John Anderson

It also happens to feature a pair of performances that eclipse all else around them.

If the screenplay to Kill the Messenger were a news story, any capable copydesk would have kicked it back to the reporter — not for a shortage of facts, but a lack of dramatic soul.

The taste with which one is left is not savory, exactly, but it certainly lingers.

Director David Mackenzie's gripping, convincing and convincingly violent convict drama owes its authenticity largely to the experiences of ex-prison therapist Jonathan Asser, who wrote its screenplay. But the opening 10 minutes are a virtuosic example of virtually wordless filmmaking.

One of the brighter aspects of Life of Crime, which otherwise ambles along good naturedly, is the casting.

In their engaging, fast-paced and ultimately ludicrous combo of espionage and mayhem, the makers of The November Man give us a very Putin-like villain in Arkady Federov (veteran Serbian actor Lazar Ristovski).

With a mood and setting worthy of a murder story by Jack London, this audience-friendly, atmospheric work could be remade as a thriller, although that’s really what it is already.

What's so unfunny about peace, love and understanding? Plenty, it turns out. But for much of the movie, viewers will be asking themselves where the conflict is. And, by extension, the drama.

Guaranteed to fan antigovernment sentiments among its audiences, Dinosaur 13 is less about paleontology than it is about prosecutorial overreach, political gamesmanship, dinosaur swindlers and true crime — if in fact crimes were even committed, and/or committed by the people accused.

Frank is a genuine original in a summer sea of sameness, and a darkly comedic manifesto against the cultural status quo.

Anita may be a tribute doc, but it’s one with real heft.

The screenwriter/playwrights have processed the characters’ last words in ways that imbue them with as much humanity as possible.

Fredrik Bond’s direction and Matt Drake’s screenplay deliver a charisma-free trip into a world of gratuitous violence, contrivances and tedium.

The Square is journalism, but Noujaim’s agenda is greater than mere reportage.

For all its immersion in the roar, grease and danger of Formula One, the fact-based Rush — about the sport's great rivalry of the 1970s — is also more predictable than a pit stop, something well-suited to Mr. Howard. He's made perfectly palatable pictures, but never a truly great one, partly because he has such a weakness for the commercial and a consequent gift for the obvious.

"Witty and brisk" is not the name of a French breakfast cereal, but it does describe a certain brand of French film, the type that coquettishly flirts with comedy while sprinting in the direction of dry, sophisticated charm. Such is Haute Cuisine.

There's a near-sacred history in Hollywood of non-U.S.- born directors providing fresh perspectives on America. Miloš Forman. Alfred Hitchcock. Ang Lee. Ernst Lubitsch. Billy Wilder. For Prisoners, a stress-inducing trip into child abduction, the director is Quebecois filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, who gives us an American "hero" guaranteed to push many buttons, many times, and who might not have been allowed to be quite so awful, under a different director's lens.

A documentary as messy as the movement it tries to portray, 99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film possesses energy, passion and about a dozen documentaries inside it yearning to breathe free.

Even as Cecil lives his life slightly adjacent to history, building a heroic film around him requires herculean effort.

There aren't many bright spots in Lovelace, although one is Amanda Seyfried's intoxicating smile, and another is the retinal insult delivered by a 16mm projector flaring out at the audience during the movie's opening moments, and which feels like an accusation. It's the odd film that indicts you just for watching. But Lovelace is an eccentric piece of cinema, made by unlikely people.

To call Lake Bell a magnetic, intelligent, blithely screwball leading lady in the Carole Lombard tradition might be selling her short. With In a World… , a rollicking laffer about the cutthroat voiceover biz in Los Angeles, she proves herself a comedy screenwriter to be reckoned with.

Shockingly, the kind of cringe-inducing material upon which Mr. Mazer has built a career as a writer for Sacha Baron Cohen ("Bruno," "Borat," "Da Ali G Show") doesn't work when rendered by types who could have been cast in "Notting Hill" (someone even makes a Hugh Grant joke). It's rather close to excruciating.

Mr. Damon brings both a weary optimism and convincing physicality to Max, who is no revolutionary. He just wants to live, and is willing to don an exoskeletal combat suit and fight robots to do it.

Like the film itself, Porter’s handful of devoted, charismatic attorneys do a righteous job of reminding people that the accused are innocent until proven guilty, and that the criminal justice system seems otherwise disposed.

Witty, wacky, multicharacter comedy My Best Day features a rural milieu that’s authentically American.

Some parts of the film are drily academic, but much of it is quite beautiful and artfully put together by the director.

Despite its dubious inhabitants, the film consistently entertains by throwing the kinds of curves one should see coming but doesn’t.

Helmers Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin... don’t quite get to the issues behind the trio’s infamous performance at the historic Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow last year, but the young women’s vulnerability and defiance make for stirring viewing.

Soko is terrific, but it is Mr. Lindon who delivers the performance of the film, his internalized consternation amounting to an eloquent dispatch from the war between the sexes.

Frances Ha also marks the rare instance in which an actress has the perfect role at the perfect time. Ms. Gerwig's work here is fragile, delicate, subject to bruising; something that could wither under too much attention. Perhaps Ms. Gerwig is the greatest actress alive. And maybe Frances Ha is just the ghost orchid of independent cinema.

Noisy, frenetic, grandiose and essentially a soap opera, director J.J. Abrams's second contribution to the franchise has everything, including romance: Never before have Capt. James T. Kirk and his Vulcan antagonist, Mr. Spock, seemed so very much in love.

A mood piece, a character study and an exercise in poetic gesture possessed of a sort of evanescent, secular spirituality.

While much of The World Before Her speaks to global womanhood, other aspects are more specific to India, but that’s what gives the film much of its life and spark.

One of the assets of Stranger Things is its air of mystery, and the actors give the indelible impression that they have much locked away inside.

A nutty Norwegian mashup of drollery, myth and jolts to the nervous system, Thale does a deft dance between grossout comedy and horror fantasy. Still, it’s too wordy by half, saying what it should be showing

What keeps Ain’t in It for My Health from being a really satisfying portrait isn’t a lack of access, but a lack of intimacy.

[The Kings of Summer] is much more interested in the laughs that can be mined from character rather than plot. Galletta’s script, Vogt-Roberts’ direction and the distinctive play of the actors, notably Offerman and Mullally, lets the viewer know who everyone is right away, and the gag lines flow.

The film grows increasingly mirthful as the characters come into focus, and the casting is the key: Ms. Garner, who also helped produce the film, has a gift for catty roles, and Ms. Wilde is so funny she should play hookers all the time.

Likely to create considerable nervous tension among viewers who think they've seen this all before. They haven't.

The scope of the subject is such that when Mr. Jarecki's voiceover cuts into the narrative, imposing a personal angle on the national story, it reduces the sense of significance its creator aimed for. But that's a fairly backhanded endorsement of a very potent movie.

Less magical is the blind adherence to formula evident in most of Taken 2. As they might say in the advertising department, it's an adrenaline-fueled thrill ride. But it could have been much more.

Sleepwalk With Me makes the subject palatable, funny and maybe even touching.

It's a purely sensory journey until the pictures start making editorial comments, in slaughterhouses and garbage dumps.

Years after its initial release, Ornette: Made in America, part of Milestone's continuing "Project Shirley," still feels fresh - its moves always surprising, yet always somehow perfect.

Lawless is one of those films that, through seeming serendipity, has a cast that defines its moment. There have been others - "The Breakfast Club," "The Godfather" and "Silverado," to name one irrelevant and two relevant examples. But Lawless really lucked out.

The situation is fascinating, and given an illuminating investigation here.

Does it all have to be so tedious? To the movie's credit, many of the inside jokes are pretty funny, and Mr. Lundgren is close to hilarious as a dissipated Swede named Gunner.

The film benefits enormously from having the luminous Rebecca Hall as its lead. It also gains an ominous gravity from the haunted, wounded and wobbly England in which it's set.

Conventional it is not. Engrossing it is.

Writer-director Andrew Okpeaha MacLean, who in his feature debut has lashed together a sturdy vehicle for unadorned morality and pragmatic justice.

It is Mr. Kinnear's slippery charm that keeps Thin Ice from sinking into the frosty Wisconsin slush toward which it seems to be heading from the start.

One of the reasons documentaries often take so long to make is the filmmakers' need to keep their subject from giving a performance. They want something genuine, something that materializes only when the camera disappears. Nothing Mr. Courtney is says is inaccurate or, God knows, dishonest. But it isn't quite true either.

What makes this nominee for the best-foreign-film Oscar singular among Holocaust movies is the way it characterizes the banality of life underground.

The island locale rings with reggae music regardless of its proximity to Jamaica, and any action sequence is rendered in painfully deliberate slo-mo.

With Mr. Harrelson, Mr. Moverman has created an antihero of epic proportions and indiscretions.

Safe House is a sturdy enough thriller, but one that consistently defaults to the less interesting of its two lead characters.

Ms. Israel's movie proves, once again, that the best nonfiction cinema possesses the same attributes as good fiction: Strong characters, conflict, story arc, visual style.

The director's apparent blindness to the epic banality of her subjects suggests that the whole project is one royally misguided mess.

The landscape is dire, the architecture is haunted, children disappear by the dozens and antique toys inexplicably spark to life. That Mr. Radcliffe doesn't is part of the problem.

As an experiment in Academy Award psychology, Albert Nobbs is fascinating. As drama? It is, forgive us, a drag.

Mr. Carnahan has till now been pigeonholed, and rightly, by comedy shoot-'em-ups like "Smokin' Aces" and "The A-Team." But here he is with The Grey - certainly an adventure film but one with a spiritual ingredient that is both surprising and fiercely resonant.

The ending, for instance, is so ridiculously tidy it squeaks. But en route to its kitchen-sink climax, "Man" manages to both amuse and provoke, to cleave to convention and promote ideas.

Despite all the nervous tension, the central drama is flawed - Jonathan isn't trying to find a killer. He is the killer. Something is lacking in the dramatic equation.

The truth is, Mr. Farina would be considered Oscar material if "Joe May" were a bigger film. As it is, he'll have to settle for being great.

Doesn't the reigning genius of the German language deserve his own "Shakespeare in Love"? Sure. But as Goethe scampers about Leipzig, comically failing his doctoral exam, spilling his books and looking bemused, young Johann might as well be auditioning for his own Disney Channel program.

The type of film with which Mr. Ratner has claimed to be infatuated is itself like a caper - it requires precise execution. Tower Heist is more like that 10-story Snoopy, as he drunkenly bobs along Central Park West.

Any self-respecting period piece, historical drama or even caper movie - and The Debt is all three - balances issues of global significance with interpersonal drama. The problem here is that the personal eclipses the global. The stakes are too low.

What may feel like Mr. Sfar's indulgences are sometimes just that, but one could hardly make an honest movie about Gainsbourg that wasn't as recklessly ambitious as this.

A delicious thriller that gets under the skin à la "All About Eve," albeit with a twist: The craft here is still theater, but of the workplace rather than the stage.

The pulp-fictional hero is inhabited by the charismatic Andy Lau who, together with Chinese stars Bingbing Li, Ms. Lau and Tony Leung Ka-fai, makes Detective Dee the most purely entertaining film of our vanishing summer.

Goofily funny, and silly, and in many ways follows the currents of contemporary comedy into the gulf stream of inanity. And yet Ned turns out to be a strangely moving figure, a comic foil worthy of affection, perhaps even respect.

The film is almost distractingly beautiful to look at, something that accentuates the tension between the film's conflicting quantities, i.e., the glories of the physical world, and the corrupted humanity it hosts.

Mr. Nixey is doing an Alfred Hitchcock homage within a movie lacking anything as subversive, or skilled, as Hitchcock.

This is a movie about longing, desire, desperation and the abandonment of principle - quite a collection of themes, all universal.

Despite a certain emotional chill, what holds this Mechanic together is - no surprise - the core Carlino story.

Cinema-as-shoplifting is okay, as long as you still get the feeling it's for a greater good. But that's something The Tourist is sorely missing.

You have to be a bit of an arrested adolescent to think "Larry" is funny.

Not as bad as it sounds nor as good as it might have been.

It's doubtful Milarepa will be opening in Beijing any time soon; all the more reason it deserves a look.

This is a movie for younger children -- they won't notice that the children deliver their lines with all the conviction of an airline flight boarding announcement.

Martin is marvelous; through sheer charisma, he takes over certain scenes as if no one else is there.

The problem with Thinner, which went unscreened for critics, is that it's medium-level King. It lacks the gravity of "Shawshank" and the crazed obsession of "Misery." It's more like "Needful Things," another good film of a lightweight story, with a few more servings of gore and gross-out humor to hold us over until the next big thing.

It's weird, wacky territory you enter in The Price of Milk, and we don't just mean New Zealand.

Infectious and inspiring, despite one's best efforts to resist its charms.

The two leads are unappealing, the story is dragged on for days and the rather random magical element renders any human factor irrelevant..

As good as Rourke is, and as willingly as he throws himself on the figurative hand grenade, his performance constantly begs the question of whether the story would be worth telling without him. Marisa Tomei, as Cassidy the pole dancer, delivers a courageous performance, one nearly as ego-battering as Rourke's.

It's the younger women's movie, and they acquit themselves admirably, even if most of the creative energy in the film seems to have gone into the costumes and set design. It's too bad, but in a year when female bonding is all over the screen, and uniformly dreadful to watch, Now and Then merely continues the trend. [20 Oct 1995, p.F14]

If Aeon Flux is what Charlize Theron does to pay the bills while otherwise being engaged in "Monster" and "North Country," it's probably a reasonable price to pay. For her. For us? No, no, no.

Proyas is trying simultaneously to create a pure thriller and sci-fi nightmare along with his tongue-in-cheek critique of artifice. And this doesn't work out quite so well.

Steven Soderbergh takes Gray (who appeared in his little-appreciated gem "King of the Hill") places he's never been on-screen. Motion, color and brazen stylizing enhance what is at times a genuinely hysterical work on rationalized terror.[9 May 1997, p.F12]

The big difference between Mr. Romero's film and Mr. Eisner's--which is so intelligent you fear the fanboys will scatter--is that Mr. Eisner never gives us the military's point of view. All we know is what David and Judy and Russell know, which for a long time isn't much. And The Crazies is all the scarier for it.

Directed by Ernest Dickerson, the film looks fine, as one might expect, but isn't particularly funny and often makes no sense.

The emotional aspects of the story are treated with such a heavy hand, the supernatural aspects are so vague and uninvolving, and the group dynamic is so unconvincing that one can't quite imagine why anybody bothered.

The source of all this information was a real-life KGB agent, Vladimir Vetrov, code named Farewell, and with the usual adjustments for drama his story gets a respectable retelling in this nervy French production.

An urban nightmare with a surfeit of soul, Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire is like a diamond -- clear, bright, but oh so hard.

So refreshing and funny and, in its way, sophisticated.

A movie that commits sins of excess, except regarding Thornton. There's not nearly enough of him.

It's an awfully confusing journey, unless you're of pro-Digi-ous intelligence. Or a digimaniac. Or just 6.