Keith Phipps

It's funny, too, though marked by an uneasy humor that's usually difficult to achieve. Anderson handles it with expert ease: At this point in his career, he moves the camera like a skilled dance partner, investing the smallest gesture with significance.

Even with material as strong as Show Boat, Whale recognizes he’s making a film, not just a record of a stage production.

A deft, three-dimensional performance from Dern, playing an almost entirely unlikable character, aids incalculably in exposing what happens when political factions lose touch with the realities of the issues for which they claim to provide answers.

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.

It only takes rat trainers and CGI artists to create swarms of vermin, but it takes a twisted kind of genius to treat them as equals.

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.

Martin touches on any number of post-Vietnam ills (urban decay, drug addiction, crises in faith) without overstatement, allowing for a deeply considered exploration of horror's ability to comment on society, a sort of belated answer to Peter Bogdanovich's Targets. At the same time, Romero still forces Martin to work as strictly a horror film, albeit an eccentric one in which the violence has an uncomfortable plausibility, starkly contrasting Amplas' romanticized black-and-white vampiric fantasy life.

Cop Land emerges as a first-rate morality play in the form of an effective, if occasionally unwieldy, crime drama.

"Adolesence can kill you," Birot has said in an interview. In a film that leaves the "you" intentionally vague, moment after moment she shows how.

Though the film portrays the racism of the South as institutional and inescapable, it’s a little too eager to offer glimmers of hope with increasing frequency as the film nears its end and Tibbs and Gillespie come to understand each other better.

As the film goes along, themes and even lines of dialogue resurface, and Jarmusch's comic sensibilities grow more assured.

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.

It’s not a subtle movie, but it’s not a predictable one, either, opening several obvious avenues for its plot to travel down then closing them off and letting the elements collide in less obvious patterns.

Most importantly, the director, script, and cast (rounded out by Judi Dench and well-placed imports Donald Sutherland and Jena Malone) all recognize that Austen is about much more than pretty costumes and knowing looks.

The film plays like the work of a creator trying to grapple with the big issues before the clock runs out.

Whedon’s handling of the personal material is what makes Age Of Ultron extraordinary. Remarkably for a film so overstuffed, no character gets neglected.

Ridicule convincingly establishes a sense of dread that comes with living in constant fear of public humiliation. And, though it's set in the past, its depiction of wealth-bloated politicians who maintain a wide gulf between actions and rhetoric seems timeless.

Neither Molina nor Lithgow are stranger to big performances, but here, they offer studies in restraint, underplaying dramatic moments in ways that make them all the more powerful.

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

Rossi (who is handicapped himself) gives the film a magnetic presence, playing the part as a mix of sweet-natured good intentions and frustrating limitations.

For as long as director and co-writer Jacques Audiard focuses on the central relationship, his stylish film stays on steady footing.

While Michôd never satisfactorily develops the central relationship, The Rover is still a showcase for two strong performances.

What's more impressive, and in the end more important, is the high standard of storytelling that Pixar continues to meet by locating both humor and emotional depth in worlds created out of lines of code.

Out of that clever setup, Changing Lanes pulls both the promised taut suspense and a much deeper film: an ethics thriller.

A funny, unexpectedly inspiring story of excess, poor choices, and unwavering high-mindedness, all tied to that quintessential bit of rock wisdom: Icarus did fall, but first he flew.

Sound effects, disorienting camera work, expert editing, and Humphrey Searle's discomfiting score all suggest, without showing, a horrible presence waiting in the wings. Though parts of The Haunting are talky, even that works in the film's favor, as Tamblyn's glib dismissals and Johnson's calm professorial tone are unable to clear up the mystery at its core. After all, the specters that can't be seen, classified, or otherwise contained are the scariest of all.

Hoffman (Soapdish, One Fine Day) leads a first-rate cast in an intelligent, fully realized adaptation of Shakespeare's most popular comedy that's at once highly cinematic and true to its source.

Mixing horror and humor is no mean feat, but Shaun Of The Dead tightens throats in fear without making the laughs stick there in the process.

Webber displays a great sense of understatement and a keen eye for careful framing, with cinematographer Eduardo Serra beautifully re-creating Vermeer's signature play of shadow and light.

It Was Just an Accident is both typically uncompromising and, for long stretches, disarmingly funny.

Ali becomes less the story of a boxer than the story of one man hanging onto his soul. With so many wrong ways to dramatize that process, Mann's approach seems all the more right.

A funny, tightly plotted, well-conceived comedy that transcends both Crystal's '90s curse and its horrible title.

When it's on its game, and it frequently is, South Park's portrayal of its foul-mouthed, pre-teen, construction-paper-like protagonists' navigation of the absurd adult world around them cuts as deeply as any other current comedy.

Director Zacharias Kunuk captures that feeling well, but he never quite develops it into a theme epic enough to fill Atanarjuat's scope. His film is by turns mesmerizing and trying, with enough of the former to make the latter worthwhile.

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

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.

Directed with depth, efficiency, and wit by Bryan Singer, the film suffered only from a tendency to seem like a setup for an even bigger movie...Fortunately, bigger usually equals better here, and when it doesn't, it equals just as good.

Were he only trying to remark on that world's creepiness, Cronenberg would still succeed brilliantly, if coldly, but his sympathy makes the film.

Shooting in dreamy black and white, Stuhr finds quiet poetry in shots of his character wandering the countryside with his new friend, and deadpan comedy in scenes of the camel patiently watching his new owners eat dinner, his head filling a window frame as he waits for scraps.

Evans is a revelation here, delivering a haunted performance that his previous work has only suggested he had in him. He gives the film a solid center, allowing others in the cast to explore the extreme.

MC5's mix of showmanship, hippie idealism, and brawling Detroit muscle makes it tough to categorize, and A True Testimonial carefully moves through each step of the progression.

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.

Carpenter's grittily convincing New York-in-decay remains the film's best element. Never particularly suspenseful and hampered by a finale that almost literally steers the plot toward a dead end, Escape only intermittently finds Carpenter flexing his directorial muscles. But it may be his most visionary film: Escape allowed him to build a future out of scraps from the past.

It's important for the film to establish the concentration camp as a hell on earth from the start, but Schlöndorff has more in mind than creating another reminder of the inhumanity of fascism.

One the truest-feeling political portraits in years, as well as a fine piece of drama.

Using a single set for each act and cutting minimally, Jacquot seems to recognize his limited ability to make the opera cinematic.

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.

Pawlikowski's off-balance compositions and affection for odd close-ups suggest the influence of Wong Kar-Wai, but the film's low-key observational spirit owes as much to Mike Leigh.

While director Joe Mantello (who also helmed the stage production) often uses the opened-up space of the movie well, he doesn't always avoid some of the common pitfalls that come with adapting plays.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 the film’s long middle section starts to feel a little repetitive, Park’s filmmaking remains unfailingly sharp and the performances perfectly calibrated to the increasingly absurd, and carnage-filled, situations in which they find themselves.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

A sight worth seeing.

Alternating interviews, observational passages, and conversations with past students, Hawke’s low-key film never pushes too hard for effect and lets any drama emerge slowly.

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’s a film about lonely people in an isolated part of the world, the sort of place where people go to disappear and sometimes slip further away than they’d intended. It’s also one of the most suspenseful and uncompromising noirs of recent years.

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

Blade of the Immortal raises some compelling questions: What does it mean to be virtuous in a world that doesn’t value virtue? Is there any way to shuffle off the burden of past sins? When does immortality become a curse?

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

There’s another level to it as well: Even while laying bare the mechanics he would use to tell a story likely to trip viewers’ bullshit meters and calling out one genre cliche after another, Zodiac Killer Project almost works as a compelling true crime doc anyway, up to the way it repackages a crushing anticlimax as a thrilling conclusion.

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.

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.

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

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.

Finley’s debut is an odd, hypnotically compelling film filled with dark laughs and unanswered questions.

It’s a film that remembers how awful it can be to grow up, and that even those who survive it usually don’t get out without taking a few scars.

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.

A winning mix of humor and poignant character examination, and a satisfying film.

The film weaves a study of what it means to discover you’ve built your life over an abyss into the fabric of a multiplex-friendly horror movie, but it wouldn’t work without Hall’s deft, complex performance.

Williams delivers a solid, twinkle-free (though closed-off) performance, but the film as a whole can't decide what it wants to be.

Mol nails it, in a performance that should earn her a comeback on a Heath Ledger-like scale.

As a groundbreaking examination of the reality-bending potential of film, it's of a piece with Un Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or.

Salt's mechanical command of action is what makes it one of the most entertaining films of a summer thin on its once-abundant variety of cheap thrills.

Lincoln is built around a magnetic Day-Lewis turn, and the film is a memorable, sometimes stirring look at how even the most righteous bill must struggle, and even cheat, to become a law. It demands a bigger stage than the one it's given here.

A sweet, unabashedly corny, matinee-friendly science-fiction adventure starring Lance Guest as a trailer-park videogame prodigy, and Robert Preston as the alien who recruits him to save the day from some space-baddies.

The film's greatest pleasures come from Noxon's script - which puts the sexual chaos created by Farrell's attractive bloodsucker front and center - and from the performances.

Mixing social commentary and black humor with copious amounts of blood and cracking bones, We Are What We Are offers a cannibal's-eye view of Mexico City's seamier side.

Its pleasures are borrowed, but durable.

It's a classic B-movie move of making much out of little, and while Let's Scare Jessica To Death isn't quite a top-rank B-movie classic, it at least offers further proof that all the teen-idol stars and CGI effects—or a logical plot, for that matter—mean nothing if they don't make you scared to turn out the lights.

Director Lian Lunson keeps the tone reverent, making I'm Your Man the cinematic equivalent of a testimonial dinner. But there's a place for that kind of film, particularly for subjects who've earned it.

It’s a brisk, bright, winning effort, even though it already looks sadly out of touch with the times.

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.

It’s a simplistic, superficial approach to a real-life story that marginalizes most historical details not involving scrums and tackles. It’s also pretty effective, in spite of the gloss.

Garcia shoots Mother And Child with minimal flare, an approach that keeps the focus squarely on the cast, whose moving work helps pave over some of the narrative’s lumpier patches.

If nothing else, The Omega Man remains worth seeing for its remarkable shots of Heston wandering through an abandoned metropolis.

This feels like a second-shelf Coen comedy, particularly when compared to their no-less-shaggy "The Big Lebowski."

Eastwood directs with his usual relaxed pace and bursts of intensity, a style that's pleasing to watch--and which, also as usual, never fully compensates for any shortcomings of the script handed to him.

This is very much a Sherlock Holmes movie for the blockbuster era.

For a while it's the rare film that-in the mold of the first "Matrix" movie and "Inception," although on a more modest scale than either-mixes heady puzzles with gripping suspense.

As with her debut feature, "Blue Car," Moncrieff treats sensational material with a disarming matter-of-factness that ultimately makes a deeper impression.

In the end, it's all a bit too self-consciously mysterious and Lawrence leans a bit too much on the atmosphere to do the work for him as he builds to a frustrating ending. But his vision of a place haunted by a restlessness it can't define proves unsettlingly infectious.

Wyatt brings a light touch to the potentially grim material - too light when it drops in some groan-inducing references to the original film - but he keeps the action compelling whether focusing on apes as they run amok or as they quietly contemplate their next move.

In Trouble With The Curve, Eastwood plays a reminder of an older way of doing things, a professional whose likes the world won't see again once he's gone. The role isn't much of a stretch.

We all lived through this not so long ago; it's an odd thing to make a film whose most striking effect is its ability to bring the feelings of Sept. 11 flooding back, then close on a profoundly disturbing note. A crasser film would have been easier to digest and dismiss. It's hard to do either with United 93, and that's either its genius or its folly.

Ondine looks heavy and it ends up feeling a little slight, but between those two extremes there's a beguiling siren song of a movie about the way the unexpected has a way of intruding on even the most fatalistic lives.

What Up In The Air lacks in surprises--apart from an elusive final scene--it compensates for by conveying the pleasures of living from landing to landing, and the terror of floating away.

In the end, Gladiator is overdrawn and too insubstantial for its own good, just like the old days, but it satisfies as entertainment on a grand scale.

Novelist-turned-writer/director Peter Hedges follows up his "Pieces Of April" debut with a comedy that's at once overstuffed and surprisingly subtle.

It’s a trifle, but a trifle that sticks.

Romero doesn’t have the best handle on the film as a whole, but he still manages some perfect moments that bring the era’s potential horrors into the heart of America, like a man losing his mind, then his life, against the misty backdrop of a small-town bridge at dawn. The suggestion is inescapable: one small push, and this could be your life.

Ultimately, Why We Fight reveals itself as yet another leftie doc with an anti-war agenda. But the mere fact that it takes time to ask questions and listen to opposing viewpoints sets it apart from the pack.

That's a lot for any film to unpack, and "The Last King Of Scotland" director Kevin MacDonald deserves a lot of credit simply for keeping the narrative coherent.

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.

What Castle’s films lack in originality, they make up for in carnival energy and an eagerness to please.

Little besides an endless stream of ditties—only a few of them memorable—carries the film from one scene to the next. For anyone not just coasting along with the visuals, it can start to feel like a movie to be gotten through more than enjoyed.

Soderbergh creates an unnerving mosaic from the smaller pieces, a vision of a world that's simultaneously tightly knit, delicately balanced, and prone to breakdown, whether due to disease, bad ideas, or unenlightened self-interest.

Measured scene by scene, the film isn't always successful, and its transcendent moments make it easy to wish it could reach that elevated pitch more often. But Cloud Atlas is the sort of work where the big picture matters more than the details. It's an imperfect film of great daring and tremendous humanity, a work of many stories, but a singular achievement.

Mostly, it's content to remain a compelling, visually striking political mystery with some big ideas woven into it--subversive notions about integrity, liberty, and political change.

Almost unavoidably uneven, it gets off to a rough start in a segment that relies too heavily on Winona Ryder's charms as a pixieish grease monkey. But it improves as it goes, and in segment after segment, Jarmusch's characters strive, almost heroically, to make human connections, even ones that won't last beyond the moment when they pay their fares.

Aided by strong performances from Bell and Fabian, Stamm deftly plays with the boundary of fact and fiction, though his game might have worked better with a little more grounding in verisimilitude.

While Seven Psychopaths sometimes hits the philosophical shallows, its pleasures still run deep.

Eastwood creates a tone that's at once stately and unsettling, allowing a lot of breathing room for Jolie's sad, unyielding performance. She anchors a film that needs an anchor the further it goes along.

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.

Powell and Pressburger bring their combination of good humor, visual flair, and unflinching insight to the three telling episodes that make up the film's 160-minute run time.

It's more Thompson-for-beginners than an exhaustive inquiry, but as introductions go, it's thorough and thoughtful.

The action that follows doesn't stray too far from formula, nor does it come close to Leone's film, but it's stylishly entertaining enough to serve as a passable time-filler, particularly when its second-rate hero takes to wielding an oversized (and anachronistic) handheld machine gun.

Fun And Fancy Free is a mixed bag with more than enough interesting material to make it worth seeing, even if it falls short of Disney's shameless self-praise.

Tombstone remains a shamelessly entertaining movie, filled with lively turns from virtually every appropriate actor not working on the Costner version.

On one hand, it's an ultraviolent revenge fantasy, and on the other hand, it's a masterpiece of over-the-top unintentional hilarity—with a clenched-toothed performance by Baker serving as its centerpiece. It's in the latter capacity that Walking Tall can be highly recommended as an unconscionably good time.

The trouble with the film is that it often feels too respectable for its own good, preserving the facts of yesterday's rebellion while leaving it firmly in the past. Happily, Ginsberg's words still cut recklessly through the years.

Any satirical points about contemporary gender roles get lost in a mad rush through the matriarchy's beautifully realized, Death Star-like gray fortress. It's a fun rush, though, and an intense one, too.

As an acting showcase that builds to some unexpectedly moving moments, Elegy has much to recommend it. Had Coixet found better ways to connect those moments, she might have REALLY had something to rival what Roth does on the page.

It's well-acted and filled with striking compositions, but director Mira Nair has trouble with a different kind of balance.

Both director and cast keep the familiar journey intense, but after capturing the death of love in those opening moments, the rest of the film too often feels like a study in dissection.

Fortunately, it's funny enough that it doesn't have to be subtle. In fact, subtlety would just get in the way.

The film doesn’t traffic in drollery for its own sake. Between laughs, Lying uses its skewed reality to comment on our own need to create useful fictions to wallpaper over the abyss.

The director has done the original Gremlins one better: Instead of a film with a subversive streak, he's made a puckish act of subversion with a streak of film.

Though Levy's film feels shapeless at times, what it loses in structure, it gains in handheld intimacy, letting viewers get to know the mercurial but fundamentally sweet Pleskun.

The film, which bears many marks of the Vietnam era, isn’t against any particular war, it’s against war itself. By immersing viewers in the horrors of one man’s suffering, it forces them to consider the implications of sending soldiers out to fight for a cause.

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.

Rather than trying to overwhelm viewers by overloading the senses, John Carter's effects strive to create something new using as their foundation a book that's fired imaginations for the past century.

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

From the moment Katja returns to find her life shattered, Akin seldom lets the tension subside, and Kruger’s performance matches the intensity at every step.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

It's all so uneasily compelling and quietly moving, it might be too much to ask her to sustain it through the conclusion.

Like "The Girlfriend Experience," Magic Mike doubles as an of-the-moment film about life in a down economy, so much so that it would play like a bait-and-switch if it didn't just as thoroughly deliver as a movie about stripping.

The American romantic comedy has grown distressingly moribund lately, but anyone looking to freshen up the genre a bit need look no further than Michel Leclerc's The Names Of Love.

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.

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

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

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.

A striking effort in its own right, though not in the ways that make one generation pass a film lovingly down to the next.

Director Gil Kenan has a feel for dizzying "camera" work, and the screenplay combines witty gags with a sweet, albeit familiar, suggestion that kids shouldn't be in any great hurry to be anything but kids.

It's refreshingly unformulaic, but a rambling mess. It's also tremendously funny.

The situations sometimes feel contrived, but the characters never do, particularly because Galifianakis remains simultaneously charming and unrelentingly irritating.

In form, Phase IV isn’t that different from monster movies of old, though the ants never grow to monstrous size. In execution, it’s much more striking, offering a study in contrasts between ants and humans, and one that doesn’t always reflect favorably on the humans.

Some of the gags Bruce Wagner’s script lands about the business of Hollywood and the insanity it breeds call out for rimshots that Cronenberg never supplies. The silence can be awkward, but it’s just as often fascinating.

In this long, slow fall from grace, unceremonious nudity and half-hearted sex begin to look like a mockery of a paradise lost.

The amiable but thin comedy Robots does have a little more going on, but not quite enough to make a difference, although it looks good enough to distract viewers from that fact for a while.

As a horror movie, We Bury the Dead is light on scares (and has a little trouble sustaining momentum in its back half), despite some truly upsetting zombies. But Hilditch’s film works extremely well as a mournful mood piece anchored by Ridley’s thoughtful, melancholy performance as a woman trying to understand the fullness of her loss and the impossibility of recovering the past.

Mostly, it's just a pleasure to watch Keaton and Nicholson learning new steps in an old dance, stumbling to grab at happiness before it's too late.

Like Ang Lee's "Hulk," it's a fusion of arthouse and multiplex instincts, and though it seems unlikely to satisfy anyone, it's just as unlikely that anyone who sees it will forget it soon.

Muscle Shoals’ story has needed telling, and Camalier packs that telling with memorable stories and music—though the film sometimes substitutes admiration for investigation, paving over conflicts and moving on to the next amazing piece of music to get recorded in town.

The film retains much of what worked about the first film, and it brings a similarly smart, patient, visually striking approach to the gags.

The characters occupy homes where nothing is ever out of order, but Barthes creates a sense of unease that never lets up, and a suggestion of chaos underlying all the neatly arranged possessions in the Bovary home.

Fast-paced and ambitious, it never bores, and Soderbergh proves himself interesting to watch in addition to being gifted behind the camera.

Interstellar often seems afraid to let any development go unpacked and uncommented upon, except for a handful of points that dive into the action and expect viewers to catch up. The film is at its best in these moments, when it’s unafraid of challenging storytelling, particularly since Interstellar never has trouble finding visuals to match its heady concepts.

Jordan invests attention in even the most throwaway moments and marginal characters, and his care makes the film a sustained, low-key pleasure.

Diesel clearly has fun playing a character so bullish that his skin seems to be made of leather, and he's self-conscious enough to pull it off even after the film surrenders to formula.

What it became is essentially one long free-fall from destitution to despair.

Deschanel and Schneider--who both give rich, funny performances--and everyone around them have inner lives that don't always translate into words. When they speak, it's usually in dialogue halfway between poetry and inarticulate fumbling.

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.

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.

Mendes' second effort plays like a familiar song transposed to a minor key, a gangland fable soaked in portent and fatalism until its familiarity ceases to be an issue.

What it retains is a playful sense of style, that combines with an anything-goes spirit.

Plotnick’s mix of straight-faced absurdity and unexpected poignance doesn’t always gel, but it also makes the film more resonant than a straightforward spoof could ever be, and adds another layer to the film’s central joke: You can take to the stars, but the past will always travel with you.

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.

Not every moment works, particularly in the draggy middle section, but the spirit of the thing still carries it along.

On its own terms, Dear Frankie works much better than it really has any right to. Auerbach tells a small, contrived story, but gives it the weight of life.

Here's a strangely flawed and strangely satisfying movie.

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.

It looks like no other movie, Marvel or otherwise, and it’s populated by characters compelling enough to support a more complex, richer story than this one.

Though indisputably a thriller, Charlie abandons itself to little cinematic rhapsodies, self-reflexive asides, and montages of Paris locations cued to a soundtrack of cool French pop, all of which often seems more vital than the main order of business.

Though any Cage-free attempts at comedy fall flat, the action remains exciting, thanks in large part to Logothetis’ steady-handed, no-frills approach. Who knew putting together a bunch of gifted martial artists and letting them exercise those skills could take an action film so far?

His Secret Life's languid pace and general aimlessness keep getting in the way.

While fleeting moments from Pearce and Luis Guzmán (as Caviezel's loyal servant) suggest the film might have been even more fun had they been allowed to loosen up a bit, the finished product still offers little cause for complaint.

Carion and his gifted leads never take the easy way out. Instead, they let the characters get acquainted against the slow change of the seasons, taking their relationship along unexpected turns.

Night Of The Comet borrows freely from everything from The Omega Man to Romero’s zombie films to Repo Man, but it never borrows so heavily as to feel like a rip-off of anything.

Adapting a novel by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, François Dupeyron uses handheld cameras and some jarring edits, but, prostitutes and all, this is storybook material: heartfelt, pleasant, cuddly, and a little too insubstantial to stick in the mind for long.

The fact that Full Frontal comes together so well removes any doubt that anyone other than a master filmmaker is pulling the strings.

It's a film whose virtues--particularly its rare, intelligent portrayal of the relationship between two generations of women--outweigh its faults.

The Dreamers is a universal story, one that captures the thrill of discovering culture, sex, and politics, and the painful twinge of learning that those worlds aren't enough.

Huo never quite finds the filmic vocabulary to tilt the film toward greatness-and the mawkish synth score does little to help-but Postmen In The Mountains ultimately succeeds.

It's a familiar story, but Mills and Pucci treat it as if it were the first time anyone had thought to tell it.

Massoud plays Saladin magnetically, and his arrival only illustrates how many opportunities Kingdom misses. Another, better movie would have made him the focus.

A dark-humored film about devastation, which makes Vodka Lemon's final rush into comedy in the truest sense all the more refreshing. Even in the wasteland, there might be humor other than the gallows kind.

Mistaken For Strangers, which covers Tom’s time with the band and his subsequent attempts to piece together a movie about that time, is a sweet, funny, and sad film, but also an exceedingly odd one.

Welcome To Me never develops much momentum, doesn’t always know what to do with supporting players like Leigh, and builds toward a finale that plays as a bit too neat. Yet even this doesn’t betray the character’s cracked integrity.

Mike Nawrocki and Phil Vischer, who co-write, co-direct, and supply much of the voice talent, soft-pedal the proselytizing and explicitly Christian elements in favor of gags and gentle lessons, keeping the pace fast and the scenery colorful.

Kormákur lets his stars balance the buddy-movie levity with just enough dramatic weight to keep it grounded, and his directing style seems like a conscious corrective to the disorienting cutting and obvious CGI effects that have come to dominate Hollywood action films.

Though essentially a straight-faced horror film, You’re Next also taps into a rich vein of black comedy.

In one of the film's most persuasive bits, Farley Granger talks about chucking a lucrative film career in order to tread the boards in New York. Maybe it's that kind of magnetic draw that makes an age golden.

Black's sadistic streak remains as uncomfortable as it ever was, and his direction is very much in the house style of producer Joel Silver. But both elements perfectly suit the material, which sneaks in a lot of sly stuff beneath the slick surface.

A low-key charmer that balances half a dozen winning performances, Welcome To Collinwood's momentum occasionally stalls, and it doesn't always produce laughs.

When Friday Night Lights gets to the big games, the time it's spent creates an atmosphere thick with tension, one akin to the real-world experience of watching a favorite team play for its life.

As disappointing-but-worthwhile films go, you could do a lot worse.

Good Luck feels raggedly put together at times, however precise Verbinski’s filmmaking might be within each scene, but as the story unfolds and the full scope of the threat emerges, a winning sincerity overtakes the film.

Whatever its flaws as a film, a none-too-scary monster chief among them, The Blob is a uniquely compelling monster movie.

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.

Rendering in high drama the story of Moses one moment and then underscoring that drama with songs filled with banal "you-can-make-it-if-you-really-try" cliches moves from the sublime to the ridiculous so quickly, you could get the bends.

Writer-director Tim McCanlies works in broad, kid-friendly strokes, and he's not afraid to lay on the sentiment, but his cast makes sure it's well-earned.

The film is memorable for its action scenes—from an opening raid that erupts on an eerily quiet day through a Sam Peckinpah-inspired finale—but also for the reflective moments from which those action scenes are born.

As pleasant stimulation for the eye and ear, it's two hours of sumptuousness, but anyone looking for more won't find it here.

As grim as the above might sound, it’s also a spry, funny, moving film that never heads in the direction in which it looks like it’s about to head, kind of like its protagonist.

Hoffman and Sarandon work well together, and Gyllenhaal, who's carved out a niche for himself as the new face of internalized conflict, fits nicely into a role Hoffman would have made a meal of 30 years ago.

For long stretches, Or is a dialogue-heavy kitchen-sink drama, but its naturalistic style and unselfconscious performances give it an intensity that only builds as it progresses.

While McKellen's sharp performance provides the main attraction, the film wouldn't work without both Fraser, who brings something extra to a character who could easily have been a mere lunk, and director Bill Condon's careful integration of larger themes.

Though High Art has more than a few awkward touches--all the male characters take up less than one dimension, for example--it's otherwise a nicely underplayed, memorable, beautifully filmed movie.

As a morality play, it's a one-sided contest, because the question of whether power corrupts is never a question at all. As a queasily thrilling tour of a dirty little corner of the world, however, Trapero's film offers a memorable ride.

Alan J. Pakula’s 1982 adaptation of William Styron’s 1979 novel Sophie’s Choice is one of those films whose great qualities put its lesser elements in sharp relief.

In just about every way, Insurrection seems as if everyone involved is still stuck in the weekly grind of turning out the series, but the results don't disappoint too terribly.

The film works by putting the accelerator to the floor and never looking in the rear-view mirror.

Bridges turns in another remarkable performance, and he's well-matched by Foster.

Behind the camera, Lee shows a steady hand and saves his best tricks for the big finale, which generates a lot of excitement out of the collision of disco music and some truly impressive skating.

Starr and Shihabi, a charming newcomer, play off each other beautifully, and even when the film becomes a little too heavy-handed...their relationship keeps it grounded.

The singular word “portrait” isn’t quite right, however. Both Whishaw and Hall deliver lovely, tender performances that capture the friendship between the writer and her subject.

As generous as the film is to its characters, it also keeps finding ways to criticize their myopia.

The film is unfortunately about little more than its potentially mind-boggling plot and structure.

Despite a shaky start and the presence of questionable elements throughout, by the time it arrives at its finale -- which copies Return Of The Jedi's triple-climax structure -- The Phantom Menace has won its place alongside the original Star Wars trilogy.

Sauret's approach isn't the most artful, but it doesn't have to be. Hearing his subjects speak for themselves is good enough.

It's a smart, exciting, involving film that's true to its source, which is all it really needs to be.

Though Moolaadé doesn't shy away from the task of educating its viewers about the brutality of "purification," it works equally well as a tribute to righteous defiance wherever it surfaces.

Edwards’ film doesn’t care much about metaphorical resonance, and cares even less about its human characters, many of which get forgotten for long stretches of the film. But Godzilla has a way with a disaster setpiece, and it cares a lot about providing awesome monster-on-monster action on a mammoth scale.

Polyester splits the difference between Waters’ earlier cult movies and his later mainstream work. A melodrama that touches on everything from punk rock to abortion to pornography.

The ridiculously entertaining Shaolin Soccer pulls out all the stops to make sure viewers stay happy.

The mostly wordless film simply presents Ground Zero, the dust-covered surrounding areas, and the city's immediate rescue efforts. As a document, it's invaluable, and as a viewing experience, it's somewhat shocking.

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.