Ernest Hardy

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.

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.

Although character arcs are a little too abruptly truncated as the story moves, Natali never fumbles the big picture.

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.

A diabolically enjoyable documentary on unearned self-esteem.

Director Ryan White has crafted a deceptively simple film that should almost immediately win viewers over with its low-key charm.

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

At the film's center is Emily Watson's pitch-perfect performance as Margaret Humphreys, the real-life social worker who in 1986 stumbled over the hidden practice.

A film whose sense of urgency and purpose is utterly engrossing.

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.

In a sterling ensemble cast, (Elfman) just about walks off with the movie.

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

In watching Soul, it helps to be a Spandau fan, of course, but the smart, layered contextualizing and historicizing of the group within the film makes it a gift for any pop-culture aficionado.

Intelligent, moving film.

Like "Run Lola Run," Drift circles back on itself to present a trio of possible outcomes, but it's R.T. Lee's sterling performance that rivets.

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

Told in an elliptical style with a pacing and jagged rhythms that take some getting used to, the thrust and power of the film lies in its poetic imagery.

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

The jokes fly so furiously that it'd be impossible for a single weak performance (Graham) to unravel this very funny film.

Tightly directed and well acted (even though many characters are cut-outs from every war movie you've ever seen), The Front Line shoehorns little known history into a familiar format, and it works.

Appalling because it never transcends its adolescent-boy glee at being allowed entry to the highly sexualized arena of prostitution.

An intellectually steelier case against Bush, his cabalistic administration and the Iraq war than Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, Hijacking is even more chilling because it eschews the heartstring symphony conducted (albeit very effectively) by Moore and sticks to irrefutable facts and no-bullshit analysis.

The film trots out a who's who of great thinkers - Jane Goodall, Stephen Hawking, Margaret Atwood, assorted scientists and historians - who are riveting as they walk us through the question of whether we will or can survive progress. The anticapitalism prognosis is grim, and the hope offered is slim indeed.

Has its own sense of logic and integrity that demand a kind of begrudged respect.

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.

Shot on digital and layered with animated segments, performance footage and clips from Smith family home movies, Family Movie unfolds with a gentle, justified confidence in the power of its subject.

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.

Much of what's presented is familiar territory, but it's the moments that fracture prejudices and expectations that stick with you.

Quirkily sad, unexpectedly funny -- and just a tad repetitive.

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.

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.

You need not be a student or scholar of dance to be completely enthralled by Greg Vander Veer's documentary Miss Hill.

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.

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.

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

Hopefully, the next time around, Chadha's imagination will be in the service of not just excellent casting and directing, but a script to match those other cinematic components.

Well-acted and directed, with melancholy grooved insights that will only be news to the young and narcissistic, Together is a pleasant way to while away an afternoon and see some old pros in great form.

An often gorgeous, dizzying assault of ideas and visual flourishes...it's just not very good.

Though the film, based on Dallaire's memoir, can veer toward deification of the general, it's hugely effective.

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 whole thing can be hard to follow, but the energy (and pulchritude) of the cast make it a perfectly fine bit of popcorn escapism.

Derivative, cliché-ridden and old hat.

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.

Karpovsky is unsettlingly good as Paul, and Newman's Danielle is sexy and layered.

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

It's a pleasant surprise to note how good Scream 3 really is.

A well-crafted if structurally generic documentary.

It's smart, funny and insightful and it's quite easy to see what attracted the stars to it.

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

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 film powerfully hits the note of universalism that is its goal; haven't many of us fallen for someone that we, they, and the world deem out of our league?

Composed of artfully used split-screen, lots of hand-held camera, and expertly honed dialogue, the film floats on currents of sadness and understated humor. It also makes Loic's existential ache almost palpable.

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.

The film isn't as smart on the issue of race as it needs to be, and its feminist read of the music and scene feels forced in places, but as an entry-level conversation starter, it gets the job done.

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.

The emotional and narrative core of the story is how much tragedy swirls through Petrov's personal life — from his parents pushing him into the military at the age of seventeen to his marriage to the unraveling of his circumstances after his heroic decision. It is heart-wrenching stuff that you might wish the filmmakers had trusted more.

A curious mixture of banality and revelation.

Sampled old newsreel and security-camera footage flesh out the narrative, and the film's visually arresting, but it's the performances that hold it all together.

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.

Singleton has neither the emotional nor intellectual depth to do justice to his thesis. He is too in awe of the stereotypical hood lifestyles and macho posturings that he's trying to critique.

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.

While the acting is top-notch, the real star of the film is the script.

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

Shearer builds an airtight case to prove his thesis, and one of his most chilling arguments is a roll call of brave souls whose lives and careers have been systematically wrecked in pursuit of the truth.

Rung with numb inarticulateness.

What director Aviva Kempner has done is shine a light into the past and recover a classic American hero, one with all the integrity, decency and largeness of spirit that we have been taught makes up the American character.

Poignant, funny, and proof of Basquiat's magic.

Filled with great archival footage from throughout Hancock's five-decade career, and with elder-statesman words of wisdom from the man himself, Possibilities celebrates an impulse that's too rare in modern music: the love behind the labor of creation.

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.

It’s a moving tale made more so because even after he’s “won,” Pineda maintains a clear-eyed pragmatism about what living a fairy tale costs.

Filmed over a period of six weeks and supplemented with animated music sequences and chilling news footage of the terrifying deluge, Pray is both an elegy and a love letter.

Revolution is educational, but its shortcomings are glaring.

Saturated with deep, rich color and low-key visual wit, and graced with sympathetic performances.

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.

The film's abrupt ending leaves many crucial questions unanswered, but that weakness doesn't detract from its overall power.

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.

The script is painfully underbaked, and director Bille Woodruff (Honey) continues to raise a question: How can someone from a music-video background have absolutely no sense of rhythm, timing or pacing?

A tedious exercise in filling in historical blanks through exhausted tropes.

While the film is slight, predictable, and familiar, it's great popcorn fare.

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.

A lobotomized updating of "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

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 Bomb snakes its way toward tragedy, it grates rather than entices. The actors come off more as poseurs than as characters, and the film's political and cultural insights are superficial and old hat.

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

Characters make choices that are incredibly stupid, even wildly offensive, but also recognizably human, and as the night spirals out of control Cannon demonstrates a strong hand in controlling the mayhem. He also sets himself up as a filmmaker to watch.