Jonathan Rosenbaum

Rather wan in its anything-goes spirit of invention, the movie has a surprisingly low number of laughs; some of the initial premises are good, but there's very little energy in the follow-through, and this time Murray's listlessness seems more anemic than comic.

Fairly strong on period atmospherics, but it mainly adds up to yet another pointless adaptation of a literary standby.

Needless to say, the plot goes nowhere, but under the pornographic circumstances Figgis, Cage, and Shue all do fine jobs.

The special effects, for once, are witty rather than overblown, and director Nora Ephron, writing with her sister Delia, handles the material with some grace and confidence.

Director Sidney Hayes can be needlessly rhetorical at times, relying on a campus statue of an eagle to create a sense of menace (the UK title was Night of the Eagle), but this is still eerily effective.

Considering the degree to which Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct are already self-parodies, writer David O'Malley and director Carl Reiner don't have to do much to show how silly they are; in order to understand how silly this movie is, on the other hand, all you have to do is sit through it.

Powerful and haunting.

Watchable, if at times familiar.

Fresh and edgy; the images of a wasted London and the details of a paramilitary organization in the countryside are both creepy and persuasive.

Despite the aggressive silliness of this enjoyable comedy, the emotional focus on the painful social experience of high school makes the film real and immediate, and the flavorsome dialogue in Robin Schiff's script gives the leads a lot to work (as well as play) with.

At least the special effects and outer space vistas are more handsome than usual.

This isn't the supreme masterpiece it might have been, but Nichols's direction is very polished and some of the lines and details are awfully funny.

If you haven't lived until you've seen Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill duke it out in a vat full of red paint, here's your chance; personally, my idea of hell would be having to see this stinker again.

Sitting through this barrage of all-purpose insults aimed at obvious targets was an unenlightening chore.

This is every bit as silly and adolescent as you'd expect from Besson, and about as contemporary as "The Perils of Pauline." But I was delighted by the balletic and acrobatic stunts, some of which evoke Tarzan.

The narrative kept me glued to my seat.

The efforts to plant this story in a contemporary vernacular are not always successful but the performances are uniformly fine in their adherence to the material, and consistently avoid any vulgarity or showboating.

This 2005 feature offered me my first taste of Guy Ritchie's macho-centric artiness, and I hope it's my last.

The special effects are impressive, but they don’t add up to a movie.

Directed by Richard Benjamin, this is an inordinately silly comedy that manages to be pretty likable if one can get past some of its harebrained premises.

Martin Scorsese's first feature (1968), set in New York's Little Italy and starring Harvey Keitel in his first role, can be read as a rather rough draft of Mean Streets, down to the use of rock music and Catholic guilt.

By the end Smilla has become a formulaic action hero--equally at home in an evening dress and blue jeans--not a marginalized victim seeking to uncover the source of her wound, and the film collapses around her like glaciers of melting ice.

Carax has a wonderful cinematic eye and a personal feeling for editing rhythms, and his sense of overripeness and excess virtually defines him.

All this is supposed to be as cute as bugs and chock-full of worldly wisdom, but even with lead actors as likable and as resourceful as these, the material made me alternately want to gag and nod off.

Zwigoff not only presents a complex human being and the range of his art but also guides us through a profound and unsettling consideration of what it means to be an American artist. Essential viewing.

If it speaks with a quieter voice than many of Bogdanovich's early pictures, what it has to say seems substantially more personal and thoughtful.

The results are pretty obnoxious and only intermittently funny, but certainly characteristic.

The performances, especially of Penn and Robbins, are so powerful and detailed (down to the Boston accents) that they often persuade one to overlook the narrative contrivances (particularly the incessant crosscutting), the arty trimmings (including Eastwood's own score), and the dubious social philosophy.

Directed by Katt Shea Ruben from a script she wrote with producer Andy Ruben, this starts off with some spark and drive, in part because of the writing and playing of Gilbert's character, but gradually sinks into cliche and contrivance as the familiar genre moves take over, dragging down the characters, plot, and style.

The film gets campier by the minute.

As directed by Rob Reiner from a script by Lewis Colick, it offers the most decent and convincing portrait of the contemporary south I’ve seen in ages (apart from Sling Blade).

Fresh, character driven, often funny, and unfashionably upbeat (as well as offbeat).

I'm usually a sucker for courtroom dramas, but Rob Reiner's highly mechanical filming by numbers of Aaron Sorkin's adaptation of his own cliched and fatuous Broadway play kept putting me to sleep.

Don't expect any psychological depth here, but the cool wit and fun... are deftly maintained, and Sonnenfeld provides a bountiful supply of both fanciful beasties and ingenious visuals.

If you want to know what the Warhol scene was all about, this is even better than the documentaries.

A talking bulldog named Frank steals the show.

The performances are strong (my favorite is Deborah Harry as an older waitress) and the sense of eroded as well as barely articulated lives is palpable.

Loaded with facile social themes, opaque characters, pointlessly intricate flashbacks, and inflated technique.

The unfunniest comedy I can recall seeing in ages.

I don't see this slightly better-than-average drug thriller, with slightly better-than-average direction by Steven Soderbergh, as anything more than a routine rubber-stamping of genre reflexes.

I was bored well before the end, but found the first half hour pretty funny.

Beautiful and challenging documentary.

The first four letters say it all.

Terminally boring.

Considering the 32 writers (including Tom S. Parker, Jim Jennewein, and Steven E. de Souza) who worked on this live-action adaptation of the 60s Hanna-Barbera cartoon series about a Stone Age family, one might have expected a few funny lines here and there, but this is mirthless (and worthless) from top to bottom.

Grim, phantasmagoric view of recent and not-so-recent Russian history.

This held me, but I was grateful when it released me.

Though it comes across as labored in spots, it also yields a good many beautiful and suggestive moments, and an overall film experience of striking originality.

Ron Howard, an exemplar of honorable mediocrity, reunites with actor Russell Crowe and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman of "A Beautiful Mind" for this epic treatment of a seven-year stretch (1928-'35) in the career of New Jersey boxer James J. Braddock.

As an action thriller with music by Isaac Hayes it's not bad.

Thanks to a fairly good script, this thriller about a Soviet cop sent to Chicago to apprehend a Soviet drug dealer is a respectable enough star vehicle.

Not all of these ideas are successfully dramatized, and you may have trouble believing in most of the characters, but as a deeply personal work about free-floating existential identities, this 1989 film has the kind of grit and feeling that few action comedies can muster, with Eastwood and Peters interesting and unpredictable throughout.

Another giggly gross-out comedy for teenagers.

More fun to think about than to watch.

Nihilistic greed was the major factor when GM terminated the car in 2001, though Paine is also careful to note the passivity of the general public.

The writing and directing of Jonathan Darby, a British TV veteran and Hollywood executive, make the proceedings neither believable nor compelling, so what might have been another "Rosemary's Baby" isn't even a halfway decent genre exercise.

The musical value of this footage is so powerful that nothing can deface it, despite the best efforts of Zwerin to do so: all the worst habits of jazz documentaries in treating the music, from cutting off numbers midstream to burying them with voice-overs (which also happens on the sound track album), are routinely employed.

Mesmerizing.

The script runs out of ideas long before he does, and the film doesn't build dramatically as much as it could. But it's an impressive debut, full of bizarre imagination and visual flair—a must for fans of offbeat horror films.

Kiarostami tries to explain himself and reveals contradictions and a penchant for hyperbole--along with surprising insights.

First-rate agitprop about the ruthlessness of South African apartheid, directed by Euzhan Palcy (Sugar Cane Alley) and adapted from Andre Brink's novel by Palcy and Colin Welland. The relentless plot is effectively set up and expertly pursued, and Hugh Masekela makes some striking contributions to Dave Grusin's musical score.

David Mackenzie, who directed the remarkable Scottish drama "Young Adam" (2003), delivers another masterful, disturbing tale of illicit passion, erotic obsession, and sudden death set in the 1950s.

This sounds like a slender premise on which to hang a feature, but director Ning Hao is more interested in ethnography and landscapes than narrative and often holds our interest by concentrating on how folklore, technology--motorbikes, cars, trucks, films, TV--and imagination affect a nomadic way of life.

Unfortunately, a conclusion stuffed with so many improbabilities that it left me gaping in disbelief. Prior to that, this is pretty much fun.

While billed as a romance and a thriller, the film strictly qualifies as neither, appealing to our prurience, guilt, hatred, and dread.

To my knowledge there's no one anywhere making films with such a sharp sense of contemporary working-class life -- but for the Dardennes it's only the starting point of a spiritual and profoundly ethical odyssey.

It's ultimately a losing battle when the audience's lack of interest in eastern Europeans is assumed at the outset.

If I were a Christian, I'd be appalled to have this primitive and pornographic bloodbath presume to speak for me.

With so many dubious elements at play, even the half-good ideas get lost in the shuffle.

Dreyer’s radical approach to constructing space and the slow intensity of his mobile style make this “difficult” in the sense that, like all the greatest films, it reinvents the world from the ground up. It’s also painful in a way that all Dreyer’s tragedies are, but it will continue to live long after most commercial movies have vanished from memory.

What's most conspicuously missing is the kind of background information needed to assess many of Eichmann's statements.

A highly enjoyable and offbeat thriller.

Inevitably it's a mixed bag, though the film's assurance in keeping it all coherent is at times exhilarating.

This moves back and forth between slightly clever and dopey or silly, kept vaguely watchable by the charming leads.

While it's easy to imagine an infinite number of bad courtroom comedies based on this scenario, this 1992 movie turns out to be wonderful—broad and low character comedy that's solidly imagined and beautifully played.

It has been called both detached and loaded, unfairly slanted as well as balanced by some of its critics--I can only testify that I found the film both troubling and absorbing over two separate viewings.

Very slickly and glibly put together, with a sharp eye for yuppie decor and accoutrements; even Woody's habitual, fanciful vision of an all-white New York is respected.

If you can swallow one more amnesia plot and one more recycling of favorite bits from Godard's Bande a part, pressed to serve yet another postmodernist antithriller about redemption, this has its compensations.

Despite the sudsy, overlit look of William A. Fraker's cinematography and Downey's varying success with sight gags, this is still a lot of fun. An additional kicker is provided by the picture's crazed doublethink morality, which implies that incest is OK as long as you've got amnesia.

Some of the most exhilarating camera movements and most luscious black-and-white cinematography you’ll ever see inhabit this singular, delirious 141-minute communist propaganda epic of 1964, a Cuban-Russian production poorly received in both countries at the time (in Cuba it was often referred to as “I Am Not Cuba”).

I guess one out of three ain't bad.

Carell and Apatow collaborated on the script; it does manage a few laughs, but the characters seldom progress beyond the two-dimensional.

A fleet, enjoyable Jackie Chan romp.

If you're looking to be romantically captivated, this movie just might do the job.

The mirthlessly sadistic gags tend to target people in wheelchairs or hospital beds and betray a mild if all-encompassing disgust for the source material and the audience.

John Zorn wrote the percussive score, which is compelling throughout.

Despite the flashback structure, this is a film in which mood matters more than plot, while the hero's heroic stature steadily shrinks.

What emerges is a powerhouse thriller full of surprises, original touches, and rare political lucidity, including an impressive performance by Jeff Goldblum as a Jewish yuppie gangster.

The facts of their grim treatment, often exacerbated by their estrangement from their countries of origin, sometimes recall the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Anticapitalist propaganda that persuades and uplifts is in short supply these days.

Throughout the film cause and effect, the mainspring of most narratives, is replaced by a sense of spiritual synchronicity.

Slick and effective escapism with a touch of poetry (a la "The Sixth Sense") that left me vaguely dissatisfied once the mystery was supposedly resolved.

One more sluggish, artfully framed thriller with Rembrandt lighting set in a New York borough--a kind of picture that's awfully hard to do in a fresh manner.

The notion that Page, like Marilyn Monroe, was too ditzy to know what she was doing is more a mythological construct than an observation.

Roman Polanski's first film in English (1965, 105 min.) is still his scariest and most disturbing--not only for its evocations of sexual panic, but also because his masterful employment of sound puts the audience's imagination to work in numerous ways...As narrative this works only part of the time, and as case study it may occasionally seem too pat, but as subjective nightmare it's a stunning piece of filmmaking.

The film certainly held me, and even fooled me in spots (when it wasn't simply confusing), but when the whole thing was over I felt pretty empty. It would be facile to say it substitutes style for content; actually, it substitutes stylishness for style.

The script itself—credited to Ronald Bass, and adapted from Nancy Price's novel—is a tissue of so many stupid and implausible contrivances that the only possible way of enjoying it is by taking your brain out to lunch.

The source material has undergone some sentimental softening, though Hope Davis, as the heroine's sister, does a swell job of making sanity seem obnoxious.