Bill Weber

It reaches a peak of dramatic anguish in star Rachel Weisz's single moment of naked fury, rather than through the tenacity and compassion that define her crusading title character.

True to Hollywood's tireless efforts to fit square-peg material into roundish genre niches, this wavering, intermittently smart story of daring to think differently flattens its narrative into formula.

In a character study of an ex-con who gives her heart and mind to animals rather than people, Melissa Leo's risky performance is ultimately framed with a disappointing, distanced pity.

A bubbly 90-year-old mascot from the golden days of the American musical, this doc's subject is certainly larger than the conventional testimonial treatment she's given.

A lumpy spoof of electoral mudslinging that offers some bracing bipartisan contempt amid the lowbrow, labored slapstick.

Both brutal and sentimental, this Oscar-submitted Korean war drama offers up rusty tropes as telling ironies.

A Slovakian character study of a boy ambivalently caught between worlds that ultimately squanders its promise.

Updating this anachronistic cash cow with the scrappy and sexy Craig still looks like a wise move, but it requires a greater quantum of style than Solace provides.

Von Trier and his three cinematographers fashioned a handmade, retro pastiche with a small, dried-out heart.

Alternately maudlin and snarky, Norman just doesn't risk enough, and can be consigned to the status of what the school drama geek would call "some contemporary, obscure, teen-angst thing."

Anonymous leaves one bereft of any meaningful knowledge of these personages or the theatrical energy of their age, and earns the obscurity it figures to acquire even if the war between Team Edward and Team William blazes on.

This adaptation of a prize-winning Australian novel is a stodgy slog save for some sporadic moments of blunt force supplied by Judy Davis and Charlotte Rampling.

Brighton Rock never brings its baby-faced hood antihero, the scarfaced Pinkie Brown (Sam Riley, pouting and hunched in the late-DiCaprio manner), into a semblance of human plausibility.

The weightlessness that dominates the film is no special effect.

The movie's deathblow is the casting of poet-artist Miss Ming as Mammuth's affectless niece, whose twee verse and sculpture make Miranda July seem like a bearer of gravitas.

A dry dream of postmenopausal-male sexual lethargy, this comedy's least musty ideas are among its worst.

A pseudo-investigative documentary shakily committed to the subject of subliminal messaging in America, but curiously indulgent about giving the singer of Queensryche time to spout off about whatever enters his head.

Adhering to what is apparently a formula for national superproductions, 1911 throws dates and names on the screen with unceasing speed and frequent irrelevance -- gratuitously identifying a walk-on as "German diplomat."

A banal "poetic" drama of a grieving stranger licking his wounds in a bayside Michigan town.

An ostensible Danish "Hangover" that more closely resembles "Two and a Half Men" with nudity and unexpurgated dick jokes.

Bille August's film is a protracted, soporific trip into Portuguese history that would like to be a romantic thriller.

The ill use made of the stars' charms in this initially strained, then egregiously dopey mushfest can likely be credited to market-tested notions of modern popular romance.

"With age comes exhaustion," according to a rueful line late in the film, and it serves as a fitting diagnosis for Woody Allen's latest fallen souffle set in a European cultural capital.

Lacking both spiritual and narrative spark, Vera Farmiga's directorial debut suffers from her flat performance and a moribund, weirdly sex-joke-spiked narrative.

Beginning of the Great Revival is muddled, all right, but it's the helter-skelter speed at which it ticks off names and incidents, both in hopelessly confused action and on-screen text, that seems nearly unprecedented.

Director David Frankel can't lend the inflated sitcom dilemmas of the characters any life, and most mysteriously screenwriter Howard Franklin, whose work in the '90s frequently had appealing quirk and flavor, gets the dubious credit for adapting a 1998 nonfiction book about these hobbyists' pursuit of pink-footed geese and Northern Shovelers.