At first startling, even disengaging, that strange style eventually dovetails with the awful substance.

As directed by Renny Harlin (the director of Die Hard 2), Cliffhanger passes the principal tests of an action movie - it has truly awe-inspiring stunts and special effects and many of its suspense sequences will leave you with your heart in your mouth.

The strength of this documentary lies in its balance, or at least the careful appearance of balance.

It's a brilliant opening, but the difficulty with the familiar plot formula wherein a special stranger wins over a difficult household is that once the spell has been cast, all the plot tension, and much of the movie magic, dissipates.

The fluffmeister here is writer-director Ol Parker, and say this for young Ol: This may be his feature debut, but the guy is one hell of a smooth engineer.

De Bont knows how to edit a pulse-pounding sequence, he knows how to keep the screen white-hot, and he sure knows how to blow things up real good. What he doesn't know is how to slow down - this premise is perfect for him.

Overall, it's a satisfying example of the classic thriller, with a nifty digital update for these times.

This remarkable concert film, beautifully shot by director Jonathan Demme over two days last summer, is all about legacy, a more-or-less conscious exercise in myth-making on the part of a musical giant facing his own mortality.

Julia Jentsch offers a brilliant example of what actors call "not playing the ending," and the awful suspense of the piece is watching as she realizes, in increments, that this is all much worse than she thought.

The result is the kind of feel-bad/feel-good movie that brazenly manipulates our response and leaves us grateful for it -- so relentlessly dark is the premise that, by the end, we just need to believe in the prospect of light.

Little Fish is a small film about one family and drugs, but it succeeds in standing for a larger social catastrophe.

The freestyle approach is an apt fit with the freestyle, spontaneous comedy, as both the playful director and affable star capture moments on the fly.

For a few fleeting hours, they unlearned those lessons of childhood, laying down their arms to pick up their common humanity.

Well, I didn't exactly leave the theatre barefoot, but there's a lot to like here -- the result is pretty darn cute and hardly ever cloying.

Apart from its star, though, Emma may be the least convincing Austen adaptation so far.

Yet, about as often as Marvin's Room strikes a chord of emotional authenticity, it hits a fistful of false notes as well.

As returns go, Return To Paradise falls short of heavenly, but it does get to the stars -- at least three of them.

Mainly, it's a clever gimmick, cleverly wrought, offering further evidence that you can dress up the student body in all manner of garb for all types of genres.

An uncomfortably fascinating document of a man whose bipolar disorder and artistic ambitions are inextricably connected.

Holofcener's work is character and dialogue-driven, with a keen sense of prickly female competitiveness and intimacy that a man couldn't, and probably wouldn't, dare portray.

Hard Candy not only trips along a tightrope line between exploitation and art; in some ways, that line is its subject.

A stylish, sharply observed erotic mystery.

Greengrass's reluctance to unduly demonize the villains or overly sentimentalize the victims is commendable on the surface, but it tends to blur the two sides and to mask the gulf that separates them.

Though Abrams doesn't possess a fraction of the visual pizzazz of the two previous MI directors, Brian De Palma or John Woo, his incarnation is, from a narrative perspective, better made.

Lady Vengeance is more than half over before we discover the object of Geum-Ja's hatred: a kindergarten teacher named Mr. Baek. He's played by Choi Min-sik, the prisoner in "Old Boy," and here he's as tepid as he was heated in that film.

Along with its allegorical elements, The King is also impressively specific in naturalistic detail.

Even a politically naive film critic can see that An Inconvenient Truth isn't only about science or economics; it's also about ideology.

The documentary camera has made repeated trips to occupied Iraq, but never to such raw and honest effect as in The War Tapes. The reason is surprisingly simple: This time, the lens is being pointed not by embedded journalists, but by the American soldiers themselves.

It's light, it's bright and it succeeds precisely where the lesser doc fails -- by setting modest targets and hitting them square on.

Superman returns, and he's far from inconsequential yet considerably less than super - just a demi-god content to forfeit our love for our like.

The devil may wear Prada, but Meryl wears the crown.

Funnier than "Nacho Libre," more fashionable than "The Devil Wears Prada," able to deliver more revengeful thrills than "X-Men: The Last Stand" in a single scene, My Super Ex-Girlfriend may sound like a midsummer mash of "The Break-Up" and "Superman," but it's more clever and emotionally resonant than that.

Take 13 Tzameti for what it is: a tightly screwed shocker, a suspense tour de force that proceeds through a harrowing chain of events with alarming confidence.

For once, the gimmick is a perfect reflection of the characters.

This is a grown-up film that puts liberalism under the microscope and finds it tired -- not a dirty word, as neo-cons believe, and not a panacea, as sentimentalists wish, but just tired and longing for rejuvenation.

What's so fresh about Mutual Appreciation is how acutely it represents the social rituals of today's post-collegiate types.

Gets under your skin as another thought-provoking wake-up call about the power of studios and the corporations that back them.

Mann (Comic Book Confidential) plays with archive, animation and music (hot soundtrack by the Sadies), illuminating another worthy counter-culture corner. Pure fun, fun, fun.

The film lacks flow, unfolding in a rat-a-tat series of short, artfully lensed scenes -- individually nice but collectively jerky.

As a captivating bauble, a tribute to a romantic legend, Don Juan DeMarco shines. But as an exercise in performing artistry, a gift from a living legend and an heir apparent, it positively glitters.

Wears a deep and sophisticated shade of black and is also very, very sad.

[Nolan is] back in the fine engineering business, crafting a story as intricately designed as a magician's lock, tightly packed with tumblers of deception and issuing a fun challenge to any volunteers in the audience: Just try to pick it.

Borat at its best is pure satiric genius, the Swiftian kind that has you busting a gut with laughter even while checking your conscience for implicating flaws.

Catch a Fire paints the period with a double-sided brush that gives yesterday its due and puts today on notice.

Though Babel lacks any tragic sense of inevitability, it almost compensates with a handful of vibrant performances and the palpable physical texture of the settings.

Both the Chicks and this doc are left to deal with the aftermath as best they can. The film chooses to pad with an occasional over-reliance on cutesy filler -- a pregnant Emily having an ultra-sound, giving birth, recuperating at her beloved ranch away from it all.

A masterly piece of documentary chicanery that kills George W. Bush without once pandering to his legions of ill-wishers.

This is a sewer blessedly free of actual sewage, which makes Flushed Away more kid-friendly than, say, the average "South Park" episode.

With a track record that stretches from "Monster's Ball" all the way to "Finding Neverland," Forster is clearly a director at ease with a wide range of material. He's found confection-land here, setting his beater on ready-whip and mixing the dough just fine.

The payoff is the revitalization of Bond by making him closer to what Fleming envisaged: a sociopath who, fortunately, is on our side.

Its rhythm is deliberate and unhurried, yet the film is rich with detail and with small, meaningful character revelations -- the running time of more than two hours feels just right.

This is a piece engineered to run on the high octane of clever dialogue. It's chatty, it's wordy, but a passion for the well-written word lies at the thematic heart of the thing, and cinematic flourishes would only clog the arteries. Purists can rest assured -- there's no clogging.

In recounting this conflicted tale, director Rachid Bouchareb displays some valour of his own, resisting what must have been a strong temptation to deal in aggrieved agitprop, and instead, quietly but powerfully, confining his attentions to a small group of indigenous soldiers.

For all its emphasis on doomed honour and grim death, Letters from Iwo Jima is also sentimental.

Like similar English comedies, it also teeters on the mawkish.

A fantastic holiday toy that, amazingly enough, doesn't require batteries.

Like "Rebel", directed by Nicholas Ray, this film excels at capturing the nervous posturing of adolescent boys marking their territory by pissing on each other's shoes.

Against all odds and historical improbabilities, God Grew Tired of Us is a pleasant, uplifting documentary about genocide and ethnic cleansing.

The Italian belongs in group of excellent recent Russian films -- most notably Andrei Zvyagintsev's "The Return" and Boris Khlebnikov and Aleksei Popogrebsky's "Roads to Koktebel" -- that have examined the effects of the country's woes on its youngest and most vulnerable citizens, as well as the problems faced by any child unfortunate enough to have faulty or absent parents. At its best, The Italian conveys this grave issue with admirable clarity and power.

Both a cathartic and a creative family entertainment.

Avenue Montaigne is not a film to be taken too earnestly, but it would be a mistake to miss its bittersweet undertones. The movie is as airy as a spun-sugar dessert, but Thompson's observations on the artistic life are both affectionate and knowing: Beauty and wealth, though inevitably compelling, are appreciated as means to humane ends, not goals in themselves.

The film is much more subversive for treading back and forth between the political and the personal, the Arab and the Israeli points of view.

The most provocative aspect of this compulsive riddle is how it resists closure. The end comes not when we have the answer, but when the movie reaches its irresolute end.

Cynical, stylish and witty. [21 Feb 1997]

Freed from the tiresome constraints of plot and character, Rumble in the Bronx is the distilled essence of action entertainment. [27 Feb 1996, p.D1]

This is a war film with an anti-epic feel, best when it forgoes the forced march of plot to hunker down in the trenches of our flawed humanity.

Death and the Maiden never fulfills the evocative promise of those initial frames...Beyond that, you have to settle for a craftsman working with more precision than inspiration. But Polanski at half-speed is still hard to beat. [27 Jan 1995, pg. E.1]

The film manages to make surprisingly convincing gestures toward the power of communion, and indeed pantomime, that make the world shine a bit more hopeful.

A sensitive coping drama after all, while still serving up that noirish heist flick with comic flourishes. That's some range, and in 99 succinct minutes too: Most pictures would be lucky to do half as much in twice the time.

Morse, with his hulking frame, baby face and soft voice, has probably done too many of these villain roles for his own good. But how could you avoid casting him when he manages to present someone who's screamingly insane in the mildest, most pleasant way?

How refreshing then to find a movie with an honest-to-gosh dysfunctional family at its core, a family utterly Tolstoyan in its unhappiness, utterly Dostoevskyan in its despair. [16 Jun 1995]

At two hours and 43 minutes, Eastwood's Bird is a hypnotic, darkly photographed, loosely constructed marvel that avoids every cliche of the self-destructive-celebrity biography, a particularly remarkable achievement in that Parker played out every cliche of the self- destructive-celebrity life. [14 Oct 1988, p. C1]

Missing from Married to the Mob, written by Barry Strugatz and Mark R. Burns, is the freewheeling structure, but everything else that makes Demme one of the friendliest of major U.S. directors is in glorious evidence. [19 Aug 1988]

Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, is decadent, overpoweringly erotic campiness coupled with soft-core pornography - blood, breasts, buttocks and big teeth. It's daring and those with a taste for the sexily sanguine will find it delightful. But it's not for the prudish. [13 Nov 1992, p.C1]

Though the progress of Atim's increasing empathy is predictable, the film understates its points effectively, without simplification.

Wong returns once more to what he seems to know best - the visual poetry of the urban Asian night, a world of characters on the move, coming and going, never really getting anywhere. [5 Dec 1997]

Everything's Gone Green is the second feature directed by Paul Fox (The Dark Hours), who maintains an energetic, lighthearted tone throughout the film, even when the story loses focus at its not-quite-satisfying ending.

Paradoxically cerebral and primal, reasonable and anti-rational, life- affirming and nihilistic, Naked Lunch is a sensual and intellectual feast. It will not be a meal to everyone's taste, but in its bizarre class, there is nothing classier. [10 Jan 1992]

With Hot Fuzz, you'll just have to settle for semi-hilarity.

The delight here is in the sheer workmanship. The performances, the direction, the plotting, they're just nicely engineered, usually with an eye to that most underrated of virtues -- refined simplicity.

When Veber is on form there's no one better. And when he's not, well, give The Valet a look anyway -- there's still much to admire.

Waitress is sweet, uneven and, ultimately, a heartbreaker.

Compared with the recent spate of blockbuster sellouts, Severance is a worthy package, and fair compensation for time spent. Best to watch on the big screen, of course.

Jacob's Ladder is a cheat - but a talented, disturbing, beguiling cheat. We don't know we've been truly had until it's finally over, when the screen fades and the lights rise and we wake up with a start, deliciously unnerved. [2 Nov 1990, p.D3]

Spike Lee's Crooklyn is a charming little movie. [14 May 1994]

Fatal Attraction becomes as seductive as the seduction it depicts. In the always stylish, sometimes careless hands of director Adrian Lyne, the film lures us in with an artful blend of stately pacing and caressing close-ups and brooding silences. [23 Sep 1987 p.C7]

A quick and clever thriller as nasty as a piece of shrapnel snapping the sound barrier, 48 Hrs. is as violent as it is funny. It is very funny. [03 Dec 1982]

The film is a respectable, claustrophobic and slick piece of work, and cinematographer Nestor Almendros' color strategies - Rembrandt-like light at night, lemony tones during the day, desaturated sepia at Auschwitz - are arty to a fault. [14 Dec 1982]

Buffy The Vampire Slayer should be a mess, but it's not. It's a mini-comic triumph, and although it's technically a teen movie, it's in the tiny genre of sophisticated, darkly funny teen films such as Heathers and Pump Up the Volume. [4 Aug 1992, p.C1]

Trading Places, which is wildly funny at times, is Murphy's film. [10 Jun 1983]

Hal Hartley's latest film, an odd and mentally stimulating black comedy that may or may not have a point. In any case, the ride is delectably weird and entertaining. [17 Jul 1998]

This three-hour opus, bearing only the eponymous title of Nixon, is an intriguing ramble through the social psychology of man and country alike. Indeed, the simple dialectics that both animated and marred Stone's earlier work are redeemed here precisely because they're invested in a single, complex personality - consequently, this film is more character-driven than any of its predecessors. [20 Dec 1995, p.C1]

A surprisingly large portion of the picture is given over to a gritty and unexpectedly moving examination of a senseless but understandable feud between two wrongheaded, sincere people making all the wrong moves. [21 Oct 1983]

With razor-sharp precision, Dumont interweaves scenes of battle with the unravelling of a young woman back home, involved with two of the soldiers. But this is not bleakness just for the sake of it. When it arrives, the ray of hope rings perfectly true for being so devoid of artifice.

An adolescent-oriented farce so finely tuned it projects beyond its narrow intended audience - it's not only for adolescents, it's for anyone who remembers what adolescence was like. [05 Aug 1983]

Hartley manages to spin grim-sounding material into an uplifting - and funny - story dealing with love, responsibility, the dynamics of family life and, yes, trust. [09 Aug 1991]

It is an agreeable example of how a picture conceived as "product" need not condescend to the audience it exploits. [11 Apr 1983]

Silkwood is a friendly, kooky and caring film. [09 Dec 1983]

A maniacal, hallucinogenic dip into the bloodbath drawn by a pair of mass murderers, it's the quintessential Stone opus - topical, testy, and wildly controversial, as brilliant or egregious as you wish it to be. [26 Aug 1994, p.C1]

Von Trier's proficiency at the quicksilver business of comedy comes as a surprise, given the grinding seriousness of earlier films.

It's one helluva movie that makes Ashley Judd look ugly and demented, while turning Harry Connick Jr. into the most frightening screen thug since Ben Kingsley in "Sexy Beast."

Paprika is a creatively dizzying and visually dazzling allegory about alternative realities.

It's an undemanding yet bright delight. [16 Mar 1991]

Never the most subtle of directors Oliver Stone brings a jackhammer brutality to Born on the Fourth that the material no longer needs. [22 Dec 1989, p.C1]

The cinematic strategies are energetic without being vulgar, the words are plain-spoken, and moony Mel's melancholy is what matinee idols are made of. [18 Jan 1991]

Kindergarten Cop is fast, loud and obvious, but there are unexpectedly delicate touches. [21 Dec 1990, p.C10]

Invites viewers to think critically about such weighty concepts as justice, atonement and personal accountability.

A rollicking good story set a millennium ago among Australian aborigines, Ten Canoes is one of those cultural-building exercises that genuinely entertains.

Most of this is bald, and very funny; some of it is witty, and even funnier. [14 Dec 1988, p.C9]

The movie blows through the Brat Pack smoke screen - it is superior to Colors in that regard - to reveal the troubled, lonely and sometimes crazy males behind the macho, misogynist posturing of men in groups. You couldn't find a nicer bunch of killers. [12 Aug 1988, p.C3]

Parenthood is a charming, amusing piece of work. It doesn't say anything new - Howard clings as tightly to tradition as Norman Rockwell - but it says the old things with enough wit and eloquence to keep them going for another generation. [2 Aug 1989, p.C7]

Surf's Up is that rarity in a children's movie, a comedy that's actually exciting.

Surprisingly but fittingly, for a film about the life of a singer, the use of songs is generally elliptical.

Smooth direction, vigorous performances, competent music, spotty script, and a running time that overstays its welcome. [10 Apr 1992]

Once again, then, impeccable visual detail and uniformly strong performances combine to create a polished, if slightly airless, result. [14 Aug 1998]

Red Heat, a terrifically funny and always frantic flick that hides a fascinating subtext beneath its commercial veneer. Very commercial - this should be a boffo hit; and very fascinating - the premise that props up the hit speaks volumes about America in the twilight of Reagan. [17 Jun 1988, p.C1]

Being Human is just that, and it's a profound delight. [06 May 1994]

Just sit back, plug in, and enjoy the shocks - so adroitly administered, so sweetly sensational. [24 Feb 1995]

Although it has a few technical flaws, mostly in pacing and tone, these are more than made up for by an intelligently funny and unsentimental script, and several noteworthy performances. [24 Nov 1992]

The laughs just keep rolling as 'Weird Al' makes a movie. Overheard from a still-convulsing woman after a recent screening of Weird Al Yankovic's UHF: "I'm sorry, but that's funny." I'm sorry, but she's right. Yuks you feel obliged to apologize for are yuks nonetheless. And UHF prompts a lot of apologies.

Petersen seems to be holding back, telling us about the liberating power of the imagination but never really showing us. Of course, to show us would be to spoon feed the audience, thereby blunting the message and defeating the point. [20 Jul 1984, p.E9]

It's perfectly admirable, absolutely controlled, and fully understandable. [09 Oct 1992]

The Lost Boys mixes comedy and horror with a dexterity that augments each. Dracula and Peter Pan were antipodal products of the same society: bringing them together has resulted in a marriage that would make Bram Stoker snicker and J.M. Barrie bawl. [1 Aug 1987, p.C5]

The movie remains an embodiment of Spielberg's commercially cunning brand of clankingly retro filmmaking, despite the wit and charm brought to their Spiel-speak dialogue by the talented young performers, The Goonies is less a movie than an entertainment machine. [7 Jun 1985, p.E1]

The only country in the Western world without a universal system – is indeed Sicko. But if that social wound is gapingly obvious, so is this documentary.

Is there an admired British thespian who hasn't toiled in Potter's field?

On the positive side, it's still four back-to-back Simpsons episodes, which is still better than most of what either television or the movies have to offer.

For audiences tired of summer sequels that grind through the familiar motions, Stardust provides a dizzying antidote.

Even though the subject of this British documentary is a traveller who got lost in a more terrestrial sort of void, the spirit of the stranded astronaut haunts Deep Water.

Like the comic stars of the silent era, Mr. Bean's character transcends language barriers.

Stupendously silly but viciously funny.

Sunflower succeeds as both a moving family drama and a microcosm of China's social history since the 1970s.

While the newer version's darker ending lends a more contemporary twist, overall 3:10 to Yuma is reverent to the original – a few more bullets and more spilled blood notwithstanding.

Sington's smartest decision was to let 10 of the astronauts speak for themselves. The film juxtaposes their personal stories, both their doubts and machismo, with the titanic achievement of the lunar landings.

The Hunting Party does a good job of illustrating Winston Churchill's observation, "There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result."

What it doesn't have is the resonance of Cronenberg's "A History of Violence," a film that exploited the same genre even while transcending its limitations. Eastern Promises delivers, but not on that scale.

Instead of the typical John Grisham-style connect-the-dots legal thriller, we get a film that's idiosyncratic, with a time-shifting structure, a surfeit of subplots and characters.

The winner of this year's audience award for best documentary at Sundance has it all: heartless media, art fraud and a four-year-old painting prodigy.

As always with Anderson, the comedy is neatly embedded in the jaded banter, where the insecurities and rivalries bubble up -- here, all within the bell jar of that shared sleeping compartment.

The result is a good movie that falls short of greatness by aping too well the behaviour of its subject – occasionally brilliant, sometimes mundane.

A rarity – a political film that delivers its timely message with a cinematic punch and no undue speechifying.

Of course, entire books have been written, and perused by disappointed women, about the male reluctance to put away their fantasized Biancas. In that sense, Lars and the Real Girl is real indeed. In every other, it's a sweet, bordering on saccharine, bagatelle.

As an epic, American Gangster doesn't cut it. The reputations of Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather," Brian De Palma's "Scarface," Martin Scorsese's "Goodfellas" or Michael Mann's "Heat" are safe. At best, American Gangster is no better than a workmanlike imitation of its betters.

A tender tale of semi-triumph.

This film offers a child's perspective on the ravages and complexity of war and is also a convincing testament to the healing power of creative expression.

The movie's big kick – what makes Enchanted live up to its title – is that the further Giselle progresses in New York, the more we feel like we've tumbled into a timeless Disney Neverland.

Even with new information provided in the film, however, his personality remains not so much elusive as cantankerous, particularly in contrast with the expansiveness of his songs. That gap gives I'm Not There something of a hollow centre.

This is a human-sized drama about people with contradictory motives, trying to help or use each other.

Suffused with clever lines, characters with neurotic tics and a pervasive, jocular black humour, The Savages is more about craft than art, but the craft, especially in the writing and acting, is at a high level.

Love it, hate it, but be sure to watch it, because this odd and disturbing picture is as different as the war it reflects, and that difference is vast enough to seem profound.

The result, Elegy, isn't a great film but it is a good one, and better for Coixet's perspective, her ability to interpret Roth's world from the other side of the gender fence.

The film's forced quirkiness constantly threatens to derail the entire enterprise, making this another minor American indie exercise in family eccentricity. But it keeps being put back on track by the apparently effortless performance of a great young actress.

It's an imperfect movie that serves as a perfect reminder of what the movies do best.

A demanding blend of spectacle, drama and exposition of ideas.

The movie doesn't have the heart of the book, but it does have a solid mechanical pump, strong enough at least to keep a robust story on two-hour life support.

Takes a kernel of truth and roasts it into a popcorn movie. There's terrific fun to be had, and much wry comedy too. What's missing, surprisingly given the subject matter, is any real sense of gravity.

It's adapted with charming dispatch from the Dick King-Smith story, and served up by the same CGI wizards who animated the critters in "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Narnia Chronicles."

Cloverfield is an exercise in realism that lacks reality's broader and richer context. Or, put another way, the experiment is artful, but it ain't art.

If CJ7 feels like the love child of Charles Dickens, Mao Zedong and Steven Spielberg, it's because that's exactly what this PG-rated, Chinese-made fantasy is.

Relentless, thorough and devastating.

The details are astounding. During "Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own," the camera is in so tight that you can see Bono's hand tremble around the mike as he belts out a long, sustained note.

A conventional mixture of thriller and moral drama, the film is unsettling in both intentional and unintentional ways.

There are zombie movies and then there are George Romero films.

I meant what I said And I said what I meant A flick pretty faithful 'Bout 80 per cent.

What makes The Grand a memorable comedy is that the main stories are really about families – how they screw you up and how they save you. And you don't have to understand poker to know the rules of that game.

What's fun about Benson Lee's documentary Planet B-Boy isn't just the amazingly athletic displays of B-boys he puts on screen, but the film's sense of cultural discovery.

Great title, and the whiff of existential loneliness that it conjures up – brothers locked not in solidarity but in solitude – permeates the entire movie.

Ultimately, Shine a Light is illuminating indeed, even fascinating, but not in the way Scorsese intended. What he has created, inadvertently, is an invaluable documentation of semi-fossilized Stones – musicologists may like it, sociologists should love it and, some distant day, anthropologists will treasure it.

When it comes to exploring with dignity and humour the choices a woman must make for her family, Tuya's Marriage is the clear winner.

Ultimately, though, it's the life-affirming sentiments of the documentary and not its backstage drama that may turn it into a popular hit, especially among boomers who can now legitimately fantasize about their impending retirements as musical stars.

Dull moments, so much the rule in most genre comedies, are the exception in Forgetting Sarah Marshall -- it does run long, but it mainly rollicks.

The ethical fallout, the lingering fog of the so-called war on terror, is not that people don't know what's wrong or who's guilty - it's precisely that they do, and count it as the cost of doing business.

The strengths of Fugitive Pieces are its fluidity and subtlety. Emotional repression may be one of the most difficult conditions to portray honestly, and Dillane's performance of Jakob is a study in the art of creating sympathy by not asking for it.

Cynical, hip, politically opportunistic and loaded with kick-ass comic action.

Few movies have captured the intoxicating effect of pop culture on kids better than Son of Rambow.

If Leguizamo imports a hint of pathos into his performance, Waterston adds a dollop of menace to hers, delivering another of Ross's attacks on what separates girls from men. In this world, women are their own worst enemy.

The film walks the fine line between exploitation and empathy to cast a chilly, memorable spell.

Both Speedman and Tyler deliver solid, nuanced performances as a couple caught at the most fragile moment in their relationship.

This is a blockbuster busting out of the block; this is a Hollywood staple served up on a European platter; this is summertime fare with a wintry verve.

Mixing bravura filmmaking with flat clichés in about equal amounts, The Dark Knight is all about dualism. Appropriately, the movie's half-inspired, half-frustrating.

An amused and affectionate look at the writer who formed a crucial link between the New Journalism of the 1960s and today's blogosphere.

The phrase in the title "wanted and desired" is offered by a producer friend of Polanski's who describes him as "wanted" in the United States, but "desired" in Europe, where sexual behaviour is treated more honestly and artists' dark sides are celebrated.

The result is a whodunit so nicely crafted that you're tempted to forgive the Byzantine plot -- hell, you're even tempted to pretend you actually understand its twisting obscurities.

Even its structurally weaker moments give Garfield an opportunity to expand on Jack's physical and mental dislocation. Given Boy A's final floating reel, it's an anchoring performance in every sense of the word.

A late summer treat. And in case you are wondering, yes, there is mumbling.

Overnuanced, a world of delicate cruelty, where most of the wounds take place without breaking the skin or even a sweat.

The film's greatest achievement is that it allows us to know Ray.

This intimate portrait of the so-called godmother of punk is aimed at viewers who are keenly fascinated by Smith.

The movie's climax takes Harry Potter into territory that is much more like epic horror than most of what the series has seen before. There is more obvious religious symbolism and apocalyptic violence as Harry emerges into his role as “the chosen one.”

Gotham gives way to Gaudi and the Met to Miro, but the sensibility is the same, the city as a precious treasure, and so is the message: Life may be hard and short, love may be flawed or doomed, but, my, aren't we blessed with lovely distractions.

Like the writings of William Burroughs or Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction," Watchmen falls into the category of what might be called meta-pulp, a multilayered fiction that serves as a parody and commentary on our collective bottom-feeding fantasies.

The movie's title proves to be not entirely a case of bait-and-switch. The film really is a homage to vintage Hollywood comedy.

An innovative romantic comedy that is a mixture of British spice and American sugar.

Spike Lee's voluminous "When the Levees Broke" proved a thorough indictment, a compilation of tragic and appalling facts encyclopedically catalogued. By contrast, Trouble the Water (on Oscar's short-list in the best doc category) has a more personal focus and, although just as damning, manages to strike a more hopeful chord.

George W. Bush is hammered for doubling the debt load with his high-spending, low-taxing ways.

Shakespeare would have delighted in the chapter, especially in the antagonist, but not at the expense of the longer and darker and still-unfinished book.

Disney raised the stakes by turning its hit TV-movie franchise into a feature film – and the bet has paid off.

Plot isn't what drives the picture; instead, this is a cinematic tone poem, where the dominant mood is a Faulknerian mix of sorrow and endurance.

Strange and beautiful and transfixing and confusing, it's quite the sight - martial-arts fans may find themselves disappointed, but Wong Kar-wai addicts will be delighted.

Without Kristin Scott Thomas, I've Loved You So Long would be a watchable but hardly a memorable movie. With her, it's both - she so fully inhabits the character that everyone and everything around her are simply enhanced.

Let the Right One In is a children's film, but you wouldn't want your child to see it. It's a horror film, but the gruesome splatter is the least of its scares. And it's a love story, but the prepubescent kind where sex is a distant idea and loneliness a shared reality. A wicked trick, a cinematic treat, this is some Halloween offering.

Unlike "Being John Malkovich," which JCVD sometimes resembles, there is no secret portal to the star's head; instead, the audience gets a fleeting glimpse through the smeared window of his soul.

The result isn't meant to be an historical document transmuted into fiction; instead, it's fiction turned into a fable, a dark fable.

The rare sequel that is better than the original.

It sure ain't the Christmas of Dickens's imaginings. Dysfunctional overachievers all, the Vuillards are a family bizarre enough to make the Royal Tenenbaums look like candidates for a Hallmark card.

A worthy docudrama that is solid if not sublime. But, sometimes, a merely good film can brush up against greatness, and this one does so twice – in Sean Penn's magnetic performance and in the cautionary tale's contemporary resonance.

Anyone who likes pop music or wonders how bands like the Rolling Stones got rolling will enjoy the ride.

This movie sticks.