So this bourgeois-bohemian movie is, in a way, as serene in its obliviousness to the exterior world as its man-child subject. It's not essential, but it is endearing.

Harks back to a 1960s idea of what a horror film should be.

Footloose won me over early, with a sequence in which the hero gets all heavy metal while restoring his badass ... VW Bug.

Killing Bono begs to be remade with A-list stars but, given Neil's history of near-misses, probably won't be.

Take a stroll down London Boulevard if you enjoy surly, smart, hard-edged British crime movies like "Sexy Beast" and "Croupier."

The magical mystery that is Paul McCartney may never be solved, but for fans (the line forms behind me), the new documentary The Love We Make includes some memorable displays of his world-conquering charm.

There are several adorable musical numbers that make excellent use of Adams. Segel's dancing is . . . well, he reminded me of a huge star: Big Bird.

I'm not, finally, sure what Leigh is saying - but she is a filmmaker with a voice.

It's smart, funny, agreeably perverse and simultaneously abrupt and exhausting.

Thick-necked, booze-loving and angry men beat each other with their naked fists: so far, so Irish. But the feuding clans in the documentary Knuckle actually think their habits of antagonizing one another can be fixed by just one more problem-solving brawl.

In the compelling but slow-moving Iranian film A Separation, a downbeat family drama of no particular distinction gradually turns into a mystery that raises painful moral questions. There may be several guilty parties.

Forsaken in a cruel wilderness, a man looks to God and pleads for help. Receiving no answer, he says, "F- -k, I'll do it myself."

France's Declaration of War has it all: comedy, romance, fantasy, musical interludes and a child with a brain tumor. Wait - what?

Like "Once," this film is a tender little piece of heartbreak.

The cheesehead noir Thin Ice presents Greg Kinnear in a role that's almost too easy for him: He's a morally flexible Wisconsin insurance salesman for whom honesty is the least-likely policy.

This charming kid's-eye movie, full of comical and vivid detail about the lives of these cheerful children, has the loose, lanky feel of a memoir and of French New Wave films.

Credit Westfeldt, who is also the writer and director, with a classic setup for farce, brightly executed.

Once it calms down and stops trying to be funny, it turns into a thoughtful and intriguing drama.

The dialogue, while filthy, is wickedly funny, and sounds perfect coming out of the mouths of these beaten-down characters in their low-rent surroundings.

Dafoe proves to have the right blend of ruggedness and sensitivity for this conflicted hero. The actor's habit of maintaining a lavishly styled coiffure in all situations, even when his character is meant to be sleeping in the rain for days on end, is becoming distracting, though.

So gripping and focused that it easily bests Hollywood movies with 50 times its budget.

Fightville, you had me at "gladiator school."

The Avengers is neither overwhelming nor underwhelming. What it expertly is, is whelming.

The main flaw is that, as an actor, Duplass isn't able to make the audience love him. Picture "Bottle Rocket"-era Owen Wilson in the role, and you've got something special.

Despite its excesses, Savage" is never unintentionally funny, just gritty and mean. The run time is more than two hours, yet it's also tight: no drag, no waste, no message.

I haven't seen a timelier or more important film this year, and the film's passion for school choice could hardly be more warranted. Along with documentaries such as "The Lottery" and "Waiting for 'Superman,' " the film comes with a background sound of the ice of inertia cracking.

No one loves a broad comedy like the French, but Gallic touches of restraint tend to keep such light entertainment pleasing rather than blundering.

Like a lesser Python entry ("The Meaning of Life"?), it's alternately brilliant and frustrating.

A hilarious Parker Posey provides her customary blast of brittle energy in Price Check, an engaging corporate comedy.

When Hopkins' Hitch directs the audience by waving his hands like a symphony conductor - it's a nice callback to a Hannibal Lecter highlight - it's one of the best scenes of the year: a delightfully personal way to show how the story of "Psycho" concluded.

An intensity of purpose and a patient, suspenseful directing style make the B-movie Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning superior to most of the big-budget action films I've seen lately.

Django Unchained might have been a revelation in 2005. But after Quentin Tarantino and others have spent years spoofing '60s and '70s genre movies, this mock spaghetti Western tastes like it came out of the microwave.

Cruise's Jack Reacher is a loner who doesn't smile, charm, love the ladies, aim his index fingers to the heavens or sing "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling" in bars. Here he just snarls and kills people. Yes, please, and let's have more of the same.

What's best about the film are its quick jumps from one depravity to the next as jazz rambles on the soundtrack: Youth is a candle to be burned at both ends, with (as it was once said about Bob Dylan) a blowtorch in the middle.

The line between honey and syrup is a fine one, I'll grant you, but "Best Exotic Marigold" was on the wrong side of it. Quartet carries a noble glow, as serene and beautiful as sunset.

Nature films don’t come any more spectacular than the BBC’s One Life.

Writer-director Antonio Campos, making excellent use of the queasy rhythms of a percussive musical score, keeps piling up the dread as we wonder just how dangerous Simon can be to the women who keep taking pity on him.

Typically, To the Wonder seems mostly locked in the thoughts of its characters, whispered so only we can hear, with no more actual back-and-forth dialogue than would cover the back of your ticket stub.

In the most thrilling sequence of this consistently rousing old-school adventure, Heyerdahl grabs a passing shark with his bare hands, thrusts a hook into it, drags it aboard and guts it with a knife. Now that’s what I call entertainment. I haven’t seen such crazed brutality since Lou Lumenick’s review of “Movie 43.”

Baumbach seems mainly interested in capturing the whimsical rhythms of unformed post-college life, with money too scarce and roommates too ample — but he already did that, did it better and with more rueful feeling, in the much funnier “Kicking and Screaming,” the debut he made at 25 and one of the best films of the 1990s.

Ends up feeling familiar.

The highlight is a meta touch: A funny on-screen résumé is posted each time we meet a new character.

Watching it is like being the only non-stoned person in the room as someone tells a long, long story.

For short stretches, the movie has a touch of surreal "Office Space" brilliance, but it's broadly acted, its characters are thin, and the production values are ragged. Still, it's hard to resist its goofy hostility: "You're like the drummer from REO Speedwagon. Nobody knows who you are."

The mild British wackiness is more droll than funny, but the movie is a pleasant cup of tea.

On the M. Night Shyamalan scale of stupid endings, The Prestige isn't as bad as "The Village" but it's comparable to "Unbreakable."

A boldly original undertaking: It's the first movie ever to come up with the idea of remaking "The Truman Show."

All three segments are heavy on blame-America speeches, which may be a fair snapshot of Iraqi opinion, but it's strange how fond Longley seems to be of Saddam Hussein.

There's a geyser of ambition in the visually stunning The Fountain, but the story of a thousand-year quest for the Fountain of Youth eventually trickles out.

It is a better option than the third "Santa Clause."

The beginning and end are classics.

"Babe" was a classic because of its gentle simplicity. Charlotte's Web, with its insistently "magical" theme music, an overbearing climax and a trough full of bad jokes, is merely adequate.

Director Alfonso Cuarón has a vision so mesmerizingly terrible that it alone - at least, for those who enjoy a gorgeous nightmare - is reason enough to see the film.

Stieve and Glosserman may yet strike a vein: This thing screams out for a Hollywood remake with, say, writers from "The Simpsons."

Swank's character, Erin Gruwell, is a real educator who, in the years following the Rodney King riots, coaxed her students into writing about their bullet-riddled lives.

The chatty killer and the nervy atmosphere are both so depraved that the film, though it contains hardly any explicit violence, is like stepping into a blood Jacuzzi, and there is a biblical severity to the ending.

The gags vary - a tattooed-breast mystery kinda sags - but there are lots of laughs.

The film is occasionally heavy-handed, and the priest character is almost absurdly saintly, but there is an awful power to scenes such as one in which the Europeans are evacuated on trucks.

The dialogue isn't ridiculous, and sometimes it's witty: A cynical cop (Donnie Wahlberg) doesn't buy Jamie's theory that the doll had something to do with the murder: "The mystery toy department is down the hall. This is the homicide department."

The paranoia is as thick and luscious as that Reddi-wip, and it's served from both left and right.

On the one hand, Black Book has the artiness of subtitles, the dramatic weight of history, and the desperate heroics of Jews hiding from Nazis. On the other hand, it has Paul Verhoeven.

As always in Veber's films, the predictability is part of the fun.

The big new addition in Shrek the Third is Justin Timberlake as the high school-age future King Arthur, but if Timberlake contributed a song to the soundtrack it would have to be "WhinyBack."

Kim Basinger gives one of her strongest performances in Even Money, a kind of "Crash" fueled by gambling instead of racism.

Buzzes around in random menace for an hour until its third act, when - zzzzzt! - it flies straight into the zapper.

A black-and-white fantasia shot against a bright backdrop of famous sites, and it has potential to be a cult hit on its dreamy-hipster look alone.

Doesn't do enough with a righteous premise.

This is a one-joke skit that trots in a straight line, and your enjoyment of it will depend entirely on how many times you need to see gonzo sheep rip out human entrails.

No matter how good Blethyn is at playing up the sweet hurt of a woman who is well on the decline but never made it in the first place, your admiration for her shrieking-and-drinking breakdown scenes is likely to be tested after about the fifth go-round.

Don Cheadle has a fine time jiving through Talk to Me - accent, please, on the middle word. It's a black "Good Morning, Vietnam."

So what starts out as fascinating sci-fi becomes just fi, and winds up pulp fi.

The script, narrated by Queen Latifah, is so embarrassingly dorky (it was co-written by Kristin Gore) that it's like Fred Rogers gone hip-hop.

Some documentaries are a fervent search for truth; others are a fervent search for snickers. This one is the latter, providing via interviews and old film clips a Greatest Hits for Bush haters.

The movie is just a situation salad, at least until the end, when things start to pull together a bit.

As frightening as it intends to be, but not enjoyably so.

An interesting failure, not a fascinating one.

The insult comedy is sometimes brilliant.

Destined to enchant the slumber parties.

Struggles to maintain a sober, evenhanded tone about an utterly ridiculous story.

Just when things should be getting exciting and complex, they become repetitive and predictable. Subtext becomes hint becomes statement becomes declaration. For once, Pinter is a little too easy to understand.

Cusack shows that he can still play the sensitive-but-fun guy until the ladies sigh and the men take notes.

Good grindhouse fun until a last act that's like a meeting of a psychoanalysts' convention.

The atmosphere is convincing - there is an "Eight Mile" desperation to Raya's plight - but nothing makes sense.

A chilling pulp movie told with a pavement-eye view of the dregs of humanity.

The doctors and nurses who care for America's wounded troops on the battlefield and in hospitals get their due in Fighting for Life.

Arch, wry and dry, with its exquisite wallpaper and impeccably blocked fedoras, Married Life is bracingly malicious noir for a while, a sort of gray-flannel-suit take on the Coen brothers' "Blood Simple." Every character seems morally capable of anything.

The script depends heavily on familiar stand-up comedy bits, but it's full of sharp wisecracks and slacker charm.

Suggestion: When making a film called Run Fat Boy Run, how about hiring a fat boy?

A wet, red chunk of pulp that knows what it is and doesn't care.

It's good-natured myth-making cut into kid-size pieces.

The movie has enough big-city wickedness and merry cruelty to keep things skittering unpredictably.

Despite all of the hideous critters Hellboy encounters, there is a hint that things are considerably weirder elsewhere.

The film is well shot and edited, backed with a bouncy hip-hop soundtrack and full of pep.

It may be impossible to make an uninteresting documentary about Hunter S. Thompson, but is it unfair to ask Gonzo for more Hunter and less Jimmy Carter?

As familiar as the costumes and decoration are, the conflicts are unsettlingly vivid and strange.

Its characters are likable enough to settle in with for a pleasant hour and a half.

Yet what makes this movie is the digital effects. It's got all the heart of a demolition derby.

It has a dogged all-night charm and a sense of who its audience is.