper wig that frames and obscures his scowling, searching face, [Harris] invests Beethoven with a violent turbulence that sometimes floods the room but mostly stays coiled inside, where it seethes.

The middle section of the film has some of the superficiality of a made-for-Lifetime drama of female distress and resilience, a bit too eager to make its points and solve its dramatic problems at the cost of the messiness that would bring the story fully to life.

Is this evidence of cultural decline? It's hard to think of a short answer that wouldn't be made more vivid by the insertion of the forbidden word. So skip it. No, not the movie. What, are you kidding me? No way. Go. Help yourself.

Leaving no cliché unturned, Coffee Date provides cheesy music, chats about "gaydar" and the obligatory are-you-looking-at-mine? urinal scene.

The irritations and tedium of high school life are staged with refreshing simplicity, while the performers interact with an age-appropriate naturalness the American teenage movie rarely achieves.

A limp urban comedy not nearly as whimsical as its title.

The brilliance of Borat is that its comedy is as pitiless as its social satire, and as brainy.

It is a relief to encounter such exuberant and infectious silliness.

One of the good things about bad movies is that when someone sneers about the unworthiness of a perfectly mediocre film like, say, "Crash," you can turn to a seriously unworthy film like, say, The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause and laugh. Ho. Ho. Ho.

Volver, full of surprises and reversals, unfolds with breathtaking ease and self-confidence. It is in some ways a smaller, simpler film than either "Talk to Her" or "Bad Education," choosing to tell its story without flashbacks or intricate parallel plots, but it is no less the work of a master.

Cess Silvera, the film's writer and director, doesn't find any of the humanity or inner demons that would allow the characters to rise above B-movie exploitation.

Form and content fight to the death in Wondrous Oblivion, Paul Morrison's defiantly gauzy tale of racial friction in 1960s England.

A breezy, informal history of the Black Bear Ranch, a long-running California commune begun in the summer of 1968 and still in existence, offers the fascinating spectacle of observing people then and now.

After a whole lot of buildup, and a real letdown of a payoff, the only enigma left is why we should care.

A straightforward, quietly persuasive primer on the climate-change crisis.

So sensitively acted you can almost buy its premise that love (in this case, neighborly affection and dependence) might rewire sexuality.

For $600, it turns out, you can make a short documentary about aging recreational swimmers that has just enough winning moments in it to let viewers forgive that it's little more than a glorified home video.

Keir Moreano’s muted yet moving record of his father's experience as a volunteer doctor in Vietnam, documents a journey that's substantially more philosophical than medical.

This modest, unassuming documentary about an illegal Mexican immigrant living in San Francisco is a case study of a life defined by poverty.

In the end Babel, like that tower in the book of Genesis, is a grand wreck, an incomplete monument to its own limitless ambition. But it is there, on the landscape, a startling and imposing reality. It's a folly, and also, perversely, a wonder.

It’s a film that wants to play as if it were ripped from today’s headlines, but has been shredded into near incoherence.

The most depressing thing about this series is not the creativity of the bloodletting but the bleak view of human nature.

This film paints a haunting portrait of existential solitude, one in which the images speak louder and often more forcefully than do any of the words.

Mr. Walsch’s books have sold millions of copies, and his devotees may flock to this movie. Other seekers of enlightenment might prefer the 2004 New Age curiosity "What the Bleep Do We Know!?," whose playful sense of scientific inquiry is refreshing by comparison.

The movie offers a revealing case study of the relationship between politics, celebrity and the media in today’s polarized social climate.

Some will find profundity in the film's reversals and revelations, but its provocations are not particularly insightful or original. The Death of a President is, in the end, neither terribly outrageous nor especially heroic; it’s a thought experiment that traffics in received ideas.

Cocaine Cowboys is a tabloid headline, a movie as oppressive and inarticulate as the lives it represents.

A brash, vivacious concoction of dark comedy, light drama and musical performance.

There is plenty of substance in Absolute Wilson, as it provides a concise and absorbing portrait of a powerful creative personality.

This eerie and indelible documentary about suicide juxtaposes transcendent beauty with personal tragedy.

There is pleasure in such useless beauty, of course, and pleasure too in drifting with the jellyfish amid the wild blue yonder of a great filmmaker’s imagination.

Of course, while your brain is fritzing out, you're trying to figure out how the cinematic trick was done and what the implications might be for other old films. Scary, disturbing, intriguing, all at once.

Despite the humanity and courage exhibited by the members of Exit, the film is inescapably grim.

A thoroughly modern confection, blending insouciance and sophistication, heartfelt longing and self-conscious posing with the guileless self-assurance of a great pop song. What to do for pleasure? Go see this movie, for starters.

Ms. Bening's precise, pitiless tracing of her character's decline from feisty defiance to pathetic, overmedicated self-delusion gives the film an emotional weight it might not otherwise have.

If Flags of Our Fathers feels so unlike most war movies and sounds so contrary to the usual political rhetoric, it is not because it affirms that war is hell, which it does with unblinking, graphic brutality. It’s because Mr. Eastwood insists, with a moral certitude that is all too rare in our movies, that we extract an unspeakable cost when we ask men to kill other men. There is never any doubt in the film that the country needed to fight this war, that it was necessary; it is the horror at such necessity that defines Flags of Our Fathers, not exultation.

An entertainingly ridiculous update of Mary O’Hara’s 1941 children’s novel, “My Friend Flicka.”

Stuffed with hard-working actors, sleek effects and stagy period details, The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan from a script he wrote with his brother Jonathan, is an intricate and elaborate machine designed for the simple purpose of diversion.

Sleeping Dogs Lie doesn't pretend to be more than it is: a blunt, provocative comedy sketch whose visual look is almost as bare as that of an episode of the underappreciated Home Box Office series "Lucky Louie." The acting, especially by Ms. Hamilton, is better than serviceable.

There is something good-natured about Jaan-E-Mann that makes it possible to forgive its many faults -- even the film's opening, a "2001: A Space Odyssey" ripoff with a space station gliding through the cosmos to the tune of the "Blue Danube" Waltz.

As this powerful, minutely documented film reveals, the tragedy wasn’t caused by the failure of the Peoples Temple to realize its goals. In many ways, it was succeeding as a self-sufficient community.

Requiem is a moving study of a tortured young woman more at peace with medieval ritual than with modern medicine.

Smart, resourceful indie.

Not as morose as it sounds, the film also features playful humor and steady promises of hope. And the boys, like the film, come off as very human: flawed, frequently awkward, but full of goodness at the core.

The film’s guileless, heartfelt style veers perilously close to corniness at times, but the superb cast dares you to mock.

Mr. Block has put his parents’ life, and his own, into this film with such warmth and candor that it may take more than one viewing to recognize it as a work of art.

The terrain is so familiar that it has a slightly stifling effect, even in Mr. Plympton’s demented hands. We long ago loved these characters to death.

Over all, though, the hands-off approach leaves the viewer to draw his own conclusions, but without providing enough information.

Puberty causes an exponential increase in evil -- and in incoherence -- in The Grudge 2.

It swerves from thriller to romantic comedy to farce without much conviction, though you can occasionally salvage a glimmer of amusing possibility. Mr. Williams scores with a few throwaway jokes.

Co-starring as Rome, the ringleader with "intimacy issues," Robert Patrick appears to be enjoying himself. That makes one of us.