The magic of the movies is never more evident than with stop-motion animation, and nobody does it better than Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park.

A wild buckle-up-and-blast-off adventure that plunges every corner of kids' favorite subject.

In a year rich with animation options, Happy Feet stands head and shoulders above its competition.

Virtually everything Americans know about Ellis Island they've learned from the movies, and virtually all those movies were American. Golden Door offers the other side of the story, the one that ends at Ellis Island instead of beginning there.

Broken English takes 30 minutes to do what most romantic comedies manage with a simple montage. That's a good thing, by the way.

If there's one thing missing above all else from today's action movies, it's the lost art of the car chase.

It's like "Lock, Stock" as filtered through the mind of David Mamet, with Craig as the suave middleman holding it all together.

The result is an eye-opening social portrait in the tradition of "Paris Is Burning," the landmark 1990 documentary that introduced drag balls and ''vogueing'' to the mainstream, but it lacks the earlier film's structure and focus.

A haunting, poetic film, and yet it suffers two major failings. First, Murray provides too blank a slate for the audience to appreciate whatever insights a more expressive performance might have offered. Second, and far more troubling, is the way Jarmusch refuses to take his female characters seriously.

Valiant enlists a squad of loveable birdbrains to turn the classic fighter-pilot formula into an upbeat adventure film loaded with laughs.

With its predictable confrontations and tacky fantasy sequences, you feel writer/director Jane Anderson steering the material toward schmaltzy movie-of-the-week territory at every turn.

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is a movie obsessed more with the act of telling a story than the story itself, which explains why, when the movie's finally over, less than half the audience will have understood the finer points of the mystery.

The most extreme English-language studio release I've seen in years.

The Proposition leaves you shell-shocked.

Kids will eat it up, while solid voice work from William Shatner and Wanda Sykes should keep this borderline-feral toon from pushing adults over the edge.

Ultimately, what happens with the house is not only entertaining, but a marvel of what animation can accomplish in this day and age.

While you watch, be sure to scour the background for in-jokes, including cameos by Gromit and other DreamWorks characters, and rest assured that Flushed Away gets even funnier on second viewing.

Not since "To Live and Die in L.A" has there been such a raw, cynical vision of living and dying in L.A.

But as Western analogies go, Curse achieves an emotional fervor more in keeping with ancient Greek mythology than Elizabethan theater.

[Csupo's] take on Bridge to Terabithia doesn't pander or misrepresent, but instead illustrates the power of open-mindedness in both its forms: creativity and acceptance.

The movie's politics may miss their mark, but its thrills are dead-on.

On paper, it may sound like high-level calculus, but on screen, The Last Mimzy is perfectly charming. Like "Cocoon" for the elementary-school set, the box transforms Noah and Emma's lives.

Make no mistake, Arctic Tale is a stunning film, full of all the astonishing, even breathtaking nature photography we've come to expect from the folks at National Geographic.

Has all the makings of another "Ice Storm" -- family tension, teen experimentation, friendly neighborhood wife-swapping and a death in the family -- but falls short in its execution.

Smile feels like one man's answer to movies increasingly overloaded with sex and violence.

With material like this, Samuel Fuller or David Lean might have fashioned an epic war movie for the ages, chock-full of hard-boiled characters and against-all-odds heroics. But in John Dahl's hands, The Great Raid never really lives up to its name, delivering everything you might expect from such a movie, but not an ounce more.

Baier's style is almost uncomfortably voyeuristic, amplified by the casting of a young, inexperienced actor (Pierre Chatagny) in a part that calls for hardcore sex.

This is, after all, "Mary Poppins" turned on its head.

Night Watch represents the best in Russian special effects, a collaboration between 42 different CGI specialty firms all working in the service of a single goal: to create the nation's most visually transgressive film.

Features the lamest story of any CG-animated feature to date.

This is neither the noir world of old '40s movies, of which he's clearly fond, nor something new and original enough to fit the concept. Instead, it feels like a blueprint for someone else to figure out.

An unknown commodity to anyone who doesn't follow telenovelas, Becker is sure to be a big star and has already signed on for two sequels. Apart from being scorching hot, he's enormously sympathetic in dramatic scenes.

Writer/director John A. Davis (Jimmy Neutron) is a wizard at transforming the most mundane setting -- the front yard, for crying out loud -- into another world.

True to form, How to Eat Fried Worms forgoes flatulence jokes for positive examples.

What does set Shrek the Third apart is the quality of its animation, which reaches a level of expressiveness in the faces that would make even Hollywood's heavily Botoxed live-action stars envious.

The dynamic between mother and son is fascinating, with Blethyn creating a character who is more antagonist than villain.

Death Sentence would be right at home as one half of "Grindhouse"'s B-movie double bill.

If nothing else, You I Love delivers a brisk and spirited little taste of contemporary Russian culture through the eyes of three spontaneous, unpredictable and oddly charming characters.

The entire movie rides on Paul Kaye's performance.

Basically the first movie all over again, with plenty more of the bridge-jumping, rocket-launching action that audiences loved about the original.

The result is like a low-rent "Wizard of Oz" or "Labyrinth," sticking close to the formula of a kid who falls asleep and wakes up in a fantastical wonderland where everything's just a little bit off.

One of the great pleasures of the original Love Bug comes in watching all the live-action stunts, and CG just isn't the same.

An exercise intended exclusively for fans of the genre, another crude, hard-R bloodbath from the studio that brought you "High Tension" and "Saw."

Like a cross between "Man on Fire" and "Bad Boys 2," this demolition derby delivers eye-popping action sequences that would make even the Roadrunner roll his eyes in disbelief.

As far as titles go, Cote d'Azur doesn't quite cut it for this topsy-turvy French comedy, in which an innocent seaside vacation gets really messy once a family full of busybodies starts poking around in one another's business.

Considering its superlative title (second only to George Stevens's New Testament epic, "The Greatest Story Ever Told"), I'm sorry to report that The Greatest Game Ever Played ranks somewhere in the murky middleground of sports movies.

It's all in the telling, and Loggerheads practically aches with its own heal-the-world earnestness.

It's frustrating to watch Levin try to reason with far-gone street-corner evangelicals (whose arguments are preposterous at best) when he might be building a stronger case by other means.

Unlike this summer's compulsively watchable "Hustle & Flow," Get Rich or Die Tryin' captures none of the thrill of finding your voice, recording a demo or landing a concert.

This is superficial entertainment to say the least. But if you're looking for laughs, then Just Friends is just fine.

The remake seems to have been written and directed by people whose only experience with children is the long-distant memory of having been kids themselves so many years ago.

As long as the movie's set in Mexico City, The Matador is a slick and entertaining black comedy, but the instant Danny heads back to Denver, it comes flying apart at the seams.

Like an early Woody Allen film or a classic Marx brothers feature, more of Hoodwinked's gags flop than hit, but they come at such a steady rate, you hardly notice.

This is precisely the type of moviegoing experience engineered for those who still get a laugh when the Baha Men hit "Who Let the Dogs Out?" accompanies a doggie mayhem montage.

It would seem Towne is too much in love with the book to recognize its fundamental limitations as a film.

The Sentinel isn't nearly as slick as it must have looked on the page. Those zingers are perfect fodder for a movie preview, but they just don't lead anywhere interesting on-screen.

The trouble with Kinky Boots is that director Julian Jarrold doesn't seem to know whether his movie would play better to young hipsters or the blue-haired old lady crowd.

A filmmaker like John Sayles ("Sunshine State") who shares Hiaasen's issue-conscious outlook might have framed the lesson a bit more eloquently. But Shriner blows it.

In a move reminiscent of Gus Van Sant's "Psycho," some shots are lifted directly from the original and much of the screenplay is identical.

The truth is, Jet Li has gotten soft in his old age. While fans of the "Once Upon a Time in China" star will be pleased to learn that at least half of Fearless is action, what they may not realize is just how mushy everything else is.

In post-"Wedding Crashers" Hollywood, the entire exercise feels dated (just as the comedy's PG-13 rating -- this in spite of a recurring rape joke -- makes it feel neutered).

Coolidge knows he's not making "Death of a Salesman" here (he names the store managers Glen Gary and Glen Ross in tribute to David Mamet's elegy to the American Dream), but he's got the same eye for detail that made "Office Space" great. What he lacks is Arthur Miller's (or even Mike Judge's) sense for character.

Whereas E.B. White's beloved novel introduced kids to the cycle of life, tenderly broaching the tricky subject of mortality, this latest movie version plays like just another piece of vegetarian agitprop.

This inventive family movie sets up the most delightful premise, then squanders it on the kind of yawn-inducing CG adventure you might expect from one of those long, plot-heavy cut scenes that slow down video games.

By suggesting that the man's life was as riotously funny as his plays, writer-director Laurent Tirard leaves us wishing he'd opted to do a straightforward adaptation instead.

Almost certain to polarize audiences, this bit of emotional agitprop plays like a watered-down "Short Cuts" or "Magnolia" with a shrill, one-note message: We're all a little bit racist.

What's missing is some faith in the audience's intelligence and, more importantly, the jokes.

For anyone who digs hardcore motorcycle racing, Supercross delivers enough engine-revving, dirt-spewing motorcross action to satisfy even the most intense adrenaline craving.

Have you ever noticed how it's always the worst horror movies that go really far out of their way to lay the groundwork for a sequel?

The movie is a clumsy and uninspired mess, which is not to say that it's not funny.

The explanation for all this mayhem eludes me, and even a lame last-minute twist isn't enough to cover the fact that Jigsaw ain't as clever as the movie thinks he is.

Kids will love it. It feels fresh and original and mildly subversive, but it's all a cover for the filmmakers not having the patience or confidence to put together a real story with a beginning, middle and end.

Instead of watching a professional actor pretending to be intellectually disabled, we're watching a jackass pretending to be a dimwit pretending to be intellectually disabled.

Amounts to Chicken Soup for the Soul-style torture -- unless you like that kind of thing.

Something about the sequel, Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties, doesn't seem nearly as obnoxious as the original.

With an exciting way out, the audience would have gladly overlooked all the loose ends from earlier in the movie. But the way Hall plays it, he undermines the early style and intelligence of his all-black action movie, taking audiences for the wrong kind of ride in the end.

The movie is basically a love story between a man and his elephant, and if viewed as such, it's not nearly as ridiculous as the movie it first appears to be.

Flowers' ''style'' suffers from attention deficit disorder, leaving just enough vital information for you to follow the convoluted plot. But just when one story gets rolling, he's off and chasing another.

For an inaugural effort, Open Season ain't bad, but the studio shows far more promise with its gee-whiz visuals than it does in the story department.

The movie itself frustrates by guarding the secret of Walsch's newfound spirituality.

Unfortunately, this dimwit concept barely has enough spark to power a single strand of Christmas lights, much less rival the classic-by-comparison "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" in side-splitting Yuletide snafus.

For all of 10 minutes, Gray Matters looks like it might have accomplished the impossible: uncovering a romantic-comedy scenario audiences haven't seen a million times before.

The characters, starting with Lewis himself, are downright obnoxious. Not counting those singing frogs or the time-traveling T. rex (with its big head and little arms), only Lewis' sad-sack roommate ''Goob'' is remotely sympathetic.

In Year of the Dog, director Mike White willfully violates one of the great unwritten rules of Hollywood screenwriting: Kill as many human characters as you want, just spare the dog.

Amounts to little more than a downbeat soap opera as half a dozen squatters -- hustler, junkie, stripper, queer, fallen Madonna and skank, with a mentally challenged roomie thrown in for good measure -- try to hold their lives together in a grungy New York loft just days before Christmas. Think "Rent" without the music.

Like Russia's answer to "The Matrix" and "Lord of the Ring"s trilogies, Day Watch offers the second chapter in an epic battle between the forces of Light and Dark, the result of which is a gaping gray area where nothing much makes sense.

If "Casino Royale" and "The Bourne Ultimatum" represent the new breed of 21st century action, then Rush Hour 3 is Stone Age stuff. The movie aims for irreverent, but delivers irrelevant instead. Let's hope the Rush Hour series stalls here.

There's nothing so artistic about it as to attract the same art-house crowd that braved subtitles to discover "Nine Queens," and yet, it's professional enough that Spanish speakers will be glad to have a heist movie on par with "Rush Hour 3" or "The Pacifier" made in their native tongue.

Downright awful.

Stealth is basically the kind of movie a 13-year-old boy given an infinite budget and creative freedom might cook up between Xbox games.

What is most beguiling about The Libertine is that it allows Wilmot to self-destruct without ever giving us cause to care or relate.

Janeane Garofalo is all wrong as the giraffe, whom the animators contort into all manner of weird positions so she can share the frame with pint-size love interest Benny the squirrel (Jim Belushi).

Loud, sophomoric and stunningly crude.

Sober, this kind of material is an acquired taste at best and downright unbearable in stretches. And yet, the movie has the makings of an instant cult classic, sure to grow funnier among its devoted fans with each successive viewing.

The hyper-stylized violence, for instance, isn't nearly as senseless as the narrative bits in between. And the ''twist'' employs the same sleight-of-hand as "The Usual Suspects."

Illegal Tender is the sort of crime movie in which nothing, not one detail, has been observed from real life; it's composed entirely of fantasies and falsehoods lifted from bad movies and hip-hop videos.

The way I see it, anyone who's made up his mind to see Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo deserves everything they've got coming to them, and with any luck, they might even enjoy the movie's willfully offensive gutter humor.