Ken Eisner

David Koepp's writing-helming bow is a bleak, highly stylized view of modern civilization. While The Trigger Effect maintains a potent mood of postmodern dread, even its proponents will be wondering what all the queasy fuss was about.

When Sordid Lives does what it does best -- showing Southern gals in the full flight of rabid self-denial -- it's as screamingly funny as this subgenre can get.

Watchable only for camp value, Deadfall is at its best when cameo-laden anarchy reigns. As a tribute to film noir, it won't make it to the late late show.

Fun, if finally too silly.

Encapsulates the turbulent times of the Students for a Democratic Society.

A relentless excoriation of the School of the Americas.

A visually opulent but dramatically undernourished prequel to the 1979 hit of almost the same name.

An ill-conceived effort that starts OK but quickly goes off the rails.

A promising concept is gradually run into the ground in Sex and Death 101, a would-be black comedy that lacks both laughs and gravity.

There's a stunning rags-to-rags morality tale hidden in this two-hour mess of a movie.

Third outing for prairie auteur Gary Burns is his most ambitious, and most uneven, effort yet.

Bottom-drawer plot of a South Boston bad boy returning to tie up loose ends reads like every other "Mean Streets" knockoff in the past decade, with no scene, development or performance standing out from undifferentiated din.