J.R. Jones

The movie's sexual politics couldn't be more regressive--Crudup learns to be a man in the sack as well as on the boards--but it's still a competent middlebrow costume drama.

Thoughtful and impressively mounted.

Frank Whaley and Philip Seymour Hoffman play minor characters so annoying they might as well wear T-shirts reading "Eat My Brain."

After the portentous "No Country for Old Men," Joel and Ethan Coen return to their trademark brand of cruel, misanthropic farce, and for dark laughs and hurtling narrative momentum this spy caper is their best work since "Fargo."

Portrayed ad infinitum in sci-fi and fantasy, the postapocalypse may now seem about as scary as Post Raisin Bran, but Hillcoat gives it an unnerving solidity by focusing on the drab details of survival and linking them to the more hellish aspects of modern American life.

Def and Willis are both good, but Donner's lethal weapon here is Morse, a chronically overlooked character actor whose combined tenderness and ruthlessness make him the most fascinating heavy since Robert Ryan.

Unlike many other purveyors of hip comedy, they're consistently clever without being contemptuous of their audience.

In these dusty American settings, the wistful melancholy of Wong's earlier movies seems fairly contrived.

Poor distribution doomed the original movie, though Romero has stuck around long enough to serve as executive producer of this respectable update by Breck Eisner.

The funny-looking kids steal every scene from Lawrence, simply by virtue of being funny-looking kids.

As in most bad thrillers, the number of pointless shocks increases in direct proportion to the drama's decreasing vitality, like defibrilator paddles jolting a dying man.

Some have called this neo-noir, but aside from the setting there’s nothing "neo" about it; as in classic noir, the characters are slowly but surely ensnared by their own baser impulses.

The movie's studied tranquillity will appeal to some, though its embrace of traditional village life struck me as self-satisfied to the point of smugness.

Gentle, low-key first feature.

The awful crank comedy "Spun" (2002) still ranks as the most dehumanizing youth picture of the decade, but this New York drama by first-time director Hunter Richards is a close second.

Ben Stiller produced, and the movie is so reminiscent of "Zoolander" that I wish he had rounded up Owen Wilson and starred in it himself. Farrell and Heder are pretty funny, but they're consistently upstaged by supporting players William Fichtner, Will Arnett, and Amy Poehler.

Making his feature directing debut, Hoffman shows considerable generosity toward the other players, which was probably a good idea given his own listless performance as the mumbling title character.

Cox and three others have produced a swift and economical script, but it's just porn with a different money shot--not graphic violence per se but the sort of blood-soaked crime scene that sells true-crime paperbacks.

Wise, gentle, and simply constructed.

The characters and themes are redolent of earlier and better Williams works, and the story unexpectedly putters out at the end--but seeing it now, you can't help but treasure the simple, lyrical dialogue and sure-handed narrative thrust.

Highly recommended if you want to see a distinguished cast of British character actors tarted up in garish Victorian costumes and badly executing a Three Stooges-style cake fight.

As a romantic comedy this is a cut above the norm, satirical in its treatment of both spiritually bereft New Yorkers and materialistic Indian immigrants.

The long odds against Smith only make his unexpected surge against Carnahan more exciting, and Popper sticks close to the fierce campaigner and his young, mostly inexperienced staffers, capturing all the energy, idealism, dour humor, and unreasoning hope of a Cinderella candidacy.

Without Diesel's brooding lunkhead presence it's more like "1/2 Fast 1/2 Furious."

French director Gaspar Noe has kept a pretty low profile since his 2002 drama "Irreversible" notorious for its brutal nine-minute anal rape scene. But this epic, psychedelic mindfuck confirms him once again as the cinema's most imaginative nihilist.

Hammer overplays his indie hand with an abrupt and unsatisfactory ending, but his three leads are so credible that their aching, tongue-tied characters linger in the memory.

Nicely paced but so fluffy it threatens to waft away.

Tasteful, unremarkable art-house fare, rescued from complete irrelevance by Stephen Dillane's bottled-up performance as a writer scarred by the Holocaust.

Proves that a movie can be true to life and still seem utterly preposterous.

It takes forever to get moving, but when it finally does, the Quaid and Stone characters still seem ill defined.

Has exactly the same premise (Repo! The Genetic Opera).

This indie drama spends a lot of time mooning over classical Hollywood cinema, but its own visual style tends toward the pointless flash of music videos.

Some of the editing has a giddy, overeager quality, the natural excess of a young prodigy, but when the action and the tempo align, the results are exhilarating: an early brawl in a pool hall fairly leaps off the screen.

Washes onto the big screen with a tide of weak one-liners, exaggerated reactions, and vaguely nauseating gags.

The gentle Wood isn't very convincing as a bare-knuckle brawler (which bodes ill for his forthcoming role as Iggy Pop), and the movie settles into a payback soap opera reminiscent of "West Side Story."

A fascinating allegory of modern-day Iran.

I can't remember when I last hated an art-house movie as much as this one...Other reviewers have praised the film's alleged quirky humor, but I was repelled by the two heartless creeps who set the story in motion and baffled by the protagonist's fascination with them.

Coppola based her script on a revisionist biography by Antonia Fraser, though the film reads most poignantly as a personal statement; like Marie, the director was born to a life of privilege and carries the burden of a proud family legacy.

Vincent Cassel sets a new standard for Gallic cool as the title character.

Leigh pushes the story in a more interesting direction, asking whether people find happiness or simply will it on themselves.

A shocking revelation near the end explains the soldier's nihilistic rage but simultaneously tears a gigantic hole in the plot, leaving little to admire but Considine's typically penetrating performance.

Director Brian De Palma will probably take the rap for this tepid noir, but the real culprits are Josh Hartnett and Scarlett Johansson, red-hot lovers in life but (as ever) gorgeous stiffs on-screen.

The racial satire is about as subtle as a sledgehammer, but there's something exhilarating about so blunt a weapon being swung with such wild abandon.

Despite a few bloodcurdling shocks, this handsome Spanish ghost story from producer Guillermo del Toro follows in the suggestive, richly romantic tradition of the old Val Lewton chillers.

The 3-D element is unobtrusively handled, except when it perfectly re-creates the woman who's always perched on her boyfriend's shoulders in front of you at a concert.

Gervasi has tapped into a powerful if much-overlooked truth: humanity rocks.

The plot twists are mostly predicated on the characters' improbably shifting loyalties, the sort of thing you can get away with only when the people in your movie are drained of all compassion.

Eastwood is still a primal force on-screen, but his unusual practice of shooting scripts as written, which served him well on "Unforgiven" and "Million Dollar Baby," here leaves him exposed to Nick Schenk's familiar situations and awkward dialogue.

The remake is plenty scary, though any moral inquiry into the cost of revenge seemed to fly over the heads of the screaming, laughing crowd I saw it with.

This documentary profile of poet and novelist Charles Bukowski exploits the writer's counterculture persona but also works to dispel it, revealing a gifted and extremely complicated man.

The script is stupid, the acting is wooden, the special effects are laughable, the vintage-80s synthesizer score is cheesy. The movie's paranoid premise is boiled down from two superior sci-fi movies, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and The Day of the Triffids (1962). And there are no trolls.

As usual, the three instrumentalists (Ray Manzarek, John Densmore, Robby Krieger) take a backseat to their gorgeous front man, though their nimble, idiosyncratic playing has aged much better than his pretentious poetry.

Exhilarating.

The genre shows serious signs of wear in this needlessly fictionalized feature about Vince Papale.

Mike White contributed to the script, and though he shares with the Hesses an innocence that can be both sweet and slightly grotesque (e.g., Chuck and Buck), his influence is most evident here in the conventional plotting.

This passable live-action feature from Christian mogul Philip Anschutz (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) also relies heavily on the voices, though the actors are sometimes miscast (Julia Roberts as the spider) or chosen more for their on-screen personas than their pipes (Steve Buscemi as the rat).

The cinematic equivalent of a tapeworm, this delivers few laughs beyond the initial chuckles of recognition. Seltzer and Friedberg (who also directed) have another script in development called "Raunchy Movie"; apparently one idea they haven't yet considered is "Watchable Movie."

Herzog deserves the lion's share of the credit for the movie's quality, but Port of Call New Orleans is also a comeback for Cage.

So few movies these days concern themselves with ideas of any sort that a drama like this one, about a man humbled by the consequences of his own intellectual breakthrough, seems even more powerful.

Kruger's elaborations on the original mystery are superfluous, but Watts gives this everything she's got.

The climactic sight gag is lifted from Monicelli's movie like a diamond from a jeweler's window.

Despite the gimmicky direction and a disappointing climax, this is a distinctive and unsettling comedy.

Too many extraneous elements have been added--the victim here is an aborigine, which prompts a racial backlash against the men and their families--but at the movie's center lies the knotty story of a marriage poisoned by amorality.

Being male, I can't relate to this at all; on the other hand, I don't need Midol either, but I'm glad it's on the market.

This was shot at the legendary Ealing Studios, but I hesitate to call it a British comedy: its two stars are American, it currently has no UK release date, and its innocuous naughtiness seems pitched at grandmothers who watch BBC America.

Powerful second film by writer-director Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent).

Reitman deserves credit for going through with a bitterly ironic ending, but the movie is marred by its warm condescension toward flyover country.

Cox has some wonderfully funny moments, but both actors are playing heavily to type.