Ella Taylor

Superb documentary.

Not even Altman's loose-limbed shooting style can redeem Cookie’s Fortune, a bafflingly pointless farce that belongs more properly in the vaudeville halls than on the director's sporadically lustrous résumé.

As sleek, clever and cocky as its anti-heroic protagonist, Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), a hard-driving lobbyist for the tobacco industry who can turn the most unpromising PR quagmire to his own advantage with a few well-turned lies posing as rational argument.

Aniston plays her depressed character with enough conviction to guarantee that practically every scene will be stolen out from under her by minor characters, among them a pricelessly funny Zooey Deschanel as a Retail Rodeo employee who vents her rage and frustration on the customers.

Leconte, as always, means to explore the gray areas between sexual espionage and love, and there remains something powerful about the fantasy of being listened to, without judgment.

Light on visceral thrills and heavy on the quotidian rhythms of life on the force, Xavier Beauvois' police procedural owes more to "Prime Suspect" and "Hill Street Blues" than it does to any film genre.

In his capable, yet only mildly exciting, adaptation of Charles Dickens’ third novel, Douglas McGrath (Emma) keeps reminding us that what we’re seeing is theater. This feels gratuitous.

It makes an eloquent case against the death penalty, especially when imposed on the mentally incompetent. For if one thing is clear by the time she went to the execution chamber, it's that Wuornos is barking mad, her eyes wild and vengeful, yet also, on some level, already dead.

You begin to wonder whether a story is ever going to show up. When it does, it's worth the wait for a long and well-turned set piece coordinating the heist, and two lovely flips in the plot.

By all current standards it's a startlingly ingenuous film.

The worthy text of Mad Hot Ballroom is undercut by the real source of its energy, the heat of competition and the pure joy of winning.

Warm, playful and inventive, this tale of an elephant with a spirit as generous as his waistline comes juiced with the genially goofy animation of the folks who brought us "Ice Age" (and, less memorably, "Robots") coupled with a respectful doffing of the cap to Geisel’s exuberantly wacky visual style.

Gluck, an oral historian, has the magpie eye of a born collector of objects, people and ideas, a cheeky appreciation for the ironies life drops on us, and enough of an open mind to let her odyssey lead her where it may.

Anderson and co-writer Lyn Vaus have a wonderfully light touch with dialogue both comic and sad, and Davis is the perfect mirror for the movie's gracefully shifting moods, and its soulful bossa nova score.

Though it's not much more than an haute-bourgeois morality play about the inadequacy of bourgeois morals, that's plenty in view of the small but terrific ensemble at Fellowes' disposal.

Carnage is a film about the violence of living, of finding and keeping a place in the world, and though it's a work of preternaturally sophisticated philosophy from a director who's barely out of her 20s, this beautiful, bizarre movie could function quite well without its capable screenplay.

Like "Heat," Collateral will doubtless go down in film history as the noir marvel it undoubtedly is, but I don't quite buy its characters, and I came out of the theater still wondering what it had to say. Me, I have a soft spot for that old ’60s radical.

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.

Boasts one of the most entertaining and bitterly astute screenplays I've had the pleasure of listening to in a while, with its lengthening spirals of deceit, mendacity and one-upmanship, and its elegant linguistic dances around difficult truths.

A viscerally effective thriller ends up a repugnant exercise in moral relativism, delivered with the grandstanding swagger of the self-styled provocateur.

If Drinking Buddies is meant to be his ticket into mainstream comedy, it feels mumblecore-ishly vague and rambling in its construction, like "Hannah Takes the Stairs" without the raffish charm.

There’s no denying the sharpness of his (Jason Kohn) insights into a society that hasn’t so much collapsed as reconstituted itself around venality, profiteering and rage.

The movie's wistful tone leavened with breaks into farce recalls Elia Suleiman's superbly controlled "Chronicle of a Disappearance."

Rachel Boynton's painfully timely film is actually a full-court tragedy - the sorry tale of a battle won and a war lost; of a country decimated by 500 years of colonialism and poverty; of globalization and America's losing battle to export market democracy to the developing world.

Stephen Frears has had more downs than ups of late, but I would never have thought the man responsible for "My Beautiful Laundrette" and "The Grifters" capable of stooping to pap as pappy as this unbearably chipper take on the real-life story of Laura Henderson.

Makes fascinating viewing despite its clumsy bombast.

Enlivened by journalist Avner Bernheimer's delicately witty script and some lively ensemble performances under the direction of Eytan Fox, the film offers a haunting portrait of a generation forced to risk their lives in the service of military goals they're far from totally committed to.

So oppressive is Peggy's world -- Year of the Dog is the best evocation I've seen of how much worse it is to be depressed in a sunny climate -- that when she finally loses control, it feels more like catharsis than madness.