J.R. Jones

In the end I didn't believe in their relationship, but I was pleased to see Keaton tearing it up for two hours.

Director Niall Johnson struggles to find the proper tone: the serial murders aren't horrible enough to be funny, and the characters don't respond as if they're horrible at all. As a result the black humor thins into gray fog.

So playful and imaginative that only at the very end -- in a metafictional tag about their project's success on the festival circuit -- does its narcissism become off-putting.

Novelist Douglas Coupland (Generation X) brings his millennial irony and middle-class angst to the big screen with this offbeat Canadian comedy about the lure of easy money.

In this 2006 entry the insights are worthwhile.

There's nothing remotely new here, but the movie has the taut, queasy feel of an early 70s drive-in shocker: old-fashioned suspense without any guarantee of old-fashioned mercy.

The gender-bending comedy of Billy Wilder and Blake Edwards gets a teenpic makeover in this 2005 debut feature by Martin Curland.

Director Adam Shankman (Bringing Down the House) can't block a sight gag to save his life.

Comes to life only when it reprises elements from the original movie.

This motorcycle melodrama is so stupid that during the press screening my colleagues' laughter threatened to drown out the roar of the engines.

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

The language has been changed to English, of course, which is the only real reason this movie exists; the story development, desolate tone, and key set pieces are mostly copied from the original movie, which in turn was based on a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist.

Winter's Bone often seems to be unfolding in a world apart, with its own moral logic and codes of conduct. It might feel like prison if it weren't so obviously home.

There's one nifty and original sequence--an assassination attempt during a state funeral where the pipe organs in the church all go haywire--but otherwise, this is crushingly generic.

First-time director James Gartner observes all the rituals--the coach busting chops, the team sneaking out to party--but the players are indifferently characterized and the civil rights story has a fake Black History Month feel.

For a movie about the importance of memory, Away From Her is appropriately sophisticated in its treatment of time. Polley has broken the chronological story into three sections of unequal length and woven them together, approximating our own mercurial journeys through the past.

Jaglom's 14th consists of his usual weakly improvised relationship comedy.

Cruise holds the center of the film with a sharply focused performance, though his bonding with the wise samurai chieftain (Ken Watanabe) is noticeably more ardent than his soggy romance with the stoic wife of a man he killed in combat.

Director Paul Greengrass has applied his jumpy, tumbling visual style to action blockbusters with Matt Damon and serious dramatizations of political events. This Iraq war drama makes a game attempt to meld the two, though manufacturing thrills takes precedence over any kind of journalistic insight.

All I got was this lousy movie. OK, it's not that bad, though in contrast to "Ocean's Eleven," which gave its megastars a neat little heist story, this sequel is both contrived and convoluted.

Keith is an awkward, galumphing presence, but he's more fun to watch than Kelly Preston as the girl's uptight mother.

Samberg can't carry this, though director Akiva Schaffer supplies some hilarious, "Jackass"-style wipeouts and there are nice supporting turns from Isla Fisher (Wedding Crashers) as Rod's love interest and Bill Hader as one of his goofball friends.

In a truly great movie the form becomes indistinguishable from the story, and that’s certainly the case here.

In this littered environment there's no such thing as trash, only salvage, and the biggest threat to the siblings' humanity is a creeping tendency to think of themselves as commodities as well.

A Sears catalog of rock 'n' roll cliches.

His story demands to be heard, though Tucker and Epperlein lack the material for a full feature and pad this out to 73 minutes with some incongruously playful elements (spy music, comic-book illustrations, scenes of Abbas frolicking at a beach).

Shameless exercise in high-tech sadism.

Dylan Moran has a few funny moments as Pegg's shiftless pal, and Mike Leigh regular Ruth Sheen puts in an all-too-brief appearance.

The emotion here is genuine, but the outlook is tough: in Bahrani's movies we're all aliens to each other.

The scenes between husband and wife are spectacularly awkward and arresting, though the movie grows more dubious the nearer the guys get to their shooting session in a local hotel room.

Dumb but harmless live-action comedy for kids.

When the story finally collapses in a heap at the end, you'll probably want your money back, but that's where the title comes in: "Next!"

As this wonderful adaptation reminds us, Dickens endures mostly because of his characters.

The problem is that only a fan would be inclined to tolerate this dunderheaded mystery.

Australian mockumentary offers plenty of cheap laughs early on.

Occasionally cloying, but the distinguished British cast (Anna Massey, Robert Lang, Georgina Hale, Millicent Martin) generates considerable gravitas.

Set in postwar Berlin, the story involves prostitution, black marketeering, and the death camps, and the tension between the visual style and the adult story makes the movie pretty engrossing -- it's an R-rated "Casablanca."

Actor David Morse establishes himself as a truly formidable presence in this powerful first feature by Alex and Andrew Smith.

For a family picture this is still superior.

This is a killer idea for a political satire, and screenwriters Jason Richman and Joshua Michael Stern come close to realizing its farcical potential.

The result, though clearly flawed, is passionate and ambitious, celebrating that long-gone era when a book of verse could spark a revolution in consciousness.

I appreciated its cogent history lesson, which details China's brutal treatment of Tibetan nationals from the late 1940s through the Cultural Revolution and into the '80s, when it executed 15,000 dissidents.

Adults won't find much to enjoy here, though the dog's high-octane action series serves as a perverse parody of Jerry Bruckheimer-style summer blockbusters.

The maternal triangle is pretty well handled too, giving a good sense of where Lennon came by all that exuberance and melancholy.

Thomsen's transformation from easygoing entrepreneur to ruthless executive is so engrossing I didn't pick up on the story's chilling Freudian subtext until very near the end.

A funny but genuinely dark story.

Melville's seedy characters and engrossing friendships are well preserved, thanks largely to strategic redeployment of his crisp dialogue. As revamped caper films go, this offers considerably more texture than Steven Soderbergh's "Ocean's 11."

Former FBI agent Robert Hanssen is now serving a life sentence for his long career as a Russian and Soviet spy, but this rote thriller implies he should have done prison time just for being Catholic. As played by Chris Cooper, Hanssen is a humorless asshole who commits treason because the bureau won't give him an office with a window, and the screenplay scores countless easy points off his religiosity, which masks a weakness for sex tapes and sleazy chat rooms.

The dearth of ideas is exemplified at the end by a Mary Tyler Moore freeze-frame of Graham leaping in the air.

The show has been the gold standard for satirical TV ever since it debuted in 1989. This long-awaited movie adaptation has plenty of laughs, plus an assortment of milestones for fans.

A new low for director Alan Parker, this trite mystery thriller does for capital punishment what his "Mississippi Burning" did for civil rights: with its muddled message, liberal piety, and slick Hollywood plot mechanics.

Medium Cool is also recognized as a pointed early critique of the news media, noting the amoral detachment of TV journalists and the collusion between their corporate bosses and the government to shape a political narrative. But for people who love Chicago, the film may be most valuable as a cultural document, recording a much younger city in the midst of a turbulent summer.

Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road) steals his every scene as the aphorism-spouting Fowley while Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning often fade into the 70s wallpaper as guitarist Joan Jett and front woman Cherie Currie.

Though some of his one-liners are pretty good, his shtick can't sustain this dutifully scripted comedy. Megyn Price, who's done time on the sitcom Grounded for Life, is a welcome distraction as the waitress with a crush on Larry.

The gilt-and-grime setting is eerily atmospheric, and screenwriter Dan Madigan has a nicely sick sense of humor.

This documentary about the public education crisis isn't as smart or rigorous as Bob Bowdon's shoestring production "The Cartel," which arrived in town earlier this year and quickly vanished. But the new movie is still an admirable exercise in straight talk.

Hysterically funny CGI fight sequences, which pit the chubby superhero against a series of creatures so bizarre they'd keep Hieronymus Bosch awake at night.

The villainous turns by Jon Voight (as a hard-hearted Mormon bishop) and Terence Stamp (as a bloodthirsty Brigham Young) would have been more fun if they weren't part of such a clumsy campaign to lay this tragedy at the church's doorstep.

German supermodel Uschi Obermaier slept with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and all we get is this lousy biopic.

The sentimentality is held in check by Caine, who rises to the occasion with a bleak, angry performance.

This terminally sappy romance delivers heartache, sacrifice, a make-out scene in the pouring rain, and not one but two autistic characters.

Klores and Stevens don't have much to work with visually besides talking heads, old photos, news clippings, and stock footage, but with a narrative this insane, that's more than enough.

Functions primarily as a suspense film, and it manages to be gripping even though the outcome is already known.

Like the Coens’ protagonist in "The Man Who Wasn’t There," Stuhlbarg is driven to an existential crisis, but in contrast to the earlier movie, with its tired noir moves, this one is earnestly engaged in the question of what constitutes a life well lived.

Well-meaning but thick with cliches.

It runs like a Swiss watch, though the plot continuously turns on Cage's liberal interpretation of ridiculously cryptic clues.

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.

The good humor bubbles up from a deep reservoir of affection for Hollywood schlock.

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

"American Casino" and Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story" offered more striking images of the human wreckage, but Ferguson is more successful at nailing the perpetrators in New York and their gullible accomplices in Washington.

A quantum leap in movie magic; watching it, I began to understand how people in 1933 must have felt when they saw "King Kong."

In keeping with his models, West is concerned with not suspense exactly but the ritual withholding and ultimate lavishing of bloody chaos.

The paltry theme is that we can't predict the future, but I spent part of the time calculating how many more feeble movies Allen will make, based on his productivity rate (one per year), his batting average (four duds for every success), his current age (74), and his father's longevity (Martin Konigsberg lived to be 100). Are you ready for 20 more remakes of "Manhattan"?

This isn't all gold--there are lame riffs on a booze-swilling dog and a flabby old man with a boner--but it's well above average.

Most of the humor is of the kick-daddy-in-the-shins variety, though Anjelica Huston has a few choice moments as "Ms. Harridan."

Delivers state-of-the-art freeway thrills tenuously held together by an absurd plot, cheap but pretty leads (Martin Henderson, Monet Mazur), diner and gas station locations that look like they've been preserved in amber since the 1950s, and plenty of engine porn.

Creatively it's a giant step backwards.

This screen adaptation never quite jells, veering from family drama to stale 50s consumer kitsch, but it's anchored by strong performances from Julianne Moore.

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

Steven Sebring spent a decade making this documentary about the punk poet, and it shows.

Irish playwright Mark O'Rowe, who wrote the script, has an admirable sense of dramatic proportion that suits his intertwining stories; theater director John Crowley, making his film debut, has a sure hand with his actors; and an excellent cast enlivens this web of romantic and criminal intrigue, set in a gray suburb of Dublin. R.

This dazzling CGI feature by DreamWorks Animation appropriates the vivid undersea psychedelia of "Finding Nemo," though in contrast to that movie, the father-son parable here is just an excuse to burlesque "The Godfather" for the 100th time.

As the furiously passive-aggressive title character, Jonah Hill delivers a craftier comic performance than anything in his box-office hits (Superbad, Get Him to the Greek), but what really elevates the story above its shticky premise is the combined neuroses of all three characters.

The first positive portrayal of homosexuality in Russian cinema, a distinction that carries it only so far.

As "Saw" demonstrated, Wan and Whannell have a carnivalesque sense of fun and a sure instinct for recycling classic horror tropes, but their characters are so flat and their plotting so listless that this low-budget feature fails to generate much suspense.

The movie brushes against some of India's worst social ills, but it's essentially a fairy tale.

Like the first movie this is unassailable family entertainment, with a gentle fairy tale for kids and a raft of mildly satirical pop-culture references for parents.

The climax, in which the detective's commanding officer gives him a dictionary and subjects him to a sort of linguistic browbeating, is a marvel of dead air and unspoken oppression.

Darkly funny and metaphorically potent.

This is quick and unpredictable storytelling, its dialogue simple but tough. Alberto Jimenez is excellent as the conscience-stricken father, whose duty to respect the law tests his relationship with his own son, and both kids, Juan Jose Ballesta and Pablo Galan, give passionate, committed performances.

Good movie roles have generally eluded her (Agnes Bruckner), and she labors in vain to keep this big-studio horror confection alive.

Sluggish comedy drama.

Like so many secular, big-studio Christmas comedies, this isn't naughty enough to be funny or nice enough to be uplifting; it's just an ugly sweater from a distant relative, thoughtlessly sent and destined to be thrown away.

This may be light family entertainment, but it's also a pleasingly perverse celebration of Victorian morbidity.

I'm a fan of director Bob Odenkirk, but my high hopes for this comedy were dashed by screenwriters Ben Garant, Thomas Lennon, and Michael Patrick Jann, all alumi of "Reno 911"!

An innocuous, passably entertaining effects extravaganza.

For the grown-ups there are sweet, sincere performances by Ginnifer Goodwin, Sandra Oh, and, as Ramona's endlessly game father, the likable John Corbett, relieved for once of his drippy rom-com duties.

Soporific comedy.

Not only delightfully funny but unaffectedly romantic.

Director Kenneth Branagh has mercifully pared the action down to 88 minutes (the first movie dragged on for 138), but the final act, with its obscure homosexual flirtation, still seems to go on forever.

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

The film is soon bogged down by fake hugs and a faker climax.

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

Written and directed by Tom Six--who doesn't seem to realize that movie theaters rely on popcorn sales--this nasty stuff plays like a cross between "Saw," "Naked Lunch," and "Bride of the Monster."

Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves are both such guarded celebrities that I have a hard time imagining them as lovers, a problem this Chicago-based romantic fantasy surmounted by isolating them from each other almost entirely.

The characters are drawn with such compassion their follies become our own and their desires seem as vast as the night sky.

"The Illusionist" also centers on a 19th-century magician, and the elegant contours of its story are even more impressive compared with Nolan's clutter of double and triple crosses.

Unlike high school movies made for the teen market, Chalk gets many of its laughs from the backstage wrangling among the teachers as they unload their stress on one another.

Tom Hollander gives a strong performance as the considerate and quietly grieving young man.

The vile sadism of the Saw movies has been replaced by decorative references to Saint Augustine and Immanuel Kant, and there's a beautiful but brainy police profiler (Waddell) on hand to dispense a thick layer of psychobabble.

On its deepest level it considers not a particular war but the complex feelings between mothers and the young men they send out into the world to kill or be killed.

As a suspense movie, this works pretty well: director Bryan Singer (X-Men, The Usual Suspects) maintains a crisp pace as the plotters set out to kill the fuhrer with a briefcase bomb, and the historical details of the botched coup, which exploited one of Hitler's own contingency plans to mobilize the army reserves and disarm the SS, are inherently interesting.

Its mix of personal reminiscence (Mario made his screen debut playing Sweetback as a boy) and cultural history is fascinating. This engages in a fair amount of mythmaking itself, but its lesson in self-empowerment is both vivid and sincere.

By the time Herzog tried to pass off jellyfish as Dourif's old pals, my indulgence was nearing its end--but then so was the movie.

This sequel to the apocalyptic splatter flick "28 Days Later" . . . (2002) is still well equipped to rip your face off.

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.

This manages to make the real seem generic, rather than the other way around.

Everything wrong with today's hipster comedy seems to coalesce in this toothless satire.

The script, by newcomer Sabina Murray, is occasionally cloying as the naive hero falls for a bitter prostitute (Bai Ling), but its epic tale of two cultures tragically entwined is anchored by deep and elemental emotions.

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.

The movie seems unusually honest in portraying the no-option existence of the working poor, but the story slips into melodrama in the last reel.

It preserves the peculiar machismo of Ayer's earlier projects: the alpha male dominates not only because he's the most powerful, but because he's the most jaded.

As the title of this splatter comedy by writer-director Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator) indicates, he's like a bug stuck to her windshield, and that's about the level of humanity and insight one can expect here.

Cagey low-budget horror flick.

Routine crime thriller.

This singing-along-to-the-radio effect has a dingy charm that honors the blue-collar Italian setting, yet Turturro spoils it by turning the movie into a hip star party, with a cast of indie-acting royalty.

Todd Phillips is no artist, but his lowbrow comedies (Road Trip, Old School) always hit the mark because they're so psychologically true: the superego tries to control the id, but the id gets drunk and barfs all over it. Hilarious.

Undeniably well executed.

Whether you want to trace this romance back to "La Strada" or Allen's marriage to Soon-Yi Previn is your business, but on-screen it never registers as more than a writer's conceit.

With its sappy musical vignettes and encounter-session dialogue, the movie consistently overplays its insights, though all three leads contribute thoughtful and genuine performances.

Charlize Theron, in nonglam mode, dominates this powerful drama about sexual harassment at a Minnesota iron ore mine in the early 90s.

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.

I love Franken and wish there were more funny liberals in the chattering class, but his crushing sarcasm wouldn't exactly elevate the national debate.

Brutally honest and brilliantly acted.

Indifferently scripted and shoddily animated feature.

Abysmal thriller.

Agreeable but overlong.

This is funny mostly for its brazen disregard of common sense.

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

Berman delicately unravels the silent resentments festering in the latchkey home, but the pain is leavened by his droll sense of humor.

Surrounding and ultimately subsuming this ethical struggle is a fair amount of pediatric-cancer horror and mush, though Cassavetes is frequently bailed out by his cast (Diaz is admirably unpleasant as the controlling mother, and Joan Cusack is unusually tough and restrained as the presiding judge).

To her credit, Bello makes a real commitment to this spiteful, self-absorbed character, though the credibility she generates through sheer force of will is no match for the gimmicky plot twist that arrives at the story’s midpoint and sends the movie spinning off into stupid-land.

The very idea of handing him over to professional lad Guy Ritchie (who directed Snatch, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), to be played as a punch-throwing quipster by Robert Downey Jr., is so profoundly stupid one can only step back in dismay.

Myers pumps out a river of inventive shtick, but it doesn't cohere or connect; he seems less a character than a comedian doing couch time on a late-night talk show.

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

This is pretty thin soup, but the players are spirited and the jokes generally offbeat.

Ferrell and Reilly get more mileage out of juvenile pouting and bickering than any other performers I can imagine, but that's about as far as this goes.

Jarmusch makes some effort to deliver on the promise of suspense near the end, with de Bankole stalking despicable businessman Bill Murray at his fortresslike compound in the hills.

The story is inspiring and involves sports, but to call it an inspirational sports story would be wrong; its real center is Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock in a fine performance), the strong-willed woman whose love and generosity helped turn a mute, hopeless boy with no social or academic skills into a functioning young man with a promising future.

No movie with access to the Cole Porter songbook could be a complete waste of time, but this biopic of the great tunesmith by producer-director Irwin Winkler is all upholstery and no chair.

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.

Agresti has more on his mind than tugging at heartstrings.

A chaotic sequence midway through shows Mormon and gay-rights protesters shouting abuse at each other in San Francisco, and that's pretty much what the whole movie feels like.

Siegel manages to keep the action wound pretty tight, though he doesn’t seem to sympathize much with Rose’s bleeding-heart liberalism.

This family feature from the Christian production company Walden Media is something of a disappointment after its excellent "Holes" and "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."

He looks like a truck ran over him, but at 52 he's still ripped enough to get away with the role; in the end the movie is about Rourke's indomitability more than the character's.

It's the epitome of an embedded war report, though Rademacher's at-ease scenes with the soldiers have some of the warmth and terse humor of Ernie Pyle's, and there's some hair-raising footage of a machine-gun firefight.

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

Beautifully unemphatic small-town drama.

Sublimely stupid.

By turns morally compelling and racially paternalistic, this provocative drama may be the first halfway truthful war movie to hit multiplexes since "Three Kings."

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.

Though the movie isn’t much to look at, he (Siegel) gets a credibly dark and pathetic performance from the typically comic Oswalt.

Spike Lee's fans have learned to take the bad with the good, but this is pretty damn bad.

Only in the last third, when he gets down to the business of telling a story, does The Brown Bunny become a porn movie -- though not in the sense you'd expect.

Spade claims he latched onto his snide persona to distinguish himself from the pack; it's served him well as an ensemble player and a big-screen foil to Chris Farley, but as a romantic lead he's hopeless.

This has its moments--most of them thanks to Kilmer and Joe Mantegna as the boy's abusive father--but the troubled romance is unconvincing and the big-name actors hang on the story like ornaments on a spindly tree.

Zemeckis captures all the story’s terror, but its pathos has always been the real challenge, and it mostly eludes him.

This is one dull party.

This one follows the depressing pattern of "Surviving Christmas" and "Christmas With the Kranks": enforced holiday cheer gives way to bilious hatred, then hollow forgiveness.

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

Bong's opening and climactic scenes, in which the old woman bops around to a dance tune amid a vast field of yellow grass, are typical of the movie's cockeyed poetry.

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

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.