The Clearing has been directed by a successful producer. In this case it's Pieter Jan Brugge, who brings seriousness and intelligence to his newly chosen craft, but little verve.

A lot of talent to lavish on a single movie, but the result is uncommonly smart for the genre, and not just smart but tremendously enjoyable.

A lovely surprise. Ripe with feeling and lush with physical beauty, it's a love story that swings confidently between age and youth, and, like the young Tiger Woods of old, avoids every trap along the way.

At its best, Fahrenheit 9/11 is an impressionist burlesque of contemporary American politics that culminates in a somber lament for lives lost in Iraq. But the good stuff -- and there's some extremely good stuff -- keeps getting tainted by Mr. Moore's poison-camera penchant for drawing dark inferences from dubious evidence.

The Terminal is a terminally fraudulent and all-but-interminable comedy.

Though there's less to the film than seduces the eye, the allure of those surfaces can be hypnotic.

Its terrific cast kept making me laugh out loud.

A tatty but good-natured time-passer.

A pitiful shambles of a remake, The Stepford Wives might have qualified as a rethinking of the 1975 original if there were any trace of coherent thought in the finished product.

More than a deadpan comedy about oddball losers. This dork has his day, and this story has its touching subtext -- growing pains relieved by unlikely hope.

The right word for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is wondersful -- as in full of wonders, great and small.

Please see this movie, and take any kids old enough to read subtitles. It's one of a kind.

It's a powerful polemic in its own right, despite some maddeningly glib generalizations, a documentary that functions as a 2½-hour provocation in the ongoing debate about corporate conduct and governance.

Seldom has grandeur struggled so mightily, and fruitlessly, with rampant goofiness.

It's a great accomplishment and, at a time when satire is in short supply, a terrific surprise.

Ms. Hudson makes the most of her role, even though that's not saying so very much -- the writing is terribly thin -- while John Corbett gives an unaccountably clumsy performance as a romantic pastor. Joan Cusack gets the funniest lines as Helen's sister, a model of boring mommyhood, but she also stops the movie dead in its tracks every time she plays a scene.

Mr. Samuell's stylistic revelries are meant as comments on the conventions and excesses of movie romance, but his approach is glib and self-congratulatory. No feelings dwell beneath the layers upon layers of faux-naïve artifice. I dare you to sit through this movie and not wish you were somewhere else.

News management is the main issue. Control Room shows how coverage is tailored to fit the audience, both by al-Jazeera and its Western counterparts.

There's an old-Hollywood feel to the movie's solid showmanship and unabashed sophistication. These days it's feature-length 'toons, sporting the newest-fangled technology, that take kids and adults alike back to the movies' good old days.

In Troy, and in overreaching, underachieving productions like it, digital imagery is fast becoming both a Trojan horse and Achilles' heel.

Although mood often substitutes for momentum in Ms. Kalem's film, both of her stars give affecting performances, and there's growth on both sides of the unlikely romance.

Once in a great while a film seems right in every detail. Andre Techine's Strayed ("Les Egares") is such a film.

One of the many stylistic distinctions of this outwardly modest production is the complex voice that the filmmaker has found for his young hero.

Nothing's alive in this trash-heap travesty of warm-weather entertainment, despite the frenetic pace.

This shabby enterprise gets so many things so wrong that it freezes your face into a cringe.

A high school comedy that is sharply observed and often terrifically funny, yet oddly misconceived.

Before and after plot mechanics, a drama of family tension and warmth.

Isn't the best romantic comedy one might wish for, but it's more than good enough.