No is a comedy, but of a dangerous sort. Its eyes are open and the laughs tend to stick in your throat.

It's to the "Lethal Weapon" movies what left-hand driving on a country lane is to a freeway chase: pokey, more than a little daft, but with a bloody surprise around every hedge.

Still: The Hours is a book about people writing, reading, and living another book, and that literariness makes the movie resist itself.

The Wrestler is a character study, no more and no less, yet it's open-ended enough to function as many things.

Goblet of Fire is the entry in which Rowling finally took off the gloves.

If you look fast, you'll see Waters himself in a cameo (as a flasher; what else?), proof the new film is in touch with its dyed roots.

It's not so much a remake as it is a loving re-creation of the 1933 original on extra-strength steroids, with a side order of Botox. You've seen it all before but most assuredly never like this.

If you miss the old cliches, consider whether, after 21 Bond films and countless parodies, your response is simply Pavlovian.

A sweet-natured trifle, as flavorful and as thin as a crepe.

A strange and very beautiful documentary about the gray area between obsession and art.

The last time I felt the sort of outrageously kinetic action-movie high District 9 delivers, it was 1981 and George Miller, Mel Gibson, and "Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior" had just come roaring out of Australia.

Someone walking cold into a movie theater showing Paprika might be excused for thinking the screen was having a Technicolor seizure. Fans of Japanese anime and filmmaker Satoshi Kon will simply feel dazzlingly at home.

Alison Klayman's documentary is one of the most engagingly powerful movies of the year almost completely on the strength of Ai's rumpled charisma and the confusion it creates in the bureaucratic mindset of the Chinese Communist Party.

Does Antarctica attract dreamers or create them? It's a thread that runs throughout the film.

It's an account of what helplessness does to a man whose philosophy of life has been founded on decisive action.

At the technical level, The Secret World of Arrietty isn't as ambitious as the studio's finest work, and the animation is stronger on texture than detail.

A textbook case of filmmakers who can't make up their minds about their characters; it's a failure of nerve disguised as dramatic ambiguity.

Mostly it’s a footloose tour through the noise and sun of a summer metropolis and an unassumingly wise portrait of a friendship.

Quiet, observant, and intensely moving whenever Heiskanen is on screen, and it has a valedictory sweep that feels like a summing up.

Watching Melancholia is like being stuck next to a brilliant depressive at a dinner party. The food is exquisite, the conversation scintillating, and the longer you sit there the more trapped you feel in another man's all-encompassing gloom.

Queen of Versailles is still worthwhile, not because it questions all-American entitlement but because it prompts us to think hard about what, exactly, we believe we're entitled to.

Builds slowly and naturally to an unbearable personal crisis.

Not all of Nine Lives clicks, but at its best it finds an inarticulate sisterly solace that makes you want to see what this director could do with one life per film.

A hugely entertaining personal documentary about what steroids mean to American pop culture.

At its most unsettling level, Spellbound asks us to consider what words are for and what childhood should be. It's as profound as anything you'll see this year, and, yes, it should have won the Oscar.

The filmmaker's obsessions have got the better of him. That said, I can't recommend the film highly enough, since bad Miyazaki is still leagues better than anyone else.

Giants has SO many insistent high points, in fact, that its breathlessness threatens to turn monotonous.

Watching Room 237 is like being stuck on an airplane next to a stranger hellbent on convincing you of his very detailed, very paranoid theory of the universe. Actually, it’s like being stuck on a plane full of those guys, each with a different yet compellingly insane take on reality. And the in-flight entertainment features only one movie: “The Shining.”