Dollenmayer has managed to transform a sad sack into an indie screen goddess.

A poignant portrait of one woman who has loved and lost, and another who never had a love to lose.

Insightful and endearing documentary.

With all that going for it, one must ask, why didn't they just tell it completely straight? In other words, why did they feel so compelled to create an utterly bogus Max Baer for the virtuous Jim to fight in the movie's admittedly compelling climactic, championship bout?

The scenes of Green lavishing affection on his charges under the closing credits go a long way to rounding out this entertaining portrait of a volatile but effective educator.

There isn't much to the movie, and you can see where it's going from kilometers away. But [Daniel] Auteuil gives the silliness a surprising heft.

You can make a good movie about a bad marriage, as countless directors, the latest being Ozon, have discovered.

A warm, unexpectedly moving portrait of a man on the verge of what could either be a dreadful or delightful second chapter.

Worth seeing both for its visual beauty and its insight into a little-known form

As is his wont, Spielberg can't resist stuffing the ending of the movie with a bit too much cheese and baloney. Despite those quibbles, War of the Worlds is taut, gripping and surprisingly dark filmmaking.

A funky, fun film version of the famous Marvel superhero concoction, one of the earliest of the revisionist wave of supes and in some ways the most lovable or at least the most knowable.

The acting in this ensemble is of such a high order that the movie simply takes you in and makes you feel these lives as real.

It's more of an urban fairy tale, a surprisingly charming story that -- in certain sections -- almost crystallizes into the sweetness of a Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland musical.

You don't watch Bad News Bears for the action out on the diamond. You hang out with that hangdog coach so you can catch every slurry, sour-mouthed retort coming out of his mouth.

These two generate real, slow-burning rapport, so that you're still pulling for them even during a gratingly preposterous climax.

The appeal of The Skeleton Key lies not in its plot but in its attention to detail, and the way director Iain Softley (still on probation for "K-PAX," but nevertheless the guy who did "Backbeat") luxuriates in the deeply textured sights and sounds of Louisiana.

While one might have wished for a better movie, and a few smarter decisions regarding the screenplay, generally it's a riveting, even inspirational account of an American feat of arms about which few know but about which many more should.

That's not to say it's great; it's not. Maybe it's not to say it's good, because it's only sort of good. It is to say, however, that it's nifty.

It's the moral journey of Nolte's character that is the real story in Clean, but Assayas instead focuses on the manipulative habits of an addict, resulting in a mannered study of narcissism and self-pity.

A documentary that uses Pierson's self-congratulatory mission to explore a deeper story about cultural clashes and the complex dynamics of the modern American family.

Statham isn't the best thing in Transporter 2; he's essentially the only thing.

A romper that doesn't shy away from sexual frankness or Mediterranean laissez faire.

Paltrow is pretty commanding, even if Madden pushes things toward airlessness by keeping the camera so tight.

Is it a great film? Not quite. It flits from idea to idea too promiscuously and relies too much on the visually deadening use of people talking on camera. But among the dull passages there are moving stories, and a very loving sympathy for the people it profiles.

For all its charm, we can't quite figure out for whom the film is intended: Talking maggots and decaying bodies do not a kiddie movie make.

A gently stirring symphony about emotional transition filled with lovely musical passages and softly nuanced performances.

Until those final moments, Flightplan succeeds admirably, both as a sophisticated psychological thriller and as an example of, if not great art, then superb craftsmanship.

It has its own subversive power, as it elevates one family's struggle for working-class survival and valorizes a woman of simple faith and inner strength.

A portrait of a mild-mannered zealot, one that seeps under the skin and unsettles the nerves.

What's so powerful about Mandoki's film, which he co-scripted with Torres, is the complex, ever-surprising course that Chava takes toward manhood.

Sure, this romance, starring Meryl Streep, Uma Thurman and Bryan Greenberg, follows a familiar boy-meets-girl scenario, but Younger turns the routine into combustible fun.

Shines the light on a special kind of heroism -- the guts to face up to yourself and make changes. What makes this so emotionally compelling is the way Dave scrambles from this deep vale of cluelessness to something approaching moral maturity.

Paradise may not change anyone's ideology, but it should convince some that, but for some deeply divisive views of religious morality, people are pretty much the same on either side of the holy fence.

It's fast, slick, stupid, violent fun and, despite the cynically high body count, without serious intention in this world.

This handmade feel gives Zathura an appealing, childlike sense of wonder, an element too often forgotten in movies with many times the budget and technological resources.

On one hand, the movie is guilty of schematic arrangement...But at the same time, Israeli producer-director-writer Eran Riklis and Palestinian co-writer Suha Arraf use the device to reveal touching human complexity.

It's all expectable, it's all enjoyable: British theatrical professionalism at the highest pitch.

If Tucker's road map often feels a little too confining and the screwball comedy too contrived, he can take credit for introducing viewers to a character they have almost certainly never met before.

Marshall keeps the film lean and focused. He does have a nice taste for horror imagery.

Humor and warmth abound in Mrs. Henderson Presents.

It's too long to be great and it's too square to be great and it's too loud to be great and it finds homosexual effeminacy too funny to ever be called great, but I can't imagine anyone coming out sadder than they went in.

Fun With Dick and Jane has lived up to its title: It's fun, and that's fine.

There's a reason why one goes to see cinematic gorefests like Hostel: to partake vicariously of the bloodfest, to get hopped up on the sickness of it all, the utter degradation, the fall of Western Civilization, yadda yadda yadda, and oh yeah, to hoot at the flying fingers, the guts, the blood, the bare breasts.

The movie doesn't so much end as reach a stopping point and limp hurriedly off-screen, like a bad stand-up chased out by boo birds. But God, is it funny.

You won't be disappointed, and you will be deeply, quietly moved.

A briskly moving, deeply engaging 40-minute documentary.

Lathan, who was such a live wire as the aspiring basketballer in 2000's "Love & Basketball," gives this movie an alert, glamorous presence.

With surprisingly good production values and sly, underhanded wit, Willmott never tips his hand, steadily guiding the satire to a genuinely stunning, back-to-reality conclusion.

Bekmambetov handles these narrative bumps with ease, infusing even the hoariest -- and goriest -- of horror movie cliches with equal parts macabre fascination and jaunty humor. The film lives up to its hype with a style, swagger and substance that will appeal not just to the fanboys (and girls) but to their uninitiated friends as well.

Andre Hennicke is particularly chilling as the yappy mad dog judge who sends them to death.

Political junkies will love this movie.

Notwithstanding the melodrama and the often ham-handed directing, ATL somehow works. A large part of this is thanks to Robinson's skill in evoking the hickory-smoked flavor of the ATL.

Like a good campfire storyteller, writer-director Rian Johnson knows how to fuse the amusing and the edgy. And, in Brendan, he has created an endearing character.

Devil leads us into that dark, uncharted valley where evil, genius, divine inspiration, insanity -- and other unfathomable mysteries -- commingle. It also examines the hyperbolic industry of instant celebrity and ultimately shows us the complex algebraic equation that is Daniel Johnston's life.

This film does other power-of-dance movies one better by downplaying the dancing and underscoring what its brethren often lack: a compelling, wrenching and wonderfully inspiring story.

Director Mary Harron may have more courage than talent -- and she's got a lot of talent. It's too bad Bettie's story isn't more dramatic.

Like "Winter Soldier," Sir! No Sir! will surely reopen old wounds, as the Vietnam War -- like the Civil War 100 years before -- refuses to die. But hawks and doves alike should be grateful to Zeiger for preserving a fascinating piece of American cultural history.

The movie feels more like a thriller than a drama; it's paced like a thriller, building to a murder that never happens, exciting passions that are never unleashed, waiting for a crime to occur. The only crimes, however, are of the heart. Meanwhile, the movie knows exactly what it's doing, and does exactly what it intends, without making one false move.

This is one of the most becalming films ever made. The grasslands seem oddly serene, and to watch them is to feel your pulse rate flatten out -- yet another aspect of Mongolian Ping Pong's transcendent charm.

By turns funny, affecting tale.

Abrams keeps the action clicking along in 5/8 time, and Cruise is at his scowling/smiling best as he jumps, shoots and leaves. (See Tom run! Run, Tom, run!) Best is Philip Seymour Hoffman as the baddie; the film's best sequence features him playing Cruise playing him at a swank party in Vatican City.

Some of the tropes of The Lost City are ineffective. What does work is the sense of loss. The late Cuban novelist and screenwriter G. Cabrera Infante finds a brilliant device in the love affair between Fico and Aurora (Ines Sastre), his sister-in-law, in that Aurora in some way becomes Cuba.

Enjoyable and reprises the same dyspeptic attitude that infused "Ghost World," but ultimately it lacks its predecessor's originality and humanity.

The Australian director John Hillcoat makes an audacious, unsettling American feature debut with The Proposition, a revisionist western that brings its own brand of sanguinary honesty to the genre.

Petersen leaves out, largely, character, back story, anecdote and warm personal relations. Poseidon isn't cute, funny, warm, nice, inspirational or uplifting. It's about the incredible labor of survival in a world turned totally sociopathic in an instant.

Hedge is built for laughter rather than artistry; jokes are packed into every pixel. But despite the movie's entertaining qualities, there is something a little unsettling.

Fluffily enjoyable.

Grant's unblinking but sympathetic depiction of this emotionally unhinged world makes the viewer feel like an illicit, enlightened gawker, and it has the enormous fringe benefit of fine performers, including Richardson, who puts endearing vigor into the adulterous Lauren, and Julie Walters, Ralph's aunt, who tells the boy her frequent tipsiness is a recurring case of "sunstroke."

Just when Sydney Pollack's new film about super-architect Frank Gehry, Sketches of Frank Gehry, threatens to get really interesting, Pollack, perhaps unconsciously channeling about 100 years' worth of bad movies about great artists, reverts to fall-back mode.

Follows the youngsters over the course of a tumultuous year, during which time Cuesta and screenwriter Anthony Cipriano succeed in making the audience care desperately whether they're okay and whether the adults in their lives do the right thing. The lingering question is why that should be so improbable.

The remake is directed by another slickster, the Irishman John Moore, who is no deep thinker (as his "Behind Enemy Lines" confirmed) but, like Donner, he's an able hack -- smooth, stylish, clever, soulless and a hoot. And so's his damned movie. And it is damned.

Surprisingly absorbing film.

A few others have compared this to a James Bond movie, but it's more of a piece with a Tom Clancy movie; it never leaves the real world that far behind, it has a fair sense of documentary reality, and the action sequences -- from shootout to car chase to a commando takedown of a tanker on the high seas to a final knife fight -- are extremely well managed.

An infectious (in a good way) documentary.

Lower City is sexy, but in a nice, dirty way. Everyone in it is deliciously low and sleazy, and so underdressed in the blazing heat that they are just dying to strip.

Only Human, a Spanish farce, has absolutely no business being as laugh-out-loud funny as it often is.

Creadon and his editor, Douglas Blush, add verve to an otherwise talky exercise by cutting Wordplay as if it were a puzzle itself, with Across and Down camera moves and blocks of black space. A visual pun altogether worthy of those being filled in on screen.

The much ballyhooed movie, far from great and far from short (2 1/2 hours!), is still great fun.

Streep makes it work. Streep makes it fun .

Informative and entertaining.

The splendid, painterly melodramas of Douglas Sirk lurk behind every shot, but the tone is essentially pre-Raphaelite, sexy and cold.

If the ultimate goal is entertainment, then Lady in the Water enthusiastically rises to the task. In a movie laden with enough symbolism, shamanism and mythic lore to make Joseph Campbell dance a tribal jig, Shyamalan never forgets to have fun.

The two starring performances are spot on. Wilson gets the tone that screenwriter Don Payne so expertly evokes: It's a weird sort of self-aware despicability...Thurman is beautiful, fearless and perfectly believable as a superhero.

It's not fierce, it's not angry, it's not radical, it's polite and what might be called "life-affirming." But it does have a couple of attributes most movies don't.

There are plenty of reasons to like the movie, such as its genuinely gentle wit, its occasional capture of the absurdities of aging and its endorsement of the permanence of lust, but one factor in particular is its brilliant cast of discarded '70s-era Hollywood stars.

The film ultimately becomes too contrived to be anything but a fleeting diversion, but kudos to these emerging filmmakers for daring to make something a little bit different and, for the most part, intriguing.

For all its shortcomings, Idlewild also has something that few films can pull off: Moments of such pure cinematic fabulousness, breathtaking dance sequences and idiosyncratic 3-D animation flourishes that we are more than willing to forgive it for all its sins.

Crank" is "D.O.A" on methamphetamines.

Le Petit Lieutenant shows how good French movies can be when they stay French and don't try to go international.

Danner's performance, as she rages against the dying of the romantic light, all but steals the movie from Braff.

The movie is small but sensational. I don't know what writer-director Frank E. Flowers might lose by trying to take his career international, but he has real talent.

At a time when the country is engaged in fresh debates about the fragile relationship between privacy and national security, this particular chapter seems worth revisiting.

The performers understand the simple integrity of a slapstick gag, and they're prepared to suffer for its entertainment value. This is what the Jackassers do for fun -- and their fans, already well versed in such previous shows as the original MTV series and the 2002 "Jackass: The Movie," understand that perfectly. And is there any significant moral difference between these performers and dedicated ballerinas who damage their feet in the highfalutin interests of art, or Daytona drivers risking their lives on the track?

The more you watch, the more you are committing yourself to watching "56 Up" and beyond.

For interested parties, it's entertaining to hear from, and meet, the people who live and breathe the politics of America.

Works best when it concentrates on O'Grady and the ever-rippling effect of his transgressions. Viewers may not remember the victims whose stories practically pierce the heart, but they're unlikely to forget O'Grady's deceptively innocent face.

It would be nice to report that director Stanley Nelson comes up with something new, some illumination, some revelation, some heretofore unglimpsed irony, but he doesn't.

We realize that this romance, like the beautiful land, is doomed almost inevitably to earthquake fissures, to irreversible change. But rather than making us despondent, Climates leaves us peacefully philosophical.