Designed to be "inspirational," yet it shortchanges the complex reality of the lives it makes such a show of saving.

The songs of the South African freedom fighters were a literal call to arms. The music succeeded -- magnificently. The movie, on the other hand, is only so-so.

Deeply rich and strange new romantic comedy.

An epic aestheticization of World War II, a movie at once bold and baffling, immediate and abstract.

Gini Reticker's simply made, affecting documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell reveals how these heroic ordinary women prodded the factions to peace and literally brought down Taylor, a leader of sociopathic cruelty.

The film defuses all preconceptions about the ''issues'' of transsexual identity to arrive at a place of tremulous human power.

In this offbeat buddy-cop comedy, Don Cheadle, as an FBI agent trying to stop a drug ring, makes the perfect foil.

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.

Yearns to be optimistic (juxtaposed with the disaster of Sudan, it certainly has the right to be), yet that only ends up underscoring its ache of sadness.

You giggle every so often, but you never give yourself over to the characters.

Zodiac never veers from its stoically gripping, police-blotter tone, yet it begins to take on the quality of a dream.

Fred Leuchter is just one deluded figure, but by the end of this great and chilling sick-joke documentary he stands as a living icon of the banality of evil.

A movie's refusal to judge bad behavior can be a subtle way of trumping the audience -- a passive-aggressive form of one-upmanship.

Son Frère is hushed, clinical, grimly paced, and moving.

It's a fluid cinematic essay, rooted in painstakingly assembled evidence, that heightens and cleanses your perceptions.

The past-and-present layering is a lot more resonant -- and less sketchy -- than the film's theme of ''betrayal,'' both familial and governmental.

All of Kung Fu Hustle is like that: You don't just watch it, you ride with it, laughing all the way.

Scorsese, I think, is so invested in making The Aviator upbeat and rousing that the movie never quite reveals, the way that "Kinsey" or "Ray" or "A Beautiful Mind" or even a good E! True Hollywood Story do, how its hero's vision and his grand torments could be flip sides of the same temperament.

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

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.

Powerful and searching documentary.

An existential chain reaction, yet as remarkable as his cinematic gamesmanship is the way that he traces the anatomy of feeling in Lola.

If Linklater goes to a bit of an extreme here, it's in making both characters so intelligent and sincere, so ardent and giving, that they seem a little too good to believe.

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!''

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

The movie draws us into the illusion that we're simply eavesdropping on the lives of three inner-city black and Hispanic girls.

Ulee's Gold is a story of redemption, and Nunez doesn't make redemption look any easier than it is.

Brashly engaging.