Ed Gonzalez

By the end of it, you'll be crying uncle--or wish you were watching The Help instead. At least that was a more artful lie.

Silent House dies a sudden and egregious death when the amateur players in Olsen's company, Adam Trese and Eric Sheffer Stevens, as her character Sarah's father and uncle, respectively, open their traps.

A shallow romanticization of Batista-era Cuba -- when the nation was a tropical paradise for the delectation of American jetsetters -- and what the revolution left in its wake.

In Xavier Gens's The Divide, the revolution will not be televised, only the degradation of human civility--and in a mire of clichés more toxic to the mind than the radioactive dust that causes everyone's hair to fall out in the wake of a nuclear explosion.

The difference between Niels Arden Oplev's adaptation of Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and David Fincher's own is not, as some might have hoped, the difference between night and day, but between curdled milk and a warmed-over holiday second.

It's important to talk at length about Pariah's aesthetic because of how it distracts from the emotional truthfulness of the sometimes heartbreaking, by and large gorgeously performed story.

The purpose of Lynne Ramsay's hodgepodge approach is to distract us from the flimsiness of a story that suggests a snide art-house take on "The Omen."

Shame articulates a shallow, even mundane, understanding of an uninteresting man's sex addiction-in a vibrant city rendered dull and anonymous.

Even the logos for the companies involved in its making (Sherwood Films and Affirm Films) and distribution (TriStar Pictures) scream that this will be a message from on high.

One doesn't have to look too closely at Carnage's final shot to marvel at the way Polanski refuses to haughtily indict his audience in the pettiness of his characters' behavior.

This is a beautiful vision, but in telling too many flowery secrets, it's also one that unnecessarily keeps its queerness in the closet.

The poetic, referential succession of near-still images that opens the film so immaculately distills Melancholia's moody narrative and themes that it makes the two-hours-plus that follow seem impossibly redundant.

Marc Forster regards the real-life Childers's evolution from heroin-addicted, wife-beating (implied), gun-toting oblivion to born-again do-gooderism with motorized aloofness.

The filmmaker looks to American modes of visual and aural expression to give Happy, Happy its soul, but all her fetish accomplishes is depersonalizing her story, making a sitcom of her character's lives.

A germophobe's worst nightmare, Contagion touches on all the dramas big and small, mostly big, we've come to associate with catastrophes such as this, and does so as if it were hurriedly going down and adapting a list of bullet points, never lingering on any one drama in a particularly meaningful fashion.

God bless Robert Duvall. An American cinematic institution, our greatest living actor makes the fortune-cookie bromides of Matthew Dean Russell's Seven Days in Utopia sound like Yates.

Does Katie Holmes's hubby get script-doctoring rights even on her own film projects? That would explain why Troy Nixey's inane Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, co-written and produced by Guillermo del Toro, at times suggests an anti-Rx PSA.

One of the minor triumphs of this Fright Night remake is Farrell's coolly assured performance, a cocksure spectacle of masculine virility far more intimidating to his character's victims, male and female alike, than the razor-sharp fangs Jerry uses to munch on human neck meat.

If the series really does end here, may this final installment be hailed as a triumph of poetic justice.

Like the film that constrains him, a prequel to Planet of the Apes, perhaps James Franco understands his performance as something that will one day evolve into something far greater.

Like the show, this boring, lazy, clumsily staged, overly lit, unnecessarily 3D-ed contraption even culminates with some half-hearted moral hectoring-in this case, the togetherness of the Smurfs works to validate heteronormative values.

Its ostentatious sense of horror -- think later-day Argento -- is far from suggestive, though some of its queasier moments effectively tap into our fears of not-so-bygone forms of invasive physical therapy.

Though it's as schematic in construction as Incendies, the film doesn't grind along to a ponderous plot; it's unnerving abstraction of its subject matter more daringly relays Villeneuve's view of the human cost of gender warfare.

Leap Year is a story of survival, and its poised aesthetic is remarkably keyed to its main character's shell-like behavior.

Save for its loving, plaintive, and thorough tour of the seldom-filmed East L.A., A Better Life is, top to bottom, derivative-of Polanski in its direction and of "Bicycle Thieves" in its plot (even Alexandre Desplat's gussy score suggests Angelo Badalamenti playing Mariachi Night).

Martin Campbell, though a capable director of action (Hal's training session with the Michael Clarke Duncan-voiced Kilowog is proof of that), doesn't have a poet's instincts.

Kitsch sprung from the lame imagination of adults who probably wish their tweeners lived their lives like Judy Blume characters.

Jerry Goldmsith’s ominous score is reminiscent of his Oscar-winning work for The Omen but The Boys From Brazil is pure pomp and circumstance.