Andy Klein

This is after all a romantic comedy, not a romantic tragedy, though you might not realize it since it’s almost devoid of humor.

For fans of the franchise, Evil Dead Rises marks a welcome return to the seamless blend of humor and genuine scares and creepiness that Raimi created 42 years ago.

Harrelson is enjoyable as always, and the rest of the cast delivers, but the film is too warm, fuzzy, predictable, and by the numbers to be anything more than a pleasant diversion that will vanish from your mind by the time you leave the multiplex.

The film operates like a clockwork mechanism. If there were foul-ups or major implausibilities—as such trick plots often have—they eluded me.

Instead of gags, we’re treated to endless observations about love, commitment, romance, parental responsibilities, and other well-trod subjects. None of this is particularly insightful or interesting.

Spinal Tap is still on the right side of the fine line between stupid and clever.

In the end, it's all just too damned much. It's more exhausting than edifying.

But by the end the audience, along with Clayton, has been jerked around so many times that it's almost too exhausting...By then, it's almost impossible to care.

May display an energetic and promising talent, but it is also uncomfortably close to being a 105-minute music video, with all the problems that suggests.

So uplifting, it's almost...gross.

It's not really a kids' film, nor it is particularly funny, by either design or execution. It is, rather, Columbus' latest attempt at a comically tinged tearjerker.

The film is overwrought, slow, and portentous, with confusing surreal elements and a narrative time scheme that's impossible to keep track of.

Despite the generally likable characters and the abundance of clever ideas, Lustig mucks it all up with her "trick" editing.

Except for a few slow patches, the movie is compulsively watchable: You keep waiting to see just how sick things are going to get.

Sad to say, the story is simply too slight to sustain the film.

Manages the seemingly impossible task of being very funny indeed and being as dark as anything Wong has ever made. This is an almost painfully bleak comedy that makes you squirm in the manner of “The Out-of-Towners.”

A warning is virtually mandated: No one who's even the least bit squeamish should even think about seeing Audition. But, if you have a taste for the disturbing, it's a trip that will stay with you for some time.

An uninspired, standard-issue mimeo whose only distinguishing feature is a reversal in its casting.

Maniacally funny. It remains neck and neck with "Young Frankenstein" as Brooks' best film.

The film is a masterpiece of nuance and characterization, marred only by an inexplicable, utterly distracting blunder at the very end.

Its tone has elements of Jim Jarmusch and the Coen brothers but without Jarmusch's self-conscious artiness or the Coens' hip snottiness.

At first glance, Schizopolis may seem like no more than a grab-bag of tricks and gimmicks, but repeat viewings reveal a more coherent pattern.

More involving and intriguing than any by-the-numbers studio thriller. In large part, it holds our interest because of its stylistic boldness, not despite it.

There have been other films dealing with the Jewish ghettos during the Nazi occupation of Poland -- some very good -- but The Pianist, the latest feature from Roman Polanski, may be the best.

This is not Tsui's best film by a substantial margin, but it's immense fun.

On the up side, there are some genuinely funny jokes, and Oedekerk has been wise enough to keep the running time down to 82 minutes, including the eight-minute closing credit sequence (which is worth staying through its entirety). But Kung Pow! is no "What's Up, Tiger Lily?"

The story is just as funny and touching. The only problem is the inevitable one: The freshness -- the novel delight -- is a little faded now.

The muddiness of the basic concept and the thinness of its execution eventually defeat even Witherspoon's talents.

Craven's other accomplishment here, besides resuscitating the genre, is the way he keeps things scary even when they're at their funniest. The grand finale, while thoroughly bloody and tense, has some genuinely hilarious shtick.

This is quintessential "family entertainment."

Fact is, there is nothing feloniously awful about the whole thing, but the laughs are tepid and too infrequent.

It’s Del Toro who really gets to strut his stuff with a subtle, ambiguous, and riveting performance. In a field of top-notch actors, he’s the one whom you remember days later.

It manages to be sentimental without seeming trashy.

What Nolan does accomplish here that we haven't seen from him before is staging a few horrifyingly effective suspense set pieces -- one of which, in particular, is likely to stay with you for a long time.

Fuqua has done an admirable job staging the action scenes, but the script is little more than a thin framework to justify those scenes.

A six-year-old masterpiece, never-before widely seen in the U.S., is still a masterpiece.

In the end, the performances and the basic strength of the premise make Shadow of the Vampire a relatively diverting ninety minutes. But there is the inescapable feeling that it is a shadow of the great film it might have been.

For all its mystery and its stylistic finesse, there is something vaguely plodding about The Sweet Hereafter.

It's refreshing and unusual to see clever strategy trumping ritual honor in a film of this genre, even if one of the tricks seems gratuitously brutal.

Zhang deftly and quickly draws a half-dozen supporting characters, and his pacing never flags.

It's funny, heroic, exaggerated and, most of all, energetic; the film speeds along as though afraid to lose the audience's attention for even a moment.

Full of provocative concepts, but, like most films that attack such metaphysical concerns head-on, things have become a tad too jumbled by the end to be altogether satisfying. It's a problem built into the subject matter...This all said, Dark City is immensely entertaining, as well as visually dazzling.

This really should have gone straight to video--or, better yet, to the nearest landfill.

It's hard to know just how much to trust Titanic Town.

Despite some savvy camera movement, the production values obviously can't match American action films made for a hundred times the budget. Still, Hatamikia has put together a gripping drama that balances visceral suspense and interesting ideas.

What about Ronny Yu's 1992 masterpiece "The Bride With White Hair," of which Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a decent facsimile?

The redeeming features of All Over the Guy are the consistently engaging performances and some genuinely funny dialogue.

Filled with sharp observations and interesting, often subtle, bits of visual trickery, much of it evoking the technique of Douglas Sirk's American domestic melodramas. Still, the very simple story seems too simple and the working out of the plot almost arbitrary.

As the story plows toward its finale, the cultural dislocation problems become worse, until by the end they almost defeat the whole film.

A lovely little comedy that--like its predecessor--will, one hopes, buck the odds and find its audience.

The movie is not always satisfying as a standard thriller, nor is it always clear; but it's never dull, either, and it displays a sensibility so weird as to be its own recommendation.

The ludicrous casting of Hoffman is just the fatal bit of kindling on this Joan's fire.

His most thoroughly surreal work since Eraserhead, this two-hour-plus fever dream is more of one piece than Fire Walk with Me and less desperate and jokey than Wild at Heart.

The entire cast is right on the money, a special word must be said about Seth.

What's particularly scary about Hollywood Ending, however, is that its flaws are exactly the sort of problems that often afflict aging directors, flaws that we've never seen in Allen before -- bad comic timing, slack pacing, an unsteady control of tone, a reliance on jokes that have long since become clichés.

While Mononoke is often gorgeous to look at and has a far more sophisticated story than most Japanese animated features, it still feels overlong and dramatically unengaging.

This film made Dietrich a star, and it's easy to see why: Slightly more voluptuous than in her later films, Dietrich is the embodiment of the pleasures of the flesh.

It was Melville's second-to-last feature, and it shows him in top form, with a more generous dose of humor than usual.

An exciting, sharply realized melodramatic film noir, based on Elizabeth Sanxay Holding's novel "The Blank Wall."

In the real audience with which I watched it, the only laughs were from kids under eight or nine, mostly at hilarious "hooter" jokes.

Headey, Skarsgård and Rampling flesh these people out marvelously, bringing them fully to life. It's almost a pity: The more real they become, the less pleasant is the time we spend with them.

It's nothing more than a very long movie about someone, literally and metaphorically, having to get back up on a horse.

The only genuine surprises on hand are the few moments when the film defies the expectations that have been programmed into our collective neurons by the past 25 years of horror movies.

It's during the shift to seriousness that The Ice Storm makes its missteps. The intrusion of tragedy, while altogether believable, still seems like a device, a calculated tug at the heart strings. It is, in short, a once-effective ploy that now feels like a cliche. A near-miss might have been more effective.

Thankfully, the final, long action set piece, which owes a debt to "The Manchurian Candidate" among others, is free of such problems. Shiri manages to go out on its most exciting sequence. There are worse ways to go.

While tyro director Simon West fills Con Air with all the slam-bang action and well-honed wisecracks that were the more positive qualities of its predecessors, the film brims even more with all their worst qualities.

In the end, Code Unknown is a puzzle with no obvious solution.

At 75, Aranda can still make his actors sizzle on the screen as well as he did 10 years ago in "Lovers." The explicitly hot bits here may be few and far between, but what there is of them is choice.

It is engaging, touching, and frequently funny. Maybe because his hero is inarticulate and his heroine is mute, Allen relies far more than usual on physical comedy than on the verbal jokes that are his strongest comic suit.

The texture is reminiscent of last year's "Suzhou River," but the basic material isn't as rich.

The cold distance that LaBute brings to the material keeps the viewer at arms' length.

The Wachowskis still hold the current franchise on intellectually engaging action films. It's not like I won't be heading back for a second (or even third) look.

With virtually no interesting elements for an audience to focus on, Chelsea Walls is a triple-espresso endurance challenge.

Generally engaging.

Eastwood provides more than an hour of easygoing fun, followed by 45 minutes of action and suspense.

Shot in stylish black and white, with a memorably low-key performance from Duchesne, Bob le Flambeur is definitely worth checking out on the big screen in a fresh print.

Has an awkwardness that defeats whatever emotional involvement it tries to achieve.

Condensing, paring and shorthanding the story elements can be daunting, and, despite the efforts of Kasdan and Goldman, two masters at wrangling unwieldy source material into shape, there is some awkwardness and confusion in the result.

Hope Floats comes lumbering along, scourging all in its path with saccharine sentimentality and bogus emotions.

For those with a taste for epics that integrate the historical and the intimate.

Handily in a league with its predecessor...as good a follow-up as one can imagine, given the built-in difficulties of sequels.

Stylish, but definitely not for the squeamish

Fans of convoluted narrative in the manner of Christopher Nolan and David Lynch are likely to be intrigued, although Medem has a far stronger streak of sentiment.

What's most disappointing is the almost utter lack of humor -- In the mindless action sweepstakes, however, there's still enough here to place The Transporter above big-bang gibberish like XXX.

When emotion is called for, Cassavetes drags out every tear-jerking moment beyond the point of tolerability.

What Ichaso does do is take us on a dizzying, constantly moving ride through an exciting decade in the blossoming of "Nuyorican" culture with its most flamboyant figure as our focus.

Jones seems to have trouble keeping up with the large amount of action he's required to participate in. And Del Toro seems ill-cast and ill-used.

If a movie is going to be so totally derivative, it should at least do a better job of it.

Varda, still pixieish in her early 70s, is having fun here.

While the humor is recognizably Plympton, he has actually bothered to construct a real story this time, and the joke sequences are shorter and better integrated. The visual style is also richer and "better drawn" than before.

Indeed heartwarming, though not simplemindedly so.

The acting tends toward the cartoonish (not in a good way), and the story is built on a series of illogical motivations.

The film still delivers the goods, in part because of Eastwood's iconic presence and in part because of Daniels' scene-stealing work in what could have been a hokey role.

From the start, a comprehensible, if necessarily simplified, sense of an extremely complicated moment in history.

The performance itself (which aired on PBS and is available on DVD) apparently went perfectly; given the potential pitfalls that Miller documents, it's some kind of miracle.

Gilroy has brilliantly played to his strengths in Spring Forward. With a story that has no room for big, obviously "cinematic" effects, he concentrates on simple staging, unobtrusive (though often beautifully evocative) visuals, and sheer performance. It's a decision that pays off.

Altman's technique also allows his huge cast to act up a storm, in the best sense. Gosford Park has roughly half the best actors in England in it.

This use of narrative irony is in fact not just the central joke; it's the only joke. And as a result, the movie slightly overstays its welcome.