Morris has found a real character in McKinney, but to what end, I couldn't say.

As for that central question: Yep, it’s art, all right. One only wishes they’d gotten down to the business of it sooner.

Understandably, a filmmaker tackling the retelling of a national hero must do so with great delicacy, but The Sea Inside presents not so much a hero as a saint in Sampredo.

Nolan’s end-act pacing has always felt ponderous – but it’s not enough to ruin what is surely the most intellectually and viscerally engaging action film in years. The soul doesn’t stir, no, but everything else is wildly somersaulting.

Serenity evinces the kind of swashbuckling bonhomie that made so many of us fall in love with the original "Star Wars" films, a love that was mightily tested by George Lucas' humorless prequels.

Like a kindler, gentler "Bully," Mean Creek hinges on the bullied fighting back against the aggressor, but offers a more expansive examination of aggression and, even more significantly, passivity.

Winnie the Pooh doesn't reinvent the wheel, just gives it an affectionate spin, and that is no more and no less than what one would hope from a family reunion.

There are good guys we don't care much about and bad guys that we do and even badder guys we're supposed to hate. But on the sliding scale of culpability, everybody's just a few clicks away from the next guy.

Throughout, the documentary is fun and engaging, even whimsical when using (to good effect) illustrations and Gilliam’s own storyboards.

Burrus has a face that does all the talking for him -- deep creases, sad eyes, and a gray hue that hangs over him like a rain cloud. It's a remarkable performance.

There’s gore, all right, although the real terror lies in the tease, and the often dark, herky-jerky DV format ratchets up the tension to an almost unbearable degree.

There’s an undeniable thrill to watching something so experimental and yet totally accessible to those of us who speak only layman’s Dylanese, and it’s Haynes’ warmest film yet.

It's the tortoise and the hare, Nepalese-style, and it's surprisingly dramatic.

All herky-jerky camera movements and no pussyfooting around with the interior lives of these characters.

Cornish, in her first film seen stateside, is astonishing.

Leaves you scratching your head a bit, wondering what just happened, and worrying if maybe it could happen to you too.

First, to dispel the two talking points attending The Impossible, Juan Antonio Bayona's dramatization of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami: No, it's not racist, and no, you don't have to be a parent to feel the film in your bones.

Although Super Size Me benefits from a number of interviews with nutritionists, lobbyists, lawyers, and the like, the film inevitably (but not unenjoyably) is dominated by Spurlock, who offers his sober-minded statistics and cheeky asides without ever devolving into an off-putting Michael Moore-like moralizing.

A rare achievement.

Linklater has crafted an always genial and at times even joyful period charmer about that moment on the cusp: before a boy becomes a man and another man becomes a mythological figure.

The Hangover instantly has the feel of one for the ages.

A Girl Cut in Two is Hitchcock sans the whodunit, essentially a long preamble of seduction and spiritual ruin, capped by a crime everyone saw coming (and an eye-dazzling coda that twists the title from metaphor to … something else).

When The Company owns up to what it is -– a performance piece -– it’s glorious. Everything else -– the window-dressing of a fiction film -– just gums up that gloriousness.

Isn't quite a home run: The visually flat film leans on a pop culture crutch that probably won't age very well, and the finale – while terrifically funny – feels piped in from another, far sillier movie.

It is certainly competent, lovely to look at, but leaves little lasting impression.

It's all so goddamn realistic and reminiscent of real-life love (and how often does that happen onscreen?) that The Puffy Chair would be hell to watch if it weren't so funny.

It's a dirty, ugly, joyless world these fathers and sons live in, and for all the passion involved, of retribution and a father's fierce love, Perdition is as emotionally distant as Sullivan. The feelings are all there, just submerged.

The film holds its twists too close to the chest, and there's little to chew on till the ambitiousness of its plotting is revealed late in the film.

Screenwriters Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and fanboys’ favorite whipping boy, Damon Lindelof, keep the film moving at a quippy clip; there’s really no fat here until the film feints a climax only to lurch the coaster-car back up the hill again.

In the House, from the eclectic French filmmaker François Ozon (Under the Sand, 8 Women), is an almost perverse delight, an egghead thriller that slyly shell-games its truer purpose as an inquiry into the construction – and deconstruction – of fiction. Scratch deconstruction: Make that tear-the-house-down demolition.

Starts out as a lark, but veers into grittier, more emotionally complex territory -- just like a real relationship -- that the film doesn't have the chops to sustain.

Taking a cue from the horse in question, Ross’ film takes its time getting into the race, but once it gets going, the going gets good.

This first release from Disney’s self-explanatory new arm, Disneynature, is at the very least peripherally concerned with the planet and its dwindling prospects, but the real renewable resource here is the groundbreaking "Planet Earth" miniseries.

Hair is personal. It's also political.

Smart, uncanny, resistant to the short cuts of pop psychology, and shocking in the best since of the word, Steers' debut is a stunner.

Mostly it's just terribly funny and sad and beautifully acted and terrifically feel-good for being, you know, a cancer comedy.

A surprisingly warmhearted examination of hypocrisy and social insecurity, unlikely camaraderie and stutter-stepped formation of adult identity.

A certain inevitability hangs over The Mother – as if any of this could end well – but if Kureishi's framework is perhaps predictable, his knotty, complex characters are not.

It's a wealth of material at odds with a scant running time and shallow focus.

The magnificence of the film's pieces does not quite add up to a satisfying whole.

Equally harrowing and heartrending, Shame is a film that feels akin to going into battle, and I for one didn't emerge unscathed.

But by the time this imperfect little film wends its way to one of the most winning exit lines I've heard in a long time, it's turned into something, well, perfectly lovely.

It doesn't have the bite to be satire, the pratfalls to be broad comedy, or the wit to pass as a comedy of manners. What does that leave? The French cinematic equivalent of motivational coaching, and -- just like Pignon -- something spectacularly unspectacular.

Pray maintains a steadfastly objective viewpoint, and it's a testament to his film's success that it can accommodate the audience's inevitably shifting allegiances from one family member to the next.

It's impossible to shake the feeling that these are merely actors -- albeit good ones.

Ambrose owns this crawlspace between being fierce and being fragile. But she can't escape the fact that her role is underwritten; the script suffers from an excess of subtlety.

If you shy away from that sick feeling in the pit of the stomach that comes when watching good people make bad decisions, then best to steer clear of Manito, a low-budget indie that reaches near-Greek proportions of tragedy brought on by lousy decision-making.

It’s a movie made of moments, the antithesis of "plot-driven," but the sum of these moments is magnificent, the culmination of so many elements: acting, scripting, score (by locals Michael Linnen and David Wingo), and cinematography.

This modest French-language film follows the time-honored cinematic tradition of plot as spearheaded by a simple twist of fate.

The former mayor is an alert onscreen presence, but the film surrounding him is not always so lively.

I suspect it's that spirit as much as the injustice of her incarceration that drew so many people to her cause and inspired this labor-of-love documentary about her journey to hell and back.

And yet that is what is so very remarkable about the film: In a slim 72 minutes, it heart-tethers us to these teenagers, paying tribute to their unique and private selves while allowing the audience to see its own reflection in them.

Refn’s artful and energetic film never goes further than face value.

Sleepwalk With Me is never anything less than awfully likable. But I so wanted it to be more.

I don't want to oversell the thing. It is, quite simply, something very special indeed.

The film is studded with stirring moments of surprise.

Frankly, I'm shocked that Disney, frequent purveyor of sleeping beauties and singing animated animals, is the studio behind this wonderfully black comedy/morality tale for children, but maybe Disney, too, saw past the material's deliciously macabre bent to find also a thrilling little essay on friendship, fate, and the restorative powers of onions.

There's no question that the actors and filmmakers have fashioned a compelling (if unformed) love story of a certain age – which is not to be confused for a love story for the ages.

So much here is equally befuddling and beguiling; I caught myself leaning in toward the screen repeatedly, trying to somehow get closer to the gorgeous impenetrability of the story, of the boy.

With a saga this sprawling and byzantine, it makes sense that the emphasis is not on Schiele, but rather on what the sorely wronged Bondi never stopped calling "my Schiele."

Something is terribly amiss when the American actors sound like English is their second language.

Cotillard doesn't look part Native American or sound like a Thirties Chicago moll, but damned if she isn't a sight and sound to behold. Whatever her technical limitations, she rises above them to breathe a flesh, blood, and battered verisimilitude into the part. You can't tear your eyes off her, any more than you can Mann's flawed but still engrossing picture.

Everything that was sharp in the original text has been rounded and buffed.

With so many soldiers interviewed, some only fleetingly, it's impossible to keep track of them all.

A devastating and weighty picture.

Ultimately Hedges’ film, like the turkey, comes out underdone.

No doubt about it: Bad Santa is blasphemous. But, to borrow a phrase from another famous hedonist, Homer Simpson, it’s also sacrilicious.

It's the kind of movie that lives and dies by a viewer's own idiosyncrasies.

The subdued characters I can abide, intellectually speaking, but subdued filmmaking with material this fundamentally gut-punching is a lot less easy to swallow.

A film that wants you to get happy.

Shannon is monstrously good – unpredictable where the other actors are clipped and careful – and he steals the whole picture in two short, shattering scenes. When Shannon exits the film, the air gets sucked out again, and you realize the pretty artifice extends to more than just the Wheelers.

Gilroy zings the film with tantalizing bits of absurdity (one wonders, wistfully, what the Coen brothers would have done with this material), but too often he returns to his darker, more ponderous instincts.

Giamatti is masterful.

She knew what "it" was going to be before anyone else. Or maybe she invented "it," and the magazine-buying public simply did as they were told.

Perhaps there was some confusion – should we play this as a lark or a lesson in geopolitical unrest? – or maybe there was some studio involvement to defang the politics; whatever the case, the noncommittal Charlie Wilson's War treads a good-natured but yawning in-between.

So potent it nearly succeeds even as a vacuum sits squarely at its center.

There's nothing that feels like real rage, nothing that even remotely approximates the spiritual decimation of a termination.

The film moves so subtly, in fact, and so seamlessly between wry humor and the emotional wreckage of life-or-death, that it was with some shock that I found myself weeping halfway through the film.

Wright takes the tools of a bloodless medium, the video game, and crafts an action-comedy with a true-blue beating heart.

Kazan appears in every scene of The Exploding Girl’s perfectly paced 80 minutes, and you’d miss her if she ducked out for even a moment.

Tonally, it all makes sense, but there’s such a thing as overmuchness. Gibney laudably launches a withering attack here on the pay-to-play relationship between lobbyists and lawmakers. But this viewer felt withered, too, by the end of his battering ram of a movie.

Something that falls just shy of greatness.

The film can feel a touch overscripted, but Polley and her actors effect true-to-life rhythms of speech.

Funny and fierce and deeply moving.

The only weak link here is Aniston's character – her Olivia, stuck in a holding pattern, feels like a holdover from Holofcener's previous, single-girl pictures, and Aniston underplays the role to the point of expressionlessness.

(It should also be noted that Page One wears its pro-Times bias on its sleeve, right up to the rankling but now-common inclusion of a "get involved" Web address at film's end.)

To a one, they're terrific. But in this overpacked ensemble cast, it's Binoche you want to see more of.

This is provocative stuff, to be sure, in which the stakes are so high that a pratfall concludes with exploding limbs and the anguished effect of its final minutes is a quiet shock to the system. A comedy of errors and terrors? Who woulda thunk it?

Moon doesn't belabor anything, really, so confidently measured and philosophically nuanced it all plays out (aided by a striking, under-the-skin original score by Clint Mansell).

It’s best to situate yourself in the middle of the row; a seat at the end will most likely leave you feeling cross-eyed for an hour.

What a weird, winning little movie is Robot & Frank, which explores what happens to the essential self as the memory goes. Oh, and it's a heist picture. With robot butlers. I'm not sure I've ever seen anything quite like it.

To do no disservice to the impressive work of Bridges' co-stars, anytime his ragged writer, in flowing caftans and floppy hats, is on screen, it's impossible to take in anything else, so commanding is his presence.

As is, it's simply too much information crammed too haphazardly into a running time that at times borders on interminable.

"By practicing his art, he revealed himself to us." Fellini: I’m a Born Liar provides proof positive: The art indeed reveals far more than this pedestrian documentary ever does.

Isn't Lee's most personal piece, but it may very well be his most mature.

It's unclear if Van Sant intends to inspire guilt; here, as elsewhere, he is exasperatingly abstruse. And in this striving to not say too much, he ends up not saying much of anything at all.

Chbosky surrounds his hurting characters with the cinematic equivalent of a hug circle – which is sweet, but rather antithetical to tension-building.

As an unsparing portrait of disaffection among the small-paycheck, faux-creative class, The Future is rather astute … which isn't to say it isn't also bang-your-head-on-the-wall annoying.