World on a Wire is the discovery of the season, rarely screened in America but very much a key chapter in Fassbinder's story--a step toward bigger budgets and slicker production values, yet clarifying of his core artistic legacy.

It's the casting, stupid!

Though it runs an epic five-and-a-half hours (it was made for French TV), Carlos books like no film since "Goodfellas." You will not be bored, ever.

This muted mobster story reminds us that the ties that bind can also gag you, garrote you and slowly deaden your soul.

And by the time Thornton has deftly flipped the script regarding the titular Biblical parable's misogyny, you'll feel as if Aussie cinema has indeed discovered its next great voice.

Good policy does not ensure good drama; Gerrymandering summarizes an urgent issue but forgets to detail the true fallout.

Even the admittedly thrilling gameplay footage and time-capsule news reports are couched in contexts that seem crudely sketched out.

The 3-D effects, so promising on paper, don't really add much-and, worse, there's a overreliance on slow-motion, which kills the fun.

Our fury is never directed toward concrete solutions, and that allows the guilty parties to slip, perhaps permanently, from our grasp.

Material like this doesn't require the additional strain of overnarrated freeze-frames, a "Cuckoo's Nest" supporting cast of adorable crazies and a Glee-ified musical number set to Queen and David Bowie's "Under Pressure."

Lane, experiencing her career heyday, is sweet enough to have you rooting for her, even if her journey to the winner's circle is an odds-on favorite.

Harsh-voiced Sarah Butler lends zero personality to her avenging antiheroine, and the retributive torture sequences approach "Saw" levels of unlikelihood.

If only the script had been content to stick with its let's-start-a-band verve. Like many a musical biopic, Nowhere Boy wants to explain away the man (as if a song like "In My Life" weren't explanation enough).

Brittle, workaholic and bitterly single does not a Kate Hepburn make, and in this latest screen iteration of The Taming of the Heigl, she doesn't stray far enough from her standard rom-com shtick.

When it comes to capturing the man behind the phenomenon, however, the film never progresses beyond a superficial, weird-yet-wonderful portraiture.

While the director doesn't hide her sympathies, she leaves remarkably few stones unturned in a dogged search for answers.

There's only one thing worse than a leaden moral fable that tackles issues of forgiveness with sledgehammer contrivances, and that's one that attempts to mask its manipulative corniness with an air of trumped-up gravity.

It's hardly worth slogging through a full hour of unexplained bondage and a so-bombastic-it-seems-sarcastic score, only to be rewarded with a plea for tolerance that's both insincere and inept.

There are plenty of formulaic boo! moments, yet Craven intelligently treats Bug's otherworldly issues like hormonal growing pains that must be tamed.

It's a grandly entertaining reminder of everything we used to go to the movies for (and still can't get online): sparkling dialogue, thorny situations, soulful performances, and an unusually open-ended and relevant engagement with a major social issue of the day: how we (dis)connect.

Despite a roster of off-kilter documentarians each directing an episode, Freakonomics only partly delivers the sense of traipsing into uncharted territory.

The new Let Me In does more than merely preserve the original's mood; it actually improves on it.

The film never entirely overcomes the sense that it's a calling-card vehicle.

Leaving is a tawdry potboiler slathered riotously in portent, complete with a lamebrained detour into vengeance that only Claude Chabrol would be able to pull off.

Everything from the direction of actors to the dialogue signifies the work of a filmmaker who favors easy audience-baiting reactions over dramatic momentum. Doesn't the man who would later teach Bruce Lee how to kee-yah deserve better than a chopsocky Punch-and-Judy show?

Who knew entering a belated adulthood could be so easy-and so utterly joyless?

It's a functional sequel, but with all that spirited slicing and dicing, the director could have at least broken a sweat.

It's less a film than one long advertisement for itself-and for the fact that mindless entertainment truly knows no borders.

From a bevy of cheesy jolt scares (alarm clock! barking dog!) to the embarrassing sight of Zellweger and Ian McShane treating this Orphan-style B-movie silliness with grave seriousness, the film proves to be one hokey-horror riot.

A completely unnecessary sequel, plays a lot like "The Godfather, Part III"-lush, self-parodic and cut adrift from urgency.

The movie's real asset is Reynolds himself, utilizing his comedy chops for unexpected levity.

A strong contender for both the artiest drug movie and the druggiest art movie ever made, Gaspar Noé's tour de force of forced perspectives and free-form grief is, in every sense of the word, a trip.

Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's mostly whiffed docudrama makes the influential poem by Allen Ginsberg (Franco) seem dull, ordinary, pedestrian instead of pioneering.

Zack Snyder's films have some of the best opening-credits sequences in cinema; the unfortunate thing is that there's always a movie after them.

The plentiful pop-doc touches ensure that this wake-up call won't put you to sleep, even if the ratio of spoonfuls of sugar to medicine occasionally seems skewed.

Though the movie is a testimony to one man's will to survive and a testament to a vanishing art form, Tibet in Song's greatest achievement may be the way it shows how China recast traditional songs as modern pro-Communist propaganda-an eradication of an invaded country's culture through insidious co-option.

The stars here are not the moms, but the kids-and they are truly amazing.

Since love and boys fall strictly to the side, we can't tell if this wrongheaded caper was intended as a feminist indictment of female competition or a plain old girl-fight flick.

It isn't the first time death has figured in an Allen movie, but the way he grapples with it here (leaving each character at a moment of irresolution comparable to staring down the man with the scythe) is much more potent and direct.

There's more than a few things off in this tale of a disillusioned professional thief (Affleck, dull), his unlikely inamorata (Hall, wasted) and the determined FBI agent (Hamm, solid) out to apprehend him.

Hoffman predictably knocks a familiar role out of the park (and just as unsurprisingly, wrings excellence from his performers) in this rather trivial, downbeat four-hander about a working-class couple trying to connect during a Gotham winter.

A dog in wolf's clothing, Lionsgate's drab, anthropomorphic animal saga does little more than reconfirm the preeminence of Pixar.

The script, credited to one Bert V. Royal, seems to have been run through an out-of-control sass machine (seriously, it'll make you appreciate Diablo Cody's tact).

I'll respect the studio's wishes to abbreviate all plot description. God knows, they're marketing it like the second coming of "The Crying Game," though the revelations that await Nev are only shocking if you believe P.T. Barnum was really in possession of a genuine Fiji mermaid.

Movies about children fending for themselves are predicated on pushing prepubescent despair into viewers' faces, which only makes this Swedish film's graceful mixture of terror and transcendental girl power that much more impressive.

The Freebie grimly reaffirms the status quo, concluding it's better to have no sex at all than to forsake the Ikea-furnished domestic dream.

This behind-the-curtain portrait winds up revealing only the most superficial-and glaringly obvious-of truths.

Audiences with infinite patience and no need for linear storytelling do get an intimate tour of The Anchorage's picturesque island off the coast of Stockholm, its landscapes lensed with loving appreciation. Past that, the experience of sitting through Ulla's daily routines yields little more than a travelogue and a vaguely contemplative vibe.

The film favors conspiracy theories and half-truths, in addition to discrediting Planned Parenthood as a racist institution and "Silent Spring" as the work of a vindictive cancer victim. It will incense you-for all the wrong reasons.

As the film reminds us, this Kentucky city included a world-class philharmonic, one that became the first to actively recruit new works from contemporary composers.

This is the sort of cut-rate cinematic Cheez Whiz that gives religious horror movies a bad name. Still, at least it's not "The Last Airbender."

The stylistic conceit of keeping us entirely with the clones (so that we are as ill-informed as they are and never get to meet their powerful oppressors) only reveals what an empty-headed abstraction this tale was from both page and frame one

Common wisdom suggests bakers are sour because they reserve the sweetness for their work. But these competitors' kindness in the face of adversity-at one point, a well-established chef breaks down in tears while his colleagues comfort him-is what sticks with you the most.

Is Joaquin Phoenix putting us on? After watching the terrifying, near-brilliant exposé I'm Still Here, in which the Oscar nominee's public and private unraveling becomes a sick joke, the question doesn't matter.

The only thing that remains a mystery is why anyone thinks they can pass off a poorly made, predictable-to-a-fault movie as inspiring entertainment.

It ends where you want it to begin.

A worthwhile portrait of a genius who made beautiful music, and a case study for how to tragically, epically self-destruct.

This being a François Ozon film, there's beaucoup simmering sexual tension, as well as the prolific French director's usual thematic preoccupations: death and grief, familial animosity and female awakening.

Here's a film that definitely wants to play Hollywood dress-up.

Gould is as much of a mystery at the end as at the beginning. You get the feeling that's the way he'd have wanted it.

There are riveting moments, especially in tastefully shot interviews with former captives, who quietly describe their physical and psychological torture.

Alexei Kaleina and Craig Macneill's proudly minimalist affair favors ambiguity over soap-operatics, evoking the inescapable heartache of a loss so great, it cannot be uttered.

The movie will make you tap your toes; don't expect much for your head or your heartstrings.

It's Gruber's own remembrances (and a wealth of accompanying archival photos and film footage) that best mark her life as a case study in pioneering feminist courage, ambition and individualism.

While the film's interviews with students, parents and educators tend toward the repetitious, the hammering of the same bullet-point ideas time and again only lends greater urgency to this exposé of an increasingly rotten system.

Anderson makes often-inspiring use of the 3-D effects.

The Virginity Hit is elevated by its cast of very funny young actors who match good comic timing with relaxed spontaneity.

Just because you tart up a typical romantic comedy with trash talk doesn't make it edgy or real.

This is the kind of movie in which it's considered the zenith of meta-wit to have a slumming Robert De Niro (as Machete's racist politico nemesis) drive a taxi.

Taken on its own fun-over-philosophy terms, this is an exercise in tone-shifting virtuosity.

The attention to visuals is above and beyond what most vérité is capable of; doing double duty as the film's cinematographer, Fan demonstrates a pitch-perfect photojournalistic eye.

The girls are worth rooting for, but their pursuit is secondary to one sorry-ass dude's redemption. That's a win?

Simply skip the first part entirely: "Killer Instinct" bulges with a disconnected jumble of nightclub attacks and fence-clipping escapes you've seen better elsewhere. Yet a tide change happens with the superior Public Enemy No. 1, which takes the subject's raging ego as its cue.

It's a winning farce, if one that's far too broad.

There's one crucial lesson that Baker hasn't absorbed, however: Don't get too caught up in plotting, especially when it involves a man warming to an unwanted child.

Despite the subtitles, it's basically a slice of formulaic Hollywood-style mythmaking, writ large and woefully empty.

The film's mood is so somber and minimal, it might be confused for deep. Had the plot (meager and one-last-job-predictable) zipped along, that wouldn't feel like such a problem.

A smart horror film will fatten its pigs before the slaughter, and the mock doc The Last Exorcism feeds its prize hog nicely.

It's prime B-movie material put through the Ridley Scott Cuisinart.

This disappointing dramatization, mounted with generic blandness by Jean-François Richet, makes no case for the man's larger significance, nor does any emotional digging at all. Such detachment was no doubt considered artistically shrewd-it's a big mistake.

Notwithstanding Brown's occasional half-baked critical comment about the sport's corporatization, the film ends up as a cliquish circle jerk that flatters those in the know and leaves neophytes little to mull over.

The transformation that you anticipate never comes; the movie feels strangled.

At the very least, this mush pot reminds us that countries other than ours also produce melodramatic mediocrities.

The film's horrifying experience looms over each well-constructed frame without anywhere to go.

The casting, from lead roles to supporting, is uniformly terrific.

His (Fatih Akin) new movie, an occasionally shouty comedy, is easily his most fun.

Thompson's imagination-she's also the screenwriter-knows no bounds, and she does a brilliant job of connecting the fantastical elements to the sobering realities of life during wartime.

The performance sequences feel intimate and exhilarating-but in the end, Li's journey is compelling only when he's onstage.

The Tillman Story balances cynical and inspirational aspects in equal measure. Pat's demise-and the media debacle around it-seems that much more tragic and enraging.

Marvel at the desperate spectacle of three comic leads-Aniston, Bateman and Watchmen's Patrick Wilson as the original donor-being outperformed by the wide-eyed Robinson, a quiet collector of silences. These stars will never be as young as he is; you wish they'd all stop trying.

There's no sense of the oppression France felt under Nazi rule. It's all just play-acting in period-specific attire. You can almost hear the AD calling lunch.

Even on its own limited terms, the jokes are sub–"Friday" sequel, and a last-act grab for "Boyz n the Hood" pathos is seriously reaching.

Roger Corman could only dream of producing a movie this stupefyingly gory and loaded with exposed flesh, making the updated Piranha that most unlikely of remakes-an improvement.

It will test your faith in humanity, but Hersonski's film is nonetheless a brilliant reminder of the importance of bearing witness.

It's a sloppy, tossed-off collection of parodic gags of vampire flicks and gratuitous pop-cultural references (oh, there will be pointless Lady Gaga gags!) that are below bottom-of-the-barrel.

The thought behind this body-splattering nostalgia trip is unformed and stagnant.

It's supremely annoying to see the ups and downs of romance reduced to archer-than-arch line readings and bloodless mortal kombat. What's more frustrating is that the film, adapted from Bryan Lee O'Malley's popular comic, is an endless visual delight.

The strength of Animal Kingdom is its slow-building fatalism; the criminals' luck runs out, but then finds depressing extension via an out-of-left-field collaborator. It's a movie that has very little faith in authority, not even in Guy Pearce's righteous detective. The only law here is Darwin's.