Bill Stamets

This is vicarious cinema at its best.

A fair amount of visual panache, but the fight scenes are routine, the humor juvenile, and the Toronto locales rendered drab through muddy cinematography.

Likable but negligible.

Director Bruce McCulloch, an alumnus of the Canadian TV show "The Kids in the Hall," lacks the sense of scale and timing needed for a feature film, and Lee's voice-over about fate that brackets the narrative only highlights its shapelessness.

Screenwriter Kate Boutilier provides plenty of sharp patter, and Paul Simon contributed the catchy song "Father and Daughter."

Unfortunately, Volcano is also faithful to Hollywood's legendary lack of originality.

In 20 Dates Myles Berkowitz strings together one embarrassing moment after another and triumphs in a culture characterized by actorly artifice.

As a director, Singleton shares with Furious a didactic streak. Singleton is no demagogue, but his fast-action style tends to erase the nuances of interracial dynamics.

A sunny, gentle action yarn with numbingly repetitive chase scenes and bouncy interludes of playtime.

A poet imprisoned during the Islamic Revolution is released 27 years later. Camera focus, reflections and water droplets are sublimely designed to articulate what his liberty will let him see. [04 Oct 2012, p.4]

Poetic Turkish tale. Nuri Bilge Ceylan shot this entrancing black-and-white story in his hometown, from a story written by his sister and with a cast of friends and relatives. [20 Oct 1998, p.37]

The heaving computer-generated sea swells doesn't match the conventionally animated characters. The action scenes are too antic, but directors Tim Johnson and Patrick Gilmore serve up a sweet romantic subplot.

You can laugh at lines like: "Hey, everybody, let's go inside and eat some cake"; "Leave your stupid comments in your pocket!"; "Man, I just can't figure women out. Sometimes they're just too smart. Sometimes they're flat out stupid. Other times they're just evil." In Wiseau's worldview, if "The Room" were a woman, she wouldn't be "evil" or "too smart." That leaves "flat-out stupid." [12 Feb 2012, p.B2]

Greene delivers a wrenching performance, and like "Smoke Signals," the film ends with a cathartic, triumphant flourish.

The plot is astoundingly senseless.

Maxwell continues his textbook emphasis on military maneuvers, but despite literally thousands of Civil War reenactors recruited for the film, the wide-screen canvas fails to map the tactics or evoke the terror of battle.