Aaron Hillis

Dizzily entertaining when the knives, bullets, and feet are flying, and sometimes painfully melodramatic during the interim exposition.

Rigorous and outrageous, Greenaway's defiant approach to narrative only offers insight into his character, not Eisenstein's.

The film takes one entire act too long to shake its mopey fog and get crackling.

Cohn is clearly on the right track toward making the kind of nuanced grown-up dramas that sadly are no longer in vogue.

Despite Wilson’s early control and aesthetic confidence, there isn’t a single scripted idea of weight or emotionality that pays off.

Equally lionizing but richer in detail than the recent Michael Peña-led biopic César Chávez, this occasionally stirring doc portrait of the late Latino labor organizer and civil rights icon frames his legacy around a single act of protest.

All the secrets, lies, and consequences feel as authentic as the Appalachian milieu, but the film lacks the memorable idiosyncrasy of a River's Edge, or more fittingly, the myth-making lyricism of Matewan.

Vertigo this ain’t, but there’s some quasi-Gothic charm in the baroque premise and eccentric marginal details, including a mathematically gifted dwarf.

It’s all a curious humanist experiment with anecdotal surprises and whimsy, but its motives aren’t in sharp focus like Doyle’s hotshot imagery.

Jersey Girl may have come from his soul, but it contradicts the charm of a Kevin Smith movie.

Directed with little flair, a one-sided perspective and a questionable sense of moral responsibility by Dan Klores (his negligent lack of an editorial voice in the couple's lunacy reeks of train-wreck exploitation), Crazy Love is a disturbingly captivating tabloid horror, but that's not Klores' doing.

Director Teddy Chan's glossy thriller pays tribute to martial-arts cinema by casting enough Hong Kong industry legends to rival the cameo count of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. It's a pity, then, that it's an undeniably bland film in style and story, despite a few elaborately staged fight sequences.

When he runs out of material to tickle with, Black dips into his musically tenacious "deedle-diddle-dee" for some sure-fire ridiculousness.

If the banality of life within the Bordeaux gentry is the point, then the ensuing oppressiveness is immaculately depicted through precise performances and camerawork—just don't call it emotionally engaging drama.

Mostly due to the assured polish of cinematographer Sean Stiegemeier, Chapman punches above its featherweight budget, but the punch is ultimately pulled as both strands of the narrative intersect with one last reveal of unresolved melodrama that feels coldly calculated in its cause and effect.

Spoiled by its own insatiable desire for envelope-pushing flair; it’s wider-scoped when it should be intimate, splashy instead of subtle, icky but not scary.

The film is undeniably elevated by its exotic milieu. It's a shame, then, that it's stuck with such a familiar coming-of-age call to adventure.

Are these iconic, antihero relics smartly satirized in a post-slasher, or is FVJ just more dated, third-wave trash? Disappointingly, it's the latter.

Technically, it rewards with nothing less than painterly cinematography and a seamless surge of organic soundscapes, but the story is entirely predicated on a weather metaphor so obvious that even an unplugged Doppler radar could detect it.

One-dimensional fluff piece.

When the secret is finally divulged, it’s such a letdown that it feels unfairly manipulative to have sat through such agonizing tedium.

Big and dumb and loud and entirely past its prime.

The Ten has one foot in "Monty Python's Meaning of Life" and another in their "Life of Brian," but ultimately we get the David Letterman School of Comedy: mediocre jokes continually repeated until they sometimes become uncomfortably funny.

What’s missing here is the amnesiac hook that made "The Bourne Identity" such a sleeper hit.

So stupendously funny at times that she (Streep) nearly salvages the whole thing.

The dubious whimsy, devoid of any directorial voice, plays more like a very special episode of Dawson’s Creek.

Appropriately hunky but neutered of the brute sexuality he exhibited in Bullhead and Rust and Bone, Schoenaerts and his lack of bodice-busting tension with Winslet mirrors the film's transparent, often anachronistic inauthenticity.

As a fan, it's upsetting to admit that Dumont's ideas and insights have narrowed with this picture, his relaxed pacing now lethargic, his physically and mentally thick characters too familiar, and his ice-water shocks a bit predictable. It would seem self-parodic if it weren't so damn tragic.