Gibson is a primitive all right, but so were Cecil B. DeMille and D.W. Griffith, and somehow we survived their idiocies.

Smartly crafted, impeccably acted, The Lives of Others packs a subtle punch, from its creepy first images to its poignant finale.

This is a Bond with great body but no soul.

Crowe, despite his loutish rep, is forever surprising viewers by slipping snugly into the disparate characters he plays. This time he surprises by failing. Oh, he can do engaging as smartly as he does stalwart or tortured, but he gets sabotaged by the cloying script.

A more sensitive Ferrell in a script that plays like Charlie Kaufman Lite: that should send up breakthrough and Oscar signals. It doesn't quite, though. The movie is clever, but a little too pleased with its own clockwork intricacy.

Babel is a movie that leaves you feeling limp and wrung out, but mysteriously moved by its vivid human encounters with the hot, tightly wired, chancy and coincidental world, ever capable of terrorizing us when we least expect it.

Clint Eastwood has crafted a bold and meticulous epic.

For all the film's murky misdirections, it is very enjoyable. That's because Nolan's recreation of the illusionists' backstage world is so marvelously detailed, including as it does revelations of how some of their best tricks are accomplished.

A watchable film, but it -- and its star -- might have done so much more.

Little Children does not have quite the bleak discipline of Field's more keenly judged "In the Bedroom." Yet it is a more ambitious film and a considerable achievement.

Mirren, who won an Emmy playing Elizabeth I for HBO, may deserve an Oscar for this ripe appraisal of Elizabeth II.

You can, if you will, think of All the King's Men as a purely political parable, but that is to miss its blackest, bleakest meanings.

Both horrifying and hopeful.

By the end, the canniest viewers may not be fooled, but--and you can believe this--they may be mesmerized.

Very simply, World Trade Center is a powerful movie experience, a hymn in plainsong that glorifies that which is best in the American spirit.

Dark, detailed and only really gets going when the gunplay starts.

At this late stage in a long career, Allen might consider not trying to make films like the early, funny ones. Instead he should aim simply to match "Match Point."

That metaphor is pitch-perfect, but the film works a little too hard at proving the vileness of beauty pageants.

Lady doesn't work. Although he detonates a few terrific frissons involving the scrunt, the stabs at comedy are lurching and arrant. The spreading of tension from one character to many dilutes the mood. The would-be rapturous Spielbergian ending is on the wussy side.

The best Hollywood movies always knew how to sneak a beguiling subtext into a crowd-pleasing story. Superman Returns is in that grand tradition. That's why it's beyond Super. It's superb.

Chris Paine's documentary makes an unapologetic case for the car and an unofficial indictment of the forces allied against it.

The Road to Guantánamo is his (Winterbottom’s) most unsparing statement yet of war's brutalizing effect on both the prisoner and his jailer.

Fetching little monument to the bard of rapturous bereavement.

This film is as smart and funny as its topic and its stars.

The first great movie of the summer.

Ward Serrill's feel-good doc, which covers seven years in the life of Resler's Roughriders, is hobbled by a narration so syrupy, it could be poured on pancakes. But the movie soars because of the sport's natural drama and its luck in finding a complex heroine.

Makes everything Hollywood has lately done in the action genre look clumsy, dull and stale. It is a short, nonstop stuntfest that, by going back to basics and placing them on the screen with simple, breathless stylishness, turns what is essentially a lowlife movie form into something one is not embarrassed to call "pure" cinema--all energy, movement and high kinetic wit.

Howard and Goldsman have efficiently touched all the bases. But they haven't found a way to replicate the book's page-turning urgency.