Ella Taylor

Anemic.

Brilliantly edited for drama and irony, The Goebbels Experiment juxtaposes little-seen German propaganda films with excerpts from Goebbels' diary.

Has the sprawling canvas of an epic and the emotional heat of classical melodrama.

What the movie lacks is a point.

Remember the Daze has the irony-free, instant-nostalgia earnestness of your high school yearbook, but watching it is not likely to conjure your own youthful emotions -- it’s more like flipping through the generic memories of a complete stranger.

The movie blows a fresh wind of disrespect, high drama and lush romanticism through that stolidly middlebrow subgenre, the period drama.

A triumph of production design...As a character study, though, The Aviator is downright squeamish.

(Cage's) performance feels embalmed in the accumulated shtick of an actor trapped in excess.

This heartfelt tale of disintegration and acceptance, seasoned with family devotion, will both raise and soothe the anxieties of those of us who regularly ask ourselves why we came into the kitchen two minutes ago.

Raising Helen is the kind of movie you watch on a plane while muttering “utter crap” under your breath -- and then burst into tears.

One senses that this is an intensely personal project for Binder, who is not as forgiving as he might be toward the mercurial mother. Still, the film is carried by Costner and Allen, who project a chemistry so incrementally built on reluctant camaraderie, they almost seem like siblings.

Pretty good going for a ton of moisture.

The film, like the beleaguered country it depicts, has a raw, neurotic, brawling yet tender vitality.

That You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is not more dull is due in large part to the adorably flamboyant Punch (late of Dinner for Schmucks and Hot Fuzz).

This Rob Reiner comedy jogs along pleasantly enough to the finish (Costner is charming as always in over-the-hill-ruin mode), which entails a less-than-shattering insight about love and marriage.

Their endless groupings and regroupings, their brief encounters and power struggles are framed by an armory of cinematic devices that will be familiar to any Desplechin devotee.

Though hardly a major work, The Burial Society has going for it something that many of the snickering noir comedies currently littering the field lack. Underneath its cheeky amorality, there beats a heart.

A fresh, buoyant, mischievous and rather jolly meditation - if that's the word for a movie as divinely nuts as this one is - on the meaning of life in an unhappy world.

A fetchingly improbable match of material and directors.

Precious little history of any kind shows its face in Marie Antoinette. The omission is strategic.

My own view is that, like me, the LAPD was defeated by the movie's incestuously proliferating plots. I've seen Dark Blue twice, and I still don't have a handle on all its comings and goings.

Under Peter Hewitt's phoned-in direction, Garfield chugs along like the slow train to Chattanooga, with only Jennifer Love Hewitt, as the local vet, twittering pertly in a desperate effort to raise Jon's feeble pulse.

The Girl From Paris may not have half the smooth technique of "Swimming Pool," but it has 10 times the heart and soul.

It's a tribute to Robert Gordon's nifty screenplay and Dunne's cheerful way with digression that Addicted to Love, even as it broadens into screwball, also deepens into a character study full of surprising left turns.

The movie is driven almost entirely by its exhilaratingly subversive characters.

The question is not how bad this excuse for a domestic comedy is (medium cringe), but how the gifted Fred Schepisi got suckered into directing a vanity project.

Good fun, though not more than up-market situation comedy studded with the usual leaps out of period-speak to swipe at contemporary Hollywood.

As naked and bitter and mesmerizing a display of self-pity as you've seen outside as Edward Albee play. By the end of this willfully grimy yet oddly beautiful movie, Billy and Layla have earned grudging sympathy.