Those opening trailers are hilarious and devastatingly acute, but the rest of Stiller's film could be more a deconstruction of comedy than a display of it. The brain gets the joke; the ribs are untickled.

This is a good, serious and absorbing movie -- especially, perhaps, for a reviewer who is roughly Kepesh's age and, of course, eagerly evading the issues his story forces up.

But it IS a movie about dopes: goofy guys, born without the ambition gene, and who would not survive a minute in the drug world, or the real one, without the guardian angel of a scriptwriter hovering to think them out of scrapes.

This Mummy movie is really two movies: a good adventure epic, with all the Chinese people, and a wan one, with O'Connells and the other the Westerners.

Swing Vote falls from agreeable fable into wan satire.

In the end, you feel that Frozen River gives about as truthful a picture of American bleakness as it's possible for a movie to present. It is a movie that asks something of an audience, but it richly rewards our curiously rapt attention.

For the uninitiated, The X Files: I Want to Believe may seem as musty and forbidding as one of those dank secrets that Mulder and Scully were forever digging up from some backyard, or fetid swamp, or their own aching hearts.

Brideshead Revisited is untaxing, pleasant enough to watch. But I'm still waiting to be seriously discomfited by it.

Beyond dark. It's as black -- and teeming and toxic -- as the mind of the Joker. "Batman Begins," the 2005 film that launched Nolan's series, was a mere five-finger exercise. This is the full symphony.

By the end-credit sequence, when the stars appear in spandex outfits to reprise Dancing Queen, the audience may be singing along as if they'd overdosed on ouzo.

If the film is just as strange and endearing as its glowing protagonist -- and it is -- that's because the director and co-writer (with Mignola) is Guillermo del Toro, 43, who has the wildest imagination and grandest ambitions of anybody in modern movies.

Neither the acting nor the story matters much here; the movie is simply the sum of its 3D effects.

I think Gonzo, which is wonderfully rich in historical footage, needs some skeptics, some voices suggesting that maybe, just maybe, Thompson was part of the problem, not the solution, when America flirted briefly with revolution (or was it merely anarchy?), leaving consequences that continue to resonate today -- and not always to our advantage.

It's strenuous, smartly-made and ordinary to an extraordinary degree.

Indeed, you could argue that Tell No One is a variant on one of Hitchcock's favorite themes: the running man whose story no one (except us in the audience) believes. These fictions, of course, depend for their success on the French respect for rationalism (and their horror when reason is torn asunder by criminal irrationality).

It works; this is Pixar's most enthralling entertainment since "Nemo."

The summer's zazziest action movie.

That Max Smart is played by the admirable Steve Carell, who is desperately looking for deadpan jokes in all the wrong places, is beside the point.

The Love Guru is a shambling, hit-or-miss thing, like an old Laurel and Hardy two-reeler. And like the situations those comics often got into, this movie is a fine mess.

And now we have this ill wind, this feeble gust of an environmental horror story. The writer-director's disintegration from robust artistic health to narrative incoherence, from hitmaker to box-office loser, has an almost tragic trajectory. It's a saga worthy of being told by the young M. Night Shyamalan.

One has to admit that enormous moviemaking skill goes into the creation of pictures like The Incredible Hulk. The sheer craft directors such as Leterrier lavish on them is awesome to me. I can't imagine how they orchestrate -- or even remember -- all the little pieces of film they require to build their big set pieces. That thought, however, is nearly always followed by this question: Why do they bother?

The new picture provides a master coursed in cunning visual art and ultra-satisfying entertainment.

The result is a laff riot. Well, all right, a laff scuffle -- a picture that isn't quite as funny as it might be, but is as funny as it needs to be.

I have the anachronistic notion that romantic comedies needn't be exclusively partial to one gender; they should be critical and loving and true to both. So I'll soldier on with my mixed, distant, defiantly ignorant review of this 142-minute trifle -- which comes close to being the longest non-musical romantic comedy in Hollywood history.

There are scenes in the new movie that seem like stretching exercises at a retirement home; there are garrulous stretches, and even the title seems a few words too long. But once it gets going, Crystal Skull delivers smart, robust, familiar entertainment.

Speed Racer announces the arrival of the virtual movie. If you watch the film overwhelmed by the assault of seductive visual information and wonder what you're seeing, here's the happy answer: the future of movies.

Worst-in-breed not only for this year, but very likely in living memory.

Some of us knows that there's an American style -- best displayed in the big, smart, kid-friendly epic -- that few other cinemas even aspire to, and none can touch. When it works, as it does here, it rekindles even a cynic's movie love. So cheers to Downey, Favreau and the Iron Man production company. They don't call it Marvel for nothing.