Sublimely cast as a failed musician/faux substitute teacher who leads his prepubescent charges into a “battle of the bands,” Jack Black channels both his over-the-top Tenacious D rocker and his manic inner child, and his kids, mostly non-actors, turn out to be the perfect foils. Rarely resorting to cutesy, School of Rock takes a no-brainer funny premise and brings it to its logical conclusion. Which sounds like faint praise, but when Black orchestrates his Mini-Pops into an impromptu rendition of “Smoke on the Water,” you’re pumping your fist like a total sucker. B

It’s ostensibly a revenge tale: The Bride (Uma Thurman, enjoyably nasty) hunts down her former colleagues after they ambush her wedding, shoot her in the head, and leave her and her unborn baby for dead. But Kill Bill is really writer/director Quentin Tarantino’s ambitious stab at spinning his favourite ’70s trash genres into high art. He almost succeeds, too. There’s enough fake blood to induce a spike in Heinz stock and the result is just as often cartoonish as gross. Yet, even as your stomach churns with each lopped limb, you’re taken with how stylish all this carnage is. Only Tarantino could make a movie so blithely derivative and empty, and whip it into one of the year’s most breathtaking spectacles. B+

As kindred strangers in Tokyo, Bill Murray is his reliable, rumpled self and Scarlett Johansson breaks your heart, but the real star of Lost in Translation is the mood. Whether sweeping gorgeously over neon lights, sneaking a close-up on Murray warbling through “More Than This,” or simply tracking Johansson as she’s alternately seduced and alienated by an impenetrable city, director Sofia Coppola just nails that sad, lonely, bittersweet thing. And despite its high potential ick-factor, she never allows their odd-couple relationship to feel anything less than the most touching thing in the world. A

It’s all here: the favouritism, the politicking, the excruciating team-building, the boss’s unfunny sex-’n’-potty jokes, the soul-deadeningness of it all. The best TV show you’ve probably never seen (it airs on BBC Canada), The Office mines the same biting, deadpan workplace humour as The Larry Sanders Show and The Newsroom, but there’s zero glamour at the Slough branch of Wernham Hogg (“paper merchants”). Manager David Brent (co-creator Ricky Gervais) is spineless, ineffectual and totally clueless, and his staff has basically given up, finding their marginal pleasures in drink, practical jokes and the half-hearted possibility that they’ll one day get out. It’s cynical, dark and depressing. It’s also funny as hell. A+

The real-life tale of Stephen Glass, the young star writer at The New Republic who was busted for fictionalizing 27 articles, Shattered Glass provides a surprisingly legit peek into magazine culture. Peter Sarsgaard is appropriately harried as his embattled editor, and Hayden Christensen as Glass suggests there’s life after Anakin—at least as a studlier Tobey Maguire wannabe. Though you’re still left wondering what Glass was thinking, ultimately the movie is buoyed by a great, true story. As it turns out, Glass managed to manufacture a great, true, appalling ending, too: He published The Fabulist, a novel about a young Washington journalist who happens to be a pathological liar. B-