J.R. Jones

Brett Morgen (The Kid Stays in the Picture) has made an electrifying picture.

This is well worth seeing for Bening's arresting, unpleasant performance.

Stephen Gaghan, who scripted this turkey, landed in the director's chair after Edward Zwick (Glory) bailed out, and you can almost smell the flop sweat.

This revisionist western by writer-director Andrew Dominik makes a wan attempt to present the Jesse James legend as the dawn of celebrity culture in America.

The show ends with a moving declaration of faith by the star, who was raised in the church, but there's no denying that his funniest moments spring from impulses that are less than charitable.

Watchable exercise in Zen hokum.

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.

This may not be as ill considered as it sounds--some of the sharpest material in Rock's last concert special, "Never Scared," dealt with the eternal conflict between men and women--but his crowd-pleasing gags tend to clash with Rohmer's sly moral comedy.

More than anything Chuck and Larry shows just how flaccid American movie comedy has become now that "Saturday Night Live" has replaced vaudeville as our comedy college.

The orgy of violence, as ghastly as in any video game, should go a long way toward erasing whatever goodwill Stallone earned with his sentimental "Rocky Balboa."

Written by Steve Conrad, this is the smartest script director Gore Verbinski has ever had, and he makes the most of it, aided by a strong cast.

Weird anachronisms (cars, telephones, home computers) contribute to the craziness, but despite the copious imagination on display, this is a fairly long haul.

Canned racial uplift and tear-streaked faces abound, though they're offset somewhat by a nicely funky blaxploitation vibe.

Steppenwolf alumnus Tracy Letts adapted his play into this fearsome horror movie, directed with single-minded claustrophobia by William Friedkin.

This is the usual cartoon of hound dogs, roadhouses, antebellum mansions, and Civil War reenactments. Aside from that, it's not a bad date movie.

After a 40-year career playing jut-jawed a__holes, Michael Douglas must relish the occasional oddball role: he gave a winning performance as the pot-addled professor in "Wonder Boys," and he seems to be having a ball in this funny debut feature by Mike Cahill.

Only loosely connected to the story, the visuals quickly grow monotonous, and as the chronicle arrives at Cobain's late years of curdled fame and fortune, his bitterness and cynicism make even the narration hard to take.

The narrative conceit requires a fair amount of indulgence as the story progresses, but the fleeting, incomplete glimpses of the monster early on prove the old dictum of B movie auteur Val Lewton that a momentary image can have greater impact than a prolonged one.

By the end, when Moore presents himself as a lone crusader for justice and wraps yellow crime-scene tape around the AIG building, his reasoning is so muddled that he can’t distinguish an economic system (corporate capitalism) from a political one (representative democracy).

Even 82 minutes seems an eternity...The net effect is weirdly reminiscent of taking part in any online community, where a "relationship" is more like a juxtaposing of egos.

You may not leave the theater having switched sides, but you'll probably respect the other side more, and that in itself would be a victory for human life.

With a score by the Residents, cartoon art by Warren Heise and Timothy Stock, and scenes of the actors commenting on and interacting with the real-life Kurtz, this 2006 advocacy video brings a jumpy energy to its Orwellian tale.

You don't have to get too far into Kazuo Ishiguro's brilliant 2005 novel Never Let Me Go to realize it's hopelessly unfilmable.

Underneath the wrapping lies a squalid Tarantino-style crime flick.

The setup for this Oliver Stone drama keeps its iconic villain so far removed from the financial action that he seems like a dog tied up outside a restaurant.

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.

The behind-the-scenes tragedy gives Gilliam an easy excuse for the dull chaos that engulfs the story, but he might have generated it all on his own.

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.