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.