A lot more fun than "Blair Witch," and it's more relaxed and goofy than its two predecessors -- a farcical bloodbath.

Most haunting of all is Caan, who has never given a performance this layered.

Nunez's movies go places, but with no acceleration.

Quite pleasant.

Duchovny is rather endearing and Driver's absolutely enchanting.

The laughs are fuller when they're rooted in authentic desperation, and the premise is yeasty enough to keep the film from sinking into facile hopelessness.

The film, smoothly directed by David Dobkin, has a neat farcical structure but is too in love with its overly tight-lipped protagonist and deadpan pacing.

That's what these sequences feel like -- a sensual uproar. They almost make this small, unresolved little movie feel mythic.

Throughout the film Egoyan's affectlessness has been whispering to us that life is a puzzle without a solution. The price for this lesson is that his characters seem like mere pieces in that puzzle.

Armageddon is awesome, dude, but it's, like, short on awe.

The movie, without seeming to realize it, turns into a romantic parable about the joys of being absorbed by a conglomerate.

The movie is very beautiful, with a shambling pace and slow fade-ins and fade-outs; and when it works there's a tension between its characters' scuffling small-talk and its majestically ruined rural setting.

Doesn’t have the warmth of the Toy Story pictures, but it still boasts a very entertaining slapstick-farce structure and some neat hairy, oozy, tendrilly creatures.

It demands to be seen, for Drew Barrymore, who is at once the dizziest and most magically poised comedienne in movies today.

Thirteen has a way of smashing through your defenses. Hardwicke has goosed up the old melodramatic formula with a neorealist syntax and up-to-the-minute cultural nuances and violence.

Squirmily funny documentary.

A glorious, visceral mess -- The film is, by most criteria, an ungainly piece of storytelling. Yet it sweeps you up and hurtles you along like water from an exploded dike.

In some strange way, I admire the enterprise. Like his Gerrys, Van Sant doesn't seem to know where he's going to wind up when he embarks on these journeys. The ether that seeps into his head might be the price we have to pay for his keeping his mind so open.

A fun ride. It's loud and obvious, but it's also the first high-tech, sci-fi thriller to think through some of the implications of cloning and capitalism.

Leigh at his best is a renderer of moments--the wisest and deepest observer, probably, among living directors.

There's a great, Hitchcockian suspense sequence in a bathtub.

Nearly perfect for what it is.

Better than anyone dared hope: bigger, more inventive, and more frolicsome than its predecessor, with a grab bag of scatological gags that are almost as riotous when you think back on them.

If you want rich folk-art colors, brainy spectacle, and breezy soap opera, then Frida is the biopic for you.

It's so exciting to have a perfectly sung and acted Tosca (Avatar) on film that I'm prepared to forgive the new movie, directed by Benoit Jacquot, almost everything. But I sure wish Jacquot hadn't bungled the look and feel.

It's on the verge of being really good...his narrative peters out without a decent payoff. It's a testament to the rage and anxieties that he has brilliantly tapped into that he can't get away with a subdued conflagration and a lame twist at the end.

He thrilled me, then betrayed me in the end.

You have to give credit to Frailty for jiggering up the formula a bit, so that what starts as an ominously low-key study of a boy coming of age with a mad father escalates into a combination of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Breaking the Waves" -- Grand Guignol religiosity.

The movie is mechanical, but machines can be elegant, even inspired.

The movie is a passable entertainment -- call it The Half Monty.

That neither tale is especially interesting doesn't matter -- the contrast alone is enough to make Sliding Doors an irresistible romantic fantasy.

It's a testament to Norton's utter immersion in the role that he can even halfway connect the dots between this fundamentally sweet, brainy kid and the magnetic, white trash monster who'll haunt our minds long after the movie's liberal pieties fade into static.

Bogdanovich has been so smooth and loving in his directorial attentions that he has forgotten to give the tragical farce proceedings any terrible momentum.

This is ultimately a conversion melodrama, and a clumsy one. But until it goes to hell, it's thrillingly good, a fervid answer to the spate of cop movies that glorify brutality and sanction ends over means.

Hoffman has wedged the play into a weirdly inapposite setting, has stupidly cut and even more stupidly embellished it, and has miscast it almost to a player. And yet the damn thing works: Shakespeare staggers through, mutilated but triumphant.

Matt Damon can't quite piece together a compelling poseur.

Whose idea was it to turn Minority Report into a mushy declaration of humanism? It ends up as less of a warning about an Orwellian police state than a protest that Pre-Cogs are people, too. It's Dick-less.

It's bursting with goofy banter, Hollywood in-jokes, sexy love scenes, and chases that go on much too long but have the kind of madcap self-indulgence that makes questions of logic or credibility seem dull-witted. It's a great piece of mindful escapism.

Becomes increasingly unwatchable -- not just bleak but punishing, as if the director wants to fry your circuits along with his characters'.

The movie is repetitious, crudely dramatized, and awkwardly acted -- in English, which seems to be the second or third language of everyone involved -- Yet the movie, heavy-handed as it is, serves as a powerful rejoinder to “Blind Spot.”

It's sensationally well-made: skittery and kinetic, packed with mayhem, yet framed (and narrated) with witty detachment, so that the carnage never seems garish. The film is far from a work of art, but it marks the emergence of a great new action superchef.

She's (Jolie) the most amazing special effect in movies. The best thing in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider is a bungee-jumping ballet that Lara performs late at night in her mansion, soaring high and low in Japanese silk pajamas and with her hair pulled tightly back.

It's Miyazaki's use of sound--and silence--that takes your breath away

It's a measure of Brooks' stature that he survives the self-sabotage and comes through with his most engaging performance in years.

A slender thing, with a perversely undernourished color scheme: grainy blue exteriors and old-time sepia interiors. The fullness comes from the faces of its two protagonists.

Ultimately, it has less in common with "Blair Witch" than with such quivering lumps of sentiment as "Ghost" and Field of Dreams."

This is a star-making performance, as fresh and funny as Christopher Reeve's in Superman (1978).

I'm not turning cartwheels over Adaptation as energetically as my colleagues. Part of me -- and I'm thinking aloud here, I've likely been infected by Kaufman's comic self-consciousness, and also by his meta-comic impulse to draw attention to that self-consciousness, and probably also by his meta-meta-comic impulse to draw attention to drawing attention to his self-consciousness -- that -- that --

Toward the end of Hardball, the story takes a jolting turn from heartwarming to tear-jerking that people might find cruelly manipulative. Perhaps under normal circumstances, I would too. But these are not normal circumstances, and instead of put off, I was completely undone.

The inner life of the young Spider is just screaming to be taken to the next level--but Cronenberg mulishly won't go there. What goes wrong with Spider is pretty basic: The audience has no idea why it was made.

It's scary to have to puzzle out a plot line scene by scene -- scary and exhilarating, at least for an hour.

The best thing about Seabiscuit is that it will make a lot of people hungry to read the book. They've seen the pretty pictures; now they'll want to enter the world.

Anything Else feels driven. It's like a rant from a therapist's couch--angry, unmediated, free-associational, unleavened by sentiment or compassion. And it's something else that Allen hasn't been lately: funny.

Adds up to a nice little gotcha! courtroom melodrama.

The music is chirpy and borderline annoying. But once you rearrange your expectations and give yourself over to the movie's unfailing earnestness, you realize that Favreau and Ferrell do heartwarming fairly well.

Billy Bob Thornton's performance is--there's no other word--beautiful.

I love Nicholson here because he lets Keaton take the movie--and his relative reticence is very attractive.

The movie is a testament to compromise, and so are the Farrellys' other movies--between the freakish pain of living and the wonderfully dumb gross-out slapstick that said freakishness makes possible.

Good, sometimes thrilling, but it's less a war epic than an evocative romantic melodrama with a patchy first hour.

Wing and director Peter Segal and Sandler and Barrymore have built a comedy around the thrill of first attraction, the sadness that comes from knowing it can't last, and the challenge of finding something in the heart to hang onto.

Uneven, ludicrous, but--oh man!--fun to watch.

First-time director Richard Kwietniowski has fun with the collision of high and low culture, and he does elegant work.

Sometimes I wonder how Mamet can get out of bed, he's so paranoid, let along crank out two-thirds (at least) of a thriller this crackerjack. I hope that next time he leaves out the (booby) prize.

Haynes sets out to demonstrate the power of popular music to change people's lives--to tell them it's OK to fashion themselves into anything they please.

Creepily entertaining.

No one rises above the material, though, except for Walken, who looks pleased with the paycheck and the top-shelf tequila. As a shady lawyer, Mickey Rourke is smooth and funny, but recognizable only by his familiar purr.

I had a fabulous time. Well, I did once I accepted that it was a campfest--a great Provincetown drag show of The Stepford Wives.

Napoleon Dynamite is too low-wattage to be a true nerd anthem, but it's charming in retrospect.

Bridges has evolved into a miraculous actor: one who signals wildness through the intensity of his containment.

Pecker is a breezy, agreeable picture--a charmer, thumbs-up, three stars--but there's something disappointing about a John Waters film that's so evenhanded and all-embracing, even if its sunniness is "ironic."

People who dismiss Moore and G.I. Jane out of hand are wrong, because she makes a memorably tough heroine and the movie is solid fun, even, in places, quite intelligent.

It's formulaic, but it sticks to a classic Western formula instead of a cartoonish blockbuster one.

The film is smutty-mouthed and jumpy and free-associative, and Allen does everything but hurl his feces at the audience. The result is more rambunctious--and more fun--than any movie he has made in years.

Beautifully made and unsurpassingly creepy, it's the rare remake with something contemporary to add.

When Contact finally comes alive, it leaves you frightened and thrilled and emotionally overwrought, as only a child can be. The rest is pandering.

This is not a movie to see if you're contemplating tying the knot; it's a hard slog for those of us already entwined.

Has spasms of silliness that thaw things out delightfully. Davis plays Vartan's girlfriend as an irrepressible, sexed-up brat, and gives every line a little hop, skip, and jump.

A bit of a philosophical muddle, but the climactic tennis scenes are galvanically convincing, with some long, nerve-racking volleys. And the rest of the picture works as "Notting Hill" (1999) with balls--and rackets.

The comic high point in Shaun of the Dead comes when Lucy Davis, from the great BBC sitcom "The Office," teaches the band of survivors how to lurch like zombies so that they can pass among the undead.

But there are scenery chewers and there are Michelin-gourmet scenery chewers, and Pacino has a three-star feast.

Lee views these mortal fools with a sorrowful detachment. He's a sort of clinical humanist, editorializing only by what he leaves out. The downside of this method is its impersonality, which limits our involvement. The upside is its lack of cheap sentiment, and its clarity.

Less a classical narrative than an ingenious machine for inducing terror, rage, and paralyzing unease.

I like my SpongeBob a little less lumbering, a little more free-associational, without that big, heavy anchor of a story structure to weigh him down.

The music ties together all the pretty pictures, gives the narrative some momentum, and helps to induce a kind of alert detachment, so that you're neither especially interested nor especially bored. Perhaps that's a state of Buddhist enlightenment.

It manages to be funny and charming while capturing a lot of disturbing things about the way we live now.

Has a nonsensical twist ending that almost wrecks it, but until then it has enough fast, hyperliterate venality to make it great fun.

It's depressing that this first movie in years to dramatize the American Revolution has so little to do with the politics of secession and so much to do with pop-culture themes of vigilantism.

Simply a jolly good (k)night out.

The movie is diverting enough -- it's good fun -- but much of the genius is gone with the wind.

Head-On doesn't sound like a lot of fun, but it keeps you on edge, laughing nervously, appalled and, against all odds, entertained.

What a gutsy, sad, seize-the-day, glorious life it was for the women warriors of Lipstick & Dynamite.

At times, the picture evokes such stylized musicals as "The Band Wagon"; at others, it seems to whirr every kung-fu movie ever made into the most luscious action smoothie you'll ever imbibe.

I can't think of too many actors who could bring off Jim Winters. LaPaglia manages to convey, wordlessly, the man's inner struggle.

An extremely pleasant, consistently amusing diversion that is never as uproarious as you might hope. But don't panic, as the Guide would say. In a pinch, it will do.

All along we've known that the contest was a metaphor for getting your act together BEFORE taking it on the road.

It's a good, thoughtful horror picture--and thiiis close to being a very good one.

What makes Alice Wu's debut so pleasurable is its easy rhythms, its sly juxtapositions, and its relaxed but funny performances.

Howard manipulates audiences without guile, jerking tears, piling on catastrophes, smoothing out dissonances, making bad characters badder and good ones gooder--and clearly believing that this is wholesome. At what he does, he's peerless. I wish I had more respect for what he does--and for myself the next morning for surrendering.

There's a car chase that's more fluid and inventive than the much-touted freeway sequence in "The Matrix Reloaded," and the stars are nimble enough to make their acrobatics credible--no matter how many stunt doubles the picture employed.

The movie is satisfying, though -- at least by the standards of that depressing phenomenon, the superhero "franchise."

Overlong at nearly two hours but still a sharp and amusing and subtle piece of filmmaking.

Has a routine finish but up to that point is a more than decent thriller--or, given its taut self-containment, a more than decent Hitchcockian "exercise in suspense."

Over-the-top and shockingly vicious. But what strikes some critics as complexity feels to me like shame--the shame of Cronenberg, an uncompromising director whose bloodshed has always been genuinely horrifying.

The most effective counterweight to Polanski's fatalism is young Barney Clark, whose Oliver--although given to few words--is unshakably alive and responsive, even as he's being buffeted violently by forces beyond his control.

I mean Serenity no disrespect when I say it's enjoyably junky.

An honest tear-jerker.

The hole in the film isn't a reflection on Linney's performance. It's as if Baumbach, his hands full of oily whale blubber, didn't want to deal with an exploding sac of squid ink. And who can blame him, really?

The comic surface of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is all polished brilliance, with surprisingly few dull patches...The movie doesn't deliver in the kiss-kiss department, though.

Good as it is, The Legend of Zorro would be a hollow feat without leads who are drop-dead-gorgeous movie stars and spectacular clowns.

A fine movie, beautifully acted, but it isn't easy to love--or to watch. It's a parade of miseries, made even more miserable by Gore Verbinski's direction.

What makes this an important film is the way it puts you in that landscape and in those shoes, so that you almost understand how ordinary human beings can be impelled to do inhuman things.

A grim, twisty international conspiracy picture that challenges the audience on every level, political and aesthetic. The aesthetic part is a bit of an obstacle, though. I can't remember a time I had as much trouble--at a movie I admired--just figuring out what the hell was going on.

Farce born of sadly irreconcilable impulses: Bravo!

The performances are delightful, and the picture comes together.

Match Point starts out crisply and deliciously, but in the end, it's a chess problem crossed with an ethics exam.

The New World takes a shopworn American myth--and runs it through the Malick-izer, making it feel rich, strange, and new. In so doing, the film takes wild liberties with historical accuracy.

There's something endearingly bookish about a movie whose single most frightening shot involves the possibility of an ax being taken to a typewriter.

For the first hour of Night Watch, a dark, arresting, and unrelentingly weird thrill ride out of post-Soviet Russia, one feels lost. Not bad lost, as with a densely clotted mess like "Underworld: Evolution," whose mythopoetics land in the viewer's lap in concrete chunks; but good lost, exhilarated lost, like what am I watching?

This is not a thinking man's horror movie. I wouldn't be surprised if there were slugs that could find gaping holes in the plot. But there's something winning about this grab bag of orally fixated invertebrates and mucus-covered Noids.

Like the best noirs, Brick is a triumph of attitude, and there's no arguing that its brand of deadpan cool is precisely unique.

Harron, working from a script she wrote with Guinevere Turner, doesn't solve the inherent problems of that narrative, but she evades them quite elegantly. She's made a poem instead of a biopic, an ode to intuition, iconography, seamed stockings, and star power.

Click manages to sneak some surprisingly moving moments in between the gross-out gags and the schmaltzy resolutions.

A movie that revels in pleasure: the pleasure of fashion, of luxury, of power and ambition. It's also a tremendous pleasure to watch.

As good as a summer comedy about NASCAR has any right to be, with fine actors tucked into every nook and cranny.

Quinceañera is a rare bird of an indie, a sharp-eyed analysis of class conflict that still manages to leave you as choked up as a proud auntie on her niece's 15th birthday.

Who knows whether Snakes will have--forgive me--legs, but it's more than awesome enough to assure opening-weekend euphoria.

If one of the things movies are supposed to do is make you look anew at the world around you, you may never see your doughnut vendor in the same way again.

The Last King of Scotland never rises to the standard set by Forest Whitaker's fearless (and fearsome) performance as Idi Amin.

Like the boys, Montiel's first film is rough and uneven, with more energy than it knows what to do with. But it still manages to feel fresh and authentic, perhaps because it's so deeply autobiographical.

It's nice to see Scorsese back in the saddle and a treat to find a cops-and-robbers thriller with some energy and wit. But even so, it's a stylish head rush of a movie that flies by, even at two-and-a-half hours, and keeps turning the knife (and your stomach) up to the final scene.

By turns cruel, self-pitying, and mordantly witty, Bening makes living with a delusional psychotic seem like the adventure of a lifetime.

You leave The Bridge with a new appreciation for your (relative) mental stability and a vow to make the most of your brief, ephemeral life.

Blood Diamond is a by-the-numbers message picture, to be sure...But the director, Edward Zwick, is craftsman enough that the pace never slackens, the chase scenes thrill, and the battle scenes sicken. And if it makes viewers think twice about buying their sweethearts that hard-won hunk of ice for Christmas, so much the better.

It's so courteously deferential to its source that it never really comes alive as a movie...Even so, Nair has a gift for directing actors and a feeling for the immigrant milieu of the novel that make The Namesake a rich, if not completely satisfying, pleasure.

It's the most thorough portrait yet of the world according to White.

When you watch Waitress, you're also watching a meta-movie about Shelly's brutal end, and the spirit that bursts from every corner of this overcrowded movie is so genuinely warm that trashing it feels like panning a so-so baton-twirling performance at the church talent show.

There are plenty of pleasures here: The slow birth of the Sandman from a heap of supercharged sand crystals (or something) is a marvel of digital animation, and the chemistry between Dunst and Maguire feels like the dynamic of a real couple, full of subtle shifts and eloquent silences.

It would have been easy to focus on the eroticism of horses, who, let's face it, are beautiful creatures to look at even for the nonzoophilically inclined, but Devor shows the animals only sparingly. For him, what's most interesting is what the horses represent to the men who (gulp) love them: the wildness and purity of nature itself.

It's unapologetically theatrical.

One thing is for sure: The über-dream is both gorgeously animated, in Kon's shimmering, hyperreal style, and sickeningly scary.

The Ocean movies aren't about plot, logic, or character development. They're spa experiences, two-hour-long immersions in a warm tub of Vegas (and Vegas-movie) nostalgia.

While it's true that you can't pack as much psychological detail into a movie as you can into a novel, director Philip Saville and screenwriter Adrian Hodges bring out the yeasty subtext of even the most brittle encounters.

Much of it is risible, yet I loved watching it -not because I thought that the emperor was wearing new clothes but because I thought he looked fine - beautiful, actually - naked. Figgis' camera is probing and alive, so that even when his meanings are laughable, his images remain allusive and mysterious.

This is one of those roles where casting can't help but trump acting. Like Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, Angelina Jolie IS Mariane Pearl--and that marquee-size "is" gets in the way, not of her performance, but of our ability to suspend disbelief and watch it.

Though it has its share of voice-over exposition and comic stock footage, the film's real purpose is to aggregate individual health-care horror stories into a portrait of the profit-driven and (literally) inhospitable place our country has become.

The final scene is pure teen wish fulfillment: Imagine making out with your girlfriend on the hood of your sentient Camaro, as your own personal robot bodyguard looks on fondly (all right, that part's a little creepy).

The movie is brisk and lively, if not exactly action-packed.

This movie-turned-stage-show-turned-movie-again is intermittently tasty, if a little too frantically eager to please.

2 Days in Paris doesn't quite meet the "Before Sunset" standard of intricate, subtle dialogue and sharp psychological insight--then again, neither do many movies this side of Eric Rohmer. That this one is even bearable is a surprise; that it's occasionally insightful and hilarious is a treat.

Feels more like a series of skits than a movie, though it does tie up several plot threads in a lyrical last scene worthy of vintage Woody Allen.

The movie is never quite pop enough to get audiences hooting and hollering and quoting favorite lines, nor smart enough to inspire passionate post-movie debate. Scene by scene, the film is unassailably well-crafted. But there's something oddly dull, even respectable, about Scott's adherence to the rules of gangster-film grammar.

Maybe part of the problem is that black comedy is a tough genre in which to create a masterpiece.

Could call Zemeckis subtle; but his style Well suits the poem's crude and earthy brawn. Comic-Con geeks and cinephiles alike Will gape at the resplendent imagery (But don ye specs, and see it in 3-D).

As the innocent and indomitably chirpy Giselle, Adams gives the great female comic performance of the year so far.

Like the singer's gnomic comments to the press, the movie can be maddeningly slippery; like his music, it's fierce, thrilling, and unapologetically itself.

It's too bad Baumbach's movie is already shot, edited, and up there on the screen, because after a few rounds with a red pencil, it could really have been something worth watching.

A funny, sprightly tribute to the American can-do spirit, with a bleak ending that suggests that our plucky protagonist may have just dug his own (or, in this case, his country's) grave.

A jolly mess of a movie. Overplotted, choppy, and contrived, it nonetheless has a curious vitality that makes you wonder where McDonagh will go next.

Hardly top-drawer Romero. In fact, it may be his worst zombie film yet. But even bad Romero is a far sight more interesting than the coolly sadistic guts-porn that currently passes for mainstream horror.

Married Life is a tony, well-upholstered vehicle that glides smoothly toward its destination—but despite an unnecessary and overly sentimental coda, that destination isn't necessarily where you thought you were going all along.

Like its hero, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a little soft around the middle, but all the more loveable for that.

While Morris isn't interested in exonerating anyone, he clearly sympathizes to some degree with the MPs and deplores the military's fall-guy strategy, which punished these seven soldiers as exemplary "bad apples" while leaving all higher-ranking officers untouched.

Son of Rambow bristles with the anarchic energy of late childhood and a genuine respect for the life-changing power of movies--even (or especially) the schlocky ones.

Noise is never quite as smart as it tries to be. But as summer and its mouth-breathing blockbusters loom large on the horizon, there's something touching about a movie that even tries.

They may make for clunky religious parables, but the Narnia books--and so far, the movies based on them--are wonderful as stories about childhood and its loss.

A compendium of bedside erotica. I don't know when I've seen a mainstream movie that so explicitly caters to the S&M niche. And the chemistry of the central couple, which seemed destined to bring the movie down, is instead the hottest thing in this effects-laden but ultimately empty film.

My only problem with Mongol is that--how often in life do you get to write this sentence?---Genghis Khan is a little too nice.

It's a loosely bound collection of miscellany filmed at the McMurdo Station, a 1,000-person settlement of researchers in Antarctica, during the five-month "austral summer" of round-the-clock sunlight. Herzog was sent to Antarctica by the National Science Foundation with carte blanche to make whatever movie he wanted--all he could tell them for sure was that it wouldn't involve penguins.

Laugh for laugh, Pineapple Express is way funnier than "Superbad." It may be the funniest mainstream comedy released so far this year (not that that means much when you've got "The Love Guru" pulling down your average).

It makes bursting spontaneously into song seem like a perfectly reasonable--indeed, highly desirable--thing to do, and it leaves the audience wanting to do the same. I see a big uptick in late-summer karaoke parties.

They've made a movie about trickery that neatly tricks its viewers into laughing, then screaming, then laughing again.

Despite the preponderance of (PG-rated) snogging, there are pleasures to be found along this movie's meandering path.

Like Tina Fey's Sarah Palin, Stone's George Bush gets his best lines straight from the source.

Once Leoni's Gwen comes on the scene, the movie starts to bubble along nicely. Not just because Leoni is a screwball heroine worth, er, screwballing--at 42, she's more attractive than ever--but because her character is given a weight and texture that's rare in a movie of this type.

Morgan's compact, satisfying drama presents presidential interviewing as a gladiatorial event.

Role Models may not set its sights very high, but it comes by its emotional payoff honestly. And why isn't Paul Rudd in greater demand as a romantic comedy lead?

Boogie Man is nonetheless required viewing for anyone obsessed with the 2008 race.

Cinematically, Doubt is something of a dud. But if it remains a play, it's an ingeniously structured one, with smart, thought-provoking words spoken by fabulous actors, and how often do most of us get to see one of those, whether in three dimensions or two?

Eastwood's furthest venture yet into the comic possibilities of his flintier-than-thou persona.

Once Singer dispenses with the introductory pathos and gets to the nuts and bolts of Stauffenberg's plan, Valkyrie becomes an admirably modest and compact suspense thriller.

Moment by moment, the film is a font of pleasures, yet there's something about it that keeps the audience at an aesthetic remove. Like Coraline in the doppelgänger world, we swoon over all the neat stuff without ever making ourselves at home.

There are so many leaps back and forth in time, so many twists and countertwists and double fake-outs, that we keep losing track of who (including ourselves) is supposed to know what when.

Alan Arkin virtually reprises his Oscar-winning role from "Little Miss Sunshine."

This kind of "one crazy night" tale relies on drum-tight structure to work. Without it, The Hangover sputters to a sentimental halt. Still, it's worth staying for the closing credits.

Management remains for the most part as endearing as its leads. Steve Zahn is a wonderful actor who's spent too long in the "hey, it's that guy" best-friend role.

It's fun both to watch and to talk about afterward, and it possesses the elusive rom-com sine qua non: two equally appealing leads who bounce wonderfully off each other.

Land of the Lost is an enjoyable regression to Saturday mornings gone by, as junky and sweet as a strawberry Pop-Tart.

Tarantino's radical rewriting of the war's ending is audacious and perversely enthralling. But if Inglorious Basterds were about something more than the cinematic thrill of watching Nazis suffer, it could have been a revelation.

There's something touching, even a little bit noble, about Moore's eternal willingness to serve as our nation's shame-free populist gadfly.

Just beneath this movie's gleaming high-end surfaces beats the heart of a classic screwball comedy.

With its unremittingly bleak humor and eagerness to plumb the depths of fanboy abjection, Big Fan seems destined for a future in the cult canon.

It comes by its screams honestly, earning them with incremental, at times agonizing gradations of old-fashioned, what's-that-noise-in-the-hallway suspense.

The result is a pop documentary in the Morgan Spurlock mode, cheeky and smart without being too serious.

Nearly every line of dialogue in this adaptation of A Christmas Carol comes directly from the story. What interpolations there are have to do with juicing up the transitions between scenes with unnecessary, but not obnoxiously intrusive, action.

This movie is a freaky little swamp thing.

Fraser and Ford are both actors of limited range who can be extremely appealing in the right role, and here, they're both ideally cast.

It lacks the fevered sincerity (and the political timeliness) of Romero's original, but it's tightly scripted, cleverly cast, consistently scary, occasionally funny--everything you could ask from a well-made and completely unnecessary remake.

The wispy insubstantiality of The Runaways can't be blamed on its cast--Fanning, Stewart, and Shannon are all good in their roles, even if their range is never tested. Ultimately, maybe it's OK that there's not much below the surface of this great-looking but shallow movie.

It's cast, down to the smallest role, with genuinely funny performers, people who understand how to time a joke, deliver a setup, underplay a deadpan glance.

Like "Spartacus," this movie is engaging because it's actually about something: the love of learning, the clash between science and religious faith, and the grim fact that political change often proceeds on the foundation of mob violence and genocide. Agora engages more effectively with this kind of big historical idea than it does with human drama.

It's a question of whether or not the movie speaks to your secret, unregulated, inherently ridiculous experience of identification and desire--not who you should be, but who you are. Does the warm blood of a teenager still flow beneath your icy grown-up flesh?

At the end of Inception, I hadn't lived through the grueling emotional journey Nolan seemed to think I had, but I'd seen a bunch of cool images and admired some technically ambitious feats of filmmaking.

Of all the twists in Catfish-the most surprising of all is what an honest and thoughtful film it turns out, against all odds, to be.

Like Gekko, the film also feels urgent and strangely necessary.

By the time this movie's over, you've spent an hour and a half just working your way through the words of Howl and some related source material, and that turns out to be a surprisingly satisfying thing to do.

The baby-faced Thomas Sangster nearly steals the show in the much smaller role of Paul McCartney.

Boyle's skill at wringing physical and emotional reactions from his audience is impressive; watching 127 Hours is, as intended, an experience of grueling intensity.

Tiny Furniture feels surprisingly assured, even elegant. There are those who will accuse Tiny Furniture of wildly inconsistent tonal shifts, and it is guilty of some, but I appreciated the way this movie kept upending my expectations.