Babel

Babel is a huge, messy, sensuous film, its 142 minutes stretched over such riches as an embarrassingly intimate scene in which Cate Blanchett struggles to steady herself over a bedpan, a startlingly cheerful moment in which suburban American children are subjected to the slaughter of a chicken, and a lovely, turbulent sequence in which a deaf Japanese schoolgirl (the fascinating Rinko Kikuchi) takes Ecstasy and goes out dancing. The movie is clearly of a piece with Amores Perros and 21 Grams, the previous collaborations between writer Guillermo Arriaga and director Alejandro González Iñárritu: A Japanese man traveling in Morocco gives a rifle to a goatherd, whose son accidentally shoots an American woman, whose government wildly overreacts. Meanwhile, the young son and daughter of the hemorrhaging woman are taken to a wedding in Mexico by their immigrant nanny; as the exhausted revelers return to California, U.S. border control guards provoke another wild overreaction, and the kids end up stranded in the desert. In the story with the most tenuous connection to the rest, a deaf Japanese schoolgirl tries to get laid or at least touched by other human hands. Each of the stories concerns parents and children, and each is preoccupied with the arbitrary yet unbridgeable borders between people. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

It's hairy, balls-out humor—but behind the seemingly random spray of political incorrectness, it's very carefully calibrated. Borat is a Kazakh television personality from a backwater where, supposedly, retarded brothers are stored in cages, where sisters are prostitutes and wives are enormously ugly, where pretty much everybody is related to the town rapist. On a scale of dangerous humor, riffs about a place few Americans have ever heard of, except perhaps in news reports about its self-aggrandizing dictator, are probably pretty safe. Humor about humorless feminists: relatively safe. Humor about idiot frat boys ingesting unidentifiable substances: very safe. Almost not-humor about red-state bigots: Uh, wait, aren't they most of the moviegoing public? Humor about Jews (even delivered by a Cohen): safe as Palestinian houses. There's also a reason it isn't being initially released in much of middle America. It comes down on homophobes hard, and proves, without a doubt, that Jews eat sandwiches too. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Casino Royale

Read our review.

Catch a Fire

An apartheid drama about the making of a righteous terrorist, Catch a Fire contains two inflammatory theses. One: Terrorism is not an absolute evil; it's an extra-military tactic that can be put to noble use. Two: Oppressive governments create terrorists by imprisoning and torturing innocent men. Derek Luke steps seamlessly into the real-life role of Patrick Chamusso, a black South African yes man turned antiapartheid rebel who, as a documentary clip at the end of the film illustrates, later founded an orphanage (truth is always cheesier than fiction). His wife, Precious, is pretty and "likes nice things"; his out-of-town mistress is a baby-laden footnote. When the oil refinery where Patrick works is attacked, he's arrested—and since his actual alibi involves spending the night in adulterous sin, he takes his beatings instead of fessing up. Patrick pays for this cowardice with a radical political awakening in prison. Given the complex motivations at play, it's unfortunate that the script (by Shawn Slovo) doesn't go in for much psychology and wastes precious minutes halfway humanizing Patrick's Boer rival (Tim Robbins). (ANNIE WAGNER)

Copying Beethoven

Every time I watch an inspirational dramedy about the waning years of a fiery yet vulnerable classical composer, I have the same thought: not enough chamber pots. Not enough of Ludwig van Beethoven squatting. Not enough of Beethoven's copyist's pert little nose wrinkling in bemused distaste as she pours Beethoven's urine out of a window. Praise be to Copying Beethoven, then, a film that seems to conflate gritty realism with the presence of an open kettle of urine by the bed. So aaanyway, the movie is about dewy, nubile Anna Holtz (Diane Kruger), an ambitious composition student hired to help the bewigged, bellowing beast (Ed Harris) transcribe his genius. The two understand each other, then misunderstand each other, then almost consummate their sexual tension, then don't because, you know, it's deeper than that (plus, he's hella old). The problem with making a piece of art about a piece of art is that, inevitably, one of the two suffers by contrast (hint: it's not the music). (LINDY WEST)

Deliver Us From Evil

Amy Berg's blistering exposé about pedophilia in the Catholic Church, certainly doesn't want for sensationalistic subject matter, but the real impact comes from the methodical, steady compilation of evidence. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

The Departed

A loose remake of the Hong Kong crime epic Infernal Affairs, Martin Scorsese's The Departed casts Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon as deep-cover moles. One is a rising star in boss Frank Costello's (Jack Nicholson) Boston crime family, the other is Costello's counterpunch within the state police department. Both men are little more than useful pawns in a big-city game—cat and mouse, with neither man aware of the other's machinations—and deep down, beneath all their cocksure bluster, they both know it. Once their jobs are complete, they will both be cruelly cast aside; the only question is, who will unearth the other mole first. Returning at last from the gold statuette wilderness, Scorsese has assembled The Departed with an absolute precision that's been lacking in his work since Goodfellas. The result is a film that's not so much a puzzle as it is a pretzel, overlapping and tying itself up at any given moment, and effectively capturing us within the twisted lives of its two leads. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Flags of Our Fathers

Clint Eastwood's much-anticipated depiction of the events surrounding the famous flag raising at Iwo Jima, comes off as a rather puzzling misfire. The canvas here may be too large, or the history too weighty, for the director to find an in. Whatever the reason, as both war epic and historical character piece, it feels weirdly insubstantial. Eastwood's honorable, heartfelt, well-acted film has its moments of frisson, certainly—most notably a tense, spooky tunnel sequence that bodes well for next year's more intimate, Japanese-soldier-POV companion piece, Letters from Iwo Jima—yet its overall failure to engage proves insurmountable. During the end credits, there's a stunning montage of old wartime photos, many depicting the actual heroes portrayed in the movie, which leaves you wanting to learn more about the real story behind the images. The strange thing is, you just theoretically did. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Flushed Away

Bad news first: Flushed Away, Aardman's first feature-length film since the triumphant Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit (and notably, the first made without the participation of W&G creator Nick Park), is indeed significantly more manic than the films that made the studio famous. Fortunately, it's a great kind of manic, with an unapologetically crass, blitzkrieg approach that more than delivers the comedic goods. The plot—spoiled pet rat gets accidentally washed into the sewer, only to discover a cockney rodent subculture held under the thumb of a toad mob boss (Ian McKellen)—is slight, yet charming. What makes the thing zing is the attention to detail, spanning from the large (the cityscape, cobbled together from various flotsam and rubbish, is a marvel to behold) to the blink-and-you-miss-'em gags. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

A Good Year

Ridley Scott departs his native terrain of manly action-adventure epics and plunges into the viticultural riches of Provence, dragging home the most shamelessly silly movie about grapes ever made. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Harsh Times

Freddy Rodriguez and Christian Bale star as buddies from South Central L.A.

The Illusionist

The Illusionist is, according to usually staid critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, "a lush piece of romanticism" (read: a sepia-stained triumph of ahistoricism); or, if you prefer to have it from Stephen Holden, The Illusionist "rouses your slumbering belief in the miraculous" (read: Jessica Biel is so boring you'll nod off in your cushioned megaplex seat). I saw The Illusionist (twice) at the Seattle International Film Festival, back before beer bongs and airborne snakes ruled the screens, and I can assure you, with all confidence, that the movie is dumb. Really, really, dumb. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Iraq in Fragments

The Stranger gave local filmmaker James Longley the 2006 Genius Award largely on the merits of this truly astonishing film. Longley's digital video (blown up into creamy 35mm) makes the colors pop—ardent greens and fiery reds stand out against walls and buildings the color of sand—and it's hard to count the ways Iraq in Fragments departs from the standard photojournalistic techniques for documenting a war. There are its highly psychological portraits of children, who have nothing to do with the politics of the region and little interest in the religious and ethnic divisions that are pulling the country apart. The process of shooting is hands-off, in the cinéma vérité tradition; but during editing, the footage turns in on itself, burrowing into the minds of its characters through asynchronous voiceover, provided by the subjects themselves. At the same time, the footage of blood-spattered Shiite religious observance and a vigilante attack on alcohol vendors in Nasiriyah is the stuff of traditional, daredevil war correspondence. Iraq in Fragments bears more relation to the close-range reporting of Washington Post Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Shadid (whom Longley met while they were both in Iraq) than it does to any of the other documentaries about the war. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Keeping Mum

Keeping Mum is good when Maggie Smith is bopping people on the head, and pretty effing horrible the rest of the time. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Let's Go to Prison

A comedy about life in jail, based on a book by Jim Hogshire, whose oeuvre also includes Opium for the Masses: A Practical Guide to Growing Poppies and Making Opium and Pills-A-Go-Go: A Fiendish Investigation into Pill Marketing, Art, History, and Consumption. (Based on information since removed from IMDB, the author was incorrectly identified as an ex-convict in the print edition.)

Little Miss Sunshine

A monster hit at Sundance, where it was picked up for a record-breaking $10.5 million, Little Miss Sunshine is brazen enough to truck in well-worn indie film trappings. Which is to say it's a dysfunctional-family road-trip comedy built upon a mountain of character quirks. Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Alan Arkin, and Steve Carell star as motivational speaker father, beleaguered mother, loony grandfather, and gay Proust-scholar uncle, respectively. The plot sends them tripping from New Mexico to California, where youngest daughter Olive is due to compete in a pre-teen beauty pageant. At its best, the film achieves a sort of hipster whimsy; at its worst, it's forced to create gross caricatures in order to lend its characters a semblance of humanity in comparison. Call it Indie Filmmaking 101. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette is Sofia Coppola's cash-in, her reward for low-budget ka-chings and the crafty seduction of so many underserved grown-up filmgoers. It is, in a word, a waxworks. The movie can be strikingly gorgeous at times, an exploding plastic inevitable somewhere between Peter Greenaway's tableaux-nuts The Draughtsman's Contract and every other 18th-century costume epic ever made. But waxworks, being lifeless, are quickly perused spectacles; Coppola's film is over two hours and is almost perversely undramatic and repetitious. The history covered is straight up: Archduchess Maria Antonia of Austria (Kirsten Dunst), at 14, is shipped to France in order to wed a 15-year-old Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman). She has trouble getting pregnant, plunges into marital doldrums, then embraces self-indulgence (at the state's expense) and is eventually executed during the Revolution. Visually, Dunst is a veritable creamsicle, but her role is so featureless it comes to resemble the actress hanging out backstage, dressed and prepped with nowhere to go. Inadvertently, Coppola has painted a pathetic portrait of a spoiled kitten not unlike herself, born into unlimited resources and without a thought in her pretty head, before she lost it entirely. (MICHAEL ATKINSON)

Open Season

First of all, porcupines aren't fucking blue. Where do the Sony Pictures animators get off making the porcupine blue!? They're not blue! For the most part, everything else in the movie is the appropriate color. The beavers are brown, the skunks are black and white, and the ducks are all green and brown and white and shit—so WHY IS THE PORCUPINE BLUE?! The point is, children and their sugar-drenched brains will laugh at almost anything so long as it's in cartoon form. Even (and in some cases especially) if it's the WRONG COLOR. Open Season knows it, and that's all Open Season gives you: man vs. beast. Not in the depressing Steve Irwin vs. stingray kind of way, though. In the Bugs Bunny vs. Elmer Fudd kind of way. (MEGAN SELING)

The Prestige

The complicated plot boils down to a mundane feud between rival London magicians, played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale. The origin of their rivalry is the death of Jackman's wife (Piper Perabo), possibly at Bale's hands, in a dangerous but well-practiced stunt. Otherwise, their differences are minor. One has a talent for showmanship; the other boasts only ingenuity. One gets to put his grubby mitts on the likes of Scarlett Johansson (usually costumed like a peacock, and outfitted with an accordingly pea brain); the other has to contend with true love. They strive to steal each other's best tricks, and they push each other to unhealthy limits, including an ill-advised consultation with Nikola Tesla (David Bowie, hamming it evil genius). There's no rhythm to its budding, no tightening at its most interesting intersections (like the sadistic truth behind the apparent teleportation of a bird). The film is all formless and shallow until the final payoff—known in magic jargon as "the prestige"—when doubles and sacrifice and character all coalesce into one dark metaphysical conceit. There's no sleight-of-hand here, just sick magic (not slick, mind you, sick), and it's tremendous. (ANNIE WAGNER)

The Queen

The central conflict in The Queen is, literally, whether Her Majesty Schoolmarm will deign to mention the unseemly death of an ex-princess—but no one in the whole supposedly accurate movie even notices that Mother Teresa has gone tits up. Nevertheless, The Queen's myopia is so complete, the performances so meticulous, that you can't help but start to care about, or pine for, or want to overthrow the British monarchy. Basically, The Queen is The West Wing populated by stuck-up twits, and in addition to the studiously wooden figurehead (a metaphor that's never seemed so apt), there are a whole crew of politicians and staffers conducting surreptitiously from backstage. Michael Sheen, as Tony Blair, is excellent as the sort of squishy leader celebrity-era democracy is prone to. And the minutiae of public relations have never seemed so stupid—or so fascinating. (ANNIE WAGNER)

The Return

A thriller starring Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Running with Scissors

Much of the structure of Running with Scissors—broken home, gay main character coming of age, mom prone to mental breakdowns, and oodles of eccentric supporting roles—practically howls "For Your Consideration." But the particulars—mom allows her even crazier psychiatrist to adopt her son, leading to attempted suicide, statutory rape, criminal negligence, and rampant substance abuse—are too harsh even for a fall-release family drama. But that's why Augusten Burroughs's memoirs are great: He reports the horrors of his life with a nonchalance that gives the reader permission to laugh. This movie doesn't work because an honest adaptation of Running with Scissors can't work. Without Burroughs's narration, we're left with a Tobe Hooper horror film. The movie-making changes—casting an older Augusten; miniaturizing the importance of Natalie Finch (Evan Rachel Wood); and Gwyneth Paltrow's jarring presence—accumulate into story-killing wounds. (PAUL CONSTANT)

The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause

Tim Allen battles a dude with an icy fauxhawk.

The Science of Sleep

Wads of cotton are tossed into the air and become clouds. A tiny stuffed horse is magically spurred to life. There are so many wondrous sights to behold that you can't help but get swept up in the cacophony; Michel Gondry's overactive imagination alone makes the film worth seeing. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Shortbus

The sexy scenes are overlaid with the kind of ridiculous humor that will distract the most dogged voyeur (you try getting turned on while watching someone hum "The Star-Spangled Banner" mid-rimjob), or are strung together in flitting montages that would frustrate the most single-minded masturbator. (Acrobatic heterosex on a piano! Oops, you missed it. Yogic consumption of one's own ejaculate! Oops, you missed it.) No one wants to get off in an art-house theater, and Mitchell lets you have your cake and leave it on the platter, too. Shortbus relies too much on its friendly, exotic, giddy tone. It's a cozy invention, the NYC Shortbus cabaret whose orgies are presided over by a benevolently catty Justin Bond. But a setting can't sustain an entire movie, and the plot is outright lazy. (Literal climax, anyone?) The energy of the film sputters out halfway through—Shortbus could stand to lose 30 minutes off its flabbily melancholic denouement. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Stranger Than Fiction

Taken in pieces, Stranger Than Fiction is an often clever and surprisingly emotional work, its quirkiness tempered by unobtrusive guidance from director Marc Forster. But when looked at as a whole, the film's cleverness proves overwhelming, stranding its characters in a half-baked third act that frays like an old sweater. Philosophy 101 students will no doubt find much to argue over (enabled, handily, by a Yoda-like performance from Dustin Hoffman as a babbling prof), but I suspect the true motivation behind first-time scribe Zach Helm's screenplay is an overall disdain for the writing process. It's here that the film's debt to Charlie Kaufman becomes unavoidable. If you were left cold by the self-loathing machinations of Adaptation, then Stranger Than Fiction should prove to be a tamer, and less complicated, antidote. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)