Keith Phipps

As a film, it’s ramshackle, with none of the narrative drive of Leone’s best work. But it’s held together by Fonda and Hill’s terrific odd-couple teaming, remarkable action scenes, and one of Ennio Morricone’s best, strangest scores.

In the latest of a long string of memorable performances, Hanks balances wide-eyed confusion with innate shrewdness, finding a character who's both unfailingly sweet and nobody's fool.

The Newton Boys is Linklater's most conventional film and, despite its numerous flaws, it's not bad.

A lot goes on, and it doesn't always make sense. But the cast embodies Rendell's ability to incorporate shrewd observations on human behavior into the framework of a crime story, and Miller has a great eye for the places on the Paris outskirts where the lives of haves and have-nots intersect.

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.

Hobbs & Shaw proves they work well together, stretching out the sparky dynamic of their previous appearances together to feature length.

It’s light and loose in ways that Almodóvar hasn’t let himself be in decades. Unsurprisingly, it’s also a lot of fun, a relentlessly entertaining lark that, like its setting, soars into the clouds, then discovers it doesn’t really have a way to get down.

Pretty much impossible not to like a little, but it's also hard to like a lot. There's a fantastic film to be made from this material, but now, the burden of making it falls to a sequel.

It may boil down to little more than a minor variation on Four Weddings' formula, but it's an interesting and entertaining one.

Brown's respectful film offers the usual music-doc mix of archival footage, song clips, and talking heads, but with a figure as enigmatic and underreported as Van Zandt, the safe course works well.

Another actor might not have been able to carry the film, given such a creepily monomaniacal character, but Hoffman lets the humanity soak through, registering split seconds of panic when he's on the verge of getting caught, then just as quickly creating and working a new plan.

Essentially, the film stays at the party too long. But for a good stretch, its combination of twirling excitement and dry absurdity captures the spirit of characters too intoxicated to realize they're dancing over a chasm.

Part of what makes The Parallax View so unnerving is that it also offers no explanation.

While the Veronica Mars film feels a bit small and closed-off by big-screen standards, it will no doubt be big and welcoming enough to those who love the series.

With its references to consciousness-raising groups and other archaic matters, it's very much of its time, but the film is effective for its vision of homogenized suburbia as a place in which housewifery has made women as interchangeable as the mass-produced products in their supermarket.

The director’s observant approach to the material helps pave over the frustrations.

Twin Dragons is still a Chan film, albeit not a great one. As fans have figured out by now, that goes a long way.

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.

Though sloppily structured and sometimes dangerously flimsy (not to mention truncated at a mere 78 minutes), Tadpole has an unforced charm that compensates for the absence of more traditional cinematic virtues.

Without coming out and saying it, The Nomi Song creates the sense that its subject might simply have been a few hundred years ahead of his time.

Never quite finds the rhythm of a great film, and it scores no points for subtlety by including a subplot about a horse breaking free of its master, but Shahriar displays a real gift for conveying Taghani's plight in all its grimness.

As for the unfortunates who aren't already in love with The Ramones, End Of The Century should give them a better understanding of what they've been missing, and leave them wondering why they've missed out on it for so long.

It’s the choice to put the voices of the main players front and center that saves Lambert & Stamp from taking the rise-and-fall shape so familiar from Behind The Music and similar projects.

After an opening stretch that retains the film’s first-person perspective, Kawamura skillfully uses long, fluid takes and compositions that create a sense of unease about what might be just out of frame. But Exit 8 only fully commits to horror in a few select scenes.

There's something appealing about an unapologetic love story set in an office that's only a few clicks off from looking like a fetish dungeon, and Spader and Gyllenhaal make sure that the romance, kinks and all, carries the day.

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.

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.

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.

At its best, The Broken Circle Breakdown has the feel of life as it’s remembered—moments out of time tethered together by the feelings of those living them.

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 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.

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

At once uncomfortable and compelling, Bugonia builds toward a wild and misanthropic final act that plays like nothing less than a sincere rejection of humanity itself. By that point, Lanthimos has kind of made it feel like we have it coming.

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

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

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.

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

By turning her attention to an underreported chapter in recent history, Kennedy has found a trove rich with unreal imagery and stories of heroism in the face of defeat.

An earnest attempt to convey the essential truth of Wilson’s extraordinary career and difficult life animates both halves of the film, and both performances.

Stearns directs with a slow-burning intensity that becomes more unsettling the deeper Ansel goes into his task, and the more it becomes apparent he doesn’t have an easy way out.

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.

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.

Shooting on 35mm, Jody Lee Lipes makes the harshness look beautiful and unforgiving, and in a film filled with strong performances, Morton’s work stands out.

Pokily paced for a 78-minute movie, The Jungle Book counts on winning characters and memorable songs to carry it along. That turns out to be a safe bet.

Edge Of Tomorrow’s finale can’t live up to what’s come before, though that’s mostly because what comes before is so rich and unusual, particularly in the middle of a summer blockbuster season that doesn’t always value richness or novelty.

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.

All the aspects of Alpha that work makes the film’s final stretch, which brings together the two timelines in a way that makes a lot more sense symbolically than logistically, that much more unfortunate, but no less of a worthwhile effort from a director who understands that shock and horror can sometimes clear space for understanding and empathy.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

There’s a sense that the band has left its mark on Sheffield as surely as the city left its mark on the band. This concert might be Pulp’s last hometown appearance, but it hardly seems like goodbye.

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.

It’s an unwieldy, sometimes overreaching effort, but the laudable ambition makes it easy to forgive some rough patches.

While 20,000 Days On Earth never finds the real Nick Cave, it’s because it knows better than to try to look for it.

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.

Jones delivers a quietly wrenching performance as a woman who comes to recognize too late how much of herself she’s lost. It’s subtle work in a film that is sometimes content to be a little too subtle.

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]

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.

It’s both unfailingly exciting and overly familiar, a restless but risk-averse film that’s a little too content to borrow from what’s worked before.

Though Wan is stepping away from horror, at least for now, to direct the next The Fast And The Furious sequel, the latest Insidious entry suggests he’s a long way from running out of new tricks, or at least finding infinite variations on old ones.

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.

The film’s fundamental earnestness and Cameron’s gift for astounding visuals and kinetic action scenes usually offset most of the flaws and a nagging sense of déjà vu.

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."

With The Conjuring, [Wan] once more turns the familiar terrifying, making it easy to fear what’s behind that closed door, or under the bed, or just around the corner, making a creaking noise that doesn’t sound quite right.

It might be a well-worn tale of demons and satanic beasties at its core, but Undertone’s ingenious form gives it an unnerving intimacy that begins as a dreadful whisper then slowly turns up the volume until it threatens to drown out the rest of the world.

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.

Teghil is a winning lead.

It’s a lively but also lovely kids film about what happens when you can’t just be a kid anymore.

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.

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.

Whannell commits to making a science fiction film plugged into the moment in which we’re living, and making grim projections of what might be around the corner.

Dinosaur 13 is haunted by the nagging sense that only one side of the story is getting told.

Freeway is full of nice touches—such as making the villain a psychologist— that play off the expectations of a familiar story. While also working as a conventional thriller, its many twists on the fairy tale make it work on an almost subliminal level.

Too much of Leatherheads feels like studied motions, and its charms never plaster over a story that takes forever to get going, and doesn't go too far once it does.

Hot Rod keeps a sweet tone that's filled with affection for its characters, and enough laughs to become this summer's most mildly recommendable comedy.

It's a tender, but sometimes untended, portrait of the artist as a young man-and occasionally as a young asshole-that's handsome, dutiful, and finally, a little dull.

Timeless message: Kids: They’re the worst.

It's more haunting than it has any right to be, thanks to its love of long, lonesome highways and the way the violence of the past bleeds into the present.

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.

Anyone looking for handsomely presented, kid-friendly thrills need look no further.

An unassuming wisp of a movie, Midnight In Paris finds Woody Allen penning a love letter to the City Of Lights, albeit one whose sentiments could easily fit on a postcard.

Ramona And Beezus has the undeniably nice, pleasantly uninspired feel of film designed to kill time with the kids on a rainy weekend.

How could someone so frail and terrified at the mere thought of acting in front of the camera become the biggest movie star in the world? And how could someone so unknowable become so familiar? Then the film makes the mistake of trying to answer these questions.

Spielrein's name is less familiar than the others, but the film suggests she deserves to be more than a footnote in the history of psychoanalysis.

There are formulaic moments aplenty in Pride, the "inspired by a true story" tale of Philadelphia swimming coach Jim Ellis, but in its first scenes, at least, it deserves some credit for doing the unexpected.

If only the emotions of the performances, the themes of the story, and Wright's cinematic virtuosity synced up more often. A lopsided abridgement that speeds through the plot doesn't help.

A better film would have matched Arnett's seemingly effortless intensity throughout. This okay film does merely okay by it.

Wanted is a queasily unapologetic power fantasy about becoming a better person through violence.

Mostly The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel stays focused on the cutesy, low-stakes personal journeys of its English characters, characters it would be hard to care about if they weren't brought to life by actors who give the film substance and gravity it doesn't otherwise know how to earn.

Which makes it all the more frustrating that the film doesn't quite work, and that it drags from episode to episode--some are brilliant, most merely intriguing--with little momentum.

Offers a concise summary of Burroughs' life and works. Maybe too concise. At a mere 88 minutes, it feels a bit glancing. But as an introduction or refresher course, it gets the job done.

its moments of greatness--and there are more than a couple--feel weirdly disconnected, stuck in a movie that doesn’t know how to put them together, or find a good way to move from one to the next.

Adams' winning performance and the light touch director Kevin Lima (a veteran of animation and live action) brings to scenes not tasked with advancing the plot all suggest that, silly as they may look once you take it apart, irony-free, romantic fantasy--animated and otherwise--still has a place on the big screen.

It's as subtle as a spinning kick, but some films aren't built for subtlety.

August's Les Misérables is the sort of film for which such faint-praise terms as "handsome" and "not bad" were invented. It's all of the above, and at times a bit better, but ultimately an experience akin to flipping through Cliffs Notes and a book of French paintings at the same time.

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.

No Strings Attached isn't a BAD piece of formulaic product.

It's a postcard-lovely movie that, in spite of its best intentions, ends up feeling a little touristy.

It's all a little silly, and silly in a way that's less fun than the original—due in part to an obvious subplot involving a poacher played by a hammy Peter Firth—but its kid-friendly B-movie charm and the peerless Mr. Young make it worthwhile, undemanding entertainment.

The Hulk himself looks more steroidal than superheroic, as if the expressive beast from the first film had been replaced by a WWE star.

Without "The Wire" and its like as a point of comparison, Texas Killing Fields might seem the natural heir to a gritty '70s cop drama. But with great contemporary TV around, it seems strangely incomplete.

Johnson sets viewers up for greatness, but ultimately offers much milder pleasures. The film isn’t an outright con, but it’s easy to feel a little misled by the end.

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

Almost anyone could dig up and film someone with the ability to lip-synch using his a**hole, but it takes genius to set the scene to Surfin' Bird.

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.

One of the film's oddest aspects is the way the 2002 footage appears more dated than the scenes from 1978.

The plot is only semi-comprehensible, but the nearly non-stop musical numbers-brilliant conflations of glam-rock and showtunes-and transgressive sexual energy keep things moving.

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

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.

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

Though the film never balances the grown-up stuff with the gross-out gags, it suggests the Farrellys might be able to do mature after all.

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

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.

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.

Made with affection and access but not enough structure.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s an appreciably less-engaging film in every way, suffering from lurching storytelling, wild vacillations in tone (even within scenes), and a strong cast that never fully gels as a group.

The film emerges as a perfectly agreeable action movie, one that’s both true to the concept of Charlie’s Angels, and probably unrecognizable to anyone time-traveling from the 1970s. That’s okay, though. Some concepts have to evolve to survive.

Between Two Ferns: The Movie is too much Between Two Ferns to fit into an episode but not enough movie for a sit-down-in-the-theater experience. Still, it’s companionable in the lowered-stakes world of Netflix films where pleasantness and a handful of highlights seem to matter as much as excellence.

When it does work, it's very funny, and worth a look both as an example of Allen's still-developing talent and—thanks to The Lovin' Spoonful—as the source of one of the greatest rock 'n' roll title songs ever to come out of a decade filled with excellent rock 'n' roll title songs.

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.

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

For all its simple politics, clanging dialogue, and underwritten roles—only Damon’s natural, and deepening, ability to suggest unspoken disappointment gives his character dimension—Elysium works, though never as well as it should.

It’s possible that something’s getting lost in translation, but Demme’s film only occasionally makes it seem like it’s worth the effort for the rest of the world to catch up.

But much of it, like its subject, is so cryptic, distractingly stylish, and impenetrably posed that it's rough going most of the way.

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.

The film ultimately feels like a well-trod journey to a familiar destination with not enough wonder along the way.

There really ought to be a lot more movies like Hit & Run, but only if they're just a little bit better.

It's well-acted and strikingly shot, and its depiction of contemporary Spanish squalor is hard to forget, but it never quite reconciles its high-drama situations with its low-key approach. It whispers when it really wants to shout.

The Golden Compass does manage the job of bringing Pullman's world to the screen. With luck, any future entries will try harder to get the job done right.

Faster starts to lay on a heavy-handed message about the importance of forgiveness. That isn't what anyone showed up to see.

It's the perfect end-of-summer film, and a sign that summer needs to end soon.

It's an agreeably unambitious comedy that might be called a romp, if that word didn't imply a little too much energy.

The crazies themselves could be a lot more terrifying. Without the rotting ickiness of proper zombies, they just seem like methed-out Iowans looking for a fix. That’s scary, but not scary enough.

Halloween II provides ample spotlights for Zombie’s visual gifts, but—apart from some striking Oedipal fantasy sequences featuring Sheri Moon Zombie as the spirit of Myers’ mother—we saw most of this last time around, and a lot of promising material leads to dead ends.

Video veteran Sanaa Hamri directs with smooth competence, and the leads all go pleasantly through their paces, but there are no surprises.

While Extreme Measures is competently directed by Michael Apted, and is never really boring, it's nothing we haven't seen before. And though it attempts to make an important point about the value of life, by the end viewers will only be reminded that they are two fruitless hours closer to the grave.

The action scenes don't always get the balance between flash and danger right, but the movie remains agreeably dopey--presenting street-racing culture as a hotbed of colorful stereotypes and lipstick lesbianism--until a climax that just isn't there.

The best adaptations have found ways to put a personal stamp on the familiar stories. Others have simply reproduced an Alice facsimile in the image of their own era. Surprisingly, Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland belongs to the latter camp. That doesn’t necessarily make it a bad movie, just another frustratingly impersonal one from a director who once had trouble compacting his personality down to movie size.

It’s a time-waster with brains, but ultimately not enough brains, and one that wastes too much time.

This time out, Shelton seems to be playing the part of someone who doesn't know how to finish what she started.

After a while, Daybreakers settles into the lulling rhythms of too many horror movies, as the characters ponder what to do in darkened rooms instead of doing much of anything.

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.

Either way, it's too pretentious--or not nearly pretentious enough.

"Happiness" was, in its own dry, muted way, a howl of fatalistic despair discernible to anyone who's ever felt life had run out of cruel tricks to play. Life During Wartime is less a reprise of that howl than its echo.

It's not without laughs--Poehler and Fey, as ever, have strong chemistry, and there's a truly bizarre scene in which Martin offers Fey a strange "reward" for a job well done--but there's a lot of arid space between them.

Rowan Joffe (son of Roland Joffe) provides busy, if never particularly distinctive direction, but it's the leads that continually threaten to sink the film.

Image for image and shot for shot, Scott is still one of the most striking directors around, but in Robin Hood, the cohesive particles keeping those images together--frills like a compelling plot and sculpted characters--prove unstable.

Lee’s movie is pleasant enough, but it’s too swept up in the spirit it’s celebrating to ask the relevant questions.

Director Damiano Damiani opts for an approach that's simultaneously more shameless, tasteless, and entertaining than the original.

Make no mistake. In spite of its worthy subject matter and good intentions, Made In Dagenham remains mediocre to the core.

Too bad the story is all over the place. One second, it focuses on a love triangle between students; the next, it's about Washington's efforts to unionize the local farmers.

It all goes awry in the end, but for a good stretch, Chloe neatly fixes Egoyan’s career-long obsessions with identity and communication to the familiar framework of the erotic thriller.