Annemarie Jacir, who was raised in Saudi Arabia, directs with flair and loving attention to the wild, damaged beauty of the contested landscape. But Soraya's rebellious bursts of rage come off more like the tantrums of a spoiled princess than the legitimate anger of an emerging activist.

As their extraordinarily brave black female attorney points out, at stake are not merely the rights of this family or indeed of all white farmers, but the future of race relations and human rights in Africa.

The movie's ending may be less satisfying than that of "Slumdog Millionaire"--a film you can love for its infectiously wishful exuberance, but never fully believe in--but Kisses is truer to the tragedy of a generation of children whom we have utterly failed. If they're anything like Kylie and Dylan, they'll be back to let us know.

A freakishly engrossing black comedy about excessively mothered men and the women who enable them.

Who's the bigger charlatan--Burzynski or Merola--and why is this conspiratorial rubbish being released into theaters?

This quietly absorbing film is finally more about character formation--curiosity, persistence, endurance--than about achievement as a means to some extrinsic social end.

Eric Merola, a former art director of commercials, is either unusually credulous, or doesn't understand the difference between a documentary and an advertisement, or has an undisclosed relationship with the subject of his allegedly nonfiction first film.

Dwelling as much on setbacks and hurdles as on the glitter of competition, this quietly absorbing film is finally more about character formation -- curiosity, persistence, endurance -- than about achievement as a means to some extrinsic social end.

Like its predecessor, SATC2--with a script that's basically a sack full of not very funny gag-lines wrapped in strung-together episodic mini-scenes--is not suited to be a movie.

Hansen-Love’s fevered mix of love and resentment toward this man lends urgency and eros to his professional and personal unraveling.

Sarah Jessica Parker is now 45 years old, and, frankly, I cannot stomach another moment of the simpering, mincing, hair-tossing, eyelash-batting little-girl shtick she's been pulling ever since she emerged...

Early in Laura Poitras's outstanding documentary The Oath, we learn that one of its subjects, Abu Jandal, a cabdriver living in Yemen, was Osama bin Laden's bodyguard in Afghanistan.

In its roundabout way, this usefully meandering documentary probes the enduring stain of Guantánamo on its victims and on America.

Director Daniel Barber's lame handwringing about the root causes of youthful alienation forms a thin veneer over the real purpose of this self-important piece of rubbish--to hold us hostage to the director's bottomless appetite for spurious depravity.

Director Daniel Barber's lame handwringing about the root causes of youthful alienation forms a thin veneer over the real purpose of this self-important piece of rubbish -- to hold us hostage to the director's bottomless appetite for spurious depravity.

Adequate but unremarkable animated tale.

Honestly, it would take several more dimensions to craft something special out of this adequate but unremarkable animated tale.

Watching this lauded but fatally slight comedy of manners about a middle-aged Italian who finds himself caring for four spunky old dames, it's hard to believe writer, director, and star Gianni Di Gregorio also co-wrote the bloody mafia hit "Gomorrah."

Sweet and funny at either end, but in between, it sags with endless repetition of gross bodily functions.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid is sweet and funny at either end, but in between, it sags with endless repetition of gross bodily functions and Greg's torment at the hands of larger, angrier, or more popular kids -- in that order.

The only whiff of passion comes from the sadistic care that has gone into putting garish clothes and makeup on the mother, which give her the ghoulish air of Jeanne Moreau in a fun-house mirror.

The young director Tze Chun is not a flashy filmmaker, but he understands the vulnerability of immigrant workers in the sleazy sub-rosa economies of a floundering 21st-century America.

The young director Tze Chun is not a flashy filmmaker, but he understands the vulnerability of immigrant workers in the sleazy sub-rosa economies of a floundering 21st-century America.

Gorgeously mounted tale of enlightenment through art and courage.

Flowery meadows, wafting dandelion clocks, packs of baying wolves -- all are grist for the film's palette of beauty.

What's interesting about the filmmaker's rummage through her parents' conjugal closet--another in a thriving sub-genre of domestic-turmoil docs as told by their spawn--is the abyss between the husband and wife's points of view.

DePietro is no cynic, and he means well--but he also means to corner the coveted "Dear John" demographic, which, in turn, means that The Good Guy suffers from the dreary want of imagination about the specificity of twentysomething life that has sunk so many other specimens of this battered genre.

The Good Guy suffers from the dreary want of imagination about the specificity of twentysomething life that has sunk so many other specimens of this battered genre.

There's a secret busting out of Cindy Kleine's documentary about her parents' long and -- depending on whom she talks to -- unhappy marriage, but it's a pretty banal one.

Videocracy is hopelessly infected with the very prurience it means to expose--again and again, Gandini returns to images of pretty women grinding away for the camera in hopes of scoring their 15 minutes.

"American radical" may be a misnomer for an intellectual whose life, thought, and rhetoric have been forcefully shaped by a mother whose concentration-camp experience turned her into a fiery booster for every available underdog.

"American radical" may be a misnomer for an intellectual whose life, thought, and rhetoric have been forcefully shaped by a mother whose concentration-camp experience turned her into a fiery booster for every available underdog.

A stale vibe is only one of the problems pervading Erik Gandini's documentary about the pathological symbiosis between unregulated media control and celebrity mania in Italy.

To the extent that its sympathies lie with the occupied and with those who must do the work of enforcing occupation, Ajami brings a warmly generous spirit to its subjects, almost all of whom become gangsters by default. No one is demonized or sanctified. The movie's sensibilities are humanistic.

Untidy, despairing, oddly exhilarating.

A tactful but probing and richly satisfying study of an entire family thrown into self-doubt by a teenager venturing into risky territory as she struggles to find her way.

Opper doesn't angle for a climactic group hug, but she sticks around long enough to allow us to exhale while this intelligent young woman begins to set herself, quite literally, back on track.

For better or worse, there isn't a human experience that French director Andre Techine can resist lathering into a tone poem.

Ecstatically fanciful.

For better or worse, there isn't a human experience that French director Andre Techine can resist lathering into a tone poem.

Ecstatically fanciful.

The movie turns stiff and pat, leaving us manipulated by Arnold's desire to give her hapless heroine the worst life she can think of, followed by a great escape.

[A] terrific documentary about end-times evangelical Christians.

[A] terrific documentary about end-times evangelical Christians.

This is potentially wonderful, if not exactly new stuff, but Gilliam and McKeown's willful refusal of coherent narrative and determination to pack every idea about art they ever had into one scenario, make this fiendishly gorgeous movie more exhausting than exhilarating to watch.

Closing out a pretty great year for children's movies—Betty Thomas's dutiful animated and live-action sequel to 2007's "Alvin and the Chipmunks" brings up the rear with capable mediocrity.

Man, British heritage cinema can be dull when assembly-lined for the export market.

Like every Eastwood production, Invictus is stately, handsomely mounted, attentive to detail right down to the Marmite adorning the team's breakfast buffet, and relentlessly conventional. As a portrait of a hero, the movie effortlessly brings a lump to the throat (Freeman gives a subtly crafted performance that blends Mandela's physical frailty with his easy charm and cerebral wit); as history, it is borderline daft and selective to the point of distortion.

Tolstoy fought a love-hate war with his bipolar wife, Sonya, and thank God for that, since it allows Helen Mirren, basically playing a cross between Ibsen drama queen Hedda Gabler and the little squirrel from "A Doll's House," to waltz away with the movie.

The real drama lies in the sweetly twisted symbiosis between this likable, infuriating wreck of a man and his devoted son and publicist.

What's missing from this essential, if not exactly new, information is the social context in which schools operate, and a dissenting voice to point out that some kids (and their families) do benefit from medication, that some schools are located in such high-crime areas that no security at all would be pure folly, and that some safety-obsessed parents refuse to allow their children to walk to school by themselves, yet drive them up to the front gates dressed like hookers.

Chaste, oddly bloodless, and nearly plotless saga.

What makes the film fascinating is the anguished dance around hagiography performed by two of his daughters, who wrote, directed, and narrated the movie.

The result is some nice atmospherics tethered to a cripplingly half-baked existentialism.

A Christmas Carol is a whiz-bang 3-D thrill-ride with all the emotional satisfaction squeezed out of it.

Baichwal is the least judgmental of interviewers, which is a double-edged sword when the solemn testimony ("I had come to meet me") induces a barely resistible urge to laugh.

A Christmas Carol is a whiz-bang 3-D thrill-ride with all the emotional satisfaction squeezed out of it.

This workmanlike, but enormously moving, movie makes the case that apartheid really does control her life, even her decision to rebel and get involved with a black man.

Though lovely to look at, The Wedding Song is a little overwhelmed by its relentlessly hyper-poetic imagery.

Ross is very good at teasing out the politics behind Kasztner's shifting fortunes, not to mention his murky ambitions. But closure is the last thing that's needed here.

Enjoyable as it is, Bricker's giddy hagiography could have used a little pushback, especially in the matter of Shulman's airy dismissal of the postmodernism that, he claimed, forced him into "retirement."

Can be enjoyed in all its endearing awfulness, as a loony "High School Musical" with posher accents and a lot more going on upstairs.

Just about everyone in Eric Bricker's festschrift seems to love Julius Shulman, including (adorably) the unstoppable old gent himself. What's not to like?

As usual, though, the Coens have more venal satisfactions in mind. "The fun of the story for us," they crow in the notes for this loathsome movie, "was inventing new ways to torture Larry."

Scattershot, lazy slice of agitprop, which recycles Moore's usual slice-and-dice job on corporations, while bobbing a curtsey to the current crisis.

The austere economy of Coetzee's writing, crisply adapted for the screen by Anna Maria Monticelli, plays out the melodrama with quietly brooding menace.

The Rashevski Tango begins and ends with a burial, but the movie teems with cranky life, then heals all rifts with a dance that sets a seal of comically erotic approval on that undying genre, the domestic melodrama.

It hurts to see a terrific cast (including the lovely and intelligent young Irish actress Romola Garai as the couple's quietly seething daughter) squandered on such dreary filmmaking.

The Rashevski Tango begins and ends with a burial, but the movie teems with cranky life.

Davidson weaves deeper questions of who a Jew is into this powerful tale of a clan shredded by the rage and hatred passed down through three generations.

There's nothing bitter or cynical about Amreeka, which is directed with impish wit, an observant visual competence, and an open, conciliatory spirit.

Flame & Citron is the film that the horribly overrated "Black Book" could have been, had Paul Verhoeven not indulged in the puerile reversals of sensitive Nazis and treacherous partisans.

The Cove is properly enchanting, horrifying, and rousing, but it comes dangerously close to making the narcissistic case that dolphins deserve to be saved because they're cute and breathe air like we do.

Other than Rose Byrne's on-screen radiance and a soothingly warm palette lit by cinematographer Seamus Tierney, there's not much to get passionate about in this amiable chamberpiece from theater director Max Mayer.

Other than Rose Byrne's on-screen radiance and a soothingly warm palette lit by cinematographer Seamus Tierney, there's not much to get passionate about in this amiable chamberpiece from theater director Max Mayer.

Of all European nations, Denmark enjoys the nearest thing to a heroic record of resisting the Nazi occupiers -- which adds both poignancy and punch to Ole Christian Madsen's fact-based drama about two posthumously honored Danes.

The Cove is properly enchanting, horrifying, and rousing, but it comes dangerously close to making the narcissistic case that dolphins deserve to be saved because they're cute and breathe air like we do.

Hindman is a stand-up comedian with many Turgenev-size issues on his mind--inadequate fathers and troubled sons, overprotective mothers, the search for belief--whose weight this slight picture can hardly bear. But the laid-back charm of Daniels and Graham's bumpy courtship gives the movie a much-needed edge of idiosyncrasy.

The laid-back charm of Daniels and Graham's bumpy courtship gives the movie a much-needed edge of idiosyncrasy.

Celebratory but clear-eyed portrait of Gertrude Berg.

One of the best of a new breed of indigenous movies prying open the Pandora's box of German suffering in World War II, A Woman in Berlin takes on the mass rape of German women by victorious Russian soldiers entering the country in 1945.

Bogs down in the philosophical shallow end and never quite recovers from what's clearly meant to be a deceptively light tone.

Séraphine's dependence on her patron--a cultivated but emotionally detached homosexual, who knew a fellow outsider when he saw one but came and went in her life without warning--is almost as unbearably moving as her inevitable unraveling--when money and fame cut the artist off from her creative wellsprings and drove her over the edge.

Not even the momentary participation extraordinaire of a vertically challenged famous filmmaker self-exiled from the United States can save this phony pseudo-drama from its final collapse into a heap of inconsequence and male vanity.

Il Divo plays like an elegantly ritualized black comedy.

Vardalos calls her film "the ultimate indie experiment," and if that's what is meant by ham-fisted pacing, writing, and acting, this is as ultimate and as indie as it gets.

Glued together with shards from much better movies, the humorless plot offers no mystery about who's doing what to whom, or why.

Malkovich swallows up the screen, and when he's out of frame, the movie feels slack and slow.

Quick! Noël Coward--sage or supercilious bitch? No matter where you stand, Stephan Elliott's deliciously cheeky screen adaptation of one of the satirist's lesser-known jabs at the British upper crust will charm your pants off.

Departures is built for simplicity, and, if nothing else, the appeal to decency and integrity of this sweetly old-fashioned tale make it a must for Bernie Madoff's prison Netflix queue.

Someday, a wise and potent film will be made about the Holocaust's legacy on succeeding generations. Posing as a study in evil, Death in Love is claptrap that confuses bile with art.

The best I can say for Cherry Blossoms is that it's made with love; the worst, that it's been a big hit in Germany. Yearning for Ozu, Dörrie stops off at cute, and parks.

There was no happy ending, but if Burma VJ's account of the efficacy of dictatorship threatens to crush you, the sight of a sturdy young back disappearing into the mountains, returning from a Thailand hideout for another round of bearing witness, should make your heart burst.

Marking follows the finalists around on the last leg of their PR campaigns and captures something sweetly goofy, with an edge of creepy, about their aping of smarmy American self-promotion (kissing babies, etc).

Foxx and Downey's disciplined duet come close to redeeming The Soloist from its visual excesses, but Wright leaves us with a parting shot of the dancing homeless that shamelessly exploits the very people he means to champion.

There's no breathing life into a formula that ought to have bowed out gracefully while the going was good.

Angels & Demons is still no more than another treat for whacked-out male conspiracy theorists.

One of the best of a new breed of indigenous movies prying open the Pandora's box of German suffering in World War II, A Woman in Berlin takes on the mass rape of German women by victorious Russian soldiers entering the country in 1945.

Someday, a wise and potent film will be made about the Holocaust's legacy on succeeding generations. Posing as a study in evil, Death in Love is claptrap that confuses bile with art.

If nothing else, Homecoming should effectively squelch any movie-star ambition on the part of Mischa Barton, though the camera is more than usually attentive to her cleavage.

One of the best of a new breed of indigenous movies prying open the Pandora's box of German suffering in World War II.

Celebratory but clear-eyed.

There's no breathing life into a formula that ought to have bowed out gracefully while the going was good.

Vardalos calls her film "the ultimate indie experiment," and if that's what is meant by ham-fisted pacing, writing, and acting, this is as ultimate and as indie as it gets.

Marking follows the finalists around on the last leg of their PR campaigns and captures something sweetly goofy, with an edge of creepy, about their aping of smarmy American self-promotion (kissing babies, etc).

Not even the momentary participation extraordinaire of a vertically challenged famous filmmaker self-exiled from the United States can save this phony pseudo-drama from its final collapse into a heap of inconsequence and male vanity.

Lyrical but bracing.

Lyrical but bracing.

Departures is built for simplicity, and, if nothing else, the appeal to decency and integrity of this sweetly old-fashioned tale make it a must for Bernie Madoff's prison Netflix queue.

Laila's Birthday is beautifully shot and overlaid with a spare, lyrical score that lends rueful emphasis to Masharawi's exasperated fidelity to a chronically malfunctioning city.

Quick! Noël Coward--sage or supercilious bitch? No matter where you stand, Stephan Elliott's deliciously cheeky screen adaptation of one of the satirist's lesser-known jabs at the British upper crust will charm your pants off.

There was no happy ending, but if Burma VJ's account of the efficacy of dictatorship threatens to crush you, the sight of a sturdy young back disappearing into the mountains, returning from a Thailand hideout for another round of bearing witness, should make your heart burst.

A roller coaster of alternating hope and despair.

Angels & Demons is still no more than another treat for whacked-out male conspiracy theorists.

Dark and light invariably go hand in hand in Burman's work, but this tender, goofily circular portrait of how we fill up the cavernous space once occupied by children begins and ends, beautifully, with an image of a man and a woman floating head to head on water--hapless, helpless, happy.

Foxx and Downey's disciplined duet come close to redeeming The Soloist from its visual excesses, but Wright leaves us with a parting shot of the dancing homeless that shamelessly exploits the very people he means to champion.

Hard on the heels of the acclaimed Gomorrah, Italian corruption gets a much quieter but equally vigorous workout in Paolo Sorrentino's highly stylized portrait of the country's most enduring political leader.

Bogs down in the philosophical shallow end and never quite recovers from what's clearly meant to be a deceptively light tone.

This sweetly ingenuous film, written and directed by Bohdan Sláma, is a lot less sentimental about cows and flowers than it is about its human protagonists, who fall domino-like in love with churls who won't love them back.

A highly entertaining evisceration and celebration of the milieu.

Malkovich swallows up the screen, and when he's out of frame, the movie feels slack and slow.

The movie satisfies for an hour, but never quite persuades that its subject is worth two.

Dews helps Allis hold out a gendered posthumous snapshot of an era whose smug surface, barely masking oceans of suffering, makes "Revolutionary Road" look like a tea party.

Nodding, winking, and sighing, The Lodger lumbers its way to a final twist so anticlimactic and silly as to warrant an incredulous titter.

A modestly satisfying tale of sisterly love weighed down by a history of family betrayal and mendacity.

The only crowds this stodgy little movie is likely to please tend to be home on a Saturday night, watching PBS.

For anyone who loves language, this cut-and-thrust is a heady delight, so rich and free-flowing in its rhythms that it's hard to decide whether what we're seeing is a vérité-style documentary or a realist drama.

The best I can say for Cherry Blossoms is that it's made with love; the worst, that it's been a big hit in Germany. Yearning for Ozu, Dörrie stops off at cute, and parks.

An ungainly hybrid of straight-up documentary and ingenuous reenactment.

If all you ask for is a few gay jokes, a perky score, pretty shots of Baltimore, and some clever but callow observations of sexual mores in the city, He's Just Not That Into You is an amiable enough night out.

If all you ask for is a few gay jokes, a perky score, pretty shots of Baltimore, and some clever but callow observations of sexual mores in the city, He's Just Not That Into You is an amiable enough night out.

Like many narrative filmmakers who walk on their tippy-toes when dealing with the Holocaust, neither Daldry nor Hare seems eager to make the material his own.

Clumsily wedged in like a TV commercial between deafening stunts, the emotional storytelling sinks without trace, leaving you with only one flawed character to cling to.

if there's one instance of the road to perdition paved with fat budgets and good intentions, it's Defiance, or, as I prefer to call it, Custersky's Last Stand in Belarus.

A really terrible movie based on what I imagine was a far more interesting 1981 play.

Doubt is only marginally, and tendentiously, about moral uncertainty--it's more about the sins of a nosy old biddy who pulls out all the stops when going through the official channels of a male-dominated Catholic Church would get her nowhere.

A middlebrow domestic drama beating its wings against an experimental frame.

The result is mostly a woodenly derivative melding of x2740s maternal melodramas, oaters, and World War II actioners.

Bolt carries two tales for the price of one, both handled by Disney veterans and first-time directors Chris Williams and Byron Howard with wit, grace, and the dazzling craftsmanship wex27ve come to expect from the studio thatx27s hitched its wagon to Pixar.

Antarctica takes urban loneliness as its subject, but though all the characters are strikingly attractive, there's nothing frothy or pandering about Hochner's hermetic homosexual world.

Only near the end does this likable but saccharine movie fleetingly complicate the "Gone With the Wind"–fed delusion that the love of poor, black nannies for their white charges was undiluted by bitterness.

Isnx27t so much incompetent as it is hopelessly tame and muddled.

If nothing else--and there isnx27t much else--You Donx27t Mess With the Zohan pronounces the Middle East fair game for absurdist comedy.

Though Sex and the City is every bit as busy as its HBO progenitor was, itx27s virtually plotless, not to mention pointless.

Itx27s little more than droopy ditties draped around a threadbare plot.

Now and again some pungent writing leaks through to poke fun at the excruciating banality of guru wisdom. But mostly it’s dreary dick jokes and elephant poop, slack directing by Marco Schnabel, and, of all fatal errors, Mike Myers, shooting for cuddly.

Perfectly pleasant, very good-looking, modestly funny, dispiritingly unoriginal variant on the nerd-with-a-dream recipe thatx27s been clobbered to death in animated films for at least a decade now.

Prince Caspian is fairly good fun, and Ix27m trying to decide whether it was the capable swordplay or Ben Barnesx27s bedroom eyes that prompted a significant shift in brand loyalty.