Scalding and glib, derisive yet impassioned, Fahrenheit 9/11 is an intensely resonant piece of Bush-bashing, because it lets the president do most of the work.

Supple and engrossing, a liquid-smooth street-rap testimonial.

A swankily austere piece of jeepers-creepers sci-fi.

Director Niels Mueller's attempt to create a middle-class "Taxi Driver" (he tips his hand a bit smugly by respelling Byck's name to evoke Travis Bickle) has a creepy, meticulous exactitude.

Pacino shows you what is only subliminally in the text: that Shylock's heart of stone is really a wall of wounded pride.

Everything in the movie -- family demons, May-December sex, the lessons of writing -- ties together with pinpoint precision. That's a pleasure, to be sure, and a limitation, too.

De-Lovely is something dishy and rare: a biopic about a happy, and even enchanted, man.

Ice Age never matches the brilliance of ''Toy Story'' or the heartfelt heft of ''Shrek,'' but it's an antic and sweet-spirited pleasure.

Rapt and beautiful and absorbing.

Heavier on mood than incident, but its vision of a doomed erotic power war has a lurching authenticity.

Code 46 has a noirish fatalism that renders it a close cousin to ''Blade Runner,'' but Winterbottom's film, shot mostly in the light, uses the theme of memory erasure to peer into the eternal sunshine of tragically altered minds.

It would be tempting to say that fractured time sequences in movies have become a cliché, except that Wicker Park makes your brain spin in surprising and pleasurable ways.

Harold and Kumar share a quality the overgrown adolescents in films like this are never allowed to possess: They're witty, focused, and highly aware. They make having a brain look hip.

Michael Mann's tensely funny and alive Los Angeles night-world thriller, is, in its own twisty way, a very high-stakes buddy movie, yet it doesn't look like one, because it leaps off from a situation more jangled and threatening than we're used to.

Shot in spooky gradations of silver and shadow, The Prisoner of Azkaban is the first movie in the series with fear and wonder in its bones, and genuine fun, too.

Is it really possible to make a comedy about abortion? Alexander Payne, who cowrote and directed this mischievous bit of sociological screwball, has brought it off.

A large-scale military drama with a quiet, almost mournful center.

U-Turn is an overdue event, a chance for Stone to apply his hypnotic acid-trip-of-the-soul wizardry to something sexy and lowdown.

A stylish B horror movie about giant insects in the catacombs of Manhattan, it's by turns queasy, gross, terrifying, and -- never underestimate this one -- enthusiastically dumb. It's everything you want in a big-bug thriller.

In this quiet, absorbing, shades-of-gray drama, a kind of thriller meditation on the schism in Northern Ireland, we get the story of not one but two powerfully opposing heroes.

As the village is destroyed, its people humiliated, hunted down, and murdered, Singleton brings the images and underlying psychological truths of American racial violence to the screen with a brute dramatic force that few directors have matched.

More than just a walking fat joke, Sherman Klump is Eddie Murphy's winking rebuke of his own arrogance.

Basquiat is an engrossing spectacle, but by the end, as a zoned-out Basquiat stands regally in a cruising Jeep, we realize that Schnabel has reconfigured his story as a kind of ghostly myth, and that we've never completely seen the man behind it.

The final affirmation of this romance is really an affirmation of Baumbach's talent: that a young filmmaker fixated on the solipsistic rituals of guyhood understands the hearts of women, too.

True Lies is so eager to give you a giddy good time that you're more than happy to let it work you over. It's a likably disposable pop cocktail.

Return to Paradise is "Midnight Express" remade from the outside, as existential quandary. It has the moody, disquieting undertow of a true moral thriller.

The Truth About Cats & Dogs is very funny around the edges... but as the characters begin to hang out together, forming a platonic menage a trois, the mistaken-identity ruse never escalates into true screwball lunacy.

A rousingly square romantic epic spiced with dashes of sex and bloodlust; it's "Robin Hood" meets "The Last of the Mohicans" meets "Death Wish".

The film knows how absurd this is, yet its triumph is that, by the end, we're actually rooting for Mary to see the library as her salvation.

The movie, like the book, is a work of opportunistic gamesmanship, a luridly farfetched conspiracy thriller masquerading as an inquiry into the zeitgeist. You can't take Disclosure very seriously, yet the film has been made with cleverness and skill, and with a keen eye for the latest styles in corporate paranoia and ruthlessness.

The story, at heart, is earnest and humorless teen romantic glop, but its feelings aren't fake, and the movie is compulsively watchable; it has a passionflower intensity.

The whole movie is a diversionary activity. It's trash so compacted it glows.

An enjoyably supercharged and ultraviolent teen-rebel comic-book fantasy that might be described -- in spirit, at least -- as reality-based.

Will take you places you haven't been, and also places you have.

Wiseman reveals the victims of domestic abuse in all of their pity and terror.

The fascination of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, the sharp, funny, unreasonably compelling adaptation of Barris' autobiography, is the way it soft-shoes past our skepticism.

People Say I'm Crazy doesn't defuse, or romanticize, the trauma of mental illness. It just humanizes it.

Unlike the first two Decline films, this one is only tangentially concerned with music.

Steel City could have used more rhythmic drive, but if Jun keeps weaving together characters this compelling, he could be a major film artist in the making.

Joshua does grow a bit repetitious (it lacks the cathartic climaxes of a horror film), yet it has cool and savvy fun with your fears.

There's an unconvincing last-act twist, but this is the movie "Little Children" wanted to be.

A highbrow chick flick that made me feel older, in a good way.

Can a movie be gripping and repellent at the same time? In Funny Games, a mockingly sadistic and terrifying watch-the-middle-class-writhe-like-stuck-pigs thriller, the director Michael Haneke puts his characters in a vise, and the audience too.

If you want to hear juicy inside tales of the scams devised by Lee Atwater, the right-wing visionary of media-age dirty tricks, you'll find loads of them in Boogie Man.

It's memorable when it meditates on the changing face of where we look at art, and how that changes the art itself.

When You're Strange, a documentary history of the Doors directed by Tom DiCillo, is for people like me who can stumble onto the scrappiest Doors video on VH1 at 3 a.m. and sit there, mesmerized.

Chesney makes an art form out of strolling down the catwalk while singing. He turns each song into a blissed-out journey homeward.

Unlike its obvious influence, the 1999 Japanese shocker "Audition," The Human Centipede has no real-world echoes. It's an only-in-the-movies sick goof.

Fans will gorge on this deft, year-by-year portrait of the ultimate enduring cult band.

Yes, Stone gets cozy with Hugo Chávez, soft-pedaling the Venezuelan president's crackdown tendencies, but he also captures South America in a paradigm shift, wrenching itself free of centuries of colonial control. The film is rose-colored agitprop, but it catches a current of history.

I found The Girl Who Played With Fire more gripping than "Dragon Tattoo," because this one doesn't just play with thriller conventions -- it puts them to work.

The first rock & roll kung fu videogame youth love story.

The film offers evidence that Vicious spent the entire night out cold on barbiturates. It plants resonant doubts.

Unravels the deceptions -- and the deep dishonor -- that inflated life-size valor into fake superheroism.

Going the Distance may be a minor movie, but it's also the rare romantic comedy in which you can actually believe what you're seeing.

Even when nothing is happening, the often dead-silent shots tend to grow scarier the more you look at them.

The surprise of Let Me In is that director Matt Reeves (Cloverfield) hasn't just remade the Swedish cult vampire film "Let the Right One In" into a more fluid and visceral movie. He's made it more dangerous.

Too goofy-surreal to pack a lot of emotional punch, but it's antically light on its feet, with 3-D images that have a lustrous, gizmo-mad sci-fi clarity.

The movie's redemptive structure is a bit routine, yet I watched nearly every scene with a sense of discovery. Coppola is a true filmmaker, and in Somewhere she pierces the Hollywood bubble from the inside.

The Debt is basically an entertaining riff on "Munich." It's about a (fictional) operation of top secret Israeli revenge, carried out by three highly trained agents whose plan goes off the rails in ways that are more fascinating than the mission itself.

Fair Game gets you riled up all over again at a deeply unpatriotic abuse of power.

Lurid and voluptuous pulp fun, with a sensationalistic fairy-tale allure. You can't take it too seriously, but you can't tear your eyes away from it, either.

It's a minimalist "Sideways," not so much mumblecore as talkycore.

A rivetingly journalistic account of a scoundrel's rise and fall.

Arnold Schwarzenegger appears as the rare politician who supports reform in this timely exposé of how our democracy has slipped off its tracks.

Deepens the saga of New York's former governor and attorney general into the paradoxical morality play it really was. Spitzer, almost three years after he was caught soliciting escorts, comes off as chastened but still regal, like a hawkeyed Jewish Kennedy.

Paul Giamatti, dialing down his trembly-voiced neurotic energy to good effect, gives a holy hell of a performance as Barney Panofsky.

If this is what it sounds like when a new millennium goes pop, I'll take it.

High-octane trash, but you will go "Ohhhhhh!"

Here, as in "The Hangover," the laughs aren't just staged, they're superlatively engineered.

At times, Kung Fu Panda 2 suggests "Bambi" redone as an episode of Oprah. Yet it's a more-than-worthy sequel.

In Limitless, a potently fanciful and fun thriller about a drug that turns you into a genius, Cooper proves a cock-of-the-walk movie star.

Far more grotesque than the first Human Centipede - in fact, The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) could be the sickest B movie ever made.

Win Win, it turns out, isn't a tale of facile victory. It's a movie about how loss makes everyone do things they'll both defend and regret.

A puzzle of a highly rarefied order. At times it's enthrallingly clever and subtle; at others it's borderline incomprehensible.

Last Night is on to something fascinating. It meditates on the meaning of adultery: the purposes it serves, beyond sex.

The movie is like a less original "WALL•E," but it's still vibrant and touching.

In terms of storytelling, The Avengers is for the most part a highly functional, banged-together vehicle that runs on synthetic franchise fuel. Yet the grand finale of CGI action, set in the streets of New York, is - in every sense - smashing.

The story in Madagascar 3 is functional, but the antically civilized spirit is infectious.

Bellflower is stylishly watchable - even when it's preposterous.

A fascinating and in many ways tragic documentary, takes us back to one of the high-water marks of the apes-are-people-too era.

I'm not sure what it all adds up to, but The Devil's Double puts its hooks in you and keeps them there.

Higher Ground breaks crucial, sacred ground in American moviemaking.

Beats is a welcome blast of '90s nostalgia, taking us back to a time - and a sound - that pulsates with optimism.

A Better Life was directed by the eclectic Chris Weitz (The Twilight Saga: New Moon, About a Boy), who weaves the torpor and anxiety of immigrant life into something dramatically true, if at moments a bit draggy.

So scrupulously researched and argued that only a fool would ignore its findings.

Harper Lee hasn't been interviewed in 47 years, but this meditation on her only novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird," puts you inside her skin.

A lively, original, and scattershot-hilarious ramble of a Judd Apatow production.

Depp's performance is more than just funny - it's ghoulishly endearing.

Savages is Oliver Stone doing what he should have done a long time ago: making a tricky, amoral, down-and-dirty crime thriller that's blessedly free of any social, topical, or political relevance.

A tangy raw stew of history, even if it never begins to confront the contradictions that bedeviled black militancy.

As long as the MPAA is issuing its cavalier decrees, though, they're the ones acting like bullies.

Jeff Prosserman's riveting documentary takes a question that haunted the Bernie Madoff scandal - how did he fool everyone for so long? - and answers it with a decisive "He didn't."

For a documentary that's almost engineered to lift your heart, Undefeated is very well done.

Won't Back Down says that whatever your feelings about the subject, lack of change cannot be the answer to our public-education crisis. Trying to cram an informational exposé and a vintage inspirational awards-bait weeper into one movie, Won't Back Down is awkward at times, yet it's also passionate in a surprisingly smart way. It makes a genuine drama out of impossible issues.

Throw in a nagging divorce settlement, an unplanned murder, and Billy Crudup - hilarious! - as a raging security man, and Jill Sprecher's film enjoyably fuses cleverness and sheer desperation.

Sound of My Voice doesn't follow through on everything it sets up, yet it has a hushed and revealing psycho-intensity. It also has an oh-wow Twilight Zone ending that truly made me go, ''Oh, wow.''

Director David Gelb pulls back the curtain on the kitchen rituals of sushi, inviting us to experience the savory-smooth sensation of ''umami,'' roughly translated as ''Ahhh!''

Ruby Sparks is a romantic comedy that takes off from a premise so fanciful it needs every bit of the freshness that Dano brings it.

Helgeland works in what I think of as a conservative — or maybe it's just really, really basic — neoclassical Hollywood style, spelling everything out, letting the story unfold in a plainspoken and deliberate fashion, with a big, wide, open pictorial camera eye. It's like the latter-day Clint Eastwood style, applied to material that's as traditional as can be.

Side Effects is mostly a good Saturday-night movie, but by the end, it's caused a few unintended side effects of its own: a bit of head-scratching, and a giggle or two of disbelief.

Robot & Frank is sentimental high-concept fluff that works.

The best thing about the movie is that it keeps drawing conclusions in opposite directions.

The movie is fascinating, though it smacks its own lips a bit too much at the tackiness of freak '70s stardom.

Cloud Atlas is certainly out to be a ''visionary'' mindbender, but the film's secret is that it's a nimbly entertaining and light-on-its-feet Hollywood contraption, with the actors cast in multiple roles as if playing a game of dress-up.

An alienated-teen movie that surfs along on the whims and casual cruelties of its central character runs a risk: It can wind up as random and undisciplined as she is. Instead, Little Birds is a touching and distinctive achievement.

When we finally see the time-lapse images his cameras took, they're awesome and terrifying - a meltdown out of a poetic horror film.

Urgent, heartfelt, and not-quite-as-predictable-as-you-think environmental rabble-rouser.

It's a perfect summation of why he was the ultimate filmmaker.

Posey, her attention divided up into slivers, is funny as hell, but she's also terrifying in her evocation of a kind of moment-to-moment PowerPoint existence.

Spitting obscenities at the film's director, Jay Bulger, Baker recalls his days as: the '60s thrash caveman who gave Cream and Blind Faith their transcendent power surge; the pioneer of druggy hotel-room rampages; and the damaged purist who left the pop world for Africa. The movie salutes the rhythms and the wreckage.

The movie is playful and makes no easy moral judgments.

Highlights Gaskin's down-home gumption as an advocate for the glory of natural childbirth.

As a politico, Ed Koch loved power a little too much. But as a leader, he was a storybook embodiment of New York's contradictions, which is why his chapters in the city's saga loom so large.

The Jeffrey Dahmer Files is for hardcore Dahmer obsessives only.

As visual spectacle, Avatar is indelible, but as a movie it all but evaporates as you watch it.

Shutter Island holds you, but it doesn't grip you. It's as if Scorsese had put his filmmaking fever on psychotropic drugs.

Del Toro, with his melancholy-brute features, endows this raging beast with some of the ''Why me?'' poignance you may remember from Lon Chaney Jr.'s performance in the original.

His (Gibson) slow-burn fury keeps the movie going, but not enough to invest us in any justice beyond payback.

A highly calculated act of mischief that sounds like a stunt cooked up for Howard Stern's radio show.

This Is It offers a raw and endearing sketch of a genius at work.

Overall it's more amusing than hilarious.

Slumdog Millionaire is nothing if not an enjoyably far-fetched piece of rags-to-riches wish fulfillment.

The sequence serves no real purpose beyond dazzle for dazzle's sake, but when you're watching it, that's purpose enough.

On screen, Twilight is repetitive and a tad sodden, too prosaic to really soar. But Hardwicke stirs this teen pulp to a pleasing simmer.

A marvelously designed piece of cartoon kinetics.

Ratatouille is a blithe concoction, as well as a miraculously textured piece of animated design.

This time we expect to be played, but the twist is that we're also touched -- which, the film implies, is the cinema's own form of deception.

As a fix of pop iconography, V for Vendetta is eyeball grabbing, even if it lacks the relentless videogame bravura that sold the Matrix films. As a movie, however, it's merely okay, with a pivotal dramatic weakness: Evey, for all the attentions of her revolutionary Svengali, remains, in essence, a bystander, and Portman, her head shaved, plays her like Joan of Arc as a tremulous Girl Scout.

If I respect Downfall more than I was enthralled by it, that's because its portayal stops short of revelation. Once you witness Hitler's denial, the film has little more to say about him.

Face becomes a study of the immigrant embrace of freedom in America - a bridge built over time and generations.

The Upside of Anger is overly therapized, yet Costner and Allen show you what it means not just to play a role but to inhabit it.

It took gifted hucksters to make this movie, a funny and spirited - what to call it?

If you want to see the missing link between John Wayne's squint and Clint Eastwood's sneer, look no further than Charlton Heston in Major Dundee.

This is a B movie rooted in gut-level stirrings of power and retaliation.

3-Iron is like a Raymond Carver story that slowly, inexorably takes on the dimensions of a ghostly fairy tale.

A testament to the discipline, humor, and life of kids who swing.

Beneath its exploration of fatherly distance, this is really a portrait of why cranks make better artists than earnest nice guys.

If you want a whiff of how unironic the 1970s were, consider bowling, a sport that on any given weekend was broadcast (usually on ABC) with the hushed solemnity of a moon launch.

I'd be lying if I didn't admit that Rock School, Don Argott's amusing and spirited documentary, would seem a heck of a lot niftier if its fire hadn't already been stolen by "School of Rock."

Anyone expecting a tender sunset elegy, however, has wandered into the wrong film. Saraband, despite a few wistful moments, is a poison pill of a reunion.

The moral murk of Crónicas would be more effective if the story weren't so contrived, yet the movie is worth seeing for Leguizamo's sinewy urgency, Alcázar's desperate cleverness as the killer, and the squalid, frantic atmosphere of Latin American hunger.

There is a method to its madness, since the madness here is really Cobain's. Last Days mythologizes his suicide as a haunting act of fulfillment: the consummation of a life that had already ceased to be.

Darwin's Nightmare points an all-purpose finger at globalization, yet the movie, as raw and vivid as it is, meanders terribly and - bigger problem - never hints at how the disasters it shows us are rooted in Africa's colonial past.

Ballard connects you to the beauteous inner calm of the wild, even if audiences today are looking for a lot less calm.

As an achievement in macabre visual wizardry, Tim Burton's Corpse Bride has to be reckoned some sort of marvel.

Going Shopping is sharp and funny about all the things that shopping can mean to the women who live to do it, and even to those who don't.

Might have been richer, tougher, more honestly liberal if it had revealed a few more shades of gray among the men.

This makes for a modestly touching journey, but New York Doll, in its wafer-thin way, is an oxymoron: a hagiographic tribute to a rocker with more passion than talent.

The movie, for all its half-baked visual marvels, remains remarkably faithful to Lewis' story, and the innocence of his passion begins to shine through. It's there, most spectacularly, in Aslan, the lion-king messiah.

The surprise of The Ringer is that the movie is pretty damn funny.

It's obligatory for a horror film to feature exploitative sex as an appetizer, but Roth, even as he fulfills the sleaze imperative, does something shrewder: He mocks his heroes, presenting them as cold-eyed horndog jerks who fail to see that they've wandered into an entire country of exploitation.

Let's not sell Tyler Perry short. As the vinegar-witted Madea, he's a drag performer of testy charm, but in his overlit patchwork way he's also making the most primal women's pictures since Joan Crawford flexed her shoulder pads.

Shepard's charisma has always reached back to an earlier time, so it's easy to accept him as a kind of pre-counterculture hero - Eastwood without the sneer - who aged into the era of tabloid scandal.

It makes sense that L'Enfant has been hailed as a masterpiece, since a masterpiece is what it's trying, in every unvarnished frame, to be. If you wandered unknowingly into the film, however, you would see this: a stark, fascinating, and naggingly detached character study.

Zahedi is ruefully funny and savage in his self-exposure.

Do Hou's films deserve to be seen? Absolutely, if only to end the myth that they're too perfect for this world.

It's a heartfelt movie that could have used a zigzaggier undercurrent, though Olyphant, in the sort of role that Paul Newman used to swagger through, has a star's easy command.

The surprise of Superman Returns is that it isn't a funky, ambitious conceptual reimagining, like last summer's "Batman Begins." This really IS your father's Superman; it re-creates - and updates, though just barely - the universe Donner invented.

An agreeable mischievous romp.

As entertaining as some of it is, is so cool that it's almost too cool. It takes the sin, and much of the juice, out of vice.

The races are scorchingly shot, and they lend the movie a zest.

A scrupulous and honorable film. Yet it never comes close to being a revelatory one; it sentimentalizes more than it haunts.

Stephens stages Another Gay Movie in a style of low-budget fluorescent overkill, but a handful of the gags are low-down funny.

If The Bridesmaid is middle-drawer Chabrol, it's almost worth going to just to watch Laura Smet, a vamp of not-so-basic instinct.

This modern slice of neorealism has been made with a skill, and humanity, that suggests Bahrani may have a "Bicycle Thief" in him yet.

To me, the most potent dimension of The U.S. vs. John Lennon is the way that it captures the contradictory romanticism of Lennon the radical.

Admit it: It's not every horror film that can make you feel preached at and slimed at the same time.

The movie opens as borderline Hitchcock, echoing the tone of the filmmaker's bravura "Bad Education" (2004), and then turns into a kind of overly conceptualized Tennessee Williams.

The film offers true insight into the patterns of war crimes, even if the songs sound disquietingly close to a call to violence.

There is much to poke at in Rocky Balboa, yet the movie, with its amusingly updated ''Gonna Fly Now'' montage and its very niftily staged climactic bout, summons just enough incredulous wit about just how often Rocky has been around this particular block to let Sylvester Stallone earn his nostalgia.

Miss Potter, right to the end, is the definition of a "nice" movie, and that makes it a genuine oddball in a universe of increasingly distressed and uncivilized pop culture.

A cheerfully disposable gangland freak-show thrill ride that's been directed by the gifted Joe Carnahan (Narc) as if he were trying to give the audience a seizure.

Now Ray has directed his second film, the abysmally titled Breach, and it's a bona fide companion piece, another true-life tale of duplicity gone secretly insane.

One of the rare movies from Israel that refuses to spell out its politics, and you may wind up grateful for the ambiguity.

Maxed Out, while occasionally muddled in its financial details, presents a more-accurate-than-not vision of a nation that is starting to look like a candidate for rehab, on both an individual and a national level, for its addiction to debt.

If Loach had given full voice to each side of this division, he could have made a great film -- maybe THE great film -- about the Irish struggle.

The film reveals, rather delectably, how potent the power of suggestion can be in a world gone madly groupie.

Vacancy is a schlock surprise: a no-frills motel-hell slasher film -- with a bit of soul.

An authentic real-world creep show -- better, if anything, than its predecessor.

A deft Stephen King freak-out.

An enjoyable pop projection of post-9/11 anxiety.

A spectacularly turbulent portrait of the chaos and bloodshed that have come to define Haiti.

Becoming Jane has a burnished feminine sadness, and the director, Julian Jarrold, gives it a creamy-dark visual flow.

It's been a while since we saw a demagogic feminist exploitation revenge drama, and Descent, while top-heavy with ''agenda,'' is shrewdly done.

It's the closest the movies have come in a while to the nudgy, knowing fairy-tale enchantment of "The Princess Bride."

Atkinson's goofball grotesquerie never lets up -- right through to the inspired finale.

John August directs it briskly, as a gossip-era "Twilight Zone" of image and reality.

This is how a Western today tries to give us more bang for the buck. By working this hard to be a crowd-pleaser, though, it may please fewer crowds.

It's an academic meditation in underworld-thriller drag -- a movie that looks about as close to a straight-ahead, down-and-dirty genre entertainment as anything the director has made since his exploding-head horror days.

Who said that an environmental horror film couldn't be didactic and spooky at the same time?

It's like "Deathtrap" crossed with "Cribs" as staged by Stanley Kubrick.

Meticulous and detailed, a drug-world epic that holds you from moment to moment, immersing you in the intricate and sleazy logistics of crime. Yet the movie isn't quite enthralling; it's more like the ghost version of a '70s classic.

The tiny scale and armchair talkiness mark the movie as a bit of a folly, an act of idealistic hubris in today's commercial marketplace, yet that's its (minor) fascination too.

In spirit, I Am Legend is caught in some abstractly doom-laden sci-fi past. For what it is, though, the film is well-done, a case of suspenseful competence trumping questionable relevance.

The Great Debaters is like one of those sentimentally revved youth-sports-team crowd-pleasers. This time, though, the sport is debating, and the setting is an elite black college in Marshall, Tex., in 1935

Allen's latest, Cassandra's Dream, is one of his debonair ''small'' entertainments, the closest that he has come to doing a tidy, no-frills, down-and-dirty genre thriller.

The movie walks the line of surreal vulgarity (you will not, repeat not, expect the penis), yet most of it, intentionally, is less nutzoid than your average megaplex genre parody.

Though the film gets a bit repetitive, in its moving climax Lior does more than just have his bar mitzvah -- he earns it.

Chicago 10 is well worth seeing, if only because a good half of the film is devoted to extraordinary footage of the four days of rage that spawned the trial.

A classy romantic cocktail distinguished by its tart yet breezy bite.

The fun of 21 is the way that this sharp, hyperaware star in the making, his face as readable as a mood ring, pours us into an adrenalized cocktail of fear, desire, and mental buzz.

Chapter 27 is far from flawless, but Leto disappears inside this angry, mouth-breathing psycho geek with a conviction that had me hanging on his every delusion.

A nice cookie-cutter comedy, no more and no less, but Dempsey, with his relaxed charm, and Monaghan, with her soft and peachy sensual spark, rise to the challenge of making friendship look like the wellspring of true love.

There are more chuckles than laughs, but the film does a witty job of replicating the hermetic, overlit shot language of '60s studio movies.

Stuart Gordon, the mostly under-the-radar director of "Re-Animator," pops back into view with this amusing trifle -- a piece of scuzzy tabloid noir.

this unfairly maligned sci-fi comedy testifies that Eddie Murphy still has the gift of surprise.

It ends up subverting its own subversion, arriving at a place that can only be called conventional.

Step Brothers is a Judd Apatow production and it's the closest that the Apatow factory has come to spitting out a dumb-and-dumber high-concept comedy.

The one performer who seems at home with the gravity of it all is Emma Thompson.

Even those of us who find anti-homosexual ''deprogramming'' to be hideously intolerant and naive may find ourselves oddly relieved that Mark is there (in a Christian rehab center).

At once scary and stirring.

These are standard youth-movie dilemmas, but they're brought to life by the high-energy cast and the musical numbers, which Ortega shoots with electrifying pizzazz.

Good has a stagy fustiness, but it's worth seeing for Mortensen, who makes this study of a "good German" look creepily contemporary.

All staged as a harsh poem of survival, with no great psychological interest, yet the ending carries a surprise feminist tug that’s worth the wait.

It's all a bit shapeless, yet made with sincerity and taste, and the two actors seize your sympathy.

Enjoyably dirty-minded sendup of when-ballet-met-hip-hop youth musicals.

What's infectious in Soul Power is the almost shocking optimism of its America-meets-Africa '70s world-beat vibe.

At its best, Capitalism: A Love Story is a searing outcry against the excesses of a cutthroat time. At its worst, it's dorm-room Marxism.

Fun, and believable, on the most important level: It convinces us that Jaden Smith has what it takes to fight his way to the top.

A blatant re-spin of ''The Fast and the Furious'' that also happens to be a far better movie.

Branagh shows us the comedy of a man who is too clever to understand that in the guise of dreading fatherhood, he is really at war with how much he longs for it.

For all the praise that has been heaped upon it, is a quasisatisfying, half realized vision.

Showcases a trio of terrific performances.

This trio is like a looser, funnier version of the family of wrecks in Woody Allen's ''Interiors.''

At times too restrained, yet there are moments it captures the erotics of intimacy in a way that makes most American love stories look downright unfree.

The thrust of the movie is that even for Jerry, the quintessential scientist of stand-up, comedy is very, very hard to do. By the end, you're closer to knowing why.

Little more than a rambling chain of combative buddy mishaps, but the interplay between Vaughn and Favreau, who does great double takes of thrusting chin frustration, spins you through the weak patches.

The movie, while heartfelt and vividly shot, takes too many rote genre turns.

Modest and prosaic, with an unfortunate fairy-tale ending (yes, it features Tom Jones).

A modest vérité portrait of Wilco, the engagingly melodious, deeply unglam alt-folk rockers.

If nothing else, Shaft is spicy fast food.

The film's best trick is the way that it treats conspiracy as a kind of political ''Blair Witch,'' a monstrous murk that haunts us precisely because it can never be seen.

In Happenstance, fortune doesn't just smile -- it schemes and tricks and zigzags, forming an urban road map of fate's detours.

Does all it can not to dehumanize Chong.

Younger, in his debut feature, is as canny as he is derivative.

Very much a kiddie ride, Stuart Little 2 is lively without being hyperactive -- it's a bouncy mouse caper with a wee bit of soul.

Too tightly made not to keep you watching, Holy Smoke is also too hokey and didactic to take seriously.

You know you're in the hands of a born filmmaker when he floods a scene with danger and excitement and, at the same time, tempers it with something more delicate -- a languor of the everyday.

Lawrence makes you believe in the character you're watching. He does an amazing little piece of acting.

Penn is a true talent, but there's just enough languid pretension to The Pledge to make you wonder if he's ultimately more interested in parading his promise as a director than in fulfilling it.

Moves along with a quietude, a scruffy direct plainness that has long gone out of style.

It's a pleasure to encounter a confectionary love story in which a man and woman of age and experience discover feelings that youth, more and more, has a patent on in Hollywood.

What holds the movie together, however, is Gibson's broodingly responsive performance.

Lands on an imaginative fault line somewhere between tackiness and awe.

The new version is actually better. It's still a fairly ham-handed revenge-of-the-nerd horror fable, but you don't go to a movie like Willard for subtlety. You go to be skeeved out by rats, rats, and more rats, and I'm tempted to say that Willard does a fairly rat-tastic job of it.

Colorful and exciting, yet unless you're a young moviegoer, nothing in it takes you by complete surprise. (It's less a nail-biter than a chin-stroker.)

Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin Bacon try to get inside the skins of these space-age pilot jocks, but the roles, as written, don't give them enough to work with.

Damon is a magical actor. His mind, as sharp and focused as a laser, beams out of the face of a vivacious choirboy, and, in nearly every scene, he invites you to share the jet-propelled pleasure of his precocious agility.

Had ''Boogie Nights'' been the tale of a California dreamer with a really long skateboard, the movie's delirious first half would have been ''Dogtown and Z-Boys,'' and its downbeat conclusion would be Stoked.

Assayas can't resist turning Demonlover into an overcalculatedly irrational rabbit-hole-to-the-dark-side thriller. The movie morphs into a ''dream,'' all right, but I confess that all I wanted to do was wake up from it and return to the slithery intrigue of corporate depravity.

The affair itself, in its genteel way, does catch fire, but it's the end of the affair that needs to move us to rapture, and the movie, instead, just drifts away.

It's a messy, entertaining documentary rooted in -- though not limited to -- the iconically indulgent years of Fellini's later career.

Snoop invests snarling meanness with as much authority as Clint Eastwood used to. As an actor, does this Dogg know any more tricks? At this point, he may not have to.

Roth, there's no denying, creates considerable suspense out of our desire to confront the forbidden.

The atmosphere of gentle communal chaos is authentic enough to become the movie's dramatic center.

Badly lit and at times, awkwardly inspirational, yet there's real feeling in it, especially when the movie suggests that Tourette's syndrome is every bit as pure an expression of the spirit as it is a ''disorder.''

Dunst, in her finest performance yet, has now transcended her fellow teen stars. She is arguably the first actress of her generation poised to take on Gwyneth and Julia.

An ingratiatingly scrappy little movie. It's been cobbled together out of a great many conventional crises (drugs, abusive boyfriends, heartless girlfriends, a looming record deal), yet there's a tough and appealing vitality to the way that it embraces the petty ego-tripping and party-down squalor of the rock lifestyle and stands apart from it at the same time.

It's Alan Cumming who takes over the movie as the impish mastermind Fegan Floop.

Moore makes Halley's awakening organic and touching. In an age when most teenagers are up to their eyeballs in postmodern consumer glitz, her movies seem radical not just in their retro squareness but in their unfashionable embrace of faith over ironic flippancy.

The trouble is, nothing about this couple is particularly rooted in Los Angeles. The love affair has a bland, generic feel. What's more, the picture lacks verve.

Lin works with a rhythmic observational flair that outweighs the movie's flaws. It's a long way from Long Duk Dong.

Confidence may be mannered at times, but its shell-game plot is alive with organic trickery.

Gibson, in a disarmingly nimble, fast break performance, makes Nick's new hyperempathy look like the essence of virile panache.

The movie's freakazoid intensity gets to you, but there's something at once cramped and show-offy in Aronofsky's refusal to even slighty vary its atmosphere of shock-corridor burnout.

The movie is also brisk and wholehearted and smarter than you expect.

Moses was elevating mankind to a place closer to God, but when the Red Sea parts here, the feeling it gives you isn't awe; it's closer to deep impact.

What's infectious about Groove is the friendly, almost innocent way that its brat pack of digital-age bohemians seek liberation in a world where there is nothing left to rebel against.

As a character, Austin Powers hasn't worn out his welcome, exactly, but he has outlived his novelty.

A little of this sort of thing goes a long way, but no one does it better than Myers.

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson crafts a plot of manipulation and chance, in which some zigs and zags are more convincing than others. Still, his feel for scuzz, for people living at the raw extremes of appetite, is palpable.

A tricky-bordering-on-gimmicky film noir with a glaze of soft-core kink.

As a comedy, 50 First Dates is standard Sandler, but as a love story it left me pleasantly buzzed, if not quite punch-drunk.

A good but far from great movie because it portrays truth telling in America as far more imperiled than it is.

The camera loves Banderas -- a velvet stud -- as much as it did the young Clint Eastwood.

From what we can tell, Brown was a dancer, all right, in life as well as on the field -- a dancer with a powerful forearm, one that Lee covers in protective padding.

A canny, derivative, wildly gruesome portrait of a London sociopath who's the scariest of sadists, in part because he's also a very courtly one.

Slick, reasonably amusing, never asking its audience to swallow anything too wild for consumption.

Lays on the compassion a little thick, yet its heartfelt squalor stays with you.

Charlie's Angels is finally Cameron Diaz's movie. Her Natalie has a heart as insecure as her body is smokin'.

Gerron's terrible film was never shown in the places it was meant for, but in Prisoner of Paradise it reveals a queasy corner of the Nazi mind that tried to imagine a concentration camp as it fantasized the inmates might have.

On paper, the movie sounds unbearably schlocky, but Costner plays Garret the reluctant backcountry prince as mythic but also foxy and life size.

I wish I could say that Wattstax was an ecstatic soul celebration, but most of the performances, while enjoyable, fall short of memorable.

A gonzo splatterfest from New Zealand that manages to stay breezy and good-natured even as you're watching heads get snapped off of spurting torsos.

In Monster Theron undergoes one of the most startling transformations in the history of movies.

Jonathan Nossiter's second feature (after the intricate and haunting ''Sunday'') strikes unnerving chords of mystery and dismay as it fuses the sinister, jump cut dislocations of a metaphysical thriller like ''Don't Look Now'' with a pain soaked meditation on love, guilt, marriage, and adultery.

It's ''The Matrix'' meets ''TRON'' meets ''Jimmy Neutron,'' with all the cheery (if not cheesy) evanescence of a Jolly Rancher commercial. I mean that as a compliment.

A good movie? Hardly. But more than enough to pass a dog day afternoon.

Fire, as this movie makes clear, is nothing if not photogenic, and Howard has done a beautiful job of conjuring both its danger and its deceptive, primal beauty.

Lusts for catharsis yet never quite gets there, because, for all of its bitter romantic anguish, it ultimately coalesces in your head rather than your heart.

The film's charm ends up worn out by the very perfection of Frank's con. We look at this teen wizard of rotating identity, and we realize we know everything about him except who he is.

Could have used more of the shimmering elegance of the Day-Hudson comedies. Those movies had a true sparkle. This one's a likable piece of costume jewelry.

A crowd-pleaser, all right, but, for all its appeal, a naggingly sanctimonious one.

The film is a sobering chronicle of the depressing circus of persecution and pseudo-scandal that was the Clinton years. But why did the President provoke such ire? A movie with insight into that might actually feel new.

The film is brimming with plots, counterplots, dossiers, and sinister corrupt priorities, all held together by the telephoto obsidian gloss of Scott's look-ma-no-pauses style.

Bullock gives it her all; she's bristling and alive on screen in a way that she hasn't been since ''Speed.''

The latest slacker manifesto, Clerks lacks the grunge artistry of either "Stranger Than Paradise" or "Slacker," but it's a fast, likable 90 minutes at the movies.