AMIE

If you’re looking to fall in love, or just to feel good about the world and the people in it for a couple of hours, look no further than this delightful, intoxicating confection by Jean-Pierre Jeunet (“The City of Lost Children”), the sweetest, funniest, most generous and most inventive popular entertainment of the year. In a performance that will steal, break and warm your heart, gamine Audrey Tautou plays a waitress who discovers that her true destiny is to help destiny along by altering the lives of those around her so they can find their bliss. In the process, we find plenty, while Ame discovers that destiny has its own agenda. The film is beautifully constructed, designed and photographed. Rated R; nudity, sexual situations. In French with English subtitles. (2 hours)

Liberty Hall Cinemas, 644 Mass.

A BEAUTIFUL MIND

Having won an Oscar for his beefy performance in “Gladiator,” Russell Crowe goes for another the old-fashioned way, playing mathematician John Nash Jr., a genius whose accomplishments were overshadowed by paranoid schizophrenia. Like most Ron Howard movies, this one is sincere and well-constructed, but it feels like an unsatisfying stunt. Rated PG-13; violence, language. (2 hours, 15 minutes)

Southwind Twelve, 3433 Iowa.

BIRTHDAY GIRL

“Birthday Girl” wins its winks through surprise. This is kinky love from the nation that invented emotional repression, Great Britain. Ben Chaplin plays John, a mild-mannered bank clerk who orders a bride from an online spouse service, “From Russia With Love.” John figures he’s hit the jackpot when Nadia (Nicole Kidman) is who he meets at the airport. Unfortunately, she doesn’t speak English. The early scenes between a man and a woman who have nothing in common but one’s odd sexual tastes and the other’s desire to fulfill those desires are cute and kinky, in a kind of warmhearted way. Then, director/co-writer Jez Butterworth, who gave us the mildly erotic “Mojo,” flips between thriller, as Nadia turns out to be not what she seems, and romantic road comedy, as John and Nadia go off on the run together, terribly reluctantly. But this is Kidman’s movie, a jolting reminder of the sort of year this actress has had. Rated R; sexuality, language, violence. (2 hours, 3 minutes)

Southwind Twelve, 3433 Iowa.

BLACK HAWK DOWN

Director Ridley Scott (“Hannibal”) presents the real-life tale “Black Hawk Down” from the perspective of the elite American forces who took part in the deadly 1993 firefight with a Somalian civilian army. His effort is neither a jingoistic exercise in military muscle (a “Top Gun”) nor an existential parable about the futility of war (as in “The Thin Red Line”). Rather, it is simply a detailed documentation of a specific, flawed event. And it’s as tense and compelling as a war movie could hope to be. Beyond just the combat footage which is second only to “Saving Private Ryan” in terms of sheer expertise the movie displays a number of images that burn into the mind, most of which involve the juxtaposition of U.S. military hardware against the antiquated backdrop of an impoverished African city. Rated R; language, extreme violence. (2 hours, 23 minutes)

Southwind Twelve, 3433 Iowa.

THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO

The world doesn’t need another adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ tale of betrayal and vengeance this is about the 20th but this is a mildly entertaining diversion during these dull days of the movie dumping-ground season. Jim Caviezel isn’t the world’s most compelling hero as the wrongly imprisoned Edmond Dantes, and Guy Pearce is more sniveling than sinister as Fernand Mondego, the jealous friend who frames him for treason. But the story picks up steam as Edmond puts his revenge plan into action, thanks to strong supporting work from Richard Harris and Luis Guzman. Rated PG-13; adventure violence/swordplay, sensuality. (2 hours, 12 minutes)

Southwind Twelve, 3433 Iowa.

GOSFORD PARK

So what genre hasn’t American master Robert Altman deconstructed? Oh, there’s still the opulent English country-house melodrama and the Agatha Christie whodunit, so we kill two grouse with one impeccably aimed pellet in this deliciously entertaining social satire. The wonderful cast includes Maggie Smith, Clive Owen, Helen Mirren, Derek Jacobi, Jeremy Northam, Emily Watson, Eileen Atkins … are we running out of room yet? One of the best and most entertaining movies of Altman’s 30-plus-year career which, considering “MAS*H,” “Nashville” and “Vincent & Theo,” is no small achievement. Rated R; language, sexual situations, violence. (2 hours, 17 minutes)

Liberty Hall Cinemas, 644 Mass.

I AM SAM

Sean Penn is in top form as a mentally challenged man struggling to retain custody of his adored 7-year-old daughter (Dakota Fanning), and Michelle Pfeiffer has the arguably more challenging role as the hard-driving, self-absorbed attorney who is transformed in the process of defending him. Superior acting, writing and direction Jessie Nelson is the director-co-writer conspire to stave off treacle and deliver a warm, hard-to-resist entertainment. Rated PG-13; language. (2 hours, 13 minutes)

Southwind Twelve, 3433 Iowa.

IN THE BEDROOM

Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson give the two most affecting and fully realized performances in any American movie this year in this drama about unthinkable and avoidable tragedy and the grief, regret and blame that results. When their upper-middle-class marriage, as carefully maintained as their New England cottage, begins to crumble as a consequence of the pain inflicted on them, they blame the world, the law and then each other only to seek comfort, finally, in a way they would have never imagined possible. Todd Field makes an auspicious directing debut; every detail seems perfectly, sadly right. Rated R; violence, language. (1 hour, 18 minutes)

Liberty Hall Cinemas, 644 Mass.

KUNG POW: ENTER THE FIST

The youthful audience targeted by the martial arts spoof “Kung Pow: Enter the Fist” is not old enough to appreciate why this is such silly, perfect fun, because they never had the pleasure of going to those cheesy kung fu double features in the 1970s. Consider a martial arts smackdown between the Chosen One (Steve Oedekerk), who is out to avenge the death of his family by the fist of one “Master Pain,” and an animated cow in need of a milking. Writer-director Oedekerk took a 1976 Hong Kong actioner named “Savage Killers” and re-edited it in “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?” fashion, adding new footage and dubbed dialogue, to create an entirely different movie that is cheerfully ridiculous. It’s pitch-perfect, right down to clunky camerawork, choppy editing and characters who squeal. Rated PG-13; comic violence, crude and sexual humor. (1 hour, 22 minutes)

Southwind Twelve, 3433 Iowa.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING

Those who failed to complete J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic journey through Middle-earth may find themselves headed to the bookstore at the end of Peter Jackson’s first installment of the trilogy. “Ring” sends naive hobbit ringbearer Frodo Baggins (a perfectly cast Elijah Wood), his wizard mentor Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and assorted other humans, hobbits, elves and dwarves on a quest to restore good to a world threatened by evil. The story is so involving and the characters so vivid you may not want to wait until next Christmas to see what happens next. The scenery, effects and storytelling are marvelous and imaginative, and it’s played with total sincerity, which is sometimes a problem: Some of the dramatic interludes border on the cornball. Rated PG-13; graphic violence. (2 hours, 58 minutes)

Southwind Twelve, 3433 Iowa.

THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES

A repetitive, overstylized thriller without thrills starring Richard Gere as a Washington Post reporter investigating his wife’s death in a small West Virginia town. Several locals say they’ve seen the same swooping, winged Mothman she saw before she died. Director Mark Pellington tries too hard to be spooky, but the movie ends up being annoying instead. Laura Linney improves things barely as a police sergeant who’s on the case. The movie trumpets ominously that it’s “based on true events” detailed in John A. Keel’s 1975 book of the same name. Rated PG-13; terror, some sexuality and language. (1 hour, 59 minutes)

Southwind Twelve, 3433 Iowa.

THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS

Director Wes Anderson, who cowrote this ambitious, dysfunctional-family comedy with Owen Wilson, has gone way out of his way to be accessible a response, perhaps, to the belief that his “Rushmore” was too hip for the room. But while the film is full of comically idiosyncratic characters played by bona fide movie stars (Gene Hackman, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Stiller and Danny Glover among them), its story of unhappy geniuses reluctantly reunited in their New York City family home never achieves emotional closure or coherence. This is not to say it isn’t entertaining and occasionally provocative: It’s like a good issue of the New Yorker instead of a great one. Rated R; sexual themes, language. (1 hour, 48 minutes)

Southwind Twelve, 3433 Iowa.

SNOW DOGS

One weird, edgy scene in which Cuba Gooding Jr.’s character imagines in a fever-induced hallucination that Siberian huskies are talking to him is the best part of a lightweight, predictable Disney comedy. Gooding is ingratiating as always as a Miami dentist who finds out he was adopted and treks to Alaska after his real mother dies. All the locals are flannel-wearing, heavily bearded stereotypes with bad teeth including James Coburn as his real father. But the dogs are just too cute, along with their animatronic counterparts that are so expressive they’re spooky. Rated PG; mild crude humor. (1 hour, 39 minutes)

Southwind Twelve, 3433 Iowa.

A WALK TO REMEMBER

An overwrought teen weepy “Terms of Endearment” for the “TRL” crowd starring pop star Mandy Moore and Shane West of “Once and Again” as high school opposites who fall in love. Moore plays the quiet reverend’s daughter and West plays the shallow popular guy who undergoes a moral transformation, thanks to her. Besides solidifying teen movie clich it rips off elements of “Love Story,” “Footloose” and “As Good As It Gets.” Moore and West show more poise than most pretty young actors, but they can’t overcome the maudlin script, adapted from the Nicholas Sparks novel of the same name. Rated PG; language, some sensual material. (1 hour, 38 minutes)

Southwind Twelve, 3433 Iowa.