This fourth installment is a complete reboot, returning to the web-slinger's creation story, and Garfield, more than any other factor, contributes to the sense of a bleaker vision along the lines of "The Dark Knight."

Unfortunately for Polley, Take This Waltz is a good film serving mainly to remind us that "Away From Her" is a great one.

Smart and consistently funny, with sharp performances.

Gentle, low-key first feature.

Coogan delivers a winning comic performance as the pompous impresario, but his story has little dramatic momentum of its own; he functions mostly as a pedantic narrator, imposing some cultural significance on the endless party and pointing out more intriguing personalities.

Until the ghost story takes over this is a tense and absorbing war picture.

Actually I quite enjoyed the film -- but how do I get rid of this awful discharge?

Enjoyable action comedy from the Clint Eastwood mold, though the comic elements are more fun than the action.

Given the tension dogging her every step, I wondered if this would end in bloodshed, but Abu-Assad opts for a more hopeful conclusion, making his film -- strange as it may seem -- a comedy.

In his narration Brown says that he wants to dispel the image of surfers as airheaded slackers, an ambition undercut by his own breathless and clumsy writing. But to his credit he collects some fascinating stories.

Griffin's stand-up material is consistently upstaged by sequences of him interacting with old friends and family members.

The racial satire is about as subtle as a sledgehammer, but there's something exhilarating about so blunt a weapon being swung with such wild abandon.

This dialectical drama has plenty of creaky moments, but Harvey Keitel compensates with a canny, surprising performance.

The comic juice tends to spill out in all directions.

Studded with terrorist attacks... Yet Malkovich never exploits these for action-movie thrills: in each instance the loss of life is terrible and the morality of the act is left treacherously ambiguous.

As a comedy duo Nicholson and Sandler pose no threat to the legacy of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, in part because Sandler is so outclassed, but mostly because everyone involved is playing it safe.

Despite his advancing years, Chan delivers some fleet slapstick; like his hero Buster Keaton he works intuitively with levers, pulleys, ladders, and umbrellas.

The action is so relentless that after a while things start to feel hollow, but Rodriguez still seems to believe the moral articulated at the end of the first film -- that keeping a family together is the real adventure.

Their relationship is so subtly inflected with fear, envy, and self-loathing on both sides of the class divide that I was drawn in nonetheless. Brody is a compelling presence throughout.

Eleven years on, someone in Hollywood has finally worked up the nerve to address the LA riots--but only on the slickest terms imaginable.

As in the first movie, Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart are trotted out periodically to add a little gravitas.

It certainly fulfills all the conventions of the genre: sci-fi premise, noir stylings, martial arts, snarky dialogue.

The gags come fast and furious, and though some are a little stale, Rock and cowriter Ali LeRoi strive for wit over crudity.

Offers a fascinating inquiry into memory and art, mixing clips from Fellini's films with contemporary shots of the same locales in and around Rome.

The consequent pain, anger, and confusion on all sides disrupts the standard martyrology of the genre and exposes the ordinary human wreckage that can follow even the most extraordinary acts of heroism.

Comes closer to deification than dramatization--a shame, since the film offers some powerful set pieces and jaw-dropping spectacle.

Fine character work by Juliet Stevenson, Archie Panjabi, and Bollywood regular Anupam Kher make this well worth seeing.

The main reason I enjoyed this high-powered action flick and its 2001 predecessor is their willingness to poke fun at the premise of crime-fighting dolls, even though it now has more currency than ever.

The real star is the splendid computer-generated Hulk, though his King Kong-like story is compromised by the need to keep him around for the inevitable sequel.

The scenes of family squalor are memorably persuasive, but any filmmaker ending her movie with the heroine throwing a crumpled poem into the ocean needs a few more writing courses.

A spirited crowd-pleaser.

This is the sort of funny, humane, honorable story that families need more of, though viewers of any age should be hooked by the mystery surrounding the brothers' riches.

I appreciated its cogent history lesson, which details China's brutal treatment of Tibetan nationals from the late 1940s through the Cultural Revolution and into the '80s, when it executed 15,000 dissidents.

This is cloying, deceitful, and more or less irresistible.

As in "Amores perros," Iñarritu and Arriaga slice and dice the chronology, which helps distract from the warmed-over story elements and focus attention on the superior performances.

Persuasively re-creates the experience of sailing aboard a British man-o'-war during the Napoleonic era, but its story never attains comparable grandeur.

Cruise holds the center of the film with a sharply focused performance, though his bonding with the wise samurai chieftain (Ken Watanabe) is noticeably more ardent than his soggy romance with the stoic wife of a man he killed in combat.

In the end I didn't believe in their relationship, but I was pleased to see Keaton tearing it up for two hours.

I still can't decide whether it's a masterpiece of sexual provocation or just a really classy stroke film.

Japanese animator Satoshi Kon has a striking sense of composition, but I'm more impressed by his storytelling skills.

Set in the blue gray gloom of industrial China, this cunning noir focuses on two ruthless coal miners.

Stiller and Wilson are still hilarious as the supercool detectives -- there hasn't been a comedy duo this good since John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd.

This big-budget western bears a striking resemblance to the recent Tom Cruise vehicle "The Last Samurai," though it's more fun and less pretentious.

Berman delicately unravels the silent resentments festering in the latchkey home, but the pain is leavened by his droll sense of humor.

Thoughtful and complex.

Harsh but moving drama.

Caviezel (The Passion of the Christ) gives a quietly focused performance in the title role, ably assisted by Brett Rice as Jones's father, Jeremy Northam as golf rival Walter Hagen, and Malcolm McDowell as sportswriter O.D. Keeler.

A trio of finely observant performances graces this quiet drama.

This isn't all gold--there are lame riffs on a booze-swilling dog and a flabby old man with a boner--but it's well above average.

French director Andre Techine (Alice and Martin) powerfully re-creates the mass exodus from the city and draws a fine performance from Beart as a woman struggling to shield her children from her own fear and confusion. Unfortunately the last act goes off the rails.

Its mix of personal reminiscence (Mario made his screen debut playing Sweetback as a boy) and cultural history is fascinating. This engages in a fair amount of mythmaking itself, but its lesson in self-empowerment is both vivid and sincere.

At 92 minutes this could hardly be considered a definitive statement, yet its combination of high drama and carefully articulated principle delivers quite a punch.

Engrossing documentary.

Toward the end the freak-show humor begins to yield diminishing returns, but for most of its length this delivers a steady stream of uncomfortable gut laughs.

Maximilian stresses that Maria was an icon in postwar Germany, yet the saddest thing about her isolation and disappointment is that it's so common.

I expected this to open out into another loud, thumping thriller. Instead it remains quiet and focused, exploring the couple's frayed relationship and the economic divide that separates the husband from his captor.

It's formulaic but still fun, thanks to the quick and genial players.

Allouache's script is so packed with incident that the characters have little time for debate, but the tension between fundamentalist and modern morality is woven into the action.

Funny, suspenseful, and well paced, this is definitely the summer's best time waster.

Smart and fast-paced.

This dazzling CGI feature by DreamWorks Animation appropriates the vivid undersea psychedelia of "Finding Nemo," though in contrast to that movie, the father-son parable here is just an excuse to burlesque "The Godfather" for the 100th time.

The movie's sexual politics couldn't be more regressive--Crudup learns to be a man in the sack as well as on the boards--but it's still a competent middlebrow costume drama.

This film doesn't really clear the bar, but it's handsomely mounted and proves that heartless manipulation of the weak and gullible never goes out of style.

Rudely funny splatter comedy.

With its black-and-white flashbacks and relentlessly earnest tone, this sometimes threatens to become a PBS documentary, yet its script is exceptionally fluid, tracing the tributaries of art, race, and sexuality that feed one's sense of self.

In a tale filled with perverse twists of fate, the most perverse may be that Overnight, not "The Boondock Saints," is Troy Duffy's masterpiece.

This ensemble drama by screenwriter David Hubbard isn't perfect, but its harsh honesty and sincere faith in humanity make it genuinely uplifting.

A missed opportunity, though as usual Quaid is dazzling.

Engrossing documentary.

A respectable entry in the Bicycle Thief school of art-house cinema, which uses a child's coming of age to explore an era of political and social turmoil.

Constrained by formula but executed with heart and humor.

Visually commanding, conceptually beguiling, but dramatically inert.

Rodriguez's evident delight in the form make this a worthwhile piece of eye candy.

The more interesting woman is Epper, who comes from a highly respected family of stunt doubles and at 62 shows no signs of slowing.

Elon's documentary is fascinating precisely because its high moral tone is compromised by self-interest.

Bujalski has a knack for the genuine moment.

This movie will hardly set the world on fire, but it's a worthy vehicle for the two old troopers; Smith has the stiffest upper lip in the business, and Dench is heartrending as the naive, lovelorn sister.

Thoughtful and impressively mounted.

The result is flawed but frequently haunting.

Danish director Susanne Bier elicits wonderfully intimate performances from her actors, and this 2004 drama has so many genuine, low-key encounters it manages to overcome a contrived and familiar plot.

Two prequels' worth of scene setting pays off in the politically resonant Revenge of the Sith.

Like Costa-Gavras's "Amen." (2002), this German drama uses a true story to examine the Catholic church's response to the Holocaust, but it focuses less on institutional politics than on personal conscience and responsibility.

Contemporary footage of sea creatures, reptiles, and insects serves to illustrate various chapters in our journey from the ocean floor to the megastore, and though the film's science isn't exactly rigorous, its photography and music are splendid.

This 2004 video documentary by Werner Herzog arrives in town while his hair-raising "Grizzly Man" is still playing, and it's a fascinating companion piece even though his manipulations are more obvious.

A small but achingly authentic piece of kitchen-sink realism, this might never have made it across the pond without babe du jour Keira Knightley, excellent in a supporting role as a smacked-out waitress. But the real wonder is Parker, whose vulnerability and wraithlike beauty are devastating.

This strange and beautiful Macedonian feature is a welcome reminder that national cinemas still exist.

The most poignant performance comes from Allen, a retired stock analyst who clings to his masculine pride even though his body's falling apart on him.

Some of the eggs fail to hatch and some of the chicks die, and the parents' cries are painful to hear, though what they're really crying for is the future of their species.

Avrich offers a cogent appraisal of Wasserman's importance to the industry and duly notes the darker aspects of his empire (among them MCA's alleged ties to organized crime).

A seamless mix of satire and suspense, with inspired performances by Toledo and Monica Cervera.

The performers are fresh and offbeat, with the diminutive Peter Dinklage (Elf, The Station Agent) especially funny as a gay wedding planner named Benson Hedges.

I tend to approach green documentaries with all the enthusiasm of an unemployed logger, but this hard-charging digital video about genetically modified organisms kept me on the edge of my seat with its lucid exposition and frontal assault on Monsanto.

Vince Vaughn in a wonderfully low-key performance.

Gripping drama.

Levin's curiosity and evenhandedness distinguish the movie.

Animation fans will find this worth the wait.

The movie flames to life whenever Donald Sutherland moves into frame as the young ladies' relaxed, humorous, and magnificently rueful father.

Reminiscent of the TV series "Northern Exposure," this 2001 indie comedy by writer-director Kate Montgomery smoothly transplants 30s-style screwball comedy to an Apache-run ski resort.