Keith Phipps

Mackenzie's film could almost use one or two lurid touches in place of its stately distance. Then again, a more stylized approach might have allowed less room for Richardson, whose unsparing performance makes other elements almost irrelevant.

Roberts' script and direction show sparks of wit, but the plot comes lifted from countless heist films.

The lovable characters remain, but they never do much of interest in a sequel that's safely above average but superfluous.

As an action movie, Red Dawn is a repetitive headache, and anyone with Blue State sympathies will be appalled at its manipulations and exaggerations. But there's smart subtext beneath the big dumb explosions.

Machine makes its look-to-the-future-not-the-past message as clear as a Grammy acceptance speech, but as an exploration of regret and the elusive quality of time, it falls well short of "Memento," another film starring a sad-eyed Pearce.

Though it’s still a disappointment in relation to its two predecessors, it has much to recommend it. It begins and ends brilliantly.

Though he never quite rescues the film, Bardem continually suggests the tensions bubbling under the surface that Dancer itself never penetrates.

Brett Ratner remains a director of no great distinction, but here, he proves himself an adept orchestrator of battle scenes, clearly presenting the forces on both sides, and using clear, coherent editing and dynamic compositions.

A slow, meditative movie-an appropriate choice given the subject matter-that ultimately fails, in spite of clearly heartfelt good intentions, because of its almost inhuman detachment.

Love Liza needs more than mood on its side. A moment of recognizable human behavior would have been a fine place to start.

Though it's tough to find much fault with a film so sweet, Piglet's Big Movie never lives up to its title.

The film refreshingly portrays its kids as part of a diverse group trying to succeed in a country in which they can never find secure footing. That’s the big-picture story here, and one even the occasional underdog cliché can’t obscure.

Like its immediate predecessor, Muppets Most Wanted has one tremendous advantage, even when it missteps: Muppets.

By the film's halfway point, the subplots have all started to head in the most obvious directions imaginable, which is too bad, since they all have real potential. Ferrera's story of spending the summer as an out-of-place ethnic element in the milk-white suburbs stays interesting the longest, in large part thanks to her performance.

For much of The Patience Stone, Farahani is the movie, and as she shifts from fear to despair to anger to emotions she’d never previously considered, her magnetic presence goes a long way toward putting a human face on the film, more successfully than the material around her.

Panayotopoulou's background in photography shows in the way she lets her chiaroscuro lighting mirror her characters' emotions. It also shows in the still-life quality that Hard Goodbyes never quite gets beyond.

It’s fun, but it’s ultimately more of the same in brand-new packaging.

For those who like Carrey and are waiting for a film they can honestly say they enjoyed through and through, this ain't it.

Tying The Knot's central point remains insistently stated. It would be hard for anyone to watch it and still think of the demand for same-sex marriage as a mere passing fancy.

The framing device, which has Stiller recounting his tale to a fellow recovering addict (Maria Bello) over the course of a weekend sex session, stops Permanent Midnight dead in its tracks every time it pops up, but Stiller alone is almost enough reason to check out the film.

It's a stylish, cleverly plotted, perpetually unpredictable film with another electric (albeit brief) performance from Penn. So why is it so unaffecting?

Touch never quite catches the satiric fire its subject seems to warrant. It's pleasant, disarming, and likable, but never quite miraculous.

Wong’s usual concerns overwhelm the film, and though his pairing of fisticuffs and longing is sometimes awkward, he surrounds the awkwardness with some of the most beautiful images in his career. In Wong’s world, beauty goes a long way.

When the suspense setpieces do come, many of them are staged with considerably less imagination—with cheap jolts underscored by an intrusive score—than would be expected from director Wes Craven.

Occasionally, the film invites a more dynamic touch than the careful slowness Cholodenko carries over from "High Art." But that same care gives the movie a seductive quality that would have been lost in a more hurried approach.

It's passably gripping and occasionally lively.

In the end, Chaos is as compelling as it is confounding, and it's compelling in large part because of the confusion it stirs.

It's clumsy, but also strangely refreshing. To children raised on "Spy Kids" and "SpongeBob SquarePants," it may look as primitive as a daguerreotype, but never underestimate the persuasive powers of a cute animal.

As Ouimet, the always-terrific Shia LeBeouf is an oasis of depth in a film that otherwise can't pass up a sports-film cliché.

Only a truly great director can make a film of high artistic merit, filled with personality and memorable scenes, that's still a borderline disaster. (Think One From The Heart or 1941.) So the heartfelt and woefully miscalculated Elizabethtown may be the film that marks Cameron Crowe's arrival as a truly great director.

Unfortunately, Russell paces the film as if trying to demonstrate what eternity feels like. When the plot begs to move forward, the film keeps lingering over friendly fawns and long walks through the forest.

Without challenging viewers’ notions of how gay men behave, the film shamed its homophobic characters while showing a loving family headed by longtime same-sex partners who are embraced by their community—boas, makeup, and all. Albin and Renato were onto something. It was the rest of the world’s job to catch up.

Swamp Thing has many dubious qualities, but it clearly isn’t a piece of product tested and polished to a blinding gleam, and the world is duller for not letting oddball efforts like this slip into theaters once in a while.

Short and shapeless but nonetheless welcome documentary.

While not dwelling on plot eventually gets P.S. in trouble during the slack finale, it gives Linney and Grace plenty of room to maneuver.

Director Kevin Connor, coming off a string of British horror films and Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations, never turns Motel Hell into an all-out comedy, but humor is always part of the mix.

Pretty painless by kiddie movie standards.

If nothing else, the sweep of Workman’s cradle-to-grave approach helps place Kane in a broader context, making it one chapter in a long life and a drama-packed career. The only trouble with the film is that Welles’ story has been told many times over, and Workman struggles to find anything new to say.

Through it all, Reznor and Ross keep the music pulsing in time to the action and for some thrilling, surprisingly long stretches, that’s all the movie needs.

Big Eyes contains comedy and tragedy, too, but they pair much less agreeably here, in part because each of the film’s two protagonists belongs much more to one world than the other.

But while Only The Strong Survive is essential viewing for soul fans, as a documentary it never makes the needed connections among the artists, their music, and the lives they lead.

Despite the sharp dialogue...and carefully managed dramatic rhythms, Match still can’t help but seem a bit cramped, particularly once the plot starts to take some predictable turns and the shouting starts. It’s a fine line that divides the intimate from the claustrophobic.

When the general pleasantness of the atmosphere and the cleverness of the screenplay don't carry the movie, Wilson does -- at least until a hurried, confounding finale that reveals its casualness as sloppiness.

Donner moves the film at an unhurried pace. The action scenes, for which Broderick and Hauer seem to have done quite a few of their own stunts, are fun, if not especially ambitious, and spaced out between long stretches of Mouse and Etienne traveling the countryside. But, oh, what countryside!

Eventually Stein's habit of dodging its own issues grows frustrating.

Director Chris Terrio adapts Amy Fox's play with flashes of wit, moments of insight, and some fine performances. But Heights' characters move along such preordained paths and perform such familiar movie actions that they might as well sport antennae.

Content to let his work speak for itself, Giger has little to add to the conversation, and while it’s intriguing to see him working in—or sometimes just ambling through—a house filled with his work and sources of inspiration, Sallin too often lets these scenes crowd out the story she’s trying to tell.

For everything here that’s new and exciting, there’s much that’s way too familiar. The kids are so one-dimensional and unpleasant, it’s hard to care once they start dying off.... Unfriended is often more innovative than scary, too, with some memorable but not particularly chilling and hilariously foreshadowed death scenes.

A solid, interesting B-movie, in another season it would seem a good deal fresher.

Played by Foster with flinty persistence, Lillian is part of the long, great tradition of memorably screwed-up sleuths and A Private Life makes it easy to wish we’d see her again in a sequel in which she pursues a case that’s worth her time and ours.

Young costars carry the film, creating real characters from a generally flat script and Peter Care's largely undistinguished direction, both of which conspire to keep Altar Boys' danger at a distance.

Though he (Jordan) directs with admirable skill, his usual touches don't drive the film--which occasionally threatens to lose its shape.

The fun wears thin once it becomes clear that the only trick the film has to offer is footage of the women fighting and bonding over their shared love of the handsome but uncharismatic Verástegui.

When it unexpectedly shifts back into its initial thriller mode, Walk On Water loses in human drama what it gains in tidiness, revealing itself as a film that carries more weight in its light scenes than its heavy moments can sustain.

Stallone and Schwarzenegger have all the gravity here, and keep pulling Escape Plan in the direction of an old-fashioned tough-guy action film, one filled with nods to their onscreen pasts and offscreen exploits.

Caine played Alfie as an incorrigible S.O.B. who at least made for good company. Law makes him a delicate boy with self-control problems who can't stop talking, and his charm runs out long before the film ends.

Achieves a dullness that defies its pedigree and its story's potential.

Director Thomas Balmès mostly just tags along for the ride, but the incidental details he picks up taint the sense of guarded hopefulness.

It's clever enough, but it's mostly a contrivance to hide the fact that there's nothing interesting about the story itself.

A well-chosen cast helps make the wild notions convincing, and director Chris Columbus presents it all in an attractive, thoroughly watchable package. But try imagining a universe in which the Harry Potter series existed only in film form.

As a portrait of a man at the top of his profession starting over, it's involving throughout, and funny, too. Its range proves too narrow to support the questions it raises, but it's memorable for the point it repeats.

One of the film’s greatest strengths is its refusal to oversimplify the matter and a script that allows Turner, Teller, and Olsen to make their characters more than mere type

While some of the scenes feel contrived, the naturalistic performances never do.

Though typically engaging, Ararat occasionally suffers from what's previously been a virtue in Egoyan's filmmaking. His distancing techniques, rather than sharpening his ability to deal with a subject that lends itself to high emotion -- sometimes just seem distancing.

Whatever he’s done in the past, Eastwood here seems most interested in paying tribute to some men who deserve the commendation — nothing more, and nothing less.

Happily, what Dope does well, it does extremely well—namely letting Malcolm, Diggy, and Jib hang out together and navigate the world on their own terms. All three leads are charming, and together, they convey a real sense of camaraderie, the kind that only develop between misfits who find each other.

Offers a strange mix of sentimentality and social criticism, sometimes mixing the two to awkward effect.

After spending so much time letting the characters' deeds do the talking, the film veers into overkill, which comes as a letdown. But the actions linger longer than the words.

With much more success than last summer's formula-bound "Atlantis," Treasure Planet finds the common ground between classic Disney animation and newfangled action-adventure films.

Never finds any forward momentum, but Vysotskaya's sweet performance and the unsubtle but effective use of the war-torn asylum as a stand-in for the former USSR keep it compelling.

It sputters whenever it has to move the story along, and it too often forgets to pay attention to Cuthbert; it makes a point about the mistake of treating women as sex objects, but it's perfectly content to use her as a plot device for the second and third acts.

The drama loses shape before it really develops, but the sense of place--all wood paneling and animal knick-knacks--and the memorable performances keep it worth watching.

Its pleasures are familiar and its frightening bits less frightening than before, but Insidious: Chapter 3 still does right by a series that’s served as proof that, in horror, less can be more.

There might not be anything in Deep Water that hasn’t been done better in other movies, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t done well here. And there’s something to be said for its efficiency: The conspicuous acts of homage often make it like you’re watching three or four different movies at the same time.

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.

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.

It evens out to an engaging-enough biopic, but if Song Sung Blue had found a way to interpret their bittersweet love story with a Lightning & Thunder-like intensity, it could have been even more.

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.

It doesn’t feel as fresh as the winning original, but it also never plays like a desperate cash-in, which immediately makes it better than a lot of Disney’s recent output. But is it worth seeing? Sure. Why not?

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.

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.

The film never entirely figures out what it wants to do with the myth of the superspy, but at least it has fun along the way.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Though it doesn’t come close to touching the original, it’s not the years-late embarrassment it might have been.

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.

The energy never flags, the film conveys a deep love of Brown’s music (which fills almost every scene), and Boseman remains magnetic whether onstage or in quiet moments.

Adhering to Kerr’s real-life story allows Safdie to skirt clichés, but it’s really only Johnson’s memorable characterization that suggests Kerr’s story had to be told.

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