Eddie Cockrell

A preposterously convoluted and exasperatingly sappy saga.

A seesaw chronology and generally chaotic approach plagues Haven, an overly ambitious, multicharacter love story-cum-underworld revenge drama set on a fleetingly exotic island.

A forceful, affecting experience.

Gripping, intimate genre triumph.

Tale of an idealistic local caught in the crossfire of an illicit affair is too pat and pretty to connect with upscale audiences.

Schematically scripted tale revels in its multiple story arcs, but shows signs of battle fatigue in the later reels.

Washington reveals himself to be a filmmaker with a clean, uncluttered storytelling style. Too often, overtly inspirational material such as this can become strident or mawkish.

About as vigorous and intricate as a glossy romantic comedy can get without collapsing under the weight of its own merriment.

Self-consciously mannered yet fitfully interesting, Around the Bend gets the most mileage it can from the eccentric, low-key charisma of Christopher Walken.

TV scribe Kundo Koyama's first bigscreen script peppers the proceedings with rich character detail and near-screwball interludes that shouldn't fit but somehow do.

Anchored by another marvelously quirky yet deadly serious performance from John Malkovich, and likely to be relished by the fan base of J.M. Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning novel, this is a strong, perceptive, old-school arthouse picture.

Results are solid, if stylistically unspectacular.

Picture reflects the no-nonsense storytelling skills of prolific helmer Michael Apted, whose career-long mix of feature and documentary work holds him in good stead once more.

Sublimely pointed in its idealistic simplicity yet willfully scruffy in presentation -- much like the enduring Young's best music.

Anchored by a fearless, commanding lead perf by newcomer Jonas Ball as deranged assassin Mark David Chapman, The Killing of John Lennon is a harrowing, impressionistic, widescreen tour-de-force that unfolds with the propulsive urgency of a scrapbook thrown into a howling wind.

Universally embraceable subject matter, coupled with helmer's sterling rep as benevolent booster of humanistic pioneers.

Aimless direction and subject's self-destructiveness add up to a long, unpleasant sit.

Taped in stark black-and-white and clocking in 15 minutes shy of six hours, invigorating pic is big, passionate and brimming with compelling human details and broad sociopolitical idealism.

Taxidermia sets a benchmark for body horror in the cinema.

Wenders lets the music and the sprightly people who make it speak for themselves, although the director's ongoing fascination with the urban environment is in top form as the camera serenely cruises the streets of Havana, often at a velvety dusk.

A barkingly funny new "mockumentary" that does for those canine pageants what the helmer's 1996 "Waiting for Guffman" did for smalltown theatrics.

A curious young helmer tracks down the profanity-spewing subject of a two-decade-old viral video with results at once scabrously funny and uncomfortably poignant.

A successful novelist whose films bear the expansive plotting and telling character detail of the page, Doerrie never seems in any particular hurry to tell her tales, preferring the journey to the destination.

A deliberately coarse character style that's more Gumby than Gromit.

A little bit of Slovene philosopher Slavoj Zizek goes a long way. In the verbose profile documentary Zizek! there's a lot of esoteric, eccentric theories, and little context within his globetrotting life.

The Time We Killed reps avant-garde vet Jennifer Todd Reeves' most ambitious work yet, a dense-packed feature-length black-and-white journey into a beautifully restless mind.

Handsome but dramatically static drama.

A virtual primer on the unique mixture of self-deprecating dark humor and personal tragedy that has been the Czech cinema's stock-in-trade since their celebrated 1960s New Wave.