Jessica Winter

Agathe de la Boulaye, as The Painter, gives off an appealing air of good-natured amusement, which is appropriate given her surroundings.

Sitting through the last reel is significantly less charming than listening to a four-year-old with a taste for exaggeration recount his Halloween trip to the Haunted House.

Especially in the climactic, clumsily staged gunfight, the prevailing mode is wide-eyed idiocy--which might be the point, since von Trier's satirical target is the hypocrisy of (news flash!) America's eagerness to enforce stability and security with all guns blazing.

One of Gitaï's greatest assets in Kadosh is such stillness, which leaves facile outsiders' judgment out of the frame and thereby deepens our immersion in the narrative.

This film is solidly built, faithful to its material, and utterly lacking in pretense, but its maker is still running in place.

An endless chain reaction of cartilage-crunching, organ-pulping brawls.

Begins with the same deathless question that has bedeviled generations of teenagers: how to fill the space allotted to graduating seniors for memories and shout-outs at the back of their yearbook?

Dark Blue World and Sverak's previous "Kolya" were each written by the director's father, Zdenek, and both films betray a weakness for the symmetrical and sentimental.

The raw art of the malapropism has rarely been so extensively honored, but the increasingly strident, slapstick-smacked movie runs out of steam once the culture shock wears off.

The exposition is thick, the characterization choppy, the wigs terrible.

Akerman's characteristically patient, pensive approach elegantly accommodates her reportorial responsibilities.

Comes down to two sorely limited and rapidly tiresome characters.

This is more than self-amused irony; this is kitsch as religion.

Madeleine's such a cold bitch that the adulterous lovers' anguished scruples scan like inert masochism.

Never lacks for energy, and the director and his stars stride with focused confidence through the hooey.

An arthritic exercise in self-pleasurement.

Can be blamed foremost on its fire-and-brimstone screenwriter, Pierce Gardner.

Watching Ben get the girl or be seriously injured trying always has its dry, keening pleasures.

This sly, engrossing doc is an expert riposte to smug proponents of the fetterless free market.

As sweet and unassuming a film as they come, embraces both perspectives -- it's sympathetic to the batty throes of a first infatuation, but affably demurs at indulging them.

Almost inevitably for a documentary of this stripe, it risks aestheticizing poverty--but here it's usually the kids themselves who compose the most arresting images.

Doillon's ease with young performers is again seamlessly evident.

Boldly aspirational. It's Jeunet's stab at "Paths of Glory," dipped in a sepia bath and halfway wrenched into a women's picture.

A plea for equality of opportunity, a worthy objective somewhat obscured by non-disabled actors occupying the lead roles. In any case, one imagines Rory himself would prefer a Farrelly disability blooper reel.

The wonderful-terrible dervish of Umbrellas reaches peak abandon, worthy of Vincente Minnelli, when Geneviève sobs out a plaint for Guy as a carnival whirls outside the shop.

The movie's subject is brotherly love in all its extremes; the trajectory is grimly inevitable, and yet its final descent still manages to startle.

Niccol's fatal error is in making the protagonist at once amoral and insipid, an admixture thickened by Cage's loquacious yet stoned voice-over and Moynahan's moist-eyed tremblings as the trophy wife.

Not a movie that can afford to take itself seriously.