J.R. Jones

Compared to their first movie, "The Yes Men" (2003), this one focuses on many fewer hoaxes, but they're more elaborate and potent.

Singh is much more skilled as a visual artist than a storyteller, and his artistic fortunes seem to rise and fall with the inspiration of his screenwriters. In this case he's lucked out with Mellissa Wallack and Jason Keller, whose witty script retells the story of Snow White from the perspective of the wicked queen.

Funny, suspenseful, and well paced, this is definitely the summer's best time waster.

The movie loses credibility with the arrival of Rogen and Bill Hader as two uniformed patrolmen who are drunker and crazier than any high schooler could ever get, but the variety of complications thrown at the three pubescent heroes raises this a cut above most raunchy comedies.

This film doesn't really clear the bar, but it's handsomely mounted and proves that heartless manipulation of the weak and gullible never goes out of style.

The survival drama is genuinely exciting, and the players, both human and canine, put this across with spirit.

Visually commanding, conceptually beguiling, but dramatically inert.

The documentary begins to lose its shape as Siegel ponders the spiritual and cultural impact of the honeybee, but it does succeed in flagging a potentially critical problem.

This may not be a solid biography, but it feels true.

The cruel imperialism of the war is just the sort of thing that stokes Sayles's liberal ire, which is one reason the movie so often recalls his proletarian masterpiece Matewan (1987).

Caviezel (The Passion of the Christ) gives a quietly focused performance in the title role, ably assisted by Brett Rice as Jones's father, Jeremy Northam as golf rival Walter Hagen, and Malcolm McDowell as sportswriter O.D. Keeler.

Rudely funny splatter comedy.

Combines a delayed-gratification romance and rumblings of war.

The gags come fast and furious, and though some are a little stale, Rock and cowriter Ali LeRoi strive for wit over crudity.

Occasionally a movie's subject outweighs any aesthetic flaws, as it does in this unsettling thriller about the extraordinary rendition of terror suspects.

It's a classic fight movie, with Chiwetel Ejiofor as an honorable martial arts instructor...But nesting inside is a sour little 70s-style David Mamet play about the lies, calculations, and ice-cold politics of Hollywood, as the fighter is befriended and then discarded by a callow movie star.

A modest success that makes one wish Soderbergh could find some happy middle ground between funky experiments and "Ocean's Eleven."

Comes closer to deification than dramatization--a shame, since the film offers some powerful set pieces and jaw-dropping spectacle.

The murder trial and the possibility of a real attack on the attorney nicely offset the sexual gamesmanship, though the movie is badly compromised by a final left turn into serious drama and plot machination. Up until that point, it's an uncommonly shrewd and funny farce.

Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, a documentary maker directing her first fiction film, demonstrates a sure sense of tone, and Bergsholm is memorable as the misfit teen.

An evil twin to "The War Room" (1993).

Set in the blue gray gloom of industrial China, this cunning noir focuses on two ruthless coal miners.

The hero's psychological transference is so blatant that even the characters begin commenting on it after a while, yet this modest three-hander is capably acted and genuinely touching.

Appealing restaurant comedy.

Like Costa-Gavras's "Amen." (2002), this German drama uses a true story to examine the Catholic church's response to the Holocaust, but it focuses less on institutional politics than on personal conscience and responsibility.

Becomes more engrossing as its focus shifts from Isherwood to Bachardy, who began as the bashful boy toy of a famous author but gradually emerged in his own right as a portrait artist of striking (and merciless) insight.

Engrossing documentary.

The popcorn elements are well handled, but what lingers is the sense of urban despair: watching old videotapes of the Today show, carrying on friendships with mannequins, Smith turns out to be no legend at all, just another New Yorker slowly dying of loneliness.

The movie implies that Durst murdered his wife, but the unsolved crime turns out to be less mysterious than the mind of the killer, nervily portrayed by Gosling as not evil but unaccountably empty.

Wexler emerges from all this with the commonplace wisdom that laughter and a positive outlook both prolong life and make it worth living, though his vocal concern with his own aging keeps the film from growing pat.

Despite his advancing years, Chan delivers some fleet slapstick; like his hero Buster Keaton he works intuitively with levers, pulleys, ladders, and umbrellas.

Any movie that name-checks Ford Maddox Ford's novel "The Good Soldier" is OK by me, and clearly writer-director Julio DePietro has made a careful study of Ford's crafty, illusory narrative.

Milos Forman's "Amadeus" (1984) is so ingrained in the popular imagination that its portrait of Mozart may never be dispelled, but this thorough and insightful 2006 documentary presents a more rounded and compelling view of the high-spirited genius.

In the end, his deadliest weapon turns out to be other people’s trust, something with grimmer philosophical implications than all his acts of violence combined.

As the substantially faithful movie version demonstrates, the story of Thank You for Smoking resides in that libertarian netherworld where the far left and the far right march shoulder to shoulder.

Unfortunately, every laugh is bludgeoned nearly to death by Marvin Hamlisch's jokey score of neo-James Bond riffs and 70s sitcom melodies; I liked the movie quite a bit, but by the end I felt as if I were at a live TV show with a blinking sign ordering me to LAUGH.

As usual with the series, the movie combines a plot line a toddler could understand with gadgets that would baffle an engineering Ph.D.

Until the ghost story takes over this is a tense and absorbing war picture.

Mann excels at staging the chaotic bank jobs and bloody shootouts that were just a day at the office for Dillinger, but even at 140 minutes the movie is so dense with incident that there isn't much room for cultural comment or character development.

Metal culture is a giant topic, and Dunn has made an ambitious stab at it, exploring the music's social, religious, and sexual implications.

There's a good deal of pleasure to be had in the clockwork precision of her hand-to-hand combat, which Soderbergh often shoots in profile to showcase her wall-climbing backflips. The story surrounding it is comparably smooth, skilled, and mechanical, though a lot less memorable.

A trio of finely observant performances graces this quiet drama.

A seamless mix of satire and suspense, with inspired performances by Toledo and Monica Cervera.

Handsome and generally amusing adventure.

Echoes of James Whale’s Frankenstein movies reverberate through this creepy Canadian sci-fi tale, whose innocent, confused beast is alternately terrifying and pathetic.

Danish director Susanne Bier elicits wonderfully intimate performances from her actors, and this 2004 drama has so many genuine, low-key encounters it manages to overcome a contrived and familiar plot.

Given the breadth of the story, the characters never achieve much depth, but they're part of a larger pattern: the younger ones are eager to find their way into the organization while the older ones are desperate to find their way out

Seann William Scott is the best comic Neanderthal in Hollywood (American Pie, Role Models), and he's found the perfect story in this fictionalized adaptation of a memoir by minor-league hockey brawler Doug Smith.

The black/white duality isn't terribly interesting, but as in most of Aronofsky's films, an intense horror of the body and its uncontrollability fuels the rhapsodic psychodrama.

This dialectical drama has plenty of creaky moments, but Harvey Keitel compensates with a canny, surprising performance.

Cate Blanchett returns to the role that made her a star, and though this sequel to "Elizabeth" (1998) is less defensible as history, as florid costume drama it's just as entertaining.

In its voluble mix of accident trauma and infidelity, this 2007 Danish feature by Ole Bornedal is highly reminiscent of Susanne Bier's superb "Open Hearts."

Gyllenhaal turns the young ex-con into an enormously sympathetic figure, but by the end there's no denying that her need for the girl is as selfish as her addiction.

Quietly written and convincingly played, this coming-of-age story mines its rueful laughs from a thick vein of performance anxiety, in both senses of the term.

Neatly scripted by Tim Firth and Geoff Deane, this sticks to the "Full Monty" formula of starchy working-class types learning to loosen up about sex, but Julian Jarrold's sincere, low-key direction erases any sense of artifice.

The revelation that Winslet’s character is a war criminal is the centerpiece of The Reader, but surrounding the Holocaust morality play is another story that’s more modestly scaled and, in this age of unashamed romance between older women and younger men, more contemporary.

Bier's film succeeded on the merits of its actors, and this one offers fine performances by Portman and Gyllenhaal, but Maguire doesn't cut the mustard as the anguished military man.

Some of the eggs fail to hatch and some of the chicks die, and the parents' cries are painful to hear, though what they're really crying for is the future of their species.

A thoughtful and admirably nuanced moral drama.

This is one of those movies whose empty-headed premise is so pure it's witty: with his insatiable need for excitement, the hero is a perfect stand-in for the fanboys in the audience.

Subtlety is not his strong suit--all the characters here are either adorable or loathsome--yet Perry has toned down the pandering materialism, evangelism, and black empowerment of "Madea's Family Reunion" and "Diary of a Mad Black Woman," letting his heart-tugging story tell itself.

Bale admirably shoulders the burden of Western identification figure, but the heart of the story is the ongoing tension between the schoolgirls and the hookers, who see in each other aspects of womanhood that are out of their respective reach.

Milk is steeped in the street-level details of acquiring and applying power, and a few early episodes show how clearly Milk understood the economic component.

A surprisingly credible coming-of-age story.

This movie will hardly set the world on fire, but it's a worthy vehicle for the two old troopers; Smith has the stiffest upper lip in the business, and Dench is heartrending as the naive, lovelorn sister.

Quietly unsettling in its vision of modern-day isolation.

Griffin's stand-up material is consistently upstaged by sequences of him interacting with old friends and family members.

Compared to the crucifixion, the nativity doesn't offer as much inherent drama for secular viewers, but screenwriter Mike Rich (The Rookie) generates a fair amount of suspense by framing the action with Herod's slaughter of the innocents, and the journey of the Three Wise Men supplies a warm comedic subplot.

This is sentimental but dramatically solid, its placid themes fortified by De Niro.

Subplots involving the heroine's resentful husband and rebellious teenage daughter never amount to much, though the story builds toward a satisfactory, if formulaic, climax when the woman dares to compete in a tournament against a succession of smug bourgeois men.

Once the competition arrives, the premise begins to suggest a marketing hook--it's "Spellbound" meets "The Devil Came on Horseback"!--but by then it's already served its purpose, imposing some structure around memories that would drive anyone mad.

Reminiscent of the TV series "Northern Exposure," this 2001 indie comedy by writer-director Kate Montgomery smoothly transplants 30s-style screwball comedy to an Apache-run ski resort.

Possibly the touchy-feeliest cowboy movie ever made.

Darabont doesn't match the sly cultural commentary of "The Host," a recent Korean import that also revamped the giant-monster genre, but his grocery-store survival drama, dominated by Marcia Gay Harden as a shrill fundamentalist, serves as a crude but effective allegory for post-9/11 America.

In this comedy by David Koepp, Gervais handles the big, crowd-pleasing gags with aplomb.

Constrained by formula but executed with heart and humor.

This is intelligent, committed, and politically provocative, though its narrative puzzle box may prompt you to throw up your hands and let Exxon go on running the world.

Effective advocacy film about the genocide in Darfur.

This documentary on the history of gospel music can't measure up to George T. Nierenberg's colorful "Say Amen, Somebody" (1982), but it's so jammed with great archival performances, most of them included in their entirety, that it's worth seeing.

It certainly fulfills all the conventions of the genre: sci-fi premise, noir stylings, martial arts, snarky dialogue.

Actor John Turturro follows his charming and colorful travel documentary "Rehearsal for a Sicilian Tragedy" (2009) with this assured and freewheeling look at the music of Naples (2010).

Dramatically objectifies the unfair trade practices that help keep Africa mired in poverty.

This is jammed with cliches but completely engrossing, in the manner of a movie ardently in love with its own bullshit.

With his delicate mix of sick humor and compassion, Goldthwait is that rare comic writer who can legitimately be compared to Lenny Bruce.

The movie's realism is unimpeachable, though American cops might be stunned by the idea of a half-dozen detectives being assigned to the murder of an anonymous floater.

This is affecting and thematically pointed but much more pat than the situation that precedes it, in which two different realities must coexist uneasily on the same screen.

First-time director Chen Shi-Zheng shows great sensitivity to the pressure and isolation felt by Chinese brains at American universities, and the relationship between Liu and Quinn provides a rare look at the intellectual serfdom of graduate study.

The Scandinavian moodiness of the first half gives way to a series of jolting set pieces in the second.

The injustice of the girl's thwarted career goes only so far, though Feret pushes it in some interesting directions.

The comic juice tends to spill out in all directions.

The purpose of the Bond girl, and of the Bond film, is still to stroke the male ego. Bond changes just enough to stay exactly the same.

As in "My Favorite Year," the laughs all come from seeing a nervous innocent pulled into the star's debauchery, the heart from our growing realization that debauchery is just emptiness with the volume cranked.

Levin's curiosity and evenhandedness distinguish the movie.

Thomas Hardy it's not, but as far as middlebrow British romances go, better this than "Love Actually."

Michael Sheen, who adds to his gallery of public figures (Tony Blair, David Frost) with a sharp performance here as the legendary UK soccer coach Brian Clough.

A small but achingly authentic piece of kitchen-sink realism, this might never have made it across the pond without babe du jour Keira Knightley, excellent in a supporting role as a smacked-out waitress. But the real wonder is Parker, whose vulnerability and wraithlike beauty are devastating.

Concise and thoughtful.

Given the tension dogging her every step, I wondered if this would end in bloodshed, but Abu-Assad opts for a more hopeful conclusion, making his film -- strange as it may seem -- a comedy.

Allouache's script is so packed with incident that the characters have little time for debate, but the tension between fundamentalist and modern morality is woven into the action.

Luckily LaGravenese has incorporated some of the real students' piercingly honest diary entries and rounded up an engaging cast of unknowns and young actors (April Hernandez, Kristin Herrera, Hunter Parrish) to channel their anger and hopelessness.

The movie eventually begins to wilt under the sober, plodding direction of Steve Jacobs, but the thoughtful screenplay gives Malkovich a complex, increasingly reflective character arc that he plays with great feeling, making the professor’s redemption seem honestly won.

Grimly mesmerizing saga.

Diaz, costars Jason Segel and Justin Timberlake, and a sharp supporting cast manage to deliver a crappy good time, mercifully devoid of any heart-tugging teacher-student subplots.

The real star is the splendid computer-generated Hulk, though his King Kong-like story is compromised by the need to keep him around for the inevitable sequel.

Comparisons with Michael Mann's recent Dillinger biopic "Public Enemies" are inevitable, and mostly flattering to this project: director Jean-Francois Richet and screenwriter Abdel Raouf Dafri take advantage of the additional screen time (about 100 minutes more than Mann had) to flesh out their protagonist, who fancies himself an honorable thief and even a left-wing revolutionary but ultimately turns out to be something much simpler: a man who loves his work.

Moody and thoughtful.

Jason Reitman follows his pitch-perfect satire "Thank You for Smoking" with another adventurous comedy, though here the cleverness can be grating; the movie is distinctive for its complicated emotions.

A respectable entry in the Bicycle Thief school of art-house cinema, which uses a child's coming of age to explore an era of political and social turmoil.

With its black-and-white flashbacks and relentlessly earnest tone, this sometimes threatens to become a PBS documentary, yet its script is exceptionally fluid, tracing the tributaries of art, race, and sexuality that feed one's sense of self.

The most poignant performance comes from Allen, a retired stock analyst who clings to his masculine pride even though his body's falling apart on him.

Fascinating: supposedly the crooks kept all the cash and jewelry, but their sponsors in the MI5 were really after sexually explicit blackmail photos of Princess Margaret and other aristocrats that were being held by the revolutionary Michael X.

The action is so relentless that after a while things start to feel hollow, but Rodriguez still seems to believe the moral articulated at the end of the first film -- that keeping a family together is the real adventure.

Rodriguez's evident delight in the form make this a worthwhile piece of eye candy.

Packed with dialogue and issues, and it’s most provocative when dealing with the dangers of plea bargaining.

The visual monotony of talking heads and stock footage is interrupted occasionally by the spectral charcoal drawings of veteran Si Lewen, though his art is used to full advantage only when he describes the liberation of Buchenwald.

Ayoade owes a debt to Wes Anderson (Rushmore), but the parents here are so beautifully written, and Hawkins and Taylor particularize them so well, that the movie manages to hold its own.

The movie is enjoyable for its flashy surfaces--the witty editing, the narrative forecasting, the droll omniscient voice-over--but as drama it seems superficial.

Flawed but ambitious, this biopic of British parliamentarian William Wilberforce closely tracks the political maneuvering of the late 18th and early 19th century as reformers campaign to end Britain's participation in the slave trade.

A missed opportunity, though as usual Quaid is dazzling.

The most daring aspect of the film, fully realized in Bello's grave performance, may be the notion that a parent can invest endless love in a child and one day find him unfathomable.

Documentarians Adam Del Deo and James Stern present a cogent and comprehensive postmortem of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio.

A biting academic fable about the importance of aggression over intellect.

Avrich offers a cogent appraisal of Wasserman's importance to the industry and duly notes the darker aspects of his empire (among them MCA's alleged ties to organized crime).

Treacle takes over in the last act, but most of this fact-based story by screenwriters Michael Bortman and Allison Burnett takes the inspirational sports drama into unexpected and morally complex territory.

Bier is one of the cinema's most acute observers of intimate relations, her Scandinavian reserve muting the inherent melodrama of her material, and she draws piercing, modestly scaled performances from Duchovny, Del Toro, Alison Lohman, and John Carroll Lynch.

An excellent British drama adapted by Alan Bennett (The Madness of King George) from his celebrated play.

A gravely beautiful drama about the mysteries of aging and death.

The result is pretty entertaining, though most of that entertainment derives from Katz's skillful exploitation of gumshoe formula.

The CGI is excellent, with characters whose depth and solidity suggest Nick Park's clay animations.

Quicker on the uptake than any of Eddie Murphy's fat ladies, quicker even than Flip Wilson's Geraldine Jones.

Two prequels' worth of scene setting pays off in the politically resonant Revenge of the Sith.

Debuting as director, Ayer once again points his loose cannon directly into the body politic: the protagonist of this sour but haunting tale is a crazed army ranger just returned from overseas (Christian Bale) who's so full of war that even the LAPD won't hire him.

In his narration Brown says that he wants to dispel the image of surfers as airheaded slackers, an ambition undercut by his own breathless and clumsy writing. But to his credit he collects some fascinating stories.

Toward the end the freak-show humor begins to yield diminishing returns, but for most of its length this delivers a steady stream of uncomfortable gut laughs.

Waititi's comic vocabulary hasn't changed much-there's a lot of voice-over narration illustrated with ludicrous, cartoonish tableaux - yet the kids' genuine longing for their no-good dad elevates this above simple deadpan humor.

It's the most exciting stand-up performance I've seen in years, yet in all honesty I can't say it made me laugh that much.

French director Andre Techine (Alice and Martin) powerfully re-creates the mass exodus from the city and draws a fine performance from Beart as a woman struggling to shield her children from her own fear and confusion. Unfortunately the last act goes off the rails.

Intimations of dope addiction drive the compact plot, which resorts to some stiff exposition early on but careens toward a slam-bang ending.

Offers a fascinating inquiry into memory and art, mixing clips from Fellini's films with contemporary shots of the same locales in and around Rome.

Born in Hamburg to Turkish parents, director Fatih Akin brought an unusual cultural perspective to "Head On" about a marriage of convenience between a beautiful Turk and a suicidal German. In The Edge of Heaven, his first dramatic feature since then, the characters navigate the same cultural divide, but here Akin is more preoccupied with the sense of responsibility that links parents to their children (or vice versa).

As a substantial piece of the puzzle, this is worthwhile viewing.

Harsh but moving drama.

This may conjure up unpleasant memories of Guy Ritchie's "Sherlock Holmes" movies, but Ritchie could learn a lot from director James McTeigue (V for Vendetta); this is multiplex fare to be sure, but McTeigue manages to popularize 19th-century literature without completely vulgarizing it.

Contemporary footage of sea creatures, reptiles, and insects serves to illustrate various chapters in our journey from the ocean floor to the megastore, and though the film's science isn't exactly rigorous, its photography and music are splendid.

The story might have been lifted from an old Warner Brothers melodrama, though it's smartly paced, sincerely delivered, and consistently absorbing.

Modeling the movie after the show itself grows problematic near the end, when Stern and Del Deo, anticipating that climactic, gold-suited kick line, try to whip us into a frenzy on opening night.

Unfortunately, this comeback movie, a labor of love for mush-headed screenwriter and star Jason Segel, errs on the side of sweetness and nostalgia; except for a few good zingers from balcony dwellers Statler and Waldorf, there isn't much here for mom and dad.

As Gibney follows Abramoff through the decades, he traces a solid line from Reagan’s mantra of deregulation to the financial collapse of 2008, showing how three decades of procapitalist lobbying have pushed most Americans out into the cold.

This conceit works precisely because Thatcher's popular appeal was so deeply rooted in nostalgia for the days of empire, and Streep, no fan of Thatcher, nicely undercuts the poignancy of her current condition with flashbacks that reveal her brittle arrogance in office.

For his third feature, Richard Kelly delivers neither a triumph (like his first, Donnie Darko) nor a travesty (like his second, Southland Tales) but a sure-handed genre piece that manages to wrap up before its plot mushrooms completely out of control.

This ensemble drama by screenwriter David Hubbard isn't perfect, but its harsh honesty and sincere faith in humanity make it genuinely uplifting.

Ratliff fails to deliver on any of these ideas and the ending falters badly, but as horror flicks go this is both smart and suspenseful.

The dialogue is superior, though, and director Roman Polanski has cast the characters well; Foster is particularly impressive in a stridently unattractive role, as the pinched, angry liberal who's orchestrated the meeting but doesn't get quite the apology she wants.

It's the first stop-motion feature filmed entirely in stereoscopic 3-D, and the technique makes Selick's artwork even more wondrously creepy. The problem is Gaiman's story, which keeps accumulating otherworldly mythology but doesn't establish a clear line of action in the home stretch.

Visconti rolls out some heavy left-wing proselytizing in the last half hour, but what really hits like a hammer is Lancaster’s realization that these awful people are the only family he’s got.

Adapted by Ernest Tidyman from his novel, this suffers from some sluggish dialogue scenes, but the movie comes to vibrant life whenever director Gordon Parks hits the streets of New York.

There are some striking visuals and Hartnett is a magnetic presence.

Helms's screen persona-the stiff-necked nerd who triumphs through sheer doggedness-is heavily reminiscent of Harold Lloyd's, though Lloyd was handsome and endearing enough to succeed as a romantic lead.

At 116 minutes, it's a test not of speed but endurance.

Soggy and predictable screenplay.

The film was praised upon release for its hard-nosed look at big money in politics, though these days it seems positively dainty.

Australian mockumentary offers plenty of cheap laughs early on.

The new jokes all seem like discards from a Rob Schneider comedy, but for the most part director Peter Segal (Anger Management) and screenwriter Sheldon Turner play a good defensive game, sticking close to the original film's story.

As summer shoot-'em-ups go, this is pretty well executed, with plenty of macho posing and gunfire.

It milks the characters' father-son relationship for drama without making the fairly obvious connection to the agency's paternalistic view of the world.

Donzelli, a busy actress in France, directed this drama from a script she wrote with Elkaim, which may explain why the parents become the center of the movie while the ostensibly suffering boy never takes shape as a character.

The end result is more like a supermarket on Saturday afternoon. The content is engaging, though.

Anthony Peckham's script is formulaic, woodenly reverent, and devoid of real dramatic tension.

The plot contrivances that bring them together to torture each other are so deftly handled that I almost bought them, and the two leads are charming and funny enough to offset the characters' obnoxious motives.

As usual with Stallone's Rocky sequels, the schmaltz is unbearable, but the fight is plausibly handled, and Stallone's sincere sadness at growing older makes this an unexpectedly satisfying conclusion to the series.

Undeniably well executed.

Watt's script is a bit overstuffed, and by the end the roiling animated sequences (drawn by Emma Kelly and inked by Watt and Clare Callinan) are wearing out their welcome. But the convincing characters and hearty examination of mortality make this fresh and oddly uplifting.

Kurt Russell gives a terse, unsentimental performance as coach Herb Brooks, but director Gavin O'Connor sticks to the "Hoosiers" playbook.

The gags are as idiotic as you'd expect, but they consistently hit the bull's-eye.

A box office phenomenon in France, this crowd-pleasing drama is based on a true story but sticks closely to the template for a Hollywood buddy movie.

Snippets of the band's brutally percussive music punctuate the endless encounter sessions, which expose the musicians' boundless self-absorption (the 9-11 attacks come and go without so much as a mention) and cowed obedience to their psychological guru.

Sheridan gives this a pacing and depth one doesn't often find in "urban" product, though Jackson, reliving his own life traumas, is handily upstaged at every turn by Terrence Howard (Crash) as his oddball manager.

Agresti has more on his mind than tugging at heartstrings.

Krause is completely believeable as the solid old man, and though the story moves slower than molasses, it leaves the same dark aftertaste.

As bad-taste comedies go, this is more clever than gross.

In a recent "Sun-Times" article Jeff said he purposely avoided taking a son's perspective, which leaves him without much perspective at all.

As an avid media watcher, I didn't come away from this with any new insights, but the movie is a pretty good snapshot of the daily newspaper business in transition and turmoil.

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.

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.

Michael Webber's documentary "The Elephant in the Living Room" (2010) makes such a powerful case against private ownership of exotic wild animals that this portrait of circus owner David Balding and his beloved elephant Flora seems sentimental by comparison.

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.

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.

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

It's good sleazy fun for a while, jacked up with an assortment of edgy visuals, but the greenish yellow tint favored by action director Tony Scott is a good metaphor for the movie's jaundiced sensibility.

This Indiana Jones knockoff goes down smoothly enough, and Jolie isn't bad at all, though every time she opened her mouth I expected Mick Jagger to come dancing down her tongue.

A philosophical comedy about man's place in a universe colonized by Targets and Wal-Marts.

After she's forced to confess, director Marc Rothemund doesn't have much to do but marvel at her heroic defiance, and the film is overtaken by its talkiness, claustrophobia, and polarized morality.

Carefully re-creates the first movie's lightweight romance and mildly cheeky gender comedy.

Paul Giamatti steals the picture as a sardonic grifter with a phobic terror of dirty toilet seats.

Mostly the three comics stick to the Bill Cosby formula, dispensing with racial anger in favor of good-natured and family- and relationship-based crossover material.

Though it's aimed at preschoolers, it's tuneful and funny enough to amuse any adult.

Never lives up to the hilarity of the opening, partly because the large-scale production smothers the gags but mostly because those gags are so easy to smother.

The comedy sci-fi franchise returns after a ten-year hiatus, with the same formula of respectably funny wisecracks and obsessively detailed space monsters.

Cheerful mess of a pulp-fiction parody.

There are no big surprises, but Mac and director Charles Stone III (Drumline) hit all the right dramatic notes.

Less about the characters than about the first two movies, whose best scenes it congeals into ritual or parody.

Debutant director Richard Day, a seasoned TV producer, delivers a steady stream of cheerful vulgarity and a few clever gags.

Fans of Coppola's movies (and/or perfume ads) will find this free of the absurd pop-rock flourishes in "Antoinette" and more consistent with the skilled tonality and narrative ambiguity of "Translation."

With its diabolical ending, this is the movie equivalent of a crossword puzzle: fun, clever, and disposable.

The tag here is more silly than haunting, but this is still a pretty wild ride, with a fine, knife-wielding score by Bennett Salvay.

This British drama is so overplotted it smothers the two main characters as much as they do each other.

By accident or design, the resolution here is morally ambiguous and vaguely distasteful, which may be the reason I liked it.

The cultural cock-strutting gets to be a bit much, but Neville handily captures the excitement of an art scene percolating, breaking wide open, and finally burning itself out.

Making Shakur the narrator works pretty well at first...But once he becomes an overnight star at age 20, his relentless self-articulation to Tabitha Soren begins to sound like the usual white noise of celebrity, his ideas about race and power in America potent but undeveloped.

Singer draws heavily on the 1978 hit that launched the Warner Brothers franchise, with Brandon Routh dully impersonating Christopher Reeve as the Man of Steel, Kevin Spacey getting all the good lines as the villainous Lex Luthor, and stock footage of Marlon Brando proving that death isn't always a good career move.

The fun hardens into Fun after he's (Mr. Incredible) lured out of retirement and imprisoned in a remote island compound, though the sleek computer animation is spellbinding as usual.

I guessed the big plot twist as soon as Franklin began setting it up, which gave me a good 40 minutes to appreciate the fine supporting cast and weathered coastal Florida locations while waiting for Washington's character to catch up with me.

Passably creepy chiller.

This has its sappy moments, but both women give wonderfully detailed performances, aided by Michael Learned as Hunt's mother and Chris Sarandon as the calm, cold minister.

Patrick Dempsey and Michelle Monaghan make an agreeable pair in this above-average comedy.

Pretty dispensable, though it has one of the best homosexual-panic gags I've ever seen.

Larry Doyle and John Hamburg's script is full of holes, but this is still pretty damn funny--thanks mostly to Barrymore, who seems to be retracing Lucille Ball's trajectory from sex kitten to comedienne.

The movie is fairly entertaining, but the high production values and shticky humor invert the dynamic of the show, which was played totally straight despite the fact that the sets were always threatening to fall down.

The key scene -- is typical of the film's fanciful narrative approach but also its grating pretentiousness.

Martial arts hero Jet Li takes on all comers--with one hand in his hip pocket most of the time--in this absurd but breathlessly paced actioner.

The drama is hampered by a vague screenplay that takes its sweet time explaining the characters' past and never specifies the nature of the boy's palsy and apparent retardation.

The formula works just fine on a more modest scale, without having to carry all the glittering casino sets and A-list movie stars.

The auction makes for a pretty good hinge between the two narratives and, more importantly, allows Madonna to indulge her fetish for fine English things.

Pleasantly acted and moderately funny, but it lacks the genuine bile that made "Heathers" (1987) so bracing.

Like Nicole Holofcener's "Please Give" (2010), this turns on the friction between an unusually altruistic character and the self-centered people around him, though screenwriters David Schisgall and Evgenia Peretz never pursue their premise into the sort of moral comedy that so distinguished the other movie.

You'd have to be a real curmudgeon not to enjoy a show with Ruth Brown, Mavis Staples, Solomon Burke...

Americans desensitized to senseless violence may find the subject matter almost banal, and the interspersed news footage of armed conflict from around the world feels like a rhetorical device. But the coldly telegraphic structure--a series of 71 blackouts following the four strangers to their deaths--yields some striking moments.

Clooney badly botches the spy plot by casting himself as Barris's agency contact... and a truly awful Julia Roberts as Barris's Mata Hari lover (she's soundly upstaged by Drew Barrymore as his devoted girlfriend). Yet the mounting delirium drives home Kaufman's basic point: that a shadow government rules by bread and circuses.

Seriously uneven but often charming.

Pegg has some good obnoxious moments, but he's only a few movies away from becoming Dudley Moore.

As contrived as this premise may sound (and it isn't much better on-screen), writer-director Mora Stephens manages to push the odd-couple story in some interesting directions.

Scripted by Pitre and his wife, Michelle Benoit, this is more interesting for its historical setting than for its rather wooden drama, but Tim Curry gives a pretty good performance as the town's whiskey priest.

The Holocaust subplot is contrived and schematic. Yet the central love triangle is fairly compelling, aided by Krol's fine performance.

The talented cast--manages to rescue the movie as well as the earth.

The film's opening and closing moments are weirdly reminiscent of "Black Hawk Down," another tale of Western soldiers in over their heads on the dark continent -- clearly no one these days understands manifest destiny.

Well-meaning but simpleminded biopic.

In the end, this admirably broadens our knowledge of the era but doesn't much deepen it.

Long, heavy, and not particularly edifying Holocaust drama.

This uninspired comedy drama seems to have been bankrolled by the state tourism board, yet the Celtic music sequences provide welcome relief from the reheated plot.

As one might expect from IFC, actors and directors dominate the interview segments, which may be the reason the narrative never finds its way to Heaven's Gate.

The documentary becomes more poignant and substantial when old age begins to seriously disable some of the dancers.

Director Bob Clark teamed with nostalgic humorist Jean Shepherd for this squeaky clean and often quite funny 1983 yuletide comedy, adapted from Shepherd's novel In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash.

Perry's soap opera story lines are awful, with their nobly suffering sistas, gorgeous do-right men, and shamelessly materialistic dream endings. But the movie's message of gospel joy and racial pride couldn't be more sincere, and Perry gives an impeccable comic performance as the title character.

Like the earlier film, this one has an airless quality, much of the action taking place in the hushed and colorless offices of "the Circus." But whereas the dank tone of "Let the Right One In" served to heighten the moments of poignance and shrieking horror, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy begins to seem phlegmatic after a while.

The jokes all revolve around weed, stereotypes, and Neil Patrick Harris; the stereotype stuff is by far the funniest.

Whenever writer-director Oren Moverman moves past these scattered and admittedly voyeuristic moments into the lives of the two soldiers, the movie drifts into received wisdom and unconvincing romance.

Highly recommended if you want to watch an assortment of rich movie stars feel your pain.

Terence Stamp and Wallace Shawn spend a fair amount of time skulking around as ghostly servants, which kept me amused for the movie's 99 minutes.

This absorbing documentary by George Hickenlooper (Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse) spends too much time on the celebrities in Bingenheimer's life for its analysis of fame and fandom to rise above the banal.

This is supposed to be a testament to the nation's diversity, but it's so complacent that you'd never imagine said diversity is one of the greatest social challenges of the new century.

The movie gets old fast--mostly because it’s bringing up the rear after "Undercover Brother" (2002) And "I’m Gonna Git You Sucka" (1988). But the kung-fu climax at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (“the Honky House”) is nearly worth the wait, and Adrian Younge’s score, with its moody horns, is a perfect snapshot of early 70s soul.

The battle scenes are bloody, visceral, and expertly edited, though arterial spray consumes so much screen time that the numerous subplots, involving 11 legendary Siamese defenders well-known to Thais, may feel perfunctory to Westerners despite some strong performances.

The leads are good, and Timothy Hutton is memorably off-putting as the pitcher's disengaged dad. But having created the aching umpire, Ponsoldt occupies him with some fairly shopworn situations.

Director Roger Michell seems genuinely taken with the contrast between brotherly love and homosexual obsession, but these themes are overwhelmed by the suspense machinery.

The romantic denouement is so predictable it must have driven the animators mad as they worked, but their modest art is eerily effective.

The conflict between Hawn, who prizes her freedom, and Sarandon, who values her family, is pretty rich; it reminded me of the friendship between Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft in "The Turning Point."

Fans will dig the abundant performance video and commentary from Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye; everyone else should steer clear of the mosh pit.

As usual, Sayles's dialogue scenes are as shapely as blown glass, but none of the characters' predicaments has been adequately explored, much less resolved, when the final freeze-frame arrives.

When the movie got serious again at the end I wasn't buying, though the whole endeavor is helped along by an appealing cast.

As in the other two movies, the plot is a thin cardboard box used to carry an assortment of observational doughnuts--in this case, estrogen-fueled shop talk about race, men, and the politics of looking good.

An unexpectedly troubling crime thriller.

Reasonably entertaining if utterly familiar entry in the long-running SF franchise.

I came to this expecting a standard rock doc, but its cobwebbed tale of an aged parent and grown child's debilitating relationship seems closer to "Grey Gardens."

Like the former first lady, the filmmakers go slightly overboard.

Favors character development over rude scares, though given the narrow parameters of the genre, it's not really a worthwhile trade.

Silly but enjoyable drama.

The episodic structure prevents any real momentum, but Byatt and Fothergill give a visceral sense of the sea's violence and vividly capture the riot of color to be found on the ocean floor.

Unfortunately the film never establishes either a perspective of its own or a coherent geography of the city, so the politicians pontificating at ceremonies and architects commiserating at building sites become deadly dull long before the the film exhausts its 88 minutes.

Gilbert would have done well to stick with these witnesses; instead his History Channel-type video presents a dutiful overview of the Brown case.