Justin Chang

A strong cast struggles valiantly to rise above Lifetime material in In the Land of Women, an appealingly scruffy if overly programmatic drama.

But gripping as the film often is, its unrelenting doom and gloom offers fewer lasting rewards.

Meirelles' slickly crafted drama rarely achieves the visceral force, tragic scope and human resonance of Saramago's prose.

A lavishly overstuffed gift basket of a movie.

This uneven effort saddles its likable leads, Drew Barrymore and Justin Long, with the kind of verbally exaggerated sexual humor that not only comes off as embarrassingly strained and calculated, but also compromises what the picture genuinely wants to be.

The rare Hollywood remake that, by daring to reinterpret its source material within a fresh political context, actually has a reason to exist.

Has its share of deadpan amusements, but its combo of mordant whimsy and tearjerker moments winds up curdling in an unappetizing fashion.

Its modesty is what makes its very real virtues -- a tart, literate script, an adroit balance of humor and pathos, a memorable onscreen collaboration between star-scribe Scott Caan and his father James -- so cumulatively impressive.

Emotionally harrowing and gentle by turns, this well-acted winter's tale is a more narrative-driven experience than Green's more lyrical Sundance entries, "George Washington" and "All the Real Girls."

The picture's attempts at comic portraiture feel sketchy at best, more or less assigning each character a single, belabored trait.

An innocuous abduction of viewers' time, if nothing else, King's Ransom is an appealingly cast but terminally bland farce.

Jason Matzner's woozily romantic, gorgeously lensed directorial debut about a trailer park love triangle seems to unspool in a dream of its own, and despite some sketchy story elements, much of it is pretty intoxicating -- that is, until the unambiguous life lessons bring pic down to earth with an earnest splat.

Wrapping the political hot potato of illegal immigration in the sentimental balm of a mother-son reunion drama, this stirring tale will be embraced most enthusiastically by Mexican audiences on both sides of the border.

A movie of no small generosity: It offers audiences the pleasures of a screenplay whose every acerbic line is firmly rooted in character, and it hands Michael Douglas one of his best roles in years.

Revisiting the book of Exodus in a feverish Southern-gothic context, this lurid, often ludicrously entertaining slab of Biblesploitation builds an earnest case for spirituality in a skeptical age.

Amusingly predicated on the romantic possibilities of phone sex, Easier With Practice pushes past its titillating premise to become a quietly provocative love story about emotionally stunted manhood and the risks some guys will take to connect.

This vapid street-dance soap opera boasts the series' flashiest moves and klutziest script yet, like a brilliant acrobat with a speech impediment; it's also one of the few 3D releases since "Avatar" to make compelling use of the format.

Keener, so deliciously nasty in Holofcener's "Lovely and Amazing," is no less engaging here in what is, surprisingly, the film's least bitchy role.

Most compelling in its attempts to re-create the experience of paralysis onscreen, gorgeously lensed pic morphs into a dreamlike collage of memories and fantasies, distancing the viewer somewhat from Bauby's consciousness even as it seeks to take one deeper.

Before it bogs down in one too many moments of cathartic reckoning, The Vicious Kind is an unpredictable, off-kilter and scabrously funny piece of work.

Frenetic actioner about refugees from a genetic cloning plant starts off intriguingly, burns up its ideas in the first hour and pads out the rest with joltingly repetitive action sequences.

The horrific 1937-38 massacre of more than 200,000 Chinese during the early days of the Japanese occupation gets a polished presentation in Nanking.

The behind-the-camera talent Ben Affleck displayed so bracingly in "Gone Baby Gone" is confirmed, if not significantly advanced, in The Town. Again proving a fine director of actors (this time with himself in a starring role), Affleck delivers another potent, serious-minded slice of pulp set on Boston's meanest streets, where loyalty among thieves runs thicker than blood.

This ambitious think-piece ultimately smothers its good intentions in didactic revelations, earnest pleading and incessant violin music. Engrossing nonetheless, the story of a high schooler troubled by his parents' legacy reps one of the Canadian writer-director's most accessible efforts.

This moving but far from revelatory portrait of a beloved family figure registers as too slight and personal for significant theatrical play.

Not a thriller so much as an extremely violent swimsuit calendar, the lushly lensed but dramatically waterlogged Into the Blue is too infatuated with its scantily clad stars to make sense of all the drug dealers, boat looters and bloodthirsty sharks trying to hunt them down.

Conventional but rousingly effective picture.

Funky disco-era throwback never fully jells with a surprisingly intense central tale of father-son estrangement, strongly acted by Chi McBride and 18-year-old rapper-thesp Bow Wow.

All you need is love -- for the Beatles, for psychedelic visuals, for ideas about being young in the ‘60s -- to fully enjoy Across the Universe.

This graphically well-rendered kidpic is less crass and mouthy than many recent feature-length toons, but also more sluggish and ungainly as it tries to approximate DiCamillo's singularly delicate tone.

Andrew Lancaster's helming bow looks smart but lacks confidence in its melodrama and, professional editing aside, resembles a meandering rough cut.

Only a curmudgeon could entirely resist the laid-back charms of Red, an amusing, light-footed caper about a team of aging CIA veterans rudely forced out of retirement.

A dispiritingly lazy high school comedy.

Has Gordon Gekko gone soft? The answer is, sort of -- a development that takes some of the bite out of Oliver Stone's shrewdly opportunistic, glibly entertaining sequel, which offers another surface-skimming peek inside the power corridors of global finance.

A witty, warmly crafted chestnut.

Unfolding largely within the confines of a single apartment complex, the well-structured scenario is arresting but ill-served by an overly fussy visual treatment from helmer Jeff Renfroe, while Peter Krause's increasingly psychotic performance as an amateur snoop frequently threatens to cross the line between forceful and off-putting.

A strong cast, beautiful production values and generally pleasant execution can't disguise the fact both laughs and surprises are on the thin side here, despite the abundant care and affection lavished on the central characters by first-time writer-director David Munro.

More zippy, diverting fun from Robert Rodriguez's family filmmaking factory.

Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce remains a rip-roaring entertainment.

Septuagenarian director Robert Benton brings his characteristically fine touch with actors and appreciation for the female form to this tastefully erotic ensembler, but compassion finally outstrips insight in a drama as soft-headed as it is soft-hearted.

What rankles most about Amelia is the timidity and lack of imagination with which Nair approaches one of America's most exceptional and intriguing celebrity life stories.

The film doesn't pack the same cumulative wallop as the brothers' earlier work, but its low-key artistry, immaculate construction and fine performance by relative newcomer Arta Dobroshi should rouse the usual fest acclaim and arthouse interest.

Keaton embodies the formidable Stone matriarch with an offhand sense of humor that cuts like a knife.

Searing portrait of an out-of-control youth who winds up in a decidedly shady rehab center has more than its share of teen-angst cliches but still makes a surprisingly trenchant tearjerker, thanks to strong acting from all quarters and an especially blistering perf from Lapica.

The performances remain delectable, the multiple murders startlingly bloody -- even the ones that are presented purely hypothetically. [02 Nov 2018, p.E4]

The result, though it delivers only in fits and starts, is still sharper and more inventive than most comicbook-adapted fare, and eventually gets the job done as far as action buffs are concerned.

The film's noisy, slam-bang approach and lack of imagination in all nonvisual departments will keep it from rounding up a fresh generation of thrill-seekers.

If Inception is a metaphysical puzzle, it's also a metaphorical one: It's hard not to draw connections between Cobb's dream-weaving and Nolan's filmmaking -- an activity devoted to constructing a simulacrum of reality, intended to seduce us, mess with our heads and leave a lasting impression. Mission accomplished.

With its belabored gags, misfired pop-culture references and garish visuals crammed together like so many disjointed body parts, this manic kidpic cranks up the annoy-o-meter early on and rarely lets up.

A disappointingly anemic tale of forbidden love that should satiate the pre-converted but will bewilder and underwhelm viewers who haven't devoured Stephenie Meyer's bestselling juvie chick-lit franchise.

Behind-the-curtains comedy reps an amusing showcase for John Malkovich's diva-like theatrics in the title role.

A half-hearted exercise in political paranoia, The Sentinel unravels its wrong-man scenario with business-like efficiency and an impressively jittery visual scheme, but falls far short of providing visceral or emotional thrills.

Muddled and most unmagical offering.

A bold, often clumsy, but always intriguing piece of work.

This final production from the team of James Ivory and the late Ismail Merchant is itself adrift in more ways than one, with a literate but meandering script by "The Remains of the Day" novelist Kazuo Ishiguro that withholds emotional payoffs to an almost perverse degree.

This earnest weepie plays like "The Karate Kid" with a pro-literacy agenda, pushing all the right emotional buttons yet hitting quite a few wrong ones in the process.

The movie is ultimately undone by its own reverence; there's simply no room for these characters and stories to breathe of their own accord, and even the most fastidiously replicated scenes can feel glib and truncated.

At a time when tortured superheroes like Spider-Man, Superman and Batman would benefit from some serious psychotherapy, it's almost refreshing to see a comicbook caper as blithe, weightless and cheerfully dumb as Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.

Pulse-pounding third act expertly pushes the audience’s buttons, to excruciatingly ironic and ultimately devastating effect. Pic does turn overwrought in the final stretch and would have been wise to end on an earlier note, though action fans won’t mind.

Bravura narrative filmmaking on a hugely ambitious scale, Carlos is a spectacular achievement.

To properly appreciate Must Love Dogs, one must first love John Cusack. Thesp's maverick turn steals the show in this otherwise middling romantic comedy, which retools standard meet-cute elements for the Web generation in pleasant but uninspired fashion.

The riveting interplay between Dench and Cate Blanchett draws blood with every scene, thanks to a precision-honed script and Eyre's equally incisive direction.

A mesmerizing portrait of the director as acclaimed artist and tortured human being.

This slavishly faithful update... fails to tap into anything culturally specific or uniquely funny in its Pasadena setting or its theoretically looser, livelier black cast. And because the characters are so flat, we couldn't care less about the blows to their sense of propriety.

Schlocky yet resourceful.

Despite abundant talent on both sides of the camera and a bevy of eye-catching supernatural beasties, this f/x-heavy story of a literature-loving father and daughter battling dark forces unleashed from the pages of a rare tome doesn't conjure much in the way of bigscreen magic.

A high-energy, low-impact caper-comedy that labors to bring a measure of wit, romance and glamour to an overworked spy-thriller template.

Anchored by a terrific performance from Nick Nolte as a grizzled umpire who gets an unexpected second chance at fatherhood, this easygoing comedy-drama plays out slowly but assuredly, infusing a conventional story about a blossoming relationship with welcome reserves of honesty and humor.

While it never tops the explosive hilarity of its first 20 minutes, The Invention of Lying is a smartly written, nicely layered comedy that, like last year's underappreciated "Ghost Town," casts Ricky Gervais as a mild-mannered schlub who manages, in spite of himself, to make the world a better place.

This unusually voluble comedy is as eloquent about love, self-realization and adolescent angst as its protagonist is endearingly tongue-tied.

Vincenzo Natali's outlandish sci-fier sustains a grotesque and funny fascination throughout its slightly protracted runtime.

There's no denying that viewers not prepared for the relentless stream of nasty personalities, profane invective and bone-crunching violence are in for a very long sit.

In Scum, one of only three features he directed for the big screen, Clarke finds a bleak beauty in an institution devoted to controlling, yet also propagating, all manner of human ugliness.

An in-your-face double helping of fat jokes, crude slapstick, wacky Southern-black stereotypes and occasionally inspired improv.

Presents the viewer with reams of depressing data, loads of hand-wringing about the woeful state of humanity and, finally, some altogether fascinating ideas about how to go about solving the climate crisis.

Punsters, linguists and crossword puzzle fanatics everywhere couldn't ask for a more bracing tribute than helmer Patrick Creadon's buoyant and exhilaratingly brainy documentary Wordplay.

A mostly dull-blade exercise that offers little to think or scream about.

Though it strikes some predictable coming-of-age notes, this moving, well-wrought adventure should appeal to fans of "E.T." and Carroll Ballard.

Won't do anything for adult auds, but this second bigscreen adventure from the popular VeggieTales franchise should easily win over tots with its reliable menu of silly songs, easily digestible morals and wholesome (if not always fresh) produce-based characters.

Helmer Donald Petrie seems at times to be making the modern-day equivalent of a Doris Day comedy, setting the pic in a lacquered fantasy New York, piling on cutesy-coy dialogue and mining a fluffy premise for all manner of far-fetched cleverness.

Contrived excess is rarely as entertaining as it is in the ironically titled Just Another Love Story, a furiously overheated romantic thriller from Danish writer-helmer Ole Bornedal.

Writer-director Ryan Murphy strives mightily to capture the bracing hilarity, pathos and surreal incident of Burroughs' bestselling memoir, but this rudderless adaptation never gets a firm grip on the author's deadpan tone or episodic narrative style.

Maurice, based on a posthumously published novel by E.M. Forster, is a well-crafted pic on the theme of homosexuality.

Much nastier and less genteel than his best-known Stephen King adaptations ("The Shawshank Redemption," "The Green Mile"), Frank Darabont's screw-loose doomsday thriller works better as a gross-out B-movie than as a psychological portrait of mankind under siege, marred by one-note characterizations and a tone that veers wildly between snarky and hysterical.

Though it renders a convincing portrait of fractured family life and boasts its share of powerfully acted moments, this schematic tale of two siblings, ripped apart by jealousy, misunderstanding and unshakable trauma, plays like a more polished but less effective twin to the 2005 Danish original.

A little less chatter and a little more splatter might have improved Godspeed, an initially intriguing but finally overwrought tale of murder, retribution and quasi-religious fanaticism set in the land of the midnight sun.

This is polished yet authentically moving.

A softer, flabbier and considerably higher-budgeted follow-up to Kevin Smith's 1994 indie sensation that nevertheless packs enough riotous exchanges and pungent sexual obscenities to make its 97 minutes pass by with ease.

Director Ryan Murphy's superficial take on Elizabeth Gilbert's phenomenally successful memoir is an exotic junk-food buffet that offers few lasting pleasures or surprises, let alone epiphanies.

The magic here feels machine-made and depressingly state-of-the-art.

Predictable developments are more or less redeemed by spirited execution and the pleasures of an able, good-looking cast.

If you can stomach the violence -- and despite the R rating, that's a big if -- it's hard to deny that Zombie has made exactly the movie he set out to make, guaranteed to satiate his considerable fan base and sicken just about everyone else.

A nearly three-hour talkfest that plays out in something close to real time may sound daunting on paper, but if you can make it past the opening shot, you will find yourself gripped for the duration.

Videogamers who've been itching for "Grand Theft Auto: The Movie" can tide themselves over in the meantime with Crank, a down-and-dirty actioner that follows a rugged antihero trying to outrun death by keeping his adrenaline flowing.

Little Red Riding Hood gets a cheeky CGI makeover in Hoodwinked!, a fast-paced, fitfully clever 3-D-animated feature that will entertain tykes.

A 23-minute movie dragged out, via some narrative gimmickry, to a punishing hour and a half.

Slickly charming, genteelly erotic and directed with supreme polish, Cashback is a conventional romantic comedy that plays unconventional games with time and memory.

Zac Efron's squeaky-clean tweener-bait profile is unlikely to be threatened by 17 Again, an energetic but earthbound comic fantasy that borrows a few moves, if little inspiration, from "Big" and "It's a Wonderful Life."

An altogether bumbling excuse for an action-comedy.

Uninspired character animation and obnoxious banter aside, The Wild is ultimately done in by the persistent stench of been-there-seen-that.

This rambunctious, "Jumanji"-style extravaganza is a gallery of special effects in search of a story; rarely has so much production value yielded so little in terms of audience engagement.

Compacts nearly three years' worth of globe-trotting interviews into an often visually vibrant but rhetorically muddled package. So intent on giving (almost) every perspective a fair shake that it winds up saying little of consequence.

Fitfully amusing and nearly saved by its distinguished cast.

A strikingly original and provocative first feature from scribe-helmer Carlos Brooks.

It’s the sort of verbally dexterous farce you’d have to be a total Crabapple Annie not to enjoy.

In the story's one major stroke of invention, the usual premonitions of death have been replaced with a set of photos.

Meandering at the same draggy pace as its titular gay zombie, eroto-horror-satire mixes movie-within-a-movie machinations with graphic sex scenes that will titillate anyone who's ever wanted to see someone shagging an open wound.

This middling melange of Child biopic and contempo dramedy feels overstuffed and predigested as it depicts two ladies who found fame and fulfillment in their respective eras by cooking and writing about it.

RV works up an ingratiating sweetness that partially compensates for its blunt predictability and meager laughs.

It's really not all that bad. Ultra-derivative bigscreen transplant of one of the most successful (and controversial) games ever made plays like a mutant cross between a biotech thriller and a zombie movie, with all the alien autopsies, blood-gushing protuberances and meaningless scientific jargon that come with the territory.

May not make a lick of sense, but it does make for fairly irresistible nonsense.

Lovely to look at but a headache to listen to.

A juiceless quasi-remake of George Romero's 1968 classic that, cardboard glasses aside, brings absolutely nothing new to the party.

This eloquent study of loneliness and postmodern drift likely will be received with more admiration than rapture by the helmer's followers. But Juliette Binoche's turn as a harried single mom and pic's enlivening portrait of domestic rupture make this a highly accessible Hou.

Stylishly made, armed to the teeth and ludicrous in the extreme.

Inspirational but uninspired sports movie.

The movie...remains perhaps the wisest of family dramas, an experience as wrenching as it is restorative.

Never fully succeeds in burrowing under its protagonist's skin, despite conspicuous effort.

This broad ethnic farce serves up a full-on culture collision, but -- thanks to a handful of diverting performers -- stops just short of becoming a train wreck.

There are probably some moviegoers who can laugh at the sight of a groin-punching, breast-grabbing baby, possibly even find it cute. Everyone else should steer clear of Little Man, which welds Marlon Wayans' head to a diminutive body double, offering up the creepiest bigscreen dwarf since the last David Lynch movie.

Highly informative documentary reps a heady mix of charts, graphs and talking heads... superb packaging and timely subject matter.

In the end M.A.S.H. succeeds, in spite of its glaring faults, because Gould, Sutherland, Skerritt, Jo Ann Pflug as the delicious Lt. Dish, and Roger Bowen, as the goof-off commanding officer who is bright enough to recognize his junior officers' medical competence and stay out of their way, are all believable and bitingly funny in their casual disdain for the Army.

Cruising somewhere between therapy drama and paranoid thriller, this middlebrow tone poem aims for ambiguity but often veers into soporific, suspending answers (and often, viewer interest) en route to an ending that explains all.

This educational eye-popper should prove an excellent draw for science lovers of all ages.

Josh Stolberg launches a scalding attack on the stodgy conservatism of the American public school system, only to end up stacking the deck in egregiously smirky and simple-minded ways.

Ratatouille is delicious. In this satisfying, souffle-light tale of a plucky French rodent with a passion for cooking, the master chefs at Pixar have blended all the right ingredients -- abundant verbal and visual wit, genius slapstick timing, a soupcon of Gallic sophistication -- to produce a warm and irresistible concoction that's sure to appeal to everyone's inner Julia Child.

A raucous and rigorous inquiry into the subject of African-American hair -- the stigmas, the secrets, the shocking price of maintenance -- that gets at universal but rarely discussed truths about black femininity.

Adam Sandler's recent low-key phase continues with this cleverly conceived but conspicuously unfunny comedy.

There's plenty of blood -- both literal and figurative -- coursing through the veins of Pan's Labyrinth, a richly imagined and exquisitely violent fantasy from writer-director Guillermo del Toro.

Joel David Moore leads a cast full of token minorities and bickering bimbos, whom writer-helmer Adam Green dispatches with knowing glee and an obvious love for genre conventions that almost overcomes the derivative scripting.

This high school horror romp tackles its bad-girl-gone-really-bad premise with eye-rolling obviousness and, fatally, a near-total absence of real scares.

Continues Fincher's fascinating transition from genre filmmaker extraordinaire to indelible chronicler of our times.

True torture-porn aficionados will be disappointed, as editor Tariq Anwar cuts away right before blade meets flesh -- a move that feels a tad, well, gutless under the circumstances. But elsewhere, "Citizen" proves startlingly graphic, even by R-rated standards.

This eccentric and deliriously inventive fantasy finds stop-motion auteur Henry Selick scaling new heights of ghoulish whimsy, buoyed by a haunting score that works its own macabre magic.

The movie remains a devastating portrait of grief, a master class in disjunctive editing and a haunting disquisition on the use of the color red.

Though compelling throughout, District 9 never becomes outright terrifying, largely because Blomkamp is less interested in exploiting his aliens for cheap scares than in holding up a mirror to our own bloodthirsty, xenophobic species.

A middling third-wheel comedy elevated a couple of notches by the ineffably weird charms of Owen Wilson.

Enthralling...An ambitious, full-bodied crime epic of gratifying scope and moral complexity, this is seriously brainy pop entertainment that satisfies every expectation raised by its hit predecessor and then some.

Jeff Daniels' gleeful misanthropy and Lauren Graham's emotional openness are poorly served by the pic's transparently phony story and therapeutic uplift

This overplayed, underachieving laffer feels thoroughly manufactured to Disney specifications.

Even if the story of a widower (the great Chishû Ryû) and his daughter weren’t such a naturally compelling variation on Ozu’s themes of family, devotion and sacrifice, the exquisite balance of hues and textures in every shot would render it essential viewing.

Leaving no heartstrings untugged and no doggie-fart jokes uncracked, scruffy pic reps a very mixed breed of obvious humor, gently moving father-son drama and sub-"Backdraft" trial by fire.

Completely disposable yet rousing on its own crude, testosterone-saturated terms.

This fur-fetched tale is bearable family viewing.

Results are painfully amusing, frequently random and occasionally laugh-out-loud hilarious.

Surfing the crowd in Altman-lite style, pic skims the surface entertainingly but goes limp in its stabs at seriousness, especially in the final scenes, which all but drown in emotional confrontations and hasty happy endings.

Though its absurdist inventions occasionally border on twee, this affectionate slow-blooming romance mines an understated vein of comic melancholy that the actors' wistful performances perfectly capture.

Waist Deep packs considerable energy and style into its tale of an ex-con forced back into a life of crime to rescue his kidnapped son. Yet the kinetic direction and occasional sly humor can't disguise the tale's banal brutality or pump much excitement into its routinized pileup of shoot-outs and car chases.

Squirmingly fun suspenser that brings Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" into the era of vidcams and cell phones, serving up hearty, youth-skewing portions of PG-13 violence and bikini-bait along the way.

An uneven but enjoyable trio of films that take affectionate (and sometimes literal) aim at the Japanese capital.

Raw but utterly enveloping.

As a fierce superspy and mistress of many disguises, Jolie represents the one indisputably kickass element in this brisk, professionally assembled but finally shrug-inducing thriller.

What starts out as a mildly diverting thriller blows itself to smithereens in the final reel.

Dickler's acting debut is memorably repellent, even if the movie he's in -- a fitfully engaging story about two estranged brothers on a road trip -- often feels forced and unconvincing, even on its modest, intimately scaled terms

Picture's comic smarts and affecting daddy-daughter drama provide a sturdy platform for its heartfelt advocacy of informed voting and responsible citizenship.

An exquisitely tender tale of two young Euro immigrants trying to find themselves (but not each other) in contempo London, Unmade Beds has a lively, romantic spirit that recalls the playfulness and spontaneity of the French New Wave.

In 82 minutes, Murray wrangles enough data to make his point that biology can't keep up with sophisticated fishing technologies and worldwide demand; attacks high-end restaurants such as Nobu for putting endangered species on the menu; praises Alaska as a paragon of responsible fishing.