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By Roger Ebert

"I'm Not There" is an attempt to consider the contradictions of Bob Dylan by building itself upon contradictions. Maybe that's the only way to do it. If you made a biopic with Dylan played by the same actor all the way through, it might become the portrait of a shape-shifting schizophrenic. Todd Haynes' approach is to create six or seven Dylans, depending on how you count, and use six actors to play them. This way, each Dylan is consistent on his own terms, and the life as a whole need not hold together.

Enchanted (PG)

If the slipper fits, wear it

By Roger Ebert

It's no surprise to me that Amy Adams is enchanting. She won my heart in "Junebug" (2005), where she told her clueless husband: "God loves you just the way you are, but he loves you too much to let you stay that way."

Margot at the Wedding (R)

Up the family tree

By Roger Ebert

I wonder if his family knew Noah Baumbach was taking notes. First in "The Squid and the Whale" and now with "Margot at the Wedding," he puts an intelligent but alarming family under the microscope and finds creepy-squirmy things crawling around. Of course, there is no reason to be certain the family in either movie is inspired by his own. But given the degree of familiarity, no reason not to, either. Besides, the character Margot in this one is accused of storing up every family pain, humiliation and embarrassment for recycling in her short stories. Isn't there a rule that if you bring a literary crime onstage in the first act, you have to commit it in the third?

The Mist (R)

Attention shoppers! Get eaten
during our loading dock sale!

By Roger Ebert

Combine (1) a mysterious threat that attacks a town, and (2) a group of townspeople who take refuge together, and you have a formula apparently able to generate any number of horror movies, from "Night of the Living Dead" to "30 Days of Night." All you have to do is choose a new threat and a new place of refuge, and use typecasting and personality traits so we can tell the characters apart.

Hitman (R)

Kill him, or just scan him?

By Roger Ebert

This may only be my quirky way of thinking, but if you wanted to move through the world as an invisible hit man responsible for more than 100 killings on six continents, would you shave your head to reveal the bar code tattooed on the back of your skull? Yeah, not me, either. But Agent 47 has great success with this disguise in "Hitman," which is a better movie than I thought it might be.

This Christmas (PG-13)

No wonder it's the busiest
moviegoing day of the year

By Roger Ebert

I'm not going to make the mistake of trying to summarize what happens in "This Christmas." If you see it, you'll know what I mean. I'm not even talking about spoilers; I'm talking about all the setups as the Whitfield family gathers for the first time in four years. Everybody walks in the door with a secret, and Ma'Dere (Loretta Devine), the head of the family, has two: She has divorced her husband and is living with her boyfriend, Joseph (Delroy Lindo). Almost everyone in the family secretly knows her secrets, but nobody knows most of the others.

August Rush (PG)

A mom and pop score

By Roger Ebert

Here is a movie drenched in sentimentality, but it's supposed to be. I dislike sentimentality where it doesn't belong, but there's something brave about the way "August Rush" declares itself and goes all the way with coincidence, melodrama and skillful tear-jerking. I think more sensitive younger viewers, in particular, might really like it.

Beowulf (PG-13)

Beowulf: I am the very model of a medieval monster slaughterer

In the name of the mighty Odin, what this movie needs is an audience that knows how to laugh. Laugh, I tell you, laugh! Has the spirit of irony been lost in the land? By all the gods, if it were not for this blasted infirmity that the Fates have dealt me, you would have heard from me such thunderous roars as to shake the very Navy Pier itself down to its pillars in the clay.

Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium (G)

Toys R Magorium

By Roger Ebert

Mr. Magorium is 243 years old, he informs us. He has possibly survived so long by being incapable of boredom. Life for him is a daily adventure, which he shares with the children who pack into his magical toy store. And let's talk about the toy store first. If the movies consist of millions and millions of rooms, some of them indoors, some outdoors, some only in our minds, Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium is one of the most delightful. It is jammed to the ceilings and bursting the walls with toys that, in some cases, seem to be alive, and in most cases seem to be real toys, and not the extrusions of market research.

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