Jennifer Aniston brings a needed liveliness to Derailed, though not enough to go around.

Still, the cynosure of all eyes is honest, articulate Elizabeth, her own woman in an era when women belonged to men, and at the same time full of love. Lizzie is the best, and Keira Knightley does right by her.

For a film filled with jagged shards of glass, and sometimes shot kaleidoscopically, through the windows of houses or cars, Bee Season is carefully, almost relentlessly, intended. That said, the script, by Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal, touches on themes that rarely make it to the big screen.

If I could find some facet to praise, I'd be glad to do so, but the production's mediocrity is all-pervasive -- story, character, graphic design, even music -- and it all points to a failure of corporate imagination, or maybe just nerve.

An exercise in inertia about an exercise in futility.

Spasms of kung fu wire fighting, Spider-Man acrobatics, huge explosions and a lethal polo game can't replace the first film's beating heart and witty soul.

Prime is neither deep nor as shallow as it first threatens to be, but surprisingly good fun.

A guaranteed downer that's devoid of any upside, and free of dangerously entertaining side effects.

A valuable film, provided one doesn't ask too much of it.

A feature-length documentary, by Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller, of absolutely breathtaking sweep and joyous energy.

Here's a case of clichés transmuted, for the most part, into stirring entertainment.

This is a special film whose delicate tone ranges from tender to astringent, with occasional side trips into sweet.

Amazingly and incessantly funny, a free-form riff on Hollywood shenanigans, the film noir genre and film in general.

Domino is a new definition of a snuff movie. It snuffs out every vestige of feeling.

A saga of static set pieces and strenuously clever notions, this is a fiasco of a film if ever there was one.

Malevolence is in generous supply throughout the film. Easy enjoyment is not.

A long, slow slog through what could have been, and should have been, a more absorbing story.

Many movies these days are too long; this one, at 90 minutes, feels too short. That's because its purpose is so sharply defined: a tight close-up, in black and white, of a single, seminal moment -- a black and white moment -- in American history, and American journalism.

Manipulative, but confidently so, and improbably but consistently affecting.

The absence of any nuance in the father's character bespeaks the filmmaker's unwillingness to trust his audience. Making the movie may have been therapeutic for him, but I can't say the same about watching it.

The illusion is seamless and the pleasure is boundless.

What Mr. Hoffman has done here borders on the miraculous.

The movie's smugness is insufferable.

This peculiarly predictable picture has been calculated, or miscalculated, to set up certain expectations, fulfill them, and then do the same thing again, thereby giving us a chance to see what's coming and, at least in theory, be shocked when it actually comes.

Two dramatic problems beset Roman Polanski's darkly handsome new film of the Dickens novel. The boy is as passive as ever, and bleak in the bargain -- instead of glowing like the Oliver of the musical, he takes light in -- while Ben Kingsley's Fagin and Jamie Foreman's Bill Sikes manage to make villainy a bit of a bore.

I wish I could report the arrival of an impressive movie, but this one, for all its ostensibly big ideas about mathematics and wounded minds, struck me as an elaborate pretext for a synthetic love story.

Not everything is illuminated in his (Liev Schreiber) version, but the book's humanity and humor shine through.

This stop-action animated feature is downright sweet and tender, as well as all the other things we've come to expect from him -- funny, bizarre, graphically stunning and blithely necrophilic.