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.

Mr. Herzog's perspective is an invaluable balance to Mr. Treadwell's as the animal advocate approaches what seems like madness.

Ms. Wood, who made a potent impression two years ago as a naïve adolescent led astray by a sophisticated and psychotic classmate in "Thirteen," has the whip hand this time around -- and she's wonderfully persuasive. She needs a movie to match.

The girls' enormous appeal prevents the political subtext from overburdening the film.

YEEEEE HAAAAW! They've gone and done it. The feature version of The Dukes Of Hazzard turns a sow's ear into a bigger sow's ear.

Jarmusch's uncharacteristically mainstream -- wonderful -- road trip movie.

This, too, is a mood piece, sometimes surreal and dominated by Chow's lovelorn sadness. But it's hard to find an emotional or narrative handle to hang on to, since the filmmaker keeps reaching for dramatic energy that keeps eluding him.

Duma is not a masterpiece, but its deficits recede into insignificance once you open yourself to the movie's mystery and visual splendor.

Short on dramatic energy, Must Love Dogs settles for a cheerful drone.

Brought down by repeated bursts of high absurdity.

Your reaction to the film will depend on your tolerance for scatology -- some of this stuff is very funny, although most of it is grindingly, numbingly awful -- and your interest in standup comics.

I found Hustle & Flow hard to get into at first, if only for its dialogue. But DJay's turf turns out to be everyone's turf -- a jagged landscape of hopes, disappointments, folly and fulfillment.

Comes on like an overproduced coma, and leaves you comatose by the end. In between are 127 minutes of intermittent chaos that feel like a lifetime.

Uncommonly smart and interesting.

Mr. Van Sant and his star, Michael Pitt, together with the cinematographer Harris Savides, set out to do a somber, rigorously distanced study of a man drained of all resources, and slowly though inexorably approaching his end. That they have done exactly what they meant to do is notable.

Inside the mysterious factory, a psychedelic realm where Johnny Depp's Willy Wonka holds sway, pleasure gradually gives way to a peculiar state that I can only describe as engagement without enjoyment.

Head, shoulders, funny bone and brain above the competition. It's the best comedy I've seen this year.

The new version is out of scale with the basic premise -- too much rain, too much water, too much doom, gloom and intricate eccentricity.

The result is a movie groping for a comic tone while its FX machinery spews vast clouds of visual gibberish.

There are worlds within the startling world of Murderball.