J.R. Jones

The mystery has never been resolved, but to his credit Bar-Lev acknowledges that he himself has become part of the story, torn between sympathy and suspicion.

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

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.

The famously oblique French director Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad) won a special award at the Cannes film festival for this existential comedy (2009), whose masterful technique fails to compensate for its glassy characters and mercilessly self-amused tone.

At one point screenwriter James C. Strouse name-checks the brilliant Richard Yates, whose fiction similiarly perches between grim humor and utter despair, but the movie's hip detachment is a far cry from the unruly passions of Yates's chronic losers.

In the Apatow manner, Segel mines a mother lode of painful personal memories for his breakup gags, and the vanity of entertainment people proves to be another rich vein.

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.

Assorted movie in-jokes should keep parents tolerably entertained, and Alan Menken's songs mercifully favor western swing over the expected twang pop.

Engrossing documentary.

Dismal.

Any guy who sits through this date movie deserves to get to third base at least.

This wacky Australian comedy about a struggling rock band is tolerable fun, neither as inventive as Bob Rafelson's 60s sitcom "The Monkees" nor as hilariously bad as Ron Howard's made-for-TV cult movie "Cotton Candy" (1978).

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

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

This being senior year, Burstein can't help but capture some genuine drama, but there's a stage-managed quality to the movie that reminded me of MTV reality shows.

The movie clicks along pretty well until they launch their elaborate plot against the merchants of death, which seems to go on forever.

Without the grandiose narrative structure of the six live-action releases, this feels even more pointless, a mechanical attempt to milk the kids for every last dime.

Writer-director Toni Kallem generates some touching moments (most of them involving Tom Bower as Taylor's wisp of a father), but this never surmounts the woeful miscasting of its two leads.

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.

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.

Overlong, undercooked drama.

An agreeably shallow comedy.

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.

The result is an uneasy mix of Coen-style laughs (particularly evident in the big comic close-ups) and Zhang's majestic imagery (in one shot the couple's divorce papers shatter into a burst of confetti).

The mesmerizing narrative recounts a media circus of unrivaled malignance.

Claudel commits the cardinal sin of withholding the full story until the very end, when it spills out in a histrionic scene between the two sisters and largely exonerates the older one.

The skillful Patrick Marber (Closer) adapted this gripping drama from a novel by Zoe Heller, and it's both literate and urgently plotted, with a voice-over from Dench that cuts like broken glass.

This is fairly satisfying, particularly a ghoulish episode in a Victorian insane asylum.

The first third is terrific...After that the movie settles into a series of ho-hum conflicts and complications, and the requisite slam-bang ending is perfunctory at best.

Weak comedy.

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.

The movie endorses the liberal conception of the Chicks as free-speech heroes, which doesn't quite wash: Maines shot her mouth off to a receptive overseas crowd, then issued an apology as soon as the backlash began back home.

Though its intentions are noble, it's hampered by a stock romantic subplot (Phillipe falls for his friend's squeeze, Abbie Cornish), a familiar structure (since The Best Years of Our Lives soldiers invariably come home in threes), and a lack of symmetry (some of Gordon-Levitt's story seems to have wound up on the cutting-room floor).

"Cut" is the most interesting of the three shorts because Park uses the opportunity to take stock of his career and the excruciating cruelty of his movies.

Apatow and director Jake Kasdan deliver a fair number of laughs, though nearly every good idea is pressed into service as a running gag. The biggest disappointment is their survey of rock history, which has all the depth of a Time-Life book.

Like the first two movies, this is loaded with computer-generated imagery, but for the first time there's a sense of dramatic proportion balancing the spectacle and the story line.

The dazzling star power of the French screen royalty Ozon has assembled and the film's sheer exuberance in its own artifice make this a delight from beginning to end.

Blaise and Walker cleverly widen the aspect ratio as the hero's consciousness changes and make some lovely pictures of the northern lights, but the atrocious Phil Collins score (with a vocal by Tina Turner) filled me with evil spirits.

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.

This tepid sequel to Harold Ramis's mobster-on-the-couch comedy "Analyze This" (1999) is partially redeemed by Robert De Niro's handful of scenes with Cathy Moriarty-Gentile, who made her screen debut as the teenage wife in "Raging Bull."

It's not a terribly disciplined exercise--the rehearsal dinner and wedding ceremony go on so long I felt like I was watching "The Deer Hunter"--but the performances are outstanding, especially Hathaway's and Debra Winger's in a small but devastating turn as her chilly, resentful mother.

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.

Birmingham and coscreenwriter Matt Drake adapted a short story by Tom McNeal, elaborating on its plot but beautifully capturing its low-key poeticism.

The script is a lifeless succession of attorney-client debates and stormy horror flashbacks, though I had a good time watching Jennifer Carpenter, a comic Buffy type in "White Chicks" and "D.E.B.S.," hurl herself around as the title character.

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

By the time Gooding showed up for one of his assignments disguised as a call girl, even "Boat Trip" looked good to me.

Various news stories have noted the movie's accuracy, which I don't doubt, but the blanket antipathy makes for a wearying and predictable story.

Its intelligent characterizations make it one of the best movies I've seen this year.

Watching her (Blanchett) and Jones work together is the chief pleasure of this polished but self-conscious drama--Howard delivers some terse and coherent suspense sequences, but Ford looms over the story like a rifleman hidden in the red rock.

Written by Angus MacLachlan, this indie drama explores the lingering tension between north and south with vinegar and precision.

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.

This excruciating sequel tries to squeeze a few more bucks from the "Spy Kids" espionage formula.

Lichtenstein dutifully unpacks the family's unhappy past, but he's so easily distracted by surreal dream sequences and colorful supporting characters that his main story gradually dries up into a sitcom.

Most comedies start with a straight story and hang jokes on it; Solondz begins with a cosmic joke and takes his characters by the hand as they suffer through it.

A vicious, incoherent shoot-'em-up.

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

[A] well-crafted piece of middle-American uplift...For once it really does matter most how you play the game.

A trio of finely observant performances graces this quiet drama.

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.

You won't find many surprises in the equally funny U.S. remake from producer and star Chris Rock.

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

Simpleminded indictment of every senator who voted "yea."

Remaking Get Smart without Don Adams and Barbara Feldon is like remaking "My Little Chickadee" without Mae West and W.C. Fields--the best possible outcome is disappointment.

With no personalities established and nothing at stake, it's no more interesting than a pickup game on your local court.

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.

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

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.

Whitaker directed this flaccid romance from a script by girl-power hacks Jessica Bendinger.

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.

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.

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

A nauseating, stridently phony rom-com.

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

So fraught with unresolved issues of class, sexuality, and spiritual need, and so carefully observed by Pawlikowski, that it opens out like the movie's West Yorkshire countryside.

A career low for Mark Wahlberg and director John Singleton (Boyz N the Hood), this ridiculous mean-streets adventure starts out like a Hell's Kitchen melodrama from the 30s and eventually spins off into a series of gunfights, beat downs, and trite Motown numbers.

Period westerns are so unfashionable and costly that they usually require a top-drawer script to get off the ground -- and this one, adapted from an Elmore Leonard story and its 1957 movie version, travels with an arrow's clean arc.

Rises only slightly above the level of a Harlequin romance.

I'm qualified to report that this piece of junk faithfully re-creates the Hanna-Barbera formula of scary monsters, flimsy mystery, and watery comedy.

Genuinely sad: few bands have burst onto the scene with such a perfectly realized look, sound, and philosophy or been more trapped by their own meatheaded genius.

The elder Wexler keeps insisting that he won't sign a release for the film unless he approves of the finished product, so he must have been pleased with its brutally honest assessment of him as a gifted filmmaker who never realized his true potential.

As a movie genre, the ghostly romantic comedy dates back at least as far as "Topper" (1937), and the stale premise, combined with the leads' typecasting, makes for an eminently forgettable date movie.

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

Through it all Nader, as ruefully funny as ever, comments on his adventures.

The movie is impressive for its even mix of snarky humor and sincere sentiment, and even more impressive when one considers that director Isao Takahata made his name with the harrowing antiwar drama Grave of the Fireflies (1988).

On paper the story may seem hopelessly contrived -- another nostalgia piece for art-house liberals -- but on-screen it's presented in purely emotional terms, which allows Duigan and his excellent leads to inhabit and ultimately transcend the period.

The fourth installment in the horror-parody franchise combines plot elements from "The Grudge," "The Village," and "War of the Worlds," with abbreviated spoofs of "Saw," "Brokeback Mountain," and "Million Dollar Baby." The amount of screen time allotted to each movie is roughly proportional to its box office take, suggesting that the first draft of the screenplay was written on a calculator.

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

Feeble exercise in brain-teaser noir.

This sequel to "Fantastic Four" (2005) drags in the Silver Surfer, who looks like a gigantic hood ornament and, given voice by Laurence Fishburne, has about as much personality.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's become a critical cliche to say that everyone in the U.S. should see a particular war documentary, but even the most selfish citizen might want to check out The Ground Truth, because unlike the Iraqi victims of the war, the American ones are all around us.

Eric Brevig, making his feature directing debut after a long career as a visual effects supervisor, lurches from one CG set piece to the next, though he's helped along by Fraser's easy comic touch.

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.

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

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.

This gets off to a pretty good start, with most of the laughs coming from beefy Kevin Heffernan and nerdy Steve Lemme. But at 111 minutes, the movie is too slackly paced to build up enough momentum; like the characters they play, these guys don't know when to call it a night.

The production design is superb, and the actors deliver their dialogue in subtitled Yucatecan Maya, but despite all the anthropological drag, this is really just a crackerjack Saturday-afternoon serial.

The last act is rushed and soapy, but this is still a singular observation of American life.

Dark and challenging.

Ice Cube tries his hand at family comedy in this phony story.

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.

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.

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.

This seventh installment is utterly fascinating.

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.

Producer Ismail Merchant died in 2005, but Merchant Ivory's stuffy tradition of quality lives on.

It's a damning indictment of a national disgrace, but it also reveals the incredible faith and resilience of people who have nothing to rely on but themselves.

Here the idea of sleep as the ultimate threat is still fresh and marvelously insidious, and Craven vitalizes the nightmare sequences with assorted surrealist novelties.

An unexpectedly troubling crime thriller.

Helen Mirren's flinty performance as Elizabeth II is getting all the attention, but equally impressive is Peter Morgan's insightful script for this UK drama, which quietly teases out the social, political, and historical implications of the 1997 death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

Pretentious and overconceived, the movie purports to celebrate self-determination yet squashes it at every turn.

The gags are consistently weak, though actor Miles Fisher turns in a hair-raising impression of Tom Cruise.

Jennings's film, with its missing fathers, sometimes threatens to become cloying, but it's almost always righted by a healthy dose of slapstick or the spectacle of little kids posing as muscle-bound killers.

Smart dialogue, an impeccably crafted story, and eye-catching LA locations make this low-budget feature by Alex Holdridge the most worthwhile date movie I've seen in some time.

The resulting movie (2005) covers seven years and touches on some of the same social issues that gave "Hoop Dreams" its epic sweep, yet Serrill fails to treat any of them adequately, and the narrative loses its shape as events unfold.

Like Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H" this has a banquet scene posed like The Last Supper, but the basic idea--toothless satire trimming a dull star party--reminded me more of "Ready to Wear."

The plot is just a delivery system for a series of gruesome, convoluted, and--depending on your tolerance for sadism--hilarious freak accidents.

Stark, mysterious, and often weirdly funny.

A major disappointment because here, unlike on "Real Time," Maher aims for laughs instead of insight--and aims low.

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.

The immersive quality of 3-D is particularly well suited to undersea documentaries, and this one, directed by Howard Hall ("Into the Deep"), offers a close-up look at such fantastic creatures as the fried egg jellyfish, the mantis shrimp, the sand tiger shark, and the thuggish wolf eel.

Quietly unsettling in its vision of modern-day isolation.

The disconnect between the human actors and the digital backgrounds is more pronounced here than in a futuristic adventure like "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow," and because classic Hollywood cinema is so rich with epic images of antiquity, this can't help but seem chintzy.

The story is often ridiculous, but director Antoine Fuqua provides plenty of fun distractions.

No one breaks into song, but this fact-based legal drama about a battered Anglo-Indian wife on trial for murdering her husband is infected with a fatal strain of heaving Bollywood melodrama.

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

A substantial performance from Clive Owen rescues what might otherwise have been a fairly gooey fatherhood drama.

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

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."

At its core this is just another piece of big-studio nothingness. The characters are so underwritten they barely qualify as types, and the movie is badly paced, bookended by high-ordnance action sequences but painfully static in the middle.

This is loads of fun in the early stretch, as the characters are being introduced, but the story never really goes anywhere.

Cruise and Diaz have worked together before (in Vanilla Sky), but this is their first summer-movie pairing, and their star qualities are so similar--dazzling looks, good comedic chops, complete emotional vacuity--that together, instead of romantic chemistry they generate a sort of giddy, blinding falseness.

On paper this may sound like soap opera, but Bier and screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen (Mifune) have a good feel for character, and they're aided by a fine cast.

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.

Lakeview Terrace isn't literally about the riots, but it's still one of the toughest racial dramas to come out of Hollywood since the fires died down--much tougher, for instance, than Paul Haggis’s hand-wringing Oscar winner "Crash."

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

With its stagy dance numbers, this reminded me more of Bob Fosse's confessional musical "All That Jazz" than "8 1/2," though it suffers from comparison to either, given that Marshall is several steps removed from Fellini's feverish self-investigation.

This smart and rocking video documentary by Tim Irwin follows the trio from its origins in suburban San Pedro, California, in 1979 to the death of singer-guitarist D. Boon in a 1985 car crash, which ended his deep and creatively fruitful friendship with bassist Mike Watt.

The movie's notion of humor is exemplified by Bradshaw's extended nude scene, which might be termed "roughing the viewer."

As a director Carnahan definitely has the goods: the opening foot chase, a sequence that's been done to death, is genuinely terrifying.

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.

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

Director Taylor Hackford ("Ray") seems to be aiming for a big "Boogie Nights" social canvas, though the movie's risible prize-fight sequence is more reminiscent of the later "Rocky" sequels.

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.

Commendable as pop history but fairly opaque as drama.

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.

The founding of Facebook becomes a tale for our times in this masterful social drama.

In the end I couldn't be sure whether its morality was complex or just confused. Like its young athletes, it earns a gentleman's C.

This 2003 drama suffers from a heavy narrative hand, as a series of ironic coincidences creates a tiny, hermetically sealed New York City, but the contrivances are overwhelmed by the intimacy and immediacy of the human encounters.

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

Corrupt warden, sadistic guards, new inmate debauched by her surroundings, prison-break hostage drama--could have come straight from an old George Raft vehicle.

Fascinating and troubling documentary.

The project reeks of commercial calculation, which is just tolerable until Walker, in search of a story arc, follows two chorus members with serious illnesses into the hospital.

It's nice to see a high-concept comedy with such a generous concept.

It's almost worth seeing, though, for the incredible action set piece at the center.

It's a powerful psychological conceit, but Samuell subverts it at every turn with his carnivalesque style and canned Gallic wistfulness.

This miserable comedy is enlivened occasionally by Jeff Daniels and Kristin Chenoweth as a cheerfully tacky couple who keep crossing paths with the dysfunctional clan.

Best known as a still photographer, Ellis has a powerful motif in the idea of stopping time, yet he can't seem to move his characters along.

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

The laughs and emotional moments are so weak that director Jonas Elmer has no choice but to tweak them with music cues and bland guitar-rock.

The sadism of "1,000 Corpses" is ameliorated here by the addition of an action plot and open spaces, and the comedy is more skillfully played, mingling agreeably with Zombie's ardor for southern trash culture (the final showdown plays out to the strains of "Freebird," for heaven's sake)

Silly but enjoyable drama.

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.

This is mostly a listless hodgepodge of half-improvised whatever, the seven lead characters so flatly conceived they're like the Keystone Kops (without the chops).

I found it warm, humane, pretty, and dull enough to anesthetize patients awaiting massively invasive surgery.

Effective advocacy film about the genocide in Darfur.

I missed the first half hour of this Zorro adventure, and it's a tribute to the idiot-proof screenplay that I had no trouble following the rest.

Jayasundara dispenses with conventional story pacing to alternate long, static scenes with moments of revelatory lust or violence; as a press release states, the movie is "composed of uncanny set pieces portraying sex, death, and waiting," though its aesthetic achievement may lie in making all three feel like the same thing.

Adapted from a Stephen King story, this trite but watchable chiller plays like a scaled-down version of "The Shining," with Cusack driven over the edge by hallucinations of his abusive father and dead daughter.

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

I'd recommend this, but only if you liked "The English Patient."

A triumph not of reporting but of synthesis.

Diary of the Dead features some of the most hilariously gross images since "Dawn of the Dead." In one online video the filmmakers find, a father playfully pulls off a birthday clown’s red rubber nose and the guy’s real nose comes off with it.

These ideas may well have cohered in Chuck Palahniuk's best-selling satirical novel, which I haven't read, but in this screen adaptation by writer-director Clark Gregg they seem more like an assortment of gimmicks.

This talking-heads documentary by Stefan Forbes doesn't waste much time delving into Atwater's misshapen character; instead it focuses on his South Carolina roots and his instinctive grasp of the southern strategy that's been the GOP's key to the White House for the past 40 years.

A novel twist in the second half succeeds in distinguishing this from the pack but also wrenches it away from the meager characters.

Some have suggested that the whole story, including the emergence of Mr. Brainwash, is an elaborate hoax engineered by Banksy to satirize the commodification of art. If so, it’s a brilliant one.

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

Machiavelli epigrams and 70s soul classics embellish this slice of thug life, which succumbs to the usual hypocrisy of condemning Barnes while grooving on his cars, clothes, and jewels.

There's something to be said for letting a comic book adaptation operate at the level of a comic book--i.e., with cheap laughs and ice-cold sadism.

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

Stiller plays a monster, and when Gerwig goes for him, declaring that she sees his tender side, the development seems like a fond indulgence on the part of writer-director Noah Baumbach.

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.

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.

Tim Burton finally fulfills the promise of "Beetlejuice" with this imaginative masterpiece.

The twee romance was too much for me, though the movie's first half follows in fascinating detail the innovations Warne introduced to popularize illustrated picture books for children.

The best thing I can say about this limp prequel to the Farrelly brothers' Dumb & Dumber is that it obliged me to check out the original, which I'd been studiously avoiding for years. If you haven't seen it, it's pretty funny, and mercifully light on the scatology and cheap sentiment of later Farrelly efforts.

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.

A hodgepodge of half-baked characters and story ideas, stoked by a frantic climax and a blue-chip playlist of 1966 rock classics.

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.

The comic juice tends to spill out in all directions.

A tedious movie about excitement.

Perelman never overcomes the disjuncture of having two familiar actresses play the same grown character, and despite the endless crosscutting, the two halves settle respectively into ghoulish foreboding and murky psychological drama.

What makes Outrage a bankable indie film is the promise of personal embarrassment--everyone loves a good outing. Except for the person at the center of it.

The result is an insufferable academic cocktail party of declamatory speeches coaxed to life in its middle stretch by the incredible Maria Bello, who wades in like a paramedic at a disaster scene.

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.

With its one-liners and welter of double-crosses, it should settle on the video shelf between "Intolerable Cruelty" and "Mr & Mrs. Smith."

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.

If you've seen any of these, you know that the hero is always killed for her trouble, a final stroke of mordant wit.

Concise and thoughtful.

Ferguson is admirably tenacious in assigning blame for the boneheaded mistakes that have doomed Iraqi reconstruction. Paul Bremer, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, is hung out to dry.

Grazer's writing team has filled up the film's 82 minutes with winking product placements, SNL-type goofs, PG gags premised on not quite cursing, a Smashmouth cover of the Beatles' "Getting Better," and a lame subplot about a scuzzy lothario (Stephen Baldwin).

In essence this is a celebrity revenge fantasy, something few of us can relate to, but director Paul Abascal has the sense to keep the homilies short and the pacing fast.

Tends toward the generic, and Jim Caviezel is hopelessly bland in the lead. Among the bright spots are Mary McCormack as the hero's wife and Bruce Dern as the wise old motorboat guru.

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.

A real air ball, this lethargic drama by Preston A. Whitmore II is so poorly scripted that most of the major plot developments occur offscreen.

There's a lot of self-conscious talk about the importance of timing, but the tony sense of entitlement tends to dampen any laughs. The movie functions best as a middle-class Euro-postcard along the lines of "Chocolat" or "Under the Tuscan Sun."

This big-budget adventure is based on a recent Michael Crichton thriller, though its premise is too stale to instill the sense of wonder critical to great sci-fi.

The resulting portrait shows a seriously troubled man whose brutality was bred into him on the punishing streets of Brooklyn and whose modest wisdom seems as hard-won as any title. Tyson's fight career may be over, but his battle with himself has many rounds to go.

Crisp supporting turns by John Turturro (as a hostage negotiator) and James Gandolfini (as the mayor) combine with plenty of vehicular mayhem to make this a superior diversion.

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.

The dialogue slackens after the first half hour, but the stars have some fine comic moments together, and the intimate precode encounters are pretty sexy.

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.

Cluzet's brooding performance propels the movie, and writer-director Guillaume Canet, best known here for his own acting work in "Joyeux Noel" and "Love Me If You Dare," skillfully orchestrates the cascading revelations.

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.

This quiet, elegiac road movie hinges on a few beautifully underplayed scenes between Daniel London and Will Oldham.

This takes place in the same sort of pathologically sports-obsessed hamlet as "Friday Night Lights," though in contrast to that movie's grim honesty there's enough heartland schmaltz here to embarrass John Mellencamp. Remarkably, the movie rights itself once the actual season begins, focusing on game strategy more than the usual heart-stopping pep talks.

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.

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

Having defused the fairy tale, first-time screenwriter Leigh Dunlap pads this out to 96 minutes with stale high school politics and the usual claptrap about believing in yourself.

Director Shawn Levy delivers his usual middle-of-the-road product.

Despite the fascinating topic, director Yan-ting Yuen offers relatively little history or criticism of the works themselves, squandering screen time on such gimmicks as mock voice-over and scenes of young people performing hard-rock and hip-hop versions of vintage songs. It's enough to make you pine for the good old days when irony was illegal.

The script updates Ian Fleming's first Bond novel to a post-9/11 world and scales back the silliness that always seems to creep into the series; director Martin Campbell (The Mask of Zorro) contributes some superior action set pieces but keeps the camp and gadgetry to a minimum.

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.

As a director Ball amplifies the flaws in his own writing; his supporting characters are too broadly pitched to take seriously, and he tends to smack you in the face with the point of every scene.

Fleet, gripping documentary.

Kids who are still subject to the slings and arrows of high school will find this a lot funnier than I did, though I did get a bang out of Kal Penn, Kevin Christy, and Kenan Thompson as Cannon's car-crazy pals.

This incredibly odd Japanese horror feature (1977) is like a Hello Kitty backpack stuffed with bloody human viscera.

The absence of any moral center makes this a bitter pill.

But like much of Herzog's work, it's essentially apolitical, focusing on a man at war with his environment -- and no one plunges into the foliage like he does.

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.

For a Disney movie, Holes is mercifully low in saccharine.

It's a hokey heart-warmer that works.

This historical drama is lovely to look at, with elegant Victorian fashions and verdant tropical scenery, but its story plays like a Hawaiian heritage lesson filtered through the melodramatic artifice of an old Hollywood costume drama.

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.

This remake takes an alternate tack from the original feature, expanding the story of "The Sitter" to a full 83 minutes, but the result is dull and painfully generic.

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.

Suzuki and Kaneshiro keep the first hour afloat with their easy comic interplay, but Yamazaki badly needs editing: the opening escape sequence is needlessly repeated later, and a slow drip of false endings drags this out to a tiring 118 minutes.

Screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin won an Oscar for "Ghost" (1990), a pleasant, moderately thoughtful weepie that this movie closely resembles.

In a novel twist, the movie's dumbest element--joke commercials for racist consumer products--turns out to be the most provocative when end titles reveal the products were all real.

Often seems like a Mike Leigh movie viewed in a fun-house mirror.

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.

Superior 2002 farce by Walsh, Roberts, and Katie Roberts, all veterans of Chicago's ImprovOlympic who went on to form the Upright Citizens Brigade.

Masterful low-budget drama.

The movie is perfectly appropriate for girls, and its opening scenes play like a more intelligent and historically grounded version of their G-rated princess dramas.

Outlandish but gripping paranoid thriller.

This is hysterically funny in parts, but most of the laughs are raunchy or scatological--always a sure bet when puppets are involved.

There aren't any big laughs, but there's a steady supply of small ones, and with his overgrown-kid persona Ferrell seems more comfortable in a family comedy than, say, Eddie Murphy.

Drew Barrymore is that rare movie starlet who can handle the comedy end of romantic comedy, but she coasts through her underwritten role as a goofy plant sitter recruited by Grant to write his lyrics.

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.

Morris argues that the photos also functioned as a cover-up: prosecution of the case centered on them, leaving free and clear many of those higher up the chain of command.

The dopey premise only takes to a gross extreme the "Full Monty" formula that the Brits have been milking for more than a decade.

The movie's only unmitigated pleasure is a too-brief fight scene between Connor and a naked combatant made up to look precisely like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Lately, most of Dustin Hoffman's roles have been grinning crackpots or talking animals, so accepting the 71-year-old actor as a romantic lead who could fetch the likes of Emma Thompson requires some suspension of disbelief.