We crawl into the world on all fours and-unless cut short-exit life with the aid of a cane. Aging normally begins in infancy and ends in old age, unless your name is Benjamin Button. Reversing the natural order, he was born an old man and died as a baby. Director David Fincher (Seven) freely adapted The Curious Case of Benjamin Button from F. Scott Fitzgerald's dark if humorous meditation...

Everybody loves year-end top 10 lists except me—at least when it comes time to reflect on the year in movies just ended. It’s a frustrating task. The majority of films reviewed in the New York Times...

Once there was a loan officer who said no to every application for money. If the story had been written anytime from six years ago through this September, a period when no one in banking denied anyone any sum, it could only have been meant as a fairy tale. Although Yes Man, the new Jim Carrey comedy, is a kind of fable, the moral of the story has less to do with economics than human responsibility. When we first meet the hapless loan officer Carl Allen (Carrey), he's fallen into the low-gear inertia of a dead-end job in a cul-de-sac life. After his wife left him, Carl's fallback for everything...

Upon its release in 1951, The Day the Earth Stood Still set standards for science fiction films met only a few times in that paranoid, watch the sky decade of flying saucers, McCarthy and the threat of nuclear annihilation. The cosmic orchestra and eerie theremin of its musical score suggested the awe of infinity and the unknown. The special effects behind the saucer and the hulking robot called Gort were simple and essential. The message delivered by the interstellar emissary Klaatu, though carried along by a swift moving...

Will Smith is one of contemporary Hollywood's most likable stars; alas, Seven Pounds is perhaps his least likable movie. He plays Ben Thomas, a morose and suicidal IRS agent-or at least he might be a taxman, a confusing early scene at a corporate seminar notwithstanding-afflicted with memories of a beautiful wife lost to him forever. The flashbacks eventually reveal a car accident with seven fatalities all told. It transpires that Ben was to blame. That he was texting while driving serves as the story's most apposite moral. Agent Thomas appears to be on an...

Chess Records was one of a handful of independent record labels that changed the sound of music-and the course of the world-in the 1940s and '50s. Cadillac Records is the fictionalized but mostly fact based dramatization of that label, organized primarily as a tale of two lives, the company' signature bluesman Muddy Waters and its owner, Leonard Chess. Co-owner would be more accurate and there lies the film's challenge. Leonard's real life brother and partner, Phil, is ignored by Cadillac Records. By trimming...

That dead dog will do him in. Ben just knows it! A veteran Hollywood producer, Ben (played with frazzled authority by Robert De Niro) glances with restrained nervousness around the room during the focus group screening in the shrewd Hollywood send-up What Just Happened. Being evaluated by a crew of industry insiders and everyday nincompoops is Ben's latest production, a troubled picture called Fiercely. It stars Sean Penn as a hero pursued by bad men. The audience in the screening room isn't especially impressed until that final scene-and then the impression isn't favorable. The bad men kill Sean Penn's dog in a splatter of blood before executing Penn...

Frank Martin just can't spend a quiet evening at home. In Transporter 3, he's ready to relax when a speeding car improbably crashes through the brick wall of his living room, depositing an associate about to die and a mysterious young Ukrainian woman, Valentina. Computer-generated fireballs will follow, along with software-produced car chases and titanic feats of martial arts simulated through quick-cut editing. Valentina becomes his responsibility on a car trip across Europe from his home in Marseilles to her home in Odessa. Naturally, his agility in whip-stomping the bad guys arouses her interest. By the time they cross the Ukrainian border, they are falling...

Although separated by an ocean and multiple time zones, the Australian Outback bears remarkable resemblance to the American West. Both encompass mesas towering over rocky, dusty deserts shimmering like a mirage under unforgiving sunlight. Whip-snapping cowboys with guns at their side populated both regions, driving herds across rivers and plains on their way to market. Cattle barons exerted inordinate influence over territorial governments and in the brawling towns...

It can't touch Harry Potter for scope of popularity but in some pockets of pop culture, the Twilight series has reached Beatlemania in intensity. The "young adult" novels about a handsome teenage vampire boy and the mortal girl who loves him have sold 17 million copies. Just like the Hogwarts brigade but on a smaller scale, the announcement of a movie adaptation stirred speculation, consternation and controversy among fan bloggers. Although I can't speak to whether the book was better, I will speculate that some of the scenes in Twilight the movie were better left on...

Quantum of Solace is the future of cinema, a movie whose splashiest scenes are tailored to the dimension of big screens. It opens with the camera zooming like a cruise missile, skimming the surface of the sea as it hurtles toward the Italian coast. There, on a winding road in his Aston Martin, James Bond outmaneuvers his high-speed pursuers in trucks and cars; the cameras put viewers in the midst of chaos, careening amid the splintered metal and shattered glass. It's like being immersed in a video game for giants. Just imagine downloading...

Besotted by the cinema of silence and early talking pictures, Guy Maddin also finds humor in old movies-or perhaps the humor lies more in the distance between our experience of the world and the gestures of an antique art form. In My Winnipeg, the Canadian filmmaker composes a poem for his hometown from the elements he has always loved-black-and-white film stock, bits of archival footage, exclamatory title cards, iris-eyed scenes, pointedly primitive animation and highly pitched drama in acting...

The short film Perceval is dedicated to Ingmar Bergman and no one familiar with The Seventh Seal will miss what it holds in common with the gloomy Swedish classic. Aside from the medieval setting and knightly allusions, Perceval reflects on social breakdown in a stark landscape of desolation. Directed by Milwaukee filmmaker Tate Bunker, it includes many gorgeous moments of cinematography—of bare trees stretched like picket fences across the newly woven mantle of spring green...

Grumpy, bloated and disheveled, Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour-Hoffman) rolls out of bed and into another unsatisfying day as Synecdoche, New York gets under way. Caden is a community theater director and frustrated playwright whose life is settling into the malaise of depression. His wife, a miniature painter played by Catherine Keener (the go-to-gal for unhappy movie wives) is likewise semi-despondent. Sometimes she fantasizes about the death of their four-year-old daughter. The bright hope of marriage and motherhood has faded to dull gunmetal gray. The thrill has gone...

The wattage of Anne Hathaway's star power is rare in contemporary Hollywood and the brightness may reside principally in those Judy Garland eyes, which seem two sizes too big for her face. But her poise has always been as striking as her appearance. In Rachel Getting Married, Hathaway pushes her considerable talents into a darker, more destructive zone. She's not Rachel nor is she getting hitched. Hathaway plays Kym, a slouchy twentysomething released from rehab to attend the marriage of her older sister Rachel. With her...

Angelina Jolie has climbed a long way up from her days as a Tomb Raider. Nowadays her roles usually demand acting. In Changeling, she plays Christine Collins, a mother whose panic quietly overtakes her denial when her nine-year-old son doesn't run to greet her when she comes home. Her face registers the gathering unease as she calls out his name, going room by empty room before the realization sets in: Walter is gone. Changeling is closely based on a true story, dateline Los Angeles, 1928. Dressed for the part with brightly rouged cheeks, Jolie leads Christine carefully...

The nighttime football game at the start of Pride and Glory, a contest between aggressive amateurs on a frozen gridiron, sets the wintry tone and suggests the theme. Teams are everything, embracing the families of players lining the stands shouting "Defense! Defense!" Pride and Glory is about teamwork and its abuse, family ties and the game of defense. The movie is set around an NYPD precinct at Christmas, a time when the sun hides in the gloom above a city cold and dark despite the strings of holiday lights...

The title doesn't even begin to cover it. The majority of the action taking place on a cemetery and farm, this film follows the activities of 6 ghosthunters, aged twenty-something. While working on a documentary about paranormal activity, the group happens upon an old farmhouse and gets the idea that it'd add something to their movie to interview the residents. Enter creepy killer guy...

The distance between wealth and poverty is only the most obvious chasm measured in The Pool. Set in India and filmed by Milwaukee writer-director Chris Smith from a story by Randy Russell, The Pool's protagonist is an 18-year-old country lad struggling to keep his chin up in the big city. The boy, Venkatesh (Venkatesh Chavan), does the hard work of washing terrazzo floors by hand and the harder work of scrubbing public toilets with a brush. One day he climbs onto the branch of...

Poppy is a blithe spirit, weightless as the spring breeze while zipping around the leafier wards of London on her bike, smiling and waving at passersby. Poppy (Sally Hawkins) is the focus of the self-explanatory Happy-Go-Lucky, a comedy (of sorts) from a British writer-director better known for drab and dreary dramas about claustrophobic life at the rim of poverty, Mike Leigh. Poppy might only laugh if she tripped and fell across that rim. An irrepressible 30-ish woman, she is the bubbly sort whose hellos to strangers and googly effusiveness begin to transgress the normal social boundaries of contemporary...

"You're a little nervous about the gasmask, right?" asks Yisrael Campbell. With the mask draped over the shoulder of his black suit coat, the fiercely bearded comic in the Hasidic hat pauses for a sly moment to let the crowd at a Jerusalem comedy club respond with laughter. "You think you missed the nine o'clock news?"

When he last turned to presidential biography for his subject, director Oliver Stone transformed the reign of Richard M. Nixon into Shakespearean tragedy. With W., his insightfully funny satire of George W. Bush, Stone turns the bumbling but affable president and his entourage into Dr. Strangelove. The difference is striking. With Anthony Hopkins in the title role, Nixon was a towering figure warped by resentment as he struggled out of the lower middle class and toward the White House. In Josh Brolin's loose and game performance...

A statue of Cerberus, the watchdog of Hades in Greek mythology, guards the approach to an island set aside as a graveyard. The time is 1912 during a war between Greece and Turkey, and the mainland has been turned into a charnel house. When the Greek general and an American reporter visit the cemetery island, they become trapped by the outbreak of plague with a strange assortment of locals and travelers. A vampire may be lurking among them, fed by human fear...

Body of Lies opens with a bang and the explosions keep on coming. It begins in a bleak district of Manchester, England, where a SWAT team prepares its assault on a terror cell's hideout with quiet efficiency. Meanwhile the building's tenants, followers of the fictional bin Laden associate Al Saleem, are watching a video on martyrdom narrated by their leader as they tinker with explosives. The young terrorists greet the entrance of the police into their den with calm resolve. Shouting "God is great!" they trigger the explosion that scatters fire and debris as their building is blown into the surrounding neighborhood...

Was it Orson Welles who introduced the long, dining-room table with husband and wife at opposite ends as visual shorthand for marital discord? In The Duchess, the device is used repeatedly. At first, the Duke (Ralph Fiennes) and Duchess (Keira Knightley) of Devonshire are seated across from each other, separated by a long, polished surface sparingly set with a few china serving dishes.

   Robert Downey, Jr.'s up and down career rose again earlier this year with his unusually nuanced superhero performance in Ironman. No one would call it Downey's greatest part, however. For that, my vote goes to his starring role in Chaplin, the 1992 biopic of the world-conquering star of the silent movie era. Slightly overlooked at the time of its release, Chaplin is out now on a "15th Anniversary Edition" DVD. The interviews among the special features are honest and revealing. Chaplin's director Richard Attenborough...

The first sound is of pounding hooves and the first sight is of three horsemen hurrying over the crest of a dun-colored hill, framed by the wooden gate to a ranch in desolate country. The city marshal and his deputies have come to arrest one of the hired hands for rape and murder, but the landowner, a man called Bragg (Jeremy Irons), stands firm.

Spike Lee has been fighting World War II long before the release of his latest film, Miracle at St. Anna. His campaign began with a salvo at Clint Eastwood for excluding black faces from Flags of Our Fathers and perpetuating the assumption that blacks contributed little to the U.S. victory. It was not the movie Eastwood wanted to make and the sniping between the two directors probably served to harden Lee's resolve.

"That mix CD I left on your doorstep…" says Nick at the climax of a long and rambling cell phone message to his ex-girlfriend, "…will be the last one I make for you." He's trying to mean business but the desperation is clear. Nick is an awkwardly sensitive teenager, a bit of a schlump.

Neil LaBute established his reputation as a director and writer with gritty, unrelenting scenarios about human nastiness-male division. Let's call him the David Mamet of post-boomer suburbia for short.But if In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors were almost vile in their depiction of vile behavior, Lake Terrace represents LaBute at his most polished.

After winning Oscars with the unrelentingly grim No Country For Old Men, the Coen brothers lighten up a little for Burn After Reading. Their new film traverses territory more familiar to the filmmakers. Here, death doesn't descend in the form of an enigmatic hit man who tosses coins for the lives he encounters.

The Exiles is a window to a world that time has shut forever. Nowadays it might be called a "docudrama," but Mackenzie was determined to avoid imposing his own perspective and plotline. The Exiles was a collaboration between him and a small knot of American Indians who portrayed themselves, scripted their dialogue and helped devise a scenario that amounts to a dusk-to-dawn account of their lives . . .

The mastermind and his confederates cased the World Trade Center for entrances and exits and the coming and going of guards, mapping every step of their coup with the meticulousness of professional criminals going for the vault in a heavily secured bank. But although their scheme was against the law, it was more misdemeanor than felony and would have no victims unless a tragic accident disrupted their careful plan.