Keith Uhlich

Our fury is never directed toward concrete solutions, and that allows the guilty parties to slip, perhaps permanently, from our grasp.

The film knows the words and tunes but, with rare exception, lacks the passion and the perspective to make them truly resonate.

Never quite shakes its sitcom-ish setup. The director alternates incident-laden storytelling with penetrating character moments that her terrific cast acts to the fullest.

Lone Scherfig directs it all as if it were a breezy lark, so a third-act tonal shift makes for an incongruous, excessively moralistic fit with everything that’s preceded. Most insulting, though, is the way in which the climactic passages miraculously tidy up every frayed edge of Jenny’s life.

The documentary's scope feels a bit small overall - more concerned with capturing the episodic adventures of these disparate subjects than with connecting their experiences to larger societal ills.

That the duo will work their way back to each other is never in doubt, although Chazelle doesn't succumb to easy sentiment. If anything, he moves too far in the other direction, aiming for a wizened ambiguity that doesn't entirely come off.

It's supremely annoying to see the ups and downs of romance reduced to archer-than-arch line readings and bloodless mortal kombat. What's more frustrating is that the film, adapted from Bryan Lee O'Malley's popular comic, is an endless visual delight.

Too-cutesy conceits such as Hitch's imagined conversations with serial killer Ed Gein (Michael Wincott) feebly attempt to ground the story in psychological terra firma, while horribly on-the-nose dialogue flatters those viewers who prefer to keep their sense of cinema history on fan-mag frivolous levels.

It’s unfortunate that the result is so unaffecting, especially in light of all the things the director does right.

The good news is that the film's stylistic excesses don't negate the many fascinating aspects of Nim's story.

The question lingers as the movie comes to its triumphant body-swapping close: Is this a pro-environment parable or a prophecy of virtual realities yet to come? Cameron's new world may very well be a verdant Matrix.

You still can't help admiring the project's ambition; an odd combo of "Babe: Pig in the City" and Godard's "Histoire(s) du cinéma," Hugo is the strangest bird to grace the multiplex in a while.

Reitman, who also cowrote the screenplay, feels the constant need to "deepen" his characters, granting them wants and motivations--especially during the moralistic third act--that are totally alien to how they're initially portrayed.

At its best, which is often enough, the film does provide that sort of intimate and evocative insight into a culture too often vilified due to Western ignorance. At others, the gentle exquisiteness with which Longley approaches even the most unappealing sights and sounds feels like an evasion of something more troubling, and potentially more profound.

Shots of the kids and their friends running around unfamiliar environments have the fantastical qualities of Spike Jonze's "Where the Wild Things Are," minus the forced whimsy.

What starts as an intriguing reverie ends as a hollow allegory.

Once Miller lays all his cards on the table, however, you realize you haven’t been watching people struggling with the very real temptations of unchecked privilege, so much as fumbling blindly in a glib, gloomy satire of American exceptionalism.

Writer-director Jane Campion approaches the tale with an artiste’s respectful solemnity, but it too often comes off like "Twilight" transplanted across oceans and centuries.

Weekend settles into an intentionally minor-key groove, caught somewhere between bracingly direct honesty and cringingly mumbly pretense.

The cast to die for is almost entirely wasted in this machismo-marinated slab of Brit-crime nastiness.

A grimy kitchen-sink melodrama with an Ajax cleanser script: The muck is all surface, the turmoil cleanly shallow and contrived, though never less than gripping.

The ideologies underlying Andersson’s oft-astonishing succession of extreme wide-angle, vanishing-point tableaux are a decidedly acquired taste.

This handsomely made spook story (love those echo-prone hallways!) becomes less involving the more the narrative's mysteries are solved. By the time all the tarot cards are on the table, it's likely that you too will feel conned.

Cue those weepy violins. Indeed, you get everything you'd expect from this mostly saccharine melodrama.

Ai is a great subject for a documentary, and his charismatic certitude helps to offset Klayman's unfortunate inexperience behind the camera.

Yet it's impossible to shake the sense that what felt thrillingly, cohesively alive in the director's earlier movies plays here with more laurel-resting creakiness than go-for-broke verve. Russell's once-mercurial assets have become a formula.

About as deep as a kiddie pool, which isn't to say it's an unpleasant frolic.

When it comes to individual people and their hopes, fears and desires, Akl has a talent for both the surreal flourish and the grounded insight. In this case, the bigger picture and the larger point are what prove elusive, leaving the whole enterprise feeling sadly schematic.

Once the undead start walking, however, the film loses some of its footing: Most of the bloodletting is staged with quick-cut inelegance better suited to the hack horror production of your choosing, though there’s still a potent air of hopelessness that lingers as the cast is winnowed away "Ten Little Indians"–style.

As subcultural anthropology, it’s unassailable. Yet the often ugly-looking DV aesthetic dilutes the cumulative effect.

David Lowery has a carefree, bordering on insubstantial touch, which gives rise to several rank absurdities.

The director races far too quickly to get to his ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust punch line. This is the film of a pretender, not a believer.

Still, if any modern strip is worthy of an extended, Hobbes-style tongue bath, it’s this one.

Despite a committed performance from Palminteri (ripping through scenes like an aged bulldog), Debbie Goodstein's loosely autobiographical drama is as nondescript as made-for-pennies independents come.

Bong is so concerned with whodunit that his creaky genre mechanics diminish Kim's determined performance.

Hopper keeps things light and off-the-cuff, allowing his performers free rein - sometimes too much, as in the case of the screechy and shrill Farrell - to explore grim territory without falling into heavy-handedness.

Scene by scene you wish 55 Steps made you angrier than it does. Yet August's docile filmmaking acts as an emotional soporific, removing even the potential camp pleasures of Bonham Carter's histrionics.

Loznitsa would have done better to embrace the story’s enigmas as opposed to explicate them.

Given the months-long hype, what’s most bewildering about Sundance sensation Precious is its overall shrug-worthiness.

Even in this fictional context, the line between portraying and exploiting abused innocence gets uncomfortably, offensively blurred.

The movie feels like too much of a lark. To paraphrase the play’s voice of reason, Friar Francis, it would be better if Whedon paused awhile and let his counsel sway us more.

There's more than a few things off in this tale of a disillusioned professional thief (Affleck, dull), his unlikely inamorata (Hall, wasted) and the determined FBI agent (Hamm, solid) out to apprehend him.

A study in simplicity, perhaps too much so. The writer-director is working in the same patiently observant vein as Argentine confederate Lisandro Alonso (Liverpool), especially in the intriguing early scenes, where the adults communicate mostly through furtive glances and expertly modulated body language.

Filho so completely calculates his causes and effects, even going so far as to have the villain of the piece literally swimming with sharks, that you never fully feel the senses-altering charge of a truly impassioned polemic.

Though the Tavianis’ intent is clear—to comment on the thin line separating part and performer, as well as on the quite literally liberating powers of art—the meanings rarely emerge with any elegance or resonance. Hardly a dish fit for the gods.

This is the kind of autumnal sentimentality that the Academy goes wild for-a (rightly) venerated performer acknowledging his own mortality by pandering to cheap-seat emotions.

The kids pick up the filmmakers' lyrical slack more often than not, but this ode to the power of verse could really use a redraft.

There's no sense of the oppression France felt under Nazi rule. It's all just play-acting in period-specific attire. You can almost hear the AD calling lunch.

When The Father of My Children shifts focus to Grégoire’s wife (Caselli) and children (the eldest is beautifully played by De Lencquesaing’s actual daughter, Alice), Hansen-Løve’s hand steadies, and she reveals a true talent for intimate, behavioral observation.

Miners' is tiresome and scattershot.

Despite the best efforts of a cast that mixes unstudied newbies such as The Tree of Life’s Sheridan with Hollywood prima donnas like Reese Witherspoon (a starlet-slumming-it distraction as Mud's dim-bulb inamorata), there’s an overall clunkiness that Nichols is unable to overcome.

A Matrix Reloaded–like cliffhanger reminds that this is only the second installment out of four (good lord), but at least the flick leaves us with more than a tinge of interest in whom the odds will favor next.

May’s biggest get, however, is Ciavarella himself—a man forever rationalizing his shady actions, who emerges as a more complexly tragic figure than you’d think possible.

Several quick-witted touches-such as a hilarious nod to Depp's role in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"-can't make up for Gore Verbinski's leaden direction of this digitally animated feature.

The Aatsinki siblings never rise past a kind of rotely anonymous masculinity, and overall the film tends to lull rather than engage the senses.

Disney knows how to bewitch a crowd, but the sense that Tangled was made more by corporate mandate than artistic spark remains constant throughout.

One senses this is a production better suited to the stage.

You still leave impressed at the way Stanton fiercely protects the aura of mystery that makes him such an indelible onscreen presence.

Jinn consistently lets down its premise and performers with a by-the-numbers-at-best screenplay that triple-underlines all of its forward-thinking themes.

As the Sherlock Holmes of the second Zhou Dynasty, Lau is so effortlessly appealing that he manages to anchor the fatigue-heavy proceedings, even when his character has to outrun both the rays of the sun - don't ask - and a collapsing statue while crawling over and under a pack of stampeding horses. Now that's star power.

It’s a reasonably diverting piece of work, falling somewhere between the high of "Magic Mike" (2012) and the low of "Haywire" (2011), among his recent efforts.

Maier’s images are truly stunning—vivid documents of the working class that are off-the-cuff yet rigorously composed, always capturing that enigmatic bit of her subject’s soul that leaves you in spine-tingled awe.

The story — aside from a climax that plays like a too-knowing rebuke to Disney formula — goes tediously through the motions. It isn’t only Papa Walt’s head that’s been put on ice.

Unlike a great Morris film such as "Gates of Heaven" or "Mr. Death," where the quirks of character feel connected to a larger, profoundly insightful vision of humanity, Tabloid never gets beyond its idiosyncratic surface.

Though the tale demands a darker outcome, the director disappointingly goes the Mouse House happy-ending route with a reprise of the original short film's finale - one that somehow plays with even more cringeworthy sentimentality.

Polisse builds to one of the most hilariously misguided climaxes ever conceived; let's just say that this soapy symphony of squalor literally doesn't stick the landing.

Both Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet are sadly at a disadvantage given how many of the older actors gnaw at the scenery like it’s a still-warm cadaver.

The filmmakers do a good job of laying out the whos, whys and wheres through diagrams, reenactments and testimonials from veterans on both sides of the skirmish.

This is not a choice made lightly by anyone involved, but the admirable, multilayered toughness of these sequences is unfortunately weakened by the filmmakers’ saccharine touch whenever they explore the doctors’ personal lives.

There's enough filmmaking talent evident throughout that you wish the journey were more satisfying overall.

What begins as a tense, inventive suspense film becomes, to paraphrase Doctor Who, a wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, mushy-wushy mess. That's decidedly NOT fantastic.

Yet Green, as is his wont, too often strains for poetic effect through flowery voiceover and tone-deaf interactions — like those between Joe and his latest short-term girlfriend — that undercut the genuineness.

This iron lady of cinema deserves better.

The fully committed Rush, at least, commands our constant attention, and no movie with a kookier-than-usual Ennio Morricone score (dig those staccato-chanting chorines!) could ever be a total waste of canvas.

This is a movie about a subculture, made for that subculture; only hard-core Xboxers need apply.

There are plenty of formulaic boo! moments, yet Craven intelligently treats Bug's otherworldly issues like hormonal growing pains that must be tamed.

The subjects - a husband and wife struggling to make ends meet, mostly for the well-being of their infant daughter - are eminently engaging.

Well, Ghost Protocol ultimately ends up as an eye-rollingly towering totem to L. Ron's favorite son, complete with treacly music cues and longing glances - bromantic and otherwise - that will send you screaming into the thetan-stealing clutches of Lord Xenu.

Intrigue and eroticism abound, all of it watchable, none of it particularly exciting. And the misty widescreen photography lends the proceedings a funereal air of respectability that's like catnip to Oscar voters.

For all its surface effectiveness, however, The Blue Room never quite makes that intangible leap into greatness. It’s a phenomenally executed exercise that, like its protagonist’s memory, is too wispy for its own good.

It's fascinating to be so close to a then-sitting head of state as he negotiates for his homeland's survival, and the news that Nasheed was recently deposed in a coup by Gayoom loyalists makes the hard-won victories he did secure all the more poignant.

Gould is as much of a mystery at the end as at the beginning. You get the feeling that's the way he'd have wanted it.

Diplomacy’s origins as a play (written by Cyril Gely and starring the same actors) are always evident. Despite Schlöndorff’s attempts to give the movie some pop through widescreen lensing and noirish lighting, it’s a visually staid affair—very “filmed theater.” Fortunately, both Arestrup and Dussolier are captivating presences.

A slipshod documentary about a fascinating subject: the loaded history and current complications of African-American hairstyling.

This is a movie that preaches to its rafters-raising choir.

Nicholas Wrathall’s documentary—rough-edged in style, yet anchored by pointed and poignant interviews with the man himself — is mostly for those already fascinated by Vidal’s colorful life.

The brotherly-love epiphany to which the film builds does effectively pluck the heartstrings, but there’s a lingering sense that we’re being had.

Things quickly fall apart, with a pileup of sub–Rod Serling narrative twists, a choppy action sequence heavy on the Michael Bay slo-mo and a sequel-ready climax that reveals the whole project as little more than a feature-length calling card.

At least the Abrams-helmed Star Trek from 2009 had a pretzel-logic playfulness; the portentously subtitled Into Darkness is attempting like hell to be a Trek for our troubled times. The franchise has been thoroughly Christopher Nolan–ized.

In the end, Luca Guadagnino effectively turns a very complicated literary figure into the kind of blubbering, nostalgic old man you’d expect to see in a student film or a Sundance prizewinner.

Stick with the film, though, and you might find yourself strangely moved by its oddball mix of ripe melodrama, overwrought violence and regional verisimilitude.

Adela’s troubles feel slight and underdeveloped in the face of the world around her; it’s all too appropriate, in the end, that nature swallows her whole.

The setup is pure Looney Tunes, and indeed, Despicable Me is at its best when trading in the anything-for-a-laugh prankery that was a specialty of the Termite Terrace crowd.

Depardieu and Cornillac's sibling rivalry, which segues between mostly verbal smackdowns and liquored-up bursts of merriment, is beautifully observed, as is the relationship between the detective and his devoted wife (the wonderful Marie Bunel). The thriller stuff, by comparison, is just a lot of perfunctory deadweight.

But take the puppet off his arm and he seems somehow vague and incomplete, like the Wizard of Oz without his curtain.

Comparable works like John Gianvito's "Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind," or nearly anything from cine-essayist Chris Marker's oeuvre, mine similar territory much more rewardingly.

That One Lucky Elephant ultimately comes down on the side of anthropomorphizing Flora and her kind is extremely disappointing - a little clear-eyed ambivalence would have helped the film feel more focused and less like patchwork.

Tediousness sets in eventually; there's only so much zoological abyss-gazing one can do.