Shrill and charmless. I didn't believe a word of it. I wanted to spank it and banish it to its room.

It's a cagey delight, and an imposing feature directorial debut for one of Britain's TV stalwarts.

Too bad that First Class torpedoes its lofty intentions with flights of idiocy so wrongheaded as to be almost endearing.

The year's most thrilling, FEELING mainstream movie.

The new Panda has a bright palette, an amiable vibe and enough vivacity to keep kids entertained and any accompanying moms from bolting for "Bridesmaids."

The chemistry this trio has is special; the premise of the sequel seems worn, but the way they work against and with each other is what provides the pleasure.

Whereas Italian fashion icon Valentino was larger than life in "The Last Emperor," Matt Tyrnauer's jazzy 2009 documentary, Saint Laurent in L'Amour Fou is mostly a rather sweet and anguished ghost.

This might be a turning point in feminism and comedy, provided that both sexes can embrace it.

Ferrell fits uncannily well into Carver country, and in this small but sturdy film, he challenges any assumption that he might be limited to comedy. Certainly this is the first time he's moved me to tears that weren't produced by hard laughter.

The Beaver is serious about portraying mental illness. And whatever your opinion about Gibson the man, so is Gibson the actor.

At its best moments, Thor weaves a spot of magic from the complex science of $150-million fantasy-film technology.

An enthralled and mostly enthralling guided tour of what Herzog describes as "one of the greatest art discoveries in the history of human culture."

The picture delivers the high-octane, testosteronic goods of a warm-weather smash, and maybe the first great film of the post-human era. It's just a shame that every theater showing this nonstop auto race, this animated car-toon, can't be a drive-in.

The movie proved to be an exasperating, fitfully enjoyable jumble of Perryana, full of insult humor, a gospel choir and, not to give too much away, plot elements borrowed from "Chinatown," "Precious," "Imitation of Life" and "Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke" - all restitched and Tyler-made.

The proceedings get so slow and saccharine that viewers will relishes the film's moments of redeeming idiocy. In one of them, Marlena whispers to Jacob, "Bring Rosie to my tent and don't tell anyone" - as if the roustabouts wouldn't notice a 12-ft.-tall, 10,000-lb. creature striding down the midway.

Existing in a self-contained universe, Scream 4 is its own remake (Screamake), sequel (shriekquel), parody and critique. Thus it taunts and pleases audiences, mocks and justifies itself and makes any review redundant.

If you don't go in panting for a Pixar-level masterpiece, you should have a blast at this cartoon carnaval.

Wright's performance is the key to a movie that pulses with the sick thrill of historical discovery. The Conspirator reminds us that. when we surrendered so many of our Constitutional rights and judgments after 9/11, it wasn't the first time.

It's a deceptively small piece of onscreen art that resonates afterward with such insistence that I felt positively nagged by it.

Occasionally curious moviegoers will discover an especially rotten specimen of the genus Cinema stinkibus... a work of ur-awfulness, counterbrilliance and antigenius. Your Highness, the new medieval-fantasy farce starring and co-written by Danny McBride, is such a movie.

It's a feast for the eyes, but we're still hungry.

There is no denying that Schwimmer knows something about getting a performance out of an actor. Liberato, who is 15 now, is flat-out terrific. Shifting fluidly from demure to sullen and damaged, she is tremendously compelling.

It is a tremendous downer when the second half of the movie shirks logic, defies its own established principles and raises more questions than it answers.

Sucker Punch has vast empty patches, deserts of dead air.

Rodrick Rules often feels like a mainstreamed version of that wonderful short-lived television series, "Freaks and Geeks."

The story wraps up with a tenderness that feels true but completely without mush. The irony of the title fades as Win Win wins you over.

Slick and senseless.

Not bad, but certainly not good; classify the movie as lazy fun.

Was Red Riding Hood masterminded by a cadre of particularly silly 11-year-olds undergoing withdrawal from Twilight? That's the only excuse for a movie this dopey.

This remake hits the jackpot with Wasikowska (pronounced VashiKOVska) and, not far behind, Fassbender.

The shaky-cam as used in "Cloverfield" and the Paul Greengrass "Bourne" films, and in TV shows from "NYPD Blue" to "24" to "The Office," is worse than amateurism; it's fake amateurism, the visual equivalent of a comedian pretending to have Parkinson's.

It's a clever idea that, around the mid-point, stumbles into absurdity as the movie itself makes too many lunatic choices.

Hardly unforgettable, but it is an amiable diversion, kept afloat by some comic moments of the raunchy, silly variety, and by something that does feel rather retro: a kindness to its youthful characters.

No goggles, no gloom. And no competition for the coolest, orneriest, funniest, best-looking movie of early 2011.

It is the rare conspiracy thriller that ripens as the villains' organization and motives are gradually revealed.

There are gaping holes in logic throughout this sloppy, cheap-looking mess from "Disturbia" director D.J. Caruso.

A loose but fairly snappy remake of the 1969 charmer "Cactus Flower."

The result is a knockoff cinematic ceramic.

The Other Woman earns a viewer's respect for the grace notes that director-screenwriter Don Roos finds beneath these familiar tunes, for the unassertive skill with which he paints upper-class life on the Upper East Side, and for the rightness of the performances.

Sanctum is a stinker, a horror movie without a visible monster.

The Rite is all windup, weak delivery.

Quick, capable, thoroughly bloody action film.

The picture is no great shakes as cinema, and a shade too cute for its own good.

The overall metaphor Weir was aiming for - this idea of enemies so powerful and a war so menacing and confusingly big that no place seems safe except a place absurdly far away - comes through clearly and stays with you.

The mix is not nearly classic but is congenial enough to warm up a January weekend and perhaps to stoke a sequel. Call it "The Green Hornet Strikes Again?" No: "Kato II!"

The hardest movies to review are the ones you respect and admire but don't love and also - and this is the crucial part - aren't angered by. Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Biutiful is just that sort of film.

The tense verbal comedy of Mattie's early negotiation with a Fort Smith merchant should win you over to this movie's high linguistic wit. If not, you may as well slip out of the theater and into "Little Fockers."

I wish I found The Illusionist as pleasing to sit through (twice) as to write about. I'm glad there's a "new" "Tati" film to add to his small, important body of work, yet I wish that the creator of "The Triplets of Belleville" had made a true Chomet film instead. I'll be waiting for that, with a hope to be found nowhere in this handsome, airless movie.

The scenes cut so close to the emotional bone that you can understand why they might cause a panic amongst MPAA boardmembers, although of course, it's nothing to be afraid of: just the realism of love in its varied forms.

I'm afraid the DeNiro of "The Godfather, Part II" and "Goodfellas" has mostly faded from my mind, replaced by the DeNiro of the Fockers - a grim-faced comedian who tends to make me sad.

Yeah, well, I still like the film.

Tron: Legacy is not good, but it is amiable. While it seems less like a parody than the original, it is also silly in a not unpleasing way.

In ingenuity and charm, this DreamWorks offering isn't up there with "Kung Fu Panda," which remains the sharpest, fullest film from the studio. You may get the feeling that Megamind was made for, and possibly by, really smart six-year-olds. Nothing wrong with that; audiences of all ages can be tickled by the higher form of preadolescent humor.

This is the kind of movie you should never see twice, because so much of it is based in appall-me humor. Meaning you'll laugh the first time in the reflexive way you do when you can't believe how audacious the comedy is and how uncomfortable the situations are, whereas a second viewing would afford you an opportunity to feel kind of rotten about laughing the first time.

An expensive flop and the latest Iraq movie to be shunned by the mass audience, Green Zone was still the year's most visceral, thrilling entertainment.

It's a cocktail-party movie with a Molotov-cocktail finish: a tribute to the 88-year-old auteur's artistry - and his con artistry as well.

This is a true-life heist movie, and the thieves not only got away with their billions, they're still doing business. Pay attention and blow a gasket.

Kidman, in a career-best performance, and Eckhart lend pitch-perfect calibration to the couple's shared and separate agonies. It's as if previous treatments of the subject were a series of failed experiments, and Rabbit Hole is the Eureka! moment.

While Hathaway and Gyllenhaal have good chemistry, and director Edward Zwick moves the narrative along nicely, the film is too self-satisfied to be genuinely touching.

John Wells's The Company Men is a juicy, judicious drama, and one of the few current movies to address an issue that affects many of the people who will see it - or, because reality is too depressing, avoid it.

The pitch is enough to make you swoon, but the movie itself is curiously limp.

Somewhere has a lot of good impulses, and a salutary faith in an audience's patience; but the film's tone, in its script, performances and visual style, is studiously uninflected. It's a document of people seen remotely, maybe from outer space.

Obvious, though, is the word for Hopper's direction. It amplifies to rock-concert level every pained plosive in Bertie's speech, forces certain characters dangerously close to caricature.

This is your basic, and very enjoyable, Disney princess musical, an empowerment tale to teach bright, dreamy girls how to grow to maturity - and outgrow the adults in charge.

The results, while occasionally forced, are consistently amusing.

Dawn Treader, the name of the ship in the story, should here be rechristened Yawn Treader. If this movie were a bedtime book, the wee ones would be asleep by page two.

The screenplay, credited to three writers, has that over-doctored feeling to it, and we're asked to take on a larger redemption tale that undermines the truth of Bale's wholly unsympathetic portrayal of a drug addict and a narcissist. The Fighter's desire to show us what that awful combination looks like is overwhelmed by its urge to show us a Hollywood-style triumph.

Stuff still leaps out of the screen -- the snake striking a victim, cars sent flying by Death Eaters -- but few things in the movie lodge in the audience's mind or heart.

Me, I'm of two minds about a movie that wants to be a nail-ripping thriller and a statement on an artist's unholy communion with her role. It's reminiscent of older, better movies.

Engrossing and inspiring, despite being the kind of movie in which one of the first words you hear is cheeky.

Slick, well acted and engaging. It's also morally bankrupt--a film that makes you feel as though you've been taken for a smooth ride by the Hollywood machine and dropped somewhere very nasty.

What explosive mischief might they create? That's the premise of Morris' brilliantly incendiary new comedy Four Lions.

Morning Glory is a cut above most other recent light fare, but not a prime cut.

This is a survival manual turned into an existential prison-break movie; it cuts deep and, at its ecstatic climax, soars high.

For Colored Girls feels like the cinematic equivalent to putting a garish reproduction of the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling of your McMansion and calling it art.


Unlike the original, Paranormal Activity 2's pacing is uneven; it builds slowly and effectively before rushing too quickly, and at one point not particularly coherently, through the climax. But the jolts, when they come, are bigger, causing actual physical thrills and chills, at least for me.

What takes Conviction out of the "Erin Brockovich" inspirational orbit - and gives it fresh interest - is the fact that Betty Anne is never portrayed as a fish suddenly taking brilliantly to judicial waters. Instead of being a legal savant, she's a persistent lunatic tilting at windmills for the sake of a familial love no one else can quite understand.

The movie will divide some Eastwood fans, conquer others. The naysayers will be grateful that, from this healthy, workaholic actor-director, there is always the promise of a good movie - if not here, then hereafter.

So here's my second and final verdict on the movie: it's as captivating as its heroine.

Knoxville and his team bring a defiant cheerfulness to their venture; the gang's idiocy is both self-aware and somehow innocent. Their gags have the anachronistic simplicity of pre-CGI stunts, when daredevils risked their lives to make an audience go "Wow!"

This isn't a passionate, showy part, but it's a finely drawn performance, worthy of a veteran actress (Lane) who started her career as Secretariat did in the 1970s (in A Little Romance) and has since earned a champion status of her own.

It's worth considering precisely whom the movie is meant for. It's not labeled as such, but It's Kind of a Funny Story is squarely aimed at young adults.

Nowhere Boy is a surprisingly conventional film - adroit at weaving a time-and-place mood but way too rigid dramatically to bring the Lennon family dynamic to life.

Another dreadful entry in the festering form of romantic comedy: the forced intimacy of two people who have nothing in common but hatred for each other.

The rewards for paying attention are mammoth and exhilarating. This is a high-IQ movie that gives viewers an IQ high.

Documentaries don't fly on figures, or even controversial arguments; they come to life with real, engaging people. And when this freakumentary hooks up with Urail King, it gets an A.

Let Me In is not as fantastic as "Let the Right One In," which you should rent immediately. But it is undeniably powerful and made with obvious admiration and respect for the source material.

No deep thoughts here; this is a product of shiny surfaces and glittering patter, the cinematic equivalent of a derivatives offering. Instead of whacking Wall Street, Stone gives it a poke that ends up as a tickle.

Director Rodrigo Cortes intends us to feel trapped, twitchy and unhappy and at the same time, wildly grateful we're not actually in the box like Paul. I could do without that kind of guilt trip from a film.

This is more than an Important Documentary: it is engaging and, finally, enraging - as captivating as any "Superman" movie, and as poignant as a child's plea for help.

It's rare to see an ensemble movie like this, so loaded with talented actors, in which virtually all of them get an opportunity to make an impression. Affleck is the boss and the star, but he knows how to share.

I finally surrendered to the script's breezy intelligence and the movie's relatively mature sensibility. As for Emma Stone, she didn't have to win me over. She conquered me from the first A.

Poignant, troubling and altogether splendid new film.

The raunchy but charming Going the Distance is credible, intimate and more appealing than 90% of the romantic pairings in American movies these days.

Designed and destined to win no awards, Machete is expert, cartoon-violent, lighthearted fun. Just the thing to send Junior back to school in a good mood.

The dreariest thriller of the year.

Cotton is that rarity in the horror genre: a genuinely intriguing character.

Now that Eat, Pray, Love had lost its commas and become a movie actually starring Julia Roberts, I was no longer annoyed by how much it seemed like one; it had assumed its rightful place in the entertainment universe.