As anthology films go, Freakonomics is an entertaining -- if occasionally scattershot -- documentary. But then, that was the nature of the book by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, upon which the film was based.

You could get whiplash understanding the way we deal with, shall we say, the coarseness of public discourse. On the one hand, you've got an exception...

Nowhere Boy, Sam Taylor-Wood's exploration of John Lennon's late teens, doesn't cover much new ground. But it does offer a pop psychology look at Lennon's confused home life.

This is a low-key movie about coping with depression and anxiety, and it's disappointingly insubstantial. Worse, the title amounts to false advertising: It's not really that funny.

Inside Job explains complex ideas with a clarity and skill that make them comprehensible to anyone willing to pay attention. But Charles Ferguson does it in a way that doesn't dumb things down.

Just as you'd imagine with a family-targeted movie about a horse, Randall Wallace's Secretariat is awash in sentimentality. The lump in your throat is as pro forma as the popcorn.

Stone is a stunner -- a film that seems to be one thing but turns out to be quite another. It challenges your assumptions at every turn -- and leaves you wrung out at the end.

"Why is it," Galifianakis asks, "that people always say, 'Oh, you're the fat guy from The Hangover. Why does it have go to that -- why couldn't I just be 'the guy from The Hangover?'"

You know where Live as We Know It is headed every step of the way. Yet the writers and Berlanti find the right pace and tone, and the stars are equal to the task.

You don't need to be a fan of Thomas Hardy to get the jokes in Stephen Frears' Tamara Drewe. Nor do you need to be familiar with Posey Simmonds' graph...

At the age of 80, Clint Eastwood just keeps pulling surprises out of his back pocket as a director -- the latest being Hereafter, Eastwood's version of a New-Agey entry.

No one was interested in John Curran's ideas to make Stone. Then Robert De Niro attached himself to the project. And suddenly everybody was interested.

It's not that Red is a breakthrough or a game-changer in any way -- it's just a highly enjoyable comic action-thriller with a sense of humor about itself.

Conviction is as straightforward as storytelling gets in a movie. Will that be its undoing with critics?

There's been a lot of excitement about Olivier Assayas' Carlos, and it's not hard to see why. But here's my objection: In presenting a terrorist as an action hero, it glorifies terrorism as a legitimate path of political action.

One of my most amusing memories as a member of the New York Film Critics Circle is the 2002 voting meeting, at which we selected our award-winners - a...

In Nora's Will, what starts as a comedy of one man's rebellion against what is expected of him turns into a moving story in which his understanding of his own life blossoms.

A movie that won't win any awards from the Mexican-American Border Tourism board, Inhale takes the idea of organ-transplant tourism and drops it squarely in the middle of a dramatic thriller. It's not a comfortable fit.

Is setting a movie in the pre-Internet, pre-cell phone era a storytelling shortcut -- or a storytelling challenge?

At 44, actor-director Baltasar Kormakur may soon be Iceland's most famous export since Bjork. And now, with his first American film, Inhale, reaching theaters today, his profile could expand.

Welcome to the Rileys isn't world-beating cinema. But it's a beautifully understated story with deep emotion that will capture the receptive viewer with surprising force.

The following has been copyrighted and registered with the Writers Guild. But feel free to contact me to buy it: It's a ribald romantic comedy called Grandma Is a Cougar.

There aren't many people working in films right now who have the mastery of droll, deadpan humor that Bill Nighy possesses. So Wild Target should be right up his alley. It is. Unfortunately, that alley is mostly a dead-end affair.

Is Lisbeth Salander the most fascinating female literary -- or movie -- character of all time? Certainly, Stieg Larsson's punk-hacker heroine is right up there in the pantheon.