Dennis Lim

An out-of-body experience for its viewers as well as its heroine.

Going through the motions of a liberal-Hollywood polemic with the sweaty, mounting hysteria of a bad liar, The Life of David Gale is foremost an overheating gotcha machine, scripted by first-timer Charles Randolph with seams showing and red herrings stinking up the joint.

Suggestive of nothing so much as Saturday-morning TV.

Plunging headfirst into mush at every opportunity, Marshall brings out the worst in his actors.

A numb, oddly dispassionate trudge toward predestined doom, inevitable in all the wrong ways.

Dreary adventure. Parents, be forewarned: No talking equines means more songs, and the viselike soundtrack might be someone's idea of a cruel joke: hoarse whisperer Bryan Adams.

While Strand's gay-shorts series took a tentative step toward maturity with 2000's “Boys Life 3,” this fourth anthology represents a full-blown regression.

By the end of this wholly disorienting experience (this must be what it's like to be held captive in a Long Island supper club and force-fed hallucinogens), there's only one thing we damn well know, and it's that Kevin Spacey sure as hell believes he was born to play Bobby Darin.

The film slips into a coma early on and never awakens.

Hudson keeps the movie rambling and episodic, deferring to the imposing backdrop whenever possible.

The flavor is textbook '90s indie -- self-regarding quirk with an occasional spasm of Solondzian incorrectness.

The title's pointedly incorrect pronoun is typical of the film's obtuse childishness.

A creakily mechanical B-noir.

Apparently fallen victim to the transparent damage-control tactics of studios in possession of perceived stinkers.

Bloated loquaciousness, damp self-absorption, and defensive reflexiveness on display here.

Grows increasingly slack and silly.

Another mystery that gives up its secrets all too quickly, Till Human Voices Wake Us is named for a T.S. Eliot line -- and it proves a woefully evocative title for this snoozy supernatural pastoral.

Indifferently written, passably acted, resourcefully shot in video with enlivening splashes of local color.

Strangely, there's no thrust and parry to this potentially heavyweight mind game. The effect is more like a tennis match in which every feebly contested point ends with an unforced error.

The only flicker of thematic interest -- AM radio obsession as psychopathology -- is duly subsumed into a sea of desperate soundtrack come-ons.

Limps into theaters at long last, practically begging, with every arthritic pratfall, to be put out of its misery.

The shabby metaphysics and complete absence of internal logic are perhaps meant to charm, but only add to the eye-gouging irritant factor.

Unable to capture either its wit, psychological acuity, or formal rigor, the movie essentially reduces the schematic, seesaw narrative to doomy clichés.

Just when you think it can't get any worse, Maze rams home a body blow -- equating the involuntary spasms of Tourette's with the ungovernable impulses of the heart.

Hovers between mythic poetry and earthbound grit; the result is an inert, drably florid spectacle.

The film, meanwhile, goes for that choppy, air-pocket sensation, veteran helmer Bruno Barreto directing like he's never made a movie before, and never wants to again.