This touching documentary is many things at once: a fascinating biography, a gorgeously shot travelogue, a provocative disquisition on the relevance of architecture and, above all, the record of a son's poignant search for a father.

Director Jon Favreau keeps the guy-in-an-elf-suit act from degenerating into a too-long sketch, focusing on Buddy's naïve optimism, even in the face of harsh reality.

Frequently funny, generally fizzy and occasionally piercingly perceptive about the price love exacts.

The slim story gets swamped by the stunning visuals.

Entertaining in spite its dubious accuracy.

A truly trangressive film as unsettling as it is psychologically acute.

Ask New York-based filmmaker Amos Poe, who badly botches this profile of the artist with a sloppy structure, careless editing and amateurish optical effects that detract from what's actually good about the film: Earle's music.

The result is rather like eavesdropping on a bright but painfully self-absorbed adolescent's secret thoughts: sometimes fascinating, other times just infuriating.

A move that would be hilariously absurd if it weren't so scary.

It neither works as a stand-alone film nor captures the thrilling sense of somber, pulpy mystery that made "The Matrix" so compelling. Nevertheless, It brings the saga to a satisfying close, and relies less on the clumps of pop-mystical cyber gobbledy-gook that gummed up the gears of "Reloaded" and more on the powerful emotional bonds that bind Neo, Trinity, Morpheus, Niobe, Link and Zee.

Both farcical and deeply troubling, it unfolds with the kind of breathless, minute-by-minute immediacy that only eyewitness reportage can bring.

There's so much less to the film than the novel: Nicholas Meyer's screenplay fails to capture the intricate subtleties of its subject and replaces Roth's moral scope with a moralizing tone.

An uneasy mix of B-movie scares.

A blood-curdling picture directed by Georges Franju at an even, distant pace that builds tension to an almost unbearable level.

But fabulous though the allusions, sets and costumes are, Busch's performance is the movie's heart, and like the screen idols whose every gesture he's lovingly absorbed, Busch can pack a world of meaning into an arched eyebrow and a slight crack of the voice.

It's almost inconceivable how Glass could have gotten away with so much, but the movie makes a convincing case for how Glass used office politics, the good faith of his editors and his own personal charisma to get away with the worst offenses a journalist could commit.

At heart an emotionally rich look at mothers and their daughters.

A cheesy romance tricked up in cheap sanctimony.

The heavy-handed score by notoriously heavy-handed James Horner is often the only indication that there's supposed to be a point to this showcase for Gooding's relentlessly adorable mugging.

Films like this are the definition of "critic proof"; if the casting, synopsis and very concept don't deter you, you'll probably find it very funny.

While the hand-drawn animation is visually appealing, the story is completely predictable and Phil Collins's music lacks the impact of his Oscar-winning "Tarzan" tunes.

Like the violence in Alan Clarke's Elephant, the BBC documentary about Northern Ireland from which the film takes its name, Van Sant offers no straightforward reasons for what happens at this particular school. The explosion of violence is far from unmotivated, but its roots are presented as deeply personal and, even more troubling, ultimately inexplicable.

The sequence in which the crew acquires press credentials to the Republican National Convention by helping organizers desperate to book a rock band (they deliver Leitch's scruffy pals the Interpreters USSA) is priceless.

A failure on every level.

The unspoken question that underlies their struggles is whether a facility run by sheer force of personality can survive when that personality is gone; the film ends on a cautiously hopeful note.

Ryan is raw and remarkably good, but the film's real star is New York. Draped in post-9/11 anxiety and brimming with a free-floating fear, the city hasn't appeared this threatening since the '70s.

Informative and richly illustrated documentary.

This new SAW film is so utterly unimaginative it doesn't even count as hommage; it's just a smudgy copy of a still chilling original.