Keith Uhlich

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

Chu does his best to humanize his subject, showing him surrounded by devoted friends and family, and wringing much drama from an on-the-road vocal-cord strain.

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.

Fortunately, there are a good number of Yen-choreographed action scenes to break up the monotony.

As to the movie's three sections, the best comes first, as an eclectic "cast" of characters (among them philosopher Alain Badiou and musician Patti Smith) pontificate their way around a lavish Mediterranean cruise ship.

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

By the end, you'll feel like you've seen it all before. But for a good while, Retake...seems like it's carving out some distinctive new territory in the well-trod world of queer cinema.

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.

The four leads more often than not transcend the material's calculated moroseness; Ivanir is especially good as a man whose perfectionist facade masks a soul in perpetual turmoil.

There are a few too many twists on this highway.

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.

Her (Angela Ismailos) heart's in the right place, but her subjects' ruminations demand a much larger canvas.

It’s unfortunate that Stelling and his cast aren’t able to lift the story much above mawkishness.

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.

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 pure comic-book malarkey, adapted from a graphic novel by French artist Matz. But the skeletal plot affords Hill the opportunity to go atmospherically hog wild.

Since the lead character is effectively a mystery man, some lack of grounding is appropriate. Unfortunately, the impressionism — the improvisation, you might say, of this particular life (mirroring, one supposes, Bolden's approach to music) — is so dominant that it finally proves a crutch.

The falsely euphoric close is a big misstep - Pulitzers, it would seem, are the ultimate Band-Aid. What was that old adage about printing the legend?

Though the story's wrapped-with-a-bow finale is never in doubt-ol' Meathead remains a populist, pandering Hollywood man through and through-Belle Isle still manages to cast enough of an enchanting spell.

For all the undeniable imaginativeness and visual dazzle (this is Maddin's first entirely digital feature, and it positively glistens), Keyhole ultimately comes off like a feature-length private joke that revels a bit too gleefully in its overall inscrutability. Close, Guy. But no Double Yahtzee.

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

It helps that Fame has been cast with performers who have the glow of possibility about them.

Would that the climax lived up to the tension-filled first two thirds. Let’s just say that Non-Stop reaches for some pointed post-9/11 political commentary that almost entirely exceeds its grasp. Total brainlessness, in this case, would have been a virtue.

That the filmmaker at least makes a concerted effort to tweak what in most hands would be an offensively whitewashed dark-continent parable is worth some measure of praise.

This is the kind of movie in which it's considered the zenith of meta-wit to have a slumming Robert De Niro (as Machete's racist politico nemesis) drive a taxi.

It's hard to hate a movie that affectionately references the oeuvre of Kathryn Bigelow (both The Hurt Locker and Point Break!) and uses a whiny Third Eye Blind ballad as an acidic punch line.

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

The film's sure-to-be-brief theatrical release is a mere stopover on the way to basic-cable eternity.