Andy Klein

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.