Dennis Lim

The Machinist has no meat on its bones, and we've seen it all before.

The cumulative effect is perversely deflationary: long before it's over, the film has flushed the paranoia from its system.

The film never finds a confident tone: it's pitched as a satire, but seems to have no real targets.

The time-outs from wisecracking -- invariably, to impart a simplistic self-esteem lesson or two -- feature the most awkward silences you're likely to endure in a comedy routine.

It's hard not to wish that Chicago had taken place inside a more imaginative head.

Anyone expecting the decorous serenity of the Ang Lee film should be aware that Iron Monkey strives for no more or less than comic-strip thwack and thump.

Easily the artiest queer stroke movie of the year.

The film is slight but sweetly inquisitive, and its participants are endlessly fascinating.

A disappointment after the droll, breezy suggestiveness of Fontaine's equally Freudian "Dry Cleaning," How I Killed My Father is rather less than the sum of its underventilated père-fils confrontations.

This is pure essence of Bay--it's big, it's loud, it has no context, and if you show up tanked, I'm sure it's really quite poetic.

Solid middlebrow entertainment, a vast period epic with an almost DeMillean taste for excess.

Ju-on never snaps into focus like a "Go" or a "Pulp Fiction," and what at first registers as sloppy plotting starts to seem positively diabolical.

The flashes of emotional eloquence from the actors (especially Fitzgerald and Julianne Nicholson, as the radiant vet student who befriends both boys) are muffled by the ultimately asphyxiating preciousness.

Mariage takes his time and allows the film to drift in an almost ostentatiously casual manner.

Neither as weighty nor as weird as it would like to think.

It's doubly frustrating that after flirting with (and even upending) biopic conventions for much of its length, A Beautiful Mind finally gives in to them so readily.

Tumbles happily into every pitfall that lines its well-trodden path.

It's instructive that Waking Ned Devine is being so aggressively sold as a feel-good comedy; the "good" feeling in question is called condescension.

Perhaps awed by the congress of Method men, director Frank Oz stands back as his actors phone it in.

By the final shot, which assumes the viewpoint of a decapitated head, its appalled comedy has swelled, beyond outrage, to a pitch of punch-drunk hysteria.

Bad Santa is a one-joke film; to his credit, Thornton embodies that joke with vicious, vaguely insane conviction.

Much of Undercover Brother plays as a funnier, if similarly addled, "Bamboozled."

Smitten by the symmetry of his parable, director Roger Michell crosscuts emphatically between the preening leads -- a strategy that only draws attention to the numerous lapses in logic and unpersuasive changes of heart while sidelining the lively supporting cast

Unfolds in a shroud of nonspecific suggestiveness but never emerges from under it.

Some of the testimonials are underedited, but as a work of passionate advocacy, I Remember Me can't be faulted.

There's no gold dust to be found here, just an awful lot of stick-on glitter.

Kormakur's debut feature fulfills the basic requirements of good slacker comedy: It's grounded in quotidian tedium and frustration, and it acknowledges both the humor and pathos of the relevant coping mechanisms (here, lackadaisical flings, porn addiction, amnesia-courting binges).

Boldly engineering a collision between tawdry B-movie flamboyance and grandiose spiritual anomie, Rose's film, true to its source material, provides a tenacious demonstration of death as the great equalizer.