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.

The intricacies here are moral and ethical, and they're fascinating.

This isn't entertainment in any conventional sense, but it's a mesmerizing film all the same.

The celebrated percussionist Evelyn Glennie is the subject of a wonderful documentary called Touch the Sound, although calling her a percussionist is like calling Brancusi a demolitionist.

In the end, The Constant Gardener is hardly more than yet another study of white, upper-middle-class martyrdom rather than the hard look at third-world suffering it might've been.

A wildly wondrous reinvention of the story of the chroniclers of dark, occasionally horrific, child-pleasing fairy tales.

This award-winning picture from Belgium is the kind Hollywood seems no longer interested in making: a sophisticated drama that presumes a level of insight and maturity in an audience that doesn't need winks and arrows to understand what's going on.

The jokes fly fast and sometimes very funny. They are, more often, crude and homophobic. Still, a genuine sweetness lurks.

Fits nicely among the contemporary comedies that teeter at the brink of delivering messages of one sort or another, but are in fact, nothing more than lots of fun. Which is no small achievement.

A very goofy movie that makes sense only to the screenwriter and his next of kin.

For all its noble intentions, its striving for authenticity, its unblinking look at the savagery of war, The Great Raid is far more dutiful than dramatic.

Ms. Richardson and Mr. Csokas are sunk mainly by the script (it's the handiwork of "Closer" playwright Patrick Marber and Chrysanthy Balis) and by their complete lack of chemistry. Still, their performances do them no credit.