Bill Weber

A historical melodrama that retains an ancient, elemental pull even as it insufficiently charts motivation and the self-denying values of antiquity.

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.

This documentary on the many forms of human debt, though often frustratingly broad, offers a path to balancing civilization's ledger with a hard-nosed brand of altruism.

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.

A mixed bag of Nixon-era pop burlesque and vampire kitsch is ultimately undone by pedestrian gags and bloated genre boilerplate.

"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.

A freeform, New York-based variation on the Arabian Nights tales by Jonas Mekas is both a pan-narrative and a disarming portrait of its sweetly curious maker.

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.

A prisoner-of-war drama as fever dream, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence fascinates mostly for the hit-and-miss alchemy of its discordant elements: in performance, pop-star charisma versus British actorliness; in narrative style, genre expectations coming up against modernist psychosexual undercurrents.

The result isn't drama so much as a waking nightmare of play-acting and predestined doom.

Endng in risible bathos, Tony Kaye's urban high school melodrama is all about the cute teacher's crises and the girls who love him.

Lionizing a world-class architect without tipping into hagiography, this documentary performs a graceful cinematic dance around his works.

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.

With six protagonists serving as a cross-section of Tehran's youthful population, director Hossein Keshavarz's Dog Sweat is a somber, minor-keyed debut feature about the daily manifestations of oppression in contemporary Iran.

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

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.

Those who find Rohmer heroines difficult - that is, demanding because they are three-dimensional, non-formulaic creations with an intricate set of foibles and needs - might even be won over by the depth and poignancy of Delphine, one of its maker's most generously etched characters.

This handsome mate-swapping drama never moves beyond the erotic to become incisive about the barriers built into sexual experimentation for committed couples.

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.

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.

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

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.

This autumnal statement compensates for its fixed despair with bracing wit and a willingness to see acceptance of misery as the best of all possible options.

A solid, affecting artifact of the cruelty of late 1950s South Africa, in which music often makes despair and long-suppressed anger bearable.