Seldom has a film explored such exotica as Valentino's world -- the gowns, the galas, the villas, the private jets -- with such a sense of momentous drama behind the glitz.

This is filmmaking by the numbers meant to succeed by the numbers.

You'll miss out on some really great stuff if you don't see this surprising movie.

Elegance isn't Zack Snyder's bag; a certain sort of impact is. Watchmen establishes him as Hollywood's reigning master of psychic suffocation.

Not even she (Patricia Clarkson), however, can save a movie that suffers from terminal self-enchantment.

This exquisite film by the Swedish master Jan Troell is about seeing clearly, and fearlessly. It's also about subdued passion, the birth of an artist and a woman's struggle to live her own life.

Wayne Kramer's interlocking saga of immigration in 21st-century America definitely crosses over, from workaday mediocrity to distinctive dreadfulness.

I have no idea how such shameless prattle found its way to the screen.

Doesn't measure up to the depth of detail, let alone the drama, of "Unzipped," the 1995 documentary about Isaac Mizrahi. Still, this new documentary conveys an ample sense of the process.

Horror and social value contend for equal honors in Must Read After My Death, a frightening -- and eerily edifying -- documentary that Morgan Dews created from a family trove of photos, Dictaphone letters, audiotapes, voluminous transcripts and home movies.

The malignity can be oppressive -- this is a far cry from Fellini finding poignant uplift in the slums -- but the dramatic structure is complex, the details are instructive, and the sense of tragedy is momentous.

For a filmmaker who has made his reputation with such crime thrillers as "Little Odessa" and "The Yards," James Gray reveals an unexpected gift for the mysteries of romance.

One of the best of the genre. If it doesn't serve oysters, per se, this submarine wonder offers marvels in abundance.

Coraline is distinguished, if you can call it that, by a creepiness so deep as to seem perverse, and the film finally succumbs to terminal deficits in dramatic energy, narrative coherence and plain old heart.

The possibilities of the dating game are endless and the potential for pain is great, yet the permutations of the movie's plot are predictable and repetitive.

This time he (Martin) goes through the motions.

The production renders totally irrelevant all hopes for a well-made movie. It's one of those ragged, pandemonious studio comedies that hammers at plot points in every contrived scene.

Motion is in copious supply -- a frenzied shootout at Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum grows interminable -- but the workings of the abstract plot are unfathomable, the characters are unpleasant and a couple of assassinations leave us as cold as the corpses.

The plot borrows as freely from Hitchcock and Henry James as from the Bard of Avon, and doesn't make scrupulous sense, though I'd have to see the film again, which I won't do, to make sure it doesn't cheat.

It's unfunny at best and borderline-amateur at worst, notwithstanding the desperate efforts of Renée Zellweger.

Not since the thunderous digital onslaughts of "Jumanji" has the big screen seen such too-muchness.

Fitfully amusing.

It's sad to see a promising fantasy turn into yet another industrial-scale fantasy-delivery system that beats up on its audience with mindless intensity and undercuts its own humanity -- and caninity -- in the process.

No cues are needed to understand the plot, which feels computer-generated and barely serves to sustain an hour and a half running time.

The movie is stifling, all right, and depressing in the bargain.

Benjamin Button is all of a visionary piece, and it's a soul-filling vision.

As a PG-rated film opening on Christmas Day under the Disney banner, Bedtime Stories would seem to promise fairly wholesome family entertainment. What it delivers is the glitzy allure of a hotel setting, smarmy double entendres, Ferrari lust, Beverly Hills bling and pneumatic babes -- one of the characters is a surrogate Paris Hilton.

A good chance to see two superb actors having their way with wafer-thin material.