Kevin Crust

Witt injects the film with plenty of razzle-dazzle on the visual side, but the pace deadens whenever the zombies are offscreen or the characters open their mouths long enough to do anything more than grunt.

Zodiac is primarily a complex character study, despite the film's grim and gruesome subject matter. It's a role reversal of sorts for a director who normally emphasizes the brutal tension in his movies.

While an effective rebuttal to media stereotyping, especially in its own portrayals of people of color and the LGBTQ community, Hillbilly feels less assured in dealing with the election, a subject that is getting a little tired but no less confounding.

As clumsy and awkward as his previous films were stylishly silly.

Detailed and intensely researched documentary.

The main strength of "Shakespeare" is its ability to show the vulnerability of its subjects, neither judging nor smothering them with undeserved praise.

An initially promising horror film that turns exploitive, Wolf Creek fails to deliver the requisite payoff considering its leisurely pace.

There's a dry humor underlying the absurdity of Koistinen's experience. When things cannot possibly get worse, they do.

Fascinating, highly entertaining.

Davaa has made a sweetly meditative film.

Harrelson and Maura Tierney, who plays Monix's love interest, seem to be inhabiting a different, more interesting, movie, one that follows the familiar path of a has-been athlete seeking redemption at what looks like his last stop. The strange thing is that the subplot is so tangential to the rest of the movie that the scenes could be omitted with no one the wiser.

A winning combination of humor and crafty filmmaking.

Although the message of the film sounds bleak, it is actually quite rousing.

A stupendously torpid thriller without a single redeeming quality.

A spellbinding, intelligent thriller that takes its time to get where it's going but is well worth the trip.

A clever, delightfully rendered summer diversion.

The twists and reversals that pile up, stirred by greed, friendship and betrayal, fail to register any meaning, simply accumulating -- so that ultimately Autumn is as dry and lifeless as the leaves that fall to the ground in its opening images.

And though the film also quotes Wiesenthal's exhortation "Hope lives when people remember," the filmmakers are most interested in drawing attention to what is happening now, primarily in Europe, and what it may mean for the future.

In the parlance of "The Player," Katrina Holden Bronson's Daltry Calhoun would be pitched as "Because of Winn-Dixie" meets "Napoleon Dynamite," and that is definitely not a good thing.

Director Desmond Nakano, who co-wrote the script with Tony Kayden, does a fine job in evoking the events and era and in guiding his actors through emotion-filled scenes. However, much of the plot revolving around a climactic baseball game is trite and detracts from the overall drama.

Redeemed by its adherence to a simple yet distinctive approach to storytelling and its uniformly strong acting.

The movie is a pastiche of tortured slapstick, groan-inducing dialogue and a lethal dose of treacle, apparently awaiting one of Williams' trademark sprees of riffing and vamping to save the day. That moment never comes, however.

Hurting the film is the fact that the central character, Anthony, is so self-absorbed.

The uproarious laughter that floats from the cinema wonderfully illustrates the universality of the moviegoing experience.

A highly entertaining piece of genre-blending fun.

This family adventure about a team of sled dogs abandoned in Antarctica naturally invokes the traditional shout of "Mush!" urging the canines to go faster, but it's also an apt descriptor of both its shameless sentimentality and ineptly structured story.

Most successful in capturing the emotional elements of its story, the film relies on its excellent cast to balance out sketchily drawn characters and the unfortunate obviousness of its plot.

Evans and Gideon never really succeed in selling the idea that serial killing is a disease -- which would require a degree of realism that the slick, over-plotted Mr. Brooks doesn't otherwise aspire to. They seem to be content with occupying the audience with a series of twists and jolts.