Keith Phipps

Being There finds humor in the way Sellers becomes a blank screen on which people project their expectations. But it also finds value in his simplicity, which might seem like a lot of New Age hokum if not for Sellers' disarmingly quiet performance.

You can buy the special effects, but if that's all you have to offer, it won't amount to much.

Snyder's Watchmen keeps moving so assuredly, it's nearly impossible not to get swept along.

Thirst never picks up the momentum of Park’s best-known work. But its turgid pace creates a queasy fascination all its own, drawing viewers into an ever-darkening locus of sin and obsession where even the wish for redemption comes at a terrible cost.

It's Malick's particular genius to make viewers feel like they're seeing the world, with all its beauty and danger, for the first time. [28 Nov. 2007]

A couple of halfway decent action scenes do little to distract from the story’s mounting ludicrousness—two words: adamantium bullets—or a conclusion that’s only a little more satisfying than a projector breakdown. Maybe.

This must all make sense to Yanes, somehow, but the film plays like a private joke with no punchline.

While the special effects are impressive, countless films have already proven that if you sink enough money into a project, you can at least make it look good. Unfortunately, good looks are all Godzilla has going for it.

Even the best performers can only do so much to elevate mediocre material. In the long run, good or bad, the material always wins.

Maddeningly dull. It works on the cerebrum while the rest of the body drifts off to sleep, and the dullness only intensifies as the film goes on.

Filled with video-game in-jokes, Spy Kids 3 comes roaring to life in action scenes based on different gaming genres, each of which takes full advantage of the 3-D effects.

It's a bit more than the film can handle without leaving loose ends dangling, and though it's never preachy, Sayles' political message-sending sometimes comes across too clearly for its own good. He makes valid points, though, particularly when he lets his storytelling do the work for him.

Mostly content to observe with wary admiration, the film doesn't offer any answers, and life robs the story of any sort of resolution, leaving only footage of one remarkable example of charity in action.

Attempts at high spirits and the presence of Matthew Lillard all suggest that this is supposed to be a comedy.

Julie Bertucelli spends part of the film letting her characters worry whether they've made the right choice, but mostly contents herself with capturing a place where hard choices have become unavoidable. Though her decision to pace the film to Gorintin's old-lady rhythms sometimes kills the dramatic momentum, in the end it's time well spent.

It’s such an entertaining film that it’s almost possible to forget its didactic agenda, which is certainly part of the point.

Gaghan brings in many more players, but edits the film into the lean, propulsive shape of a thriller. That ends up being something of a problem; some sub-plots never fully untangle and characters get lost as Gaghan rushes toward a conclusion that, taken on its own, is the stuff of a slightly hysterical leftie pamphlet.

A filmed Sunday-school lesson that favors a dry, by-the-Book approach over even a suggestion of dramatic interpretation. It's more Christmas pageant than movie.

Thoroughly realized characters and relationships and Solondz's masterful ability to switch the tone from comic to tragic within the same scene help make Happiness a better film than it might have been otherwise. Much better, in fact.

Purists will balk at a pointless--and boring--revamp of a major villain, but that's the least of the film's worries. Only a few isolated shots of the group striding together as a team make Surfer feel like a Fantastic Four movie.

Though "extremely mediocre" may seem like an oxymoron, no phrase better defines Picture Perfect. Aside from wearing, with visual discomfort, a series of absurdly revealing dresses, Aniston does little to distance herself from her "Friends" persona with this slightly less likable character.

A few stray livers and severed heads aside, this is a monster too polite for its own good.

The action, while busy, never produces much excitement, particularly since Thanit never gives the audience any reason to care about the characters, beyond their underdog status.

Hush! takes an excessive, saga-like running time to reach its conclusion, but Hashiguchi frequently makes the trudge worthwhile, particularly when he finds the energy to match his three leads' charming performances.

To concentrate on the minor faults of a fable as beautiful and unusual as Pleasantville would be missing the point.

Unfortunately, Brother Bear doesn't offer much to marvel at beyond its animation.

The film's attempts at meaning do it in. The longer it goes on and the darker it grows, the further it drifts from any kind of human experience, outside of its protagonists' particular flavor of madness.

The Hidden Fortress is, above all, a roaring piece of entertainment, a Western-like samurai adventure set against the chaos of 16th-century Japan.

It's a hard-won comfort, found here over a bleak stretch of days, but All Or Nothing makes it look like the best life has to offer.

Mann takes all the instincts he learned as a Miami Vice producer and trims them of their excesses, and the result is an unsettling thriller whose detached style perfectly complements its psychological intensity.

Sadly, Taking Lives, adapted from a novel by Michael Pye, proves to be one long wallow in elements that have long since had their effectiveness dulled flat.

Vaughn opts for comic-book bigness—big fights, big laugh lines, big explosions—but without a Spider-Man or Batman at the front of the action, Kick-Ass’s heroes and villains look smaller-than-life in a larger-than-life world.

For all its nonsensical qualities, it also contains some of Argento's most hallucinatory images and unforgettable setpieces, as always reason enough to watch even when the usual reasons are nowhere to be found.

No stranger to sneaking left-wing politics into his genre films, Corman emphasizes the struggle between the callous haves and the suffering have-nots, while Price’s performance teases out the story’s seediest elements.

The film is at its best when it isn't afraid to be earnest.

Ultimately, it's an absence of personality that does the film in. The creatures remain beautifully designed and Narnia still looks like a colorful, inviting place, but it feels as lifeless as the fantastical anyworlds found on glittery unicorn posters.

Haynes makes it possible to forget all the layers at work and simply be swept up in the story's emotions. As in Sirk's films, these characters live and breathe within the film's exaggerated reality, thanks to rich performances by Haysbert, Quaid, and especially Moore.

A joyless trudge, particularly when compared to Fellini’s vibrant original?

Dirty Love offers a series of desperate would-be comic moments.

Even though its rough edges (the wildly mismatched acting, the scenes that never take shape) look rougher today than they must have at the time, watching Shadows still feels like witnessing a mold breaking.

The best parts come in the rare moments when the film decides to break from formula, as when old Zucker-team warhorse Leslie Nielsen returns as the U.S. President.

Co-directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg—the latter then a top-rank cinematographer making his directorial debut—it begins as a nasty slice of British underworld life, and ends as a psychedelic excursion into insanity.

Played with black humor that never gets in the way of the horror, Natali’s film cleverly exploits Dren’s uncanny semi-humanity.

Though the episodic, low-key action bears a resemblance to Kurosawa's Madadayo -- his little-seen, underrated final film -- neither the characters nor the plot lend it even a hint of dynamism.

Maher's too smart to make a movie this dumb.

Encounter remains the definition of timeless, a beautifully shot, heartbreakingly acted, minutely detailed illustration of thoroughly recognizable human frailty.

Much of what makes Freaks so unsettling comes from its refusal to treat its stars as, well, freaks.

Zombie fills The Devil's Rejects with thrilling setpieces, pays homage to his inspirations without outright ripping them off (most of the time), brings back some cult-movie icons (hello, Mary Woronov and E.G. Daily), and works in some profanely clever dialogue.

Huston’s tone sometimes feels as conflicted as his protagonist’s, and the overbearing Alex North score doesn’t help. But the decision, possibly helped by the film’s tiny budget, to shoot the novel as a contemporary piece with no period trappings and a minimum of the attendant Southern-gothic clichés pays off beautifully.

Apart from a funny turn by "Arrested Development's" Will Arnett as Williams' evil boss, nobody appears to be having a good time. And the feeling is infectious.

Though there's a formula at the film's core, Whale Rider still has the good taste to make that formula go down easy.

Its a stupid thrill for a while, but the high wears off, and the anything-goes approach gets headache-inducing.

That nauseous mixture of laughs and shocks, and the fact that real passion drives Kastle's characters even when they plot against each other, is what makes The Honeymoon Killers such an enduring one-off.

The plot's profound implausibility wouldn't matter if the ideas and emotions behind it had any power.

Tries for that series' breezy matinee atmosphere but the results turn out far too forced.

Mirren begins the film having her portrait painted, looking every inch the monarch and proud to play the part. By the end, she's let the pressure of one week, and maybe a lifetime, show in her eyes.

Perhaps Lee took a look at the script -- saw all the jokes about diarrhea, pubic lice, drunk old ladies, and drugged gravy, and thought, "Why bother?" Looking at the final results, it's hard to feel any other way.

Once it reaches the meat of the story, it seems to lose its confidence.

It looks good. It seems to work. It occasionally coheres into a priceless moment. But in the end, the pieces don't all fit together as they should.

The film is much more intriguing in its dread-inducing opening half, when Moll's assured direction keeps suggesting that something horrible will be happening soon, then, when it does, that something even more horrifying may follow.

However much the film may mirror the truth, dramatically it feels like a cheat. It omits the human spark that would make it work as a film, rather than a collection of dramatized issues.

The story is well-told, but so familiar that it renders the surrounding film a bright, shiny, dispensible bauble, an amusing diversion but not much more.

Given nothing to do, Carrie-Anne Moss looks on from the sidelines as the film halfheartedly toys with the tired old notion that only a thin line separates the dogged investigator and the compulsive killer. She looks bored, and she should.

Lord Of War charges bravely and relentlessly into volatile territory, and it's hard to leave unscarred by the experience.

The pleasure here, as before, comes from watching skilled professionals team up for a job well done.

The Beyond's first half-hour or so is extremely entertaining, alternating between genuinely frightening, gory shocks and hilariously awkward, atonal acting. After a while, however, it becomes as dull as its repetitive Italian prog-rock soundtrack, neither good nor bad enough to hold your attention for long.

It's a heartbreaking tale, a sliver of a tragic history still unfolding, but one that Braun largely leaves others to document.

Fans of the genre might appreciate the decidedly R-rated violence and nudity, but that's really all the film has to offer.

The film's generous spirit, disarming mixture of beauty and brutality, and gentle, insistent sweep make it easy to surrender to it anyway.

An engaging thriller done in the Cronenberg style is still worth anyone's time. And this one boasts memorable turns from Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl, and Vincent Cassel.

Until Timeline reaches its flaming-trebuchet-siege finale -- which should impress anyone who's never seen "The Two Towers" -- it has the stirring production values of an episode of the Tia Carrere action series "Relic Hunter," but with only a fraction of the acting talent and intellectual heft.

Eastwood didn’t overreach with Play Misty For Me. It’s a tense thriller that’s inside his comfort zone in more ways than one. But he does overdeliver in the best way. Co-star Jessica Walter plays an obsessed fan, and Eastwood wrings every ounce of tension from a scenario in which a casual affair turns into a life-threatening mistake, and the film executes a potentially trashy scenario with respect for its audience.

It's hard to shake the sense that there's less here than meets the eye, but what meets the eye burns with a rare intensity.

Smart in a rare way that matters greatly to good contemporary comedy: Like last year's "Flirting With Disaster," its script and direction underplay absurd situations, letting its characters amuse without showing the strains of forced wackiness.

Working from a script by Edmund North (Patton), taken from a story by Harry Bates, Robert Wise directs the movie with a minimum of spectacle.

So instead of history and drama, we get images, many of them striking but none of them memorable, and noise that deafens until no sense can escape. The events beg for Shakespearean gravity, but the only tragedy here is that so little could be made of so much.

It's dark and exciting, but with little breathing room.

Nature lacks a little of Malkovich's freshness, but that's just about all it lacks.

Add to these problems the fact that Fathers' Day is a comedy starring two reputedly hilarious people who don't make you laugh once, and you have a movie that would be great if everything about it weren't terrible.

Though it occasionally wears its metaphors on its sleeve, Ulee's Gold should, if there's any justice, find the same thoughtful-drama-hungry audience that made "Sling Blade" a hit.

All the principals -- except, significantly, screenwriter Kenneth Lonergan -- reprised their roles for the sequel, and all seem confused as to why they returned.

What a shame that The Hunting Of The President feels like part of the problem.

The film could have turned out worse, but only via the addition of a Tom Green cameo, or an accident in which the actors caught on fire.

Occasionally resembling an episode of Seinfeld taken to the big screen, waydowntown shares that show's ability to mine mundane details for humor, and its Tomorrowland-gone-awry setting provides plenty of raw material.

Never good, Crush takes a turn for the worse when it takes a turn for the serious. Its attempt to drop cartoon comedy for cartoon tragedy essentially thrusts the characters from Cathy into the panels of Mary Worth.

Much of The Edge's success can be credited to Baldwin and Hopkins, who know just how far to push a performance without crossing too far into ham territory.

Pinhead barely appears in Hellraiser, a film that, with its intense and uncomfortable family drama, might have even worked without him. With him, however, it becomes one of the most innovative and memorable horror films of the '80s.

Though initially off-putting, Chick's distanced direction pays off as XX/XY goes along.

Newman picks up speed and symbolic baggage as the movie progresses, and much of the film’s brilliance lies in the way Sarafian balances the two elements.

Stahl quietly plays the straight man, giving the usually skillful Farmiga plenty of room to overact with abandon; she plays her character as one part Rosanna Arquette in David Cronenberg's "Crash" to two parts Natalie Portman's magical life-saving pixie in "Garden State."

In three short scenes, this otherwise linear film unexpectedly slips loose from time, portraying a joyous moment, a tragic revelation, and then a long, slow scene that holds both in the balance, letting viewers tip the scale in whichever direction their hearts incline. It's an effect that could only happen in cinema, and it's made all the more stunning by its appearance in a film taken from a by-all-logic-unfilmable book.

Hoffman and Travolta are both good, but this toothless satire does little to justify their performances.

The Curt Siodmak-penned, George Waggner-directed film uses werewolf legends as an excuse to put modern minds comfortable living with moral ambiguity into conflict with undeniable evil.

Neither condemning nor forgiving, the film is a model of documentary evenhandedness, even though James makes no claims of objectivity.

It's okay to be manipulated, so long as you don't feel the strings being pulled. Here the tug is constant, and constantly distracting.

A self-crafted elegy starring Cocteau as himself, an artist at the end of his life wandering through a symbolic landscape filled with his own creations (and guest stars Yul Brynner and Pablo Picasso). In the end, Cocteau takes comfort in the immortality of art, and therefore his own immortality, a sentiment that would seem far less moving and far more egotistical if it weren't true.

The film contains so many plugs for Warner Bros. movies like the "Harry Potter" series and "300" that it could almost double as an infomercial.

It's the material that stinks, failing to give even an old pro like White more than a couple of modest laughs.

John Travolta should realize that people appreciate him, maybe more than ever, but that he should start making movies people won't feel ashamed for having seen if he wants to avoid co-starring with a talking lemur in the future.

But the slickness grows mesmeric and the performance unexpectedly wrenching as each trip Gere takes in a succession of classic cars brings him ever closer to his fate, a fate sealed the moment he drops a gun on top of a Silver Surfer comic while speeding through the desert to the accompaniment of Jerry Lee Lewis in the same type of Porsche that James Dean rode to his death.

This is teen product at its most generic.

Director Jacques Sarasin lazily relies on a talking-heads/archival-footage approach to tell Traoré's story, doing little to put it in context and assuming a lot more knowledge of Malian history than most viewers possess.

Adults should steer clear. Kids should be sent to it only if they’ve been extraordinarily naughty.

It’s a great-looking film--and an impressive use of 3D--but ultimately, the story makes it memorable.

The film's surface is made up of familiar '60s romantic-comedy elements, from Hepburn's haute wardrobe to the Henry Mancini score to the breezy interaction between the stars. They banter, bicker, and make up with witty repartee. It's what movie love is supposed to look like, which makes it all the more heartbreaking to know that it's destined to sour.

This sort of film lives or dies by its promise of bullet-dodging, stylishly clad women throwing themselves into impossible feats of daring, and when the time comes for action, Yuen displays a rare gift.

A funny and fascinatingly open-ended look at the state of the art, Irma Vep is well worth a look.

Red Riding’s depiction of the avarice and corruption possible when regions become kingdoms unto themselves feels simultaneously cynical and true.

Roeg’s film contrasts Western corruption with native goodness, but it’s naïve by design, and ultimately concerned more with the way all innocence passes than with the politics and particulars of any single part of the world.

An extraordinary story uniquely suited to Herzog's abilities, it eventually becomes easy to accept Ahola as a nearly mute witness to the obsessives around him, most immediately Tim Roth in a striking performance as Ahola's employer.

Well-crafted, star-driven entertainment doesn't come much better.

The result: some intriguing moments, even more intriguing performances, and a film that doesn't quite work.

Though Machuca ultimately doesn't shy away from taking sides, it wisely keeps the focus on the human element. The politics take place in the background until they demand the foreground.

Sin City draws on the cumulative history of both mediums, creating a pastiche that would have been technologically impossible even three years ago. Its creators invent a queasily intoxicating new world.

As it goes with the TV show, so it goes with the movie, which benefits from being shot largely in Rome and suffers from trying to stretch its sitcom antics to feature length.

The overstuffed film lumbers across clichés of the heart and of history until it reaches a big, tune-filled climax that isn't worth the wait.

The ability to find performers who never seem for a moment to be performing is also here, giving Bleak Moments, like all of Leigh's films, an almost voyeuristic feel.

The film plays like a companion piece to Usher, but one eager to push beyond its limits, particularly in its tinted flashback sequences. It also lets Price begin the film as a delicate gentleman and end it as a madman.

Proven comic talents like Judah Friedlander and Ed Helms make up much of Murphy's crew, but apart from speaking in contraction-free spaceman-ese, the film doesn't give them anything funny to do.

It essentially uses the setup of an early Dick short story as a bookend to one long, dull chase scene.

The atmosphere makes a deeper impression than the drama, which might represent a failing on Nelson's part, but could it be avoided? His film portrays the pinholes of light in a place of otherwise unrelenting darkness.

For his first feature, Canadian director Vincenzo Natali has, like the setting of his film, created a complex piece of work around an essentially simple foundation.

Two movies in one. That’s one more movie than it needs to be.

After a compelling opening act and some shocking late-film developments, the film feels disengaged from the action at hand and the issues raised.

As a nail-biting thriller, The Siege is too confusing, and as a thought-provoking social drama, too confused.

Has a message, which it effectively conveys by succeeding first as an affecting film. Winterbottom's actors give a human face to current events as they proceed along their grim road-movie toward a destination that may not even want them. They may be statistics, too, but their stories stick in the mind.

Fascinating in the way only a wrongheaded film by a great filmmaker can be, Legend lends beauty to such imagery, but the story keeps dragging it back to the mystical land of kitsch.

Doesn't shy away from the social or psychological explanations of the Le Mans murders, but never comes down on one side or another.

Hartley's most ambitious film, but it's also among his most uneven, shifting away at moments when its characters should be allowed to connect, underemphasizing some themes, overemphasizing others, and letting a general clash of ideas stand in for momentum.

It's seldom a good sign when a Rob Schneider cameo elevates a comedy, but Little Man aims so low and fires so often that it can't miss all the time.

While it's very funny, Boogie Nights taps into something much deeper with its on-target depiction of the shifting political and social tides of the '70s and '80s and thoughtful relationships between characters. It's a deeply satisfying movie.

Yet for all Ashes' frustrations, it's still a gorgeous piece of filmmaking.

Here's a great way to start savoring life: Don't waste it on pat manipulations like this.

It's a winning comedy, though some of Pecker's jokes inspire silence and some scenes are awkwardly staged.

As history, it's mostly bunk. Flynn's Custer is a heroic, high-spirited, Indian-respecting dunderhead prone to plunging into battle without thought and winning the day in spite of overwhelming odds (until, of course, the odds catch up with him). Dramatically, however, it's much more interesting.

The way-too-familiar climax feels less like a comment on destiny than like watching a finely crafted but soulless product roll off an assembly line.

Beloved has an almost gut-wrenching quality to it. But the same can't be said for the movie overall--it's a noble, ambitious failure, but a failure nonetheless.

Choreographed to the last beat, the action scenes have a depth that the film's thinly sketched characters never quite develop.

It plays like the work of a filmmaker operating at the highest level of his abilities.

Even if it weren't a remake, The Italian Job would still look startlingly unoriginal, but in a summer that promises plenty of sold-out showings, it could be the season's breakout pretty-okay-second-choice film.

This vanity project belongs to an audience of one.

Becomes precisely the sort of film its elements demand. As tearful goodbyes and joyful montage sequences set to lite-jazz saxophoning take over, "neatly winsome" trumps "messy drama" yet again.

An ambitious undertaking, but not a successful one: It unfolds with the studied determination of a grade-school book report.

Moss offers few startling revelations, but gently gets at the truth of his subjects' lives by playing the past against the present.

Much poorly choreographed gunplay, many lovingly rendered head explosions, and some half-assed exposition about centuries-old, immortality-seeking pirates follow, with nothing to recommend House Of The Dead to anyone but the most undiscriminating zombie-movie fans.

What Von Trier arrives at is a complex, contemporary, and deeply moving exploration of faith.

Though the film suffers from Sidney's point-and-shoot approach to the Robert Alton-staged musical numbers, it's buoyed nicely by the songs themselves, a clever script, crisp Technicolor cinematography, and Hutton's spirited performance.

Their talk feels as unforced as it is intense, but even that’s an illusion piled on top of an illusion. The film keeps returning to questions about the nature of reality and the function of performance, whether in theater or in everyday life.

Trashy enough to envelop its sex scenes in aerobicized glamour (a Lyne trademark), so the fact that it takes itself so seriously almost counts as a daring move.

The second Pierce Brosnan-fronted James Bond movie settles into the groove of unspectacular convention-adhering that has marked the series for the last couple of decades.

Ed Harris and William Hurt deliver inspired turns as the villains.

Before reaching a bittersweet finale that doesn't ring as loudly as it should, The Italian starts to look too much like a neo-realist "Home Alone" sequel, as Spiridonov outwits his pursuers in one scene after another.

McCarthy's characters make for good company even in their story's awkward patches, and in a film so unabashedly about the value of friendship, good company goes a long way.

The characters are all a little too old for this sort of drama, and they know it, but that makes Two Lovers as much about last chances as new loves.

Well matched both to the material and each other, Cage and Beach capture Windtalkers' true struggle, the fight to hold on to values like honor, friendship, and tenderness in an environment that demands otherwise. This is as much a Woo trademark as the carefully orchestrated gunplay.

Its gloomy speculations on the ephemeral nature of art are paradoxically not easily forgotten, and Godard's daring again pays off, or at least comes close enough to get credit for trying.

The film too often gets bogged down by a rhythmless pace and an overabundance of the kind of wacky physical business better left to experts in a dumber brand of comedy.

Shaw and Kingsley both create crisp, comic performances, but Sorvino remains a problem throughout. Her physical transformation falls short of the "Boys Don't Cry" standard, to put it mildly.

If its star were more consistently funny, it might have worked, but the film opens with a string of dreadful Sept. 11 gags and takes a while to recover.

The film's a bit like a dessert that could have been dinner, particularly with so many winning elements (including songs by Fountains Of Wayne's Adam Schlesinger and a brief appearance from a wickedly sleazy Campbell Scott). But dessert isn't a bad thing either, particularly when it's prepared with this much heart.

It’s a funny, bittersweet film that opens as a cautionary tale about growing up too fast, but deepens into a movie about the unplumbable gulf between childhood and adulthood, and what it feels like to stand on either side, wishing for a way over.

The film, like its source, is filled with pessimistic fatalism, but it spares no pity for the instruments of fate, painting Alec as an irredeemable villain. What, if anything, this meant to Polanski remains unknowable.

One long tease, not just because it keeps promising sex it doesn't deliver. It teases at deeper themes and cultural commentary.

It’s a film of odd moments, dry humor, and restless characters, each of whom end the film by departing from Memphis, weighed down by what they’ve taken away from it, even if they can’t exactly define what that is.

It's tacky and beautiful, sometimes both at the same time. Occasionally flatfooted even as it sparkles, the film suffers when Hogan lets the scenery do the directing for him, but he's chosen a cast capable of shouldering the film's weight.

Though it soon devolves into a laughable mess, The Forgotten at least spends its first 10 minutes or so raising provocative questions.

Yes, it's fundamentally business as usual, but it's the best kind of business as usual, and it finds everyone working in top form. Abrams imports and enlarges "Alias'" smooth, stylish, yet remarkably visceral approach to action, and the actors pack a satisfying amount of drama into the moments between action scenes.

For a while, it's a dark, insubstantial treat.

Not especially gag-driven, May's deadpan style clears the way for some remarkable performances by Jeannie Berlin, Eddie Albert, and especially Grodin, who has to remain likable even while doing stupid, mean things.

For all its nonsensical qualities, it also contains some of Argento's most hallucinatory images and unforgettable setpieces, as always reason enough to watch even when the usual reasons are nowhere to be found.

Perfectly in keeping with a series that began by simply putting a monster on a spaceship, then gave itself the creative freedom to explore what that monster and that spaceship really meant. [Quadrilogy]

The film lays on its politics-as-chess-game metaphor a little thick, however, and its refusal to leave the corridors of power to see the impact of its developments on the country at large makes it feel stuffy after a while.

As a filmmaker most often comfortable working within a genre, De Palma also knows how to deliver thrills, a skill he displays with remarkable regularity in Sisters, which still looks like one of his best.

Though Sith finally finds some life in the old saga, was it worth it in the end? Did we have to go through all that to get back where we began?

It’s an endearingly odd, consistently creepy film that hearkens back to the director’s previous work.

No Reservations is pretty much the dramatic equivalent of a burger and fries, however pretty the presentation.

The Last Party's scattershot approach doesn't linger on any single topic long enough to make a convincing case for any side.

It’s more a misguided, though occasionally retch-worthy, mediocrity elevated by its cast—Bening, as always, is particularly strong—and Nichols’ fluid camerawork. Those elements at times make it seem like a better movie than it really is, but it doesn’t benefit from scrutiny or thought.

Contains enough exciting surf scenes that it could almost get by on visceral thrills alone.

It's not like the screens are so flooded with decent movies that we couldn't use another, particularly a timely, clear-eyed thriller about the Middle East and the role of the U.S. therein.

But the parts of Foer's lively novel that didn't get cut in the script stage have died on the way to the screen. To be fair, it's not an easy novel to adapt.

Through it all, Muccino piles on one shrill confrontation after another. At times, he seems headed for the melodramatic turf owned and operated by Pedro Almodóvar, but where the young Almodóvar would have deployed a prankish wit and the older Almodóvar scraped toward the humanity beneath.

The unimposing Fiennes may not suggest the burly Luther's plain-talking peasant background, but he at least captures the charisma.

Partly improvised, partly scripted, and partly somewhere between the two, Cassavetes' films have frequently been likened to jazz. Faces bears the stamp of its particular era's jazz; it trades in long stretches of chaos, even ugliness, which produce unexpected passages of grace and beauty. As punishing as that ugliness can be, the graceful bits stick in the memory.

Predictably, the best moments belong to Buscemi, whose performance is a model of understatement in a field of grotesques.

It's an imperfect film, but it's the kind of imperfect film of which it would be nice to have seen Shelly make more.

Moore is so uncharismatic, he works his way back around to become incredibly charismatic, and so does the film.

A sight worth seeing.

Cinematographer Italo Petriccione gives the film a dramatic look, but that never compensates for the lack of actual drama; when so much of the conflict concerns Cristiano's reluctance to betray his father, it might have helped to spend more time on exploring that relationship than on capturing what light looks like when it pours in from a cellar door.

Sure, it quickly turns into a one-note exercise in laughing at the yokels, but at least it has a vision.

The Three Musketeers...is superficially little more than a high-spirited adventure in the form of a string of beautifully executed moments of physical comedy.

Conceptually compelling, but the interest ends there, in part because the humans get squeezed to the margins in favor of pseudo-history and clashing battleaxes.

In spite of its cast and seemingly can't-miss premise, Wedding Crashers is at its best a succession of mild chuckles.

Not least among Khan's pleasures is the way it continually veers toward, but never quite crosses, the neutral zone between space opera and interstellar camp. By the end, it becomes simply operatic, with a death scene of surprising emotional power.

Once the dust clears, it's hard to think of a film saga that's wound down with such a profound anticlimax. It's a whimper in bang's clothing.

The film is a bit of a slog, but in the end, it's a slog worth taking, thanks to a strange, moving ending that reduces the samurai era's codes of warfare, class, and honor down to two men meeting face to face.

Handsomely shot by Brazilian director Walter Salles and beautifully played by the two leads, The Motorcycle Diaries would amount to little more than a minor, softly politically conscious coming-of-age story, if not for its historical context.

A sharp, exciting thriller that beautifully captures a dispirited Europe nowhere near recovered from WWII, Carol Reed's The Third Man is one of those miraculous films that work on every level.

An important act of historical preservation, a focused and effective film that brings back a dark, important moment in history with startling clarity.

Garden State coasts on this considerable charm until it hits a brick wall in its final segments.

Realized through old-fashioned camera mastery and newfangled special effects, it’s a stunning technical accomplishment, but one seemingly designed only to broadcast banal sentiments, when it says anything at all.

It accumulates weight as it goes along, ultimately becoming as thoughtful and emotionally involving as it is beautiful to behold.

Opting for car chases instead of the thought-provoking ideas of its predecessors, the film looks like the work of, if not pod people, folks who gave up any kind of passion for the material long before the cameras started to roll.

What makes Towers so staggering is the way it brings the full scope of Jackson's adaptation into focus. Without missing a beat in three hours, the film shifts from epic to lyrical and back.

An almost literal slice of life, as its title suggests, Cléo allows Varda to illustrate beautifully the lost world surrounding those too stuck in their own heads—and, more pointedly, too caught up in the role-playing expected of women.

Ubiquitous screen presence Steve Buscemi makes an impressive writing/directing debut in this depiction of small-town alcoholism.

Ozu lets the story of uneasy transitions play out against a Japan that's undergoing changes of its own.

Cholodenko's casually observant style perfectly matches the cast's thoughtful work, though the film ultimately proves more successful at creating messy situations than trying to resolve them.

The careful balancing of the two sides produces its own interesting effect, however, showing how war goes from possible to inevitable, whatever the wishes on either side. Had Tora! Tora! Tora! taken the notion a bit further, it might have created a portrait of escalating tension chilling enough to rival its carefully orchestrated climactic bombing raid.

Franciosa and John Saxon (as his agent) turn in amusing performances, and Argento makes some points about the intersection of art, reality, and personality, but the director's stunning trademark setpieces, presented here in a fully restored version, provide the real reason to watch.

Years from now, Team America will better convey the political character of 2004 than a stack of Time magazines. Staying funny helps even more.

Though Smith loses many of his past efforts' familiar trappings--Jay and Silent Bob are now confined to the production-company logo--Jersey Girl plays to Smith's strengths like no film since "Clerks."

A sweet, inoffensive, achingly laughless comedy.

That love triangle is Coastlines' center. Trouble is, it plays more like canned heat than blazing inferno.

Either a thoroughly incomprehensible movie or a daring exercise in the cinema of disorientation, and a painful viewing experience either way.

Both Kennedy and Lewis turn in colorful performances, but it’s Eastwood and Bridges’ film, and their ill-defined, tender friendship makes the movie.

In happier times, director Stuart Rosenberg confidently helmed Cool Hand Luke. Here, he resorts to one spookhouse cliché after another, and even the original touches are more puzzling than startling.

The generous, sharp performances, especially Garai's, deepen the story's emotional impact, as does Wright's assured, frequently astounding direction.

That makes it hard to watch "Billy Elliot" director Stephen Daldry's adaptation without thinking of the one Almodóvar might have made -- which surely would have been warmer, less self-consciously tony, and less relentlessly arid than the one that did get made.

It should be a personal triumph or a personal tragedy, but it's neither: just another moment between curtain-rise and curtain-fall in the glorious business of creating beauty.

At times, this makes the film easier to appreciate than it is to watch: The story is perfectly clear, but the film's style takes its cues from the characters' oblique emotions in a way designed to freeze viewers out.

Teghil is a winning lead.

Apart from Considine, the actors all deliver superficial performances beneath several layers of slathered-on Summer Of Love drag, and Woolley's use of multiple film stocks and flash-cut editing jumbles together a bunch of '60s filmmaking clichés without putting them to any particular use.

Director Shawn Levy brings a yeoman-like joylessness to the project, spoiling whatever fun might have been had. Kutcher and Murphy seem game enough, and it's a testament to their charisma that they're the hardest element of the film to hate.

Too pretty to dismiss, but too dull to recommend.

It looks great -- thanks in large part to production designer Dean Tavoularis and Wes Anderson cinematographer Robert Yeoman -- but just as importantly, it looks like it's interesting. Ultimately, it's not, but that almost doesn't matter.

Ultimately, the film is the kind of neither-fish-nor-fowl work unlikely to satisfy anyone: There's not enough hot-and-heavy action for thrill-seekers, and not enough substance for those looking for above-the-waistline kicks.

At least Christensen seems to have the right idea: She gives her character a look that's part lust, part thousand-yard stare, and part Machiavelli in tight sweaters and form-fitting skirts. It's not exactly acting, but it's not predictable, either, which makes it stand out all the more.

Hitchcock is fully Hitchcock here, plunging deeply into his characters’ psyches, and remaining in full control of every cinematic effect.

It allows Lee to draw out a theme that's been present in his films from the start: the notion that repressed passion does no one any good. In Brokeback Mountain, it turns vibrant men ghostly.

That points to the problem at Sleepover's heart: It buys into the caste system it ostensibly flouts.

Just as memorable and emotionally intense as any of Wong's films. It's a mood as much as a movie.

All that aside, American Pop is still worth watching. Bakshi may not have perfectly captured eight decades of American music history, but his attempt to do so is often thrilling for reasons other than ambition.

It’s not that great a movie, with a plodding pace that makes teenage wildlife look kind of dull, even as it wraps it in attractive packaging.

The film at its simplest serves as a cautionary tale, but it also functions as a meditation on how little it takes to redirect a life by choice or by chance.

Unlike in similar past efforts, Sayles never finds a way to bring it all together. Individual moments of considerable impact alternate with stretches that go nowhere.

It owes much too much to Argento pal George Romero's zombie movies, but without enough of the suspense or metaphorical weight. That said, it still has more imagination and style going for it than most horror films.

Herzog instills in his film a hypnotic, dreamlike quality. It may fail as a straightforward story, but its many other virtues allow this version of the Dracula tale to stand beside Murnau's Nosferatu, Tod Browning's Dracula, Hammer's The Horror Of Dracula, and the good bits of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula as the best committed to film.

A grimy mess set among L.A.'s speed-abusing "tweakers," Salton has neither the substance to justify first-time feature director D.J. Caruso's pretentious flourishes, nor the skill to make those flourishes work on their own terms.

Rudnick is a wit, and his script allows everyone a decent one-liner or two. But the problem with one-liners is that they only last one line, leaving a whole movie around them that needs filling in.

Girotti has no magical powers, but his dementia has a way of coming and going at just the right time to move the story and themes wherever director Ferzan Ozpetek and co-writer Gianni Romoli want them to go.

Annaud has given Seven Years In Tibet an epic scope, packed with beautiful scenery, lush costumes, and elaborate sets. Which would all be well and good if they didn't often seem like the reason the movie exists.

I’m still deeply fond of De Laurentiis’ King Kong now, no doubt in part because we’ll never see its likes again. Whatever the failings of its ape effects, they have a tangible quality that even Jackson’s great CGI work couldn’t fake.

Abril and Banderas are both terrific as the lovers-to-be... Almodóvar makes it easy to root for them to get together and balance each other out, but that means getting past the situation that brought them together in the first place, and the tension makes the movie queasy even when it’s compelling.

The film de-emphasizes plot and action in favor of lyricism and outbursts of magic-doing, but the results are more dull than enchanting, no matter how many people fly across the room.

In McKay, Ferrell has found an unusually simpatico collaborator for the type of humor that's made him a comedy force: outsized, unexpectedly sweet, and unrelenting.

The Bellboy strings together artfully choreographed comic setpieces as it follows a silent Lewis through his rounds at a posh Miami Hotel.

Demme’s excitement for Young and his music is evident throughout, and the songs fit comfortably in the unvarnished setting.

Innocence and corruption live together beneath the harmonious, hypocritical surface of an idyllic-seeming American town, and while that situation may seem familiar now, thanks to the films and TV shows Naked Kiss helped inspire—Blue Velvet comes immediately to mind—familiarity has dulled none of the film’s force.

Ramis is at his best when dealing with men facing a soul-defining crisis, and he finds plenty to work with in Russo and Benton's script, which offers Russo's trademark blend of colorful characters and slow-building dilemmas. The Ice Harvest finds them all operating in top form in as dark a territory as they've ever explored.

Extreme Ops seems to have only the slightest grasp of its own absurdity (or its own horribleness), which makes it almost charming.

The film is clearly an act of boosterism, and it makes a pretty good case for the Glastonbury cause.

Gordon's feature directorial debut mostly stops being about video-game obsession and turns into a film about what it takes to make it in America.

You have to give She's All That points for unironically staying true to its genre in its purest form, one Kevin Williamson-like bit of dialogue aside.

What does a film called Hotel For Dogs need in order to avoid being a watch-checker for grown-ups? Whatever it is, Hotel For Dogs doesn't have it.

The role needs a steely, inhuman reserve, and Garner's innate likeability works against her.

A garish mediocrity.

For a while, the tension powers the film. And when it doesn’t, the lead performances by Oldman and Webb pick up the slack.

The issues Decena raises rarely get treated on any but the most superficial of levels, and the flatly realized characters make it difficult to care what becomes of them.

The same willingness to plunge into luridness and melodrama allows The Gatekeeper to work as a taut suspense film on its shoestring budget.

In The Loop floats above its chaotic world on wave after wave of beautifully profane dialogue.

Brown probably captures enough to satisfy hardcore enthusiasts, but everyone else might end up wondering why he ignored the glory for the dust.

Turns a fond look back at the great Federico Fellini into an occasion for the kind of talky tedium Fellini's own movies would never have allowed.

Whenever The Box threatens to crash, Kelly summons up another haunting image or heartfelt, albeit thin, moral inquiry. It’s an unwieldy, ambitious, one-of-a-kind film waiting for a cult to find it.

About Piven: When did it go wrong? When did the caustic character actor guaranteed to liven up even the dullest movie turn into a walking black hole of smarm from which no joy can escape?

Despite the casual homicide and a premise rich with Reagan-era political undertones, the gleeful satire draws inspiration as much from Bugs Bunny as Luis Buñuel.

The film owes as much to Caddyshack as to Capra.