David Fear

Whistle-blowing works best without gratuitous pop-doc debris, but there are only so many dry, fact-heavy testimonies from engineers you can take before a certain dullness uneasily settles in.

Performances barely meet a junior-collegiate theater-troupe level, the narration hits maxi-fromage heights, and just when you think it can't get any more derivative, out comes a glowing suitcase à la "Pulp Fiction." Rock bottom has now been firmly established.

Whereas Yuen's speciality has always been gonzo, gravity-defying spectacles, now he's spiced his set pieces with plasticine computer-generated flourishes-effectively puncturing the inventive, handmade charm and fluid flurries of artistry that made his classic fight scenes so thrilling.

Famous fans (Rosanne Cash! Oprah!!!) attest to the book and film's greatness, but at best, this is a half-hour A&E Biography episode padded out to feature-length with forgetful trivia, frustratingly facile history lessons and far too much fawning.

Wiig comes out a winner, but nothing is worse than watching a perfect marriage of performer and material get so perversely undermined.

Once this cultural exploration devolves into just a forum for grating geek griping and Jar-Jar Binks hatred, however, you'll wish you could escape to a galaxy far, far away.

You can easily see why Ichikawa's vision of the 20th-century Japanese-lit landmark is considered definitive; the way he elevates the story's soap-operatic elements to a level of extraordinary sublimity makes the melodramatic seem positively majestic.

The film ham-fistedly hammers home its message more than the usual collateral-damage drama.

Given how prominent the postcard sultriness of her backdrop is compared with the story's emotional ping-pong, all she ends up with is a kinder, chicer Adrian Lyne movie.

Gibson simply turns his signature righteous rage into a crushing inward sorrow-Sad Max?-and Foster boldly plays everything straight, rendering her actor's unnerving turn to mania (and a pitch-black third act) with zero tongue-in-cheek.

Thor accomplishes its essential goal and little else, which is to introduce the mighty warrior to the Marvel screen universe.

The writer-director does have a wonderful eye-a shot of a tractor wheel sticking out of the Hudson River is museumworthy-but his grasp of the melodramatic could use a little more grounding.

Shindô concocts a stylistic mix of odd experimental flourishes, female nudity, Soviet-style close-ups and baldly sentimental melodrama to emphasize the toll this disaster took; its cup may runneth over, yet the stark vibe is impossible to shake.

A single arresting shot of a photographer chasing a man on fire says more about journalistic ethics and the queasy power of the image than all of the speechifying and star-posing combined; if only the rest of this muddled movie had as much insightful Sontagian bang.

A collective sense of psychological turmoil seems to weigh heavily on the entire country as much as Champ, reaching critical mass once chaos creeps into the city-leading to a quiet, climactic walk into darkness that earns the right to be called haunting.

The filmmaker provides intellectual rigor to spare, yet precious little narrative focus (you virtually wander into plot strands) and there's a stiffness to the proceedings that neither Wilson's charisma nor Ulliel and Thierry's screen-ready beauty can remedy.

Here's the thing: We enjoy a good mindf--- lark as much as the next filmgoer, but such fluid tomfoolery eventually has to add up to something, and The Double Hour ultimately doesn't.

Robert Greene's documentary captures so many wonderfully delicate, private moments in Kati's life that it seems churlish to wish the film said more about what it's actually like to be a young woman today.

The disparity only makes Reeves's earnest-but-monotonous turn that much more pronounced-and the film that much more dismissible.

Names get checked, baby-faced future celebrities like Vincent Gallo and Steve Buscemi make cameos, and various cross-pollinations between below–14th Street mavericks are clarified.

Kids will squeal with delight. Adults will smile indulgently at the mildness of it all.

While Bier doesn't offer easy partisan answers, she still dilutes a social issue down to the level of soap-operatic background noise and back-patting platitudes. It-and we-deserve better.

Circo zeroes in on the interpersonal strife within this collapsing clan - an angle that only occasionally lifts the film above confessional exotica.

Atmosphere and acting can't save a script filled with easy-target irony ("Who ever heard of gettin' rich from workin' with computers?") and a plot that telegraphs every left turn miles in advance.

Bal's familiarity doesn't breed contempt. It does make you wish, however, for something above and beyond the usual high-art-cinema catnip.

The historical tragedy that's dramatized is heartrending; the movie itself is merely one cliché piled atop another.

These kinds of disease-fueled dramas already tend to be soap-operatic, but Kohlberg isn't taking any chances; by the time father and son end up at a Dead show in matching tie-dyed outfits, the director has aggressively, insistently overplayed audience heartstrings like Jerry Garcia in a long-winded solo.

Anyone curious about the man behind the lens may find this doc, like its subject, frustratingly opaque and out of reach. Those interested in witnessing a true NYC eccentric document everyday-people city life one outfit at a time, however, will feel like this has been tailor-made.

Cracks simply doesn't make the grade.

Fess up: You want to see Los Angeles get blowed up real good, and it's a measure of this movie's incompetence that it can't even deliver that vicarious thrill properly.

Ignore the documentary's regrettable low-rent look and that kitschy "Love, American Style" soundtrack, and just focus on how this portrait turns a work of art into a sociological flash point.

Her (Binoche) award-winning performance is reason alone to dive into such intellectual gamesmanship. (She can suggest an entire emotional arc with one facial tic.)

After the novelty of these backgrounds and comin'-at-ya bits wears off, Mars Needs Moms has to rely on Fogler's obnoxious Jack Black Jr. shtick, a weak subplot involving a '60s-obsessed Martian graffiti artist (Harnois) and rote video-game-y action sequences to carry it along-and that simply won't cut it.

It's undeniably humanistic; resourceful and well managed, however, are a different story.

The movie misses the Hughes sensitive-raunch sweet spot, though a game supporting cast hits bull's-eyes on lesser targets.

By the end of this funny, insightful doc, you get a sense of an extraordinary mind that both fueled and fed the zeitgeist. Don't miss it.

Porterfield has proved he can do grit and atmosphere. Should the young director ever decide to channel this talent into storytelling with purpose and a point, he might be someone to watch out for.

Even if you ignore the bad acting, dogmatic dirty-talk dialogue so wooden it'd put a Redwood forest to shame and director Phillippe Diaz's total lack of visual sense, you'd still have to digest a junior-collegiate lecture with less savvy than a horny 14-year-old.

It's a movie that doesn't inspire anything as passionate as love or hate.

As a thriller, however, the film only comes alive in fits and starts.

The movie just ping-pongs between empathetic chuckles at Helms's charming social awkwardness and putting him through a raunchfest ringer.

It's such a haphazard, absent-minded history lesson that you'd think the filmmakers had ingested some of the era's pharmaceuticals before concocting this tribute.

While Araki has finally perfected a shoegazey visual aesthetic that's simultaneously sensual and too cool for school, it's hard not to feel that his reprise of yesterday's greatest snits borders on being stuck in a rut.

Her (Steen) emotional acrobatics are reason enough to sit through Applause's parade of pain, though it's a movie to admire rather than enjoy.

This tale of a rich brat (Jonet) is a banal, tone-deaf dud.

Feste's ode to showbiz clichés is closer to contemporary Nashville pop: twangy enough to qualify as Southern-fried, but too slick and disposable to be truly deep.

We've come to expect diminishing returns from the once-promising Mexican director who then gave the world "Babel," but the combination of wallowing humanistic-cinema overkill and outright ridiculousness he lays out here represents a new low. Biutiful is not a tragedy. It's a straight-up travesty.

Those of us who dig the comedian's hyperactive persona may feel that the meter is now officially running on his amiable rocker-doofus act; everyone else will simply marvel that a Christmas season could produce such an unfunny, unentertaining lump of coal.

This is fertile material for a darkly comic indictment. Instead, we get recycled cynicism (politicians are hypocrites! more dirty money, more problems!) and Spacey's gallery of impersonations-W.C. Fields, Stallone, Reagan-in lieu of a flawed, flesh-and-blood human being.

Easily the most gracefully performed grief-porn you'll see this season.

The difference between a movie about emptiness and an empty movie becomes abundantly clear.

To make a Western now is in itself a subversive act. Improving, embellishing and reclaiming an old-fashioned oater from the vintage studio-cheese bin with such humor and vigor seems truly, truly ballsy.

To Cool It's credit and its detriment, the movie establishes that Lomborg quickly made enemies, without spelling out exactly why he's so loathed besides refusing to toe the Green Party line.

We know how these bargains turn out, so all we're left to do is watch pretentious exchanges about grief pile up, laugh at the way the movie exploits its Indian-girl-as-innocence-personified notion and wish that Eddie Marsan's giddy cameo as Hell's personal weapons dealer were much, much longer.

Shoah's ultimate legacy, however, is being the final word on the Final Solution-one that renders every well-intentioned dramatic re-creation of such horrors into repulsive Ausch-kitsch by comparison.

This Age-of-Aquarius relic's dedication to utopian ideals is great; this superficial portrait, however, is merely grating.

You can't necessarily blame Wahlberg, as his modest performance is the one element that feels truly authentic and heartfelt.

It's a juicy story, though that doesn't excuse Jarecki from fixating above all else on the tabloid-ready twists and pop-psychological turns of Durst's story.

Even if you can forgive the crude JAP caricatures (et tu Minnie Driver?) and the blatantness of the film's attempts to make you sob, you're still left with lovely actors stuck in a lackluster cover version of the real thing.

Both a baroque thriller set in New York's ballet demimonde and a portrait of artistry as schizoid perfectionism, Darren Aronofsky's new film percolates parallel lines of fine madness-but then, doubling down on duality is this movie's raison d'etre.

Such overall familiarity makes the over-the-top soap-operatic elements, such as a histrionic screamathon between mom and daughter, that much more grating-and Hrebejk's upending of cathartic clichés that much more gratifying.

Far be it from us to deny the director his deserved catharsis or to dissuade someone from speaking out about abuse. Still, Family Affair feels less like a documentary than one man's filmed therapy marathon, to which you're voyeuristically privy in an oversharing-on-Oprah sort of way.

Reducing an influential genius to a bohemian Zelig with a firearm fetish misses the forest for the flaming metal trees; in Leyser's biographical interzone, the superficial trumps the truly subversive.

Even by the stultifying standards of everything's-screwed ensemble movies, Joseph Infantolino's thirtysomething drama feels particularly threadbare.

This charmless movie thinks it can soft-sell its date-night love story and its media meta-jabs without people feeling they've been bamboozled on either count.

Even the movie's trio of outstanding actors come off like mouthpieces from a creaky Group Theater play, spiced with an occasional Cagneyism or two.

When the movie keeps its focus on retribution and Rambo-esque ambushes, however, this slice of Ozploitation doles out grind-house pleasures by the dozens.

Then Plame's cover gets blown, and so does the film's; suddenly, the clunky melodrama that had been lurking in the shadows starts hogging the spotlight.

Strange Powers works best when inadvertently capturing the toll of living in the shadow of a genius. When it comes to examining the genius himself, it's woefully out of tune.

Only Leo, always a dependable supporting actor, turns her character into something resembling a three-dimensional person. Watching her tentatively reconnect with her maternal instincts is a welcome surprise. Everything else here just feels like another descent into mediocre Amerindie miserablism.

Whether anyone over the age of 16 will find the film's proud amateurism and choir-preaching personally enlightening, much less profound, is anyone's guess.

All ye searching for Primal Fear redux, abandon hope. The character-driven drama he (Curran) offers viewers instead is something far more complex, cracked and unique for an American movie boasting big-name stars: an unblinking glare into the abyss.

Even those that have acquired a taste for Green's rigorous, super-ascetic aesthetic may find this French drama about a starlet (Baldaque) to be almost as bare as it is spare.

These artists are risking everything by playing Western-influenced music; that Ghobadi cheapens and cheeses up their subversion with Hollywood tricks makes for a seriously bitter irony.

Neither Reilly nor Tomei have ever seemed so effortlessly funny, and whoever thought to cast one of Judd Apatow's regulars as a dysfunctional, disturbed manchild should be dubbed a genius.

No one would claim that director Lance Daly delivers an Emerald Isle version of "The Spirit of the Beehive," though this scrappy film does have a knack for capturing the elation and confusion of late childhood in their ragged glory.

Even if Women in Trouble didn’t keep bringing to mind a superior artist, the film would still be badly written (DOA tangents about cunnilingus and kink don’t make dialogue edgy, only vulgar), not to mention unevenly paced and an embarrassment to all involved.

But while you can’t fault this labor of love’s conception, you can take issue with its leaden execution.

Though it’s divided into three chapters--“Voices,” “Recollections” and “Innocence”--the film takes a largely free-form look at a dying community that’s more reminiscent of Frederick Wiseman’s nonfiction case studies than the usual sociopolitical hand-wringing.

Focus, instead, on the perks that Nightfall does offer: You still get the criminally underrated Aldo Ray trading hardboiled barbs with Anne Bancroft (“I’m a painter.” “Soup cans or sunsets?”); Brian Keith and Rudy Bond’s giggly good-thug-bad-thug double act; and the joy of watching beefy guys in boxy suits dangle cigarettes off sweaty lips and talk tough.

The first-person sections, however, couldn’t be more clumsy or grating, and every time Diamond’s tone-deaf narration starts repeating the obvious, you can feel an eye-opening history lesson turning into a quirky, orbs-glazing travelogue.

Delivers Moore’s usual grab bag of ironic kitsch, gotcha clips and infotainment-journalism.

The big question isn’t whether middle-aged romance will bloom, but rather, how much sub-Jarmusch deadpan humor and pathos can you take?

Unlike "The Wrestler," which Siegel scripted, Big Fan has a way of making a socially marginal figure seem oddly charismatic without stacking the sympathy deck.

For better or worse, that detour into proverbial uncharted waters ends up hipchecking a by-the-book hagiography into the realm of compellingly cracked vérité.

It’s just blinkered middle-class pandering at its most shameless.

An overall lack of drive drops the pacing from languorous to a slow, stalled crawl, but the journey itself isn’t the point here. For once, it’s the destination--forgiveness--that really counts.

It remains a how-to model for making something that fancies itself a slow-burn thriller—until it isn’t slow-burning whatsoever.

Third times are rarely charms in the movies, much less fourth go-rounds, and it takes more than ho-hum 3-D and video-game-ready action sequences to liven up diminishing returns

This muted mobster story reminds us that the ties that bind can also gag you, garrote you and slowly deaden your soul.

And by the time Thornton has deftly flipped the script regarding the titular Biblical parable's misogyny, you'll feel as if Aussie cinema has indeed discovered its next great voice.

The problem is that the film also refuses to move beyond a glacial pace, and its choice to go slow-and-low doesn’t scream art-house aesthetic so much as unintentionally sluggish. For such a small character study, that decision ends up being a doozy of a deal breaker.

Taking a page--or rather, several chapters--from the Eastern European art-house playbook, Hungarian filmmaker Kornél Mundruczó works this stock tale into a deliberately paced parable of desire and dread.

Even the admittedly thrilling gameplay footage and time-capsule news reports are couched in contexts that seem crudely sketched out.

To her credit, Howard’s performance as a class-obsessed Southerner is decent enough to keep things from completely devolving to community-college level. But such weak work needs strong hands all around to guide it, and one pair isn’t enough.

It’s gratifying to see Eisenberg move past nerdy-cutie parts; his slim shoulders, it seems, are capable of handling more than Michael Cera’s leftovers.

If you can roll with Almereyda’s free-form vibe, you’ll find the docu-essay’s cumulative effect goes a long way toward proving his thesis

The performance footage alone makes this worthy of study by musicologists and historians. There are too many great scenes to mention.

This slapdash parody will simply inspire shrugs.

A strong contender for both the artiest drug movie and the druggiest art movie ever made, Gaspar Noé's tour de force of forced perspectives and free-form grief is, in every sense of the word, a trip.

The plentiful pop-doc touches ensure that this wake-up call won't put you to sleep, even if the ratio of spoonfuls of sugar to medicine occasionally seems skewed.

Robert Wise's adaptation of Michael Crichton's novel about a deadly space pathogen trades in the genre's cosmic pulp and head-trippiness for a procedural-like seriousness. Germaphobes, proceed with extreme caution.

We like our secondhand vengeance as sleazy and bloody as the next grindhouse fiend, but even an intentional throwback shouldn’t feel content to coast on so much déjà vu.

Non Stop doesn’t know how to hit it and quit; it’s a rock doc that screams loud and says frustratingly little

Even if you can miraculously avoid comparing this take on rock & roll record maker Leonard Chess (Nivola) to 2008’s similar Cadillac Records, Jerry Zaks’s lukewarm biopic still won’t get your fingers snapping; it’d be a runt in any litter.

The film, meanwhile, gives Wahlberg and Ferrell beautiful opportunities to turn their anger-mismanagement-meets-milquetoast act into an absurdist version of Abbott and Costello.

Like the "Scream" series, Hot Tub Time Machine is a cake-and-eat-it-too experience; you get both a vintage Brat Pack comedy, albeit one regrettably drenched in post-Hangover raunch, and an ongoing metacommentary at the same time.

The story is stock, but thanks to the behind-the-scene fire wranglers, you can practically feel the heat.

While her focus has drifted away from the upper middle class, Jaoui’s sensibility remains rather middlebrow; there’s the distinct feeling that she’s preaching solely, albeit with impressive subtlety, to the same bourgie choir as before.

You get the "girl," but little else; even as a tribute to one woman's determination, this semibiopic screams botched opportunity

The odor of musty, late-’80s nostalgia may still hover around this already threadbare brand, but you simply don’t see movies that leave both the curious and the fans who truly care this viscerally satisfied anymore.

Would be fascinating by virtue of its subject alone. But the filmmaker wisely emphasizes how Harris also represents something bigger; this isn’t just the story of one man but also the dawning of the virtual über alles age and the death of privacy.

It takes more than a few good actors playing bad apples to sustain such familiar romps through regurgitated material. There’s no bounty to be plucked from Perrier’s Bounty. The treasure chest has long since been emptied.

Wah Do Dem simply mopes along before aimlessly stumbling to a halt.

Everything from the script to the film’s score seems stock, and echoes of past victories--Eyre’s dissection of infidelity in "Notes on a Scandal," Neeson and Linney’s chemistry in "Kinsey"--only remind you of what these talents are capable of when the stars actually align.

Given that Sarandon played this same role so sublimely before in "Moonlight Mile," her devolution into theatrical rending of garments and gnashing of teeth is particularly disappointing, but no one--not Brosnan’s shell-shocked–by-numbers patriarch nor Mulligan’s wide-eyed waif--comes out of this steroidal pity party unscathed.

If this is what passes for contemporary art terrorism, we’ll opt instead for something truly subversive--like genuine art

Audiences with infinite patience and no need for linear storytelling do get an intimate tour of The Anchorage's picturesque island off the coast of Stockholm, its landscapes lensed with loving appreciation. Past that, the experience of sitting through Ulla's daily routines yields little more than a travelogue and a vaguely contemplative vibe.

This isn’t revisionist history; it’s a key moment in political radicalism reduced to an empty pop-cultural posture.

Eye-candy–wise, the film plants a big wet smooch; everything else about this happily-ever-after tale, however, feels like a mere air-kiss.

These guys belong in the avant-odd pantheon. They also deserve a stronger, more penetrating tribute.

For those of us who’ve been fans of Dequenne since her role as a blanc-trash Belgian waif in "Rosetta" (1999), her subtle portrayal of the pathological perpetrator proves that she’s monumentally talented.

It’s a 60-minute documentary that feels like days of watching paint dry.

It’s a trial run that puts many of his peers’ masterpieces to shame.

To fall in love with it, viewers only have to be receptive to a movie that examines the ties that bind with grace, wit and depth.

Caan can’t seem to play up his strengths. He’s a raw talent who needs an editor for his scripts and a strong hand behind the camera guiding him. Mercy gives our guy neither.

While this totally impartial approach is admirable, it also robs Collapse of any invested sensibility. Smith has given this bull a stage on which to rage, but why the filmmaker has bothered to mount the platform in the first place is, frustratingly, anybody’s guess.

The Tillman Story balances cynical and inspirational aspects in equal measure. Pat's demise-and the media debacle around it-seems that much more tragic and enraging.

A truly impressive portrait of self-destructive, smooth-talking alpha males, and a testament to an actor who waltzes across that Peter Pan–syndrome tightrope with the greatest of sleaze.

Part alt–art-history lesson and part pilot for CSI: The Louvre, Peter Greenaway’s deconstruction of Rembrandt’s 1642 painting The Night Watch contends that the work is--after the Mona Lisa, Da Vinci’s The Last Supper and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel--the fourth best-known artwork in the world.

All that's left is to enjoy the ravishing visuals, which range from gorgeously dusky scenes of semidarkness to the sort of smeary neon palettes that Wong Kar-wai has virtually patented.

Kari Skogland’s flashy yet dead-on-arrival drama turns Belfast’s backstreet battlefields into music-video backgrounds.

Medina is simply content to let the film’s sub-Jarmusch vignettes slow-fizzle to their finishes.

Adding hot naked men to a predictable narrative doesn't equal titillating or taboo; it just means you've dressed up a messy melodrama

Has neither enough bite nor enough heart to sustain it as a female-revenge-fantasy-cum-romantic-comedy; even its “shocking” switcheroo and faux-edgy moments seem remarkably frivolous and flavorless.

You can’t deny the inspirational qualities of the story or Parker’s screen presence, any more than you could accuse the film of subtlety or of masking its conspicuous pro-Christian agenda.

Even if you’ve seen this footage of the sit-ins at Southern diners, the Selma-to-Montgomery marches and Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral before, you can’t help but be moved to your core.

Everything from the direction of actors to the dialogue signifies the work of a filmmaker who favors easy audience-baiting reactions over dramatic momentum. Doesn't the man who would later teach Bruce Lee how to kee-yah deserve better than a chopsocky Punch-and-Judy show?

His “treason” gave credence to ending the war, helped push a corrupt administration toward its ruin and underlined the importance of the First Amendment. Rickety doc or not, Ellsberg deserves every ounce of hero worship he gets here.

When violence eventually rears its ugly head again, the effect is as anticlimactic as the movie’s title is misleading. Brief bliss is a red herring; there’s only a lifetime of pain left in such acts’ wakes.

It's a revolutionary movie in more ways than one.

When it comes to capturing the man behind the phenomenon, however, the film never progresses beyond a superficial, weird-yet-wonderful portraiture.

The movie’s b&w images of craggy landscapes and shirtless young men have never looked more vibrant.

The only thing that remains a mystery is why anyone thinks they can pass off a poorly made, predictable-to-a-fault movie as inspiring entertainment.

While the director doesn't hide her sympathies, she leaves remarkably few stones unturned in a dogged search for answers.

A worthwhile portrait of a genius who made beautiful music, and a case study for how to tragically, epically self-destruct.

A fun-sapped maelstrom without meaning, 300 simply pummels you with endless loops of battle-porn. While you couldn’t classify the movie as entertainment, it might have a long, prosperous future as a Clockwork Orange–style Ludovico Technique.

This being a François Ozon film, there's beaucoup simmering sexual tension, as well as the prolific French director's usual thematic preoccupations: death and grief, familial animosity and female awakening.

American Casino tries to connect the big picture regarding a major problem to a human pulse and comes up lacking on both sides. It’s a gamble that simply doesn’t pay off

So it’s no surprise that, even with longtime screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala watching his back, the director never finds his groove with Peter Cameron’s tale.

Every so often, you get the gift of watching an under-the-radar actor bloom into a critical-mass phenomenon before your bloodshot eyes: Franka Potente in "Run Lola Run," or Christoph Waltz in "Inglourious Basterds." Add Noomi Rapace to the list; what she does with the title character of this Swedish thriller-cum-pop-lit-adaptation will spawn cults of swooning Rapacephiles stat.

Once the sharp, clever satire gives way to what feels like a special must-see-TV episode, the movie’s promise slowly deflates.

There’s one bright spot amid all the awkward groping and abundant onscreen texting, and his name is Zach Gilford.

The movie will make you tap your toes; don't expect much for your head or your heartstrings.

Never finds a common ground between the fantastic and the heartfelt. Such unintegrated flip-flopping between a muted character study and a horror flick relying on cheap scare tactics leaves you feeling mildly schizophrenic

Such passé testosterone worship might have been passable if the filmmaking weren’t so amateurish--every emotional exchange is accompanied by insipid, high-volume pop songs--and the film’s self-satisfied chest-thumping didn’t extend to its creator as well.

It’s the kind of two-hander that relies solely on the chemistry of the actors, both of whom banter, parry and bum rush their way through various left turns with grace. Their pas de deux almost makes up for this threadbare tragedy’s no-win endgame. Almost.

Movies about children fending for themselves are predicated on pushing prepubescent despair into viewers' faces, which only makes this Swedish film's graceful mixture of terror and transcendental girl power that much more impressive.

It’s unfair to blame Hess solely for condescension comedy’s bad aftertaste--he’s not the only perpetrator--but his particular brand is the most graceless.

This film will make you cry tears. They won’t be happy ones.

At the very least, this mush pot reminds us that countries other than ours also produce melodramatic mediocrities.

A little more in-depth insight into a person who both produced that song ("Be My Baby") and pulled a trigger might have been nice.

The effects here run the gamut from grandiose to goofy, but watch the upside-down ballroom sequence again. It's a set piece of pure destructive bliss, set to a symphony of screaming and breaking glass. Awesome.

Kutcher is surprisingly anticharismatic as a star. A smarmy grin and looking good while shirtless does not equal screen presence, dude.

You could chalk this kid’s flick up as another manic Saturday-matinee time killer if it weren’t for a singularly impressive element. It’s not the stretchy, lava-lamp–ish animation, which offers the usual in-your-face 3-D tricks.

Other than the Pottersploitation and presence of current It nerd Baruchel, this fantasy-action-comedy might have been spat out into multiplexes any summer over the previous two decades, yet it would seem like forgettable abracadabra filler regardless of the date.

A wise man once said that every film is a documentary of its own making, and Philip Hartman’s No Picnic doubles as a chronicle not just of a lost paradise but a forgotten era — of downtown NYC, of genuinely independent moviemaking, of an alternate version of the “greed is good” go-go Eighties.

Mira Nair’s lush, heartfelt romance glows with humanity and desire; it puts the “passion” back in “compassion.”

Ghost Bird has a bad habit of briefly taking flight and then crashing back down into NPR-like stodginess.

At its best, this pomo oater gets within chaw-spitting distance of action-flick greatness; at its worst, the movie is simply unadulterated guns-and-guts fun.

A paranoid police procedural, a perverse parable about the corrupting elements of power, and a candidate for the greatest predated Patriot Act movie ever, Elio Petri's stunning thriller makes no attempt to hide the culprit behind the film's grisly murder.

The question is, could someone turn these full-frontal-dudity snapshots into a satisfying, cohesive movie? Answer: no, but not for lack of trying.

This could have been a true urban mosaic. Instead, we simply get a vision of Paris as the city of lite.

Vallée and his lead get high marks for kittenish revisionism. In all other respects, however, this movie is indistinguishable from every other throne-and-scepter biopic to hit the screen.

Red herrings, rabbit holes and oddball detours lurk around every corner. It’s a film that can’t decide whether it wants to be a comedy or a nightmare, so it splits the difference. Even by 1979 standards, it’s a seriously warped film.

What started as an underground goof ended up becoming a fascinating foul-mouthed curio; though it aims for profundity, Winnebago Man seems destined to suffer the same fate.

Just because you tart up a typical romantic comedy with trash talk doesn't make it edgy or real.

There’s something admirable about the anything-goes energy that Van Peebles brings to this tall tale, but the amateurishness and Video Toaster–era technical tricks start to grate after a bit. It’s a funky, free-form fairy tale, but one that only a mutha could truly love.

Watching [Hanks] in this career footnote now is a little like seeing an unformed lump of sculptor’s clay and knowing that there’s a famous statue just a few well-placed moves away.

The final KO of a brilliant cinematic one-two punch, Leos Carax’s follow-up to his gobsmacking feature debut, Boy Meets Girl (1984), proved this enfant terrible was no one-hit wonder. Boy still meets girl, in the form of feral Denis Levant and gorgeous Juliette Binoche, but this sophomore outing’s real romantic coupling is an artist swooning head over heels for his medium.

The film’s tendency to wax sentimental occasionally undermines its authority, but you won’t find better behind-the-scenes looks at the era’s mouse-eared power struggles or at the making of modern Disney classics.

The attention to visuals is above and beyond what most vérité is capable of; doing double duty as the film's cinematographer, Fan demonstrates a pitch-perfect photojournalistic eye.

So it's the story of a down-and-out bigwig vindicating himself by revising his crowning cultural moment. Feel free to draw your own conclusions.

Only jackanapes and jackasses would deny that the experience of war can cause psychic damage, but does that mean we have to sit through such a schematic, dogmatic melodrama about the subject?

Simply casting doubts isn't the same as making a compelling counterargument-or crafting a coherent film.