Andy Klein

It is a moving and solidly entertaining comedy/drama that should bolster director and co-writer Juan José Campanella's reputation in the United States.

It's an interesting, often worthwhile, film, but humor isn't its strongest attribute.

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

Greenwood gives a nuanced performance that may be the film's best work, but at times his surface dissimilarities to JFK are jarring.

While the whole is diverting, the ending's utter repudiation of reality seems like pissing on the audience; -- we feel like we've been suckers for bothering to care about the characters at all.

Rea hits just the right balance of sympathy and self-interest.

Hu has crafted a charming and modest movie.

The actors labor long and hard to bring some semblance of reality to the proceedings, but the whole affair has a distinctly faux '50s feel to it.

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.

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.

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.

Solidly entertaining little film.

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.

Pecker is a satire, but an incredibly good-natured one, which is not quite the contradiction in terms it might seem.

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

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.

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

Belongs somewhere in the low middle of Altman's output -- not up to "Cookie's Fortune," but way better than, say, "Beyond Therapy," which remains his worst film by some margin.

With no aspects of the personalities represented outside of their music, Grateful Dawg ends up feeling dry and incomplete; its two subjects are stripped of all other characteristics and come across as not very interesting.

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

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.

An amusing trifle. There are few comic staples less convincing or more timeworn than charming lunatics in love, and the only thing that lifts this film beyond TV-movie quality is Jones' performance.

The problem with Wendigo, for all its effective moments, isn't really one of resources. At its heart, the story seems confused, as though the director has given it one too many twists.

Star Jeremy Renner seems shorter than Dahmer, but is otherwise a look-alike and gives a convincingly intense and weird performance. Bruce Davison (as Papa Dahmer) and the rest of the cast also do nice work.

Both Fellini and Woody Allen have remarked that casting is 90 percent of directing--and Citizen Ruth bears witness to that notion. While this is primarily Dern's show, the casting is perfect all around.

It manages to be sentimental without seeming trashy.

It just doesn¹t get very good until halfway through, in large part because the usually excellent Walston is miscast.

In terms of cleverly hidden exposition, this ain't "The Sixth Sense."

Fails dramatically as well as ideologically.

It more or less makes sense and it's not dull -- more than can be said for many similar attempts.

I can’t imagine why anyone would plunge ahead with this project -- an adaptation of a classic no one reads, about characters no one could care about, directed by a filmmaker of little talent and less success.

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.

If you don't view it too analytically, Men of Honor provides almost more uplift than a body can handle.

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

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.

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

While there's nothing original in Rush Hour, it runs through its well-worn paces with both wit and excitement.

Stylish, but definitely not for the squeamish

The film looks great, but Wargnier is so heavy-handed in his portrayal of postwar Russia that it casts suspicions on the film's reliability as history.

Lee's pace is slow enough to try viewers' patience.

Cube is essentially a glossy, beautifully designed 90-minute Twilight Zone episode.

As satisfying as much of the film is, there are a few missteps, large and small, that may require indulgence on the part of viewers.

Reasonably well-made and all, but it's simply too familiar, too derivative and too inferior to its predecessors to have any reason to exist.

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

Abandon all hopes of common sense, and enter the theater with high expectations for visceral entertainment. You won't be disappointed.

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

For all of the heroine's shockingly "modern" lifestyle choices, the thrust of the film is remarkably old-fashioned. It embraces the notion that you can have only a single great love in a lifetime...and that's if you're lucky.

It's always risky to characterize a new film as "unique," but Tuvalu, the debut feature from German director Veit Helmer, has as good a shot as any at claiming that label.

Will probably please hard-core action fans who have become inured to plot idiocies, but it remains a terrible waste of talent.

Whatever its flaws -- and it has some lulus -- it's a textbook model for how to structure action of this kind.

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.

It's unlikely that anyone will be bored. But it's just as unlikely that anyone will be swept off his feet either.

As in Extraction, the action sequences are the whole game here, and they do not disappoint.

Taymor moves Titus completely out of time and into all time.

More than just a disappointment. It is also a spoiler, possibly weakening the impact of "Silence" for its fans.

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

It doesn't add up to much more than a trifle that might have been more impressive as a short.

It doesn't have enough power in the first place to make a strong claim on our attentions.

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

By the end, we simply have no idea what he (Lee) feels or what the film is really about. And we are too worn out to care.

Doesn't show us much of anything we haven't seen better already.

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.

Middlebrow art has its built-in pitfalls, not the least of them sentimentality and intellectual flabbiness -- both of which are in abundant supply in Bagger Vance.

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.

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

Not everything in the film happens according to the traditional, overly familiar blueprint.

An occasionally funny, but overall limp, fish-out-of-water story.

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

A political film in the form of a thriller, rather than a garden-variety potboiler gleefully helping itself to stock political tropes from the genre's grab bag.

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.

This nearly perfect confection never takes its action more seriously than its comedy.

Brosnan proved his worth last time around; but, sad to say, the rest of Tomorrow Never Dies lacks the wit and inventiveness of GoldenEye, let alone of Goldfinger.

Enjoyable, if utterly stupid, upscale entry in the old Amityville Horror genre -- that is, a horror film allegedly based on spooky and inexplicable real-life events.

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.

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

After a few very funny early sequences, tricked up with grotesque, surreal editing and camerawork, the movie gets bogged down a bit during the first third.

The over-the-top sincerity that is so rewarding in "Face/Off" (1998), Woo's best American film, feels too clichéd in this more conventional context.

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.

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.

Slips by quickly enough, but it never engages our interest more than passingly.

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.

The film is often moving and explores the discomfort inherent in the contacts between the American "hosts" and their "guests," but its effect is diluted by slow pacing and lengthiness.

This is mostly well-constructed fluff, which is all it seems intended to be.

Scrappy, sappy, and appealing.

While the movie tries to make the connection between the rough but sensitive lad we see on screen and the notorious carouser of later years, there's little here to suggest whatever torment led Behan to drunkenness and an absurdly early death at 41.

While Brother may be the perfect introduction for Kitano newcomers, longtime fans may find it superfluous and even a step down from the likes of Hana-Bi (1997) and Sonatine (1993).

Schnitzler's film has a great hook, some clever bits and well-drawn, if standard issue, characters, but is still only partly satisfying. The problem may very well be one of cultural translation.

At best, second-rate pulp, hampered by excessive length, a thematically meandering screenplay, and a general lack of excitement.

Just barely diverting, even at under 80 minutes -- a TV episode inflated past its natural length.

Helgeland makes a solid debut as director here, finding a new angle through which to view the Parker character, and doing so without exhausting the possibilities.

Festival in Cannes is an amused indictment of Jaglom's own profession; he doesn't seem to be making excuses for anybody's compromised (or even downright immoral) behavior here.

It's sweet and well intentioned, with occasional amusing moments.

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

While the idea may be good, its execution is awful.

This is quintessential "family entertainment."

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.

Nobody can convey more while doing nothing than Thornton. And while his minimalist style is appropriate for the ironically named Levity, what is conveyed never quite generates the emotional charge of "Monster's Ball."

Its greatest flaw is the casting of Miller ("Trainspotting," "Hackers"), who continues to have virtually no screen presence...For all that, Plunkett & Macleane is fun.