Ella Taylor

Elegantly stylized but emotionally strained.

A middlebrow domestic drama beating its wings against an experimental frame.

The film never coheres. Trying to carve out a space between black comedy and straight evocation of a difficult but rewarding marriage, the movie never settles on a tone.

As a character study Vera Drake is coarsely drawn, and as pro-choice polemic, it’s both a blunt instrument and a red herring. Which may be why, among all the moviegoers who staggered from the theater wielding soaked tissues, I was among the few who remained dry of eye, and raised of brow.

Yet the movie, distilling into purest form the blend of viciousness and sentimentality that informs all Woo's work, winds up as emotionally bogus as it is viscerally overwhelming.

It is a dull and boring film, pretty as a Turner landscape and as sweetly becalmed as the glassy Sargasso Sea in which the men of the unfortunately named “Surprise” find themselves trapped for what felt, to me at least, like weeks on end.

Like a date who's primped too long to arrive at dinner with something to talk about, Road to Perdition is beautifully groomed and a perfect drag to be with.

Mostly, though, 44 Inch Chest is complacently in love with the rhythmically profane talk that came so easily to writers Louis Mellis and David Scinto in "Sexy Beast."

Despite a hopelessly corny score, the movie is redeemed by a goofily touching final scene.

You can only cram so much of this stuff into a movie without putting your audience to sleep -- The movie sags badly in the middle, swirling around itself without making headway.

Patriot reflects on nothing, except perhaps that the American Revolution was a golden opportunity for Mel Gibson to go postal.

This overcrowded, overheated scenario, with many scenes repeated from the first two films, keeps us so busy tracking all the overlapping storylines, we have no time to imagine what they might mean.

A capable, soulful thriller with a love story as steamy as is possible when its lead characters are Orthodox Jews.

Essentially a TV movie souped up by the divinely skittish cinematography of Chris Menges, the film suffers from a screenplay full of labored attempts at wit by Steven Knight, and characters who barely make it off the page alive.

Evidently, this bloated piece of Oscar-nominated nonsense was a big hit in Denmark, which makes me think there's a glittering future in that otherwise discriminating country for several seasons of "Days of Our Lives."

The best that can be said for this excitable, harmless romantic comedy is that it is smoothly directed by Pierre Salvadori.

As a political statement it is either a cry of despair or a grim acknowledgment that in the endless cycles of history, civilization will always have its saboteurs.

There's some funny erotic business with gas masks, but neither that nor the unfolding love story is quite as engrossing as the raucous bunch of former Soviet citizens.

Under the charmless direction of Mark Rosman, the actors seem to be frozen at the rehearsal stage, with the blessed exception of a sublimely funny Jennifer Coolidge as the Botoxed horror of a stepmother.

Loses focus and sags into a how-we-got-through-it family procedural.

Shuttles between schoolboy humor, calculated savagery and, at the end, a rank sentimentalism in which love all too easily conquers all.

The Mother winds up unpersuasive, in large part due to writer Hanif Kureishi, who visits on all his mopey characters such calculated savagery, it's hard to care much for them or to get onboard for the hope implied in the hastily stitched-on ending.

Adequate but unremarkable animated tale.

Isn't much more than a proficient gothic mystery with a final twist that offers a satisfying little frisson before you start counting how many times it's been used before.

Estes never really completes a thought about this sorry group's moral dilemmas.

Everything about the movie seems excessive to the material. What should have been a small, independent feature without marquee casting -- the story's protagonists, after all, are meant to be the kind of people nobody ever notices.

If anything, as it lathers up into an abortive attempt at scarlet-woman branding and a goofy siege on the nunnery where a dazed and confused Antoinette has holed up, The Duchess of Langeais works best as the comic bondage fantasy implied in its deliciously sly French title: "Don't Touch the Axe."

After half an hour spent drooling over its visual splendors, I found the movie every bit as sickening as its creators intended it to be, minus the kicks they so palpably got out of making it.