It's kind of like a hit man's Olympics. Isn't this grown-up? In a word, no, and that's what's so much fun about it.

It is a snapshot of a great actor in his prime and a chance for us to see one of yesteryear's great films in all its kingly luster.

Mafioso may have been made in another era, but it stands as a classy, even radical rebuke to the film school posers who keep recycling the same tired gangster tropes.

The movie suffers from an uncertain structure, but it boasts an extraordinary naturalism, not particularly flattering. Sharon Stone has a brilliant, harsh turn as Zack's mom, and both Bruce Willis and Harry Dean Stanton have good turns as the elder generations of Trueloves. But the movie belongs to its youngsters, and it's a real eye-opener.

Short is a professional choreographer, and his dancing seems unstuck in time. How he can break his movements down to such small elements, keep them so precise and in such rigorous rhythm, yet keep the whole thing on track and moving forward with Nureyev's beauty and discipline is something to see.

The movie alternates between cornball and ridiculous, and the frequent violence is extremely bloody if stylized. Love it or hate it, and I'm not sure which applies to me, you've never seen and never will see anything quite like Tears of the Black Tiger.

Winds up answering the question of what "Shrek" hath wrought, and between its plastic-looking visuals and cynical attitude, the news isn't good. Lacking the genuine wit and humanism of that film and any number of forebears, this one deserves its dumpin'.

It offers a sort of Chinese food poignancy, the kind that may seem satisfying at the time but ultimately leaves us hungering for more, for something authentic.

Aside from Cedric's admittedly appealing persona -- he's always watchable, even in dreck like this -- there's absolutely nothing to recommend The Cleaner.

Thr3e needs help with more than spelling.

With this film, del Toro seems to have created his manifesto, a tour de force of cautionary zeal, humanism and magic. At this writing, Pan's Labyrinth is the best-reviewed film of 2006 listed on the movie review Web site Metacritic.com, and for a reason: It's just that great.

It's simultaneously arty, arcane and nasty.

Zellweger is certainly likable as Beatrix, but as an upper-class English lady of a century ago, she enunciates her words as if sucking a lemon -- you almost start to wonder if you've stumbled into a satire of "Masterpiece Theatre."

We find ourselves wondering about the real story, not this version.

Miller is key to the film's success, with his earnest, sweet-faced looks and evident dark side. He plays Obree with just the right understated intensity, a believable competitor who fights back fiercely with his wits and a few tight-lipped words.

None of the characters are compelling, despite the star-studded vocal cast behind them, including Madonna, Robert De Niro, Snoop Dogg and Jimmy Fallon. Our attitude toward them is casual interest, not anxious concern.

I can't remember a film that sees the here and now more precisely, one that offers total believability in the tone and motive of its characters and then goes further, showing us a whole and completely recognizable world.

Working with his longtime cinematographer Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki, Cuaron creates the most deeply imagined and fully realized world to be seen on screen this year, not to mention bravura sequences that bring to mind names like Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick.

The remake neither pays perceptive tribute to the original nor updates it in anything but hackneyed form.

The Good Shepherd is serious adult moviemaking, a truly surprising effort from De Niro, a man deeply interested in the art, craft and psychology of espionage. He seems to believe that we'd better be interested in it, because it's interested in us.

It's a fun ride, and the big payoff -- that history turns out to be way cooler than its reputation suggests -- is even more gratifying. Bully!

"Lost" star Matthew Fox pitches in with a strong performance as a coach who, by the laws of whimsy, didn't take the final flight home and had to struggle with survivor's guilt.

Director Roger Michell and writer Hanif Kureishi take a deeper, edifying interest in the moral ambiguities that arise between Maurice and Jessie. And thanks to our warm investment in both characters, we're more than willing to sign up for this existential ride. We allow this relationship -- and the movie -- to take us places we'd never usually go.

Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Golden Flower is a kind of feast, an over-the-top, all-stops-pulled-out lollapalooza that means to play kitschy and grand at once.

In the last half-hour, the story, like the Japanese, loses its way; lacking any clear-cut goals except survival, the film becomes repetitive. Letters From Iwo Jima is a necessary movie; too bad it's not a great movie.

The result is a movie that feels weirdly disconnected from reality.

It matters because this boxer taps into something deeper in our collective souls than the desire for entertainment. It's the hope that one day we're going to win big, too, after everyone's given up on us. It's as hokey as it's true.

Even with Hudson's triumphant arrival and an overall fizzy mood of singing, dancing, pop nostalgia and camp, Dreamgirls is an uneven crowd pleaser.

Of The Good German, it can be said that the operation was a brilliant success, even if the patient is not merely dead but most sincerely dead. The movie, in other words, lies there as if on a slab in a morgue, while you admire the corpse for its beauty.

For all its contrivances, Breaking and Entering has its finger on the pulse of contemporary London life and possesses its share of fleeting delights, chief among them the sublime Robin Wright Penn as Law's live-in girlfriend.

Remember the peaceful atmosphere of bedtime storytelling? The kind that allows parent and child to take satisfaction in the story, not the teller? That's how "Charlotte" draws you into its web.

Though I don't think giving it a cuddly human personality and the vocals of Rachel Weisz helps much, the thing itself, part dog, part fish, part weasel, part dinosaur, is a terrific illusion, and the technical team manages to really sell the idea of flight. Too bad the acting is so lame, the story so derivative and the thing so long.

The movie is almost devised like a rat-in-maze experiment at the Yale psychology department. Each few minutes some new obstacle comes up for Chris, threatening to obliterate his dreams, at which point the film stands back and watches him improvise brilliantly on the run.

The best thing about the movie is that it's interested in the soldiers, not the self-serving popinjays who seem to think the war is a big fat career-enhancing photo opportunity. The people who got shot at deserve most of the attention.

Gibson may not be much of a deep thinker, but he's a heck of a storyteller. Apocalypto turns out to be not a case of Montezuma's revenge but of Gibson's: It's something entirely unexpected, a sinewy, taut poem of action.

For its flaws, Blood Diamond is a gem, if only for being an unusually smart, engaged popcorn flick.

This overproduced romantic comedy doesn't even qualify as fluff; it's flat, featureless plastic.

Unaccompanied Minors, a sort of junior league version of "The Breakfast Club," never achieves the universal appeal of John Hughes's 1985 film about youth and authority.

Writer-director James Ponsoldt's film treats big subjects -- loneliness, coming-of-age and father-son relationships -- with such half-baked conviction, it's a wonder the screen doesn't redden with embarrassment. Which makes it all the more gratifying to watch Nolte pulverize the dramatic banality around him.

The film paraphrases a quote from Hitler before he invaded Poland in 1939 (a quote still in hot dispute): "Who still speaks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?" This documentary does. Whatever its flaws, that alone makes it worth seeing.

A profoundly disturbing -- and depressing -- look at the New Anti-Semitism of the post-9/11 world. Produced by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, the film is remarkably restrained, given the outrages it documents.

Family Law never really gets to the nitty-gritty of the Perelmans' fraught relationship, instead maintaining a gently ironic distance that, while admirable in its restraint, ultimately lacks emotional fire.

If anything, it's worth watching as yet another example of Lynch's extraordinary collaboration with Dern. It may be overstating things to call her performance heroic, but it's nothing if not brave, as she dares to embody Lynch's most brutal impressions of Hollywood -- not as a dream factory, but as the place where dreams come to die.

Is there anything new here? Honestly, not really. The content is the same, the plot the familiar litany of ordeals leavened by soapy interludes. But the fight that develops is taut, tough and extremely bitter; it's never showy in the grinding, big-movie Spielbergian way, but a portrait of the war's daily interface with hell in a very small space, as the four stand against a much larger unit.

To watch "Lives" is not just to enjoy a fabulously constructed timepiece; it's to appreciate a deft cautionary tale.

This drab exercise in glum piety slumps where it should soar, sapping the story of its mystery and transcendence with an overriding sense of literality.

A good-natured but failed experiment in meeting cute -- indie-movie style.

Horror fans will twitch impatiently at those long stretches between killings. And audiences anticipating a feature-length "Girls Gone Wild" video will suffer withdrawal from the lack of loosened bra straps.

To paraphrase her infamous Oscar speech: You will have to like Sally Field, you will have to really like Sally Field, to sit through Two Weeks.

It's a sprawling experiment in philosophical time travel and metaphysical noodling. And it's an earnest, magnificent wreck.

I literally did not count a single laugh in the whole aimless schlep, except for the hucksters who made it, on their way to the bank.

After 9/11, few of us look at terrorist acts casually. It's insulting to watch this grandiloquent pornography, using shock value and Hollywood cliche to evoke poignancy.

Jack Black and Kyle Gass bring characters they created for the HBO program "Mr. Show With Bob and David" to the big screen with mixed success, depending on the age, gender and degree of inebriation of the filmgoer.

Charming enough.

Wildean panache of this caliber is not the norm in movie dialogue, so on this score alone, The History Boys is a blessing. The top-drawer work of a fine ensemble is another.

Turns out to be cracking good entertainment, as well as a fresh start for the perdurable 21-picture franchise.

What's truly surprising about Happy Feet is not its giddily brilliant entertainment, its intimate knowledge of the culture or its toe-tapping music. It's how commonplace these qualities have become in computer-animated movies… Happy Feet may be just one of the crowd, but what a great crowd it is.

Cornish provides a counterbalance for Ledger's authoritative presence, turning what could have been just another heroin movie into a flawed but engrossing parable on love and sacrifice.

Works far better as journalism than as drama. One weakness is that poor Linklater has to keep bringing in guest explainers, who lay out one policy or another but have nothing whatsoever to do with the story.

Things take a nasty turn in the film's bilious third act, suggesting that Guest's deepest gift -- his expansive humanism -- stops at the studio gates.

Bobby, even if it suffers from a few silly scenes, gets more right than it does wrong.

The two main characters are so shallow and self-involved -- not to mention the friends, family members and sundry apparatchiks they lug around with them -- that the two hours of Flannel Pajamas begin to feel like real time.

Falls as flat as a bottle of corked Bordeaux.

The film amounts to a harsh and perpetual assault on viewers' sensibilities -- not only because of its violence but because of its overall bleakness.

There's a problem: This romance isn't developed enough to be truly satisfying -- it's fat-free SnackWell's when you want Godiva. It's not the original story we signed up for -- or thought we did.

A vivid, poetic evocation of life in post-invasion Iraq that works both as impressionistic collage and candid portraiture.

Purists will howl at the liberties Shainberg has taken with the facts, but there's a bravery to Fur, an uncompromising commitment to its narrow focus -- of one woman's creative birth -- that rhymes with Arbus's own artistic courage.

This feels like a cramped, TV-style retelling, with small groups of people, no special effects, in some ways almost cheesy.

The movie is completely beguiling, and it delivers joy, the beautiful spark of the gods.

A documentary on the F-word that manages to amuse superficially until it moves into its seventh hour, at which point it grows wearisome.

The result is a perfect combination of slapstick and satire, a Platonic ideal of high-and lowbrow that manages to appeal to our basest common denominators while brilliantly skewering racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and that peculiarly American affliction: we're-number-one-ism.

Shot through with cheeky wit and hilarious musical numbers by the aforementioned slugs, Flushed Away features an eye-popping boat chase through London's watery nether regions, as well as the winning vocal talent of Kate Winslet, Bill Nighy and Ian McKellen, doing his best Sydney Greenstreet. Well done!

This all makes for a deeply entertaining experience that engages our hearts as well as our funny bones. And it's gratifying to see Cruz finally get her due.

Music video director Simon Brand makes an impressively taut debut with Unknown, a nifty little psychological crime thriller that suggests a "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" for the postindustrial age.

How about a well-sustained argument for saving the planet instead of this round-robin approach? And where are those holdouts of humanity who believe humans shoulder no blame for carbon dioxide buildup? Let's hear from them, too, and draw our own conclusions.

Yet as sophisticated a piece of filmmaking as it is, it seems hamstrung by the banality at its center; that's why it never assembles into a satisfying whole. It's pretty -- oh, what's the word? -- stupid in its dramatization of the silly little connections that unite us, and it's somewhat selective in its choice of them.

Director Phillip Noyce has made a serious movie that switches to almost popcorn entertainment.

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.

If Simon's desire to feed the better angels of our nature is admirable, it would be nice if he could do it with better movies.

One of the excellent attributes of Shut Up & Sing is that it lets the cards fall where they may and really doesn't try to spin the Chicks themselves. It's quite possible, then, to watch the film and come to the conclusion that Maines has a big mouth. Spectacularly talented, the young singer is also a spectacular blowhard.

As skillful an artist as Range clearly is, he has gone to an awful lot of trouble to make a painfully obvious point about threats to civil liberties in a post-9/11 world.

Cocaine is the most aggressively edited film in years: It pounds, it churns, it spurts, it spray-paints.

Although the film shows many photographs and videos of his performances, it never allows a particularly coherent assessment of any of them.

Coppola brilliantly conjures the young queen's insular world, in which she was both isolated and claustrophobically scrutinized.

This dame is as sick as a sick dog on a hot day, if still always perversely amusing, and the story is constructed as a survivor's ordeal, not a colorful picaresque.

Stands with the best movies of this young century and the old one that preceded it: It's passionate, honest, unflinching, gripping, and it pays respects. The flag raising on Iwo might have indeed become a pseudo-event as it was processed for goals, but there was nothing pseudo about the courage of the men who did it.

So those seeking a softer approach to the realities of both child- and animal-rearing should search elsewhere. The rest of us, meanwhile, are free to enjoy a well-made family drama pitched to young adults that's honest, tough and surprisingly engaging.

Bale and Jackman inject their reliable charisma into two otherwise very cold fish. Okay, I'll say it: If you see only one magic-at-the-turn-of-the-century movie this year, make it this one.

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.

Sweet Land is as empty and beautiful as the picturesque Minnesota terrain it's so clearly taken with.

Block, an experienced documentarian, does an outstanding job walking the knife-edge between personal and self-absorbed.

A movie so bewildering and impenetrable that I believe it siphoned off a good 40 IQ points.

A movie that can be smart-funny and astutely topical. But if what you're expecting is a start-to-finish laugh fest, beware: This picture takes some detours and never really figures out what kind of movie it wants to be.

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.

There is but one reason to sign up for Driving Lessons: to watch Rupert Grint -- Harry Potter's redheaded pal Ron Weasley -- squaring off with Julie Walters, Queen of the English Scenery Chewers.

Though it's not as good as the brilliant "Capote," it's nevertheless a riveting, well-made picture.

Rarely has an act of such cinematic cruelty as Tideland been perpetrated on filmgoers.

Perhaps as a publishing phenomenon the concept works, but on-screen it's pretty dull, with good actors in bad roles and bad special effects.