Keith Uhlich

The story's half-baked environmental themes become more prevalent as Letters from the Big Man progresses to its back-to-nature finale, which unfortunately distracts from Munch's consistently sure hand with his actors.

The tone never stops waffling, and nothing truly revelatory ever emerges about those terrible few days in Texas. What we’re left with is the Disney theme-park version of history — all waxworks and weepiness.

It’s a comedy and a tragedy, though the people involved aren’t necessarily on rigid opposite sides. Better to say that everyone has some level of fluidity, not just in terms of personal belief, though they’ll speak their dogmatic minds if the occasion demands it.

Jordan’s poetic sensibilities more than make up for any flaws. His uncanny aptitude for conjuring up resonantly metaphorical images — from a pointed fingernail pushing toward a vein to a waterfall turning into a literal river of blood — proves there’s plenty of life left in this undead genre.

By the time the beast spreads his wings to full span, soaring skyward toward a vaguely Spielbergian moon, you’re in the kind of breathless awe that so few current cinematic superproductions are able to provide.

After the story takes a cloyingly sentimental turn, this lean-and-mean thriller becomes bathetically bloated. Just a few spokes short of a wheel, guys.

If you’ve seen "Species," you know where this don’t-mess-with-Mother-Nature horror show is going, though director-cowriter Vincenzo Natali has a few interesting twists up his sleeve.

Carice van Houten (Black Book) is superb as the emotionally unstable Jonker - all manically beaming highs and depressively gloomy lows, a tempestuous force of nature in a movie that too often plays it blandly polite.

The closing scenes of Straight Up are more contrived and constrained — an acquiescence to living inside the box, with one dramatic wrinkle that feels tacked on and ill-considered. The fiery talent that Sweeney displays throughout, both in front of and behind the camera, regrettably ends up ashen.

The film has the look of unflinching truth, yet it too often feels like a calculated ploy to stoke viewers' liberal-guilty consciences.

I'll respect the studio's wishes to abbreviate all plot description. God knows, they're marketing it like the second coming of "The Crying Game," though the revelations that await Nev are only shocking if you believe P.T. Barnum was really in possession of a genuine Fiji mermaid.

Exploitative as this may seem in theory, it works beautifully onscreen, mostly because of Binoche’s radiantly complicated humanity.

The overall effect is not unlike watching a chef de cuisine experimenting in his off-hours; not everything takes, but you still come away with a pleasingly stimulated palate.

Less deadpan spoof than loving act of possession, Black Dynamite near-fully channels the look and feel of its blaxploitation ancestors, warts and all.

Fortunately, Roth himself proves to be a fascinating presence — soft-spoken, sharp and bearing a vague air of melancholy that offsets the surrounding adulation.

In Claire Denis’s film, sex is the great equalizer, or at least the act that allows people to defer taking a firm moral or ethical stance.

Viewers familiar with Daniels’s idiosyncratically vulgar work might be disappointed that there’s little here that compares to Nicole Kidman loosing a yellow stream on Zac Efron’s jellyfish stings in "The Paperboy" (2012).

Charlie Victor Romeo would probably work best as a training tool for commercial airline pilots (the play, interestingly, has already been used in this fashion by the Pentagon). In a movie theater for a paying crowd, it’s little more than minimalist snuff.

Despite the chronological juggling, the film's stylistic debts (a Hitchcock flashback borrowed from Stage Fright, a Bertolucci-esque apartment sequence that could be titled Last Tango in Auschwitz) are simplistic to a fault; they lack the multifaceted suspense and sensuality typified by those directors at their best.

For a while it’s a low-key fish-out-of-water comedy (with McDonald’s as one of its many obvious punch lines), then it morphs into a cumbrously sentimental tale of redemption.

It isn't until the story reaches its fancifully abstract final passages, where cinema displaces music as Douglas's weapon of choice, that Chase's reverie reveals itself as a particularly exceptional exploration of how art ceases being an idle hobby and becomes an obsessive vocation.

The real drama in Parnassus comes from the troupe of sideshow performers, led by a terrifically morbid Christopher Plummer.

The filmmaker’s second feature is an unfortunate sophomore slump, an abrasive and opaque artist-in-crisis story that feels protracted at barely 80 minutes.

Simon Curtis's watchably third-rate biopic doesn't try to sort out truth from fabrication; that would be like "teaching Urdu to a badger," as the short-tempered Olivier - played by a whole-hog-slicing Branagh - might say. Better to print the legend and be done with it.

Jolie must eventually become a comic-book supergirl impervious to explosions and bullets, all the better to set up a "Bourne"-like franchise by the final fade-out.

People who like their comedies pitch black (we're talking midnight, no stars or moon) should get a kick out of the tale of Steven Russell (Carrey).

The casting, from lead roles to supporting, is uniformly terrific.

By the time Nick decides to have an emotionally purgative yard sale-the primary holdover from the short story-all the adult ambiguities have been traded in for facile Indiewood profundities.