John Patterson

Koppelman and Lieven's toneless, generic direction style is slack, not slick, and they handle actors like livestock. Only John Malkovich, as Matty's psychotic uncle, retains his dignity.

Even the relatively successful pairing of neckless maestro of anxiety Stiller with the indomitably effervescent Black gets bogged down by Steve Adams' aimless screenplay. Would the Barry Levinson who once made "Diner" please wake up and pull himself together?

Yet another unfunny buppie sex comedy in the manner of "The Brothers," "Two Can Play That Game" and "Deliver Us From Eva."

Indulging his taste for Grand Guignol and the stylistically baroque, Schwentke never quite overplays his hand, though his occasional lapses into visual extravagance can be irritating, and the result is a nasty, intelligent and complex thriller.

It's outclassed by the memory of just about every prizefighting flick you've ever seen.

The narrative chronology is so heavily hacked about, its tenses so addled and the material so thinly spread across so many characters, one can scarcely keep it straight in one's head without going cross-eyed.

Aranoa's bleak yet warmly humanistic Princesas deftly and sympathetically ponders the interlocked destinies of two Madrid prostitutes.

Extraordinary is the very last adjective that comes to mind.

If as much thought had been expended on character and consequences as was lavished on bell-bottom diameters, collar widths and soundtrack selection, Blow might have been a richer, more intelligent experience, and much more Demme's movie than a carbon copy of other people's.

Ramsay has made a movie in which a universe of hopelessness and decay is penetrated by shafts of light that remake these bleak surroundings in strange and beautiful ways.

No matter how “real” things appear, scenarios and story arcs are relentlessly imposed upon the partay-cipants so as to finesse a narrative as crudely overdetermined and howlingly predictable as any studio-manufactured fiction.

By the time it hits you, you're worn out by all the dead ends and false trails the movie has put you through.

Writer-director David DeFalco's ugly, pointless and dishonest remake of Craven's remake.

One of the sweetest comedies in a long time, which doesn't mean it's sugary or fey.

A cut above the usual teenage-wasteland movie.

Fleming's more than passable, often extremely funny remake.

Remarkable energy and wit, and is probably the most purely enjoyable entry in Kaufman's suboeuvre of literary excursions.

The movie lover in you will recoil; your inner sophomore will rejoice.

Culkin, a revelation here, mines every last nuance of the confusion and anger that results. Bursting with grenadelike one-liners and full-bodied performances, particularly from Sarandon (batty) and Goldblum (creepy) -- Igby Goes Down inaugurates a career that should be well worth following closely.

If the contrast between Marine life and blue-blood luxury sometimes pulls the film in awkward directions, Anselmo's perceptive fondness for all his characters -- parents, children, grunts, even drill sergeants -- more than compensates.

Even more problematic is the script's clumsy, sprawling architecture, Sheridan's clubfooted sense of pacing and his grubby, indistinct visuals. The only upside? The Chieftains aren't on the soundtrack.

A bracingly sarcastic political comedy -- it opens on a bound copy of Mexico's Constitution, stuffed with cash -- possessed of a baleful satiric eye for hypocrisy and greed, a delicious anti-clerical bent, and pitch-perfect comic timing.

A refreshing antidote to those E! True Hollywood Story documentaries on adult-film figures like John Holmes, Savannah and Traci Lords.

Nauseating, tasteless and offensive -- but in all the best ways.

The result is the niftiest Bond movie in years -- fresh, funny, and jammed to the rafters with demented stunts, Boys'-Own gadgetry and brazen promiscuity.

Lurches from one set-piece stomach-lurcher to the next with nary a nod to narrative coherence.

Miraculously seems a great deal longer (this is not a good thing) as it careens from shit joke to corpse joke to ass joke to dog-turd joke and back.

Proves that it's possible for a movie to be reckless and adventurous merely by being sedate, unhurried and contemplative.

Immensely exciting and funny.

Lovely, lovely, lovely.

Equal parts big-house B-feature, hammer-down road movie, post-feminist consciousness-raiser and rock & roll pipe dream.

Genially moronic, Road Trip will tide you over until the next slice of "American Pie" comes along.

Overall Sheridan keeps both "Oirishry" and sentimentality in check. He captures the book's evenhanded sense.

It's a rare pleasure to see these senior citizens given so much screen time, droopy butts and all.

Helgeland strips the material back to its pulp origins and overlays it with a patina of glib motifs familiar to devotees of Hollywood’s 1970s renaissance.

Without a well-delineated political or social framework, Union Square offers little that we didn't already know.

A coercive script by James Kearns, and some middling direction by Nick Cassavetes, can't rob the movie of an undeniable, headlong crowd-pleasing power.

Inspirational...unfolds gently with an evenness and rural patience.

Oscillating gracelessly between the coarse and the merely saccharine, 50 First Dates, directed with zero visual or comedic flair by Peter Segal (Anger Management, Tommy Boy), showcases Sandler's cuddlier side as it reprises the tepid chemistry that he and Barrymore road-tested in "The Wedding Singer."

Inspirational stuff, and often hysterical to boot.

An accomplished miniaturist's documentary -- 80 finely wrought minutes in alternating increments of wonder and loss.

Noyce has made a good-looking, intelligent stab at the novel, mildly undermined by a tendency to seek contemporary relevance.

Although its lushness and penchant for melodrama are the cinematic equivalent of Billy Sherrill's syrupy string arrangements for George Jones, Tammy Wynette and Charlie Rich circa 1973, the movie deftly manages to remain sweet without becoming saccharine.

The film's sheer likability and very impressive gag-to-giggle ratio derive more from sweetness and sharpness than from shit jokes.

It sure comes through on the belly-laugh front, from its animated in-flight, safety-manual credits through to the very last blooper ('ooligan Vinnie Jones' breathtaking, obscenity-filled rant against the "fahkin' Eye-ties").

Babenco's kindly, concerned eye seeks out the humanity in even the worst of his characters, and by the time he re-creates the massacre, with shocking power and force, one has been equally captivated and appalled at the world he shows. The result is one of the richest prison movies in years.

Gormless, gutless little home movie.

Occasionally the Woo-inflected action sequences - particularly a horse stampede through town on hanging day, and an escape from a moving train - rouse the film from its anti-historic, even mythophobic torpor.

Crowe's undeniable gifts -- his well-crafted individual scenes and his love for his characters -- are more evident here than his flaws.

Gossip is trash, but it's well-written, slickly directed trash.

A schizophrenic outing from habitually hysterical director Tony Scott (True Romance, The Fan), Man on Fire is a movie of two unreconcilable halves.

The result is an intelligent, moving and invigorating film, just the thing for adults bored with the shock-horror posturing to be found in the work of so many young European directors.

Jolie hogs the spotlight as usual, leaving romantic interest Ed Burns struggling to register and only Shaloub -- fetid, dirty, soulful -- with his dignity intact.

It goes straight to the top of the class. O can there be such a thing as too keen a guilty pleasure, particularly when the whole genre is knowingly pitched to audiences as a trashophile's delight? No, there cannot.

Any movie offering a Muzak version of the Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop"warrants an immediate and unqualified recommendation.

Jackson and Levy strike only damp sparks off each other, and they seem to have been introduced to each other --without benefit of rehearsal -- mere moments before the director cried "Action!"

Into the Blue is a likable bimbo of a movie, all surface and -- despite breathtaking underwater photography and a marked resemblance to Peter Yates' "The Deep" -- zero depth.

While the film has the feel of an illustrated radio play, it teems nonetheless with pleasing ambiguities and subtle doubts, and its elusive qualities force the viewer into active and rewarding participation rather than simple passive spectatorship.

The drawback is Tyler, who lacks the vigor and energy her part requires in order to transcend charges of misogyny.

Whenever Green shows up to do his semi-improvised, non-acting shtick (detaching pit bulls from testicles, kamikaze wheelchair rides, etc.), this otherwise sprightly and intermittently amusing movie suddenly feels like a ship dragging its anchor.

If you've never seen the original, you may have no idea what's going on.

One of the great movies about childhood innocence accidentally violated by adults...Reed, an often inconsistent filmmaker, handles the brutal mechanics of the plot superbly, with the marbled interiors of the embassy contrasting sharply with his almost neo-realist outdoor shots of postwar London.

Worth it, though, for the conviction and ramrod-erect bearing that pros Jackson and Jones bring to their roles.

Remarkably, it took four writers to concoct this tin-eared, slighter-than-slight farce.

One of the sturdier superhero movies of the last couple of years, with monsters and effects and diabolical baddies to spare, a heart as big as a house and a love story that actually gets its hooks in you.

Looks like no other recent release...certainly rich enough to warrant more than one viewing.

Whether Quitting will prove absorbing to American audiences is debatable: After all, it's not like we don't have enough rehab stories of our own, and Jia often comes across as a sullen, unreachable brat.

Despite its flaws, Arlington Road romps home as an absorbing, unpredictable thriller.

Although not quite as uproarious or as wickedly subversive as Pedro Almodóvar's more substantial body of work, Queens is content to scamper gaily in the wake of his achievements -- and to offer one more reason for old Franco to roll anew in his grave.

The movie has a rambunctious and likable energy that compensates for its unsteady, only intermittently amusing narrative.

Relentless, infantile and impossible to dislike.

Full of clever reversals, brief triumphs and bitter setbacks, Wolf Creek is consummately well-crafted, unapologetically vicious and leavened with moments of humor that merely intensify the horror.

One of those puppy-love movies that make you feel like you're slowly drowning.

Very much a fully realized cinematic experience. John Turturro, even if you have to act less, be sure to direct more, and often.

The inventive, often comically horrible fight set pieces will have you standing on your seat cheering like a Viking, and the result is a supremely kinetic and amusing guilty pleasure.

Sadly for dramatic purposes, Jones' achievements seemed effortless, and the movie could really use the odd Ty Cobb wig-out.

It all feels rather laddish and belabored, but it will eat up 90 minutes of your time without making you regret the loss.

A little bit "pi," a little bit "julien donkey-boy," a little bit "Eraserhead," Buddy Boy doesn't equal these, but offers bizarre pleasures of its own.

The characters are flat creatures of duty, and the film is more a tale of the collective will of a state than of the rugged individuals behind it.

It's dirty and delightful, if a tad on the slight side.

The interchangeable males all resemble Freddie Prinze Jr., and Anderson's direction is no less anemic, making one yearn for an Escape/Quit button that, sadly, doesn't exist in this medium.

Disfigured by flabby dialogue (“You can't put a number on my dreams!”), unfunny pratfalls and criminally slack pacing.

Intriguing for a while, then steadily more confusing and finally just incoherent.

Richer and cleverer than any Merchant Ivory movie in memory.

What's left is "Masterpiece Theatre," a very clean, straightforward adaptation of a beautifully constructed play, faithful to a dead man's classical virtues -- harmony, proportion, balance -- if not to the director's own, more iconoclastic ones.

The end result is like cold porridge with only the odd enjoyably chewy lump.

Somehow poor pacing and this lack of visual variety manage to make a great show seem boring.

At once over- and under-written, and peppered with tiresome coincidences and misunderstandings, Goldberg’s mechanical, joke-one, joke-two, joke-three approach to ensemble screenwriting soon betrays his TV-sitcom roots.

Mutates halfway through into a ham-fisted action movie that squanders the good will, and insults the intelligence, of its audience.

There's more than a hint of self-pitying male-castration fantasy in writer-director Jeff Franklin's portrayal.

Oddly anemic and muted -- BBC Saturday-night material.

The always-watchable Bologna is the adhesive holding together this slight and gentle romantic comedy, lending it perhaps more conviction and authority than the material warrants.

Schwentke handles the claustrophobic environment efficiently enough, though he dallies too long before letting anxiety give way to action.

Profound and joyously silly at the same time.

Writer-director Alex de la Iglesia's bouncy, swaggering satire of ethics-deficient, survival-of-the-fittest free enterprise, peopled by broad grotesques and hysterical caricatures, adds Chabrolian callousness to a cartoonish worldview reminiscent of Frank Tashlin or Joe Dante at their most frenzied.

Marks no discernible improvement on its predecessors "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo" and "The Animal," though the sight of the deeply unprepossessing Schneider all dolled up for girlie business is good for a few shallow chuckles.

Relentlessly positive and optimistic, the film is also likable, in the most chaste way imaginable.

Immensely rich, clipped and precise, with a sly, sardonic sense of humor.