A brisk and entertaining indictment of the Bush Administration’s middle East policies before and after September 11, 2001.

The Terminal is Spielberg's shortest feature since the first "Jurassic Park," yet it drags, plods, piling one lifeless situation atop another. For all the effort and good intentions, the movie is in-terminal-ble.

If you surrender to the film's often inexplicable rhythms, if you let its dark materials reach out and envelop you, it can be a curiously rewarding experience -- a blend of silences and sudden bursts of violence that, despite its highly stylized manner, feels more edgily lifelike and more disturbing than most movies.

A film full of smart laughs.

Enjoy the savory witches' brew that Cuaron has cooked up in his Harry pot. For on its own terms, this one is truly wizard.

The next time you hear a director complain about the studio or his stars or the weather or whatever, think of what Jorgen Leth achieved with Lars von Trier as his boss -- when five obstructions became five splendid opportunities.

This wonderfully animated movie is a little more softly pitched than its predecessor, but it still has plenty of rollicking spin on the ball.

In this vigorous, stalwart epic, they blend martial breadth and emotional intimacy, honor and obsession, romance and machismo to show the glamour and folly of war.

It feels as if it has been recovered from a time capsule, and what larger meaning it may have is anyone's guess. But it is way cool -- and funny -- in ways that more expensive comedies trying harder rarely are.

Elegant and understated.

Agresti's just out to give us a sentimental good time. Which some people, heaven help us, will have -- while the rest of us choke on the cutesiness.

It's pretty awful.

In a movie age when there's hardly a garde, let alone an avant-garde, Maddin proves there are many languages to cinema, including the dead one of antique film. And in that language, he sings, he soars.

This being a Tarantino film, the conversations are as long and lurid and finely choreographed as the martial-arts set pieces.

Politics aside, this is a handsome film with orange skies to die for, or under, and a lovely score by Carter Burwell. The picture has some ponderous and snooze-worthy stretches, but it attains a certain melancholic grandeur, with the actors and crew fighting as desperately as Crockett and Bowie to make the best of a fated adventure.

The Coen brothers merrily subvert that standard caper trope.

It's a brilliant idea, for about 10 minutes. Then the bare set is elbowed out of a viewer's mind by the threadbare plot and characterizations.

Kaufman may be counting on the audience's will, insistence and yearning to create a coherent love story from the shards and shrapnel he provides us.

Starsky & Hutch has moments of hilarity a little greater than you might expect of a movie that is just out for a lazy good time.

A romantic comedy so smart and sweetly mature, it's liberating.

A serious, handsome, excruciating film that radiates total commitment.

What a pleasure it is not to be hectored by a director as we laugh our own little laughs, watching a profound story unfold.

Dispassionate, curiously lifeless, lacking the energy of either youthful commitment or a deeply engaged re-examination of the past.

Has a whirligig wit, and 11 songs crammed into its 67 minutes: that's more melodic content than in most Broadway musicals.

Japanese Story is a simple, austerely told tale. But there is something memorable, even haunting, about it.

A grand and poignant movie epic about what is lost in war and what's worth saving in life. It is also a rare blend of purity and maturity -- the year's most rapturous love story.

Maybe Wellesley isn't the only injured party here. Can an audience sue for cruel and edifying punishment?

This is spellbinding reality cinema about duplicity and, worse, ignorance at the highest level.

As reversible misunderstandings grow into irreversible tragedy, it slowly dawns on you that this is a superior, heartbreaking film.

The second half of the film elevates all the story elements to Beethovenian crescendo. Here is an epic with literature's depth and opera's splendor -- and one that could be achieved only in movies. What could be more terrific?

This material is either underdeveloped or crudely put by a director whose style is so conventional that he makes James Ivory look, by comparison, like Jean-Luc Godard.

The Farrellys need to remember this: Sappiness is easy, comedy is hard.

The film fairly groans from all the narrative gamesmanship and lavish romantic gestures...The unbewitched viewer may groan as well.

A movie that demands our surrender -- to its energy, to its bold-stroke moviemaking, to its acting (particularly by Cruise and Watanabe, who blend musing and graceful muscularity) and, above all, to its romantic vision of a lost world.

Emma Bolger is -- no other word for it -- magical in the role...In her way she encapsulates In America's virtues. It's a realistic movie, but one that's always aware that transformative hope may be just around the corner.

Triplettes is terrific…there's no competition for the fall's most imaginative delight. In that race, Triplettes can already take its victory lap.

Not for everyone. The plot is full of holes, and its language is worse than it has to be. But it has some swell supporting performances and a lot of vulgar inventiveness, and best of all, it plugs into -- and electrifies -- the mostly unacknowledged grimness that lies just beneath our holiday cheer.

Arcand has a gift for witty dialogue but a weakness for force-feeding his story with sentiment. References to ancient holocausts and to 9/11 simply expose the intent of a director who will do anything to touch his audience -- with a sweet gesture or a cattle prod. And in a comedy of manners, that behavior is very impolite.

As for Blanchett, she's simply wonderful. She has played her share of queenly figures, but her acting essence is, emotionally speaking, plain-Jane. She's a straight shooter, with an uncanny ability to find a character's spine and communicate it without fuss or feathers.

Master and Commander is to movies what Russell Crowe is to acting. With subtlety and power, it explores the complexities of men at war, even with themselves. It puts the passion into action, and the thrill into thought.

This fine, persuasive movie will have to serve as his testament, and it's a fitting one. How many men can say they wrote their own epitaphs in their own blood?

Enough of Curtis' lovably crazed characters do succeed in finding love in all the unlikely places that you leave the theater with your heart humming happily. He has his dark -- well, darkish -- side under control. Which is to say that he is an Englishman, well practiced in masking pain and absurdity and descents into sheer goofiness with mannerly behavior, sly irony and stiff upper lips.

The film is high romance, rather like those American movies of the 1940s -- people snatching at happiness in a world aflame. We don't make them anymore -- stupid us --but we ought to be glad someone does.

The trilogy ascends and soars with the two combatants and ends not with a whimper but with a blast of light. Thus the fabulous original film has found an honorable way to sign off. For those who didn't bother to join the early crowds, The Matrix Revolutions is a definite might see.

Elegant, thoughtful film.

Somehow, by a narrow margin, the film doesn't quite make it. Potter recolored his work a little more sunnily, and it is, perhaps, too compressed; it needs TV's room to digress.

Veronica Guerin paid with her life. This film would make her proud, for it is ultimately not depressing but -- we say without a shred of journalistic irony -- inspiring.

Even when the movie sags and strains a bit in Act III, Clooney keeps it flying with old-fashioned movie-star allure. He's got it all: Cary Grant's looks and, inside, Bob Hope's snake-oil-salesman soul.

By next semester, some grad student will be writing a thesis on the B-movie influences on this A+ film.

Three of the hippest indie film princes make a perfect commercial comedy.

This wisp of a movie turns out to be more thoughtfully affecting than many a more high-flying film.

It's an exercise in style by Robert Rodriguez and not to be taken any more (or less) seriously than his giddy "Spy Kids" movies.

Watch Murray's eyes in the climactic scene in the hotel lobby: while hardly moving, they express the collapsing of all hopes, the return to a sleepwalking status quo. You won't find a subtler, funnier or more poignant performance this year than this quietly astonishing turn.

A kind of bipolar movie, not exactly haha funny but true to life.

It's a real and rare pleasure to see Costner and Duvall together -- these masters of intense passivity, who know how to be watched when they're listening.

Its visual thrills are chilly and wearying compared with the other films' quirky humanity. It's not a megamovie; it's a Sega movie.

Ross is a filmmaker with a taste for inherently sentimental tales…but the discipline not to play mawkishly to our sentiments. You will be moved by Seabiscuit--but not to tears.

This is an original work in an antique mood. The actors and authors all have fun with the genre without making fun of it. Rather, they revive it.

We're talking fables, not reality, here, and this is a fine and merry one--"Ms. Woods Goes to Washington"--played to airy perfection by Reese Witherspoon and a light-on-its-feet cast.

At its metallic heart, T3 is another chase movie -- one figure relentlessly tracking three others, mostly in cars, at high speed through implausibly underpopulated Los Angeles streets.

Boyle's ingenuity with the camera gives this fraught journey plenty of menace and pizazz.

After “The Matrix Reloaded” and “The Hulk,” there's something refreshing about this movie's complete lack of intellectual pretense.

Lee must have thought he could work a similar magic on this clunking, clanking machine. But despite a few witty wipes and split-screen tricks, he fails. Hulk is no better than hulking.

Isn't an audience that was nurtured on the doomsday screeds of art-house cinema entitled to vacation in the warmth of a superior film about a boy with almost too many people to love?

Nemo, with its ravishing underwater fantasia, manages to trump the design glamour of earlier Pixar films.

You are never exactly bored by The Matrix Reloaded. But there is something alienating about it, maybe because it fails to fulfill its possibly loony intellectual aspirations.

The new film is conflicted about its subject -- it both derides and adores what it means to parody -- and it's miscast at the top. Still, the Eve Ahlert -- Dennis Drake script has a gentle heart to humanize its sharp sitcom wit.

An elegantly polished little film.

Patient and plodding -- but as realized by John Malkovich, in his directorial debut, utterly absorbing.

Wants to contain multitudes -- high ideals and high tech, the poignant and the silly. Doing so, it becomes a lexicon of modern filmmaking. It could be its own creature: Super-Generico. That's not the worst thing for a movie to be, but it's not quite Marvel-ous either.

You'll have to seek it out in its limited release, but no current movie is more worth the effort.

Intellectually austere but technologically and aesthetically riveting documentary.

The sweetest and funniest of Guest's true-life fake-umentaries.

It should make audiences happy. But then so did most of his earlier movies, and they were lame, gnat-brained pieces of demagogic doo-doo!

Droll, reticent, flawlessly filmed fable of generosity.

Can one recommend this unblinking film to the average moviegoer, out for a good time? Only in this way: if James and his crew can spend years with these blighted souls, surely you can spend two hours with them, exploring compassion's outer limits.

Kasdan has been a serious filmmaker, so he gives the goofiness a smart look and some pertinent metaphors about Americans wrongfully detained. But the aim is no higher than the impulse of old schlockmeisters like Roger Corman and Ed Wood: to get the audience to scream.

Glover, as usual, is phenomenal.

Green shoots his groping lovers in the art-film style -- long takes, static frame -- but his tone isn't at all minimalist; it's achingly, breathtakingly romantic, like the old Hollywood love stories his kids have never seen.

Colombani has created uncommonly arresting entertainment.

It will fascinate and possibly even delight cinephiles. Who does not enjoy gawking at accidents, particularly those in which there are no fatalities and the sad story unfolds in almost slow-motion clarity?

Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention is a cure for nagging ethnic generalities. This Palestinian sort-of-comedy has a sly wit that amuses and disturbs in equal, salubrious measure.

The film is seductive, disturbing, enthralling -- a trip to hell that gives the passengers a great ride.

Has so much razzle-dazzle that viewers may end up both raised and dazed. It's remorselessly inventive, trying anything fast and sassy to keep you watching. In other words, it's the most honest display of showpeople's need to be noticed this side of a Madonna concert.

A raw, unblinking film. It teaches that in dire circumstances our only obligation is to our own survival; all else -- culture, ideology, even love -- is a dispensable luxury.

Now and then McGrath's film feels a bit rushed and breathless, but mostly you sink gratefully into its handsomely staged plenitude.

A grim and uninvolving film, for which Philip Glass unwittingly provides the perfect score -- tuneless, oppressive, droning, painfully self-important.

Results in about the nicest movie you could ask for at the holidays: a gently funny, sweetly adventurous film that makes you feel genuinely good, that is to say, entirely unconned by false sentiment or sharp, overmanipulative Hollywood practices.

This daring, perhaps confusing declaration of irrelevance suggests that the epic is a form a director like Scorsese must subvert even as he invokes it. But it doesn't erase the sordid splendor of Scorsese's congested, conflicted, entrancing achievement.

Pretty lethargic stuff. Monty, a convicted drug dealer on his last day before he is to report to prison, does more moping than moving.

Towers, while not quite so varied as Fellowship in its moods and settings, has a grave gusto that energizes every moment...a thrilling work of film craft.

Maid in Manhattan is not so much a movie as a collection of career moves. J. Lo needs a comedy hit to support her principal activity, adorning magazine covers. Fiennes needs to warm his austere British image if he hopes to become a true international star.

Sublime and sorrowful movie.

The movie ends in a burst of violence that we are unprepared for and don't believe. Maybe it's the film's final joke. It's a miscalculation -- though a calculated one -- but it does not erase one's fond memories of all the odd, deeply humorous behavior that preceded it.

A coda that will have the movie's audience gasping in exhilarated exhaustion, whispering astonished gratitude to Sokurov for having created vigorous art out of 21st century video technique and asking themselves, "What's the Russian word for Wow!?"

This is a chase movie (Simon Legree after three Little Evas) across parched outback terrain, captured with rapturous authenticity by cinematographer Christopher Doyle.

Can't touch the 1972 film's austere poignancy, and McElhone lacks the bewitching beauty of Natalya Bondarchuk in the original Solaris. But the project's gravity and ambition can't be denied.

May leave viewers emotionally disconnected from this distinctly unchipper Mr. Chips.