Lindsay Lohan in I Know Who Killed MeI KNOW WHO KILLED ME

Lindsay Lohan's latest movie, I Know Who Killed Me, is for those who saw the actress' recent mug shot and were praying that Hollywood would adapt it for the big screen. (The photograph in question, as nearly everyone now knows, was taken after Lohan's arrest for alleged drunk driving and cocaine possession.)

Keisha Castle-Hughes in The Nativity StoryTHE NATIVITY STORY

After more than an hour of noble attempts and unfortunate - though unembarrassing - failings, director Catherine Harwicke, in her biblical tale of The Nativity Story, finally lands upon the style she appears to have been aiming for all along. Mary (Keisha Castle-Hughes) has just given birth to Jesus, and as she lies in the manger alongside her husband, Joseph (Oscar Isaac), a blinding shaft of light descends from the heavens and lands directly on the holy family, creating a tableaux that is at once instantly familiar and freshly moving.

Garrison Keillor, Meryl Streep, and Lindsay Lohan in A Prairie Home CompanionA PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION

One of the many glories of Robert Altman is that he never pretends to know everything there is to know about the characters in his movies, and doesn't expect his audiences to, either. In an Altman film, you may think you have someone all figured out, until a later scene proves that you haven't begun to understand what makes them tick; Altman is fascinated with the dichotomy between characters' public and private faces. (It makes perfect sense that he eventually filmed a murder mystery.) It sometimes seems that there's not much going on in an Altman movie, and audiences could easily assume the same about the director's latest, A Prairie Home Companion. But if you're as enthralled with character as the director is, and with the drama of actors gradually revealing character, his ambling, "plotless" films can be sheer bliss.

Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou in The Da Vinci CodeTHE DA VINCI CODE

Throughout Ron Howard's The Da Vinci Code - based, of course, on Dan Brown's staggeringly successful novel - Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou continually find themselves in dimly lit rooms, gloomy cathedrals, and the occasional underground tomb. When the characters finally do venture outdoors, their visibility doesn't much improve, as almost the entire movie takes place at night. And during the film's two-and-a-half-hour running length, deprived of nearly all natural (and even artificial) light, I never craved a nap so badly in my life.

Will Ferrell and Nicole Kidman in BewitchedBEWITCHED

As needless films versions of "classic" '60s TV series go, Nora Ephron's Bewitched is even worse than endeavors such as I, Spy and The Beverly Hillbillies, because this one actually seemed promising.

Shia LaBeouf and Will Smith in I, RobotI, ROBOT

I, Robot is perfectly titled, because it's about as mechanical and impersonal as Hollywood entertainment gets. That's not to say it's completely unenjoyable - Alex Proyas' sci-fi work, inspired by a series of Isaac Asimov stories, features some nifty set pieces, including an exciting mid-film sequence involving a hundred 'bots doing considerable damage on an underground freeway - but the film progresses with so little inventiveness that you'll have better luck tallying up the film's numerous influences (Blade Runner, A. I., Minority Report ... ) than finding an original idea.

Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Seyfried, Lacey Chabert, and Rachel McAdams in Mean GirlsMEAN GIRLS

Recently, some friends introduced me to the considerable pleasures of Freaks & Geeks on DVD, and I understood why the show barely lasted a season; it was a nearly pitch-perfect rendering of high school's everyday horrors and comic humiliations, and what mass audience, hoping for mindless entertainment, wants to subject themselves to that? And just like that sublime TV series, Mean Girls, the new teen comedy directed by Mark Waters and written by Tina Fey, is so wickedly sharp and achingly funny that its target audience probably won't know what to make of it.(At the screening I attended, everyone laughed like hell at the overt physical comedy, but the movie's most hilarious dialogue fell on deaf ears.)

Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan in Freaky FridayFREAKY FRIDAY

Everyone I know has enormous fondness for the 1976 Disney comedy Freaky Friday, wherein mother Barbara Harris and daughter Jodie Foster switched bodies and discovered, on one very strange day, how the other half lived.