Maitland McDonagh

A sleazy, seamy, flashy, steamy, vulgar exploitation thriller that revels in every minute of its own trashiness and delivers some pretty solid -- if prurient -- entertainment before strangling in a one-twist-too-many ending.

This lushly produced, lightweight romance embraces every cliche of the genre without so much as an ironic shrug.

The movie's low budget shows, but the competent (many of them also sitcom veterans) cast keeps things moving smoothly.

Though Bittner's slacker charm may not be to all tastes, the parrots are natural-born scene-stealers with more than enough charm to seduce the most dubious viewer.

Miike's goofy, gallant, action-packed fantasy deserves to become a classic family film.

The bad news is that, though professionally produced on a micro-budget, Azita Zendel's ambitious writing-directing debut is undermined by an awkward script and some very amateurish acting.

It's a shame to see such dedicated performers flay their psyches in the service of such fundamentally shallow material.

Rob Reiner's feel-good tear-jerker, in which dying well is the best revenge, wants to be heartwarming. But first-timer Justin Zackham's screenplay is so stridently formulaic and disingenuous that the film falls flat at every inspirational turn.

Still odder is the movie's sexual worldview, which is simultaneously infantile and fetishistic. Boys wear rubber, lipstick, and spandex, but don't seem to have a sexual bone in their unmuscled bodies.

There's very little plot, and director Mangold's attempts to make a connection between the social confusion of the '60s and Susanna's inner turmoil don't really work.

The big trouble here is that there seem to be pieces of three different films rubbing up against each other without ever fitting together.

Their subtle, complex performances could put far more experienced and better-known actors to shame.

The film delivers lots of high-pitched hysteria but never manages to make its spoiled protagonists interesting.

A throwback to an age when action movies had room between shoot-outs and car chases for dialogue - real dialogue, not rim-shot-ready one-liners - and character development.

A gloomy, preposterous psychological thriller.

The results are a bit amateurish, but wholesome and achingly sweet.

Negret brings personal experience to the material; his own family endured two ordeals by kidnapping, and he works up a painfull convincing sense of sweaty desperation.

An honorable film, beautifully acted, refreshingly un-camp in its take on wide lapels and progressive rock and occasionally coolly moving. It's just that ultimately, there's less here than meets the eye.

This coarse, nearly incoherent action picture apparently aspires to a 'Pulp Fiction"-like mixture of brutality and self-referential insouciance.

The jabs at the expense of self-centered New Yorkers with more money than sense are so mild they're pointless -- if satire doesn't hurt, what's the point?

Simultaneously nakedly formulaic and oddly clumsy, particularly in terms of character introduction.

A small slice of a suspended life, intimate and filled with the mundane details most people forget when the waiting is over and their real lives begin.

It's funny without being toothless, adrenaline turbocharged without being mean and utterly deranged in the best sense of the word.

William Klein's film documents a turbulent time and an outsized personality, but the film's glories are in the details and its intimacy would be unimaginable in the rigidly spin-controlled atmosphere of 21st-century sports.

McCarthy's flawless casting may be the film's greatest strength: Veteran character actor Jenkins and his costars vanish into their characters -- their performances are so subtle and unforced that they don't feel like performances at all.

By turns profane, vulgar, unpredictable, scabrous and perpetually somewhere between buzzed and three sheets to the wind, Bukowski opened a window onto a fringe world of blue-collar drudgery and alcoholic self-obliteration with his blistering, bleakly comic dispatches from the gutter.

Alnoy's narrative is better suited to a trashy thriller than a vehicle for weighty political themes.

A blockbuster hit in Korea, Park's feature debut is a beguiling mix of the generic and the unfamiliar, and it ends on a shot that's nothing short of heartbreaking.

Director Sturla Gunnarsson crams each sequence with subtle, telling detail while avoiding "exotic India" clichés.

Zahedi has been compared to Woody Allen, and he shares Allen's neurotic sense of entitlement and navel-gazing fascination with his own sexual peccadilloes. Whether you find either man funny or infuriating depends in large part on whether you identify more with their narcissistic quests for self-knowledge or the collateral damage left in their wakes.

An improvement over the tedious "Saw II" (2005), this second sequel to the surprise 2004 hit still features the series' trademark gruesome "games" but shifts the focus to the relationships among the characters.

It's a lavish entertainment that revels in lurid colors and yet more lurid emotions.

The loose, rambling conversations that substitute for action might be more interesting if any of the characters were capable of real introspection. But they're so shallow and distracted they can't even manage sustained navel-gazing, which makes their so-called relationships profoundly uninteresting.

Mark Moormann's documentary tends to the worshipful, but Dowd, a charmer onscreen, was by all accounts just as appealing in real life.

This dopey swashbuckler offers little action but lashings of DiCaprio's soft, hairless flesh.

Beneath the plot's romantic turns lies a surprisingly complex examination of the personal and professional price of honesty; falsehoods, half-truths, little white lies and self-delusion spur most of the key plot developments, and Roos never resorts to platitudes to account for their effects.

Though the story is formulaic, the bleakly naturalistic performances give it an uncomfortable sting.

Though the film contains many haunting images, the absence of a solid emotional foundation makes its increasingly preposterous story developments feel arbitrary and ultimately pointless.

The result is hypnotic.

The film should be required viewing for all aspiring filmmakers, but the story's road-accident appeal is universal.

The giddy, "anything could happen" sense that made "Pulp Fiction" and "Reservoir Dogs" so viscerally exciting is missing here. But Tarantino's first picture in nearly three years is a faithful adaptation of Elmore Leonard's "Rum Punch," and its melancholy edge is a wistful delight.

Solomonoff cuts back and forth between 1984 and 1976, gradually revealing the truth of what happened, but the mystery is less important than the complex relationship between Natalia and Elena, which was sorely tested by events beyond their control.

Overall, Grindhouse may well be the Beatlemania of sleaze-movie viewing, but since the real thing is gone it's the best that many fans will ever have.

Horror buffs in search of a fresh take on the usual grue should embrace it wholeheartedly.

Piper Perabo is a revelation -- and Barton is maturing into a sensitive, subtle performer with a marvelously expressive face.

A predictable moral tale enacted by blandly pretty young things who bear little resemblance to the average brainiac.

It's really all about the cars, kandy-kolored nitro-injected streamline babies with sweeter curves than a Playboy photo spread, more personality than Rome, Brian and Monica combined and enough juice to send a fleet of rockets to the farthest reaches of the known universe.

Features some strikingly intimate footage of Noonan's extended family, but lets Noonan himself drives the show and his colorful tales of villainy that cry out for more context than MacIntyre provides.

Curl your cynical lip if you want, but there's a place for heartwarming, life-affirming, even weepy dramas, and Robert Redford brings the best-selling novel about a traumatized teen and her wounded horse to the screen with dignity and restraint.

The framing story is pointless and almost insulting, even though it's part of former New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen's novel.

In the end, the film feels a little futile; its relentless, one-miserable-note tone is numbing.

Bill Murray plays the secondary role of a nameless American gag writer brimming with one-liners about the absurdity of Cuban life, Dustin Hoffman has a cameo as kvetching gangster Meyer Lansky.

Marvel-man Mark Steven Johnson, who wrote and directed "Daredevil" (2003) and scripted "Elektra" (2005), continues to demonstrate the wrong way to make comic book movies: Make sure special effects overwhelm the characters, let campy mannerisms go unchecked and be sure dialogue is declaimed rather than spoken.

Overall, the performances are surprisingly convincing, but the mockumentary elements – feel out of place and the intrusive.

Ironically, the filmmakers seem to think the audience for this movie about super-smart people is super-dumb.