Ernest Hardy

While moderately entertaining, the film also captures another old dynamic: The “ew” factor dissolves into the yawn factor with surprising quickness.

Too self-consciously dark, too aware of its long, murky, art-designed descent into the underbelly of America's addictive personality.

The list of ills is endless, well-researched, and cross-referenced repeatedly for emphasis. That makes the film a bit of a slog at times, but the fury and grief of the folks interviewed propel it forward.

That crack in Vitale's storytelling foundation would be forgivable if the writing, acting and character epiphanies . . . well, existed. As it is, not even Scotti's formidable lips can blow life into this stillborn flick.

While all the pieces don't quite add up in the end, as memory, fantasy and delusion collide, the film succeeds again and again at pulling you to the edge of your seat and keeping you there.

Although Mansfield Park is an enjoyable film, you can't help but wish that it were as brave, feisty and unconventional as it keeps telling us its heroine is.

Orlando Jones, buff and commanding, steals the film as Soul Train, a lawyer-biker, while Lisa Bonet, a sexy, enigmatic earth mother, is stranded in a movie that has no idea what to do with her.

Director Raja Gosnell apparently doesn't even try to pump life into this wan film version of the beloved Saturday-morning cartoon.

Stars the cult celebrity Om Puri, widely considered by cinephiles to be one of the best actors in the world.

Egoyan and Hoskins fans will definitely want to see this film. Others will feel their fingernails grow as they watch it.

Go for the dazzling, if repetitive, human stunt work. Endure the appallingly simplistic politics.

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

For all the violence and breaking-up-to-make-up that go on, there's never really a sense of risk or exploration, and the film's pulse never rises above faint.

Wants to be many things, but ends up being not much of anything.

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.

Has a warm and intimate feel that helps push it a little deeper than its cable movie-of-the-week blueprint.

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.

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

A curious mixture of banality and revelation.

Doesn't even come close to being a good movie, but it is a lot of fun.

The film offers no new insights into its people or into the dynamics of the Hollywood machine -- the whole affair, played for low-intensity laughs, is numbingly familiar.

Atrocious bit of by-the-numbers screen filler. And anyone who easily lapses into sugar comas is advised to stay far, far away.

Honeydripper is classic Sayles cinema: an insightful sketch of assorted common folk whose criss-crossing dreams and agendas unfold against larger, more powerful (and sometimes crushing) sociopolitical and cultural forces.

Danner, the film's sole strength, does what she can with the material, but it's not enough to offset writer-director Daniel Adams' cliché-ridden script and leaden direction, or the excruciating hamfest that is Richard Dreyfuss' lead performance.

Questions loom heavily over this entertaining but not-too-deep film, making it more a commercial than real exploration.

The film's deadly lulls outweigh its infrequent highs.

What leaves you breathless, though, is the knockout acting by the cast.

One of the best films of this year...unlike anything you've seen on the big screen.

Laced with brilliantly knotted ideas on race, masculinity and cults of violence.

A couple of unexpected revelations in the final act pack an emotional wallop that shifts the film (shot in clean, uncluttered takes) into the realm of old-fashioned tearjerker, but the tears are wholly earned.

The cutesy opening of writer-director David Moreton's Testosterone (co-written with Dennis Hensley) turns out to be a crippling miscalculation.

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

Working from a preachy, clumsy script that's full of gaping holes in logic, plot and character development, director Zak Tucker is also handicapped by a cast filled with actors who seem to be in their first year of acting school.

It’s the captured conversations about everyday lives and struggles that pin you to your seat.

One of the things that makes Traffic so very good is the wry humor that's laced throughout the film. It's a funny movie.

This film puts a pained human face on the cost of the corporate status quo.

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

Almost unbearable.

What really makes the film fall dead (although the preview audience I saw it with howled from beginning to end) are the actors and the way the characters have been scripted.

Cloudy is smart, insightful on a host of relationship dynamics, and filled with fast-paced action.

Crushingly airless film -- Food chokes on its own depiction of upper-crust decorum.

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.

Sitcom humor substitutes for wit, and tedious angst supplies the drama.

Lilya is the more genuinely unsettling film because Moodysson seems to actually know something of what it is to take and stumble beneath a crushing blow. You feel that here. And you feel it for days after.

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

An illuminating, infuriating document that paints McKinney as a true American heroine and patriot and confirms your worst fears about just how rotten our "democratic" process is at its core.

What follows is one set piece after another in which the women make fools of themselves as the script herds them toward a happy ending of hugs and tears.

It all collapses under an atrocious performance by Pacino, whose laughably bad accent and scene-chewing delivery serve up thick slabs of that rarest of delicacies: Jewish ham. There may be grounds here for a class-action lawsuit.

There's not a single surprise or moment of dramatic tension in Uncle Nino, which has already proved itself a hit as a self-distributed film in the Midwest.

The whole point is nothing more than the revelation that the terrain of suburbia is populated with damaged people inflicting damage on others. This is still news?

So gently told, so deceptively simple a story, that its considerable emotional power sneaks up on you.

Afailed attempt at a hipster screwball comedy. Very failed.

Funny, immediately and consistently engaging, and -- well done on almost every level.

For a film that deals with adultery, racism, immigration and class struggle, Loco Love is a startlingly weightless work. It has the antiseptic look and feel of an Olsen Twins video.

Even though it delivers on frights and special effects, and is well-acted and gorgeous to look at, never really surprises us.

A smart, quietly moving film.

It's not bad; it's just completely inconsequential.

The gorgeous Crudup is talented, but this charming asshole (more asshole than charming) is old hat for him, little more than another of the blank-eyed-loser-on-a-spiritual-quest roles in which he's been trafficking lately.

In the end, Some Fish Can Fly doesn't.

Through masterful editing, nimble music selection and smart use of documentary materials, the filmmakers shake the dust off cultural clichés to provide a provocative survey of the past. It’s a subversively sleek enterprise.

The film is ultimately more labored than inspired. A cameo by James Brown is amusing, but it can't keep The Tuxedo from earning the distinction of being Chan's worst Hollywood film to date.

We should expect more of summer fare than that it merely be a visual junk-food snack as we cool off in the chill of a darkened theater.

Coy, cutesy, sentimental, and shamelessly manipulative.

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

Creation's power lies in its layers, in the way it makes distinctions between religion and faith, and the ways it beautifully (save for one clunky bit of overexplanation) lays out the similarities between religion and science.

Black's cool-headed but blistering indictment of globalization and the racist international economic policies that have shoved that country into crushing poverty.

Nathan Lopez, armed with a diva's slinky cat walk and determination, is absolutely fantastic as Maximo.

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

All these years later, the film is far more infuriating than it is exciting.

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

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

Intermittently amusing, rarely illuminating and ultimately tedious documentary.

Conceptually, Underclassman is the stillborn spawn of "Beverly Hills Cop" and "21 Jump Street." Except its star, Nick Cannon, possesses neither the biting cool of young Eddie Murphy nor the sullen mystery of Johnny Depp. And the script, by David T. Wagner and Brent Goldberg, is breathtakingly bad.

It’s like watching an annoying young drag queen who flubs the quips she’s stolen, refuses to shut up and thinks attitude is wit.

The latest installment in the "Boys Life" series has just as many hits as misses -- more misses, actually -- but the high points easily stand alongside past triumphs.

The movie is stolen by the gorgeous, droll and hilarious Depp. The movie crackles when he's onscreen and only fitfully sparks when he's not.

The biggest problem is that the character of Sabine is such a lame male fantasy of the enigmatic woman-child.

An adequate popcorn matinee flick that's anchored by Judd's wonderful lead performance -- a performance that is better than the film earns or deserves.