127 Hours is the fascinating true story of Aron Ralston, a mechanical engineer and adventurer who went hiking alone and got stuck in a canyon
Chain Letter is an out-and-out joke of a film, a risible piece of garbage incompetent on every level
Tangled, Disney’s 50th animated feature, returns the company to a more comfortable traditional fairy tale setting
The Tourist is a refined but lighthearted, Hitchcock-influenced thriller, which explicitly recalls North by Northwest and To Catch a Thief
Gulliver’s Travels is lightweight, dumb, and short enough to remain tolerable, though it bears little resemblance to the original story
The Next Three Days scores no points for originality but it is a taut, reasonably compelling and adult thriller
Mike Leigh lends a steady hand and a careful eye and ear to Another Year, a tone-perfect, life-affirming film that ranks among his best work
Season of the Witch might seem to legitimize the medieval witch hunting, or hey, take it a step further, the witch hunting in contemporary US politics
The Green Hornet is a heaping mess of a film that just about sinks to the level of A-Team or Transformers 2 incoherence
The Good Heart is about as unsubtle as (bad) silent melodrama, and within minutes it reaches an undesirable crescendo
The Kids Are All Right is light sitcom-level entertainment, tame and dull and even, perhaps, unwittingly offensive in design
Petr Jákl’s high-profile Kajínek profiles the man called the “most famous prisoner in the Czech Republic”
Paranormal Activity 2 rehashes the found footage first film and expects us to eat it up just the same
TRON: Legacy is mesmerizing as as a two-hour music Daft Punk music video, a triumph of art design that’s fully captivating on style alone
Megamind is a spoof of superhero films, a genre pioneered in animation by Pixar’s The Incredibles
Some may leave Anton Corbijn’s The American unsatisfied; what’s all this symbolism and philosophy doing in my George Clooney thriller?
Due Date is so close in story and spirit to John Hughes’ Planes, Trains & Automobiles that it might as well be considered a remake
The Switch has been sold to unsuspecting audiences as a romantic comedy, but it’s neither romantic nor funny
The Other Guys succeeds where many others have recently failed as a ribald spoof of an oft-spoofed genre
Harry Potter by way of Ingmar Bergman: Deathly Hallows: Part 1 is rich and vibrant, dark yet sensitive
Protektor, a period drama set before and during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, nearly swept the 2010 Czech Lion awards
Devil, produced and written by M. Night Shyamalan, is Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None on an elevator
Howl tries to capture many diverse scenes in the life of poet Allen Ginsberg, played by James Franco
Saw 3D, or Saw: The Final Chapter, is easily the most violent entry in the series (yet) though the 3D is a non-event