Keith Phipps

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.

A truly scary horror film, something akin to a lost art these days.

Where Noyce could easily have given Branagh a mustache and tilted the film toward old-fashioned melodrama, he leans on tactics that are less obvious and more effective.

While it may sound like pairing Murray with a pachyderm couldn't fail, Larger Than Life suffers from a stifling air of blandness.

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

It’s a monster movie made with energy, but no real enthusiasm, and its setting just makes it feel like a long way to go to get the same old thing.

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

The honesty behind Garcia's queasiest moments gives the film its pull.

It’s a wistful, unabashedly minor swan song that fittingly casts Stanton as a man recognizing he’s much closer to the end of his life than the beginning — and wondering what it all means.

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

Star Maps rather transparently equates prostitution with show business; both exploit the impoverished and do no favors to minorities. It's a valid equation, but once the point is made, Star Maps has no place to go.

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.

Deliverance is a film about finding the place where ideas mean less than instinct.

The main problem with Tarzan is its story, which, after a strong start, finds a steady groove and stays with it, offering no particular highs or lows.

It's a remote location, but Frammartino's canny eye, wry humor, and careful sense of rhythm make it feel like the best possible spot to observe the workings of the world, from ashes to ashes.

As absurd as the situation gets--and the film occasionally launches into surreal asides that only heighten the absurdity--director and star both keep it grounded in the situation's emotions.

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

As historical speculation, it's clever enough. As a film, it glows with flop-sweat.

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.

Henson's characters maintained an essential innocence while sending up the very idea of entertainment. They put on a show with quotation marks around it, but the irony never felt cynical. When it isn't getting bogged down in unearned sentiment, The Muppets gets that right.

The film finds a surprising amount of tenderness and humor beneath the brutality. The laughs may catch in the throat, but that's only a byproduct of City Of God's power to leave viewers breathless.

It's tough to dismiss a film that succeeds so well at producing spectacle, and it's hard to miss the contemporary parallels in its simple, tortuously protracted story.

Its social conscience and deep concern with what it means to be human remains unspoiled.

As played by Ralph Fiennes in his own cinematic adaptation of the play, Coriolanus' military genius makes him a figure of awe, but it's his near-absence of empathy that makes him terrifying.

Chandor’s film suggests more than it can explore, and a contrived climax makes the film seem like less than the sum of what’s preceded it.

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.

Adapting Ripley's Game, the third of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels, 1977's The American Friend knits Wenders' ongoing concerns into a thriller in the Hitchcock mold.

Why it works is anyone's guess. It's fair to argue--and the film makes this argument itself, with no great subtlety--that Godzilla embodies Japan's nuclear anxieties in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It's the journey that matters, however, and sometimes the film doesn't seem to know where it's going.

It’s breathtaking on two fronts: Reinert unearths stunning footage—far removed from the fuzzy copies used as B-roll in other documentaries—that captures the full scale of NASA’s accomplishment. But he keeps that footage grounded in the image and voices of the modest men and women who made it happen.

Yet for all the heady ideas at play, Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes remains a visceral film, one of movement, action, unexpected developments, and disarming poignance.

Midnight Express is at war with itself. Strong when it focuses on the psychological toll of prison, it falls apart when it turns the focus elsewhere, and its depictions of all Turks as swarthy, corrupt, and sadistic is pretty inexcusable.

Ultimately, writer-director Joseph Cedar has created a film that resembles a subtitled very special episode of "JAG."

A florid, often lurid, completely enthralling film held in place by a disarming Portman, who rarely leaves the frame.

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.

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.

The roots of reality TV can be found here, but unlike most reality TV, Hitchcock shows a genuine (though characteristically distant) interest in people.

The film combines dour heroes with a drab look, and the string of "Don't try this at home"-style stunts should underwhelm even viewers too young for James Bond or XXX.

The latter half, set in the less visited parts of New York's subway system, bogs down considerably, abandoning its hybrid approach and becoming content to simply clone Aliens.

Superlative action scenes, particularly a bloody guns-grenades-and-swords finale with a body count to rival the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan, help wash away many of the flaws. Action for its own sake may not have been the film's intended point, but it'll do.

For all the memorable dialogue and elegant camerawork (courtesy of Javier Aguirresarobe), it’s Blanchett’s movie, and her performance tells yet another story, that of a woman losing control.

Fontaine gives her film the tone of a psychological thriller, with the potential of violence always lurking beneath the surface.

Frears has directed a surprisingly sturdy hybrid of thriller and social melodrama, even if the thrills turn ludicrous and the social critique grows a little pat.

As the record of a landmark staging of a great play, however, this Merrily feels like a gift to all those who wish they could have been there, or want to return.

Focusing the film on Gleeson was certainly the right choice. His performance is equal parts funny and unnerving, and he keeps viewers guessing about what drives the man and what he'll do next.

Hawke’s ability to convey flashes of self-awareness elevates his performance from a brilliant impression to a fully realized tragic portrait.

The best thing about Taymor's Tempest is also the worst: It's not stunning but it is sturdy, a handsome-enough showcase of a film that never really comes to life. It plays like a challenge politely declined.

One of the best films of the year.

The film offers a rare and fascinating firsthand look at two sides of the modern immigrant experience.

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.

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.

Once the film finds its true hero, it becomes exactly as good as the idea of a del Toro adaptation promised: the defining 21st century cinematic Frankenstein.

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

The tone and subject at times recall David Lynch's "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Dr.," but the approach is Hellman's own.

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

The original was a tart dipped in acid; this one's a biscuit sprinkled in Splenda.

In some respects a less tidy film than before, particularly when it veers off into a subplot involving a Nazi soldier played by Siegfried Rauch, the new cut mostly retains the original's virtues while adding details and episodes that make it more recognizably a Fuller film.

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

Uncompromising in her art, her teaching, and her professional relations, Boyd makes for a classic tough old bird of a character.

Paddington is a charmer, portrayed as a little guy whose unflagging goodness makes it easy to forgive his clumsiness. That’s the one detail from Bond’s book any adaptation has to get right, and this one nails it.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

While Driver and Seyfried are both quite good, there’s nothing specific enough about their characters to avoid making the film feel like a blanket condemnation of a whole generation and their new ways of doing things.

A sophomore film major would be lucky to get a passing grade with such material.

A fairly faithful adaptation of what a game is like, but without the pleasure of getting to play or the much-needed option of pressing the "off" button.

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.

Like the best of its forebears, Grindhouse contains thrills to keep viewers in their seats, plus moments to think about on the ride home, which will probably seem unusually fraught with peril.

Pulling this off requires an actor who can balance comedic grace and gravitas with the skill of, well, Ryan Gosling, who’s ideally cast as a man who can ponder big, existential questions at the end of the universe and goof around with an excitable pal from another planet. (Get you a movie star who can do both.) At once zippy and emotionally wrenching, the film performs a similar balancing act as its leading man.

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.

Winter Kills provides a perfect, absurd finale to the half-decade of post-Watergate paranoid thrillers that preceded it and compares favorably to the grand unified conspiracy-theory fictions that followed, such as Oliver Stone's JFK and James Ellroy's book American Tabloid.

Investing a lot of time on each corner of his three-sided character piece, director Ira Sachs (who co-wrote the film with Michael Rohatyn) has created a film as dramatically intense as it is opaque.

At times, Bani Etemad succeeds only too well at capturing the confusing rush of Adineh's family life--the film presents more subplots than it can follow thoroughly, until its final act snaps all that's come before into sharp focus.

What makes it effective isn’t the facts of the case, so much as the way Philomena lets viewers spend time with its characters and get to know exactly who’s getting hurt.

While watching Gazzara, Huston, Kevin Corrigan, Rosanna Arquette, and others take things two steps beyond over-the-top is inherently compelling, it becomes embarrassing before long.

A sight worth seeing.

Flanagan has a command of how to make the most of a single location, and Gerald’s Game often captures a sense of mounting tension and fear through small touches like the play of light through the window signaling the end of another day with no promise of a way out.

In spite of some affecting moments, the film never quite works. It's too theatrical, perhaps unavoidably.

Broken Embraces welds Douglas Sirk melodrama to the most gracefully unsettling elements of Alfred Hitchcock, wrapping both in the stylish, hushed elegance that’s become Almodóvar’s trademark since his mid-’90s reinvention.

Death makes what’s left unsaid unknowable. But life can make the gap between parents and children feel unbridgeable, too. Father Mother Sister Brother plays like a long, plaintive sigh of acceptance that this is the way of the world, and perhaps a quiet wish that it might be otherwise.

It finds no clear answers, but that suits both the horrific event and this haunting, elusive film.

Heavy is the kind of deliberately slow-paced character study that allows carefully realized performances to shine.

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

Gunn, a B-movie enthusiast who got his start at Troma, has found a way to bring funkiness and humanity to a galaxy-spanning blockbuster, one filled with dogfights and floating fortresses, but also with heroes quick with a quip, fast on the draw, and more than a little beaten up by the universe.

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.