Keith Uhlich

The oft-hilarious push-and-pull between director and subject - Williams wryly notes that the film is turning into "the Steve and Paulie Show" - effectively hacks away at the celebrity-enthusiast divide. By the end of this perceptive dual portrait, both men are content to merely be human.

The satire rarely stings, as first-time feature directors Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod give a polite Masterpiece Theatre gloss to this most impolite of tales.

Gerwig is plenty charming, considering the rote stuff she has to work with. Yet this still feels like a real devolution - hopefully short-lived - after her distinctively eccentric turns in "Greenberg" and "Damsels in Distress."

This is a man-versus-nature parable heavy on the sappy existentialism that's very much of our time. Call it Nicholas Sparks's The Grey.

This is mostly all reefer, no madness.

The rousing speeches and booming battle scenes are all well done as far as blockbuster spectacle goes, but you can't help but feel the filmmakers' resistance to the story's grimmer undercurrents.

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.

Cluzet and Sy nonetheless make for ingratiating foils; the extended opening sequence in which the duo outwits a pair of cops like a hell-raising Laurel and Hardy could be a stellar short comedy if it weren't married to the deadly self-serious shtick that follows.

Anderson's romantic fantasia is after something much more complicated and profound-an ever-renewing balance between the hopes of youth and the disappointments of age.

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

If What to Expect represents the best tearjerking laugh-machine that Hollywood can birth, it's probably time to get those story ideas implanted in vitro.

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.

Even the stoniest face will crack when Aladeen sums up our cultural moment in a rousing, uproarious climactic speech worthy of both Chaplin and Team America.

By the time the film takes a glib turn into role-switching farce - as Muslims become Christians and Christians become Muslims - the overall toothlessness of the satire becomes damningly apparent.

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.

By the time they've taken full control of the movie's alternate universe-as the melodrama morphs with marvelous ease into a musical comedy-you feel like anything is possible. Cinema this alive is a rare bird, indeed.

Madden pads the film with shimmering images of Jaipur and its surroundings; a midmovie funeral sequence - 'cause somebody's got to kick the bucket! - even manages to be somewhat evocative and moving. The rest makes you long for senility to set in, but quick.

You can't help feeling that an initially adventurous movie has had its rough edges sanded away.

Though the film wraps up its spinning-plates narrative a little too neatly, this is still a Scandi-noir to die for.

A 25-words-or-less pitch for The Day He Arrives - shot in luminous black-and-white - might go something like: "Hong Sang-soo does Groundhog Day."

The story's treacly all-souls-in-alignment outcome is never in doubt, but as Kasdan dogs go, this is light-years better than Dreamcatcher.

Brava, Mia! The exceedingly talented Ms. Hansen-Løve (the writer-director of Father of My Children) is sure to win many more fans with her latest feature, an incisive, exhilaratingly frank examination of l'amour lost.

Hurt tries on an English accent as if he were in the Walmart changing room and a splendid-in-theory supporting cast - Simon Callow, Joanna Lumley, Arta Dobroshi - either ham it up or make moony eyes. Extra discredit to the embarrassingly jaunty score by Sodi Marciszewer, which should be taken behind the recording studio and shot.

Who would have thought that the man behind such wackadoo fantasies as "The Professional" and "The Fifth Element" was capable of being so bloody boring?

The satire becomes more scattershot and strangely cuddlesome (didja know sequestered holy men enjoy socializing and playing sports, just like us?), while the usually great Piccoli-saddled with a ridiculously contrived failed-actor backstory-comes off like an unholy mix of Gérard Depardieu and Robin Williams at their sad-puppiest. That's some cinematic blasphemy, Moretti.

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.

Too many movies come to us as preordained cult objects - this is the real deal.

Like all of Tarsem's films, story takes a backseat to visuals, and there's plenty to pop the eyes-love those life-size string-puppet assassins!-if not, ultimately, to stir the soul.