If I seem cool, it might be because I came in hoping for the same level of blood-and-thunder as in the Evangelical scenes of "There Will Be Blood," whereas The Master is a cerebral experience. But Anderson has gone about exploring fundamental tensions in the American character with more discipline than I once thought him capable.

That's the feeling Stephen Chbosky captures in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, his exquisite adaptation of his best-selling YA novel about a Pittsburgh high-school freshman who doesn't fit in and then all of a sudden does, for a spell.

There's nothing in David Ayer's cop drama End of Watch that you haven't already seen, but the film has moments so riveting that you might not care too much.

If high-toned futuristic time-travel pictures with a splash of romance float your boat the way they do mine, you'll have yourself a time.

A marvel of cunning, an irresistible blend of cool realism and Hollywood hokum.

Holy Motors is typically confounding but on every level that matters a work of unfettered - and liberating - imagination.

It's an unusually funny, literate, worked-out script, and Mendes seems hell-bent on making the best Bond since "Goldfinger" - or the best, period, given that he exhumes Bond's old Aston Martin only to shoot it cheekily to pieces.

God, I love Plummer's performance - the twiddling fingers, the tipsy sway of the head, the reverberating roar, as well as the pathos of a man who can't stop acting long enough to hear the cry of his own soul.

It's Lawrence who knocked me sideways. I loved her in "Winter's Bone" and "The Hunger Games" but she's very young - I didn't think she had this kind of deep-toned, layered weirdness in her.

Save the Date works best when it's getting under your skin, and it does that when it's capturing the queasy halfway point - part sadistic, part bittersweet - of still loving somebody while trying to move on to someone new. It's a kind of subtlety that movies, especially American movies, rarely do well, but this quietly unassuming, secretly brilliant little charmer nails it.

Django Unchained doesn't merely hit its marks; it blows them to bloody chunks. It's manna for mayhem mavens.

Salles hasn't reinvented On the Road, but rather turned it into a rambling, beautiful, and occasionally even heartbreaking museum piece.

This is more social anthropology than psychology. 56 Up isn't concerned so much with opening up individual lives as it is with showing us how the journey of an ordinary life - or over a dozen ordinary lives - can offer insights into our own, and into society. The effect is often profoundly moving, but you can't help but feel at times like there are other stories here you're missing.

The Gatekeepers doesn't play like agitprop. The storytelling is strong, the images stark. The camera roams among multiple monitors showing multiple satellite views while an ambient score works on your nerves.

In a scant hour and a quarter it enlarges your notion of what theater and cinema, what art itself, can do — it dissolves every boundary it meets.

Soderbergh’s alleged last theatrical film is paranoid and hopeless, but he leaves the field with a bounce in his step.

Like Someone in Love has rather simple, sentimental, melodramatic underpinnings, but the vantage changes everything. It opens up this world — and the next. It’s an enthralling journey.

I’ve seen Upstream Color twice and liked it enormously while never being certain of anything.

The Angels’ Share is a rare upbeat Ken Loach comedy — and a wee dram of bliss. Set in Scotland, it has a blessedly funny overture.

Before Midnight counts on our previous investment to keep us riveted. We are. And we want them back in spirit on that train to Vienna as much as they do. What’s next — After Sunrise?

By the time this twisty, probing, altogether enthralling movie hits its final notes, the crimes against the Constitution and humanity have been upstaged by personal demons. Which is our woe as well.

The magnetic Alexander Skarsgard is the leader, Benji, a soft-spoken dreamboat, ever-direct but with a haunted quality, with something in reserve. Ellen Page gives a Lili Taylor–worthy performance (high praise) as a suspicious, abrasive young woman.

It’s an unshowy, quietly intense drama with grace notes in every scene — and a hellish punch.

It's still possible to have a good time at this movie, and the primary reason is De Niro.

iIsn't really much more than a funny, touching little squiggle, but it has a bracing honesty and pays particular heed to the betweenness in people's lives, to how much goes on when nothing seems to be going on at all.

The hang-loose grodiness of these films has its charms, and the Ray-Banned team of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, at its best, is good vaudeville.

She sometimes falls into the same trap that Lenny Bruce fell into, playing the taboo-breaking emancipator, but for the most part she's blessedly bawdy.

If the bad guys in the real world were all this obvious, life would be a whole lot easier.

A lovely confection.

It all works on the level of a sprightly sitcom: lesbianism for the Lucy-and-Ethel crowd.

The usual Sayles mix of torpor and talent prevails here.

By continually interrupting the sequences of the adult couple with scenes of the young pair, Eyre shatters the emotional power of Dench and Broadbent.

A loose-limbed documentary about the hip-hop D.J. scene that, for know-nothings like me, is highly informative without being in the least academic.

I'm all for films that don't flow from the usual Hollywood test tubes, but A Civil Action is basically the standard formula with a dash of downbeat.

Practitioners of Cajun, Creole, and zydeco music strut their stuff. So do the players of a style new to me but instantly beloved: I'm speaking of swamp pop.

del Toro blends agit-prop politics and ghoulishness without making the entire enterprise seem silly.

The stage is set for a wonderful movie, and yet The Luzhin Defence, based on the Vladimir Nabokov novel The Defense, never courts greatness.

I much prefer the whacked-out, Dr. Strangelove-ish brand of political-apocalypse film to all this straitlaced you-are-there dramaturgy, which seems a throwback to the early sixties not only in time but in spirit. But what Thirteen Days sets out to do it does admirably.

This entertaining but rather peculiar movie asks extraordinary questions, and I wish it were better equipped to give the answers.

Complicated thriller that gets more interesting as its complications pile up.

At its most basic level, Cast Away is a graceful and powerfully rendered survivalist saga.... And yet there's something generic about Chuck's plight. The filmmakers don't opt for the usual happy-face Hollywood ending, but even the half-smile they provide smacks of inspirationalism.

Pleasingly shaggy.

In The Circle, which is banned in Iran, the enforced society of women is, in effect, a community of adults treated as children.

In political terms, True Crime is a far cry from "Dirty Harry" -- it actually stands up for due process of law. In Hollywood, I believe this is known as mellowing.

His (Aoyama) existential odyssey is so attenuated and aloof that he turns suffering into an art thing.

In the scenes between Hanks and Newman, we get glimpses of greatness.

Evans, in effect, is the real producer here, and the film, which mostly consists of artfully blended archival footage, comes across like a last will and testament.

Costner is always at his best when he’s a little ornery, and Duvall is the same way. His grizzled performance is so thoroughly in character that he even chews as if it were 1882.

At its best in the interludes between explosions.

More entertaining than it has a right to be. It's pulpy and preposterous, and yet it gets at a real truth.

Arkin has a great and gentle feeling for small-time malcontents, and he knows how to make their woes our own. He does justice to the human comedy -- and redeems the movie.

It's a pure (guilty) pleasure trip. That's pleasure, De Palma–style -- twisted, dirty, voyeuristic, a vast glissando of amorality.

Jeunet wants us to know that times are hard for dreamers and that one shouldn't pass up a chance for true love. He means it, no doubt, but he doesn't have the simplicity of soul to quite bring off the sentiment. Still, we're charmed by the attempt.

Rivette keeps the life-is-a-play metaphysics to a minimum, and the cast, including Jeanne Balibar and Sergio Castellitto, is attractive.

The emotional resolutions aren't pat, exactly. But they're not messy either, and for material this inherently volatile, that seems like a cheat.

Reygadas is both a sophisticate and a primitive: He sets up his film as a religious allegory, with the nameless painter as a kind of suffering Christ and the old woman--whose name is Ascen, as in Ascension--as his redeemer.

Noah Taylor does startlingly well by this role, but the conceit behind the film is a bizarre piece of wish-fulfillment.

Great on atmosphere and less good on everything else. That’s not entirely a knock.

Breezily enjoyable but thin.

Hoffman has his specialty, though, and it’s not inappropriate here: He always looks supersmart and yet his reactions to what goes on around him are superslow.

Has some rapturously observant sequences concerning childhood.

Tends to settle for easy, homiletic insights. But it also has a collection of first-rate performances by some marvellous actresses.

As a technical achievement, K-19 is right up there with Das Boot. Don't expect much dramatic depth, though. The fathoms descended in this movie are strictly nautical.

Powerful, uneven police drama.

One of the glummest and most forbidding thrillers ever.

As with much of Soderbergh's avant-garde work, his garde isn't quite as avant as he would have us believe it is. Still, Soderbergh's jazzed stylistics can be smartly entertaining. Without them, an uneven movie like Traffic might seem more of a mélange than it already is.

In this otherwise rather schematic swatch of social catharsis, Brazil's Fernanda Montenegro gives the best performance by an actress I've seen all year.

The best thing about Insomnia is that despite director Christopher Nolan's soft spot for moody-blues obfuscation, he has the good sense to keep his star in practically every shot.

The movie is no more than a well-produced confection designed for quick payoff in the big cities, but it's pretty consistently funny.

A prime piece of whirlybird filmmaking, and the technique saps what might have been a powerful experience.

Eminently disposable, but that's its charm. It stays with you just long enough to make you smile.

Entertaining documentary.

As in many a French movie, especially crime movie, the philosophe and the crook turn out to be each other’s mirror image.

Mamet has to learn to trust the camera more than he does; he has to stop trying to control everything with language; he has to let loose a little and just give in to the fluency, the ease, the free-flowing pleasure of making a movie.

Mamet doesn't take the material as far as it can go -- we're left with a pleasing fable about the battle of the sexes and the virtues of persistence in a just cause. The neatness of it all is both appealing and appalling, and perhaps this combo is what finally hooked Mamet.

Caine is burlesquing his own iconography and enjoying every minute of it. He hasn't lost his dignity, though; it takes a lot of self-possession to act this blissfully silly. He even looks good with bad teeth.

Every generation has to discover the same clichés that were drummed into previous generations, and kids could do worse than to learn them from this film.

Stunning, and it has the added bonus of being about an era that is virtually new to movies. As a dramatic achievement, however, it is not quite so amazing.

Disney's Lilo & Stitch, which is animated in the traditional way, with watercolor backgrounds, is lovely, and funny, too. It owes a great deal to Japanese anime, but there's also a "Looney Tunes" friskiness to it that's distinctively homegrown.

An ungainly, intermittently harrowing omnibus filled with moments of piercing sorrow and rage.

Noé shoots his sequences in long, unbroken takes, and the unblinking horror that results is, I think, the opposite of exploitation. There has been so much lurid bloodletting in the movies that you might think nothing could faze us anymore. Think again.

A kind of psychological whodunit, but without the thrills. The clue-making is rather desultory, as if Cronenberg were indulging a narrative strategy he didn’t really care for.

Freaky Friday gives Curtis the chance to go all goofy and showcase her gift for splayed physical comedy.

Watching this movie, you get the feeling that the Depression existed so that Seabiscuit could be memorialized.

Parts of this film are as blandly lulling as a mood tape, but at best it’s a literally soaring experience.

It’s a pleasant movie -- very pleasant, in fact -- but soft as a down quilt.

Cory Yuen's So Close is a kind of Hong Kong martial-arts variation on the Charlie's Angels movies, only better.

Excruciatingly vivid.

A fine example of what a filmmaker can achieve when she takes on a great subject and lets it play out with all the respect and attention it deserves.

The director of "Gallipoli" and "The Year of Living Dangerously" has muffled the rage and darkness of his best work in favor of an antiquated pleasingness. Master and Commander is a too-comfy classic.

Cold Mountain has some marvelous, intimate moments and a real feeling, at times, for the loss that war engenders, but it also has more than its share of hokum--which would be more entertaining if the hokum were juicier.

Keys takes a scattershot approach to Cuban music, filming not only specific artists, like Los Cohibas and Los Zafiros, but also street musicians in the barrio and just about everywhere else he can find them.

A pretty good documentary about a great subject.

It’s both lowdown and effete, a jamboree of whoopee jokes and sick wit.

For all its high-end ambitions, This So-Called Disaster has a tabloid-TV-like appeal: We want to see if these volatile performers get on each other's nerves.

A smart little teen picture that, for a change, actually features recognizable teens.

Too much of this fantasy is filled out with artsy folderol, but it's a movie like no other--except, maybe, one by Guy Maddin.

What unites everything is Jarmusch’s playful, hang-dog absurdism.

It’s an odd fable: Viktor is the mysterious visitor who shows us what the American Dream is all about--in the movie’s terms, compassion for others--without ever wanting to become an American himself. He's a spiritual twin to E.T., who also had trouble phoning home.

More often than not, Moore goes for the guffaw, and as enjoyable as that can be, it falls short of producing the kind of devastating, in-depth analysis that might really challenge the hearts and minds of ALL audiences, left and right. At the very least, this approach undercuts the effectiveness of Moore’s own case.

The set pieces, such as an unmasked Spider-Man trying to stop a runaway subway car, are furiously scary, and compensate for all the icky mooning and moping that Peter does whenever he's questioning his gift, which is most of the time.

Cunningham's depth of feeling transformed the book's premise into something beyond sniggers or camp, and the best moments in the movie, which was directed by theater veteran Michael Mayer in his film debut and adapted by Cunningham, have a similar emotional charge.

The Village is a better movie (than Signs) --probably his best since "The Sixth Sense"--but it indulges Shyamalan's penchant for messianic uplift.

The film was adapted from a 1993 novel by Robert Bober, who drew on his own childhood experiences, and as it unwinds, one begins to appreciate Deville's desire to see things work out well for these people.

So deliriously chockablock with high-flying, color-coordinated fight scenes that non-aficionados may find it all a bit bewildering--a gorgeous abstraction. It sure is gorgeous, though, and it has a dream cast

Taut and straightforward and a little grungy, which is how these movies ought to be.

Crudup, whose features have the appropriate delicacy, plays Ned with complete conviction; it’s difficult to imagine anyone else succeeding as well.

Barry Levinson’s political and media satire Wag the Dog goes as fast as the wind, and that’s a relief because the idea behind the movie is thin. Very thin -- and at times offensively glib.

It's a new Neeson as Dr. Alfred Kinsey, all spiky-haired and harried, and he's enormously appealing in the role.

May be at once too gimmicky and too sincere. But it still exerts an uncanny power: Like the best of Almodóvar’s work, it throws you a first-love sucker punch that will stagger your heart, mind, and soul.

As one of the few movies around not pushing state-of-the-art animation or Jude Law, Alexander is a damn good date movie.

So fizzy it nearly fizzles out.

Gorgeously shot and utterly respectful of the story of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, but it’s dramatically inert.

Eastwood's earnestness has its own stoic charm. There's something nutty but also heroic in how he plays this macho-man-with-the-heart-of-a-woman premise with a straight face.

Our familiarity with the actors, and their comfort in this period setting, lend the piece an unexpected air of naturalism.

Jackson's wonderfully nuanced, witty performance, and a few unexpected plot turns, give Coach Carter a subtext that helps complicate such knee-jerk oversimplifications, redeeming the role with energetic humor and a loose-limbed grace.

It's simply an astringent action flick that uses the wounded sensitivity of Ethan Hawke and Fishburne's witty hauteur to give the shoot-'em-up scenes some juice.

The new version of Lolita, released at last, turns out to be a beautifully made, melancholy, and rather touching account of a doomed love affair between a full-grown man and a very young woman.

Penn is terrific in his low-key doggedness.

Fortunately, director Ken Kwapis, who's done a lot of briskly unsentimental TV work with young people--"Malcolm in the Middle," most notably--knows how to avoid mawk, keeps the squawk to a minimum, and gets wonderful performances out of at least two of the sisterhood, "Gilmore Girls'" Alexis Bledel as the modest Lena, and America Ferrera ("Real Women Have Curves") as the stubborn Carmen.

A pungent delight.

Danes gives a marvelously quiet, poignant performance.

The terseness of a thriller, the clarity of a documentary, and a mixture of high drama and low humor.

If only Knightley had a co-star equal to her here: The 1995 edition of Colin Firth, come to think of it, would have been perfect.

Its focus--the children--are not even onscreen very much. But their ghosts are everywhere, and the pain of the film is primal.

Given that this retrograde memory loss has cleansed Doug Bruce's perceptions and made him an altogether more open and emotional person, Unknown White Male suggests that amnesia could be the ultimate chicken soup for the soul.

A happier surprise is the smart work of director Richard Donner: 16 Blocks is all jumble and jangle--crowds, snarled traffic, and discordant car horns. The scariest moments have no music.

The fullness of Duck Season is in direct proportion to its smallness; its modesty makes it bloom.

Writer-director Rian Johnson gives the usual teen angst an entertaining kick. But the joke wears off, and what's left is as convoluted and monotonous as any conventional hard-boiled mystery.

Surprisingly diverting as a case study: not only of a talented misfit sublimating like mad to keep his loneliness from consuming him but also of a fringe artistic community (which includes the makers of this film) that rallies to give him the reinforcement he craves.

Its tone is semi-parodic, with lurid black-and-white cinematography and brassy, tongue-in-cheek music. But Harron stops well short of camp.

James Toback seems oddly nice in Nicholas Jarecki's delicious cult-of-personality documentary The Outsider.

Little turns out well in Rebecca Dreyfus's Stolen, a haunting and expansive documentary.

This Romanian movie defies categorization--it's halfway between a black comedy and a Fred Wiseman documentary. And it haunts you like the ghost of any dead person you've ever ignored.

In the world of bloated movie-star vehicles, it's not unusual to see an ego trip of these dimensions. What’s rare is when one hits its marks so smoothly.

It's a fast and enjoyable B-movie, though, and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine brings some good stormy drama to the proceedings.

Has William Hurt ever been this perfectly cast? He uses his groggy self-importance to make the pastor the victim of evil and the very fount of it.

See The War Tapes. Maybe this picture can be worth a thousand lives.

Deliriously stupid romantic time-travel drama.

The movie is semi-infantile camp but often riotous.

Niceness also takes the edge off Patrick Creadon's otherwise revitalizing documentary.

The filmmakers have done their job brilliantly: The Road to Guantánamo is yet more lousy PR for the infidels.

A collection of swashbuckling set pieces with the hustle of a vaudeville show.

As with all Ozon's work, Time to Leave resounds with grace notes. The wide-screen cinematography by Jeanne Lapoirie offsets (or maybe disguises) the movie's narrow scope, and there's something private--withholding--in Poupaud's beauty that gives his misanthropy a touch of mystery.

The movie might be scary for small kids--but good scary, with goose-bump-inducing frames, witty repartee, and three resourceful kid protagonists.

That's a knock on ­Bujalski -- that his characters exist in a vacuum, with few references to popular culture or politics or much of anything, really. Of course, one artist's vacuum is another's poetic distillation, and there's something about Mutual Appreciation (which is shot in an unassuming black and white) that spoke more directly to my inner slacker than any film since, well, "Funny Ha Ha."

Profoundly different from the others. On the cusp of their half-century mark, Apted's British subjects have accommodated themselves to what they were, what they are, and what they will be.

Neither movie (Capote/Infamous) gives you the whole picture, but it's fun to see them both and rearrange the pieces in your head.

This is one of the most immediate, personal costume dramas ever made, and so it's not unseemly to consider how the writer-director and her heroine overlap.

Ryan Murphy’s jaunty screen version of Running With Scissors proves that nothing consecrates one's depiction of a narcissistic mother like having her embodied by Annette Bening. Bening's specialties are (a) insane people and (b) actresses.

In the end, the movie is more than the sum of its fragments. The montages are intense, the images ravishing. The movie is tactile. When you finally feel this place, you understand just how little you understand.

The movie makes for a good old-fashioned wide-screen wallow. Norton isn’t remotely credible, but Toby Jones is dandy as a sleazeball with a core of decency, and Watts is so open, so soulfully petulant, so transcendentally pretty, that even Maugham might reconsider the pleasures of the flesh.

Conrad's last film, the underrated "The Weather Man," was a parade of miseries, too, but the protagonist (Nicolas Cage) didn’t move very fast in the throes of his existential crisis, and the palette (it was Chicago in winter) was glacial. Here, those crazy San Francisco hills give the movie a lift, and Muccino frames it all airily, with a glancing touch.

Venus is worth seeing for the scenes between O’Toole and Vanessa Redgrave as the woman he abandoned--the mother of his children.

Does Rocky Balboa deliver? Weirdly enough, it does: I was jumping out of my seat during Rocky's bout. If you close your eyes and try to halve your IQ--aim for something between a baboon and a lemur--you might even think it's a masterpiece.

A jaw-dropper: a delirium-inducing crash course in international trash.

Given that the movie is one long chase--Neeson's motive withheld until the end, the monotony broken only by the slaying of one member of his posse after another--the film is surprisingly gripping.

What makes An Unreasonable Man so compelling is its perfectly fluid line. Simply put, the private Nader and the public Nader are the same: There are no contradictions with which to grapple, no byways to explore.

Cooper's performance is outlandishly great, but Phillippe’s knocks Breach down a peg.

Michael Apted's Amazing Grace is a beautifully chiseled blunt instrument. No, it's not subtle, but how subtle was slavery?

What begins like your basic police procedural becomes more and more choppy and diffuse. To a point, that’s intentional: Zodiac was never caught, and Fincher aims to creep you out with the lack of closure.

It's outlandish, hilariously overripe, and possibly sexist: You'd expect no less from Craig Brewer, the writer and director who made the passionate case for how hard it is out there for a pimp. But I loved the picture's tabloid energy and heart.

The movie is too long (nearly two hours), but the acting--Gere, Molina, the peerlessly edgy Hope Davis, Marcia Gay Harden as Irving's loopy Swiss-German painter wife--keeps you giggling. And the story has something up its sleeve--a dream finish.

It's deftly calibrated and acted with relish: Kasdan is really good!

It's Jordan’s feat to make a linear, talking-heads documentary (among the heads are Jonas Mekas, Robert Wilson, John Waters, Nick Zedd, and John Zorn) that still manages to evoke something of Smith's floating, ravishingly colorful dreamscapes--a menagerie of creatures that, even as they're captured on film, are already fading into the air.

Hot Fuzz is fun, and it's nice to see all the English character actors who aren't busy in Harry Potter films, but it lacks its predecessor's freshness.

What makes Fracture hum is the way Hopkins bares his teeth, twitches his nostrils, and trains his shiny pinprick Lecter eyes on his co-star.

Not every sight gag works, and there's a brief stretch in the middle where the action becomes landlocked. But once we're out to sea the movie goes swimmingly--its three protagonists fighting, flailing, and often on the verge of drowning as their tiny skiff surges toward the land of the Inuit.

It has vivid characters, a strong sense of place, and a free-floating hopelessness that never precludes the possibility of meaningful action.

Pierrepoint is worth seeing for Shergold's attention to process and for all the ghoulish details.

Don't worry, parents, only you--and not your 5-year-old--will get that the chicken's stoned out of his gourd.

It's one of the few tween movies that isn't in your face; its limpness becomes appealing.

The movie is clipped, blunt, and grimly realistic. It is practically a POLICIER , although the suspense is mitigated by our knowledge that the investigation will end badly.

The film, Rescue Dawn, is so good it makes you wish that Herzog had gone Hollywood earlier in his career. His pet theme is here: man tested against nature, his sanity more precarious than his body.

Adam Shankman's movie of the Broadway Hairspray gets better as it lumbers along, but there’s something garish about its hustle--it’s like an elephant trumpeting in your face.

They’ve taken "2001" and Tarkovsky’s "Solaris" and "Silent Running," mixed in stuff from save-the-earth pictures like "The Core" and "Deep Impact," and thrown in a cheesy climax out of "Alien."

It’s intermittently very funny. But it doesn’t make the existential leap to the big screen, and it doesn’t have the density of gags or the lunatic free-association of the best episodes.

It’s not just vérité--it’s battlefield vérité; it triggers your fight-or-flight instincts.

It goes soft, but even a gelded traditional farce is more potent than most of our slob comedies.

It isn’t much of a movie (unless your aesthetic was formed in high-school science class), but it will be hugely informative to aliens who land on this planet in a thousand years and wonder why there’s no welcoming committee.

If you’ve never seen a Johnnie To crime picture, Exiled is a simple, stylish, and utterly delightful introduction.

As Ben Wade, gang leader and murderer, he gives an ironic performance, but Crowe’s irony is more intense than other actors’ obsession. He turns the idea of having so few emotions--of being beyond caring--into a bloody joke. He upstages everyone with his laughing eyes.

It’s engrossing, and Mueller-Stahl’s mix of Old World chivalry and murderousness is scarier than Jason and Freddy combined.

As a narrative, it’s clunky. As a whodunit, it’s third-rate. As the drama of a closed-off man’s awakening, it’s predictable. But Haggis has got hold of a fiercely urgent subject: the moral devastation of American soldiers serving in (and coming home from) Iraq. At its heart are deeper mysteries--and a tragedy that reaches far beyond anything onscreen.

Like his "Wendigo," the film has a lot of mumbo jumbo about ancient spirits revived and angered by human disrespect--the old Indian-graveyard paradigm, as clunky as ever. But the context is overpoweringly eerie.

Sensationally directed by Peter Berg, it’s a combination forensics detective movie (car bomb blows up secure American compound in Saudi Arabia--who dunnit and how can we stop him from doing it again?) and red-meat waste-the-terrorists action picture.

After seeing "Brokeback Mountain," with its sanctified couplings against a backdrop of purple mountain majesties, some of us felt that Ang Lee owed us a dirty movie with more bodily fluids. Lust, Caution is that movie--for maybe 10 of its 158 minutes. The rest of the film is absorbing, though.

Jake Paltrow's comedy takes familiar male-angst material and turns it into a painful--but fun--string of jokes.

Clooney is as good as he has ever been.

Casey Affleck has never had a pedestal like the one his brother provides him, and he earns it. His Patrick is pale and raspy, with a slight grogginess that gives him an astounding vulnerability--and makes his bursts of temper shocking.

Often howlingly funny, and the actors are a treat. But the underlying message is so suspect that it’s hard to suspend disbelief.

I think the movie works best if you know the original and have a taste for goofy revisionism.

Gray knows how to sell the idea of unalterable destiny with a car chase: That’s the mark of a real action director.

For all the sprawl, American Gangster feels secondhand. It’s like "Scarface" drained of blood, at arm’s length from the culture that spawned it.

The depressing subtext is that even with detailed proof of ongoing genocide, it takes movie stars to get to the movers and shakers, and to get worthy movies like this one into theaters.

Occasionally you see a documentary and it hits you how much you don’t know about someone who was part of your mental landscape.

For these kids to sing and dance with all their hearts, they need to go to a place in themselves that should be closed down forever. The glories of War/Dance are torturously won, and all the more glorious for it.

Anyone who sees the suffering faces of the victims in "Casualties" and "Redacted" knows that De Palma not only despairs over what he’s showing us but implicates his own medium--his own male gaze--in the crimes against nature.

Atonement works reasonably well as a tragic romance, but that sting is dulled. As a book, it was a blow to the head; as a movie, it’s an adaptation of a book.

A heartbreaking vérité documentary by Jennifer Venditti about a misfit Maine teenager--a film that makes you think about (and question) what fitting in really entails.

Half the time in the mystical saga Youth Without Youth, I had no idea what the movie was about, but I always felt that the director and screenwriter, Francis Ford Coppola, did, and that he was deeply in tune--and having a hell of a time--with the material.

Philip Seymour Hoffman carries the movie. As the CIA operative who hates Communists and his myopic superiors in equal measure, he has a wily, don’t-give-a-shit drive that makes you wish he’d been in Baghdad in 2003.

The captain narrates in a punchy, journalistic style that gives Elite Squad an air of sociological realism--it bears a resemblance to viscerally exciting seventies urban thrillers like "The French Connection."

Praying With Lior engages us on so many levels it transcends its middle-class Jewish milieu.

Excitingly convoluted.

Rivette has aged into one of cinema’s most ingenious minimalists. In The Duchess of Langeais he uses intertitles--bits of literary exposition--with cheeky understatement.

Compared with other first-person motion-sickness horror pictures like "The Blair Witch Project" and "Cloverfield," George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead is weak tea, yet there’s enough social commentary (and innovative splatter) to acidulate the brew--to remind you that Romero, even behind the curve, makes other genre filmmakers look like fraidy-cats.

Hideously depressing but also enraging documentary.