Geoffrey Fletcher's filmmaking debut, Violet & Daisy, is the summer's oddest, most original treat. Imagine a script by Quentin Tarantino, directed by Wes Anderson - and you have an idea of just how deliciously surprising this film can be.

I heartily endorse the original Hangover. Now we've got Part III. And yes, I recognize that the Roman numeral is meant as a joke -- but I have to point out that it's about as funny as many of the gags in this uneven and busy film.

Anyway, Kim Ki-Duk's Pieta, opening in limited release tomorrow, is as twisted and unexpected as much of the Korean cinema that has reached this shore.

The conventional wisdom about the Star Trek movies starring the cast of the original TV show was that the even-numbered films were the good ones and the odd-numbered ones kind of sucked.

Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell is one of the year's best films: funny, moving, thought-provoking -- and so personal that it strikes universal chords.

Chanoch Ze'evi's documentary, Hitler's Children, tracks down survivors of the top command of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. What they've made of the world is unique from person to person and raises questions in the viewer, as well.

To say that Evil Dead is a film for a specific audience is an understatement. If things like dismemberment and self-mutilation make you queasy -- as they would any normal person -- then you probably shouldn't even visit the same multiplex where this film is showing.

Neither terrible nor revelatory, Ramaa Mosley's The Brass Teapot is the kind of movie you might stumble across on cable and stick with, if only because, well, you've got nothing better to do.

The darling of the Australian Academy Awards and a hit on the festival circuit, The Sapphires is that pure treat: an aggressively entertaining movie about the struggle, uplift, romance and joy of music.

The Silence is chilling stuff, the kind of thriller -- like The Vanishing, let's say -- that leaves you stunned and gulping.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but as someone who was working as a rock critic for the first decade and a half of Journey's existence, I always regarded them as unexplainably popular, an at-best thoroughly mediocre hit-making machine.

Phantom supposedly is based on actual events. But that doesn't lend it weight, authority or even a modicum of dramatic sense.

While this could nominally be considered an action film -- because of a couple of shoot-outs and car chases -- Snitch is more a dramatic thriller with violence thrown in.

Based on the first in a series of books by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, Beautiful Creatures (opening Thursday) hopes the "Twihards" can shift their focus from the undead to the magically endowed.

The only thing Identity Thief steals is your time and your expectation of inventive comedy. The concept may be high, but the yield (in terms of laughs) is depressingly low.

Dear Steven Soderbergh: Please don't stop making movies. Your name is high on the list of filmmakers whose careers I'm thankful have coincided with my career as a movie critic. And Side Effects is further proof that you are at the height of your powers as a filmmaker.

The waste of talent in Fisher Stevens' Stand Up Guys is criminal. It's the movie equivalent of shooting a man in Reno, just to watch him die.

Sometimes, all you want is a knock-down, guns-blazing approximation of an old-style western, even if it's set in contemporary times. As a modern oater, The Last Stand is shamelessly entertaining.

The new Red Dawn isn't that much better than the original and doesn't make much more sense. About the only thing it doesn't do is make the imposing of Sharia law part of its package of horrors.

It's a little early to be proclaiming Ben Affleck's Argo the best movie of the year -- but one of the best? No question.

It's one thing when documentaries like Davis Guggenheim's Waiting for 'Superman and Madeleine Sackler's much better The Lottery look at problems in public education and offer some solutions (such as charter schools).

Hit & Run is like a car doing doughnuts, driving in circles while going nowhere fast.

Gorgeously shot and acted with aching tragic truthfulness, Michael Winterbottom's Trishna is a romance of depth and feeling.

Crazy Eyes was spawned by the same boozy mentality (and, sometimes, sentimentality) that has inspired the work of everyone from Dylan Thomas to Charles Bukowski.

Kirby Dick's shocking documentary, The Invisible War, details a small part of what seems like an epidemic -- not just of sexual assault in the military but of the closed-ranks mentality that keeps the outrage from bubbling into public view.