Ernest Hardy

This is powerful reportage, beautifully shot and gracefully laid out; too bad that Kendall ties it all up with more deep thoughts from the bus itself, thoughts that sound like outtakes from a TED Talk on the interconnectedness of all living things.

What follows is a film as odd as its title character. Timothy flings grown-up ideas at the viewer but rips the teeth from them rather than risk our discomfort.

Remind(s) us of the power of good old-fashioned character-driven movies.

For adults, the film will drag in spots, but it's filled with all those values you hope to instill in your children.

The film's scope is staggering, including its detailed outlining of BP's origins and fingerprints across decades of unrest in Iran.

The film staggers under its own didacticism. Too often we're told of men who were professionals back home and are here reduced to driving cabs, waiting tables or vending ice cream.

It's a wit-free homage to Hitchcock and M. Night Shyamalan that, for all its slick presentation, never comes close to hitting the mark of its forebears.

If only this movie were rich enough, strong enough to be worthy of this (Dafoe's) performance.

Slight but enjoyable documentary.

The film lacks a pulse. There's sound and fury, but the result is more drizzle than tempest.

Sofia Coppola, who's directed the film from her own screenplay, narrowly misses making the story work on the screen.

A gorgeously burnished vintage post card come to life, Motorcycle Diaries has about as much depth and emotional currency as the cardboard that post card would be stamped on.

Striking the right balance between interior and exterior can mean the difference between compelling drama and accidental melodrama. Writer-director Ron Morales just misses equilibrium in the visually arresting Filipino thriller Graceland.

Drags on far too long.

For those seeking even a little adventurousness in their filmgoing experiences, the movie will wear thin very quickly.

What's fresh for these people is, frankly, old news for anyone who has seen even one or two documentaries on similar subject matter.

This schizophrenic mess zigzags all over the place, trying to figure out whether it's a dysfunctional-family drama, a slapstick comedy or an angst-ridden coming-of-age movie.

Unfortunately, given both its content and the media's collective failure to fully report the (ongoing) story, the film only intermittently has a pulse.

We don't really care about this everyman's moral dilemna and spiritual crisis because -- for all the poetic insights he offers in his philosophical voice-over -- he never transcends the details to become an engrossing character.

Ustaoglu has made Mehmet unbelievably naive -- and the hardships piled upon him unintentionally evoke "The Perils of Pauline." That dilutes what should be a powerful protest film, and robs it of the emotional impact it aims for.

Writer-director Kirk Jones has the movie roll over, fetch and chase its own tail in order to make you love it.

There's satiric comedy to be mined from the conflicting messages society still sends about pregnancy, motherhood, and women's worth, but the script isn't smart enough to explore them.

There are undoubtedly several moving moments in the film, and the kids are gorgeous and heartbreaking, but none of that is strong enough to balance Braat's galling and enabled narcissism, which pervades the film.

It could have been a hoot in a bad-movie way if the laborious pacing and endless exposition had been tightened. As it is, only LaSalle's sizzling performance makes Crazy more than a by-the-numbers psycho-horror thriller.

The kids absolutely win your heart, but there's something off-putting in the film's lazy juxtaposition of unexamined Negro dysfunction tropes (absent fathers, violent streets) against an idyllic Africa tended by white benevolence.

Hamlet, like its title character, is a mopey, dopey thing that you just want to scream at: Do something!

Too slow-moving and too understated in much of its humor.

More than once, while watching the film, I thought: The camera should really just turn away from those grating teen brats and follow the mom (Holly Hunter).

The film won't likely change any minds, but there's a taut political essay beneath the blatant campaigning.

Less would have been more, and this film is sabotaged by its maker's unchecked pretension.

Wrought with pretension -- and a blind eye to its own exploitation.

It has to be noted that the use of music in this film is the worse in recent memory: maudlin, syrupy, and overwrought.

People Places Things crackles to life whenever the camera turns to one of Will's students, Kat (The Daily Show's Jessica Williams), and her professor mother, Diane (Regina Hall).

A good, though unremarkable, film.

Disappointingly dumb.

You root for the kids, who are utterly captivating, but Green is another story. His shtick -- a combo of insufferable stage-parent and unbearable rock geek -- is exhausting.

Well-meaning but mediocre.

Corsini's insight into the psyche of this contemporary woman doesn't have much of a point because it tells us nothing new.

Fly Away could have been stronger if its antiseptic visual style, which anchors it in old-fashioned TV movie mode, had been more adventurous in shouldering some of the weight of depicting the emotional and psychic anguish of the story.

This time around, writer-director Robert Rodriguez has stumbled badly, creating a clunky, gadget-happy film full of characters -- even returning ones -- about whom it is hard to care.

Volumes are said about class, assimilation, and the ways the assimilated sometimes shame and scar those who haven't shorn themselves of ethnic or racial signifiers. There is pungency in this shorthand, in these sketches that are richly evocative without saying too much or giving too little. You can't help but wish the movie had more of it.

Despite its weighty material and some moving scenes (much of the Sudanese cast are survivors of the war), this aggressive crowd-pleaser is slighter than its subject matter deserves.

Writer-director Todd Haynes (Safe, Poison) still makes movies like a first-time filmmaker afraid he won't get another chance; he crams every idea, every image ever dreamed, onscreen.

Where the young writer-director impresses is in the unforced sketching of era details (gas lines, the tacky energy of roller-skating rinks), in the sharp psychological insight into his lead characters, and in the performances he pulls from his actors.

What makes The Cell worth viewing at all is the carefully sculpted imagery.

Director Darnell Martin (I Like it Like That) races through the script's bullet points with a brisk superficiality that leaves crucial plot points underdeveloped and unresolved, and refuses to engage the dark side of Leonard Chess’ paternalism.

As exasperating as it is insightful. The film ultimately falters, though, because it's so resolutely old-fashioned.

One part stand-up comedy concert film (think Kings of Comedy) to two parts social outreach activism, documentary The Muslims Are Coming! works somewhat better as the latter than the former.

Devotees of Motorhead frontman/certifiable rock icon Lemmy Kilmister will be in heaven watching this gushing love letter to the man who straddles rock subgenres, but anyone who's not already a fan will cry for mercy long before the nearly two-hour film ends.

A very odd cinematic creature.

Director Paolo Virzi (who co-wrote the script with Francesco Bruni) errs badly by creating totems and types in lieu of characters.

As he explains the male-male relationships and the absence of stigma or judgment, the film soars.

Albaladejo turns his film into a banal, mildly entertaining trifle of affirmation, eliciting a shrug more than any real emotion.

So riddled with unanswered questions that it requires gargantuan leaps of faith just to watch it plod along, while McCann's overly broad strokes miss crucial details as he tries to mount an attack on both the power of the media and an indifferent medical profession.

Isn't a must-see, but it's definitely worthwhile.

Coy, cutesy, sentimental, and shamelessly manipulative.

Mildly amusing, both charming and diverting, it plays like a La La Land home movie.

Had Xiaoshuai trusted audience sympathies to stay with a slightly more forceful character, he'd likely have crafted the heart tugger that the film aims to be.

By the time the movie ends, having traversed numerous plot twists and character revelations, the viewer is emotionally drained in a bittersweet sort of way.

Stranded in superficiality, the film is a lifestyle commercial.

The tragic ending they tack on to the film reinforces the same fear-mongering notion of cause and effect that gives the Church its power to abuse and exploit, and the film winds up muffling its own powerful protest.

What's made powerfully clear is that we've reached a dire point of crisis that, while largely rooted in economics, is about so much more than dollars and cents.

Unfortunately, whenever the story quiets down for exposition or to move the plot forward, it all becomes a grinding and often confusing bore.

Though sprung from the mind of a woman, the film plays like a hetero male fantasy of tortured love.

The viewer is meant to chuckle at the escalating violence-ringed absurdities (the kidnapping of a bafflingly passive drug dealer who winds up becoming a road-trip buddy, for example) and at Ray's brutish philosophies, but the chuckles are few. Though the film starts out modestly amusing, it very, very quickly lists into tedium.

There are so many complicated political, religious, and cultural issues swirling around Yoni's story, and Follow Me keeps them on the sidelines. It is pure hagiography.

At a minimum, the film might inspire some people to hit up Google for a crash course on this historical narrative.

This look at the assorted struggles of modern hetero coupledom gives off a distinctly moldy aroma.

While Escape is filled with inspired touches... Moore lacks the off-kilter psychological nuances of Lynch, as well as the go-for-broke storytelling skills and visual élan. It doesn't help that the cast is largely competent at best.

Mr. 3000, which starts out promisingly, squanders Mac's natural gift of salty gruffness by shoehorning him into a dull, heartwarming cinematic lesson on humility and the joys of teamwork.

Daydream is decently acted, overwritten, slickly shot, decked out with the requisite indie soundtrack, and propped up with angst-ridden poses and pouting lips. It's also another film in which on-screen teens, especially the nubile femme fatale at the center, are but vessels to showcase the screenwriter's irony-drenched, self-satisfied intellect.

The film is never really more than a series of loosely connected riffs and set pieces. That'd be fine except much of it is slack and airless; the laughs are many but they're too spread out -- a far cry from the series' heyday of taut, rapid-fire lunacy. Still, it's worth catching the film just for Sedaris' performance.

The corniness and predictability feel, if not quite fresh, then not so groaningly stale.

It's fine acting of - and chemistry - between Paxton, Margulies and Mark Wahlberg that gives this film (written by Jim McGlynn, directed by Jack Green) its kick.

Shamelessly manipulative, it's a highly effective if not very good film, its success entirely due to the talents of its cast. They bring heart to a script that is unabashedly about pushing buttons.

Hamstrung by a script that is too often smug, obvious and self-important.

In truth, the only reason this film was made was to allow viewers to ogle pretty young things behaving badly.

Despite Menkin's clear belief that he's crafted a rousing true-life drama, his film plays like a cliché-ridden, painfully self-conscious Hollywood melodrama about a noble person with disabilities.

Infuriating on almost every conceivable level.

For a film purporting to tell it like it is for black gay men, race is the most poorly handled aspect in Punk's equation; it's almost as if it had no relevance. That might have flown if its most telling moment didn't suggest otherwise.

A very competent film, but it barely pulls you in.

To be fair, the cast is largely good, given the material.

The flaws pale against what's illustrated, which is not just how Prop. 8 passed, but the sordid, cynical workings of our political machine.

A curious mixture of banality and revelation.

It is -- in mood, execution, and shameless sentimentality -- a Bette Midler movie with an Irish accent.

It limps, not gallops, across the screen for what seems an interminable stretch of time and leaves the viewer with precious little to show for the experience.

When Boote gets out of the way, the film is illuminating and infuriating.

The film only rarely harnesses the power of the anachronistic, funk-driven, beat-heavy rap music that swells its soundtrack. Even the intricately choreographed crowd dance scenes, filled with frenzied movement, are more often stillborn than stimulating.

What really sink the film are the script's reductive, outdated psychological implications (molestation leads to queerness/transsexualism) and its clumsy melodramatics.

Rung with numb inarticulateness.

Writer-director J.B. Ghuman Jr. shoehorns the character into a witlessly stitched homage to other films - notably "Heathers."

Stripped of the pretension of the overrated "Trainspotting," but it's also void of the earlier film's ambition or glimmers of real cultural insight.

Revolution is educational, but its shortcomings are glaring.

Chabria lacks the effervescent touch, in both his clichéd, logic-challenged writing and his leaden direction, to make you care. Though the film is crammed with music -- the soundtrack is stellar -- the production numbers fall completely flat, leaving you to pine for the over-caffeinated touch of Baz Luhrmann.

Dorian Blues is full of similarly rigged moments, but there are genuine chuckles, and a palpably heartfelt final scene between Dorian and his mom ends the tale on a powerful note.

Like the melancholy remininces of an old relative who lived through an exciting, even harrowing time, but no longer possesses the mental faculties to really flesh out the tale they're spinning.

As Serendipity moves into the final stretch, Chelsom's direction becomes frenzied but still lethargic; he never breathes life into the film.

A calculated bid to turn the Rock into a more family-friendly commodity. That calculation may be transparent, but it pays off: Cracking one-liners and alternating between world-weariness and growing affection for his charges, Johnson is wonderful -- much better than his material.