Marc Mohan

Isn't a complete waste of time. If Kutcher seeks to transition from national joke to lightweight actor, he's made a decent stab at it.

Ordinary folks working together to triumph over incredible odds, depicted in a Disney film that doesn't overdose on sentiment? That's the real miracle.

Compelling both as a chronicle of guerrilla filmmaking and as a son's movie about his father, it presents a clear-eyed, warts-and-all view of artistic obsession.

A fascinating experiment in both filmmaking technology and narrative style, but one that can be counted a success only in limited ways.

Collette proves herself worthy of carrying a movie with a performance that runs the gamut of human emotion without striking one false note.

This deadpan ode to living life to its fullest could be the ultimate crowd-pleaser at this year's PIFF.

This story could take place anywhere there are families struggling to remake themselves in the aftermath of tragedy; its universality is perhaps the most potent political message of all.

Oswalt sells Auferio's pasty indecision and makes him a more sympathetic figure than he has any right to be.

Made with a slapdash non-style that doesn't seem quite lame enough to have been intentional, this aptly titled low-budget horror comedy serves up tame amounts of both guts and gut-busters.

A solid, twisting, well-acted mystery, but it strains credulity at times, and its ultimate revelations are unsurprising and, when you think back on the whole film, confusing. It also lacks a distinctive atmosphere, shot in an almost TV-style flatness.

A facile, feel-good fable that substitutes cliché for reality at nearly every turn.

Ultimately, the movie takes its characters, and the absurd ethical dilemma it subjects them to, far too seriously.

An alternately harrowing and poetic take on the fatal 1982 hunger strike of Irish Republican Army prisoner Bobby Sands, Hunger is also one of the most impressive feature directing debuts in years.

Whishaw's oddly charismatic performance makes the despicable Grenouille into an almost sympathetic antihero. The rather astonishing finale will likely have audiences either howling in derision or ardently dissecting afterward. And it must have given the bluenoses at the MPAA fits.

The performance of Bening (and, quietly, Irons) keeps Being Julia from being too tiresome.

Nothing more and nothing less than a savvy and talented cast having its way with a clever, hilarious script, with absolutely no weighty issues at stake.

Decent performances aside, the only interesting bits involve Geoffrey Rush as a chemistry professor who enables their self-abuse.

Rosemary Clooney (that's Danny Ocean's aunt) steals the show as one half of a sister act accompanying the boys on their yuletide misadventures. The real highlight, of course, is the Irving Berlin score. [24 Dec 2004, p.39]

For those to whom life is but a stage, this will be sweet, sweet candy; to those of us destined to be their audience, it's a satisfying, if flawed, look behind the curtain.

A rather schizophrenic comedy that gives respected performers Dame Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins a chance to show they don't take themselves too seriously.

The whole thing unfolds with sadistic precision, but Edgerton's expert manipulation makes it a fun ride nonetheless.

The title is too cutesy and clever, but it's about the only unsubtle aspect of this poignant, humble drama that'll probably get lost amid the multiplex bombast, but shouldn't.

Warmhearted lesson in tolerance.

Whether Elia Kazan could have done something memorable with this script will remain an eternally open question. This film, though, is most effective as a reminder that Williams' works emerged from a certain time and place, and to approach them from another is fraught with peril.

Cobbled together from other sources without much thought to originality.

Caro stumbles in a couple ways. By flashing forward throughout the film to scenes of the climactic courtroom showdown, she blunts the story's dramatic impact.

The two stories never come close to meshing the way the filmmaker intended. The result is a well-acted movie that simply doesn't gel.

Well, if Jordan believes he's made an excellent film, that's one thing, but the fact is it's a minor, though mostly enjoyable, one.

The overall thrust of the story -- that downtrodden folks in desperate circumstances have the capacity for goodness -- is one too rarely seen.

Unfortunately, the precision and presence Hurt brings to the table aren't enough to carry this warmed-over Southern melodrama.

As with many Iranian films, reality and fiction collide (the lead actor really is a pizza deliveryman), and the moral of the story is a surprisingly blunt critique of the growing inequality of wealth in the slowly Westernizing nation.

When it's not lapsing into disease-of-the-week prose, Adam presents a credible account of the challenges inherent in this misunderstood and often-ridiculed condition.

It's not a question of Lucas' right to revamp his own work -- the movie simply was much better without these absurd additions.

Unfortunately, neither of these fascinating artistic giants is given much of a personality.

Sweet Land brushes against the true spirit of American independent cinema.

The overall effect of the movie is to make you wish there were a statute of limitations on how long maladjusted adults are allowed to blame their parents before it's OK to holler, "Get over it, people!"

What could have been a biting, darkly comic action flick about capitalistic health care run amok is instead a familiar, gory, post-apocalyptic slog.

There's an inherent contradiction at the film's core: this sexually explicit motion picture, seemingly made by and for altered consciousnesses, is all about how an innocent newcomer falls prey to gin, sex, and television.

Papale's story is more than any fan could dream of, which is why it's frustrating that Invincible feels the need to embellish it. While mentioning he never played football in college, the film ignores that he did play in a semipro league prior to his Eagles tryout.

Reaches truly terrifying heights as it becomes clear how possible the worst outcome can be. Like "Pan's Labyrinth," this is a movie about children made very much for adults.

Her film is just as effective as a portrait of two unknowable, individual souls caught up in events of global scale.

You might not be able to picture yourself in such a life, but you'll be glad that it persists.

In addition to providing a fascinating, agenda-free look at an unseen way of life, the film presents a lesson that should be welcome among people of any faith or none at all.

The domestic and romantic turmoil all gets resolved a bit too neatly to seem realistic, but realism isn't the goal; this is comfort food, plain and simple, and achieves its modest goals in nearly effortless fashion.

Throughout, Sophie exhibits the quality common to all of history's great martyrs, a preternatural calmness that perseveres despite (or perhaps because of) the inevitability of her doom.

The edited footage has an intensity and immediacy you won't find on cable news networks.

Tommy Wiseau's film oozes sincerity, which is then slathered in a thick coating of oblivious narcissism, and sadly serves as an example that not everyone should follow their bliss...It's the emotional earnestness that places The Room squarely within Susan Sontag's famous definition of pure camp.

At its core, the story is a Mars vs. Venus case study.

The glory of "Breathless" lies less with its narrative, though, than with its style, a self-conscious blend of drawn-out conversational scenes and rapid-fire cuts of action. [14 Dec 2001]

Manages to excavate enough universal pathos from the mundane to find something truly extraordinary in the ordinary.

A haunting, melancholy fable, Tony Takitani is the kind of film that could seem tedious from a mere description. Approached with the right mind-set, however, it's a hypnotic mood piece on love and loss, one that knows -- at 75 minutes -- not to overstay its welcome.

This gritty take on Grimm's suffers from mannered supporting performances and an inconsistent level of realism.

The result is a hybrid of "Falling Down" and "Short Cuts" without the iconic central character of the former or the latter's clear-eyed humanism.

Ultimately, ATL is the same old teenager angst in a mildly novel package.

In this involving if slightly unfocused documentary, director Daniel Karslake takes a two-pronged approach in examining how religion has been interpreted -- some would say twisted -- into, at its worst, monomaniacal homophobia.

An old-fashioned story of courage and self-sacrifice in the face of war and deprivation. It's also sappy, boring and obvious.

Director Jim deSeve has done an excellent job of providing both historical and personal perspective on a topic that provokes heated emotional reactions.

The good news is that this movie is no "Spanglish;" the bad news is that Sandler's performance is actually better than the material deserves.

The Harvey Girls isn't really anything special, cinematically speaking. This run-of-the-mill Judy Garland musical is notable mostly for its Oscar-winning song, "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe."[10 May 2002]

Land of the Dead is huge. It's Romero doing what he does best: using zombies to create a lowbrow social parable. It shows up junk like "Resident Evil: Apocalypse" for the brainless pap it is. And it's got something that even the best previous "Dead" films have lacked: good acting.

Ultimately, though, it's unfortunate that the movie tries to make so many oblique comparisons to more modern tragedy (paparazzi with sketchbooks; yes, we get it!), since Georgiana's life seems fascinating enough on its own.

What this alteration says about societal trends of the past three decades is open to debate, but the change is a tiny hint that earnest fidelity to the source was not a top priority.

The result is a frustrating and disturbing mishmash of vague philosophical noodling, which even the best-chosen cast can't imbue with zip.

The result is an exercise in emoting that features one of the worst Southern accents in recent memory and does about as much to establish the actor's range as "Battlefield Earth."

Every so often there's a tabloid news story about the Virgin Mary seen in a piece of toast or Mother Teresa on a tortilla, and most of us equate them with Elvis sightings. This film is for the rest.

It's a refreshingly human-scale saga.